A friend of mine from the local LessWrong meetup created Democracy Chess—a game where the human players play against an AI, vote on moves, and the move with the most votes is played. Yesterday a bunch of us gave it a try.
In brainstorming how it could be better I had an interesting thought: what if there was a $10 buy in where if we win we get our money back but if we lose the money is donated to some pre-agreed upon charity?
I could see something like that being fun. Having something at stake can make games more fun. And along the lines of charity runs, it can be fun to get together with a group of people and raise/donate money for a cause.
My angle here is that if something like this is genuinely fun and appealing, it could be a good way to generate money for charities. Along the lines of 1,000 True Fans, if 1,000 people spend $200/year on this (~$20/month) and won half the time, that’d be $100k in charitable donations a year. A meaningful sum.
I don’t think Democracy Chess would be the ideal game. I think something like trivia would make more sense. Something that has more mass appeal and is more social. Trivia is particularly appealing since it’d be easy to build an prototype for.
One thing I like about this idea is that customer acquisition seems straightforward. I think direct outreach to EA and rationalist groups would make sense as an initial target audience. From there it seems plausible that other groups might be interested. For example, a local bike advocacy group might want to organize a trivia game where donations would go to a pro-biking organization. And direct outreach to such groups is very doable.
Longer term I could see celebrities promoting it. Maybe motivated by altruism, maybe motivated by virtue signaling, maybe a mix of both.
But I’m not feeling optimistic about this idea. The 6+ people I asked from the Portland rationality meetup weren’t excited about it and wouldn’t be motivated enough to organize a game. Maybe they’d join in if someone else organized it. And I myself fall into that boat: I’d tag along if someone else organized it but I wouldn’t be very motivated to organize a game. And I think for this to work it’d require people who are excited and motivated enough to organize games on a recurring basis.
Maybe those people are out there though! Does anyone reading this fall into that camp?
Half-baked idea free to good home: Calibration trivia for charity.
The event has an array of charities available to pick. Each person or team puts up a stake. They answer trivia questions with answers and how sure they are that they’re right. At the end of the game, they get back some amount of money based on their brier score, with more calibrated teams getting back more of their stake. Whatever team has the most correct answers gets to pick where all the money that wasn’t returned goes. Ties on correct answers get broken by calibration. Winning team maybe gets a free hat or something.
I don’t know if this has any memetic fitness compared to existing charity drives.
what if there was a $10 buy in where if we win we get our money back but if we lose the money is donated to some pre-agreed upon charity?
I feel like this structure could be improved, as I don’t think it would press the right psychological buttons. If I’m enthusiastic about the charity, it’s strange to be (effectively) playing against it—especially if there’s a relatively large amount of money at stake, most of it conditionally donated by people other than me, so the altruistic benefit of losing the game clearly outweighs the selfish benefit of winning it. And if I’m not enthusiastic about the charity, I have no strong motive to put any money up, when the best I can personally do is break even.
If you’re expecting the participants to be enthusiastic about the charity, maybe a better structure would be to ditch the idea of giving the players their money back, and find someone (or offer yourself) to match (or at least significantly augment) the donation if the human team wins. That way they’re all working together for a good cause.
(If you wanted to go in the other direction and appeal to their selfish motives, you could stick with something similar to the original plan but make the winning outcome better than breakeven—either by putting some extra money in the pot, or by breaking the humans up into two teams and giving some of the worse-performing team’s money to the better-performing team while donating the rest to charity.)
I feel like this structure could be improved, as I don’t think it would press the right psychological buttons. If I’m enthusiastic about the charity, it’s strange to be (effectively) playing against it—especially if there’s a relatively large amount of money at stake, most of it conditionally donated by people other than me, so the altruistic benefit of losing the game clearly outweighs the selfish benefit of winning it.
That’s a good point. Maybe it’d be better if it were like one team of humans against another. Although I could also see it being the case that people are in fact motivated to win: competitiveness, social pressure, not enough money to be particularly driven to have it donated to the charity.
find someone (or offer yourself) to match (or at least significantly augment) the donation if the human team wins
Yes, sorry—‘magically find more money’ was not exactly a helpful suggestion! (I think I was more confident in the negative part of my critique, but wanted to at least try to offer something constructive.) I do think it could potentially work for quite small values of ‘significantly augment’, though, if that is an option; just enough to take the game from from zero sum to non-negligibly positive sum.
