EA Forum Creative Writing Contest: $22,000 in prizes for good stories

Hi Aaron,

I am a science fiction writer and member of SFWA (the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) and just wanted to leave a note to strongly encourage you to firm up the copyright stuff a bit more, particularly the part where you seem to be saying it's okay for people to copy someone else's work into a forum post and publish it there. Even if it's correctly attributed to the original author, that has the potential to open the author up to liability, especially if the piece was published recently and may still be under exclusive rights to the magazine where it was originally published. At worst, it might result in unintentional plagiarism or even intentional theft of others' copyrighted work.

I see WSC Friedman has already quite correctly pointed out how posting the work on a public forum will lose the author their first publication rights. This is more of a concern for reprints, or works that have appeared previously.

Speaking as an author, links to published work in their original location are always appreciated, and I don't think anyone will be upset if their work wins an award based on someone else suggesting it (although depending on the rights you're asking for in exchange, a few people might balk), but that and "try to post the full work [in a public forum post] if you can" are very different animals.

Thanks for considering, and I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have about my concerns if that helps. You can find my contact information on my blog at https://infomancy.net/

Stewart

So, I have multiple comments.

First, as an EA person, I want to thank you, because I think this is a great idea, and I very much approve. I think the amazing power of fiction to change people's minds has been an occasional but important force throughout history; the claim that Uncle Tom's Cabin got the abolitionist movement to the mainstream seems historically plausible enough to agree that this is, indeed, a useful thing for the EA movement to do, and one I highly approve of.

But the second is as a SF&F author who tries to get his stories published.

As far as I can tell, the reason most SF&F fiction contests don't use the 'post on forum, award money to best' model is because anything once published becomes a 'reprint',  and reprints can't be sold elsewhere except at for a few places and usually at a 7x markdown, and anything that can show up in Google searches is published. If you send it to the editor's work E-mail address, or post it on a password-protected forum only for authors, it's 'not published'. But here, it's 'published'.

So submitting stories to this content means that I can't sell it anywhere else if it doesn't win the prize, while submitting stories elsewhere I can try, try again.

On the one hand it is probably worth me doing this because I believe in effective altruism and the cost to me is pretty negligible, given that individual short stories don't actually sell for all that much. On the other hand, I think the public posting might mean that the profit motive is pointing in the opposite way from you want.

First of all, I'm really excited for this contest! Using fiction to communicate EA messages has always seemed a priori plausible to me (along the lines of eg 4.2 here), and I'm excited to see various possible different takes here!

Certainly the success of introductions like HPMOR lends additional nontrivial evidence to this theory, so I'm excited to see more experiments like this one and others.

Secondly, really cool that CEA is taking the initiative to encourage these things.

How do I submit content?

All stories must be published on the EA Forum and tagged with Creative Writing Contest.

We want lots of people to read and discuss your submissions — we think the Forum will be a really fun place if good stories start showing up. However, we won’t use upvotes or comments as part of our process for choosing a winner.

If you’re wary of sharing your work in public, remember that winning the contest guarantees your work being shared in public (with many, many people). That said, you are welcome to use a pseudonym if you’d prefer!

I think I personally will have a preference for fiction to not show up as top-level posts on the Forum, unless they've been previously vetted as unusually good or they're unusually culturally significant. But obviously a) different people have different tastes, and b)  this is your forum! 

Love this idea! For all the writers here, I'd like to notify you about the EA Creatives and Communicators slack. You can use it to connect with other writers and maybe give feedback and bounce ideas off each other!

(Please let me know or downvote if this was inapproriate of me to comment, as it could be considered advertising.)

Also, different comment that I'm kicking myself for not bringing up until now:

The Submission Grinder is a website that tracks places where people who write SF&F can submit stories. If you can get listed with them, that ought to bring more attention to the contest. 

Here's the link: https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/

I know conventional wisdom is that ideas are a dime a dozen, but if people are looking for inspiration, I'd be interested in stories with the framing of "Mohism-inspired alternative history." 

Here are a few ideas I brainstormed some time ago.

I have a concept for a story, but not the time/energy to finish it before Friday. I'm posting it here, in case anyone wants to take a go at turning it into a story! If it wins anything, some kind of split of prize money should be decided on..

The concept is inspired by Harsanyi's Veil of Ignorance: if you didn't know which person you'd be, what kind of world would you want to be in? Also inspired by Andy Weir's The Egg.

