Nice! In the few minutes of reading this post I came up with five ideas for related things I could (and maybe should) write a post on. My only issue is that there’s only 6 weeks of time for this, and I’m not sure if that’ll be enough for me to finish even one given my current schedule. But I’ll see what I can do. May even be the right kind of pressure, as otherwise I’d surely be following Parkinson’s law and work on a post for way too long.
(The many examples you posted were very helpful by the way, as without them I would have assumed I don’t have much to contribute here)
Sure. Those I can mention without providing too much context:
calibrating on one’s future behavior by making a large amount of systematic predictions on a weekly basis
utilizing quantitative predictions in the process of setting goals and making plans
not prediction-related, but another thing your post triggered: applying the “game jam principle” (developing a complete video game in a very short amount of time, such as 48 hours) to EA forum posts and thus trying to get from idea to published post within a single day; because I realized writing a forum post is (for me, and a few others I’ve spoken to) often a multi-week-to-month endeavour, and it doesn’t have to be that way, plus there are surely diminishing returns to the amount of polishing you put into it
If anybody actually ends up planning to write a post on any of these, feel free to let me know so I’ll make sure focus on something else.
Thanks! That’s useful to know. I intend to host more prizes in the future but can’t promise things yet.
There’s no harm in writing up a bunch of rough ideas instead of aiming for something that looks super impressive. We’re optimizing more to encourage creativity and inspire good ideas, rather than to produce work that can be highly cited.
You can look through my LessWrong posts for examples of the kinds of things I’m used to. A few were a lot of work, but many just took a few hours or so.
Nice! In the few minutes of reading this post I came up with five ideas for related things I could (and maybe should) write a post on. My only issue is that there’s only 6 weeks of time for this, and I’m not sure if that’ll be enough for me to finish even one given my current schedule. But I’ll see what I can do. May even be the right kind of pressure, as otherwise I’d surely be following Parkinson’s law and work on a post for way too long.
(The many examples you posted were very helpful by the way, as without them I would have assumed I don’t have much to contribute here)
Do you want to make some of them public so that other people can steal them?
Sure. Those I can mention without providing too much context:
calibrating on one’s future behavior by making a large amount of systematic predictions on a weekly basis
utilizing quantitative predictions in the process of setting goals and making plans
not prediction-related, but another thing your post triggered: applying the “game jam principle” (developing a complete video game in a very short amount of time, such as 48 hours) to EA forum posts and thus trying to get from idea to published post within a single day; because I realized writing a forum post is (for me, and a few others I’ve spoken to) often a multi-week-to-month endeavour, and it doesn’t have to be that way, plus there are surely diminishing returns to the amount of polishing you put into it
If anybody actually ends up planning to write a post on any of these, feel free to let me know so I’ll make sure focus on something else.
Thanks!
Thanks! That’s useful to know. I intend to host more prizes in the future but can’t promise things yet.
There’s no harm in writing up a bunch of rough ideas instead of aiming for something that looks super impressive. We’re optimizing more to encourage creativity and inspire good ideas, rather than to produce work that can be highly cited.
You can look through my LessWrong posts for examples of the kinds of things I’m used to. A few were a lot of work, but many just took a few hours or so.