Complainments

A suggestion box that rewards useful criticism

David Reinstein · An idea I'd like to try

This page is very preliminary and AI-generated. I'm hoping to improve it as I have bandwidth. Here's my short EA Forum post on the idea.

Tell me what's wrong with this · A small pilot?

Comments on a particular passage? Highlight the text and choose “Annotate,” or open the Hypothes.is sidebar at the right. Annotations can be public and show your username. For private or anonymous feedback, use the form below.

If you're an EA organization or a “rationalist,” you may already maintain an anonymous suggestion box. So does The Unjournal. Are people using it? My guess is often not, or only minimally. (Aside: please give The Unjournal feedback.)

Writing up useful criticism takes time. Making it anonymous can make it less awkward or risky, but it's still not rewarded, and anonymity removes the possibility of reputational benefit.

You could offer rewards, but the promise may not be credible. Following up takes work and bandwidth. It's also not easy to compensate “anonymous person B” without giving up their anonymity. And once an organization has a good idea in hand, it may want to cheap out and not pay.

I've had some version of this idea for decades. Maybe we can now try it. I've been calling these suggestions complainments (complaint/compliments). The same idea could apply to businesses, public agencies, or individuals.

A committed reward pool and an independent administrator

  1. The organization commits a monthly or yearly reward pool in advance, to be paid under published rules.
  2. Contributors submit through an independent administrator, which keeps their identity from the organization but can still contact them.
  3. The administrator assesses usefulness and implementation, or requires the organization to report on and score each suggestion.
  4. Rewards come out of the pool, and payouts are reported without identifying contributors.

Money set aside in advance makes it harder to be stingy later. The administrator's fee would be separate and disclosed, so it gains nothing by rejecting claims.

How would anonymity and rewards work together?

The intermediary could know how to contact you without telling the organization who you are. Or it could give you a private code to come back for a reply or claim a reward. We'd need to choose how payments work.

That protects your identity from the recipient, not necessarily from the intermediary. And the details of a complaint can give you away. You should be able to check what gets passed on, especially if someone has rewritten or summarized it.

The administrator could make its decisions and payouts inspectable without publishing raw complaints. It should charge a stated fee; it shouldn't get to pocket rewards it decides not to award.

What still needs sorting out?

Quite a bit. How do we tell whether an idea was implemented? How much weight should the organization's own assessment get? What about duplicate suggestions, disputes, or a company awarding the money to a friend?

We'd also need a rule for a month with nothing worth rewarding. Rolling the money forward or sending it elsewhere could work; returning it to the organization would weaken the commitment. I don't yet know the best rule.

A fixed pool also won't guarantee that someone who saves a company a million dollars gets anything like a fair share. It would give contributors a more credible minimum overall reward budget. We'd have to test whether that is enough to change behavior.

Why might this be easier now?

AI tools could help sort comments, group duplicates, and help contributors clarify their points. They could also help follow up on what was implemented and check whether the administrator is following its own rules. I think this could make the process much less of a hassle.

I'd start with a person making the reward decisions. And people should approve edits to their own suggestions. The comments you send on this page aren't automatically sent to an AI service.

Could we try it on this page?

You can already send one thing you'd change, anonymously if you like. The form works, and I can read the comments. There are no rewards yet.

For a paid pilot, I'd suggest one month, this page as the subject, and a small pool (say $100) held by an outsider. We'd agree the scoring, deadline, and unused-money rule before inviting entries. Contributors would need a private way to return for a reply or claim a reward.

What would we learn, and what's needed to start?

Did we get useful suggestions? Did I make changes because of them? How much work did the reviewer do, and did contributors trust the process? With a small trial, we probably couldn't say much about whether rewards caused more feedback; that would need a comparison.

We need someone willing to administer it independently and someone to put up the pool. We'd also need a way for contributors to return privately and receive payment. The optional example below only demonstrates the allocation rule; the form below currently takes one-way comments.

The Unjournal could also be a test subject, and we might help administer this for other organizations. But someone outside The Unjournal should administer rewards for feedback about us.

Interested in helping with that? I'd like to hear from you.

Optional example: dividing a reward pool

Imagine an organization asking how to improve its application process. You're the independent reviewer. Score these three made-up suggestions, then see what happens if the organization decides it would rather keep the money.

Illustration only: pretend money and made-up suggestions. Your choices stay on this page; nothing is sent or saved.

This leaves the difficult judgment to you: which suggestions deserve what scores? Committing the pool helps with stinginess; it doesn't settle who deserves the money.

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Want to help?

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