And in doing so, I feel proud to assume the role of Patron Saint of LessWrong Challenges, and All Those Who Test Their Art Against the Territory.
Some reasons I’m excited about this post:
1) Challenges help make LessWrong more grounded, and build better feedback loops for actually testing our rationality. I wrote more about this in my curation notice for The Darwin Game challenge, and wrote about it in the various posts of my own Babble Challenge sequence.
2) It was competently executed and analysed. There were nice control groups used; the choice of scoring rule was thought through (as well as including what would’ve been the results of other scoring rules); the data was analysed in a bunch of different ways which managed to be both comprehensive while at the same time maintaining my curiosity and being very readable.
Furthermore, I can imagine versions of this challenge that would either feel butchered, in such a way that I felt like I didn’t learn anything from reading the results, or needlessly long and pedantic, in such a way that getting the insight wouldn’t have been worth the trek for most people. Not so with this one. Excellent job, UnexpectedValues.
3) I want to celebrate the efforts of the participants, some of whom devised and implemented some wonderful strategies. The turtle graphic fingerprints, gzip checks, mean-deviation scatter, and many others were really neat. Kudos to all who joined, and especially the winners, Jenny, Reed, Eric, Scy, William, Ben, Simon, Adam and Viktor!
I would love to see more activities like these on LessWrong. If you want to run one and would like help with marketing, funding for prizes, or just general feedback—do send me a message!
Curated!
And in doing so, I feel proud to assume the role of Patron Saint of LessWrong Challenges, and All Those Who Test Their Art Against the Territory.
Some reasons I’m excited about this post:
1) Challenges help make LessWrong more grounded, and build better feedback loops for actually testing our rationality. I wrote more about this in my curation notice for The Darwin Game challenge, and wrote about it in the various posts of my own Babble Challenge sequence.
2) It was competently executed and analysed. There were nice control groups used; the choice of scoring rule was thought through (as well as including what would’ve been the results of other scoring rules); the data was analysed in a bunch of different ways which managed to be both comprehensive while at the same time maintaining my curiosity and being very readable.
Furthermore, I can imagine versions of this challenge that would either feel butchered, in such a way that I felt like I didn’t learn anything from reading the results, or needlessly long and pedantic, in such a way that getting the insight wouldn’t have been worth the trek for most people. Not so with this one. Excellent job, UnexpectedValues.
3) I want to celebrate the efforts of the participants, some of whom devised and implemented some wonderful strategies. The turtle graphic fingerprints, gzip checks, mean-deviation scatter, and many others were really neat. Kudos to all who joined, and especially the winners, Jenny, Reed, Eric, Scy, William, Ben, Simon, Adam and Viktor!
I would love to see more activities like these on LessWrong. If you want to run one and would like help with marketing, funding for prizes, or just general feedback—do send me a message!