If they told you what you were paid for, you would Goodhart it. As every boss knows, you should not give precise orders, but instead ask ambiguous, generic requests, observe what people do, and then hand out punishment or praise based on drawing out combinations of colored sticks.
Consider this: would you be happy if the government actually told you clearly and upfront, in a way you can understand the rationale of, what it's going to do with your taxes the moment you pay them? I bet you wouldn't; for if governments were so constrained, you would pick governments whose policies you like, and quickly end up addicted to a spiral of good policing.
Consider this: would you be happy if the government actually told you clearly and upfront, in a way you can understand the rationale of, what it's going to do with your taxes the moment you pay them?
There are a lot of different things for which government pays money and most government budgets are publically available.
you would pick governments whose policies you like
No I wouldn't (nor would he) usually because the very high expected personal cost of switching governments will usually swamp the considerations you speak of.
In mid-September Facebook asked me if I wanted to start getting paid for posting things:
This seems to be the performance bonus program. I think they offered it to me because my Facebook profile is in professional mode and I post a lot? It's all very unclear, including what effect saying yes would have: how would they decide how much to pay me? Would this affect how the algorithm prioritizes my writing? Would they attempt to exert editorial control? One way to find out!
I decided to try joining, and started 2023-09-13.
On 2023-10-23 I received a payment of $16.31 for September. There are no details on how they decided what to pay me, which is too bad: I was at least hoping for some information about rates.
FB does give data on "reach" and "engagement" so it does look like I can see if this was having any effect. The data is in the form of awkward charts, not CSVs I can export, but still there's something:
.That "reach" spike right around when I signed up is very interesting! Did Facebook start showing my posts to more people in response to me signing up, and then give up when peopld didn't engage? While it's hard to read the chart, however, squinting at the timing I think the spike is actually on 2023-09-12 or 2023-09-11. So this went the other way around: I had a post ("Apple Cider Baklava") that was unusually popular among strangers and in response FB decided to offer to offer me money.
Overall this seems a bit silly: while I don't mind taking a few tens of dollars to keep doing what I was going to do anyway, a deal where they don't say how you'll be compensated or how they've figured your payments is pretty suspect.
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