I think the question, narrowly interpreted as “what would cause me to spend more time on the object-level answering questions on LW” doesn’t capture most of the exciting things that happen when you build an economy around something. In particular, that suddenly makes various auxiliary work valuable. Examples:
Someone spending a year living off of one’s savings, learning how to summarise comment threads, with the expectation that people will pay well for this ability in the following years
A competent literature-reviewer gathering 5 friends to teach them the skill, in order to scale their reviewing capacity to earn more prize money
A college student building up a strong forecasting track-record and then being paid enough to do forecasting for a few hours each week that they can pursue their own projects instead of having to work full-time over the summer
A college student dropping out to work full-time on answering questions on LessWrong, expecting this to provide a stable funding stream for 2+ years
A professional with a stable job and family and a hard time making changes to their life-situation, taking 2 hours/week off from work to do skilled cost-effectiveness analyses, while being fairly compensated
Some people starting a “Prize VC” or “Prize market maker”, which attempts to find potential prize winners and connect them with prizes (or vice versa), while taking a cut somehow
I have an upcoming post where I describe in more detail what I think is required to make this work.
This all seems plausible, but for it to work it seemed like it needed to cross the initial threshold of “are people actually willing to do this, and what will it take for them to do so?”. For this question I’m most interested in getting a sense of what things are necessary for this sort of project to get off the ground.
I think the question, narrowly interpreted as “what would cause me to spend more time on the object-level answering questions on LW” doesn’t capture most of the exciting things that happen when you build an economy around something. In particular, that suddenly makes various auxiliary work valuable. Examples:
Someone spending a year living off of one’s savings, learning how to summarise comment threads, with the expectation that people will pay well for this ability in the following years
A competent literature-reviewer gathering 5 friends to teach them the skill, in order to scale their reviewing capacity to earn more prize money
A college student building up a strong forecasting track-record and then being paid enough to do forecasting for a few hours each week that they can pursue their own projects instead of having to work full-time over the summer
A college student dropping out to work full-time on answering questions on LessWrong, expecting this to provide a stable funding stream for 2+ years
A professional with a stable job and family and a hard time making changes to their life-situation, taking 2 hours/week off from work to do skilled cost-effectiveness analyses, while being fairly compensated
Some people starting a “Prize VC” or “Prize market maker”, which attempts to find potential prize winners and connect them with prizes (or vice versa), while taking a cut somehow
I have an upcoming post where I describe in more detail what I think is required to make this work.
This all seems plausible, but for it to work it seemed like it needed to cross the initial threshold of “are people actually willing to do this, and what will it take for them to do so?”. For this question I’m most interested in getting a sense of what things are necessary for this sort of project to get off the ground.