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brook3y140

I think it's good to experiment, but I actually found the experience of being on the site over the last week pretty unpleasant, and I've definitely spent much less time here. I initially went through some old ideas I had and tried posting one, but ended up just avoiding LessWrong until the end of the week.

I'm not totally sure right now why I felt this way. Something-like I'm very sensitive to feeling like my normal motivation system is being hijacked? I spent all of my time thinking about the best way to act differently given GHW, rather than just reading the content and enjoying it. This was pretty uncomfortable for me.

I also definitely felt some stress & weirdness. Ultimately I did manage to overcome my procrastination to actually post something, and stress isn't always bad, but I agree that the experience was by no means strictly positive for me.

2Ben Pace3y

That's interesting. Thanks for the feedback.

55

Good Heart Week Is Over!

8th Apr 2022

1 min read

55

Final leaderboard for the goodest of hearts

Good Heart Week has ended!

This week has seen a lot of content. I've had a great time reading posts and comments from new writers and returning writers, as well as polished-old-drafts from present writers :)

I'll write a retrospective in a week or two, but right now here's some information about what's happening and what to do next.

End Time: Good Heart week ended at midnight tonight (Thursday), Pacific Time. No tokens will be earned after that time.
Please Submit Financial Info: If you have 25+ Good Heart Tokens and you want to receive the money, please add either your PayPal address or ETH address or the name of a charity of your choice at lesswrong.com/payments/account. (It says "PayPal Info" but just add the other info in that field.)
Submission Deadline: You have a week to fill out the financial info. Please submit your financial info by EOD Thursday 14th (Pacific Time).
Security Concerns: This is hopefully wildly redundant, but please don't enter any passwords or secret keys or other private information when submitting financial info. I cannot assure you that this site is secure enough to keep such secrets. If you have further security (or anonymity) concerns about financial info feel free to PM me and we can try to figure something out.
Payout Date: One user on the leaderboard said to me it would make their life easier if the payment for this came after tax day on April 18th, so I'm tentatively planning to do payout the Friday after that. It also gives me time to do basic checks of the voting and such.
Retrospective: After the payouts I'll post a final update/retrospect on the week.

Let me know if you have any requests or questions at this time! I am also very interested in hearing your thoughts on and experiences from the whole week.

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55

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[-]Rafael Harth3y270

With the rate of posts being that far up, there may have been a lot of posts that were totally overlooked, especially those that started at 1 or 2 karma, since they disappeared from the frontpage very quickly. It may be a good time to look a bit through the All Posts page (which I assume most people don't).

(That could be true even if some people upvoted more during this week rather than less. Maybe the posts that went above 20 or even 10 karma had an advantage, but I doubt the 1-2 karma posts did.)

I gotta say, having the power to just gift someone 2$-21$ with the click of a button, at no cost to myself, was pretty neat :-)

I'd suggest a community norm of "if you think your post(s) got overlooked because of GHW, feel free to resubmit slowly over the next ~month". (Where I'm not sure what resubmitting looks like exactly - if you move to drafts and then publish again, does that bring to the top of the front page while preserving comments?) I'd likely do this with one of my posts but not the other.

[-]Ben Pace3y50

Yeah I think this is okay this time, especially if your post fell off the front page in under an hour.

I feel this is a good norm too. I expect the trivial inconvenience is sufficient to prevent most people from resubmitting.

[-]Lukas_Gloor3y60

Yeah I felt like maybe my post about my metaethics/anti-realism sequence got overlooked. I saw that by the time it was promoted to frontpage, it was no longer directly visible because of new posts or high-karma older posts taking up the frontpage space. I don't care about the karma but I was hoping to get some more comments on the sequence from Lesswrongers. I never crossposted any of the 9 sequence posts because that would be cluttering up people's attention, so this is the only time Lesswrong hears about this pretty big amount of content that I put together.

[-]Ben Pace3y50

Yeah, if your post was on frontpage for less than an hour I think it's fine to draft it and re-publish a week or two later. Site isn't quite used to having this much content.

I published an article on induction https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7x4eGxXL5DMwRwzDQ/commensurable-scientific-paradigms-or-computable-induction of decent length/complexity that send to have gotten no visibility at all, which I found very discouraging for my desire to ever do so again. I could only find it by checking my user profile!

[-]Ben Pace3y30

Alas. I think re-posting in a week or so is fine.

I think it's good to experiment, but I actually found the experience of being on the site over the last week pretty unpleasant, and I've definitely spent much less time here. I initially went through some old ideas I had and tried posting one, but ended up just avoiding LessWrong until the end of the week.

I'm not totally sure right now why I felt this way. Something-like I'm very sensitive to feeling like my normal motivation system is being hijacked? I spent all of my time thinking about the best way to act differently given GHW, rather than just reading the content and enjoying it. This was pretty uncomfortable for me.

