Good Heart Week Is Over!

post by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2022-04-08T06:43:46.754Z · LW · GW · 35 comments
Final leaderboard for the goodest of hearts

Good Heart Week [LW · GW] has ended! 

This week has seen a lot of content. I've had a great time reading posts and comments from new writers and returning writers, as well as polished-old-drafts from present writers :) 

I'll write a retrospective in a week or two, but right now here's some information about what's happening and what to do next.

Let me know if you have any requests or questions at this time! I am also very interested in hearing your thoughts on and experiences from the whole week.

35 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Rafael Harth (sil-ver) · 2022-04-08T12:54:56.445Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

With the rate of posts being that far up, there may have been a lot of posts that were totally overlooked, especially those that started at 1 or 2 karma, since they disappeared from the frontpage very quickly. It may be a good time to look a bit through the All Posts [? · GW] page (which I assume most people don't).

(That could be true even if some people upvoted more during this week rather than less. Maybe the posts that went above 20 or even 10 karma had an advantage, but I doubt the 1-2 karma posts did.)

I gotta say, having the power to just gift someone 2$-21$ with the click of a button, at no cost to myself, was pretty neat :-)

Replies from: philh, Lukas_Gloor, samshap
comment by philh · 2022-04-08T14:03:29.394Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'd suggest a community norm of "if you think your post(s) got overlooked because of GHW, feel free to resubmit slowly over the next ~month". (Where I'm not sure what resubmitting looks like exactly - if you move to drafts and then publish again, does that bring to the top of the front page while preserving comments?) I'd likely do this with one of my posts but not the other.

Replies from: Benito, lsusr
comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2022-04-08T18:03:07.001Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yeah I think this is okay this time, especially if your post fell off the front page in under an hour.

comment by lsusr · 2022-04-09T10:22:27.855Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I feel this is a good norm too. I expect the trivial inconvenience is sufficient to prevent most people from resubmitting.

comment by Lukas_Gloor · 2022-04-08T14:22:23.578Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yeah I felt like maybe my post about my metaethics/anti-realism sequence [LW · GW] got overlooked. I saw that by the time it was promoted to frontpage, it was no longer directly visible because of new posts or high-karma older posts taking up the frontpage space.  I don't care about the karma but I was hoping to get some more comments on the sequence from Lesswrongers. I never crossposted any of the 9 sequence posts because that would be cluttering up people's attention, so this is the only time Lesswrong hears about this pretty big amount of content that I put together. 

Replies from: Benito
comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2022-04-08T18:00:59.559Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yeah, if your post was on frontpage for less than an hour I think it's fine to draft it and re-publish a week or two later. Site isn't quite used to having this much content.

comment by samshap · 2022-04-08T15:42:33.203Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I published an article on induction https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7x4eGxXL5DMwRwzDQ/commensurable-scientific-paradigms-or-computable-induction [LW · GW] of decent length/complexity that send to have gotten no visibility at all, which I found very discouraging for my desire to ever do so again. I could only find it by checking my user profile!

Replies from: Benito
comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2022-04-08T18:01:52.839Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Alas. I think re-posting in a week or so is fine.

comment by brook · 2022-04-09T09:43:49.045Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think it's good to experiment, but I actually found the experience of being on the site over the last week pretty unpleasant, and I've definitely spent much less time here. I initially went through some old ideas I had and tried posting one, but ended up just avoiding LessWrong until the end of the week. 

I'm not totally sure right now why I felt this way. Something-like I'm very sensitive to feeling like my normal motivation system is being hijacked? I spent all of my time thinking about the best way to act differently given GHW, rather than just reading the content and enjoying it. This was pretty uncomfortable for me. 

Replies from: MondSemmel, Benito
comment by MondSemmel · 2022-04-10T14:04:23.510Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I also definitely felt some stress & weirdness. Ultimately I did manage to overcome my procrastination to actually post something, and stress isn't always bad, but I agree that the experience was by no means strictly positive for me.

comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2022-04-09T23:23:03.387Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That's interesting. Thanks for the feedback.

comment by Slider · 2022-04-08T14:20:00.396Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I am under the minimum threshold for actual payout. I propose with similarly situated users having collectively 25 tokens to our names draw lots to name one user that we argue and champion to actually receive $25 (with probabilities proportional to how much each user entering the pact personally has).

comment by Gunnar_Zarncke · 2022-04-08T10:00:45.093Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What do I have to do if I want to donate my GHT to the LW team?

PS. Now that GHT is no longer displayed: Where can one see how many a person got?

Replies from: Benito, ege-erdil
comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2022-04-08T18:04:36.212Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If you do not give me a financial address to send it to, we will just not send the money, which is functionally equivalent to donating it back to us.

Replies from: Gunnar_Zarncke
comment by Gunnar_Zarncke · 2022-04-08T19:28:36.203Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Easy. Done :-)

comment by Ege Erdil (ege-erdil) · 2022-04-08T12:53:39.790Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think it's still visible in your profile? (At least it is for me.)

