”The 12 month age limit in the current prize makes little sense: If someone has been producing valuable content for a long time, they will probably continue doing so for quite a while. The current prize is unfairly excluding past effort.”
Isn’t the point to incentivise additional blogging activity? A $100,000 prize for Scott Alexander is unlikely to increase the quantity/quality of ACX/SSC posts.
Also, if through this prize you have developed the habit of blogging/built an audience, then I suspect you are likely to continue. Especially, given how easy it is to monetise a newsletter/blog today.
“Except for rare exceptions (Slate Star Codex being the most notable one), blogs usually don’t provide much long-term value—who cares enough to read the whole archive of a blog, unless the author is exceptionally skilled?”
The whole point is surely to find and encourage more SSCs, and within a few weeks, they seem to have had some real success with Hands and Cities/The Fitzwilliam based on your assessment.
Major point:
I think you significantly underrate the pedagogical value of a blog. Marginal Revolution has influenced the way I think about economics, longtermism, and effective altruism. But I can’t easily point to the eureka post. I can think of the same with many other blogs. My knowledge of nominal GDP targeting, human capital signalling, zoning/spatial economics, optimal tax theory, etc. are all the result of reading blog after blog. I can’t think of many, if any, books that have had the same impact on my worldview. Maybe I’m unusual on this front. But I suspect I’m not at all.
In the case of Scott Alexander as an example, it seems noteworthy that he was writing online from at least 2006 on his LiveJournal. This seems to be a common thread with many well-known bloggers: they build up a following over a long time, and hone their skills with repeated practice. My intuition is that the marginal Scott Alexander is more likely to already be writing online, and might have done so for a couple of years already, than to be on the fence whether to do any writing at all.
I’m not sure how easy it is to monetize a blog/newsletter today—afaik, most bloggers make not enough money to be worth it the additional hassles with taxes. But I might be wrong, I’ve never tried it.
Minor point: Hands and Cities/The Fitzwilliam were created before the prize, so I would put them in the “found” category, but I don’t think Hands and Cities would technically qualify for the prize—it’s older than 12 months (having been created October 2020). (The Fitzwilliam does, but only because Sam Enright switched platforms—his blog was started in november 2020, which would disqualify it for the prize; but that’s where all the good content is!)
I definitely don’t underestimate the pedagogical value of blogs! I’ve read a fair share of them over the years, and learned nearly everything I value knowing from them. My complaint is that blogs often capture the outer loop of a community in a way that is far from optimal, and that most blogs are just really inefficient (such as Marginal Revolution or Econlog or Overcoming Bias) because their information is just scattered over many posts and not fully organized anywhere, as opposed to sites such as Gwerns (other positive examples are Essays on Reducing Suffering, An Anarchist FAQ, Ethan Morse’s site, Metaculus, XXIIVV, nintil, FAQs and of course Wikipedia).
Perhaps we’d need a third outer loop to distill findings from blogs into long content, then?
Small points:
”The 12 month age limit in the current prize makes little sense: If someone has been producing valuable content for a long time, they will probably continue doing so for quite a while. The current prize is unfairly excluding past effort.”
Isn’t the point to incentivise additional blogging activity? A $100,000 prize for Scott Alexander is unlikely to increase the quantity/quality of ACX/SSC posts.
Also, if through this prize you have developed the habit of blogging/built an audience, then I suspect you are likely to continue. Especially, given how easy it is to monetise a newsletter/blog today.
“Except for rare exceptions (Slate Star Codex being the most notable one), blogs usually don’t provide much long-term value—who cares enough to read the whole archive of a blog, unless the author is exceptionally skilled?”
The whole point is surely to find and encourage more SSCs, and within a few weeks, they seem to have had some real success with Hands and Cities/The Fitzwilliam based on your assessment.
Major point:
I think you significantly underrate the pedagogical value of a blog. Marginal Revolution has influenced the way I think about economics, longtermism, and effective altruism. But I can’t easily point to the eureka post. I can think of the same with many other blogs. My knowledge of nominal GDP targeting, human capital signalling, zoning/spatial economics, optimal tax theory, etc. are all the result of reading blog after blog. I can’t think of many, if any, books that have had the same impact on my worldview. Maybe I’m unusual on this front. But I suspect I’m not at all.
In the case of Scott Alexander as an example, it seems noteworthy that he was writing online from at least 2006 on his LiveJournal. This seems to be a common thread with many well-known bloggers: they build up a following over a long time, and hone their skills with repeated practice. My intuition is that the marginal Scott Alexander is more likely to already be writing online, and might have done so for a couple of years already, than to be on the fence whether to do any writing at all.
I’m not sure how easy it is to monetize a blog/newsletter today—afaik, most bloggers make not enough money to be worth it the additional hassles with taxes. But I might be wrong, I’ve never tried it.
Minor point: Hands and Cities/The Fitzwilliam were created before the prize, so I would put them in the “found” category, but I don’t think Hands and Cities would technically qualify for the prize—it’s older than 12 months (having been created October 2020). (The Fitzwilliam does, but only because Sam Enright switched platforms—his blog was started in november 2020, which would disqualify it for the prize; but that’s where all the good content is!)
I definitely don’t underestimate the pedagogical value of blogs! I’ve read a fair share of them over the years, and learned nearly everything I value knowing from them. My complaint is that blogs often capture the outer loop of a community in a way that is far from optimal, and that most blogs are just really inefficient (such as Marginal Revolution or Econlog or Overcoming Bias) because their information is just scattered over many posts and not fully organized anywhere, as opposed to sites such as Gwerns (other positive examples are Essays on Reducing Suffering, An Anarchist FAQ, Ethan Morse’s site, Metaculus, XXIIVV, nintil, FAQs and of course Wikipedia).
Perhaps we’d need a third outer loop to distill findings from blogs into long content, then?