[UNENDORSED] Reward Long Content

niplav

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Hello, thank you so much for your thoughtful piece. I am sorry about the missed email-these have been busy weeks, and it was never my intention to ignore you. You make really interesting points and I appreciate the engagement. Like any new project, we know there are still issues to work out. We recognize that this is an imperfect incentive structure, and we do welcome the feedback. We intend to learn from, iterate, and experiment during this process. That being said, even while imperfect, we believe the incentive structure created by the prize is better than the status quo’s limited incentives for new writers. Our main aim is to create something that, on net, improves the EA communications and media space. We think the prize is contributing to that.

Central points:

If I understand correctly, your core point is about the value of blogging relative to other forms of content. First on the object-level value of blogging you like:

Except for rare exceptions (Slate Star Codex being the most notable one), blogs usually don't provide much long-term value—who cares enough to read the whole archive of a blog, unless the author is exceptionally skilled?

“Except for rare exceptions” is doing a lot of work here: we created this prize exactly to discover exceptional bloggers. I agree that the most outstanding blogs create many times more lasting value than the average.

But I don’t think long-lasting writing is the only thing worth caring about: we’re especially interested in raising the salience of longtermism right now, as we look for people to lead new projects, and look forward to Will MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future.

Another goal, possibly the more important one, is this contest’s role in identifying talented writers and communicators for longtermism. Blogs are a specifically good way of searching for these skills, as they have low barriers to entry. For example, you write:

I could see an EA newspaper as a good idea: having an institutionalized content & Discourse-producing machine à la Works in Progress or Jacobin will reach a different kind of people who demand the air of respectability of a newspaper

I agree. I’m actually an editor of Works in Progress. I’ve also been in discussions with two people starting EA magazines. To varying degrees, these projects are bottlenecked by a shortage of writers. We believe that the Blog Prize will introduce us to writers whose careers we could continue to cultivate beyond their blogs — to write for EA magazines, or join something like the EA Comms Fellowship this summer. After all, some highly impactful EAs (like Dylan Matthews and Kelsey Piper), not to mention some of the most prominent public intellectuals got their start blogging. Essentially, we’re hoping that this prize will be the first of many initiatives in this space to cultivate a robust tool of talent.

You make a similar point about books:

What advantage, if any, do blogs have over other media? Books can be (and usually are) far more comprehensive and high-status, instant messaging and social media are more engaging, but move from one fashionable topic onto another, and imageboards—well, we don't talk about imageboards here.

The same point holds: we can use blogs to identify talented writers now, who we will support to create all sorts of (different) content in the future. As you quote me saying, we want to incentivize EAs to develop skills which easily generalize from blogging to books to journalism, and much more. In a moonshot case, this contest could help identify future longtermist-oriented public intellectuals.

This relates to one of your central concerns, which is the “new blog” requirement. I understand how this could be very frustrating, especially given your history of blogging. But I hope you understand the incentives we wanted to create here: to identify new writers, and incentivize the creation of new content, which might not otherwise have been written. Were we to allow all previously written content to be eligible, it would actually be a disincentive for new content, as there would be so much more to compete against. In the hopes of partly reconciling this issue, we’re planning on announcing prizes for posts on specific topics beginning next month, which all bloggers will be eligible for.

To the further points about incentives, I agree that we should expect some people to stop blogging after the prizes are awarded. But where we’ve found promising new writers (not limited to the overall winners), we plan to continue supporting them — through grants or help with job placement. So while I agree that it would be bad to let good blogs vanish, I don’t expect that to happen.

You make a good point about web content being lost, more generally. I think I’ll look into finding a way to preserve, either in print or on a website, the best content that the prize generates.

Per your comments on the “Some of our bloggers” section on the website, I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to comment on people’s specific circumstances here. But I will say the point of these being on the website is to give potential bloggers ideas about different ways to connect their work to longtermist discourse. If you want to review a more broad swath of content, I would encourage you to look at our Twitter feed or our newsletter.

Some assorted comments:

Even in the case of Scott Alexander, additional effort had to be made to curate the best posts and order them by topic, something still sorely missing for blogs like Overcoming Bias and Marginal Revolution or econlog.

We’re curating posts via our Twitter feed and monthly newsletter.

But I looking over those lists, I don't get the impression that there's a dearth of blogs about effective altruism, but rather a lack of discoverability or aggregation (why doesn't everyone of those post their texts to the EA forum?).

This is a useful point to respond to, because I’ve noticed a few people say something similar. There are, in some sense, many existing EA blogs. But as you have correctly identified, they are mostly geared towards internal discussion — the kind of blogs that are well-suited to Forum discussions. As we’ve tried to emphasize with this prize, we’re looking for content that crosses between the general blogosphere and internal conversations in EA. This is consistent with our interest in talent identification: we’re interested in people who can write about and communicate ideas in longtermism to a wider audience. It might be the case that community discussion deserves additional prizes, but that isn’t our focus.

