= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
"Announcing" the "Longevity for All" Short Movie Prize
The local Belgian/European life-extension non-profit Heales is giving away prizes for whoever can make an interesting short movie about life extension. The first prize is €3000 (around $3386 as of today), other prizes being various gifts. You more or less just need to send a link pointing to the uploaded media along with your contact info to info@heales.org once you're done.
While we're at it you don't need to be European, let alone Belgian to participate, and it doesn't even need to be a short movie anyway. For instance a comic strip would fall within the scope of the rules as specified here : (link to a pdf file)(or see this page on fightaging.org). Also, sure, the deadline is by now supposed to be a fairly short-term September the 21st, 2015, but it is extremely likely this will be extended (this might be a pun).
I'll conclude by suggesting you read the official pdf with rules and explanations if you feel like you care about money or life-extension (who doesn't ?), and remind everyone of what happened last time almost everyone thought they shouldn't grab free contest money that was announced on Lesswrong (hint : few enough people participated that all earned something). The very reason why this one's due date will likely be extended is because (very very) few people have participated so far, after all.
(Ah yes, the only caveat I can think of is that if the product of quality by quantity of submissions is definitely too low (i.e. it's just you on the one hand and on the other hand that one guy who spent 3 minutes drawing some stick figures, and your submission is coming a close second), then the contest may be called off after one or two deadline extensions (also in the aforementioned rules).).
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
[Prize] Essay Contest: Cryonics and Effective Altruism
I'm starting a contest for the best essay describing why a rational person of a not particularly selfish nature might consider cryonics an exceptionally worthwhile place to allocate resources. There are three distinct questions relating to this, and you can pick any one of them to focus on, or answer all three.
Contest Summary:
- Essay Topic: Cryonics and Effective Altruism
- Answers at least one of the following questions:
- Why might a utilitarian seeking to do the most good consider contributing time and/or money towards cryonics (as opposed to other causes)?
- What is the most optimal way (or at least, some highly optimal, perhaps counterintuitive way) to contribute to cryonics?
- What reasons might a utilitarian have for actually signing up for cryonics services, as opposed to just making a charitable donation towards cryonics (or vice versa)?
- Length: 800-1200 words
- Target audience: Utilitarians, Consequentialists, Effective Altruists, etc.
- Prize: 1 BTC (around $350, at the moment)
- Deadline: Sunday 11/17/2013, at 8:00PM PST
To enter, post your essay as a comment in this thread. Feel free to edit your submission up until the deadline. If it is a repost of something old, a link to the original would be appreciated. I will judge the essays partly based on upvotes/downvotes, but also based on how well it meets the criteria and makes its points. Essays that do not directly answer any of the three questions will not be considered for the prize. If there are multiple entries that are too close to call, I will flip a coin to determine the winner.
Terminology clarification: I realise that for some individuals there is confusion about the term 'utilitarian' because historically it has been represented using very simple, humanly unrealistic utility functions such as pure hedonism. For the purposes of this contest, I mean to include anyone whose utility function is well defined and self-consistent -- it is not meant to imply a particular utility function. You may wish to clarify in your essay the kind of utilitarian you are describing.
Regarding the prize: If you win the contest and prefer to receive cash equivalent via paypal, this wll be an option, although I consider bitcoin to be more convenient (and there is no guarantee how many dollars it will come out to due to the volatility of bitcoin).
Contest results
Reminder: $250 LessWrong source introduction prize submissions due soon
This is just a reminder that the deadline for $250 prize for the best introduction to the LessWrong source is (Edit: not Nov. 23rd!) next Tuesday Oct. 25th. Good luck to all contestants!
A prize to become artist in residence at CERN
Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN is the new international competition for digital artists to win a residency at CERN the world's largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva. It is the first prize to be announced as part of the new Collide@CERN artists residency programme initiated by the laboratory.
The residency is in two parts - with an initial two months at CERN, where the winning artist will have a specially dedicated science mentor from the world famous science lab to inspire him/her and his/her work. The second part will be a month with the Futurelab team and mentor at Ars Electronica Linz with whom the winner will develop and make new work inspired by the CERN residency.
What are good topics for literature review prizes?
The last prize, for the best literature review of spaced repetition, was moderately successful, inspiring a pretty good review of the academic literature on spaced repetition. I am interested in experimenting more with prizes, but I would like to get input other people's input: what are other good topics for future prizes?
The topic should be:
- Well defined.
- Not too big. Something someone could understand pretty well in two weeks.
- Academically researched.
- Relevant to being effective.
Spaced Repetition literature review contest submissions: August 1st deadline
This is a reminder that the deadline for submissions to the Spaced Repetition literature review contest is August 1st (about 2 weeks from now). If you have questions or comments post them in the original thread or email me (jsalvatier@gmail.com).
The Seattle meetup group is looking forward to reviewing your submissions!
[prize] new contest for Spaced Repetition literature review ($365+)
Update: the prize is now finished!
The previous contest was poorly formatted for eliciting the most useful reviews of the spaced repetition literature so I've created a new slightly different contest.
