Upvoted for interesting take on an important question: why do people do things that don’t involve money? I disagree with the framing that quantified exchange and debt is the “base case” for human interaction, nor the implication that most groups would be improved by imposing such requirements.
I first came across the word “autotelic” in the rulebook for an ’80s nerdy card game, which amused me that they felt the need to say it about a game, but also has stuck with me. My view is that a whole lot of human interactions are self-rewarding. People like to explain, be explained to, argue, and generally be part of things. At a certain scale, and above a certain production value / cost to produce, payment and legible value needs to be tracked, because it stops being autotelic.
But trying to make it legible before that point actually RUINS the experience for a lot of people. It’s no longer a casual participation that anyone can do as much or as little as they enjoy, and no longer people seeking places to interact with compatible others, now it’s a job, or a quantified entertainment expense.
A lot of sites walk the line pretty well—non-obvious revenue through ads or donations or all-you-can-eat subscriptions, some amount of paid moderation/curation, possibly even some amount of paid content. But still keeping most of the illegible value in autotelic posting and reading of non-curated content. And a lot of sites TRY to walk the line, but utterly fail. A few of them fail so spectacularly that they accidentally take over the world, get very rich, and are exposed as clearly evil.
Note that debt is logically downstream of exchange, and exists to time-shift a part of the transaction. It’s not core to the transaction, in most cases. ‘debtlessness’ is just a side-effect of ‘paymentless’, which is itself an abstraction over ‘unquantified or untracked value exchange’. There are some places that DO track some level of value exchange, without money—upload/download ratio or karma requirements are a bit of this.
My view is that a whole lot of human interactions are self-rewarding. People like to explain, be explained to, argue, and generally be part of things.
If you don’t pay, you only get people who like doing X. From their perspective, not being paid provides a sense of freedom. (If you don’t pay me, I can write about topics I like. If you paid me, it would imply an obligation to write about topics you like.)
There is always a risk that people will do an unpaid job from wrong reasons. People may volunteer as authors because they have a product to sell, or volunteer as moderators because they want to win the virtual space for their political tribe.
But if you start paying, then on top of this there is a risk of attracting people who don’t care about the project, and just want the money.
I think it makes sense to pay if you want someone to do a full-time job, such as rewriting the LessWrong software from scratch. Or maybe a moderator on Reddit. Basically, if you want guaranteed nontrivial amount of work, to be done even when it stops being fun.
But trying to make it legible before that point actually RUINS the experience for a lot of people.
Being strictly unable to enjoy things that people pay you to do is obviously not healthy. I think you’re mostly just describing pathologies of the present labor relations that don’t actually entail from tracking credit. We can imagine a world where people are allowed to just work as much as they feel like and where the jobs available are fairly enjoyable, and we must.
In practice, yes, we don’t really know how to track debt in systems of dialog and collaborative filtering systems, but that could change very quickly as the internet becomes more amenable to experiments in that sort of thing. I think there are situations where the overhead of tracking debt will always be too much, peer to peer protocols, maybe, or interactions between bacteria. For anything higher level, I doubt it’s the best we can do.
Being strictly unable to enjoy things that people pay you to do is obviously not healthy.
I think this is a crux (or a communication failure that is important). I didn’t say that payment ruins the experience, I said that the attempt to make it legible in order to calculate payment ruins it. Or at least changes it enough that it’s not the same experience, and I’m likely to look elsewhere for the illegible parts, while gladly accepting payment for the legible (but not as valuable as before) parts.
My main point is that the overhead of debt tracking or payment handling is small, compared to the mental model changes and reconfiguration of expectations when the value is framed in measured units rather than personal, incomparable enjoyable activities.
So, hypothetically speaking, do you think that paying people without measuring them would be harmless? Though I am not sure whether this question even makes sense in real world, because at least you need to make a decision how long you keep paying someone (unless you just committed to paying them forever, regardless of whether they do something or not), which implies some form of measure.
I don’t know how it would be possible to pay without measuring. At the extreme of “unmeasured payments”, I presume a national or global UBI wouldn’t significantly harm any given community or shared space that isn’t related to the UBI criteria. Narrower payment schemes require AT LEAST objective identification of who pays (or is paid), why, and some exclusion mechanism to prevent overpayment. It’s possible this could be minimally-invasive, but improbable.
And, to the extent it’s not distortionary, it’s also not motivating. Payment is (almost always) intended to have an effect on behavior. When it has no effect, there’s not much reason for payment (there may be reason for grants or gifts as rewards, thank-yous, or kindness, but if they’re regular enough they become expected and impactful on future motivation).
Relatedly, the legibility and universality of currency will cause any payment scheme to be considered in terms of scaling. How do we make these measured dimensions bigger (or keep them smaller, in some cases), regardless of impact on all the unmeasured values that people take from the interactions.
