Is community-collaborative article production possible?

How did this go? Did you get around to piloting this? 

I trust LWers to do expected utility calculations, but it's actually much worse than this.

We may decide whether or not to enter based on our probabilities about how many other people will enter: if I think many people will enter, I shouldn't waste my time, but if I think few people will enter, I have a good chance and should enter. But we also know all of our potential competitors will be thinking the same, and possibly making predictions with a similar algorithm to ourselves.

That makes this an anticoordination problem similar to the El Farol Bar, which is an especially nasty class of game because it means the majority of people inevitably regret their choice. If we predict few people will enter, then that prediction will make many people enter, and we will regret our prediction. If we predict many people will enter, that prediction will make few people enter, and we will again regret our prediction. As long as our choices are correlated, there's no good option!

The proper response would be to pursue a mixed strategy in which we randomly enter or do not enter the contest based on some calculations and a coin flip, but this would unfairly privilege defectors and be a bit mean to the Singularity Institute, especially if people were to settle on a solution like only one person entering each contest - which might end up optimal since more people entering not only linearly decreases chance of winning, but also increases effort you have to put into your entry, eg if you were the only entrant you could just write a single sentence and win by default.

And you might think: then just let everyone know exactly how many people have entered at any one time. But that turns it into a Malthusianism: people will gain no utility by entering the contest, because utility of entering the contest is a function of how many other people are in the contest, and if there were still utility to be gained, more people would enter the contest until that stopped being true.

(Although this comment isn't entirely serious, I honestly worried about some of these issues before I entered the efficient charity contest and the nutrition contest. And, uh, won both of them, which I guess makes me a dirty rotten defector and totally ruins my point.)

My problem with contest labor is that it exploits people's probability biases.

On the other hand, there could plausibly be many people who want to help SI but are suffering from akrasia issues, partially due to the lack of a concrete reward. Offering a reward, even one that people knew was illusionary, might play two biases against each other and get people to do what they'd endorse doing for free anyway.

I don't know how many people fall into this category, but it would at least somewhat describe me. (Or at least would describe me if I weren't currently getting paid to do writing for SI anyway.)

When I entered the Quantified Health contest, I calculated my expected return. I thought it would take me maybe 20-30 hours. I was right. I thought I had a 10% chance of winning $5000, 10% chance of winning $1000, and 50% chance of winning $500. That's $850 expected return. That's about $34 an hour to do something that I enjoyed doing, thought was a valuable use of my time, and taught me research skills and nutrition. I had just graduated high school, so that was way more than the wage I would have gotten in any mind-numbing part time I could have gotten in the small town where I was living. So entering was totally worthwhile.

I only won $500, which was an actual return of $20 an hour, but that's still more than you get flipping burgers.

So I think that there's nothing wrong with running these contests. People enter them if they think they should, and they're relatively cheap ways of getting stuff done.

Thank you for explaining to me what I was thinking. This is exactly my concern.

My problem with contest labor is that it exploits people's probability biases.

Exactly -- this is what I understood to be the point of running contests. So presenting such a contest to LessWrong is odd (to put it politely).

Definitely not an ethical issue anyway. Dark Artists, though, present all sorts of stuff they disagree with as "ethical" issues to claim the "high ground" and try to head off debate.

Yeah, that would definitely allay my concerns. I think it's the uncertainty surrounding the number and quality of other entrants that bothers me.

See Raemon's comment. The Dark Arts are involved, mere honesty is no defense.

The only thing is that you and I would have to have enough conversations that I understand what you're talking about, so I can fill in the inferential gaps and hold the reader's hand through the explanation.

(This might be premature optimization, but:) I suspect this process would go a lot smoother if you could find someone in the Bay Area to act as a sort of on-site translator, 'cuz long distance back-and-forth is sometimes a hassle. Are there any active decision theory hotshots in the Bay Area?

Well, sometime ago I moved past the "considering" stage and started writing, but then gave up. After what Luke said just now, I think I'll give it another try. I gave a lot of weight to Wei's opinion that publishing UDT might be dangerous, but now he seems to think that the really dangerous topic is logical uncertainty, and my mathy ideas serve as a nice distraction from that :-)

Hey. Just to clarify, for whatever reason I haven't been contacted with an assignment to try at all so I didn't end up sinking any time into it.

Were you one of the habit formation applications?

Maybe make people who didn't win but still did a vaguely decent job get mentioned as co-authors (maybe not) or acknowledged somehow?