Thanks for this—it seems honest and useful. I also enjoyed your entry! Some additional data from my own case, which may be helpful for analysing this (for context I won first prize):
I also probably spent around 2-3 full-time weeks total (but hard to judge as I did lots of little bits and then a big block of work—could be more, but not substantially less)
I entered the prize because I thought after a few hours reading/thinking that I had a decent (10-20%) chance of one of the top prizes. I probably would have entered the contest with approximately the same effort if both top and runner prizes were $5K less (so $20K and $10K). Less than that and I probably would have still entered but not tried as hard. A big motivator was that there were 3 generous runner up prizes—so I thought my odds of winning one of the major prizes were at least worth it. I have fairly good writing and generalist research skills and some experience in the EA context, but was new to my cause area (aside from a useful academic background in medicine/neuroscience + being familiar with the case for lead as a developmental neurotoxicant, which is the key precedent). My higher than base-rate hope for a major prize was probably due to a combination of believing in my idea, thinking that not that many others (<80) would enter, thinking that I was probably at least a little above average compared to the imagined average of entries, and some over-confidence.
After finishing I worried I had spent too much effort/time on it for it to be worth it, given the high likelihood of not winning a major prize.
I didn’t have significant opportunity cost to prepare my entry. I was meant to be studying for my final exams, but they were still >6 weeks away and I had already decided to just aim to confidently pass, rather than attempt to do very well on them. So I had considerable freedom/time to work on the project. I also had high upside to participating in the contest—I did’t have significant achievements or reputation in the community, nor a full-time role.
It’s hard to judge my own work objectively and I can’t confidently assign quality to the other good entries I read (I don’t know OP’s desiderata well enough nor the other entries’ fields well enough) - plus there’s plenty I didn’t read beyond a skim. Having said that, I agree my entry is not close to 50X higher quality than a majority of the other entries (there’s a few low-effort entries where 50X better is maybe not crazy, but I’m uncertain on this).
I haven’t thought enough about prize structure to have a strong view. I’d imagine a top-heavy structure probably leads to a more heavy-tailed distribution—i.e. more lowish quality efforts, a few higher quality ones. Whether this distribution is good would depend on the purpose—for finding new cause areas I can see the motivation for a heavy-tailed distribution. For finding good arguments/criticisms I would probably want a less extreme distribution (if indeed that arises from less steep prize structures). A motivation there would be wanting a cluster approach to a problem.
Thanks for this—it seems honest and useful. I also enjoyed your entry! Some additional data from my own case, which may be helpful for analysing this (for context I won first prize):
I also probably spent around 2-3 full-time weeks total (but hard to judge as I did lots of little bits and then a big block of work—could be more, but not substantially less)
I entered the prize because I thought after a few hours reading/thinking that I had a decent (10-20%) chance of one of the top prizes. I probably would have entered the contest with approximately the same effort if both top and runner prizes were $5K less (so $20K and $10K). Less than that and I probably would have still entered but not tried as hard. A big motivator was that there were 3 generous runner up prizes—so I thought my odds of winning one of the major prizes were at least worth it. I have fairly good writing and generalist research skills and some experience in the EA context, but was new to my cause area (aside from a useful academic background in medicine/neuroscience + being familiar with the case for lead as a developmental neurotoxicant, which is the key precedent). My higher than base-rate hope for a major prize was probably due to a combination of believing in my idea, thinking that not that many others (<80) would enter, thinking that I was probably at least a little above average compared to the imagined average of entries, and some over-confidence.
After finishing I worried I had spent too much effort/time on it for it to be worth it, given the high likelihood of not winning a major prize.
I didn’t have significant opportunity cost to prepare my entry. I was meant to be studying for my final exams, but they were still >6 weeks away and I had already decided to just aim to confidently pass, rather than attempt to do very well on them. So I had considerable freedom/time to work on the project. I also had high upside to participating in the contest—I did’t have significant achievements or reputation in the community, nor a full-time role.
It’s hard to judge my own work objectively and I can’t confidently assign quality to the other good entries I read (I don’t know OP’s desiderata well enough nor the other entries’ fields well enough) - plus there’s plenty I didn’t read beyond a skim. Having said that, I agree my entry is not close to 50X higher quality than a majority of the other entries (there’s a few low-effort entries where 50X better is maybe not crazy, but I’m uncertain on this).
I haven’t thought enough about prize structure to have a strong view. I’d imagine a top-heavy structure probably leads to a more heavy-tailed distribution—i.e. more lowish quality efforts, a few higher quality ones. Whether this distribution is good would depend on the purpose—for finding new cause areas I can see the motivation for a heavy-tailed distribution. For finding good arguments/criticisms I would probably want a less extreme distribution (if indeed that arises from less steep prize structures). A motivation there would be wanting a cluster approach to a problem.