Thank you for writing this up—I’ve wanted to do the same for a while! I think the only thing I see missing is that prizes can raise the salience of some concept or nuance, and therefore serve as a coordination mechanism in more ways than you list (e.g., say that we want more assessments of long-term interventions using the framework from WWOTF of significance—durability—contingency, then a prize for those assessments would also help signal boost the framework)
I also think another similar bonus is that prizes can sometimes get people to do EA things who otherwise wouldn’t have done EA things counterfactually.
E.g., some prize on alignment work could plausibly be done by computer scientists who otherwise would be doing other things.
This could signal boost EA/the cause area more generally, which is good.
Thank you for writing this up—I’ve wanted to do the same for a while! I think the only thing I see missing is that prizes can raise the salience of some concept or nuance, and therefore serve as a coordination mechanism in more ways than you list (e.g., say that we want more assessments of long-term interventions using the framework from WWOTF of significance—durability—contingency, then a prize for those assessments would also help signal boost the framework)
Cool! I added that
Cool! I added that
+1
I also think another similar bonus is that prizes can sometimes get people to do EA things who otherwise wouldn’t have done EA things counterfactually.
E.g., some prize on alignment work could plausibly be done by computer scientists who otherwise would be doing other things.
This could signal boost EA/the cause area more generally, which is good.