A friend of mine from the local LessWrong meetup created Democracy Chess—a game where the human players play against an AI, vote on moves, and the move with the most votes is played. Yesterday a bunch of us gave it a try.
In brainstorming how it could be better I had an interesting thought: what if there was a $10 buy in where if we win we get our money back but if we lose the money is donated to some pre-agreed upon charity?
I could see something like that being fun. Having something at stake can make games more fun. And along the lines of charity runs, it can be fun to get together with a group of people and raise/donate money for a cause.
My angle here is that if something like this is genuinely fun and appealing, it could be a good way to generate money for charities. Along the lines of 1,000 True Fans, if 1,000 people spend $200/year on this (~$20/month) and won half the time, that’d be $100k in charitable donations a year. A meaningful sum.
I don’t think Democracy Chess would be the ideal game. I think something like trivia would make more sense. Something that has more mass appeal and is more social. Trivia is particularly appealing since it’d be easy to build an prototype for.
One thing I like about this idea is that customer acquisition seems straightforward. I think direct outreach to EA and rationalist groups would make sense as an initial target audience. From there it seems plausible that other groups might be interested. For example, a local bike advocacy group might want to organize a trivia game where donations would go to a pro-biking organization. And direct outreach to such groups is very doable.
Longer term I could see celebrities promoting it. Maybe motivated by altruism, maybe motivated by virtue signaling, maybe a mix of both.
But I’m not feeling optimistic about this idea. The 6+ people I asked from the Portland rationality meetup weren’t excited about it and wouldn’t be motivated enough to organize a game. Maybe they’d join in if someone else organized it. And I myself fall into that boat: I’d tag along if someone else organized it but I wouldn’t be very motivated to organize a game. And I think for this to work it’d require people who are excited and motivated enough to organize games on a recurring basis.
Maybe those people are out there though! Does anyone reading this fall into that camp?
Half-baked idea free to good home: Calibration trivia for charity.
The event has an array of charities available to pick. Each person or team puts up a stake. They answer trivia questions with answers and how sure they are that they’re right. At the end of the game, they get back some amount of money based on their brier score, with more calibrated teams getting back more of their stake. Whatever team has the most correct answers gets to pick where all the money that wasn’t returned goes. Ties on correct answers get broken by calibration. Winning team maybe gets a free hat or something.
I don’t know if this has any memetic fitness compared to existing charity drives.
I feel like this structure could be improved, as I don’t think it would press the right psychological buttons. If I’m enthusiastic about the charity, it’s strange to be (effectively) playing against it—especially if there’s a relatively large amount of money at stake, most of it conditionally donated by people other than me, so the altruistic benefit of losing the game clearly outweighs the selfish benefit of winning it. And if I’m not enthusiastic about the charity, I have no strong motive to put any money up, when the best I can personally do is break even.
If you’re expecting the participants to be enthusiastic about the charity, maybe a better structure would be to ditch the idea of giving the players their money back, and find someone (or offer yourself) to match (or at least significantly augment) the donation if the human team wins. That way they’re all working together for a good cause.
(If you wanted to go in the other direction and appeal to their selfish motives, you could stick with something similar to the original plan but make the winning outcome better than breakeven—either by putting some extra money in the pot, or by breaking the humans up into two teams and giving some of the worse-performing team’s money to the better-performing team while donating the rest to charity.)
Thanks for the feedback!
That’s a good point. Maybe it’d be better if it were like one team of humans against another. Although I could also see it being the case that people are in fact motivated to win: competitiveness, social pressure, not enough money to be particularly driven to have it donated to the charity.
That sounds difficult.
Yes, sorry—‘magically find more money’ was not exactly a helpful suggestion! (I think I was more confident in the negative part of my critique, but wanted to at least try to offer something constructive.) I do think it could potentially work for quite small values of ‘significantly augment’, though, if that is an option; just enough to take the game from from zero sum to non-negligibly positive sum.