I proposed renaming them to “Transferable Attribution”, usually shortened to just “Attribution”. I like this, because the point of selling these things really is to transfer credit, and attribute the act to the buyer.
This would make it less awkward to refer to fractions of the tokens than “impact certificates”, as “attribution” is a quantity word, rather than a discrete object, you can have amounts of it. Sort of gets rid of the speedbump of having to explain how it’s possible to own a portion of a token or a certificate. (I guess “patronage” does this too, though)
People seemed to like it. I don’t know what we’d need to do to actually standardize on this name, though.
It wouldn’t be too catastrophic if we just ended up with a decontextualized “cert”.
“Transferable attribution” is exactly the right sort of idea!
Or what about “responsibility certificates” or “Recs” for short? Arguably that is even better because 1) it keeps “certs”, 2) “responsibility” has the connotation of being divisible, even moreso that “attribution”, 3) “responsibility” gets closer to the relevant concept of “causal blame”/ “the cause of an effect” by Joe Halpern 4) doesn’t have as many connotations of intellectual property as “attribution’.
Other ideas: acclaim, approval, credit, blame, or attribution certificate.
Regarding intellectual property connotations, it seems to me, at this point, that all of the systems we’re making for trading impact certs would also be useful for trading intellectual property, so we might have to tolerate that.
I like “credit”… It might introduce too many ambiguities. I initially overlooked it because it also means “money”… it’s also used in “carbon credits”, which would exist in the impact cert system.. but another ambiguity is introduced there in that the impact cert for a carbon capture job and a “carbon credit” would be subtly different, the capture cert wont be unitized or fungible, while a “carbon credit” would be expected to be, to represent one tonne of capture, or something.
I’m resistant to “responsibility”, because that represents this idea that is pretty important and fragile to the anglosphere, the intersection of authority and legitimacy, and I wouldn’t want to overload that. I like the idea of using “blame” because unlike “responsibility”, our culture’s conception of blame is extremely unhealthy, and needs to be fucked with. Useful to promote the idea that blame can oscillate between being good or bad (asset or liability), or can be shared between many parties, and that anyone who does things in the world will tend to accumulate blame.
Interesting points. I agree that impact certs differ from carbon credits by being by corresponding to a fraction of the impact of a whole project, or at least an amount of work (inputs), rather than a quanta of impact (outputs). But it does strike me that carbon credits still might be the most closely related among well-known existing concepts. This could suggest “project credits”. If you say—on your resume for example—that you sold “project credits” for a company, or a research project, it seems this would give a naive reader more of an idea of what has gone on than many other terms—they are a way of assigning credit to patrons of the project. The main downside, as you allude to is that they sort-sound like someone might be owed something. But if talking to a naive outsider, you can just say that the credit is a certificate that commemorates their patronage of the project, similar to a carbon credit, which would seem to be clear enough...
I think the problem with blame is that it sounds too negative—you won’t want to write that on your resume. And if the term isn’t used by recipients, then it’s unlikely to catch on.
Re “transferable attribution”, to be a bit more concrete, if I say that I have sold the attribution for a paper I wrote, it sounds a bit like I am giving away the authorship to a funder, which would be some kind of academic malpractice. Since that’s not always the case, it seems like we don’t want the general term to sound like it is...
I like it! What do you think about “(Transferable) attribution contract”? “Contract” clarifies that it’s an agreement rather than something nature-given. On the downside, it’s not as much of a quantity word. Then again I’ve been imagining certificates (just like contracts) also as the thing that lists the fractions rather than something that gets cut up.
Well I think that would be an extremely uninformative and fairly confusing thing to call it. It’s only an agreement insofar as any exchange of anything is an agreement, the class of agreement is uncharacteristically open-ended relative to most contracts, and reducible to a transfer of ownership. I’m supportive of Ryan’s suggestion of “credit” at this point. The difference between “an amount of credit” and “an amount of credits” might resolve the ambiguity it might have had with carbon credits.
I don’t understand the critique of “attribution contract.” Could you try rephrasing the second sentence?
I’ve seen “credit” interpreted as “this person is to be (morally) credited,” which leads to all sorts of complications in thinking about impact markets. I suppose no one makes the mental gymnastics anymore to remember that their credit card provider is to be credited temporarily for the food one buys with the credit card, but impact markets are not as commonplace yet, and it’s something I’ve come across already. So I prefer terms that simply have something like “certificate” or “contract” in them.
