[PROPOSAL] Sponsor OHwA and DSC

we’re quite off topic, but the Council can also post “request for proposals” and allow for bids and we’re not set up for that just yet. This is something I want to see implemented very soon.

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Wen CoE vote!? I also got to say that as someone without a data science background, the daily scores and chill really helped me refine my modeling and continues to this day while I continue to work on making a signals model. When I would hear talk about data science topics that ive never heard of before and heard them explained over steam, it gave me that extra motivation to look into the topics further. I remember specifically a stream last year that arbitrage and another member were on talking about feature selection and using supervised learning modeling with scikit by mixing together linear and non linear models using a pipeline. That specific one helped me a great deal with one of my models. The daily scores is not all about scores. The office hours with special guests is really cool too. Gives you an idea of what others are doing and it lets us all get to know each other a little more. If breaking away from Numerai is needed for this to become more open and being funded by the CoE, im all for it! Vote, Vote, Vote!

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Hi Jon,

Is this an all-or-nothing proposition? Or is the price negotiable? I can definitely see the value in this but 120 NRM per month seems a bit much, and may deter other new proposals if most of the CoE budget has already been used up.

Regarding the KPIs you’ve included, are you proposing that you get paid the full amount regardless if the proposal was deemed a success or not? It might be worth considering having part of the amount as ‘base’ and the rest as a type of bonus incentive structure, depending on if it was deemed a success or not (by the CoE or the Community I suppose)?

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Also, even though you are not voting yourself, it may have at least the optics of a conflict of interest.

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I have enjoyed and benefited from the ohwa and dsc streams and would really hope they would continue. My one suggestion for any content project is for the CoE to greenlight them one season at a time (however CoE defines a season).

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I voted No to CoE being the sponsor. This is why: trailblaze-vs-scale. My belief is that CoE should be in the business of solving the lack-of-enough-disruptive-ideas problem, by seeding many new and crazy pilot projects.

I think OHwA and DSC are valuable, delightful, should definitely continue, and it is Numerai’s job to resource it. Just like it is Numerai’s job to scale-up the best ideas that graduate from the CoE.hatchery.

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I am leaning towards this type of philosophy as well. CoE shouldn’t just be taking over functions that are naturally Numerai’s. But that’s in general. I could go either way on this one – at least for OHwA. DSC is fun but it is really kinda limited to a small subset of people in the right time zone (and the right day jobs). Do many watch those streams after the fact if they can’t do it live? OHwA is more of a resource (although they too get outdated after a while, but not right away).

If it’s about being compensated for the workload, I’m wondering if we could decentralise Office Hours and DSC, to share the load (and pleasure) of hosting. Perhaps with a rotating chair and region, starting with different members of the CoE? Having built in redundancies is generally a good thing to avoid single point of failures. Though maybe there really is more to it than just hosting a zoom call and hit record?

/Joakim

While I’m sympathetic to the general feeling that paying Arbitrage USD 3,000 per month in NMR seems like a lot - that’s a real salary for many (I have read in posts above that it’s estimated at USD 46 per hour), we have to keep in mind that he’s not an hourly wage worker. He’s shown that he’s highly skilled at producing these videos and creating engagement within the community.

I’m quite certain that investors in Numer.ai today would argue that the engagement and exposure created by the long duration content of office hours (it’s not really evergreen but I’ve gone back to see 2 year old videos. Aven’t you all?) produced by Arbitrage far exceeds USD 36,000 per year over the last 2 years. Therefore paying him the same amount to continue going forward seems like a no brainer to me. I think anyone that holds NMR is indirectly benefitting from his efforts.

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Maybe you’re right.

However, for me, it’s not so much the absolute amount I have a problem with. I completely agree that Arbitrage has created > $36K of value per year. No doubt, 100%. I also agree that he deserves to get reasonably compensated for all his efforts (I’ve benefited as well).

It’s the relative piece of the pie that I think is disproportional. If the CoE budget was NMR 20,000 per year then yeah, it’s a no-brainer to me as well. Now I don’t know what the CoE yearly budget is (no-one seems to know this), but if it’s NMR 2000 / year, then paying a single person NMR 1440 (72%) seems a bit much. What about @uuazed who created Numerapi? Or @surajp and @jrai who created amazing Signals example scripts? Or @ceunen who created the amazing Numerai Payouts app and dashboard? I could go on. Aren’t they equally deserving of a decent piece of the pie? Maybe they got paid directly by Numerai, in which case transparancy and communication around this could definitely be improved.

In short, I think the CoE needs to first work out what their mandate, budget, KPIs, etc. are before approving large (relative to budget) payouts to a single person.

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Yes. I understand and agree with you Joachim.

The issue is more about what is the financing mandate of the COE vs Numer.ai itself, and what other projects the COE could finance instead with the same resources.

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I am trying not to be offended or to take anything personally, because I know no one is making attacks. I struggle with defending my compensation, because that’s not a good conversation in any context. I don’t like where this conversation is going and I simply ask that you refrain from converting human beings into commodities.

