Overall, I’m intrigued and like this general line of thought. A few thoughts on the post:
If you’re using earn.com, it’s not really email anymore, right? So maybe it’s better to think about this as about “online messaging”.
Another (complementary) way to improve email is to make it like facebook where you have to agree to connect with someone before they can message you.
Like many ideas about using $$ as a signal, I think it might be better if we instead used a domain-specific credit system, where credits are allotted to individuals at some fixed rate, or according to some rules, and cannot be purchased. People can find ways of subverting that, but they can also subvert the paid email idea (just open all their emails and take the $$ without reading or responding meaningfully).
Do you have any data on the extent of the “email mess”, either within the community or in the general space of “people who do a lot of work through their email”? I don’t have an intuitive idea for how stressed the average person is by email, much less the average person in EA (we’re an unusual group in some ways).
Overall, I’m intrigued and like this general line of thought. A few thoughts on the post:
If you’re using earn.com, it’s not really email anymore, right? So maybe it’s better to think about this as about “online messaging”.
Another (complementary) way to improve email is to make it like facebook where you have to agree to connect with someone before they can message you.
Like many ideas about using $$ as a signal, I think it might be better if we instead used a domain-specific credit system, where credits are allotted to individuals at some fixed rate, or according to some rules, and cannot be purchased. People can find ways of subverting that, but they can also subvert the paid email idea (just open all their emails and take the $$ without reading or responding meaningfully).
Do you have any data on the extent of the “email mess”, either within the community or in the general space of “people who do a lot of work through their email”? I don’t have an intuitive idea for how stressed the average person is by email, much less the average person in EA (we’re an unusual group in some ways).
This is the kind of thing that could be a good Effective Altruism Poll, by the way!
I’m posting this as a first step towards collecting data. Poll is a good idea, thanks!
This was crossposted to LessWrong, replacing all the mentions of “EA” with “rationality”, mutatis mutandis.