This does seem like a very good initiative, though I wonder whether grant funding might make more sense than small prizes. Jason Crawford got $75,000 from Open Phil (and also an EA Funds grant), though I don’t know how many bloggers may have applied to EA Funds/been looked at by Open Phil and then turned down.
With Prize funding, we could support roughly $22,000 in grant funds per year, which could provide solid incentives to… a dozen bloggers, maybe? Something to think on.
Are there any blogs/newsletters/etc. that you’d fund if you had the money to run a Tyler Cowen-like initiative for EA writing?
Yeah I don’t know whether/when grants or prizes are better, or exactly what the optimal initial scale is, although presumably you would want to go beyond $22k/yr once it has been demonstrated to work. One would also want to look at why previous prizes, such as Paul’s alignment prizes didn’t work out.
I guess I would be granting to individuals similar to those who “I’ve enjoyed reading” according to the post above. I also wonder if someone could get Zach Weinersmith to do something EA, given how much related stuff he’s already done previously.
Here is the kind of initiative that would seem more useful to me than an EA forum prize (if you switched in EA for liberalism): https://mobile.twitter.com/tylercowen/status/1296152595728412675
This does seem like a very good initiative, though I wonder whether grant funding might make more sense than small prizes. Jason Crawford got $75,000 from Open Phil (and also an EA Funds grant), though I don’t know how many bloggers may have applied to EA Funds/been looked at by Open Phil and then turned down.
With Prize funding, we could support roughly $22,000 in grant funds per year, which could provide solid incentives to… a dozen bloggers, maybe? Something to think on.
Are there any blogs/newsletters/etc. that you’d fund if you had the money to run a Tyler Cowen-like initiative for EA writing?
Yeah I don’t know whether/when grants or prizes are better, or exactly what the optimal initial scale is, although presumably you would want to go beyond $22k/yr once it has been demonstrated to work. One would also want to look at why previous prizes, such as Paul’s alignment prizes didn’t work out.
I guess I would be granting to individuals similar to those who “I’ve enjoyed reading” according to the post above. I also wonder if someone could get Zach Weinersmith to do something EA, given how much related stuff he’s already done previously.