I noticed that many prizes / awards / contests have been announced on this Forum in the last semester—possibly more than in the rest of the last 5 years. I wonder why we didn’t do it before—the case for this sort of competition has been argued for some times in the last few years, and EA Forum prize has been around for many years. So we knew that doing this was generally useful. One of the possible reasons is that funding was a problem back then… but except for a few contests that actually involve substantial amounts of money (e.g., the blog prize), most awards are relatively cheap in comparison to most grants, and their potential benefits usually surpass their monetary value—they provide incentives and help elicit information. So it wouldn’t have been a budgetary problem if 5y ago we had assigned about U$50k for the best ideas / posts / theses, etc.
I noticed that many prizes / awards / contests have been announced on this Forum in the last semester—possibly more than in the rest of the last 5 years. I wonder why we didn’t do it before—the case for this sort of competition has been argued for some times in the last few years, and EA Forum prize has been around for many years. So we knew that doing this was generally useful.
One of the possible reasons is that funding was a problem back then… but except for a few contests that actually involve substantial amounts of money (e.g., the blog prize), most awards are relatively cheap in comparison to most grants, and their potential benefits usually surpass their monetary value—they provide incentives and help elicit information. So it wouldn’t have been a budgetary problem if 5y ago we had assigned about U$50k for the best ideas / posts / theses, etc.