Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence - Less Wrong

43 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 May 2013 12:43AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 September 2013 12:44:15AM 0 points [-]

Well, $100K/year would probably pay someone to write things up full time, if we only had the right candidate hire for it - I'm not sure we do. The issue is almost never danger, it's just that writing stuff up is hard.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 September 2013 01:08:33AM *  1 point [-]

Apropos the above conversation: Do you know Annalee Newitz? (Of io9). If not, would you like to? I think you guys would get on like a house on fire.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 September 2013 01:05:12AM 0 points [-]

I can certainly see that people who can both understand these issues and write them up for a general audience would be rare. Working in your favor is the fact that writers in general are terribly underpaid, and a lot of smart tech journalists have been laid off in recent years. (I used to be the news editor for Dr. Dobb's Journal, and although I am not looking for a job right now, I have contacts who could probably fill the position for you.)

But I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and it doesn't seem like this effort would pay for itself. I doubt you have enough questions like this to cover a daily article, and for a weekly one you'd need to take in over $2K in donations (counting taxes) to cover your writer's salary. And that seems...unlikely.

Sad! But I get it.