How to incentivize people doing useful stuff on Less Wrong

Am I the only one who thinks that linking this site to Facebook (or any other similar site) is a really bad idea? It sounds like a recipe for an Eternal September.

Luke, it is rather unfortunate that you offered a problem (How to incentivize people) and a single potential solution (use karma) in the same post, committing what seems to be a rather basic violation of rationality, something one would hardly expect from an expert in the matter.

Now, as you can see from the comments, nearly everyone has concentrated on discussing your solution, as opposed to offering their own, and the utility of your post has been greatly diminished as a result.

Then again, maybe it was your intention all along, in which case I would appreciate your thinking on the matter. (For example, maybe there was some other post where plenty of options were discussed and karma use was agreed to be the way to proceed.)

For example, I really wish LW could award karma to programmers for improving LW.

It can't? The programmers of LW should be incentivized to implement awarding karma to programmers. (Although I would deduct karma from whoever replaced the "Reply Permalink Edit" etc. with icons.)

Suppose PersonA did a ton of good work on Less Wrong and got 10,000 karma, and then donated all of that karma toward making some great project highly incentivized. This person has done two wonderful things - all the wonderful work and incentivizing more wonderful work - but they have 0 karma to show for it.

They have real-world karma to show for it. But if that isn't enough for you, they could instead invest their karma in the project, and get back some fraction of the karma voted to the project.

Typically, if someone does something useful for less wrong, they make a top level post about it, and they get karma for that post.

One difficulty here is that karma ranking boards still wouldn't optimally reflect status. Suppose PersonA did a ton of good work on Less Wrong and got 10,000 karma, and then donated all of that karma toward making some great project highly incentivized. This person has done two wonderful things - all the wonderful work and incentivizing more wonderful work - but they have 0 karma to show for it.

This is the difference between us and what.cd. There are so many albums in the world filling a request might mean satisfying the desire of only one or two people. But major contributions to site code are collective goods. Because they are collective goods people will often be unwilling to sacrifice karma and will instead wait for someone else to fund the projects. Unless we're going to name site features after the posters who fund them ("The Lukeprog Lawrence, KS Meetup Group!") it would be more effective to have a public funding model.

Posters should have a set monthly "Karma Vouchers" that they can spend on requests. When the request is fulfilled the person who fulfilled it is accorded in real karma whatever the task was given in vouchers. The amount of vouchers one gets can be a karma incentive as well- say you have to get to 500 karma before you get any and after that it increases occasionally as you level up. You cannot claim your own vouchers. Karma vouchers can also be put against tasks (i.e. you can downvote with the vouchers) for an easy way of disqualifying unpopular site features and preventing people from gaming the system.

Suppose PersonA did a ton of good work on Less Wrong and got 10,000 karma, and then donated all of that karma toward making some great project highly incentivized. This person has done two wonderful things - all the wonderful work and incentivizing more wonderful work - but they have 0 karma to show for it.

We can fix this by having karma be multiplied when it is donated. So if I donate 100 karma to see some task completed that will reward the person who does that task with 200 karma. Another idea (that I prefer) is that the karma bounty you post is returned to you (as well as given to the other person) when a task is completed.

Also, there should probably be more incentives for gaining karma in general, as there are incentives for gaining upload ratio on what.cd. Rising through the karma ranks should give users special privileges that are actually desired.

On stackexchange style sites users are awarded with the power to do site admin tasks as a reward for tasking the karma ladder. For instance 2000 karma nets you the ability to edit others post (helpfully correcting broken links). Obviously there are still consequences if you use your powers for evil.

Independent of modifications to the karma system, more users should be given such editting powers. In particular the sequences could do with being more interlinked, and I would happily do this given the chance. Putting links to the next post in the sequence at the end of every post would increase their addictiveness substantially, pulling in more readers.

Finally, it occurs that making such modifications might use more work than simply making the changes that would otherwise have rewards posted for them.

Do we think the 10:1 ration between top-level main posts and discussion posts/comments accurately represents the differing value of those contributions? The question matters more the more value we give to karma.

Why not just have programmers post what they've done and let people upvote them for it?

Somehow I'm suspicious of any possibility of anyone's karma changing for other reasons than upvotes/downvotes.

Karma markets are a good plan. I approve.

Before we have any more discussion, I highly recommend committing yourselves to using "karma charity", "donate karma", "receive karma" instead of "karma market", "pay karma", "paid with karma". It is aesthetically pleasing - juxtaposing karma with capitalism just grates on my sense of taste. It also has obvious framing benefits which we should not be above using - if the idea of participating in karma charity is attractive to one good programmer where buying and selling in a karma market is not, Less Wrong garners that many more improvements.

