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shminux comments on Rationality Quotes June 2012 - Less Wrong
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Patrick McKenzie, the guy who gets instrumental rationality on the gut level.
More from the same source:
Obviously I need to figure out how to start charging for my website!
I've had the impression that you've been selling yourself short for quite some time.
Maybe you can start by following Patrick's example and offering some of the choice data you collect and analyze to the people subscribing to your mailing list. You can also figure out who might be interested in the information you collect (a cool project in itself), and how much it would be worth to them.
I wonder if a donate button at the end of each article, tied with a question along the lines of "How valuable was the article you just read?", would be effective. (You could even set it up so that you can track the amount donated by article, and use that to guide future research- I'm not sure how effective that would be, since that depends on how many alternatives you have to pick from in considering new research topics.)
Well, I do have donation stuff setup; last week I moved the Paypal button from the very bottom, post footnotes (where the Bitcoin address remains), to the left sidebar, to see if that would help. (So far it hasn't.)
A rating widget is a good idea; I'm messing around with some but I'm not seeing any really good ones hosted by third-parties (static site, remember).
I am completely undisciplined and I do this stuff as the whim takes me. A month ago I didn't expect to learn how to do meta-analyses and run a DNB meta-analysis and 2 weeks ago I wasn't expecting to do an iodine meta-analysis either; the day before Kiba hired me to write a Silk Road article, I wasn't expecting that either...
There's also a competition effect here. With thousands of free blogs, people don't want to pay for yours or mine. They'll just navigate to someone else's, even if it isn't quite as brilliantly insightful.
Indeed, that's a problem. I like to think my content is pretty unique - no other site is as good a resource on dual n-back, no other site is as good a resource on modafinil, etc. - but that doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy old world.
A way to make real money is to sell to businesses. Do you have any content or service a 100+ person company might want?
Not that I've thought of so far.
Well, you have the ability to write articles of exceptionally high quality. They are concise, easy to read, very thoroughly researched, and always offer paths to learn more or elaborate on points of interest.
These sorts of reports are highly valuable to companies and I think you would be incredibly valuable as a knowledge consultant. Think Lisbeth Salander for technical subjects.
I do value your research and writings. I was thinking about offering to buy you a laptop because it sounded like you had an old POS that was hampering said research and writings, but then I decided that would be too weird.
I did have a POS, but in July 2010 I finally bit the bullet and bought a new Dell Studio 17 laptop that has since worked well for me. (The hard drive died a few months ago and I had to replace it, almost simultaneously with my external backup drive dying, which was very stressful, but Dell doesn't make the hard drives, so I write that off as an isolated incident.)
Ah, then I only need to buy you a 2-year backblaze subscription, that's far cheaper.
Backblaze sounds great, but they don't have a Linux client.
tarsnap it is, then.
Tarsnap is cool - I like Colin's blog and stuff like scrypt. (The latter was relevant to one of my crypto essays.)
For the record: khafra actually did donate to me and wasn't just cheap signaling. Well done!
Wow. Great stuff khafra. I hereby grant you some portion of the respect granted to gwern for his nootropics research!
Crashplan does.
I will sing the praises of git and vim, but I didn't pay any money for them. He says extract a commitment, not necessarily a monetary commitment; I read half a book before I started using git, and vim took a lot of practice. So you could use more specialized terminology or something like that. git and vim are both very well-spoken of, and I probably wouldn't have bothered to learn them if they weren't. But I also don't bother to spend money on things that don't have a good reputation, if I haven't had experience with them already. So, either way, requiring a commitment from the user turns away a lot of them.
(I've never read your website)
Probably won't work very well. If you can program, you can make some money writing some useful software. You can write an app to make it easier for people to perform double blind experiments on their medications for example. People in general only pay for something they directly use.
FFS, how can people misremember who they voted for in an election with only two plausible candidates?
A large number of them may have not voted at all, but remember themselves doing so.
I suspect, with no data to back me up, that is those who were ambivalent when they stepped into the polling booth that genuinely misremember. Others know they voted for the other guy, but want to be seen as one of the 'winners'.
There are many U.S. elections I have voted in where there were two candidates for an office and I couldn't tell you which one I voted for. Admittedly, no cases involving Presidential candidates; I'm usually pretty sure who I'm voting for in those cases.
I suspect, with no data to back me up, that the latter class contains many more people than the former. (If I were that ambivalent, I wouldn't vote for either major candidate at random; I would either vote for a minor candidate, or not vote at all. But I guess not everybody is like me.)
Or the survey he's referring to is biased. Seems hard for it not to be... did they knock on doors all across the country? If it's based on mail or telephone responses, are people who voted for Obama more likely to respond to those?
Or, he's misquoting the survey. If you were testing the hypothesis that people misremember voting for the winner, wouldn't you sample a smaller area than the whole country, and then compare your results with the vote count from that area? Why would an experiment like that ever get a number meant to be compared with the whole country's votes?
Wrong question. I'd say people who voted for the other guy remember, but aren't so eager to respond to surveys.