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pengvado comments on 2012 Winter Fundraiser for the Singularity Institute - Less Wrong
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Comments (126)
I donated 20,000$ now, in addition to 110,000$ earlier this year.
Really?
Nice quote.
"Really?" is more polite to say than "I find that hard to believe, can you provide confirming evidence" or "[citation needed]", though. Also, sometimes people actually will say "No, I was kidding" if you ask them.
Or "Oops, I accidentally typed an extra zero. Twice."
That is unlikely owing to the placement of the commas.
No, that just makes it worse, because 20,00$ could be referring to donating 20 dollars.
Ah, right. I had forgotten that some people use commas where I would expect periods. Adding an extra zero twice is still somewhat unlikely, though. My current hypotheses about the distribution of LW users make it more plausible that the tail of high income can afford fairly large donations.
Yes.
Wow.
There is a largely innocuous conversation below this comment which has been banned in its entirety. Who did this? Why?
In general, I'd say that people's desire to be anonymous should be respected unless there's a very good reason to override it, and solving a puzzle is not a very good reason.
Anyway, he pretty much admitted who he is now.
Thanks very much!!
(At the time of this comment) 27 karma for a $20k donation, 13 karma for $250, 9 karma for $20 (and a joke) ... something's amiss with the karma-$ currency exchange rate!
Reversed scope insensitivity?
What do you expect to happen? We don't have enough users giving karma for donation to sustain a linear exchange rate in the [$20, $20000] range. Unless, I suppose, we give up any attempt at fine resolution over the [$1, $500] range.
In practice, what most people are probably doing is picking a threshold (possibly $0) beyond which they give karma for a donation. This could be improved: you could pick a large threshold beyond which you give 1 karma, and give fractional karma (by flipping a biased coin) below that threshold. However, if the large threshold were anywhere close to $20000, and your fractional karma scales linearly, then you would pretty much never give karma to the other donations.
Edit: after doing some simulations, I'm no longer sure the fractional approach is an improvement. It gives interesting graphs, though!
If we knew the Singularity Institute's approximate budget, we could fix this by assuming log-utility in money, but this is complicated.
Under the assumption that being rewarded with karma can motivate someone to make a donation, but if they make a donation, they do not respond to karma as an incentive when deciding how much to donate, then upvoting any donation is the best policy for maximizing money to SI. I'm not sure how realistic that model is, but it seems intuitive to me.
It might motivate someone to donate $20 rather than $5 if there is a karma difference; probably not $20000 rather than $20, though.
Holy pickled waffles on a pogo stick. Thanks, dude.
Is there anything you're willing to say about how you acquired that dough? My model of you has earned less in a lifetime.
I value my free time far too much to work for a living. So your model is correct on that count. I had planned to be mostly unemployed with occasional freelance programming jobs, and generally keep costs down.
But then a couple years ago my hobby accidentally turned into a business, and it's doing well. "Accidentally" because it started with companies contacting me and saying "We know you're giving it away for free, but free isn't good enough for us. We want to buy a bunch of copies." And because my co-founder took charge of the negotiations and other non-programming bits, so it still feels like a hobby to me.
Both my non-motivation to work and my willingness to donate a large fraction of my income have a common cause, namely thinking of money in far-mode, i.e. not alieving The Unit of Caring on either side of the scale.
Yeah, I know exactly who you are, I just didn't want to bust privacy or drop creepy hints. I didn't know that VideoLAN projects were financially independent of each other, so that explains where profit comes from. It's just that I didn't expect two guys in a basement to make that much, and you're too young (and didn't have much income before anyway) to have significant savings. So they're more money in successful codecs than I guessed.
Err, I haven't yet earned as much from the lazy entrepreneur route as I would have if I had taken a standard programming job for the past 7 years (though I'll pass that point within a few months at the current rate). So don't go blaming my cohort's age if they haven't saved and/or donated as much as me. I'm with Rain in spluttering at how people can have an income and not have money.
I don't, either -- possibly because I've never been in real economic hardships; I think if I had grown up in a poorer family I probably would. (I do try to be frugal because so far I've lived almost exclusively on my parents' income and it seems unfair towards them to waste their money, though.)