This comment thread did convince me to put it on personal blog (previously we’ve frontpaged writing-contents and went ahead and unreflectively did it for this post)
Frontpage posts must meet the criteria of being broadly relevant to LessWrong’s main interests; timeless, i.e. not about recent events; and are attempts to explain not persuade.
Technically the contest is asking for attempts to persuade not explain, rather than itself attempting to persuade not explain, but the principle obviously applies.
As with my own comment, I don’t think keeping the post off the frontpage is meant to be a judgement that the contest is net-negative in value; it may still be very net positive. It makes sense to have standard rules which create downsides for bad epistemics, and if some bad epistemics are worthwhile anyway, then people can pay the price of those downsides and move forward.
Raemon and I discussed whether it should be frontpage this morning. Prizes are kind of an edge case in my mind. They don’t properly fulfill the frontpage criteria but also it feels like they deserve visibility in a way that posts on niche topics don’t, so we’ve more than once made an exception for them.
I didn’t think too hard about the epistemics of the post when I made the decision to frontpage, but after John pointed out the suss epistemics, I’m inclined to agree, and concurred with Raemon moving it back to Personal.
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I think the prize could be improved simply by rewarding the best arguments in favor and against AI risk. This might actually be more convincing to the skeptics – we paid people to argue against this position and now you can see the best they came up with.
This comment thread did convince me to put it on personal blog (previously we’ve frontpaged writing-contents and went ahead and unreflectively did it for this post)
I don’t understand the logic here? Do you see it as bad for the contest to get more attention and submissions?
No, it’s just the standard frontpage policy:
Technically the contest is asking for attempts to persuade not explain, rather than itself attempting to persuade not explain, but the principle obviously applies.
As with my own comment, I don’t think keeping the post off the frontpage is meant to be a judgement that the contest is net-negative in value; it may still be very net positive. It makes sense to have standard rules which create downsides for bad epistemics, and if some bad epistemics are worthwhile anyway, then people can pay the price of those downsides and move forward.
Raemon and I discussed whether it should be frontpage this morning. Prizes are kind of an edge case in my mind. They don’t properly fulfill the frontpage criteria but also it feels like they deserve visibility in a way that posts on niche topics don’t, so we’ve more than once made an exception for them.
I didn’t think too hard about the epistemics of the post when I made the decision to frontpage, but after John pointed out the suss epistemics, I’m inclined to agree, and concurred with Raemon moving it back to Personal.
----
I think the prize could be improved simply by rewarding the best arguments in favor and against AI risk. This might actually be more convincing to the skeptics – we paid people to argue against this position and now you can see the best they came up with.