[Question] Good Heart Donation Lottery

Gordon Seidoh Worley1 Apr 2022 17:51 UTC
72 points
14 comments2 min readLW link

Note: This was for April Fools. I’ll leave the original top text for posterity, but see the updates for the current state of actual donation lottery.

Greetings, all!

Good Heart Tokens are clearly the mechanism we need to do more Good in the world. To that end, I’m starting a donation lottery.

Here’s how it works.

First, strong up vote this post. We need to try to get it to at least $600 worth of upvotes to maximize the payout. (though see update 1; there’s no limit)

Next, give an answer to this “question” specifying the charity you’d like to see donated to.

Then, upvote answers. This will generate a weighted distribution from which I will randomly pick the winner of the lottery. So, for example, if there’s 1 answer for MIRI that gets 69 Good Heart Tokens and 1 answer for AMF that gets 420 Good Heart Tokens, then I’ll do a random weighted drawing where MIRI has a weight of 69 and AMF has a weight of 420. The winner gets the pot of tokens generated by upvoting this post.

You get to do what you like with the tokens on your answer. I think in good conscience you should donate them to the winner (announced in an update to the post the next day), however I have no way to enforce that.

No duplicate answers for the same charity. If you accidentally post a duplicate please delete it. If you don’t, whenever I notice it I’ll keep only the one that has the earliest time stamp.

Good luck!

Update 1: After posting this I quickly realized there’s no $600 cap. From the payments page: “If you receive more than $600 in a year, you’ll need to be entered into Center for Applied Rationality’s payment system. CFAR will contact you via your LessWrong email address about next steps. (Make sure it’s an email that you check regularly)”. So up vote as much as you can, the sky is the limit!

To that end I’ll be posting some seed answers to vote on since I’m not the bottleneck. All tokens earned on my answers will be added to the donation pool.

Update 2: Okay, so here’s some updates in light of the announcement that Good Heart Tokens are extending until end of day Thursday, April 7th, Pacific Time. First, I’m going to just donate whatever amount I get to the winner of the lottery. I’ll still subsidize the amount to make up any shortfall in the earnings, but I’m making a couple modifications:

  • I’m upping the amount I’ll subsidize to $1000. This reflects the change to a cap of 1000 tokens that can be redeemed.

  • I’m retracting my bid to get the Goodest Heart. This was a fun game for April 1, but since we’ve been asked to discontinue “fun” uses of the karma system I’ll retract that.

  • I’ll make the drawing on or after April 8 based on the procedure described above. I’ll do this based on the vote values of the answers whenever I happen to look at it. I’ll document the values at the time I ran the drawing as well as the outcome. Thus you can continue to vote on the options to adjust the relative weights, however in the spirit of no more “fun” you should only make adjustments to bring them in line with your preferences, not to artificially pump up the number of tokens I’m going to receive to offset my subsidy of the pool (or to try to push the pool to over $1000 and see if we can get LW to pay out).

Update 3: Winner announced!

Gordon Seidoh Worley1 Apr 2022 17:51 UTC
72 points
14 comments2 min readLW link