One difficulty here is that karma ranking boards still wouldn't optimally reflect status. Suppose PersonA did a ton of good work on Less Wrong and got 10,000 karma, and then donated all of that karma toward making some great project highly incentivized. This person has done two wonderful things - all the wonderful work and incentivizing more wonderful work - but they have 0 karma to show for it.

Solution: anonymise karma donations, announce the total pool of 10,000 karma, then on project completion return the largest single donation to its donor as well as giving it to the recipient. In PersonA's case, they lose no karma. This is deserved, because it is a generous move on PersonA's part. In usual usage, it will contribute slightly to karma inflation and encourage larger than usual prizes (think "closest guess to 2/3s of the average of all guesses wins" but growing instead of shrinking) without allowing people to game the system.

What's to stop Eliezer from donating 150,000 karma for anything he wants done, comfortable in the knowledge that he will receive his full karma donation back? Nothing except that this will drastically decrease his future power by massively devaluing karma. Anyone with enough karma to pull off that manipulation has too much invested in their karma to squander it.

Maybe the award would eventually rise to 5000 karma points - a pretty damn good reason for some programmer on LW to write the code and make it work.

“A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” --Napoleon

I think more effort should be given to parceling out sub-assignments. The following is too big a project:

If somebody wants to summarize the literature on choice modelling or AI preference elicitation/learning from the point of view of what's most likely to be useful for CEV, that would be awesome. But I am very, very skeptical that anybody will actually do that.

Are there people willing to purchase LessWrong karma with Second Life dollars, World of Warcraft money, or even real US dollars?

If it were possible to sell LessWrong karma for a dollar a point, some people could quit their jobs and write for LessWrong full time.

One problem is that this would in itself probably devalue karma against the dollar.

An alternate system would be to add another button next to 'thumbs up' that would use paypal to pay people a dollar directly for a clever comment or $5 for a post.

(This raises an interesting question: Would the karma system be more informative if we had no downvotes? As it stands, a karma of +/- 2 is usually a strong signal; but for a controversial comment, that doesn't rise above the noise.)

Perhaps tasks could be assigned karma award amounts by LW editors (Nesov, Eliezer, Louie, etc.), or even just one person who is appointed as the Karma Genie.

Some kind of democratic or market mechanism would more accurately reflect the value of tasks.

Also, there should probably be more incentives for gaining karma in general, as there are incentives for gaining upload ratio on what.cd. Rising through the karma ranks should give users special privileges that are actually desired.

The top contributors list on the sidebar could link to a page with the full rankings.

I think the Karma value of a post is quite useful. The Karma value of a person is less so - it's a combination of how long they've been around, and how good their posts are considered to be. As long as you have enough Karma to post a main article if you want, you have enough Karma, imo. Having said that, I do take more notice of posts from people who I recognise, or have something of a track record. We'd lose that information if Karma became something else.

There is of course the well-known incentive of changing the relative probabilities of a good or bad singularity - you would think that ought to be enough for most people.... Actually it isn't - we tend to do things like less wrong in order to mix with a community of like-minded people. I think encouraging that aspect stands most chance of success.

The thing is that in the current karma model, karma simply can't be treated as currency, because every time someone upvotes something, that karma is drawn anew from the aether, it's not a transfer of existing electronic karma bills or anything like that. You can't even say there's an infinite bank it comes from, because there's not. Karma currently exists only as a ranking, and although that's a goal in itself for some people, I'd say it's not for everyone.

Why not just have people who are good at writing write up a top level post explaining why non-writing contribution is important, and why person X should be thanked for doing it. They then give the article to the person in question to post (the article is still signed by the author)? The article is hopefully up voted (10 karma each up vote adds up quick), either because people like how its written or agree that it indeed is a very important contribution for other reasons.

Also a feature that I'd be willing to donate karma for is co-authorship, where the karma gained by a top level post can be split between the authors. Bonus if they can do so in a way in which they can customize how much of the karma share or burden of the article each of them will get.

This is worth about half my current karma to me.

Glad others are interested in this!

Implementing this is relatively straightforward, if not easy. Make a subreddit, where people request improvements. Karma from the upvotes on those requests goes to whoever successfully implements said improvement. No reason to make karma less legitimate by having admins hand out arbitrary chunks of it.

If you want to increase participation on Less Wrong, converting irrational thinkers to rational thinkers is the only way.

Less wrong does not have a mandate to educate the merely interested, probably because most of that kind of interest seems temporary. The educational efforts that seem required are rarely intrinsically rewarding. And the bar for valued participation is so high, it discourages the unprepared.

Less Wrong seems to be trying to create plenty of tools for self-education on the subject of rationality, so I don't know that a mandate to educate individuals is necessary... But I do think that anyone who is compelled to reply someone at a different level of education on a subject than themselves ought to feel compelled to point out where the energy for contribution/education should actually go, instead of merely curbing the enthusiasm to participate.