Doesn’t the leverage go both directions? Donating causes earlier people to pay more, but also adds leverage for later people? Such that you don’t know if later people would’ve donated unless you also did.
Though maybe that depends on some factors of the system, whether the leverage grows or shrinks with more donations. I think this might hit your worry that it incentivizes donating later cause that makes you pay less, but if actors are proper EV-maximizers won’t they scale up their donation such that the expected payment/leverage is the same?
Seems like there’s lots of strategies at play here, including donating several times. Making it work both for real-life humans with real-life problems and TAI seems ambitious though, they require very different incentives to work and I imagine the design ends up significantly different.
Interesting stuff!
You’re right, the leverage definitely goes two ways. The thing it, this later leverage will tend to be smaller than the one you get immediately. At least, this is how the system behaves in my naive simulations. The exception is, when you expect some very big contributors to join later on—then the later leverage is bigger. So yeah, it’s a complicated situation and I didn’t want to go into that in the post, because it would get too bloated.
And yeah, humans and TAI may have different strategies which complicates it further. This is why I’m not yet fully satisfied with this mechanism, and I will try to simplify it, so that we don’t have to care for all those strategies.
Doesn’t the leverage go both directions? Donating causes earlier people to pay more, but also adds leverage for later people? Such that you don’t know if later people would’ve donated unless you also did.
Though maybe that depends on some factors of the system, whether the leverage grows or shrinks with more donations. I think this might hit your worry that it incentivizes donating later cause that makes you pay less, but if actors are proper EV-maximizers won’t they scale up their donation such that the expected payment/leverage is the same?
Seems like there’s lots of strategies at play here, including donating several times. Making it work both for real-life humans with real-life problems and TAI seems ambitious though, they require very different incentives to work and I imagine the design ends up significantly different. Interesting stuff!
You’re right, the leverage definitely goes two ways. The thing it, this later leverage will tend to be smaller than the one you get immediately. At least, this is how the system behaves in my naive simulations. The exception is, when you expect some very big contributors to join later on—then the later leverage is bigger. So yeah, it’s a complicated situation and I didn’t want to go into that in the post, because it would get too bloated.
And yeah, humans and TAI may have different strategies which complicates it further. This is why I’m not yet fully satisfied with this mechanism, and I will try to simplify it, so that we don’t have to care for all those strategies.