An idea I've been thinking about for LessOnline this year, is a blogging awards ceremony. The idea being that there's a voting procedure on the blogposts of the year, in a bunch of different categories, a shortlist is made and winners are awarded a prize. 

I like opportunities for celebrating things in the online, written, truth-seeking ecosystem. I'm interested in reacts on whether people would be pro something like this happening, and comments on suggestions for how to do it well. (Epistemic status: tentatively excited about this idea.)

Here's my first idea for what the categories would be this year.

1. Blog of the year
2. Best original contribution (e.g. novel discovery, did some science, etc)
3. Best explanation of a complex idea
4. Biggest mistake admitted (H/T @ymekshout for suggesting this one)
5. Best fiction
6. Best counter-argument
7. Best prediction
8. Most productive dialogue
9. Most beautiful non-fiction
10. Best new blog

As for structure, I'm not really sure. Here's my first idea.

• How to nominate? Anyone can nominate a blogpost for $10. Anyone with a LessOnline ticket gets a free nomination. Anything published in 2024 is eligible.
• How is it judged? For the first year I'd probably keep it small and simple, perhaps hand-selected ~10 judges and pay them a little to each read 5 nominations in 4 different categories and vote on those.

I've also not got a name in mind yet. It's not a generic "Blogging Awards", tons of blogposts would not naturally be included (e.g. food blogs, fashion blogs, travel blogs, etc). I think "Blogging-With-High-Epistemic-Aspirations Awards" is too long. "Rationalist Blogging Awards" is a reasonably narrow pointer but I don't want to risk intertwining too much with a narrow social group's identity when there's probably a good alternative name that also points toward the substance.

Suggestions and feedback appreciated!

Thanks!

Zvi's post is imported, so it's stored a little differently than normal posts. Here's two copies I made stored differently (1, 2), I'd appreciate you letting me know if either of these look correct on mobile.

(Currently it looks fine on my iPhone, are you on an Android?)

Same, here's a screenshot. Perhaps Molony is using a third-party web viewer?

Seeing this, I update toward a heuristic of "all polymarket variation within 4 percentage points are noise".

I tried to invite Iceman to LessOnline, but I suspect he no longer checks the old email associated with that account. If anyone knows up to date contact info, I’d appreciate you intro-ing us or just letting him know we’d love to have him join.

I have a bit of work to do on the scheduling app before sending it around to everyone this year, not certain when I will get to that, my guess is in like 4 weeks from now.

Relatedly: we have finished renovating the final building on our campus, so there will be more rooms for sessions this year than last year.

Am I being an idiot or does technically 99%< work? Like, it implied that 99% is less than it, in a mirror to how <1% means 1% is greater than it.

I personally have it as a to-do to just build polls. 

(React if you want to express that you would likely use this.)

Edited, should be working fine now, thx!