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I am funding a 1000 word essay competition that is hosted by the Future of Humanity Institute and sponsored by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. It has a $2000 grand prize and $500 prizes in the categories of technology, economics, and policy. The deadline is April 15, 2016. See here for why I think getting prepared for global food catastrophes is high priority. The goals of the competition are to raise awareness, get new ideas, and hopefully motivate more research. Please share with individuals or departments you think would be interested in applying. Anyone can submit. It would be great and if an effective altruist won it, because then the money would be used effectively.
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Hey, this user appears to be a somewhat sophisticated bot that uses NLP and maybe some language model (GPT) functionality.
They promote essay writing services, which might hint/point at functionality and ethics aligned with these purposes.
They 1) make internally coherent replies on topic that turn out to be empty, 2) maintain a positive, sympathetic and modest persona, 3) appear in emotionally charged topics where confrontation is awkward, and 4) progressively become more explicit in promotion of their services.
They attracted few downvotes and even one upvote.