Another downside is that it eats up quite a lot of time. E.g. if we take the Cause Exploration Prize and assume:
there are 143 entries (the tag shows 144 posts with that tag on the Forum, one of which introduces the prize)
an average entry takes ~27h to research and write up (90% CI 15-50h)
an average entry takes ~1.4h to judge (90% CI 0.5-4h, but maybe I’m wildly underestimating this?)
then we get ~2 FTE years spent (90% CI 1.2-3.6 years). That’s quite a lot of labour spent by engaged and talented EAs (and ppl adjacent to EA)!
(Caveats: Those assumptions are only off-the-cuff guesses. It’s not clear to me what the counterfactual is, but presumably some of these hours wouldn’t have been spent doing productive-for-EA work. Also, I’m not sure whether, had you hired a person to think of new cause areas for 2 years, they would’ve done as well, and at any rate it would’ve taken them 2 years!)
Edit: To be clear, I’m not saying the Prize isn’t worth it. I just wanted to point out a cost that may to some degree be hidden when the org that runs a contest isn’t the one doing most of the labour.
It’s a 2 year full time equivalent, but I think in these cases you get most of the value from it being done by so many different people rather than one person over two years. This gives you not only the advantage of parallelization, but also that of having a diversity of perspectives, which is good for being more thorough in digging into different causes.
Secondly, I don’t know how many people actually get a prize, but I think tons of these potential cause area writeups will be valuable in the future as the movement grows, regardless of whether OpenPhil decides to use them at this moment.
I think the “get lots of input in a short time from a crowd with different semi-informed opinions” feature of prizes are hard to replace through other mechanisms. Some companies have built up extensive expert networks that they can call on-demand to do this, but that still doesn’t have quite the same agility. However, in those cases you may often want to compensate more than just the best entry (in line with the OP)
Another downside is that it eats up quite a lot of time. E.g. if we take the Cause Exploration Prize and assume:
there are 143 entries (the tag shows 144 posts with that tag on the Forum, one of which introduces the prize)
an average entry takes ~27h to research and write up (90% CI 15-50h)
an average entry takes ~1.4h to judge (90% CI 0.5-4h, but maybe I’m wildly underestimating this?)
then we get ~2 FTE years spent (90% CI 1.2-3.6 years). That’s quite a lot of labour spent by engaged and talented EAs (and ppl adjacent to EA)!
(Caveats: Those assumptions are only off-the-cuff guesses. It’s not clear to me what the counterfactual is, but presumably some of these hours wouldn’t have been spent doing productive-for-EA work. Also, I’m not sure whether, had you hired a person to think of new cause areas for 2 years, they would’ve done as well, and at any rate it would’ve taken them 2 years!)
Edit: To be clear, I’m not saying the Prize isn’t worth it. I just wanted to point out a cost that may to some degree be hidden when the org that runs a contest isn’t the one doing most of the labour.
2 FTEs doesn’t seem that bad to me for something as important as cause exploration and given how big the movement is? This just seems fine to me?
It’s a 2 year full time equivalent, but I think in these cases you get most of the value from it being done by so many different people rather than one person over two years. This gives you not only the advantage of parallelization, but also that of having a diversity of perspectives, which is good for being more thorough in digging into different causes.
Secondly, I don’t know how many people actually get a prize, but I think tons of these potential cause area writeups will be valuable in the future as the movement grows, regardless of whether OpenPhil decides to use them at this moment.
I think the “get lots of input in a short time from a crowd with different semi-informed opinions” feature of prizes are hard to replace through other mechanisms. Some companies have built up extensive expert networks that they can call on-demand to do this, but that still doesn’t have quite the same agility. However, in those cases you may often want to compensate more than just the best entry (in line with the OP)