A contract is also not usually transferable. It doesn’t really have an owner.
But the implied analogy about the owner of the impact cert being morally credited for the work, is actually good, and clarifying. If you buy the credit for the act then you get credit for the act. Yes. That’s how it’s supposed to work. And if the worker wants to retain credit then they should retain a fraction of the impact cert, because selling the entire thing is genuinely supposed to mean that they relinquish all right to be retroactively rewarded to the buyer.
Contract: I was thinking of the contract as specifying the ownership, sort of like a page in the land register or the list of owners in a company that uses a paper list of the purpose. So you don’t really care about owning the piece of paper or the abstract idea of the list, but you care about owning the part of the company or the plot of land that is specified there.
Credit: It’s interesting that you find it clarifying. If it has that effect, then I suppose that works? But in my experience people who encounter the term “moral credit” or just “credit” in this context start to think about these contracts in mystical terms: “Why would I value buying and holding impact certs [gold, euros, Bitcoin, Apple shares] if I don’t inherently value impact certs [gold, euros, Bitcoin, Apple shares]?” “Are other people going to respect me for buying and holding impact certs [gold, euros, Bitcoin, Apple shares]?” These questions probably seem weird and besides the point to anyone with any of the bracketed items, but I’ve heard them repeatedly when it comes to impact certs.
One of the tests I want to do is to run the system while making the concept of the impact cert very nonobvious in the UI. I’m hoping that that’ll make it easier for people to grasp the idea of the impact market without being distracted by these mystical thoughts. But maybe it’ll be confusing again in some other way…
Can you imagine a way to get a person to engage well with an impact market (or any market) when they don’t understand money/beneficial self-reifying games or whatever?
I replied to this in private, but maybe it’s helpful to put it here too:
> Dann suggested to just see to it that investing is really profitable in the beginning. :-3 That’s a bit in tension with my hope to limit various risks by [initially, for the first experiments] not attracting non-altruists to the market, but I think experiments on the EA Forum can safely be made quite profitable.
I proposed renaming them to “Transferable Attribution”, usually shortened to just “Attribution”. I like this, because the point of selling these things really is to transfer credit, and attribute the act to the buyer.
This would make it less awkward to refer to fractions of the tokens than “impact certificates”, as “attribution” is a quantity word, rather than a discrete object, you can have amounts of it. Sort of gets rid of the speedbump of having to explain how it’s possible to own a portion of a token or a certificate. (I guess “patronage” does this too, though)
People seemed to like it. I don’t know what we’d need to do to actually standardize on this name, though.
It wouldn’t be too catastrophic if we just ended up with a decontextualized “cert”.
“Transferable attribution” is exactly the right sort of idea! Or what about “responsibility certificates” or “Recs” for short? Arguably that is even better because 1) it keeps “certs”, 2) “responsibility” has the connotation of being divisible, even moreso that “attribution”, 3) “responsibility” gets closer to the relevant concept of “causal blame”/ “the cause of an effect” by Joe Halpern 4) doesn’t have as many connotations of intellectual property as “attribution’.
Other ideas: acclaim, approval, credit, blame, or attribution certificate.
Regarding intellectual property connotations, it seems to me, at this point, that all of the systems we’re making for trading impact certs would also be useful for trading intellectual property, so we might have to tolerate that.
I like “credit”… It might introduce too many ambiguities. I initially overlooked it because it also means “money”… it’s also used in “carbon credits”, which would exist in the impact cert system.. but another ambiguity is introduced there in that the impact cert for a carbon capture job and a “carbon credit” would be subtly different, the capture cert wont be unitized or fungible, while a “carbon credit” would be expected to be, to represent one tonne of capture, or something.
I’m resistant to “responsibility”, because that represents this idea that is pretty important and fragile to the anglosphere, the intersection of authority and legitimacy, and I wouldn’t want to overload that. I like the idea of using “blame” because unlike “responsibility”, our culture’s conception of blame is extremely unhealthy, and needs to be fucked with. Useful to promote the idea that blame can oscillate between being good or bad (asset or liability), or can be shared between many parties, and that anyone who does things in the world will tend to accumulate blame.
