Viliam_Bur comments on Who Wants To Start An Important Startup? - LessWrong

41 Post author: ShannonFriedman 16 August 2012 08:02PM

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Comment author: OphilaDros 18 August 2012 02:41:42AM 3 points [-]

One way to combat extreme poverty is by creating employment opportunities so that people can help themselves, rather than giving them free shoes, or corn, or wells, all of which are suboptimal for meeting their varied pressing needs. So our approach is to hire them to do human computation work.

How are you planning to reach out to the poorest of the poor in developing countries? Will you be tying up with some agencies back there? Because you will not be able to find them over the internet.

You will also need strong mechanisms in place for quality control of the process so that the output is usable. I'm guessing a lot of the problems you will face will be similar to other crowdsourcing ventures like Mechanical Turk.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 21 August 2012 09:11:57AM 2 points [-]

How are you planning to reach out to the poorest of the poor in developing countries?

Could humans be also used for doing this? Something like: "If you find other people to join this system, you will get 10% of their reward."

Surely, this has a lot of negative connotations. This is what many scams do, because it is an efficient way to reach many people. To remove some connotations, perhaps the reward could be limited in time, for example you get 10% of other person's reward only for 2 years. (To make it certain nobody is promissing you to "find 10 more people, and then you don't have to work again, ever".)

Comment author: spoutdoors 22 August 2012 05:04:27PM 1 point [-]

That's definitely a possibility! Ideally we want to harness the natural creativity that fuels capitalism - so we want to allow some flexibility in how workers get recruited while still making sure the incentives are aligned to promote beneficial outcomes.