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.
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.