When I started this subthread, I didn’t think this was the same as Goodhart, but maybe it is: if people like doing something, and you measure part of it for monetary purposes, you’ve got an imperfect proxy for that value.
Upvoted for interesting take on an important question: why do people do things that don’t involve money? I disagree with the framing that quantified exchange and debt is the “base case” for human interaction, nor the implication that most groups would be improved by imposing such requirements.
I first came across the word “autotelic” in the rulebook for an ’80s nerdy card game, which amused me that they felt the need to say it about a game, but also has stuck with me. My view is that a whole lot of human interactions are self-rewarding. People like to explain, be explained to, argue, and generally be part of things. At a certain scale, and above a certain production value / cost to produce, payment and legible value needs to be tracked, because it stops being autotelic.
But trying to make it legible before that point actually RUINS the experience for a lot of people. It’s no longer a casual participation that anyone can do as much or as little as they enjoy, and no longer people seeking places to interact with compatible others, now it’s a job, or a quantified entertainment expense.
A lot of sites walk the line pretty well—non-obvious revenue through ads or donations or all-you-can-eat subscriptions, some amount of paid moderation/curation, possibly even some amount of paid content. But still keeping most of the illegible value in autotelic posting and reading of non-curated content. And a lot of sites TRY to walk the line, but utterly fail. A few of them fail so spectacularly that they accidentally take over the world, get very rich, and are exposed as clearly evil.
Note that debt is logically downstream of exchange, and exists to time-shift a part of the transaction. It’s not core to the transaction, in most cases. ‘debtlessness’ is just a side-effect of ‘paymentless’, which is itself an abstraction over ‘unquantified or untracked value exchange’. There are some places that DO track some level of value exchange, without money—upload/download ratio or karma requirements are a bit of this.
If you don’t pay, you only get people who like doing X. From their perspective, not being paid provides a sense of freedom. (If you don’t pay me, I can write about topics I like. If you paid me, it would imply an obligation to write about topics you like.)
There is always a risk that people will do an unpaid job from wrong reasons. People may volunteer as authors because they have a product to sell, or volunteer as moderators because they want to win the virtual space for their political tribe.
But if you start paying, then on top of this there is a risk of attracting people who don’t care about the project, and just want the money.
I think it makes sense to pay if you want someone to do a full-time job, such as rewriting the LessWrong software from scratch. Or maybe a moderator on Reddit. Basically, if you want guaranteed nontrivial amount of work, to be done even when it stops being fun.
Being strictly unable to enjoy things that people pay you to do is obviously not healthy. I think you’re mostly just describing pathologies of the present labor relations that don’t actually entail from tracking credit. We can imagine a world where people are allowed to just work as much as they feel like and where the jobs available are fairly enjoyable, and we must.
In practice, yes, we don’t really know how to track debt in systems of dialog and collaborative filtering systems, but that could change very quickly as the internet becomes more amenable to experiments in that sort of thing.
I think there are situations where the overhead of tracking debt will always be too much, peer to peer protocols, maybe, or interactions between bacteria. For anything higher level, I doubt it’s the best we can do.
I think this is a crux (or a communication failure that is important). I didn’t say that payment ruins the experience, I said that the attempt to make it legible in order to calculate payment ruins it. Or at least changes it enough that it’s not the same experience, and I’m likely to look elsewhere for the illegible parts, while gladly accepting payment for the legible (but not as valuable as before) parts.
My main point is that the overhead of debt tracking or payment handling is small, compared to the mental model changes and reconfiguration of expectations when the value is framed in measured units rather than personal, incomparable enjoyable activities.
So, hypothetically speaking, do you think that paying people without measuring them would be harmless? Though I am not sure whether this question even makes sense in real world, because at least you need to make a decision how long you keep paying someone (unless you just committed to paying them forever, regardless of whether they do something or not), which implies some form of measure.
I don’t know how it would be possible to pay without measuring. At the extreme of “unmeasured payments”, I presume a national or global UBI wouldn’t significantly harm any given community or shared space that isn’t related to the UBI criteria. Narrower payment schemes require AT LEAST objective identification of who pays (or is paid), why, and some exclusion mechanism to prevent overpayment. It’s possible this could be minimally-invasive, but improbable.
And, to the extent it’s not distortionary, it’s also not motivating. Payment is (almost always) intended to have an effect on behavior. When it has no effect, there’s not much reason for payment (there may be reason for grants or gifts as rewards, thank-yous, or kindness, but if they’re regular enough they become expected and impactful on future motivation).
Relatedly, the legibility and universality of currency will cause any payment scheme to be considered in terms of scaling. How do we make these measured dimensions bigger (or keep them smaller, in some cases), regardless of impact on all the unmeasured values that people take from the interactions.
When I started this subthread, I didn’t think this was the same as Goodhart, but maybe it is: if people like doing something, and you measure part of it for monetary purposes, you’ve got an imperfect proxy for that value.