WSCFriedman

Karma: 196

History nerd, reader, writer. Main worries: Extreme poverty, X-risk, metaphorical X-risk in the form of a war that is not an existential risk to humanity as a whole but still kills me and everyone I know and possibly destroys civilization as we know it.

Not a vegetarian, but would like to do a serious long-term analysis of costs and benefits at some point, so if you have any really really good arguments for it that are not incompatible with a total-sum utilitarian the-repugnant-conclusion-is-not-all-that-repugnant perspective, I’m happy to hear them.

WSCFriedman Sep 14, 2021, 12:29 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA Forum Creative Writing Contest: $10,000 in prizes for good stories
Also, completely separate question: should I try to err on the side of submitting or not submitting a marginal work, written either by me or by someone else? How do you want to weight the tradeoff between ‘deluged by irrelevant nonsense’ and ‘people whose work you might be interested in don’t submit?’

WSCFriedman Sep 14, 2021, 12:27 AM
30 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA Forum Creative Writing Contest: $10,000 in prizes for good stories
So, I have multiple comments.

First, as an EA person, I want to thank you, because I think this is a great idea, and I very much approve. I think the amazing power of fiction to change people’s minds has been an occasional but important force throughout history; the claim that Uncle Tom’s Cabin got the abolitionist movement to the mainstream seems historically plausible enough to agree that this is, indeed, a useful thing for the EA movement to do, and one I highly approve of.

But the second is as a SF&F author who tries to get his stories published.

As far as I can tell, the reason most SF&F fiction contests don’t use the ‘post on forum, award money to best’ model is because anything once published becomes a ‘reprint’, and reprints can’t be sold elsewhere except at for a few places and usually at a 7x markdown, and anything that can show up in Google searches is published. If you send it to the editor’s work E-mail address, or post it on a password-protected forum only for authors, it’s ‘not published’. But here, it’s ‘published’.

So submitting stories to this content means that I can’t sell it anywhere else if it doesn’t win the prize, while submitting stories elsewhere I can try, try again.

On the one hand it is probably worth me doing this because I believe in effective altruism and the cost to me is pretty negligible, given that individual short stories don’t actually sell for all that much. On the other hand, I think the public posting might mean that the profit motive is pointing in the opposite way from you want.

WSCFriedman Sep 13, 2021, 10:48 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: [Creative Writing Contest] [Fiction] [Referral] A Common Sense Guide to Doing the Most Good, by Alexander Wales
While I like the story, I wouldn’t recommend it for the contest, for spoilery reasons. Putting them into ROT13:

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