So napkin math suggests that the per-post cost of a contest post is something like 1% of the per-post cost of a RP publication. A typical RP publication is probably much higher quality. But maybe sometimes getting a lot of shallow explorations quickly is what’s desired. (Disclaimer: I haven’t been reading the forum much, didn’t read many contest posts, and don’t have an opinion about their quality. But I did notice the organizers of the ELK contest were “surprised by the number and quality of submissions”.)
A related point re: quality is that smaller prize pools presumably select for people with lower opportunity costs. If I’m a talented professional who commands a high hourly rate, I might do the expected value math on e.g. the criticism prize and decide it’s not worthwhile to enter.
It’s also not clear if the large number of entries will persist in the longer term. Not winning can be pretty demoralizing. Supposing a talented professional goes against their better judgement and puts a lot of time into their entry, then loses and has no idea why. Will they enter the next contest they see? Probably not. They’re liable to interpret lack of a prize as “the contest organizers didn’t think it was worth my time to make a submission”.
Hey just want to weigh in here that you can’t divide our FTE by our total publication count, since that doesn’t include a large amount of work we’ve produced that is not able to be made public or is not yet public but will be. Right now I think a majority of our output is not public right now for one reason or another, though we’re working on finding routes to make more of it public.
I do think your general point though that the per-post cost of a contest post is less / much less than an RP post is accurate though.
BTW, I hope it doesn’t seem like it was picking on you—it just occurred to me that I could do math for Rethink Priorities because your salaries are public. I have no reason to believe a cost-per-public-report estimate would be different for any other randomly chosen EA research organization in either direction. And of course most EA organizations correctly focus on making a positive impact rather than maximizing publication count.
Another possible mechanism is forum leadership encouraging people to be less intimidated and write more off-the-cuff posts—see e.g. this or this.
Side note: It seems like a small amount of prize money goes a long way.
E.g. Rethink Priorities makes their salaries public: they pay senior researchers $105,000 – $115,000 per year.
Their headcount near the end of 2021 was 24.75 full-time equivalents.
And their publications page lists 30 publications in 2021.
So napkin math suggests that the per-post cost of a contest post is something like 1% of the per-post cost of a RP publication. A typical RP publication is probably much higher quality. But maybe sometimes getting a lot of shallow explorations quickly is what’s desired. (Disclaimer: I haven’t been reading the forum much, didn’t read many contest posts, and don’t have an opinion about their quality. But I did notice the organizers of the ELK contest were “surprised by the number and quality of submissions”.)
A related point re: quality is that smaller prize pools presumably select for people with lower opportunity costs. If I’m a talented professional who commands a high hourly rate, I might do the expected value math on e.g. the criticism prize and decide it’s not worthwhile to enter.
It’s also not clear if the large number of entries will persist in the longer term. Not winning can be pretty demoralizing. Supposing a talented professional goes against their better judgement and puts a lot of time into their entry, then loses and has no idea why. Will they enter the next contest they see? Probably not. They’re liable to interpret lack of a prize as “the contest organizers didn’t think it was worth my time to make a submission”.
Hey just want to weigh in here that you can’t divide our FTE by our total publication count, since that doesn’t include a large amount of work we’ve produced that is not able to be made public or is not yet public but will be. Right now I think a majority of our output is not public right now for one reason or another, though we’re working on finding routes to make more of it public.
I do think your general point though that the per-post cost of a contest post is less / much less than an RP post is accurate though.
-Peter (Co-CEO of Rethink Priorities)
Thanks for the correction!
BTW, I hope it doesn’t seem like it was picking on you—it just occurred to me that I could do math for Rethink Priorities because your salaries are public. I have no reason to believe a cost-per-public-report estimate would be different for any other randomly chosen EA research organization in either direction. And of course most EA organizations correctly focus on making a positive impact rather than maximizing publication count.