I haven’t engaged deeply with any of the winning posts like the judges have, but I engaged shallowly with 3–4 when they were written. I thought they were methodologically doomed (‘Dissolving’ AI Risk) or constituted very weak evidence even if they were basically right (AGI and the EMH and especially Reference Class-Based Priors). (I apologize for this criticism-without-justification, but explaining details is not worth it and probably the comments on those posts do a fine job.)
Normally I wouldn’t say this. But OP is high-status and I worry people will defer to its judgment about Good Posts and then defer to these posts (despite the disclaimer that the judges disagreed with some) or add them to reading lists or something, which I think would be mostly bad.
[edited: last sentence for explicitness of my point]
I think this worry should be more a critique of the EA community writ-large for being overly deferential than for OP holding a contest to elicit critiques of its views and then following through with that in their own admittedly subjective criteria. OP themselves note in the post that people shouldn’t take this to be OP’s institutional tastes.
No, I don’t have a take on deference in EA. I meant: post contests generally give you evidence about which posts to pay attention to, especially if they’re run by OP. I am sharing that I have reason to believe that (some of) these winners are less worth-paying-attention-to than you’d expect on priors.
(And normally this reason would be very weak because the judges engaged much more deeply than I did, but my concerns with the posts I engaged with seem unlikely to dissolve upon deeper engagement.)
Congratulations to the winners.
I haven’t engaged deeply with any of the winning posts like the judges have, but I engaged shallowly with 3–4 when they were written. I thought they were methodologically doomed (‘Dissolving’ AI Risk) or constituted very weak evidence even if they were basically right (AGI and the EMH and especially Reference Class-Based Priors). (I apologize for this criticism-without-justification, but explaining details is not worth it and probably the comments on those posts do a fine job.)
Normally I wouldn’t say this. But OP is high-status and I worry people will defer to its judgment about Good Posts and then defer to these posts (despite the disclaimer that the judges disagreed with some) or add them to reading lists or something, which I think would be mostly bad.
(To avoid being purely negative: I think excellent quantitative work on AI forecasting that directly addresses the big question—when will powerful AI appear—includes bioanchors, the Davidson takeoff report, and Fun with +12 OOMs of Compute.)
[edited: last sentence for explicitness of my point]
I think this worry should be more a critique of the EA community writ-large for being overly deferential than for OP holding a contest to elicit critiques of its views and then following through with that in their own admittedly subjective criteria. OP themselves note in the post that people shouldn’t take this to be OP’s institutional tastes.
No, I don’t have a take on deference in EA. I meant: post contests generally give you evidence about which posts to pay attention to, especially if they’re run by OP. I am sharing that I have reason to believe that (some of) these winners are less worth-paying-attention-to than you’d expect on priors.
(And normally this reason would be very weak because the judges engaged much more deeply than I did, but my concerns with the posts I engaged with seem unlikely to dissolve upon deeper engagement.)