I think an important point here is that GeneSmith actually wrote a post that’s of high quality and interest to billionaires that people pass around.
The mechanism that he described is not about billionaires reading random posts on the front page but about high value posts being passed around. Billionares have network that help them to get send post that are valuable to them.
The point I’m making doesn’t depend on truth of the claim or validity of the argument (from the GeneSmith post followup) that suggests it. What I’m suggesting implies that public legible discussion of truth of the claim or of validity of the arguments is undesirable.
I think there’s a pretty strong default that discussing the truth of claims that actually matter to the decisions people make is worthwhile on LessWrong.
Saying, we can speak about the truth of some things but not about those that are actually really motivating for real-world decision-making seems to me like it’s not good for LessWrong culture.
Sure, that’s a consideration, but it’s a global consideration that still doesn’t depend on truth of the claim or validity of the argument. Yes Requires the Possibility of No, not discussing a Yes requires not discussing a No, and conversely. In the grandparent comment, I merely indicated that failing to discuss truth of the claim or validity of the argument is consistent with the point I was making.
If the claim is sufficiently true and becomes sufficiently legible to casual observers, this shifts the distribution of new users, and behavior of some existing users, in ways that seem bad overall.
Tomorrow, everyone will have their Patreon account added to their LW profile, and all new articles will be links to Substack, where the second half of the article is available for paying subscribers only. :D
To be clear, I wish more LW users had Patreons linked to from their profiles/posts. I would like people to have the option of financially supporting great writers and thinkers on LessWrong.
I agree that the second thing sounds v damaging to public discourse.
Consider finding a way to integrate Patreon or similar services into the LW UI then. That would go a long way towards making it feel like a more socially acceptable thing to do, I think.
That could be great especially for people who are underconfident and/or procrastinators.
For example, I don’t think anyone would want to send any money to me, because my blogging frequency is like one article per year, and the articles are perhaps occasionally interesting, but nothing world-changing. I’m like 99% sure about this. But just in the hypothetical case that I am wrong… or maybe if in future my frequency and quality of blogging will increase but I will forget to set up a way to sponsor me… if I find out too late that I was leaving money on the table, while spending 8 hours a day at a job that doesn’t really align with my values, I would be really angry.
The easiest solution could be like: if someone has a Patreon link, put it in the profile; but if someone doesn’t, put there a button like “dude, too bad you don’t have a Patreon account, otherwise I would right now donate you $X per month”. And if someone clicks it and specifies a number, remember it, and when the total sum of hypothetical missed donations reaches a certain threshold, for example $1000 a month, display a notification to the user. That should be motivating enough to set up the account. And when the account is finally entered in the profile, all users who clicked the button in the past would be notified about it. -- So if the people actually want to send you money, you will find out. And if they don’t, you don’t need to embarrass yourself with setting up and publishing the account.
I also have some negative feelings about it. I think the most likely reason is that websites that offer the option of payment are often super annoying about it. Like, shoving the “subscribe” button in your face all the time, etc. That’s usually because the website itself gets a cut from the money sent. I think if this incentive does not exist, then the LW developers could do this option very unobtrusive. Like, maybe only when you make a strong upvote, display a small “$” icon next to the upvote arrow, with tooltip “would you like to support the author financially?” and only after clicking on it, show the Patreon link, or the “too bad you don’t have Patreon” button. Also, put the same “$” icon in the author’s profile. -- The idea is that only the people who bother to look at author’s profile or who made a strong upvote would be interested in sending money, so the option should be only displayed to them. Furthermore, hiding the information behind a small “$” icon that needs to be clicked first makes it as unobtrusive as possible. (Even less obtrusive than having the Patreon link directly in the profile, which is how people would do it now.)
Linkposts to articles that are subscriber-only should be outright banned. (And if they are not, I would downvote them.) If you require payment for something, don’t shove it to my face. It is okay to make a few free articles and use them as advertisement for the paid ones. But everyone who votes on an article should see the same content of the article. -- But that’s how it de facto works now; I don’t really remember seeing a paid article linked from LW.
