We’re still working on judging right now, but I want to assure you that we looked at neither the name of the submitter nor the number of upvotes when judging the prizes. Of course, some of the submissions are quotes from well known people like Stuart Russell and Stephen Hawking, and we do take that into account, but we didn’t include the names of individual submitters in judging any of the prizes. (Using a quote from Stephen Hawking can add some ethos to the outside world, but using a quote from “a high-karma LessWrong user” doesn’t.)
Of course, that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to correlate with forum karma; maybe people with more forum karma are better at writing. But the assertion “it’s not what’s said, it’s who’s saying it” is not true in the context of “who will be awarded”.
We’re still working on judging right now, but I want to assure you that we looked at neither the name of the submitter nor the number of upvotes when judging the prizes. Of course, some of the submissions are quotes from well known people like Stuart Russell and Stephen Hawking, and we do take that into account, but we didn’t include the names of individual submitters in judging any of the prizes. (Using a quote from Stephen Hawking can add some ethos to the outside world, but using a quote from “a high-karma LessWrong user” doesn’t.)
Of course, that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to correlate with forum karma; maybe people with more forum karma are better at writing. But the assertion “it’s not what’s said, it’s who’s saying it” is not true in the context of “who will be awarded”.