EA Forum Prize: Winners for December 2019

By Aaron Gertler 🔸 @ 2020-01-27T10:33 (+31)

CEA is pleased to announce the winners of the December 2019 EA Forum Prize! 

In first place (for a prize of $750): “Thoughts on doing good through non-standard EA career pathways,” by Buck Shlegeris.

In second place (for a prize of $500): “Will the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons affect nuclear deproliferation through legal channels?,” by Luisa Rodriguez.

In third place (for a prize of $250): “Managing risk in the EA policy space,” by weeatquince.

The following users were each awarded a Comment Prize ($50):

See this post for the previous round of prizes.

What is the EA Forum Prize?

Certain posts and comments exemplify the kind of content we most want to see on the EA Forum. They are well-researched and well-organized; they care about informing readers, not just persuading them.

The Prize is an incentive to create content like this. But more importantly, we see it as an opportunity to showcase excellent work as an example and inspiration to the Forum's users.

About the winning posts and comments

Note: I write this section in first person based on my own thoughts, rather than by attempting to summarize the views of the other judges.

Thoughts on doing good through non-standard EA career pathways

Many people who want to do a lot of good are pursuing or will pursue careers that aren’t among the top suggestions of 80,000 Hours. Thus, it seems highly valuable to consider ways in which people can aim to increase their impact across a wide range of career paths.

Aside from tackling a promising topic, Buck’s post also does some specific things I like:

One thing I’d have been interested to see: More real-world examples of people in the community who have done a lot of good through unusual career paths. This could have provided evidentiary support (or the opposite) for some of the ideas Buck presented.

Will the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons affect nuclear deproliferation through legal channels?

Many Forum posts try to cover very broad topics and wind up struggling to do them justice — not because the authors haven’t done excellent work (they often have), but because the world is enormously detailed and complex.

This post, on the other hand, aims at a question that… is still detailed and complex, but also sufficiently narrow that the author can tackle what seem to be most of the key sub-questions.

Particular aspects I liked:

I do wish, however, that the post had been a bit more clear on how this question fits into Luisa’s overall perspective on nuclear risk, and what her conclusions in this post might imply for EA-aligned work in this space. (Of course, those might come up in some future post!)

Managing risk in the EA policy space

As more EA energy goes into policy change, the community will benefit from having good heuristics about making change happen. I appreciate the author’s focus on this important goal, as well as:

The winning comments

I won’t write up an analysis of each comment. Instead, here are my thoughts on selecting comments for the prize

The voting process

The winning posts were chosen by five people:

All posts published in the titular month qualified for voting, save for those in the following categories: 

Voters recused themselves from voting on posts written by themselves or their colleagues. Otherwise, they used their own individual criteria for choosing posts, though they broadly agree with the goals outlined above.

Additionally, one of our judges (Larks) chose to withdraw his post “2019 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison” from consideration.

Judges each had ten votes to distribute between the month’s posts. They also had a number of “extra” votes equal to [10 - the number of votes made last month]. For example, a judge who cast 7 votes last month would have 13 this month. No judge could cast more than three votes for any single post.

—— 

The winning comments were chosen by Aaron Gertler, though the other judges had the chance to evaluate the winners beforehand and veto comments they didn’t think should win.

Feedback

If you have thoughts on how the Prize has changed the way you read or write on the Forum, or ideas for ways we should change the current format, please write a comment or contact Aaron Gertler.


RyanCarey @ 2020-01-31T23:24 (+19)

Larks' post was one of the best of the year, so it's nice of him to effectively make a hundreds-of-dollars donation to the EA Forum Prize!

Larks @ 2020-02-01T01:44 (+10)

You're welcome! It was a tough decision, as I did find it quite motivating last year, but figured it would create the appearance of a conflict of interest if it won this year.

Ozzie Gooen @ 2020-02-01T11:41 (+2)

Would it have been reasonable for you to have been secretively part of the process or something?

Some options:

  1. You write in that if you win, you just don't accept the cash prize.
  2. You write in that if you win, they tell you, but don't tell anyone else, and select the next best person for the official prize.

I'd be curious what the signaling or public value of the public explanation, "Person X would have won 1st place, but removed themselves from the running" would be compared to "Person X won 1st place, but gave up the cash prize"