Basically, if someone wants to get paid and believes that they will get the readers, there is already a standard way to do that: make a Substack account, post there some free and paid articles, and link the free ones from LW. The advantage of my proposal is the feedback for authors who were not aware that they have a realistic option to get paid for their writing. Plus if we have a standardized UI for that, the authors do not need to think about whether to put the links in their profiles or their articles, how much would be too annoying and how much means leaving money on the table.
I wish more LW users had Patreons linked to from their profiles/posts. I would like people to have the option of financially supporting great writers and thinkers on LessWrong.
is this something you’ve considered building into LW natively?
A norm is more effective when it acts at all the individual relatively insignificant steps, so that they don’t add up. The question of whether the steps are pointing in the right direction is the same for all the steps, so could as well be considered seriously at the first opportunity, even when it’s not a notable event on object level.
For the record, the “:D” at the end of my comment only meant that I don’t think that literally everyone will do this tomorrow. But yes, the temptation to slightly move in given direction is real—I can feel it myself (unfortunately I have no Patreon account and no product to sell), though I will probably forget this tomorrow—and some people will follow the nudge more than the others. Also, new people may be tempted to join for the wrong reasons.
On the other hand, even before saying it explicitly, this hypothesis was… not too surprising, in my opinion. I mean, we already knew that some rich people are supporting LW financially; it would make sense if they also read it occasionally. Also, we already had lots of people trying to join LW for the wrong reasons; most of them fail. So I think that the harm of saying this explicitly is small.
For the record I think regular users being aware of the social and financial incentives on the site is worth the costs of people goodharting on them. We have a whole system set up for checking the content of new users that the team goes through daily to make sure it meets certain quality bars, and I still think that having a 100+ karma or curated post basically always requires genuinely attempting to make a valuable intellectual contribution to the world. That’s not a perfect standard but it’s help up in the face of a ton of other financial incentives (be aware that starting safety researcher salaries at AI capabilities companies are like $300k+).
Why would the shift be bad? More politics, more fakery, less honest truth-seeking? Yeah that seems bad. There are benefits too though (e.g. makes people less afraid to link to LW articles). Not sure how it all shakes out.
That’s not the kind of thing that’s good to legibly advertise.
I think an important point here is that GeneSmith actually wrote a post that’s of high quality and interest to billionaires that people pass around.
The mechanism that he described is not about billionaires reading random posts on the front page but about high value posts being passed around. Billionares have network that help them to get send post that are valuable to them.
The point I’m making doesn’t depend on truth of the claim or validity of the argument (from the GeneSmith post followup) that suggests it. What I’m suggesting implies that public legible discussion of truth of the claim or of validity of the arguments is undesirable.
I think there’s a pretty strong default that discussing the truth of claims that actually matter to the decisions people make is worthwhile on LessWrong.
Saying, we can speak about the truth of some things but not about those that are actually really motivating for real-world decision-making seems to me like it’s not good for LessWrong culture.
Sure, that’s a consideration, but it’s a global consideration that still doesn’t depend on truth of the claim or validity of the argument. Yes Requires the Possibility of No, not discussing a Yes requires not discussing a No, and conversely. In the grandparent comment, I merely indicated that failing to discuss truth of the claim or validity of the argument is consistent with the point I was making.
Why not?
If the claim is sufficiently true and becomes sufficiently legible to casual observers, this shifts the distribution of new users, and behavior of some existing users, in ways that seem bad overall.
Tomorrow, everyone will have their Patreon account added to their LW profile, and all new articles will be links to Substack, where the second half of the article is available for paying subscribers only. :D
To be clear, I wish more LW users had Patreons linked to from their profiles/posts. I would like people to have the option of financially supporting great writers and thinkers on LessWrong.
I agree that the second thing sounds v damaging to public discourse.
Consider finding a way to integrate Patreon or similar services into the LW UI then. That would go a long way towards making it feel like a more socially acceptable thing to do, I think.
That could be great especially for people who are underconfident and/or procrastinators.
