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.)
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.
In fairness, this is only true if expected utility is purely a function of the number of participants, as in the El Farol Bar game. Here you also need ...
When I showed up at the Singularity Institute, I was surprised to find that 30-60 papers' worth of material was lying around in blog posts, mailing list discussions, and people's heads — but it had never been written up in clear, well-referenced academic articles.
Why is this so? Writing such articles has many clear benefits:
Of course, there are costs to writing articles, too. The single biggest cost is staff time / opportunity cost. An article like "Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import" can require anywhere from 150-800 person-hours. That is 150-800 paid hours during which our staff is not doing other critically important things that collectively have a bigger positive impact than a single academic article is likely to have.
So Louie Helm and Nick Beckstead and I sat down and asked, "Is there a way we can buy these articles without such an egregious cost?"
We think there might be. Basically, we suspect that most of the work involved in writing these articles can be outsourced. Here's the process we have in mind:
If this method works, each paper may require only 50-150 hours of SI staff time per paper — a dramatic improvement! But this method has additional benefits:
This is, after all, more similar to how many papers would be produced by university departments, in which a senior researcher works with a team of students to produce papers.
Feedback? Interest?
(Not exactly the same, but see also the Polymath Project.)