I feel like I should provide some data as someone who participated in a number of past bounties.
For one small bounty <$100, it was a chance to show off my research (i.e., Googling and paper skimming) skills, plus it was a chance to learn something that I was somewhat interested in but didn’t know a lot about.
For one of the AI alignment related bounties (Paul’s “Prize for probable problems” for IDA), it was a combination of the bounty giver signaling interest, plus it serving as coordination for a number of people to all talk about IDA at around the same time and me wanting to join that discussion while it was a hot topic.
For another of the AI alignment related bounties (Paul’s “AI Alignment Prize”), it was a chance to draw attention to some ideas that I already had or was going to write about anyway.
For both of the AI alignment related bounties, when a friend or acquaintance asks me about my “work”, I can now talk about these prize that I recently won, which sounds a lot cooler than “oh, I participate on this online discussion forum”. :)
I feel like I should provide some data as someone who participated in a number of past bounties.
For one small bounty <$100, it was a chance to show off my research (i.e., Googling and paper skimming) skills, plus it was a chance to learn something that I was somewhat interested in but didn’t know a lot about.
For one of the AI alignment related bounties (Paul’s “Prize for probable problems” for IDA), it was a combination of the bounty giver signaling interest, plus it serving as coordination for a number of people to all talk about IDA at around the same time and me wanting to join that discussion while it was a hot topic.
For another of the AI alignment related bounties (Paul’s “AI Alignment Prize”), it was a chance to draw attention to some ideas that I already had or was going to write about anyway.
For both of the AI alignment related bounties, when a friend or acquaintance asks me about my “work”, I can now talk about these prize that I recently won, which sounds a lot cooler than “oh, I participate on this online discussion forum”. :)
Thanks, it was useful to hear about that variety of cases.