Last updated: Oct 2021
Studying BTech at IIT Delhi. Check out my post history for topics of interest. Spent 18 months deep into cryptocurrency and DeFi before I came here.
Samuel Shadrach
Karma: 196
I didn’t understand the ‘share-specific obligations’ idea. How might such an obligation look like?
People who use the voting rights of those shares can’t vote for decisions that violate those obligations.
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Nobody might want founding members / CEOs to retain a controlling interest on all matters, especially after the exit. The founding member themselves may not want this responsibility once they exit the company. People buying shares may not want it, and regulators may not like it because the agency problem becomes extreme here. (Cause here in the extreme, nobody who stands to earn the profits of the company has any say in how the company is run.) I’m not sure 1000x voting rights are even allowed in many countries for this reason, as far as I know there is a limit on how much extra voting rights supervoting shares can have.
In my proposal, the founders have control only to set some principles right before they leave, rather than control all aspects of the company forever.
Imo the implications on social norms need to be thought out. Shifting economic incentives also has a tendency to shift social incentives, norms and behaviours.
An ideal EA is probably past the point where they have any significant personal needs or desires that are unmet—and if given more money they would donate it because they believe someone else needs it more than they do. Ofcourse in practice idk how many that holds true for (including myself).
Your proposal might create status dynamics where people look at their coworkers pay and think they need to make more—not in absolute sense but relative to their coworker. Could be motivated by envy, fear of missing out, seeking recognition of value from others, or fulfilling feelings of self-worth / adequacy. All of which can act as motivating factors but then it might be weird to see that the reward for such drives being having more money to spend on yourself. Or atleast it feels a bit weird to me, I’m not sure how to describe it.
Tiny implementation details could matter (weak opinion again). For instance there’s an unspoken assumption here that more money means the group now claims it is acceptable for you to spend on yourself (versus donate or save). And again, people look strongly for group approval when deciding what is morally acceptable or not. “Seeking recognition of one’s value from managers” can both be a very negative or a very positive thing depending on how it is celebrated and whether you are compensating for feelings of inadequacy, or feeling good about actually having done some good in the world.
P.S. I have very little real experience with this so I would be keen on hearing different viewpoints.
Somebody to run this anonymously as a full-time job and assume legal risk:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Zxiugmj5EnS6SXYnS/scihub-backups-for-open-research
Yup this makes sense.
Whoever works on this could probably accept cryptocurrency deposits directly from individual donors. And EA orgs could possibly add this information to their websites with a notice like “do as you see fit”. Would that model work?
Profit maximisation and obligations on shareholders
I’d like to link my post on maintaining Scihub backups here, if that’s alright
Scihub is probably atleast 1% as impactful as Wikipedia, and shouldn’t take more than $1M to save forever (the actual figure is likely lesser).
This is useful info. The button html embed is a nice touch.
But this still doesn’t satisfy the requirements I’m suggesting. Namely 1 (no website visit) and 4 (can be used by DAOs and smart contracts), and to some extent 3 (anonymous)
I am personally excited by the potential use cases with DAOs and smart contracts. Essentially the list of actions under “Reason 4: One can experiment …”. There is a difference between opening a yield-earning app that has button that takes you to a different site that requires you to fill an e-mail address and donate, versus the app itself directing 10% of your yield as it is earned on a second-by-second basis. Both in theory can lead to the same donation, but the latter is a lot “cooler” and aligns much better with the ideologies of crypto users.
DAOs and their founders being able to pre-commit profits or treasuries to charity is also huge, and is more of a challenge if you go through the legal route. A DAO can’t press a website button. (And again, doesn’t align with crypto users’ ideologies).
I am happy to discuss this further in private if that’d be useful.
Thanks for the info
P.S. Do you support USDC?
This is great! I was going to suggest a UI on your earlier post, but refrained because it felt outside of the window of things that can be done easily. I will share this with people I know.
I’d still like to link my post here on features beyond this that may be worth supporting at some point, for anyone else here.
Thank you for this, I found jekyll + github pages easiest to use too :)
Anyone here wanna suggest me a good static site generator for my blog?
I can write code if I absolutely have to, but would prefer a solution that requires less effort, as I’m not a web dev specifically.
Don’t want something clunky like wordpress, I like gwern.net’s philosophy of not locking into one platform. I used pandoc markdown it seems cool.
Literally the main thing keeping me from next step in my EA career that I’m procrastinating on (make blog → post ideas and work → apply for summer internship)
Random idea: Social media platform where you are allowed to “enter” a finite number of discussion threads per day. Threads can only be read if you enter them, until then you just see the top-level discussion. The restriction can be hard-coded or enforced indirectly via social norms (like you are supposed to introduce yourself when you enter a thread).
Basically explores how public discussion could transition to semi-private. Right now it’s usually public versus (or transitioning to) fully private between a tiny number of people. But semi-private is what happens irl.
EA orgs should integrate with The Giving Block for cryptocurrency donations
Update: I’ve written the email.
The Giving Block seems to support the features I am looking for, I would be keen to know your opinion on them.
Happy to take this conversation further on email
in the event that it becomes a problem,
It’s a problem before it becomes a problem though. As long as donors think this could happen, they’ll abandon your system and ensure it never happens. And if the candidates think it’s a problem, they too will explicitly try try push money away from your platform.
I think you should try plotting out a utility function U(a,b) for utility to A given donations amounts to A and B as a and b respectively. It’s definitely not linear, both parties want a minimum budget nobody wants to receive literally zero funds as that kills their campaigning right there. (And no, candidates don’t want to gamble on risk of zero funding even if there is some upside, because is not a game they are used to.)
[Question] Do any EA orgs accept crypto donations (unbounded) from anonymous parties or smart contracts?
Could you add if you accept anonymous deposits? Or deposits from smart contracts (such as DAOs)?
Update: I’ve made it a separate post because I think it’ll be a strong determinant to how much funding you receive this way. Keeping crypto addresses anonymous is valued very highly by many for both ideological and practical reasons.
I have voted for two posts in the decadal review prelim thingie.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FvbTKrEQWXwN5A6Tb/a-happiness-manifesto-why-and-how-effective-altruism-should
9 votes
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hkimyETEo76hJ6NpW/on-caring
4 votes
Seems to me like perspectives I strongly agree with, but not everyone in the EA community does.