[-]MondSemmel3y30

I also definitely felt some stress & weirdness. Ultimately I did manage to overcome my procrastination to actually post something, and stress isn't always bad, but I agree that the experience was by no means strictly positive for me.

[-]Ben Pace3y20

That's interesting. Thanks for the feedback.

I am under the minimum threshold for actual payout. I propose with similarly situated users having collectively 25 tokens to our names draw lots to name one user that we argue and champion to actually receive $25 (with probabilities proportional to how much each user entering the pact personally has).

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke3y70

What do I have to do if I want to donate my GHT to the LW team?

PS. Now that GHT is no longer displayed: Where can one see how many a person got?

[-]Ben Pace3y80

If you do not give me a financial address to send it to, we will just not send the money, which is functionally equivalent to donating it back to us.

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke3y60

Easy. Done :-)

[-]Ege Erdil3y10

I think it's still visible in your profile? (At least it is for me.)

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke3y20

Confirmed. Either I was blind or temporarily it wasn't.

[-]MondSemmel3y40

Things I'd be interested to learn in the retrospective:

What was the volume of posts and comments, relative to the LW baseline? I felt pretty overwhelmed and certainly couldn't keep up with everything.
- Side note: Is there a way to get some rough site analytics for one's own posts? I was quite surprised with how many comments I got on this post (especially relative to its karma), and when I shared it on r/SSC here, I learned that the reddit linkpost got 5.9k views. Which to me sounded frankly implausibly high by an order of magnitude. But on the other hand, I have no sense for which proportion of LW readers upvote or comment on posts, either.
- And a question from another angle: what are the best times to post on LW, if one wants to maximize the chance not to have it get buried unseen?
Did this experiment have any long-term effects on site traffic and behavior? (To be answered in a few months, I guess.)
You'll presumably list the total payout, but what was the internal expectation of the LW team? How much money did you budget for this?
And how much other resources (e.g. staff time for engineering or site moderation) did you expend?
What were your greatest hopes and fears for this experiment? How does the actual result compare to these expectations?
Are there any other crazy experiments you'd love to try? How do they compare in crazyness to Good Heart Week?

[-]Ben Pace3y20

Thanks for the comment, I'll return to this when I do my post.

[-]MondSemmel2y40

If you ever find the time, I'd still be interested in seeing the retrospective from Good Heart Week 2022.

One user on the leaderboard said to me it would make their life easier if the payment for this came after tax day on April 18th

Pretty curious why this would be; can't think of any tax reason.

Guess:

They already have their taxes ready and think it will make things more complicated, and they don't want to look at that stuff again right now.

If they do think that, they're wrong. Money you earn in 2022 impacts the taxes you file by April 2023, not April 2022.

Conjecture:

They are doing thier own taxes, and owe money, so they want to file at the deadline. and
For some reason, they need to have the current balance in thier paypal/ETH account to not change until after filing? Or
They are on some quarterly system as an S-corp and want to book revenue in a different quarter because they already filed for this quarter assuming 0 additional income and would have to amend the paperwork if they got new income. And thier quarters line up with Tax day?

2: I don't see why it the balance would matter?

3: It's pretty uncommon to have your quarters roll over on the 18th. April 1st would be typical. Additionally, if they do use the 18th to define their quarter, it would be a bit surprising for them to refer to that as tax day, since that isn't usually the 18th.

[-]Ben Pace3y20

Brief update: most of the payments have gone out, and a few of the bigger ones still to do. I'm slow on this because I am on vacation and was ill for a while. My guess is this will all be wrapped up within 7 days.

[-]MondSemmel3y20

I suggest sending a (LW and/or email) notification which points to this post to every user on LW that's eligible for a payout, i.e. everyone who got >=25 Good Heart Tokens. (Or just to those who don't yet have any payment details submitted.) Not everyone sees admin posts like this one.

[-]Chris_Leong3y20

I found myself pretty motivated to reach the leaderboard, but once I reached the leaderboard, I was fine with letting myself slide off it so that I wouldn't be distracted by it.

This post - General Thoughts on Less Wrong - had been in my drafts, but I forgot to hit publish (since the situation had changed, I had to spend a bit of time rewriting it).

Overall, Goodhart's were harder to mine than I thought, but I've also been very busy with work, so didn't really have time to create any effort posts.

[-]ChristianKl3y20

I think they were harder because people thought more seriously about their votes knowing that they are essentially giving the person money.

For what it's worth, I upvoted and strong-upvoted more than usual.

[-]Chris_Leong3y20

I think maybe I didn't take into account that posts would get less attention both due to more content, but also due to me posting content in a shorter window.

Same here.

Same here as well

[-]George3d63y10

Wait, you were actually serious about the paying people part :)))

[-]Ben Pace3y20

Yes, it is going to happen.

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