No.

But I would advise against setting up the software for yourself (unless this is the type of thing you also do for a job), because it can be more work than initially expected, especially if you need to keep updating it afterwards. Also, if you use a standardized solution, there are standardized exploits out there, so unless you set it up carefully and update regularly, you probably should expect it to get hacked sooner or later.

Basically, remember the situation when one person practically took down Less Wrong, and it had to be reprogrammed from scratch, because updating the original Reddit codebase would be too much work? Similar thing can happen when you use a free solution, and defending against it can turn out to be too much work. I don't know how big a target is the "friend who is a professional in the behavioral sciences", but sometimes it just takes one crazy person with too much free time.

So, in my opinion, if it's not a big deal, use some cheap and simple solution that can (and will) be thrown away later. If it is important, I am afraid that you will need a paid solution (or you will pay with your own time, more than you expected).

Some webhosting companies already provide the entire combination of PHP + database + forum, for the price of webhosting. (At least this was the situation a decade ago.) Then you just set the access rights to "only registered and approved users can read and write" and you're ready.

I can certainly see the appeal of social pressure/the potential reward of better social standing for sticking a long-term goal through.

That is not really what motivates me. It's that when I work on something alone, I feel lonely. If I can talk about it to other people, I don't. Also, I find it easier to focus on things when I can talk about them.

I feel that I am expected to bail by default

Expected... by yourself, or by others? For example, I find talking to some people helpful, but talking to some people harmful.

One way some people can disappoint me as talking partners is when they immediately start predicting that I will fail. "You always talk about doing things, but you never finish any of them. This time it is certainly not going to be any different." This hurts in two ways: on one hand, because it is uncomfortably close to truth; let's say that I finish maybe 1 out of 20 things that I start doing. On the other hand, because it is literally false; I actually do finish 1 out of 20 things that I start doing, and I always hope that this is going to be the one, or that the ratio will start improving.

A glass 5% full is still not the same as empty! I may feel on most of days like a loser, but sometimes I look back and see an accumulated record of successes. If I told someone only about the successes, and not a word about the failures, they might actually consider me impressive. And when we look from outside at others, isn't this kind of filtered view that we usually see? Both of these perspectives can be true simultaneously. I had to learn to stop talking to people who are predictably negative. (Which is different from betting. Yes, when I start a project, I would rationally bet that this project will probably fail. But the point is that some things are worth trying even if the probability of success is smaller than 50%.)

Another way of disappointing me is when the other person tries to takes ownership of my project. When they start giving unsolicited advice, and then get defensive when I don't accept it, often because they completely misunderstand my motivation for the project (am I doing this for myself, or for others? do I want to achieve a specific goal, or to practice a specific skill? which parts of the project are the ones that I am looking forwards to do, and which are the annoying parts that I simply need to overcome?).

What I need instead is someone who would listen, be gently encouraging, maybe give an idea or two, but be perfectly okay with me saying no. Basically, something like a (Rogerian) psychologist. Someone who would remind me of what I said yesterday or a week ago, but would not express disapproval if I failed to do that or changed my mind. Shortly, positive motivation, not negative. Celebration of success (and partial progress), rather than fear of failure. Removing the pressure, rather than increasing it.

My motivational hack is having people I can talk to about my project.

When it feels like I am the only person in the universe who cares about whether X succeeds or fails, I find it very difficult to continue working on the project. Even if it is something where quite naturally I am the person who should care most, such as my health or my finances.

OK, by why should actually anyone care about my projects? One solution is to find another person in a similar situation, and talk to each other about our projects. That's one of the things friends are for.

Sounds interesting. The question is, would it be better for companies than the current situation? Because it's the company who decides the form of the interview, so if the answer is negative, this is not going to happen.

On a hypothetical nerdy planet where things like this happen, we could go further and let both sides specify numbers for various scenarios, for example what would be the salary for working in open space vs having your own office with doors, how much for work from home vs work in office, on-call vs no on-call, etc. Not sure how exactly to evaluate the results, but I think it might be good for the employers to have data such as "having open spaces is $X cheaper than having offices with doors, but our employees hate it so much that we need to pay them $Y higher salaries, so maybe it was not such a good idea" or "remote work makes people 10% less productive, but we could hire 30% more of them for the same budget".

Made a short math video. Target audience maybe kids in the fifth grade of elementary school who are interested in math. Low production quality... I am just learning how to do these things. English subtitles; the value of the video is mostly in the pictures.

The goal of the video is to make the viewer curious about something, without telling them the answer. Kids in the fifth grade should probably already know the relevant concept, but they still need to connect it to the problem in the video.

That could be great especially for people who are underconfident and/or procrastinators.

For example, I don't think anyone would want to send any money to me, because my blogging frequency is like one article per year, and the articles are perhaps occasionally interesting, but nothing world-changing. I'm like 99% sure about this. But just in the hypothetical case that I am wrong... or maybe if in future my frequency and quality of blogging will increase but I will forget to set up a way to sponsor me... if I find out too late that I was leaving money on the table, while spending 8 hours a day at a job that doesn't really align with my values, I would be really angry.

