I donated:

$100 to Zvi Mowshowitz for his post "Covid-19: My Current Model" but really for all his posts. I appreciated how Zvi kept posting Covid updates long after I have energy to do my own research on this topic. I also appreciate how he called the Omicron wave pretty well.

$100 to Duncan Sabien for his post "CFAR Participant Handbook now available to all". I'm glad CFAR decided to make it public, both because I have been curious for a while what was in it and because in general I think it's pretty good practice for orgs like CFAR to publish more of what they do. So thanks for doing that!

I donated for some nonzero X:

• $X to johnswentworth for "Alignment By Default", which gave a surprisingly convincing argument for something I'd dismissed as so unlikely as to be not worth thinking about.
• $2X to Daniel Kokotajlo for "Against GDP as a metric for timelines and takeoff speeds", for turning me, uh, Against GDP as a metric for timelines and takeoff speeds.
• $2X to johnswentworth for "When Money Is Abundant, Knowledge Is The Real Wealth", which I think of often.
• $10X to Microcovid.org, which has provided me many times that much value.

One question I've mulled over the past couple years is "is there any principled way to determine which posts 'won' the review, in terms of being worthy of including LW's longterm canon?"

In past years, we determined what goes in the books largely via wordcount. i.e. we set out to make a reasonable set of books, and then went down the list of voting results and included everything until we ran out of room, skipping over some posts that didn't make sense in book format. (i.e. Lark's Review of AI Charities of The Year is always crazy long and not super relevant to people 3 years after-the-fact).

I still don't have a great answer. But, one suggestion a colleague gave me that feels like an incremental improvement is to look at the scoring, and look for "cliffs" that the vote falls off.

For example, here is the graph of "1000+ karma voters" post scores:

(note: there's a nicer version of this graph here, where you can mouse over lines to see which post they correspond to)

I see maybe 4 "discontinuities" here. There's an initial 4 posts clustered together, then a second cluster of 4, then a (less pronounced) cluster of 6. You can maybe pick out another drop at number 53.

...

If you look at the All Users vote, the results look like this:

With a massive, massive landslide for "Microcovid", followed by a cluster of 4, and then (maybe?) a less pronounced cluster of 9.

...

And then the Alignment Forum user votes look like this:

With "Draft Report on AI Timelines" having a very substantial lead.

...

Finally, if I do a weighted-average where I weight "1000+ karma users" as 3x the vote weight of the rest of the users, the result is this:

This still has Microcovid taking a massive lead, followed by a small cluster that begins with Draft Reports, followed either by a cluster of 4 or "1 and 3" depending on how you look at things.

There's a few more days left to have donations matched by Lightcone Infrastructure. I wanted to talk a bit about my own personal donations here.

I wanted to donate to authors who a) didn't show up in the top 15 and were less likely to end up receiving money from The Voting Results Prize, b) who contributed novel information that actually changed my plans in some important ways. I aim to donate about 1% of my post-necessary-expenses income per year [EA · GW], and this year decided it was worth putting that towards LW authors who have changed my strategic thinking. 

This is partly because I directly think these posts are worth paying money for, and particular because I want to signal support for the idea that paying for ideas that changed your life is worthwhile.

$100 for Abram Demski's "Most Prisoner's Dilemmas are Stag Hunts; Most Stag Hunts are Schelling Problems [LW · GW]". This was a very crystallizing read on how to think about game theory. It both gave me a sense of what real coordination problems look like, as well as a visceral experience of what it looks like to see a formalization that carries through multiple stages of abstraction. 

$100 for Zvi's "The Road to Mazedom [LW · GW]". This was crisp model of how organizations can become pathological, which changes what I keep an eye out for when the Lightcone team is considering expanding, and when I interact with other organizations.

$100 for landfish's "Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction [LW · GW]". While I already wasn't working on nuclear risk reduction, this post shifted my beliefs from "AI is more important" to "actually nuclear risk just doesn't seem like it's in the top 10 things I should be thinking about, and probably shouldn't be in other people's either", which affects my approach to x-risk fieldbuilding.

$50 for Mark Xu's "The First Sample Gives the Most Information [LW · GW]". This concept was something I was already vaguely familiar with, but it turned out to shape my thinking quite a bit in the last year.

$50 for Malcolm Ocean's "Reveal Culture [LW · GW]". After the results of this Review, I've given up on making "Reveal Culture" happen as a phrase. But I still think this post heavily informs my take on what is required for a culture to succeed, which is relevant beyond the specific "reveal culture" idea.

$50 to Rick Korzekwa for "Why indoor lighting is hard to get right and how to fix it [LW · GW]". This directly caused me to buy myself a bunch of lights, which made my life better.

The donation-matching has been extended to February 15th, 12:59pm PST.

121 got at least one review, bringing them into the final voting phase.

IIRC the Final Voting page initially displayed 121 posts, but eventually displayed 122 [? · GW]. I assumed one additional post had gotten its first review after the Review phase had passed.

Anyway, I'm kind of confused regarding what happened to it, as it's not listed here in the final results. Maybe it was never displayed in the list-of-posts-to-vote-on? Maybe no-one voted for it? Or maybe it was erroneously filtered out at some point despite receiving votes?

EDIT: The missing post is Vaniver's Circling as Cousin to Rationality [LW · GW]. It was reviewed on January 13th, so IIRC before the review deadline. It's possible that it got no votes or something. But it's also a bit suspicious that it was published on 2020-01-01 at 2:16 AM CET, so maybe there's a bug there.

The lesswrong word counter tells me that this post is, 67927 words long. Is it a mistake?