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picking up litter at local parks - thousands of pieces per month
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sowing non-native seeds in wild areas - thousands of seeds per month
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spray painting random poems in public areas - thousands of poems per month
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handing out fliers for inaturalist - thousands of fliers per month
please rank the above activities based on your perception of their usefulness to society. whether you do this or not, it can be done. no two activities are equally useful to society.
if you say that you’re id’ing thousands of moths per month, regardless of how useful this activity is to society, it doesn’t sound quite right. alternatively you could say that you’re id’ing thousands of moths per month, and this activity is very useful to society, this begs this question of how, exactly, you measured its usefulness to society.
recently i crossed ficus carica and ficus opposita. this is the very first time that these two species have been crossed. i was inordinately proud of myself. my partner, not so much. i told her, “you seem more impressed when you manage to make yourself coffee in the morning.” she replied something like, “let’s see how much your hybrid sells for.” well yeah, i can’t argue against that. the market is the ultimate test of usefulness.
if i churn out 1000s of paintings per month, but haven’t managed to sell a single one, then my use of society’s limited resources isn’t benefiting anyone other than myself, which is nothing to brag about.
this isn’t quite what i suggested. i suggested that we use our donations (to inaturalist) to “grade” the work done on inaturalist based on our perception of its usefulness. if somebody thinks your id of a moth is useful, they could give it any amount of money. inat would get all the money, and your id would get the grade. this would allow us to sort all the ids and observations by their grades. we could quickly and easily find the single most useful observation and id on inat. this information would influence which experts were attracted to inat, like moths to the flame, except for the getting burned part.
with democracy, how many people would give an obscure little brown moth a thumbs up? you and 2 other people? with donations, how big a sacrifice would you 3 people make for this moth? i have no idea. it would be entirely up to you 3. you all want to collectively spend $1,000,000 for this moth? nobody would stop you. and for sure your big sacrifice would put this moth on everyone’s radar.
right now you have the option to crowdfund a billboard for this moth. nobody would stop you. but 1st you’d have to overcome the obstacle of coordination and logistics. this is not a small obstacle. my only suggestion is that there shouldn’t be any obstacles to making collective sacrifices for the plants and animals that we want everyone to know about.
people spending their money wrongly, which admittedly happens way too often, is not, or should not be, an argument against giving people the opportunity to spend their money rightly. essentially you’re worried that there are too many ignorant people on inat. this is a serious issue regardless of the opportunity to use money as a feedback mechanism. if this opportunity allowed us to easily and quickly identify these people, then that would be half the battle. the other half would be educating and informing them.
it’s impossible to fund research that you’re unaware of. i’ve been collecting ficus for the past 3 decades, but it wasn’t until 3 years ago that i learned that it was even possible to artificially hybridize ficus. i don’t remember the 1st email that i ever received, but i sure wish it had been from my future self informing that it was very possible and very easy to cross-pollinate ficus. sadly, i can’t send such an email to my past self. however, i can send such a memo to everyone who still hasn’t figured out that ficus hybridization is possible, easy and desirable. but again there’s the significant obstacle of the coordination and logistics of crowdfunding to put this memo on a billboard.
it’s not inat’s fault if it doesn’t eliminate the obstacle (coordination/logistics) of crowdfunding to create a “bat signal” that attracts the attention of anyone even vaguely interested in ficus? obviously it can’t be inat’s fault. inat isn’t even a person. if it’s anyone’s fault it would be mine for failing to effectively explain how beneficial and useful it would be if we could use our donations to inat to promote the plants and animals that we most love, which would attract to inat all the people in the world who also love those plants and animals.
this is a misunderstanding based on my poor explanation. all the money to which i’m referring would go to inat. the only difference is, we’d have this option to use this money to improve the rankings of our favorite plants and animals. naturally everyone, from novices to experts, would see the rankings and this would influence their decision whether to participate on inat in order to improve them.
let’s say that we were given the opportunity to use our inat donations to rank all the plants and animals. despite my big sacrifice, ficus is last place. out of all the plants, it’s the very lowest rank. an outsider who loves ficus sees that it is ranked last on inat. what do they think? how do they feel? would it discourage them from joining inat? or would they feel motivated to join inat to try and improve the ranking of ficus? maybe they’d be curious who donated for ficus?
it’s like the most complicated game of tug-of-war where each plant and animal has a rope being pulled on by its supporters. team ficus is pulling on a rope but they are losing ground. someone from the sidelines sees this, and they care about ficus, do they join the game and help team ficus pull on the rope?
and perhaps you’re thinking, it’s a useless game. there’s no benefit to anyone participating in such a stressful and hard game when the current relaxed system works perfectly fine. except, in real life, everyone who donates to inat is currently pulling on a rope. there’s also a rope for wikipedia, and a rope for facebook, and a rope for youtube, and one for google and one rope each for all the other sites. the supporters of each site are pulling for limited resources, like talent and attention. the harder that supporters pull on the rope, the more resources their site can use. because this is how and why the market works. the amount of resources allocated to any site is entirely determined by how hard its supporters are willing to pull on its rope. this is a good thing. none of the alternatives make sense and they would all result in too many or too few resources being given to a site.
right now inat is in a market, but it’s not a market. so how our limited resources, like time and attention, are distributed among all the different plants and animals is wrong, really wrong.
if inat became a market, not only would this correct the current distribution of resources within the site, but it would also improve the current distribution of resources outside the site. way more people would pull harder on inat’s rope, so it would compete far more resources away from the other websites.