Donald Knuth is a Stanford professor and world-renowned computer scientist. For years he offered cash prizes to anyone who could find an error in any of his books. The amount of money was only a few dollars, but there’s a lot of status associated with receiving a Knuth check. People would frame them instead of cashing them.
Why don’t more people do this? Like having a bug bounty program, but for your beliefs. Offer some cash and public recognition to anyone who can correct a factual error you’ve made or convince you that you’re wrong about something. Donald Freakin’ Knuth has cut over two thousand reward checks, and us mortals probably make mistakes at a higher rate than he does.
Everyone could do this: organizations, textbooks, newspapers, individuals. If you care about having correct beliefs, create an incentive for others to help you out.
$2 via Paypal to the first person who convinces me this practice is harmful.
This practice works when applied to a book, but would be harmful if applied to your entire life. I make factual errors all the time—sometimes I’m wrong about what the canteen is serving today or I misremember the capital of Niger—but it’s not worth paying people to point it out.
In particular, the admin cost would be very heavy. Imagine you spend five minutes sending someone money every time you notice you made a mistake. You could easily spend 10-30 minutes every day just sending people money. Wouldn’t that time be better spent working or reading or sleeping?
In fact, I think you would quickly be incentivized not to say anything you’re uncertain about. At best, it would lead to excessive hedging which would make you appear less confident and likely hurt your career. At worst, you’d be so loathe to make a mistake that you wouldn’t speak up on a topic you’re uncertain about, even if your contributions could help someone.
In fact, I think you would quickly be incentivized not to say anything you’re uncertain about. At best, it would lead to excessive hedging which would make you appear less confident and likely hurt your career. At worst, you’d be so loathe to make a mistake that you wouldn’t speak up on a topic you’re uncertain about, even if your contributions could help someone.
I think you make solid points, though I think you could limit it to some type of important post and certain types of concepts. eg “only when I state something as true in my blog posts”
Likewise, I often think declaring our uncertainty would be better for us as a species. Learning to should “I don’t know” as loudly as the yesses and nos in a debate would I think be helpful to most debates also.
Relatedly: if you have a website you’re sometimes spammed by bots that tell you that you have grammar mistakes, broken links or that they can help you reduce the loading time of your page.
Perhaps there’s a business idea here somewhere, where you ‘mass tell’ people they’ve incorrect statistics/beliefs etc. on their website, which they can find behind a $X paywall. Also see: http://statcheck.io/
Donald Knuth is a Stanford professor and world-renowned computer scientist. For years he offered cash prizes to anyone who could find an error in any of his books. The amount of money was only a few dollars, but there’s a lot of status associated with receiving a Knuth check. People would frame them instead of cashing them.
Why don’t more people do this? Like having a bug bounty program, but for your beliefs. Offer some cash and public recognition to anyone who can correct a factual error you’ve made or convince you that you’re wrong about something. Donald Freakin’ Knuth has cut over two thousand reward checks, and us mortals probably make mistakes at a higher rate than he does.
Everyone could do this: organizations, textbooks, newspapers, individuals. If you care about having correct beliefs, create an incentive for others to help you out.
$2 via Paypal to the first person who convinces me this practice is harmful.
This practice works when applied to a book, but would be harmful if applied to your entire life. I make factual errors all the time—sometimes I’m wrong about what the canteen is serving today or I misremember the capital of Niger—but it’s not worth paying people to point it out.
In particular, the admin cost would be very heavy. Imagine you spend five minutes sending someone money every time you notice you made a mistake. You could easily spend 10-30 minutes every day just sending people money. Wouldn’t that time be better spent working or reading or sleeping?
In fact, I think you would quickly be incentivized not to say anything you’re uncertain about. At best, it would lead to excessive hedging which would make you appear less confident and likely hurt your career. At worst, you’d be so loathe to make a mistake that you wouldn’t speak up on a topic you’re uncertain about, even if your contributions could help someone.
I think you make solid points, though I think you could limit it to some type of important post and certain types of concepts. eg “only when I state something as true in my blog posts”
Likewise, I often think declaring our uncertainty would be better for us as a species. Learning to should “I don’t know” as loudly as the yesses and nos in a debate would I think be helpful to most debates also.
I love this idea.
Relatedly: if you have a website you’re sometimes spammed by bots that tell you that you have grammar mistakes, broken links or that they can help you reduce the loading time of your page.
Perhaps there’s a business idea here somewhere, where you ‘mass tell’ people they’ve incorrect statistics/beliefs etc. on their website, which they can find behind a $X paywall. Also see: http://statcheck.io/
This is a clever/fun idea.
How much money do you have? How often are you wrong? To what extent do you want people to try and correct you all the time?
Actually I think it’s a really good idea and if you try it, let me know how it works out.