I think this is an excellent essay, and I think approximately everyone should read it or something covering the same topic by the time they're twenty. 

It's at least adjacent to LessWrong's favourite topics. (Consider Money: the Unit of Caring for a start.) Especially as the rationalist and adjacent spaces continue to professionalize, and continue to pay less than standard market wages elsewhere, it's a good thing to watch as either manager or employee. And since so much of the adjacent community runs on volunteers helping out because they want to, it's a useful question for anyone volunteering as well. 

But ignore the LessWrong connection for a moment: It's just good career advice, of the sort I'd hope young bright people everywhere would run into at one point or another. You really can get paid in "hundreds of people applaud you regularly" or "you get to find out secrets of the universe's laws before anyone else" if you want that. You can also get paid in cold, hard cash with which to purchase goods and services.

"What do you actually want to be paid in, and are you getting it?" has entered my list of short questions to ask about basically every project I work on these days. I think it would also be a good addition for everyone else to ask before embarking on a project. That makes it worthy of the Best Of LessWrong collection.

Half-baked idea free to good home: Calibration trivia for charity.

The event has an array of charities available to pick. Each person or team puts up a stake. They answer trivia questions with answers and how sure they are that they're right. At the end of the game, they get back some amount of money based on their brier score, with more calibrated teams getting back more of their stake. Whatever team has the most correct answers gets to pick where all the money that wasn't returned goes. Ties on correct answers get broken by calibration. Winning team maybe gets a free hat or something.

I don't know if this has any memetic fitness compared to existing charity drives.

Would that be unreasonable and irresponsible? 

How do I heart react an entire post?

I have been interpreting it as "weird!" when Ray says it.

Self review.

I still like this post. I think it's a good metaphor with a strong visual component, one that makes pretty intuitive sense. It also highlights a problem that happens at kind of the worst frequency; issues that happen all the time people get bothered enough to fix, issues that never happen may legitimately aren't worrying about that much, but the ladder basically hits an organization once each generation. (However long a "generation" is for that org- student groups go faster than church leadership.)

Upon review, I think it pairs well with Melting Gold. The ladder isn't just for organizations; any contribution you're making to the world, that you have to put ongoing effort into maintaining, is worth spending at least five minutes thinking about what the ladder is like for someone new starting out.

I think this is worth putting in the Best Of collection, largely on the grounds that at least one post every year should be talking about why your on-ramps are important otherwise people forget to maintain the on-ramps. I wouldn't want two such posts, but one seems correct.

Yeah, it's pretty much the same idea with StS's Daily Run or copying someone's Minecraft seed. I hadn't realized you could do that with a board game.

A recent (well, a few weeks ago) discussion with Collisteru taught me a useful piece of game design that feels really useful for one of my lines of thinking on Chaos Investing. 

In Duplicate Bridge, a deck of cards is shuffled, then the order of the cards is written down (or the hands are recorded or something equivalent) then the deck is played by players who don't know the order. (That is, Referee Adam wrote down the order, and Players Bob Carla Debbie and Evan are sitting down to play.) The players can then compare their score to the scores of other players, who had the exact same deck/hands.

I've been saying "try to beat your personal best score" but that's kind of fuzzy in a game with a fair amount of randomness, and to keep the endgame from becoming rote I actually want to add a little more randomness. This kind of comparison sounds like a useful bit of design.

In case folks missed it, the Unofficial LessWrong Community Census is underway. I'd appreciate if you'd click through, perhaps take a survey, and help my quest for truth- specifically, truth about what the demographics of the website userbase looks like, what rationality skills people have, whether Zvi or Gwern would win in a fight, and many other questions! Possibly too many questions, but don't worry, there's a question about whether there's too many questions. Sadly there's not a question about whether there's too many questions about whether there's too many questions (yet, growth mindset) so those of you looking to maximize your recursion points will have to find other surveys. 

If you're wondering what happens to the data, I use it for results posts like this one.

My two cents, I'm happy with the amount of reacts I usually see and would probably enjoy about 20% more.

Thank you for chipping in your two cents!