I felt like experimenting, so I posted this on my shortform:

In short, I am selling my attention by selling the right to put cards in my Anki deck, starting at the low price of $1 per card. (Current price $4)
I will create and add a card (any card that you desire, with the caveat that I can veto any card that seems problematic, and capped to a similar amount of information per card as my usual cards contain) to my Anki deck for $1. After the first ten cards (across all people), the price will rise to $2 per card, and will double every 5 cards from then on. I commit to study the added card(s) like I would any other card in my decks (I will give it a starting interval of 10 days, which is sooner than the usual interval of 20 days I usually use, unless I judge that a shorter interval makes sense. I study Anki every day, and have been clearing my deck at least once every 10 days for the past 5 months, and intend to continue to do so). Since I will be creating the cards myself (unless you know of a high-quality deck that contains cards with the information you desire), an idea for a card is enough even if you don't know how to execute it.

Money is a unit of caring, and everything should, in principle, be fungible for money at some (usually) non-infinite cost, including our knowledge and attention. In the long run, I suspect I value my attention and time at a rate higher than that implied by $1 per card, but I also suspect my value on it isn't so high as to make this experiment not point in the right direction. I also expect that this experiment will help expose me to new ideas and ways of thinking, and I'm curious to see what information people will ask me to add.

Advertisements work on a similar principle: a user uses a service (either a website, or a television channel, or similar) that costs the host resources to maintain, and in return implicitly agrees to watch and listen to messages provided by a sponsor, who pays the host to compensate them for providing the service to the user. While I have mixed feelings about advertisements as actually practiced in the modern world, this dynamic seems pretty reasonable to me when I state it that way. Perhaps what bothers me there is that modern advertisements often try to make me believe things that are untrue, or to be designed to appeal to the irrational parts of my lizard brain to manipulate my behavior in ways that aren...

MikkW's Shortform

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MikkW's Shortform

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