Part of the Efficient Charity Article competition. Several people have written articles on efficient charity. The entries were:
The original criteria for the competition are listed here, but bascially the idea is to introduce the idea to a relatively smart newcomer without using jargon.
Various people gave opinions about which articles were best. For me, two articles in particular stood out as being excellent for a newomer. Those articles were:
and
articles.
I therefore declare them joint winners, and implore our kind sponsor Jsalvatier to split the prize between them evenly. Throwawayaccount_1 should also unmask his/her identity.
[I would also ask the winners to kindly not offer to donate the money to charity, but to actually take the prize money and spend it on something that they selfishly-want, such as ice-cream or movie tickets or some other luxury item. Establishing a norm of giving away prizes creates very bad incentives and will tend to decrease the degree to which prizes actually motivate people in the future]
I would estimate a probability <3% that the author is Alicorn; we talk on AIM often enough that I think I would have noticed the familiarity of her style if she had written it.
Having read the article before reading this comment, I developed the distinct impression that I was reading another of Yvain's posts partway through. I would estimate 45% confidence that the author is Yvain, and 50% confidence that the author is someone else whose writing style I am not familiar with, so not Alicorn or Eliezer.