For example, I don’t think anyone would want to send any money to me, because my blogging frequency is like one article per year, and the articles are perhaps occasionally interesting, but nothing world-changing. I’m like 99% sure about this. But just in the hypothetical case that I am wrong… or maybe if in future my frequency and quality of blogging will increase but I will forget to set up a way to sponsor me… if I find out too late that I was leaving money on the table, while spending 8 hours a day at a job that doesn’t really align with my values, I would be really angry.
The easiest solution could be like: if someone has a Patreon link, put it in the profile; but if someone doesn’t, put there a button like “dude, too bad you don’t have a Patreon account, otherwise I would right now donate you $X per month”. And if someone clicks it and specifies a number, remember it, and when the total sum of hypothetical missed donations reaches a certain threshold, for example $1000 a month, display a notification to the user. That should be motivating enough to set up the account. And when the account is finally entered in the profile, all users who clicked the button in the past would be notified about it. -- So if the people actually want to send you money, you will find out. And if they don’t, you don’t need to embarrass yourself with setting up and publishing the account.
I also have some negative feelings about it. I think the most likely reason is that websites that offer the option of payment are often super annoying about it. Like, shoving the “subscribe” button in your face all the time, etc. That’s usually because the website itself gets a cut from the money sent. I think if this incentive does not exist, then the LW developers could do this option very unobtrusive. Like, maybe only when you make a strong upvote, display a small “$” icon next to the upvote arrow, with tooltip “would you like to support the author financially?” and only after clicking on it, show the Patreon link, or the “too bad you don’t have Patreon” button. Also, put the same “$” icon in the author’s profile. -- The idea is that only the people who bother to look at author’s profile or who made a strong upvote would be interested in sending money, so the option should be only displayed to them. Furthermore, hiding the information behind a small “$” icon that needs to be clicked first makes it as unobtrusive as possible. (Even less obtrusive than having the Patreon link directly in the profile, which is how people would do it now.)
Linkposts to articles that are subscriber-only should be outright banned. (And if they are not, I would downvote them.) If you require payment for something, don’t shove it to my face. It is okay to make a few free articles and use them as advertisement for the paid ones. But everyone who votes on an article should see the same content of the article. -- But that’s how it de facto works now; I don’t really remember seeing a paid article linked from LW.
Basically, if someone wants to get paid and believes that they will get the readers, there is already a standard way to do that: make a Substack account, post there some free and paid articles, and link the free ones from LW. The advantage of my proposal is the feedback for authors who were not aware that they have a realistic option to get paid for their writing. Plus if we have a standardized UI for that, the authors do not need to think about whether to put the links in their profiles or their articles, how much would be too annoying and how much means leaving money on the table.
is this something you’ve considered building into LW natively?
A norm is more effective when it acts at all the individual relatively insignificant steps, so that they don’t add up. The question of whether the steps are pointing in the right direction is the same for all the steps, so could as well be considered seriously at the first opportunity, even when it’s not a notable event on object level.
For the record, the “:D” at the end of my comment only meant that I don’t think that literally everyone will do this tomorrow. But yes, the temptation to slightly move in given direction is real—I can feel it myself (unfortunately I have no Patreon account and no product to sell), though I will probably forget this tomorrow—and some people will follow the nudge more than the others. Also, new people may be tempted to join for the wrong reasons.
On the other hand, even before saying it explicitly, this hypothesis was… not too surprising, in my opinion. I mean, we already knew that some rich people are supporting LW financially; it would make sense if they also read it occasionally. Also, we already had lots of people trying to join LW for the wrong reasons; most of them fail. So I think that the harm of saying this explicitly is small.
For the record I think regular users being aware of the social and financial incentives on the site is worth the costs of people goodharting on them. We have a whole system set up for checking the content of new users that the team goes through daily to make sure it meets certain quality bars, and I still think that having a 100+ karma or curated post basically always requires genuinely attempting to make a valuable intellectual contribution to the world. That’s not a perfect standard but it’s help up in the face of a ton of other financial incentives (be aware that starting safety researcher salaries at AI capabilities companies are like $300k+).
Why would the shift be bad? More politics, more fakery, less honest truth-seeking? Yeah that seems bad. There are benefits too though (e.g. makes people less afraid to link to LW articles). Not sure how it all shakes out.