Replies from: Gunnar_Zarncke
comment by Gunnar_Zarncke · 2022-04-08T13:24:47.193Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Confirmed. Either I was blind or temporarily it wasn't.

comment by MondSemmel · 2022-04-10T14:41:33.568Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Things I'd be interested to learn in the retrospective:

  • What was the volume of posts and comments, relative to the LW baseline? I felt pretty overwhelmed and certainly couldn't keep up with everything.
    • Side note: Is there a way to get some rough site analytics for one's own posts? I was quite surprised with how many comments I got on this [LW · GW] post (especially relative to its karma), and when I shared it on r/SSC here, I learned that the reddit linkpost got 5.9k views. Which to me sounded frankly implausibly high by an order of magnitude. But on the other hand, I have no sense for which proportion of LW readers upvote or comment on posts, either.
    • And a question from another angle: what are the best times to post on LW, if one wants to maximize the chance not to have it get buried unseen?
  • Did this experiment have any long-term effects on site traffic and behavior? (To be answered in a few months, I guess.)
  • You'll presumably list the total payout, but what was the internal expectation of the LW team? How much money did you budget for this?
  • And how much other resources (e.g. staff time for engineering or site moderation) did you expend?
  • What were your greatest hopes and fears for this experiment? How does the actual result compare to these expectations?
  • Are there any other crazy experiments you'd love to try? How do they compare in crazyness to Good Heart Week?
Replies from: Benito
comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2022-04-11T03:59:45.272Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for the comment, I'll return to this when I do my post.

Replies from: MondSemmel
comment by MondSemmel · 2023-08-11T10:46:50.888Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If you ever find the time, I'd still be interested in seeing the retrospective from Good Heart Week 2022.

comment by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2022-04-08T19:41:46.507Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

One user on the leaderboard said to me it would make their life easier if the payment for this came after tax day on April 18th

Pretty curious why this would be; can't think of any tax reason.

Replies from: Pattern, Ericf
comment by Pattern · 2022-04-09T15:40:08.042Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Guess:

They already have their taxes ready and think it will make things more complicated, and they don't want to look at that stuff again right now.

Replies from: jkaufman
comment by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2022-04-09T17:14:17.335Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If they do think that, they're wrong. Money you earn in 2022 impacts the taxes you file by April 2023, not April 2022.

comment by Ericf · 2022-04-09T02:00:03.438Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Conjecture:

  1. They are doing thier own taxes, and owe money, so they want to file at the deadline. and
  2. For some reason, they need to have the current balance in thier paypal/ETH account to not change until after filing? Or
  3. They are on some quarterly system as an S-corp and want to book revenue in a different quarter because they already filed for this quarter assuming 0 additional income and would have to amend the paperwork if they got new income. And thier quarters line up with Tax day?
Replies from: jkaufman
comment by jefftk (jkaufman) · 2022-04-09T17:17:48.727Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

2: I don't see why it the balance would matter?

3: It's pretty uncommon to have your quarters roll over on the 18th. April 1st would be typical. Additionally, if they do use the 18th to define their quarter, it would be a bit surprising for them to refer to that as tax day, since that isn't usually the 18th.

comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2022-05-06T13:05:58.486Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Brief update: most of the payments have gone out, and a few of the bigger ones still to do. I'm slow on this because I am on vacation and was ill for a while. My guess is this will all be wrapped up within 7 days.

comment by MondSemmel · 2022-04-10T14:06:33.612Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I suggest sending a (LW and/or email) notification which points to this post to every user on LW that's eligible for a payout, i.e. everyone who got >=25 Good Heart Tokens. (Or just to those who don't yet have any payment details submitted.) Not everyone sees admin posts like this one.

comment by Chris_Leong · 2022-04-08T07:49:34.327Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I found myself pretty motivated to reach the leaderboard, but once I reached the leaderboard, I was fine with letting myself slide off it so that I wouldn't be distracted by it.

This post - General Thoughts on Less Wrong [LW · GW] - had been in my drafts, but I forgot to hit publish (since the situation had changed, I had to spend a bit of time rewriting it).

Overall, Goodhart's were harder to mine than I thought, but I've also been very busy with work, so didn't really have time to create any effort posts.

Replies from: ChristianKl
comment by ChristianKl · 2022-04-08T09:54:45.455Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think they were harder because people thought more seriously about their votes knowing that they are essentially giving the person money. 

Replies from: p.b.
comment by p.b. · 2022-04-08T10:09:53.772Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

For what it's worth, I upvoted and strong-upvoted more than usual.

Replies from: Chris_Leong, Measure
comment by Chris_Leong · 2022-04-08T16:05:10.744Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think maybe I didn't take into account that posts would get less attention both due to more content, but also due to me posting content in a shorter window.

comment by Measure · 2022-04-08T12:42:24.581Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Same here.

Replies from: yitz
comment by Yitz (yitz) · 2022-04-08T13:01:16.548Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Same here as well

comment by George3d6 · 2022-04-09T11:01:24.648Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Wait, you were actually serious about the paying people part :)))

Replies from: Benito
comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2022-04-09T23:23:21.599Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yes, it is going to happen.