SI/CFAR Are Looking for Contract Web Developers
The Singularity Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality are looking to expand their web development team. As per usual we’d like to post this opportunity to the LW community first. All work will be on a contract basis (you quote us your hourly rate).
Perks:
Make money while contributing to organizations you care about.
Age and credentials are irrelevant; only product matters.
Requirements:
WordPress and PHP skills (some features require PHP coding).
Good design sense.
Ability to start work on tasks/features quickly and deliver them in a timely manner (i.e., responsiveness).
If you’re interested, apply here!
What are you developing? Why are you developing it in PHP?
(From the advertisement I infer that it is) because they are using wordpress as the base. This is something I’ve done in the past and PHP skills were required when moving to significant levels of customisation—particularly when adding ‘interactive’ features.
Developing a site from scratch in PHP would seem to be rather less practical.
Wild-ass guess: Since WordPress is written in PHP, customizations on it are written in PHP.
While PHP is pretty seriously undesirable for new projects, one heck of a lot of programming is not on new projects.
I would apply, as this seems like ideal work for someone largely shut off from human society, but I only have experience in good web frameworks.
But I do have some advice: why do you seem to prefer hourly pay? Why not pay these contractors through so-called “piecework”? Is there a fundamental constraint on doing so?
The “Paid Per Finished Product” model is particularly stigmatized in contract Web Design, particularly without face-to-face meeting and interaction, notably because it’s very easy for the employer to contract several designers, and then turn around and only pay the one they prefer and take the best work while a bunch of other designers also worked hard and got turned out and were paid nothing. This isn’t the only reason, but it’s one of the main reasons why the stigma came to be, AFAICT.
This alone may be reason enough to use models generally seen as “more fair” for nonprofits that want to maximize their transparency and avoid image blows from petty legal disputes over forum banners.
Those concerns would mainly apply in situations of interactions between strangers with little knowledge of either’s trustworthiness or when the broader values of the two parties are divergent or conflicting, which (by the nature of the user pool on this internet website) would not be applicable here.
ADBOC.
SIAI is a real legal organisation that heavily depends on its public image to remain effective in any capacity (unless some billionaire philanthropist suddenly showed up and threw a bunch of capital their way). There could be various issues with changing hiring practices and using different hiring criteria for discriminate groups; there could be fears of public backlash if favoritism in “business practices” is shown towards a certain group of Internet users; various unknowns could subconsciously (or consciously) be telling them it’s a bad idea, even if there’s no solid reason.
Then again, I’m just derailing on my own tangent here. The above is all pure speculation based on very weak evidence.
What does this initialism stand for?
Edit: “Agree Denotationally But Object Connotationally” ?
Yes. When applied to context, it roughly decodes to:
I agree that there is a high likelihood that the empirical personspace cluster of LW users is more likely to trust SIAI in such scenarios, and that SIAI is also more likely to trust known LW users, but I disagree on the possible implied notion(s) (from the phrasing) that LW users are inherently more trustworthy, or more deserving of trust from SIAI, or that SIAI should trust LW users more, or that SIAI should not need to act in a transparent and industry-fair manner towards LW users, or that LW users and SIAI form the exact same empirical cluster, or that LW users and SIAI are essentially indistinguishable, or that they share a common set of values, or any combination / nuance / variation of the above.
SI and CFAR: What are you working on? Will it help teach people rationality? Will it reduce existential risk? Could it be developed as open-source software? If so, maybe software developers such as myself would be willing to work on it for free.