This is a great writeup! As the person who runs this Forum and tries to incentivize cognitive work* from participants, I found it useful and will return to it.
The memetics idea was particularly novel to me, but I think I intuitively understood the point—hence my always capitalizing “the EA Forum Prize” to make it a concrete, recognized proper noun.
If you look over the most recent Prize post, do you notice any places where you see an opportunity to improve the program? Or cases where you aren’t sure if we do X, but think that X would be particularly valuable to do if we weren’t yet doing it?
Also:
...e.g. awarding a prize for responses to “Does God exist?” and only having theologians put in the work, almost all of whom answer “Yes”.
I’m deeply amused by the thought of a theologian who sets out to win the “G-Prize”, only to discover that he’s no longer convinced by the arguments that sustain his faith once money is on the line. That would be quite the r/rational story prompt.
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*Though I prefer to think of it as “cognitive fun” for those who like writing and helping the community and getting compliments from your friendly neighborhood moderator!
The prize has been going on for a while, which seems important, and I think the transparency of the Prize post is really important for making common knowledge of what kind of work there is demand for. So overall it’s pretty great.
The structure of feedback looks to me like: “here’s the object-level content of the post, and here are 2-3 reasons we liked it”. I think you could be more clear about what you want to incentivise. More precisely, the current structure doesn’t answer:
How strong were the reasons relative to each other? (e.g. maybe removing Reason A would make the person win 2nd prize instead of 1st, but removing Reason B might make them win no prize)
Were the reasons only jointly sufficient to merit the prize, or might accomplishing only one of them have worked?
What other properties did the post display, which did not merit the prize? For example, maybe prize-meriting posts tend to be quite long—even though length is not something you want to incentivise on the margin.
Why did the posts end up ordered the way they did? Beyond “the black-box voting process gave that verdict” :) Currently I don’t know why SHOW was judged as deserving 4x the prize money of “The Case for the Hotel”, for example.
Adding a bit of critique where appropriate seems good, since I’m the person who writes the summaries and can ask myself to put in more time.
Your other questions all come back to the black-box voting criterion, and I don’t push judges to share their individual reasoning. That’s largely because doing so makes being a judge more difficult; right now, voting is relatively little work, and given the small amounts of money at stake, I’m reluctant to ask for many more EA hours going toward the project).
We may consider splitting up the prize funding differently in the future; saying “piece X deserves four times as much money as piece Y” isn’t a good way to think about how the Prize works, but there’s still an argument for trying to more closely match grant funding to judges’ enthusiasm levels.
This is a great writeup! As the person who runs this Forum and tries to incentivize cognitive work* from participants, I found it useful and will return to it.
The memetics idea was particularly novel to me, but I think I intuitively understood the point—hence my always capitalizing “the EA Forum Prize” to make it a concrete, recognized proper noun.
If you look over the most recent Prize post, do you notice any places where you see an opportunity to improve the program? Or cases where you aren’t sure if we do X, but think that X would be particularly valuable to do if we weren’t yet doing it?
Also:
I’m deeply amused by the thought of a theologian who sets out to win the “G-Prize”, only to discover that he’s no longer convinced by the arguments that sustain his faith once money is on the line. That would be quite the r/rational story prompt.
--
*Though I prefer to think of it as “cognitive fun” for those who like writing and helping the community and getting compliments from your friendly neighborhood moderator!
Thanks, that’s great to hear.
The prize has been going on for a while, which seems important, and I think the transparency of the Prize post is really important for making common knowledge of what kind of work there is demand for. So overall it’s pretty great.
The structure of feedback looks to me like: “here’s the object-level content of the post, and here are 2-3 reasons we liked it”. I think you could be more clear about what you want to incentivise. More precisely, the current structure doesn’t answer:
How strong were the reasons relative to each other? (e.g. maybe removing Reason A would make the person win 2nd prize instead of 1st, but removing Reason B might make them win no prize)
Were the reasons only jointly sufficient to merit the prize, or might accomplishing only one of them have worked?
What other properties did the post display, which did not merit the prize? For example, maybe prize-meriting posts tend to be quite long—even though length is not something you want to incentivise on the margin.
Why did the posts end up ordered the way they did? Beyond “the black-box voting process gave that verdict” :) Currently I don’t know why SHOW was judged as deserving 4x the prize money of “The Case for the Hotel”, for example.
Adding a bit of critique where appropriate seems good, since I’m the person who writes the summaries and can ask myself to put in more time.
Your other questions all come back to the black-box voting criterion, and I don’t push judges to share their individual reasoning. That’s largely because doing so makes being a judge more difficult; right now, voting is relatively little work, and given the small amounts of money at stake, I’m reluctant to ask for many more EA hours going toward the project).
We may consider splitting up the prize funding differently in the future; saying “piece X deserves four times as much money as piece Y” isn’t a good way to think about how the Prize works, but there’s still an argument for trying to more closely match grant funding to judges’ enthusiasm levels.