[Reminder] Cause Exploration Contest

By Joel Tan🔸 @ 2023-07-16T07:22 (+17)

This is a linkpost to https://exploratory-altruism.org/contest/

This is just a brief reminder announcement that CEARCH is running a small cause exploration contest. The original announcement can be found here; the short of it is that:

We invite people to suggest potential cause areas, providing a short justification if you feel it useful (e.g. briefly covering why the issue is important/tractable/neglected), or not, if otherwise (e.g. the idea simply appears novel or interesting to you). All ideas are welcome, and even causes which do not appear intuitively impactful can be fairly cost-effective upon deeper research.
People are also welcome to suggest potential search methodologies for finding causes (e.g. consulting weird philosophy, or looking up death certificates).

Prizes will be awarded in the following way:

USD 300 for what the CEARCH team judges to be the most plausibly cost-effective and/or novel cause idea (and that is not already on our public longlist of causes).
USD 700 for what the CEARCH team judges to be the most useful and/or novel search methodology idea (and that is not already listed in our public search methodology document).

Entries may be made here. The contest will run for another 2 weeks, until 31st July 2023 (23:59, GMT-12). Multiple entries are allowed (n.b. do make separate individual submissions). The detailed rules, for those who are interested, are available here.

rime @ 2023-07-16T12:18 (+9)

Any other points worth highlighting from the 10-page long rules? I find it confusing. Is this normal for legalspeak? The requirements include, and I quote:

All information provided in the Entry must be true, accurate, and correct in all
respects. [oops, excludes nearly all possible utterances I could say]
The Contest is open to any natural person who meets all of the following eligibility
requirements:
- [Resides in a place where the Contest is not prohibited by law]
- The entrant is at least eighteen (18) years old at the time of entry.
- The entrant has access to the internet. [What?]

Joel Tan (CEARCH) @ 2023-07-18T14:03 (+2)

Hi Rime,

We based the requirements off the Open Philanthropy Cause Exploration Prize's official rules - see the full legal terms linked to here (https://www.causeexplorationprizes.com/rules-faqs) - and changed them only when necessary. Then it was vetted by the lawyer at CEARCH's fiscal sponsor.

I can't speak for the lawyers, but my presumption as a non-expert is that there are good legal reasons for the various clauses. For example, the prohibited-by-law stuff is obvious enough; and I imagine the access-to-internet-clause is ensure no administrative difficulties with contacting winners after the fact and getting the details needed to wire them their money.