Good Heart Week Is Over!

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 :-)

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. 

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).

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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