This is very exciting, I think it's really important for community builders to think carefully about meta stuff. Is there a reason for the the deadline being March 31st? 

1. That's about 3 weeks from now, which feels fairly short to write a couple thousand word piece (especially if you have classes or full-time work)
2. EAGxBoston is right after (April 1-3rd) and I would guess it would inspire a number of cool submissions.

I expect most submissions will take <10 hours to write over the course of 1-3 days.

If memory serves, it took me ~40 hours to write each of these retrospectives (maybe over the course of a month); these were by far the most useful reflections for me to improve my community-building efforts.

• My impression is that three weeks is enough time, though I might be poorly calibrated on this. I expect most submissions will take <10 hours to write over the course of 1-3 days.

I would have expected the average person to spend longer than 10 hours to write a submission. Especially for the reflections that help others - I think it can be nontrivial to go from "here's a thought I have" to "how do i express it to others well" (and often, that process is super valuable because you end up refining your argument and even changing your mind about what it is you're trying to say).

I might be a good idea to flag this more prominently in the post - this wasn't really the impression I got from reading the post (perhaps others did).  

I was keen to check out the winning entries to this contest, but I'm wondering if I missed the announcement, and I can't seem to find it anywhere. Have the entries been made public somewhere?

Do we have a date for the announcement of the winners at this point? I've attempted to reach out to Akash via the forum and via email, and haven't gotten a response after a few weeks. Has someone else taken over the organisation of this contest? 

Are you considering previously posted work or are only new posts between today and the end of March eligible?

Came across this post today—I assume the bounty has been long-closed by now?

Eh, I'm just pretty happy to claim that many contests can in fact push people to do more valuable things with their time than they would have done otherwise. It's not that hard to think of considerations that most EAs haven't thought about.

Also, by this logic, should we also not have any posts that give advice to EAs? After all, they might pull EAs towards following that advice, even when that's not altruistically / impartially best.

Maybe the idea is that once there's money involved, it is individually rational for EAs to pursue the money from contests instead of doing what is best, and this is community-irrational? That seems surprising; if that were the situation, then why aren't the EAs just pursuing a normal job which would get more money?

Maybe the idea is that it isn't the money, it's the prestige from the contest that's motivating? That seems plausible.

Maybe the idea is that EAs can just ignore advice if it's bad, but they will irrationally be more persuaded when there's money and prestige attached (as in a contest)? That also seems plausible.

Okay, I'm more convinced of distortionary effects, though I'm still pretty keen on "yeah it's not hard to find cases where individual EAs could do better, because you thought of a consideration that they didn't".

My guess is that most entrants would benefit from reflecting for 1-10 hours, and a smaller subset would benefit from reflecting for 10-100 hours.

For this contest I was most compelled by the benefits to other organizers, and for that I think I would be a lot more excited about the 10-100 hour reflections.

On the timelines:

• I do see the value of having posts published before / betweem conferences. 
• If you are primarily trying to attract university students then it does make sense to time it with spring break, but I do think for working professionals it's a fairly short timeline. 
• I think it's very likely that many people will not read this post until a few days or weeks later, or will see it soon but won't come up with an interesting idea until several weeks into the deadline. 

It's worth noting that the creative writing contest offered 55 days (7-8 weeks)* for submissions after the original post was posted (though I know this is different from creative writing). I think this is a reasonable amount of time and that this contest should offer roughly the same amount of time. 

Edit: Somehow I messed up my math haha. It was 47 days, 6-7 weeks.

Do you need a Google Doc or is it okay to just post it directly on the forum?

I agree with all three of Vaidehi's comments as of typing this. I'll add that I think some posts would require research or talking to experts and could therefore take much more than 10 hours. 

One response may be that this contest isn't intended for those kinds of posts. But since those posts could be potentially very high value to the community, it seems reasonable to extend the deadline to encourage those kinds of posts. It seems to me like the value of extending the deadline and potentially getting a few more especially well-researched, well-argued posts outweighs the value of keeping the deadline March 31 and getting shorter posts that are written after spring break and between EAGs. 

Are we able to post contest entries elsewhere? I'm still on the fence about trying to go after the blog prize, but I figure a reflection post submitted here would be a good post for a blog as well.