So, high-impact blog posts happen. How do we reliably produce them though? By finding good bloggers and paying them money to write on a topic. I am talking about, if necessary, literally transferring cash I earned into the bank accounts of private individuals on the completion of a blog post at my request. I don’t know why more effective altruists don’t do this. A friend said they’re worried if the current heavy hitters in the rationality blogosphere don’t post to LessWrong 2.0 it won’t take off. Here is the chain of thought I immediately reacted with.

  1. “The relaunch of LW2.0 is obviously very valuable.”
  2. “Talking about how much we’re not going to do anything doesn’t seem productive.”
  3.  “By the time LW2.0 is in full swing, I will have enough money to motivate other aspiring rationalists to blog on LW2.0”

This isn’t something I’m thinking about abstractly. If within a couple weeks of the LW2.0 open beta if it doesn’t look like there’s enough quality activity on the site, I am strongly considering unilaterally and privately incentivize such by paying people to blog. Maybe they’re an underemployed rationalist who blogs because they’ve got nothing better to do, and the idea of getting paid to do it is the bee’s knees. Maybe they’re a software engineer or entrepreneur who is between projects or jobs right now, has a higher net worth than me, but has too much of an ugh field around blogging on LW2.0. In that case, I’ll overcome their lack of intrinsic motivation to blog with an extrinsic motivation via cash injection.

Read the source article at Evan Gains Power