For LessWrong, we've thought about some kind of "karma over views" metrics for a while. We experimented a few years ago but it proved to be a hard UI design challenge to make it work well. Recently we've thought about having another crack at it.

Yes! This. Thank you for writing.

I often get asked why LessWrong doesn't hire contractors in the meantime while we're hiring, and this is the answer. In particular the fact that getting contractors to do good work would require all of the onboarding that getting a team member to do good work would require.

He also gave a talk at the EA Summit 2014

I don't mean that I expect EA Forum software to replace Swapcard for EAG itself probably, just that the goal is to provide similar functionality all year round.

My understanding (which could be wrong, and I hope they don't mind me mentioning it on their behalf) is that the EA Forum dev team is working to build Swapcard functionality into the forum, including the ability to import your Swapcard data.

In the meantime, I agree with the OP.

I bet that if they are impressive to you (and your judgment is reasonable), you can convince grantmakers at present.

But there already is from the major funders.

Thank you for the detailed reply!

I agree that Earning to Give may make sense if you're neartermist or don't share the full moral framework. This is why my next sentence beings "if you'd be donating to longtermist/x-risk causes." I could have emphasized these caveats more.

I will say that if a path is not producing value, I very much want to demotivate people pursuing that path. They should do something else! One should only be motivated for things that deserve motivation.

I've looked at the posts you shared and I don't find them compelling. 

I think the best previous argument for Earning to Give is that you as a small donor might be able to fund things that the major funders won't or can't, but my current sense is that bar is sufficiently low that it is now very hard to find such opportunities (within the x-risk/lontermist space and framework at least). Things that seem like remotely a good idea get funding now.

I think that the reason we're not hiring more people isn't for lack of money, as discussed on that post.

There might be crazy future scenarios where EA suddenly needs a tremendous amount of money, more than all the funders currently have (or will have), in which case additional funds might be useful, but...it seems if we really thought this was the case, the big funders should raise the bar and not fund as many things as generously as they do.

Earn to Learn

Well dang.