This is a special post for quick takes by Biff Wiff. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
A friend of mine from the local LessWrong meetup created Democracy Chess - a game where the human players play against an AI, vote on moves, and the move with the most votes is played. Yesterday a bunch of us gave it a try.
In brainstorming how it could be better I had an interesting thought: what if there was a $10 buy in where if we win we get our money back but if we lose the money is donated to some pre-agreed upon charity?
I could see something like that being fun. Having something at stake can make games more fun. And along the lines of charity runs, it can be fun to get together with a group of people and raise/donate money for a cause.
My angle here is that if something like this is genuinely fun and appealing, it could be a good way to generate money for charities. Along the lines of 1,000 True Fans, if 1,000 people spend $200/year on this (~$20/month) and won half the time, that'd be $100k in charitable donations a year. A meaningful sum.
I don't think Democracy Chess would be the ideal game. I think something like trivia would make more sense. Something that has more mass appeal and is more social. Trivia is particularly appealing since it'd be easy to build an prototype for.
One thing I like about this idea is that customer acquisition seems straightforward. I think direct outreach to EA and rationalist groups would make sense as an initial target audience. From there it seems plausible that other groups might be interested. For example, a local bike advocacy group might want to organize a trivia game where donations would go to a pro-biking organization. And direct outreach to such groups is very doable.
Longer term I could see celebrities promoting it. Maybe motivated by altruism, maybe motivated by virtue signaling, maybe a mix of both.
But I'm not feeling optimistic about this idea. The 6+ people I asked from the Portland rationality meetup weren't excited about it and wouldn't be motivated enough to organize a game. Maybe they'd join in if someone else organized it. And I myself fall into that boat: I'd tag along if someone else organized it but I wouldn't be very motivated to organize a game. And I think for this to work it'd require people who are excited and motivated enough to organize games on a recurring basis.
Maybe those people are out there though! Does anyone reading this fall into that camp?
That sounds difficult.
Yes, sorry -- 'magically find more money' was not exactly a helpful suggestion! (I think I was more confident in the negative part of my critique, but wanted to at least try to offer something constructive.) I do think it could potentially work for quite small values of 'significantly augment', though, if that is an option; just enough to take the game from from zero sum to non-negligibly positive sum.