Could we solve this email mess if we all moved to paid emails?

I think it's great that you're trying this and I hope it succeeds.

But I won't be using it. For me, the biggest problem is lowering the sense of obligation I feel to answer other people's emails. Without a sense of obligation, there's no problem - I just delete it and move on. But part of me feels like I'm incurring a social cost by doing this, so it's harder than it sounds.

I feel like using a service like this would make the problem worse, not better. It would make me feel a strong sense of obligation to answer someone's email if they had paid $5 to send it. What sort of monster deletes an email they know the other person had to pay money to send?

In the same way, I would feel nervous sending someone else a paid email, because I would feel like I was imposing a stronger sense of obligation on them to respond to my request, rather than it being a harmless ask they can either answer or not. This would be true regardless of how important my email was. Meanwhile, people who don't care about other people's feelings won't really be held back, since $5 is not a lot of money for most people in this community.

I think the increased obligation would dominate any tendency for me to get less emails, and make this a net negative in my case. I still hope other people try it and report back.

Instead of email, we could use Less Wrong direct messages with karma instead of money. Going further, we could set up a karma-based prediction market on what score posts will reach, and use its predictions to set post visibility. Compare Stack Exchange's bounty system.

May I ask for a resolution comment (or follow-up questions if not resolved) when you've decided that this question has sufficient answers to make a decision or summarize a consensus?

It's not fair to pick on this one, and I apologize for that, but this is one of a number of recent topics that generate opinions and explore some models (some valuable, many interesting), but then kind of die out rather than actually concluding anything.

Tangential, but I confess I'm surprised that the model is "pay if you get a reply". I would have expected "pay if they think you wasted their time" (i.e. you attach an amount of money, they read your email and then choose to collect the money or return it to you).

I guess that would be solving a different problem. Of the four "have you ever"s from the beginning, I think it would help with like, one and a half.

someone in rationality [...] the community [...] many rationalists [...] the collective action problem of how to allocate our attention as a community. [...] within the rationality community [...] positive effects on the community

What community?

The problems with email that you mention are real and important. I'm glad that people are trying to solve it. If you think one particular solution (such as earn.com) is unusually good and you want it to win, then it might make sense for you to do some marketing work on their behalf, such as the post you just wrote.

What I don't understand (or rather, what I understand all too well and now wish to warn against after realizing just how horribly it's fucked with my ability to think in a way that I am only just now beginning to recover from) is this incestuous CliqueBot-like behavior that makes people think in terms of sending email to "someone in rationality", rather than just sending email to someone.

In the late 'aughts, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a bunch of really insightful blog posts about how to think. I think they got collected into a book? I can't recommend that book enough—it's really great stuff. ("AI to Zombies" is lame subtitle, though.) Probably there are some other good blog posts on the lesswrong.com website, too? (At least, I like mine [LW · GW].)

But this doesn't mean you should think of the vague cluster of people who have been influenced by that book as a coherent group, "rationalists", the allocation of whose attention is a collective action problem (more so than any other number of similar clusters of people like "biologists", or "entrepreneurs", or "people with IQs above 120"). Particularly since mentally conflating rationality (the true structure of systematically correct reasoning) with the central social tendency of so-called "rationalists" (people who socially belong to a particular insular Bay Area-centered subculture) is likely to cause information cascades [LW · GW], as people who naïvely take the "rationalist" brand name literally tend to blindly trust the dominant "rationalist" opinion as the correct one, without actually checking whether "the community" is doing the kind of information processing that would result in systematically correct opinions.

And if you speak overmuch of the Way you will not attain it.

If I am sending you an email, it could be because I have some info that I believe would benefit you and am honestly trying to be helpful in sending it. I am unlikely to do this if I have to pay you.

This was crossposted to the EA forum [EA(p) · GW(p)] replacing all mentions of "rationality" with "EA", mutatis mutandis.

I like this idea, and I think for it to take off, it would have to be implemented by easily piggy backing off of the existing email system. If I could download some kind of browser-extension that allowed me to accept payment for emails while letting me continue to use my existing email, I would consider having that option.

However, I think this could face some adoption problems. I could easily imagine there being negative social consequences to advertising having a paid email address. As it makes the statement "I am more likely to ignore your messages unless you pay me for my time." common knowledge.

Having these norms would create scammers that try to look prestigious. If you only get paid when you reply to a message, lots of low value replies are going to be sent.

One reason to escew earn.com specifically is the use of bitcoin. Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are a major waste of energy (0.2% of the global energy use currently) and should be avoided by rationalists.

I could not clean information to get a picture what is the percieved problem. The closest I got was guessing that the game Uplink had a mission trakcing system that was a mission per email.

If someone tells you to do something you can exercise your own judgement whether you will do it. If a person tells you to jump into a well and you do jump into a well the problem is not that people are able to talk to you (unrestrictidly) but that you are way too suggestible than is good for your own health.

You can say no. You can control who you reveal your which email address to. You can control what kind of connectivity you ask for. (I have to pay because you lack filtering skills?)

It's also weird that burning social capital is undesirable but burning money would be. And the moloch toolbox link mainly adviced to the contrary. The "magic tower" metaphor critises that just taking 4 years off people is not a good way to select employess. It would seem you need to believe that burning $1 or $10 would somehow make the content more quality? It would also seem that paying to cry wolf would be a more tempting joke as more extreme reactions would be expected (and the cost being "adequate compensation" for the disruption, there was a phenomenon where making a trivial cost on picking your kids late from kindergarden made the parents late more and not sorry).

There could be something interesting about how mechanics of email leads to "drive-by-burdening" where you skip the negotiation phase whether some committed can be formed and just simply proceed to assume that it will be done. But I would asssume the solution or problem formulation would be more social or communication centric. And would guess the solutions could be "stop making everyone your boss, make commitments that you don't plan on keeping (spam your business card with email on it to 'network' and then not wanting to reply when people use it, are you in or out in this networking thing?) and avoid legimate turning down just because it's icky". And in the case of your actual employer boss leaving too much emails a line of "you have to talk about overburdening with management and be prepared to leave employement that doesn't fit your life"

I also have a bad feeling about baggage that economical thinking will bring with it. It is dissatisying to me that the reservations are nebolous to me. But if communication is free I can focus on whether the idea has merit, on paid communication I might tend to shift to a frame where I "assume merit" rather than "verify merit". And rather than being confident in my communication because I speak the truth I could be confident because of sunk-cost fallacies etc.