I wonder about how the mechanism leads to behaviour-change though. In particular, each prize is relatively small compared to the cost of launching an activity—the expected value of the reward is significantly below start-up costs unless one was planning to basically do that anyhow. This means you might end up just funding the activities that were most effective in the last cycle but which would have happened anyway (which may be fine, they might be most likely to do well in the future with that money).
An opposite end of the spectrum would be to offer larger chunks that were big enough to motivate people to invest their own resources chasing it. I.e., an EA X-Prize. I think there will be some really cool lessons from varying the size of the award.
We expect to be purchasing small activities for now. We also expect to be funding things that would have happened otherwise (e.g. we are purchasing stuff that was done in 2014), in large part. See here for some discussion of the anticipated direct impacts.
This is a very interesting idea!
I wonder about how the mechanism leads to behaviour-change though. In particular, each prize is relatively small compared to the cost of launching an activity—the expected value of the reward is significantly below start-up costs unless one was planning to basically do that anyhow. This means you might end up just funding the activities that were most effective in the last cycle but which would have happened anyway (which may be fine, they might be most likely to do well in the future with that money).
An opposite end of the spectrum would be to offer larger chunks that were big enough to motivate people to invest their own resources chasing it. I.e., an EA X-Prize. I think there will be some really cool lessons from varying the size of the award.
We expect to be purchasing small activities for now. We also expect to be funding things that would have happened otherwise (e.g. we are purchasing stuff that was done in 2014), in large part. See here for some discussion of the anticipated direct impacts.