Andrew Gelman's Blog Is Not Mine

[Xerographica]

Earlier in the month I started a thread to discuss Andrew Gelman's planned blog entry about voting versus spending. The thread was quickly locked because...

1. NSG still isn't my blog
2. The topic wasn't a conversation starter

I protested the locking to no avail.

Gelman recently posted the entry... $ vs votes... and several of his readers and I have been discussing the topic in the comments.

I suppose this is me asking permission to post a thread on the same topic. And I really hate that I have to do this.

[Mallorea and Riva]

Earlier in the month I started a thread to discuss Andrew Gelman's planned blog entry about voting versus spending. The thread was quickly locked because...

1. NSG still isn't my blog
2. The topic wasn't a conversation starter

I protested the locking to no avail.

Gelman recently posted the entry... $ vs votes... and several of his readers and I have been discussing the topic in the comments.

I suppose this is me asking permission to post a thread on the same topic. And I really hate that I have to do this.

If you craft an appropriate OP, sure. If it comes across as lacking in direction and bloggy, then it will get locked. Feel free to craft up an OP and plop it here for review if you're concerned.

[Xerographica]

Here's my attempt to craft an appropriate OP...

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Subject: Voting VS Spending

For a few years now several of us have rigorously debated voting (democracy) versus spending (markets). For the most part the debate has been fairly productive, so I figured it would be worthwhile to share a couple new developments for us to consider...

1. Andrew Gelman and his readers' take on spending vs voting
2. A new website called Cent where posts are sorted by spending

Gelman is a professor of statistics and politics at Columbia University. Earlier in the year I emailed him to get his, and his readers', thoughts on spending versus voting. On 27 Nov he posted my email and his response. While I certainly appreciated his doing so, I don't feel like he, or his readers, really addressed my main point that it's relatively easy to simply test and compare the relative effectiveness of voting and spending. But I recommend looking over his post and the replies. Let me know what you think.

A while back, perhaps on Medium, I heard about a very new website called Cent which is based on the Ethereum cryptocurrency. What do I know about crypto? Not much, but Cent sounded interesting so I signed up. After trying, and failing, to get my wallet set up, I decided to email some feedback to Cent. I ended up corresponding quite a bit with a guy there and recently decided to give it another shot. They just released a pretty big update.

In some ways Cent is a pretty typical website... you can post something and others can reply to it. But then there's the crypto aspect, which is a bit tricky to explain.

When you create a post you can add a bounty to it, which is any amount of money that will be distributed among the people who reply to your post. What determines how the money is distributed? Voting. Naturally this is why I haven't offered any bounties with my posts. In my most recent post I suggested that users be given the option to sort the replies by tips. Once you have your wallet setup it's pretty easy to tip a reply. So far the few people who replied to my post haven't loved the idea. Yet, somebody did fairly substantially "seed" my post. This means that they essentially invested in it. By doing so, they helped my post show up higher in the results when the posts are sorted by "top".

Are you totally confused? The key takeaway is that Cent is using spending ("seeding") to sort some of its content (posts). And if they heed my sage advice, they will also use spending (tips) to sort the rest of its content (replies).

So with Gelman we have the theoretical and with Cent we have the practical. I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

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Does this OP pass mustard?