As someone who isn't really in a position to donate much at all, and who feels rather silly about the small amount I could possibly give, and what a tiny drop that is compared the bucket this post is sketching...
I uh ... sat down and did some simple math. If everyone who ever votes (>12M) donates $10 then you'd have >$120 million covered. If we follow bullshit statistics of internet activity, where it's said 99% of all content is generated by 1% of all people, then this heuristic would get us $1.2M from people paying this one time "subscription" fee. Now I also feel, based on intuition and ass-numbers, that LW folk have a better ratio than that, so let's multiply by 2 and then we could get a $2.4 million subscriber fee together from small donations.
Now on the pure power of typical mind ... I personally like people knowing when I do a nice thing - even a stupidly small thing.
So I'm commenting about it.
I find this embarrassing, and I'm working through the embarrassment to make it easier for others to farm this nutrient too and just normalize it in case that helps with getting a critical mass of small donations of the $10 variety.
Basically my point to readers is: 'Everyone' paying a one-time $10 subscription fee would solve the problem.
The trick is mostly to help each other generate the activation energy to do this thing. If it helps to post, high five, or wave about it, please do! Visibility of small donations may help activation energy and get critical mass! Group action is awesome. Using your natural reward centers about it is great! <3 Hi :D Wanna join? _
Thanks, abstractapplic, for noticing the first error in my calculation: It's number of votes, not number of people voting. Additionally I noticed I applied the power of dyslexia to the decimal point and read that as an thousand separator. So ignore the errored out math, give what you can, and maybe upvote each other for support on giving as much as possible?
PS: I would prefer if actually big donators would get upvoted more than my post of error math. Feel free to downvote my post just to achieve a better ordering of comments. Thanks. <3
PPS: Note to the writer - Maybe remove decimal numbers entirely throughout the graphs? This is what it looked like for me, and led to the error. And this image is way zoomed in compared to what I see naturally on my screen.
Thanks for the explanation! Are you familiar with the community here and around Astral Codex Ten (ACX)? There are meetups and events (and a lot of writers) who focus on the art and skill of rationality. That was what led to my question originally.
This made me unreasonably happy. Thank you :D
Thank you for the in-depth thoughts!
Thank you!
It was a joke :) I had been warned by my friends that the joke was either only mildly funny or just entirely confusing. But I personally found it hilarious so kept it in. Sorry for my idiosyncratic sense of humor ;)
Oh cool!
I was asking for any connection of any type. The overlap just seemed so great that I’d expect there to be a connection of some sort. The Clearer Thinking link makes sense and is an example, thank you!
Oh and also, thank you for checking and sharing your thoughts! :)
I didn't look deeply in to the material, but good branding gives people a good feeling about a thing, and I think rationality could use some better branding. In my experience a lot of people bounce off a lot of the material cause they have negative associations with it or it's not packaged in a way that appeals. I think even if (I didn't check) the material is too superficial to be useful as content, it's still useful to increase people's affinity / positive association with rationality.
Yeah, I can second this entire sentiment. I try to write up parenting tricks that work for me that are clearly not going to reflect negatively on my kids, or will even feel too personal. And then I realized that a lot of the most valuable information that I could read as a parent, I'll never find cause a parent with high integrity is not going to write down very negative experiences they had with their kids and all the ways they failed to respond optimally. It reminds me a little of Duncan's social dark matter concept.
Oh shit. It's worse even. I read the decimal separators as thousand separators.
I'm gonna just strike through my comment.
Thanks for noticing ... <3