Taking money seriously — LessWrong

To an extent, I suppose this project (reading.hruss.com) could be used as a way to prove my knowledge on a topic. I remember there was this startup, Readocracy, that presented at a conference I attended to promote their app, which would award real educational diplomas via reading online, watching videos, etc. While I see this making sense in a way, I do think this is quite credentialist; the real purpose of a college degree is not to show that you learned from the classes in college, so these degrees wouldn't serve that purpose either. Also, it would award Harrisburg University degrees.

It's been maybe a year and a half since I signed up for the app, and despite having a conversation with a co-founder (afaict), I haven't been added to the app, and I haven't heard anything else back from them. I imagine that the degree awarding didn't scale (after all, Harrisburg University probably didn't want to give an insane amount of degrees), and this seems very easy to automate/game.

After checking their website, they do seem to still be in operation (pre-seed & seed round in 2020 & 2021), and the problem they are solving appears to be a combination of credentials-for-online-reading, preventing disinformation, something with AI, keeping track of reading (like this!), and also allowing people to show their expertise online. I guess they must be profitable?

I do think that their strong anti-misinformation/trust-the-experts lean might not be ideal, as this seems very focused on learning existing orthodox knowledge but minimally so for creating new knowledge or for true things that aren't expert supported.

Their website has itself an "unorthodox" prose style; you can see it at readocracy.com.

From their FAQ: (emphasis mine)

Here are the rules of the road to be part of the Readocracy community:

1. Be truthful. Don't mislead, misdirect, or manipulate people or the platform. This includes trying to automate activity, spreading misinformation, or trying to use it as a sales channel.
2. Contribute with respect, humility, and good intentions. a) No ad hominem attacks - neither against other users, nor the subjects of a discussion. Use reason. Name-calling is the lazy way out. b) Be open and thoughtful with new and different perspectives. Nothing is black and white. People and problems are nuanced. c) Try to understand, rather than judge, people, perspectives, and problems.
3. Try to be helpful. We're all in this together.
4. Focus on better, not more. Quality over quantity. 5. Recognize logical fallacies, and remember Occam's razor. Deliberately and consistently violating any of these points - especially 1. and 2. - will result in expulsion from all community features, and potentially expulsion from Readocracy as a whole (even solo features). Conversely, exemplifying these points will get you recognized and rewarded. Readocracy = meritocracy.

Occam's Razor?

Anyways, on the article itself: I'm often surprised that when people hear about the importance of various issues and need to make a choice that would trade off multiple, they don't think to do a cost-benefit calculation/fermi estimate, which is the obvious solution. I think this is one of the better ideas from rationality.

Claude

Summary. This LessWrong post argues that rationalists should apply the same rigor to money-related decisions as to other beliefs: explicit cost-benefit calculations, fair-value comparisons, and Fermi estimates rather than gut heuristics or mental-accounting shortcuts. It treats "taking money seriously" as a specific instance of taking your own stated values seriously, urging readers to actually run the numbers when weighing trade-offs involving time, effort, and cash rather than defaulting to vague intuitions.

On the note. Your Readocracy tangent actually loops back nicely into the article's point: degrees work as signals partly because they're costly and hard to fake (the classic Spence signaling story), and a reading-tracker-issued diploma breaks that model precisely because logging pages read is cheap to game — which is itself the kind of cost-benefit reasoning the post is asking you to apply to money and effort more broadly, just redirected at credentials instead of dollars.

Related

• costly signaling as what makes a degree meaningful ↔ notarization that verifies only the signature, not the underlying claim (Bureaucracy is a world of magic) · Both cases show a credentialing system that checks the cheap, legible proxy (a notarized signature, a page-read log) instead of the costly underlying substance it's supposed to certify, so the credential can be satisfied without the thing it claims to verify.
• anti-misinformation platforms favoring existing orthodoxy over new knowledge ↔ AIs as poor judges of idea quality (Moderation Log — LessWrong) · Readocracy's trust-the-experts filter and LessWrong's moderation queue face the same problem from opposite sides: any gatekeeping mechanism tuned to reject bad ideas risks also filtering out true ideas that don't yet have expert support.
• treating money decisions with the same rigor as beliefs ↔ trivial-cost DIY fix with outsized payoff (The mosquito bucket of doom works — LessWrong) · The mosquito bucket is a concrete instance of exactly the Fermi-estimate mindset the money post advocates: a trivial-cost intervention whose payoff becomes obvious only once someone actually runs the numbers instead of relying on gut intuition.