Whether Numerai retains my contract or the CoE picks it up, the outcome is the same. Regardless of which entity provides funding, I will continue to provide the highest quality content that I can. Content which encourages exploration, ideation, and creativity. Content that teaches. Content that is timely. Content that fosters collaboration. Content that entertains. Content that builds community.

I can’t vote on this proposal and I can’t place the proposal in the queue to be voted on, either. This proposal is dead until someone who isn’t me (SWIM) on the CoE moves it forward. Reading through Rocket Chat and the forums, I would be surprised to see anyone on the council move anything forward.

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I think one of the general points is important: if the CoE simply takes over functions that Numerai the company ought to be doing or would be doing anyway, then we have gained nothing by having a CoE.

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Indeed, if opacity is desirable, then let’s just disband the CoE and have Numerai hire someone to fund projects that Numerai deems desirable for the community.

Opacity? Not sure the connection.

But you know, if someone proposes that we have a in-person Numerai conference this fall, everybody might think that’s a great idea. But Numerai is doing that anyway, why should the CoE be expending resources on it? So it isn’t solely about whether it is worth doing or not, it is about whether it will happen or not without the help of the CoE. Your proposal is somewhat the same – you are already being compensated by Numerai, so why change that unless they are firing you? Well, then you can do this & this that is different from what you do now – those differences are really the meat of the proposal because if the proposal is not taken up, presumably OHwA and DSC will still continue just as before, right?

So proposals for things that just won’t exist without the CoE are the natural focus of the CoE, right? That seems like common sense to me. It also seems natural that they’d be doing something a bit different than stuff the company would naturally do itself and/or are already doing – either ideas so experimental that the company just can’t be bothered with that until they prove themselves, or very user-centric things like acting as user advocates to prod Numerai to place more priority on things that are important to users (i.e. to actually challenge Numerai at times that they are neglecting something important), as well as stuff like a predictions marketplace (which seems like will go forward) where Numerai doesn’t really even want direct involvement in that kind of thing.

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I didn’t understand the opacity comment and I’m not sure I understand this insinuation either.

I would vote no on this proposal.

I believe the streams are valuable. Numerai made a good choice by investing in you. The archived episodes are great to have on-hand. But I agree with those who have pointed out the CoE should be funding things that wouldn’t exist without CoE funding.

Also, as I watch the payout factor approach 0.5 I remain unconvinced of the value of bringing in new participants. That may just be me but I’d be happy seeing the number of participants go down. Note I am not on Numerai’s payroll; maybe I’d think differently if I was.

As for the spirit of cooperation argument: what do the streams provide that’s above and beyond the forums and rocketchat vis-a-vis the spirit of cooperation? If typing a question into a live chat on twitch is markedly better from typing it into a forum post and/or rocketchat I haven’t witnessed that yet. Indeed, I see more thoughtful backs-and-forths on the forum than on the stream chats.

Regarding the “certain topics” that have not been discussed because Numerai has been funding the streams: this is the most interesting part of the proposal. If the one problem with OHwA is the gag order, why not propose that the CoE fund the creation of an unrestricted stream (the exclusive “certain topic” stream) for a few episodes to see if it indeed adds something to the community that is currently absent?

If the CoE can spend less NMR to beta-test a new un-gagged stream I’d be more supportive of the proposal. Though I suspect that to have you running both an un-gagged stream and the sponsored streams might not be something Numerai will smile about.

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I don’t quite agree with your first point, aren’t you just incentivizing Arbitrage to just suspend all streams / pull his content off Youtube and then create a CoE request ? Surely there’s value in the content and could be worth investing in to create more content / engage the community.

I find a ton of value in the OHwA and DSC content and maintaining a strong community presence outside of the forum and rocketchat. To suggest that anybody can do what arbitrage does hosting a livestream (attracting an audience, asking the right questions, keeping the conversation going, preparing guests, scheduling, etc) is just plain wrong. It also seems fair to assume that Numerai is no longer funding this with the expectation that the CoE would end up doing it. I’ve also been wondering how many social media content proposals should be supported by CoE, but this does gets a vote from me to get funded, contingent on the conversation of pricing that I feel needs to continue.

As I just posted in the proposal for Signals development & streams, the decision about how much to pay does matter. At this requested amount for the year, it consumes close to half (?) of the current treasury. This might unfortunately be the proposal that acts as the test grounds for how we determine a fair price to pay and how we logistically go about doing that. In that Signals content thread, I suggested somewhere between $40/hr - $60/hr marked to market at time of funding and paid post-hoc (whether on a bi-weekly or monthly basis) would be fair. I also feel the need to add that there is no intention here to “convert human beings into commodities.”

Lastly, it may make sense to separate the proposals between OHwA and DSC since I do think they’re fairly different.

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Why assume this responsibility onto the CoE?

From “we have nothing to do with CoE” to “run our marketing and foot the bill for our content” is an astounding contradiction of intents.