--

The story would start with an "empty soul" as MC. They have heard only a few (very positive) things about Life, and are really excited about it. Just before they get planted into an embryo, they need to sign some paperwork. When reading the fine print, they stumble on all the negatives that could happen: papercuts, heartbreak, losing loved ones, getting psychosis, starvation, being raised in a factory farm, drowning as a fish on a ship deck, etc. They realize that the probability of becoming a human, and a happy, healthy one at that, is very low.

Of course, the MC becomes hesitant, and considers maybe waiting a couple thousand years. But they hear, or realize, that Life may not exist anymore by then, or at least not humanity. And they would miss what might be the most important time in history! They don't really want to live for themselves, but wonder what to do about all that suffering they've read about!

Then they get offered a deal: they will be born with the ability to make a difference, if they pledge to use it the best they can. They are not guaranteed to be happy, nor to have it easy (is there really such a thing as an easy life? Few souls have the luck of turning into a house cat..). They are not guaranteed to make a difference.

The MC doubts: how can I possible make a difference, by myself? But it's revealed more souls have been offered the deal, and some have accepted (while most have chosen to wait for utopia). They could find like-minded souls. The story ends before the MC makes a choice, and that's it.

--

It still needs an explanation for why so many should did choose Life with those abysmal odds, but maybe most just didn't get a choice.

So, any takers? 🙃 I'd prefer to first be in touch before you start on it, so that we don't have multiple people writing on it. Details can definitely be changed, although I do have some preferences for a style that's not overly didactic.

I assume this is just a general comment, but so I can be sure — did you mean to make a point about the current rules of the contest?

Also, completely separate question: should I try to err on the side of submitting or not submitting a marginal work, written either by me or by someone else? How do you want to weight the tradeoff between 'deluged by irrelevant nonsense' and 'people whose work you might be interested in don't submit?'

The method of submitting someone else's work seems problematic if I understand it right - it sounds like a breach of copyright.

I suggest there should be an honourable mention for the most upvoted in each category if that entry doesn't win a prize. If the community thinks something is great and it doesn't get anything, I think that would be a shame.

Are there any rules against using crude language or having a lot of violence in the story?

People have suggested story competitions before, but this has gotten way more upvotes. Why?

I guess it's because there is a 10k prize and because Aaron suggested it. 

If we were getting too biased to the person writing forum articles rather than the quality of those articles, how would we know?

How about Dylan Balfour's 'Pascal's Mugging Strikes Again'? It's great.

New EA Cause Area: "dethrone paperclips"!

Unfortunately I worry that paperclips might exist at an un-de-throne-able optimum point of memetic sharability vs educationalness.

The great thing about the paperclip meme is that it is an AI safety Koan -- it helps people learn about orthogonality, because until you until you understand orthogonality the story sounds totally insane, but then once you make the leap then everything fits perfectly.  (Similarly, IMO Koans are supposed to be stories that make a kind of sense to a spiritually-attained person, but sound ridiculous to anyone else, thus helping people become spiritually-attained.)

By contrast, other more complex or realistic stories (like an AI that makes everyone happier and happier and then starts wireheading them, or about an unsafe AI that is created as part of a great-power military arms race), hew closer to existing Hollywood stories about evil robots, mad scientists, and genies granting tricky wishes.  The very plausibility of this story detracts from the Koan-like ability to teach people "AI safety isn't about fear of evil overlords or about wrongdoers getting their comeuppance, it is literally a technical problem".

IMO, instead of trying to dethrone paperclips as the snappiest and most memetic story, what the AI safety movement could use is more immersive, detailed, and well-written stories basically all along the pareto frontier of memability vs realism that we can point people to as a next step, after they've heard about paperclips.  Paul Christiano's detailed future-histories of AI slowly derailing humanity's future might exist at the far end of realism, but it's long and very sophisticated... but it would be sweet to have some more-memeable, medium-realistic, medium-length, well-produced tales in between that and "paperclips".  ("Paperclips" translated well into videogame form... maybe a more sophisticated AI story could also be told as a simple game, to encourage the systems thinking vs associations of hollywood tales?)

Is there no guidelines to who can submit?

I actually have another question. I submitted a Kipling poem as a recommendation for the contest. (It's my first post, so it's currently awaiting moderation.) If I find more EA-themed Kipling poems (which, given the poet, would not be surprising), should I add them to the first post, submit them in batches or make individual posts for each of them?

Hi Aaron,

Many thanks to you and everyone for organising and funding this contest.

If anyone is interested in a sequel, November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

A good opportunity to expand that short story into a novel!

Hi Joanna,

I totally agree with your points regarding music copyrights and appreciate your efforts.  Could you please suggest to me some good writers who could actually write good content about copyrights just like you?