Prizes for Last Year's 2018 Review
post by Raemon · 2020-12-02T11:21:16.211Z · LW · GW · 8 commentsAbout 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 [LW · GW], we have decided to award.... *drumroll*
- Abram Demski & Scott Garrabrant are each awarded $200 for Embedded Agents [LW · GW]
- Eliezer Yudkowsky receives $200 for The Rocket Alignment Problem [LW · GW], and another $200 for Local Validity as the Key to Sanity and Civilization [LW · GW]
- Paul Christiano is awarded $200 for Arguments about Fast Takeoff [LW · GW]
- Abram Demski receives an additional $200 for Towards a New Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation [LW · GW].
- Martin Sustrik receives $200 for Anti-Social Punishment [LW · GW]
- Scott Alexander receives $200 for The Tails Coming Apart as a Metaphor for Life [LW · GW]
- Alkjash receives $200 for Babble [LW · GW]
- Patrick LaVictoire $200 for The Loudest Alarm is Usually False [LW · GW]
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 [LW · GW], and Decoupling vs Contextualising Norms [LW · GW]
- Bucky receives $200 for his critique of Unknown Knowns
- Abram Demski receives $100 for his response to Realism about Rationality [LW(p) · GW(p)]
- Daniel Filan receives $100 for a variety of reviews of Coherence arguments [LW(p) · GW(p)], Explain enlightenment in non-mysterious terms [LW(p) · GW(p)], Realism about Rationality [LW(p) · GW(p)], Towards a New Impact Measure [LW(p) · GW(p)]
- 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!
8 comments
Comments sorted by top scores.
comment by Chris_Leong · 2020-12-02T12:30:42.019Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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?
↑ comment by Rob Bensinger (RobbBB) · 2020-12-02T16:00:58.810Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
Replies from: Chris_Leong↑ comment by Chris_Leong · 2020-12-02T22:22:05.448Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
Replies from: Raemon↑ comment by Raemon · 2020-12-02T23:02:42.021Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
Replies from: Benito↑ comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2020-12-02T23:13:29.309Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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.
comment by Chris_Leong · 2020-12-04T11:14:23.256Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Also, I noticed that only some of the prize-winning reviews were linked. Is there a reason for this?
Replies from: Raemon↑ comment by Raemon · 2020-12-04T19:54:42.921Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
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. :(
Replies from: Chris_Leong↑ comment by Chris_Leong · 2020-12-04T22:43:17.273Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Fair enough