Prizes for Last Year’s 2018 Review
About a year ago, LessWrong held it’s first annual review, where we looked over the best posts from 2018. The LessWrong team offered $2000 in prizes for the top post authors, and (up to) $2000 in prizes for the best reviews of those posts.
For our top post authors, we have decided to award.… *drumroll*
Abram Demski & Scott Garrabrant are each awarded $200 for Embedded Agents
Eliezer Yudkowsky receives $200 for The Rocket Alignment Problem, and another $200 for Local Validity as the Key to Sanity and Civilization
Paul Christiano is awarded $200 for Arguments about Fast Takeoff
Abram Demski receives an additional $200 for Towards a New Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation.
Martin Sustrik receives $200 for Anti-Social Punishment
Scott Alexander receives $200 for The Tails Coming Apart as a Metaphor for Life
Alkjash receives $200 for Babble
Patrick LaVictoire $200 for The Loudest Alarm is Usually False
For Reviews, there are three tiers of prize ($300, $200, $100):
Vanessa Kosoy receives $300 for her reviews of Realism about rationality, Coherence arguments do not imply goal-directed behavior, and Clarifying “AI Alignment”.
Zack M. Davis receives $200 for commentary on Meta-Honesty, and Decoupling vs Contextualising Norms
Bucky receives $200 for his critique of Unknown Knowns
Abram Demski receives $100 for his response to Realism about Rationality
Daniel Filan receives $100 for a variety of reviews of Coherence arguments, Explain enlightenment in non-mysterious terms, Realism about Rationality, Towards a New Impact Measure
Mingyuan receives $100 for a good critique of Give Praise.
Jacobian receives $100 for his review of Intelligent Social Web.
Zvi and Jameson Quinn both receive $100 for lots of good short reviews.
Val receives $100 for taking the time to reflect on and rewrite his own post, The Intelligent Social Web.
Not for reviews, but for discussion in the review, $50 apiece goes to Richard Ngo and Rohin Shah.
Prizewinners, we’ll reach out to you in a week or so to give you your prize-money.
Congratulations to all the winners!
Congrats to everyone!
Feedback for next year though: To be honest, including Eliezer Yudkowsky in the competition feels a bit silly given that he founded the site. But I don’t know, maybe he feels that the existence of this competition would greatly increase his motivation to actually write things here?
Eliezer should be in the competition so everyone else on LW has a financial incentive to blow him out of the water with the quality of their posts.
I don’t know. It feels a bit like competing against Taylor Swift in a song competition on a Taylor Swift fan site. That’s an exaggeration of course, but I don’t think it’s too much of one.
I do agree that it feels somewhat weird. But it’s worth noting he didn’t actually win the top spot. I also think it’s fairly important for the competition to be grounded in “we’re actually trying to produce the best stuff”, and for us to have an evaluation process that’s actually checking what the best stuff is.
I think the metaphor here is if Taylor Swift goes and founds a community about songwriting, aiming at writing literally the best songs in the world because the fate of the world is at stake and there’s an alien god asking us to Show It What We Got. And, well, yeah it’s hard to compete with Taylor Swift but man it’s even harder to compete with reality, and that’s what the competition is actually about.
I mostly don’t think it seems weird. He got 2 of the top 10 slots. That’s like, a fine amount. He might not even get any this year.
Also, I noticed that only some of the prize-winning reviews were linked. Is there a reason for this?
I think this was mostly “I was busy and there were a lot of reviews, and I ended up linking to the ones where the user had a couple high-profile reviews, and less to the ones where they had done a largeish number of reviews that were difficult to track down”, for which I am sorry. :(
Fair enough