I disagree somewhat; if we directly fund critiques, it might be easier to make sure a large portion of the community actually sees them. If we post a critique to the EA Forum under the heading “winners of the EA criticism contest,” it’ll gain more traction with EAs than if the author just posted it on their personal blog. EA-funded critiques would also be targeted more towards persuading people who already believe in the idea, which may make them better.
While critiques will probably be published anyway, increasing the number of critiques seems good; there may be many people who have insights into problems in EA but wouldn’t have published them due to lack of motivation or an unargumentative nature.
Holding such a contest may also convey useful signaling to people in and outside the EA community and hopefully promote a genuine culture of open-mindedness.
You cited a Gallup poll that said that 1 in 25 adults said that high school was the “worst period in their life.” You presented this as positive evidence, but this seems to me like a strong point against your thesis.
To illustrate this with a simple model, we can imagine that the average survey respondent is 40 years old and that they split up their life into 10 4-year “periods.” If the quality of people’s lives are about evenly distributed across time, we’d expect high school to be the worst period for 10% of respondents, which is way more than 4%.
More importantly, 54% of respondents to that same survey said that high school was a great period in their life, and 7% said it was the best period. This makes me skeptical of the rest of your argument.
To steelman against this contradictory evidence: it seems reasonably likely that people look back on their past with nostalgia, biasing them towards believing it was better than it was.