Interesting points. I agree that impact certs differ from carbon credits by being by corresponding to a fraction of the impact of a whole project, or at least an amount of work (inputs), rather than a quanta of impact (outputs). But it does strike me that carbon credits still might be the most closely related among well-known existing concepts. This could suggest “project credits”. If you say—on your resume for example—that you sold “project credits” for a company, or a research project, it seems this would give a naive reader more of an idea of what has gone on than many other terms—they are a way of assigning credit to patrons of the project. The main downside, as you allude to is that they sort-sound like someone might be owed something. But if talking to a naive outsider, you can just say that the credit is a certificate that commemorates their patronage of the project, similar to a carbon credit, which would seem to be clear enough...
I think the problem with blame is that it sounds too negative—you won’t want to write that on your resume. And if the term isn’t used by recipients, then it’s unlikely to catch on.
Re “transferable attribution”, to be a bit more concrete, if I say that I have sold the attribution for a paper I wrote, it sounds a bit like I am giving away the authorship to a funder, which would be some kind of academic malpractice. Since that’s not always the case, it seems like we don’t want the general term to sound like it is...
I like it! What do you think about “(Transferable) attribution contract”? “Contract” clarifies that it’s an agreement rather than something nature-given. On the downside, it’s not as much of a quantity word. Then again I’ve been imagining certificates (just like contracts) also as the thing that lists the fractions rather than something that gets cut up.
Well I think that would be an extremely uninformative and fairly confusing thing to call it. It’s only an agreement insofar as any exchange of anything is an agreement, the class of agreement is uncharacteristically open-ended relative to most contracts, and reducible to a transfer of ownership.
I’m supportive of Ryan’s suggestion of “credit” at this point. The difference between “an amount of credit” and “an amount of credits” might resolve the ambiguity it might have had with carbon credits.
I don’t understand the critique of “attribution contract.” Could you try rephrasing the second sentence?
I’ve seen “credit” interpreted as “this person is to be (morally) credited,” which leads to all sorts of complications in thinking about impact markets. I suppose no one makes the mental gymnastics anymore to remember that their credit card provider is to be credited temporarily for the food one buys with the credit card, but impact markets are not as commonplace yet, and it’s something I’ve come across already. So I prefer terms that simply have something like “certificate” or “contract” in them.
A contract is also not usually transferable. It doesn’t really have an owner.
But the implied analogy about the owner of the impact cert being morally credited for the work, is actually good, and clarifying. If you buy the credit for the act then you get credit for the act. Yes. That’s how it’s supposed to work. And if the worker wants to retain credit then they should retain a fraction of the impact cert, because selling the entire thing is genuinely supposed to mean that they relinquish all right to be retroactively rewarded to the buyer.
Contract: I was thinking of the contract as specifying the ownership, sort of like a page in the land register or the list of owners in a company that uses a paper list of the purpose. So you don’t really care about owning the piece of paper or the abstract idea of the list, but you care about owning the part of the company or the plot of land that is specified there.
Credit: It’s interesting that you find it clarifying. If it has that effect, then I suppose that works? But in my experience people who encounter the term “moral credit” or just “credit” in this context start to think about these contracts in mystical terms: “Why would I value buying and holding impact certs [gold, euros, Bitcoin, Apple shares] if I don’t inherently value impact certs [gold, euros, Bitcoin, Apple shares]?” “Are other people going to respect me for buying and holding impact certs [gold, euros, Bitcoin, Apple shares]?” These questions probably seem weird and besides the point to anyone with any of the bracketed items, but I’ve heard them repeatedly when it comes to impact certs.
One of the tests I want to do is to run the system while making the concept of the impact cert very nonobvious in the UI. I’m hoping that that’ll make it easier for people to grasp the idea of the impact market without being distracted by these mystical thoughts. But maybe it’ll be confusing again in some other way…
Can you imagine a way to get a person to engage well with an impact market (or any market) when they don’t understand money/beneficial self-reifying games or whatever?
I replied to this in private, but maybe it’s helpful to put it here too:
> Dann suggested to just see to it that investing is really profitable in the beginning. :-3 That’s a bit in tension with my hope to limit various risks by [initially, for the first experiments] not attracting non-altruists to the market, but I think experiments on the EA Forum can safely be made quite profitable.