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 Iâm wildly underestimating this?)
then we get ~2 FTE years spent (90% CI 1.2-3.6 years). Thatâs 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. Itâs not clear to me what the counterfactual is, but presumably some of these hours wouldnât have been spent doing productive-for-EA work. Also, Iâm not sure whether, had you hired a person to think of new cause areas for 2 years, they wouldâve done as well, and at any rate it wouldâve taken them 2 years!)
Edit: To be clear, Iâm not saying the Prize isnât worth it. I just wanted to point out a cost that may to some degree be hidden when the org that runs a contest isnât the one doing most of the labour.
Itâs 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 donât 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 âget lots of input in a short time from a crowd with different semi-informed opinionsâ 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 doesnât 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 Iâm wildly underestimating this?)
then we get ~2 FTE years spent (90% CI 1.2-3.6 years). Thatâs 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. Itâs not clear to me what the counterfactual is, but presumably some of these hours wouldnât have been spent doing productive-for-EA work. Also, Iâm not sure whether, had you hired a person to think of new cause areas for 2 years, they wouldâve done as well, and at any rate it wouldâve taken them 2 years!)
Edit: To be clear, Iâm not saying the Prize isnât worth it. I just wanted to point out a cost that may to some degree be hidden when the org that runs a contest isnât the one doing most of the labour.
2 FTEs doesnât 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?
Itâs 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 donât 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 âget lots of input in a short time from a crowd with different semi-informed opinionsâ 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 doesnât 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)