Nice Things

I’ve been thinking about the best way to incentivise the creation of content I like. As a broke college student, the most obvious answer (Pay for it!) doesn’t really scale for me, but word of mouth certainly helps.

Something I would really like to see happen is micropayments integrated with online content. I hate paywalls, but I have often reached the end of an essay and wished that there was a simple button I could click to pay the author a small amount of money. (Julian 2022: Artur Piszek says the cognitive transaction costs are too high to make micropayments worth it) I’m not sure if this is a sustainable model, but I note that what I was willing to pay seemed to increase as my own funds grew. There are things like patreon and Ko-fi but they have significant transaction costs and trivial inconveniences matter. Siderea on what patreon does right: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html

interesting funding avenues

Impact certificates

This is a list of people whose work I enjoy, and would like to see more of:

Bujold – Self publishing? Novellas, interesting model with subterranean press

Bret Victor – Dynamicland? Looking for

Ada Palmer

Visakan Veerasamy

Sarah Monette/Katherine Addison

Evan Chen (Napkin)

Scott Alexander

Rosemary Kirstein

Duncan Sabien r!Animorphs the Reckoning

Other recommendations

Math and CS things that have been designed with particular attention to being learnt from.

  • Napkin
  • Neel’s videos and notes
  • MIT Math for Computer Science

Songs of the Times

R visit to Goa – Ophelia

Eclipse US Trip – Bright Eyes, America by Simon and Garfunkel

Thesis writing – Endogeneity by molly ofgeography