How much is karma worth, after all?
No (fungible) US dollars?
You get karma for comments, including comments signalling altruism. If you want to get karma via saying that you have donated then it becomes a task of maximising the efficiency of your PR exposure. The same applies to other signals, costly or otherwise.
Donating to charity is a less efficient way to gain lesswrong karma than googling for rationality quotes even in terms of time taken to make a donation, neglecting the cost of a donation itself.
Donating to charity is a less efficient way to gain lesswrong karma than googling for rationality quotes even in terms of time taken to make a donation, neglecting the cost of a donation itself.
I earned more than 100 karma from a single rationality quote, and a max of 56 from any single donation comment.
No (fungible) US dollars?
Hmmm, I suppose all I would need is a botnet and a bitcoin address to change this. That's somewhat beside the point, though.
The economic language here ("exchange rate", "paying", etc.) is not meant in a serious sense: obviously the donors were not making a donation for the sake of gathering karma. But yet, they did signal, and they did (in a non-serious sense) purchase that signal.
Donating to charity is a less efficient way to gain lesswrong karma than googling for rationality quotes even in terms of time taken to make a donation, neglecting the cost of a donation itself.
Of course it is. As I wrote,
Naturally, there's little point to this analysis. If anyone is trying to maximize net karma by donating to SIAI, something is probably wrong with their priorities.
First thoughts and impressions....
First observation: the users with the best USD/karma exchange rate made modest contributions early.
We have a thread from the last Challenge where the time aspect is roughly equal for all posts. Perhaps the data there will control for this time variable.
Hyperbolic discounting is alive and well.
Potentially not the case; if you allow that some fraction of the upvoters are not aware of the 12-months-matched and are upvoting based on 1-month-matched, the discounting might disappear.
Large donations are really inefficient at netting karma.
This screams karma = log(dollar amount) to me.
Potentially not the case; if you allow that some fraction of the upvoters are not aware of the 12-months-matched and are upvoting based on 1-month-matched, the discounting might disappear.
While they might not be aware of 12-months-matched, 1000/mo should still rank significantly higher than 2000, and it doesn't.
This screams karma = log(dollar amount) to me.
Me, too; it coheres with what I know about how humans cope with large numbers. I had tried a log regression, but there's just not enough data...
It's been a couple days since the funding plea, so I thought I'd like to take this chance to compare self-reported donations to short-term karma gains. Naturally, I voted on none of these comments. Note that after posting this, the karma on these posts will almost definitely change; the values here are for 27/8/11 at around 9:00 GMT.
So, the data:
Note: two people (Kaj_Sotala and Rain) reported monthly commitments, but as far as I understand only the yearly pledge is matched, so for the purposes of this informal study I treat them as reporting X*12 USD donations, instead of X/month.
There's not enough data for an honest causal analysis (I tried), but there are a few observations one can make. Intuitively one expects karma to be determined by the donation amount, the duration of time since the posting, and some unknown error.
First observation: the users with the best USD/karma exchange rate made modest contributions early. Nisan came out best, with $6.25/karma — though some of this karma may be due also to the fantastic signal, on their part, that they overcame a rational hazard to make this donation. (Also, EY responded afterward, confounding the karmic flow with his wake.)
In this spirit, we now name "doing the least restrictive, obviously acceptable thing, instead of doing nothing while contemplating alternatives" Nisan's razor, (ニサンの剃刀, perhaps) unless it happens to have a better, previously-existing name.
Second observation: Hyperbolic discounting is alive and well. Those reporting monthly donations have karma below comparable one-shot donations, though both monthly data points did come slightly later than their one-shot counterparts.
Third observation: Large donations are really inefficient at netting karma. pengvado paid $277.48/karma; no one above 1000USD paid less than $50/karma.
Naturally, there's little point to this analysis. If anyone is trying to maximize net karma by donating to SIAI, something is probably wrong with their priorities.