I'm interested in making projects happen on Less Wrong. In order to find out what works and to inspire others to try things too, I'm sponsoring the following small project:
Spaced Repetition is often mentioned on Less Wrong as a technique for adding facts to memory. I've started using Anki and it certainly seems to be useful. However, I haven't seen a good summary of evidence on Spaced Repetition and I would like to change that.
I hereby offer a prize, currently $385, to the best literature review submitted by August 1st. 'Best' will be judged by voting with discussion beforehand by the Seattle LW meetup group. People are not allowed to vote for their own submissions.
The summary should address questions such as:
- What spacing is best?
- How much does spaced repetition actually help memory?
- Does spaced repetition have hidden benefits or costs?
- Does the effectiveness vary across domains? How much?
- Is there research on the kinds of questions that work best? Especially for avoiding 'guessing the password' and memorizing the card per se rather than the material.
- What questions do researchers think are most important?
- Is there any interesting ongoing research? If so, what is it on?
- What, if any, questions do researchers think it is important to answer? Are there other unanswered questions that would jump out at a smart person?
- What does spaced repetition not do that people might expect it to?
The post should summarize the state of current evidence and provide citations to back up the claims in the article. Referencing both academic and non-academic research is encouraged. Lukeprog's The Science of Winning At Life sequence contains several examples of good literature review posts.
If you think you would benefit from the result of this project, please add to the prize! You can contribute to the prize on the ChipIn page.
If you have suggestions, questions or comments, please leave them in the comments. Prizes demotivating? Due date too soon/far? Specification too vague? Judgement procedure not credible enough?
This project is tagged with the 'project' tag and listed on the Projects wiki page.
[prize] Spaced Repetition literature review
EDIT: I am canceling this contest because I feel that the structure of the incentives were poorly thought out (see gwern's comments). I will be posting a new better structured contest in the near future (now posted). If you feel this is unfair or otherwise feel slighted, please contact me at my username at gmail.com.
I'm interested in making projects happen on Less Wrong. In order to find out what works and to inspire others to try things too, I'm sponsoring the following small project:
I hereby offer a prize to the first person to submit a good summary of the evidence on Spaced Repetition to the main page. The winner will get the prize, currently: $265 + 40 to charity (see comments)
The summary should address at least the following questions:
- What spacing is best?
- How much does spaced repetition actually help memory?
- Does spaced repetition have hidden benefits or costs?
- Does the effectiveness vary across domains? How much?
- Is there research on the kinds of questions that work best?
- What questions do researchers think are most important?
- Is there any interesting ongoing research? If so, what is it on?
- What, if any, questions do researchers think it is important to answer? Are there other unanswered questions that would jump out at a smart person?
- What does spaced repetition not do that people might expect it to?
$100 for the best article on efficient charity -- deadline Wednesday 1st December
Reposted from a few days ago, noting that jsalvatier (kudos to him for putting up the prize money, very community spirited) has promised $100 to the winner, and I have decided to set a deadline of Wednesday 1st December for submissions, as my friend has called me and asked me where the article I promised him is. This guy wants his god-damn rationality already, people!
My friend is currently in a potentially lucrative management consultancy career, but is considering getting a job in eco-tourism because he "wants to make the world a better place" and we got into a debate about Efficient Charity, Roles vs. Goals, and Optimizing versus Acquiring Warm Fuzzies.
I thought that there would be a good article here that I could send him to, but there isn't. So I've decided to ask people to write such an article. What I am looking for is an article that is less than 1800 words long, and explains the following ideas:
- Charity should be about actually trying to do as much expected good as possible for a given amount of resource (time, $), in a quantified sense. I.e. "5000 lives saved in expectation", not "we made a big difference".
- The norms and framing of our society regarding charity currently get it wrong, i.e. people send lots of $ to charities that do a lot less good than other charities. The "inefficiency" here is very large, i.e. Givewell estimates by a factor of 1000 at least. Our norm of ranking charities by % spent on overheads is very very silly.
- It is usually better to work a highly-paid job and donate because if you work for a charity you replace the person who would have been hired had you not applied
- Our instincts will tend to tempt us to optimize for signalling, this is to be resisted unless (or to the extent that) it is what you actually want to do. Our instincts will also tend to want to optimize for "Warm Fuzzies". These should be purchased separately from actual good outcomes.
- Our human intuition about how to allocate resources is extremely bad. Moreover, since charity is typically for the so-called benefit of someone else, you, the donor, usually don't get to see the result. Lacking this feedback from experience, one tends to make all kinds of gigantic mistakes.
but without using any unexplained LW Jargon. (Utilons, Warm Fuzzies, optimizing). Linking to posts explaining jargon is NOT OK. Just don't use any LW Jargon at all. I will judge the winner based upon these criteria and the score that the article gets on LW. Maybe the winning article will not rigidly meet all criteria: there is some flexibility. The point of the article is to persuade people who are, at least to some extent charitable and who are smart (university educated at a top university or equivalent) to seriously consider investing more time in rationality when they want to do charitable things.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}