I would like to interject for a moment and say that I would be very willing to volunteer a substantial portion of my time, given that I’m specifically taught what I should do, and given sufficient time to learn.
Although this is a purely anecdotal thought, I believe that there is a significant number of people, including myself, who would like to see the Singularity happen, and would be willing to volunteer vast amounts of time in order to increase the probability of a friendly intelligence explosion happen. You might be underestimating the number of people willing to volunteer for free.
In our experience, valuable volunteers are rare. The people who email us about volunteer opportunities generally seem enthusiastic about GiveWell’s mission, and motivated by a shared belief in our goals to give up their free time to help us. Yet, the majority of these people never complete useful work for us.
...almost 80% of people who take the initiative to seek us out and ask for unpaid work fail to complete a single assignment. But maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. Writing an email is quick and exciting; spending a few hours fixing punctuation is not.
Now, maybe you are one of the volunteers who will turn out to be productive. I already have 6-8 volunteers who are pretty productive. But given my past experience, an excited email volunteering to help provides me almost no information on whether that person will actually help.
If 20% of people who seek you out actually volunteer, what’s the fraction like for those that don’t seek you out? 1e-8? So that email is worth over 20 bits of information? Maybe we have very different definitions of “almost no information”, but it seems to me that email is quite valuable even if only 20% do a single assignment, and still quite valuable information even if only 20% of those do anything beyond that one assignment.
With good collaboration tools, for many kinds of tasks testing the commitment of volunteers by putting them to work should be rather cheap to test, especially if they can be given less time-critical tasks, or tasks where they help speed up someone else’s work.
Serious thought should go into looking for ways unpaid volunteers could help, since there’s loads of bright people with more time and enthusiasm than money, and for whom it is much easier to put in a few hours a week than to donate equivalent money towards paid contributors’ work
I would like to interject for a moment and say that I would be very willing to volunteer a substantial portion of my time, given that I’m specifically taught what I should do, and given sufficient time to learn.
Although this is a purely anecdotal thought, I believe that there is a significant number of people, including myself, who would like to see the Singularity happen, and would be willing to volunteer vast amounts of time in order to increase the probability of a friendly intelligence explosion happen. You might be underestimating the number of people willing to volunteer for free.
This article rings very true to me:
Now, maybe you are one of the volunteers who will turn out to be productive. I already have 6-8 volunteers who are pretty productive. But given my past experience, an excited email volunteering to help provides me almost no information on whether that person will actually help.
Then I suppose we should test that theory out. I’ve already repeatedly sent the SIAI messages asking if I may volunteer, unfortunately, with no reply.
Give me a task and I’ll see if I’m really committed enough to spend hours fixing punctuation.
Where did you send the message? Actually, if your past messages didn’t go through, probably best to just email me at luke [at] singularity.org.
If 20% of people who seek you out actually volunteer, what’s the fraction like for those that don’t seek you out? 1e-8? So that email is worth over 20 bits of information? Maybe we have very different definitions of “almost no information”, but it seems to me that email is quite valuable even if only 20% do a single assignment, and still quite valuable information even if only 20% of those do anything beyond that one assignment.
Right, it’s much less than 20% who actually end up being useful.
With good collaboration tools, for many kinds of tasks testing the commitment of volunteers by putting them to work should be rather cheap to test, especially if they can be given less time-critical tasks, or tasks where they help speed up someone else’s work.
Serious thought should go into looking for ways unpaid volunteers could help, since there’s loads of bright people with more time and enthusiasm than money, and for whom it is much easier to put in a few hours a week than to donate equivalent money towards paid contributors’ work
Behold, our new, gamified volunteer system.