The easiest solution could be like: if someone has a Patreon link, put it in the profile; but if someone doesn't, put there a button like "dude, too bad you don't have a Patreon account, otherwise I would right now donate you $X per month". And if someone clicks it and specifies a number, remember it, and when the total sum of hypothetical missed donations reaches a certain threshold, for example $1000 a month, display a notification to the user. That should be motivating enough to set up the account. And when the account is finally entered in the profile, all users who clicked the button in the past would be notified about it. -- So if the people actually want to send you money, you will find out. And if they don't, you don't need to embarrass yourself with setting up and publishing the account.

I also have some negative feelings about it. I think the most likely reason is that websites that offer the option of payment are often super annoying about it. Like, shoving the "subscribe" button in your face all the time, etc. That's usually because the website itself gets a cut from the money sent. I think if this incentive does not exist, then the LW developers could do this option very unobtrusive. Like, maybe only when you make a strong upvote, display a small "$" icon next to the upvote arrow, with tooltip "would you like to support the author financially?" and only after clicking on it, show the Patreon link, or the "too bad you don't have Patreon" button. Also, put the same "$" icon in the author's profile. -- The idea is that only the people who bother to look at author's profile or who made a strong upvote would be interested in sending money, so the option should be only displayed to them. Furthermore, hiding the information behind a small "$" icon that needs to be clicked first makes it as unobtrusive as possible. (Even less obtrusive than having the Patreon link directly in the profile, which is how people would do it now.)

Linkposts to articles that are subscriber-only should be outright banned. (And if they are not, I would downvote them.) If you require payment for something, don't shove it to my face. It is okay to make a few free articles and use them as advertisement for the paid ones. But everyone who votes on an article should see the same content of the article. -- But that's how it de facto works now; I don't really remember seeing a paid article linked from LW.

Basically, if someone wants to get paid and believes that they will get the readers, there is already a standard way to do that: make a Substack account, post there some free and paid articles, and link the free ones from LW. The advantage of my proposal is the feedback for authors who were not aware that they have a realistic option to get paid for their writing. Plus if we have a standardized UI for that, the authors do not need to think about whether to put the links in their profiles or their articles, how much would be too annoying and how much means leaving money on the table.

I suppose you could argue it’s a “positive right” to have Justice be served

Yes. (Connotationally, from my perspective there is nothing wrong with having positive rights, so I don't see this as an argument against having a criminal justice system.)

Some libertarians would argue that you should literally pay for the criminal justice system. I mean, we do that anyway, using taxes... but the (extreme?) libertarian version is that the criminal justice system is a service to be purchased on the market, just like anything else. In a perfect libertarian world, it would be a kind of insurance -- you choose a company, sign the contract, pay your monthly dues, and if something wrong happens to you, the company will try to find and punish the perpetrator. And if you are not satisfied with how the justice was served, next time you may choose a different company and also tell all your friends. So the inefficient criminal justice companies will gradually go bankrupt. But only the people who pay will have the crimes against them avenged. Maybe a company would provide a discount for poor people, saying "we will make some effort to prosecute the crimes against you, but only if it is trivial". Or maybe the companies gradually become so efficient that even the poor people will be able to afford some quality justice.

Then you have e.g. Objectivists who (I think) accept justice as one of the few legitimate functions of the government.

But anyways, the expectation is that the theoretical possibility of punishment acts as a deterrent to crime, and that’s how your negative rights are protected without the need to posit any positive rights at all, at least strictly speaking.

Why would anyone bother to punish acts done against me? We could imagine a system that would e.g. only punish crimes against the nobility, and would not care about crimes against peasants... unless those crimes are considered to be property crimes against the nobles. (If you murder a peasant, you need to pay a fine $50 to his master, so that he can buy a new peasant.) Such criminal justice system would be much cheaper. (Also, this is what I imagine the extreme libertarian version of criminal justice would ultimately converge to. There is no way a company would defend 10 customers paying $10 each against one customer paying $1000. That's not how profit is maximized.)

So the fact that someone spends money to extends the criminal justice system so that it also covers crimes against peasants, and thus acts as a deterrent to crime against the peasants, is a service to those peasants. Rights that requires someone to provide a service are positive rights.

Like so much modern prose, this demands to be read quickly, with just enough attention to register the bold use of words. Slow down, and things fall apart.

From the perspective of someone who is not a native English speaker, this kind of text always falls apart. There are articles in newspapers that I simply can't read, because every other word is just some useless distraction from the main point. Even worse, those useless words are often the kind of words that is rarely used, so it takes more of my attention to remember what they mean. No, I have no idea what the article was about, because the words that required my attention were actually the useless ones. I would have to read very slowly and carefully to figure out the meaning, like solving a puzzle... but frankly, I have no motivation to do that, because it is easy to predict that the solution of the puzzle would not be worth the effort, that the underlying text is actually quite boring.

For the record, the ":D" at the end of my comment only meant that I don't think that literally everyone will do this tomorrow. But yes, the temptation to slightly move in given direction is real -- I can feel it myself (unfortunately I have no Patreon account and no product to sell), though I will probably forget this tomorrow -- and some people will follow the nudge more than the others. Also, new people may be tempted to join for the wrong reasons.

On the other hand, even before saying it explicitly, this hypothesis was... not too surprising, in my opinion. I mean, we already knew that some rich people are supporting LW financially; it would make sense if they also read it occasionally. Also, we already had lots of people trying to join LW for the wrong reasons; most of them fail. So I think that the harm of saying this explicitly is small.