I’m really happy to see this contest and hope it will produce high quality scripts!
I’ve watched all the longtermism-relevant videos on your channel and thought they were very well done overall. To be more specific, I thought the video you released promoting WWOTF was significantly better than Kurzgesagt’s video promoting WWOTF and I was disappointed Kurzgesagt hadn’t used a script like yours (given their very large audience).
While I’m sure you’ve already thought of this, I want to highlight one concern I have about the contest, namely that your $5,000 prize may provide a much smaller incentive than a prize 2-3 times as large:
Given you’re hiring a team of 9 animators to work on the next video, I’d guess that $5,000 is not a large fraction of the budget (though I could be mistaken). And in my opinion, the script matters more than the animation (e.g. see my claim that your WWOTF video was better than Kurzgesagt’s despite them presumably having a much larger / more expensive animation team). So I’d question the decision to spend a lot more on animators than the script (if you are in fact doing that).
Additionally, contest participants know they are not guaranteed to win the top prize. To asses the expected hourly earnings from entering the contest they need to discount the prize by the probability that they win. All things considered I’m not sure that many people who could write great scripts for you would be justified in believing they’d earn a reasonable wage in expectation by participating in the contest.
Anyway, I’m sure you picked the $5,000 amount carefully and that you’ve already thought of the relative value of higher prize amounts, but just wanted to provide this quick feedback in case it’s helpful.
The second related point of feedback is that committing to “0-4” prizes means that someone might think “even if I write the best script, they still might not choose me and I might not win any money” leading people to discount their expected earnings even more. Perhaps commit to offering some prize for the best script regardless of whether you create a video out of it?
I have the same concern about the fact that the expected income from participating in the contest might be small. I think the other two prizes somewhat mitigate this, but I’m not sure how people value those prizes.
I’m indeed spending a lot less on scriptwriting than on animation. This hasn’t always been true, but it is true now and will continue to be true as the team becomes larger because animation is just way costlier. That said, the proportion of the budget devoted to scriptwriting will increase again in the near future, but not drastically. More specifically, as I say in the post, I’d like to hire more scriptwriters, and, later on, I’d like to bring in at least one fact-checker.
For now, I’ll leave the prizes unchanged. I’ll wait at least a couple of weeks to see how the contest goes. Depending on how many scripts I’m getting and their quality, I might decide to change the prizes.
I’m really happy to see this contest and hope it will produce high quality scripts!
I’ve watched all the longtermism-relevant videos on your channel and thought they were very well done overall. To be more specific, I thought the video you released promoting WWOTF was significantly better than Kurzgesagt’s video promoting WWOTF and I was disappointed Kurzgesagt hadn’t used a script like yours (given their very large audience).
While I’m sure you’ve already thought of this, I want to highlight one concern I have about the contest, namely that your $5,000 prize may provide a much smaller incentive than a prize 2-3 times as large:
Given you’re hiring a team of 9 animators to work on the next video, I’d guess that $5,000 is not a large fraction of the budget (though I could be mistaken). And in my opinion, the script matters more than the animation (e.g. see my claim that your WWOTF video was better than Kurzgesagt’s despite them presumably having a much larger / more expensive animation team). So I’d question the decision to spend a lot more on animators than the script (if you are in fact doing that).
Additionally, contest participants know they are not guaranteed to win the top prize. To asses the expected hourly earnings from entering the contest they need to discount the prize by the probability that they win. All things considered I’m not sure that many people who could write great scripts for you would be justified in believing they’d earn a reasonable wage in expectation by participating in the contest.
Anyway, I’m sure you picked the $5,000 amount carefully and that you’ve already thought of the relative value of higher prize amounts, but just wanted to provide this quick feedback in case it’s helpful.
The second related point of feedback is that committing to “0-4” prizes means that someone might think “even if I write the best script, they still might not choose me and I might not win any money” leading people to discount their expected earnings even more. Perhaps commit to offering some prize for the best script regardless of whether you create a video out of it?
Thanks a lot for the feedback!
I have the same concern about the fact that the expected income from participating in the contest might be small. I think the other two prizes somewhat mitigate this, but I’m not sure how people value those prizes.
I’m indeed spending a lot less on scriptwriting than on animation. This hasn’t always been true, but it is true now and will continue to be true as the team becomes larger because animation is just way costlier. That said, the proportion of the budget devoted to scriptwriting will increase again in the near future, but not drastically. More specifically, as I say in the post, I’d like to hire more scriptwriters, and, later on, I’d like to bring in at least one fact-checker.
For now, I’ll leave the prizes unchanged. I’ll wait at least a couple of weeks to see how the contest goes. Depending on how many scripts I’m getting and their quality, I might decide to change the prizes.
Terrific, I’m excited to see how things turn out!