There's also more experimental structures available: Don't give out prizes; instead perform credit assignment for past work.

This might be worth someone doing, but I see it as a separate project from this—the sort of credit an established writer deserves or could benefit from would be unique in comparison to new writers.

FTX Long Term Future Fund announced the Ideas Project: a $500,000 prize for new blogs.

As a point of clarification, this project was funded by FTX Future Fund, but isn’t connected beyond that.

As a final note: so far, we’ve been very happy with the response from the prize. It has already generated two very successful blog posts:

Erik Hoel’s Why We Stopped Making Einsteins
Dwarkesh Patel’s The Mystery of the Miracle Year

Moreover, I’ve been generally happy with how many applicants are coming in from outside the EA community and are beginning to blog about EA and longtermism.

Part of our approach is to try multiple ideas, in the expectation that some will fail and some will succeed. Thank you again for your comments.

niplav

As a point of clarification, this project was funded by FTX Future Fund, but isn’t connected beyond that.

Thanks, corrected

salonium

This is an interesting critique! I think it misses a lot, though, so would like to push back on it.
Full disclosure/conflict of interest – I'm one of Nick's colleagues – we're both editors at Works in Progress.

1) Blogs are short content. – I think a lot of your critiques here (that they become outdated quickly, don't provide much long-term value, fall prey to replication crises) actually apply to all forms of published, static content – newspapers, tweet threads, newsletters, books, etc. We've all heard of books and news content that have aged badly – it's unclear why you've listed this as a drawback of blogs. If anything, blogs are much easier to keep updated than the others (as you mention), especially compared to printed content – you can easily update an old blogpost and signpost when you've done that. You can't edit a tweet thread, a printed book, or a news article easily.

I don't think people need to read through entire archives of blogs for them to be useful. People often share links to particular old blogposts as references on a particular topic, and that's fine. In the same way, we don't say that newspapers are bad because people don't read through newspaper archives.

2) Did anybody think about the incentives? – as you mention later on, the purpose of the prize is to incentivise new blogs to be created and maintained, so it wouldn't make sense to reward ones that already exist. I don't think it's ironic because the topic is on longtermism – and it's likely that at least some of these blogs will be maintained in the longterm, which may be another way to look at it. Many projects (and blogs) are likely to be unfinished, but that's a feature of new projects in general. One way to improve the prize might be to reward blogs that stay maintained years from now, but I don't think you make that point.

3) Examples – skipping over this as it looks like you liked many of them.

4) There's not that many longtermist blogs around. To me, it seems like the EA and longtermist movements are growing rapidly in size and could be a lot bigger than they currently are, so what may seem like a sufficient number of blogs now wouldn't be later. If you recognise all the blogs on that list, that seems like an indication that there aren't very many of them. Ambitiously, people might want to reach a level where there were so many EA blogs that they weren't able to keep track of all of them. EA Forum is great, but if EA was huge, people might not use this as the central forum to cross-post all their blogposts. This seems more like a central node or bridge to other content than The place to put everything EA related.

5) Blogs are for discourse. I think you may not be aware that Nick's already an editor at Works in Progress (the long form magazine you mentioned). Blogs and longer form discourse magazines don't seem like an either/or to me, and not to Nick who's involved in both. I think they actually feed into each other: We sometimes recruit authors because we've read their blogs and want to develop their content further. And we'd be very happy if bloggers riffed off ideas that we've published on another platform like their own blog. In short, why not both?

niplav

-3

Thanks for the detailed answer :-)

I list this ageing as a drawback of blogs because it is in practice, if not in theory (and the structure of blogs encourages this). Safe some exceptions (SSC for minor stylistic edits, Nintil) blogs are usually not maintained in any way. I guess my complaint is that it would be entirely possible for this maintenance to occur (unlike with tweets/newspapers/books), but it usually doesn't happen.

The structure of blogs doesn't encourage this either: usually arranged chronologically, not by topic, with a focus on novelty.

As for reading archives, there is certainly a style of blog that is in practice not linked very often in the long term (I'm thinking of Overcoming Bias or Marginal Revolution or Econlog).

I don't object to the posts being unfinished! That would be quite hypocritical of me :-) My argument is that here, the incentives are structured such that it's much more likely that people will start a blog because of the prize, and once it's over, they abandon it. I admit to the point that the prize will probably push marginal not-yet-bloggers over the edge.

One way to improve the prize might be to reward blogs that stay maintained years from now, but I don't think you make that point.

Interesting! I thought I was absolutely making that point, especially in this section and especially especially in this section.

Maybe I wasn't as clear here as I could have been, but I didn't want to discourage the bloggers on your site. But to be absolutely clear:

You list 1 person who doesn't have a public blog at all (!), 2 people whose blogs contain 0 content (!!), 2 more people who have written 3 blogposts each, and 3 more bloggers who actually have presentable blogs. That 3/8 blogs that could be in the category of "Flagship blog". Not, I think, a good ratio.

Yeah, you're probably right about this one.

Maybe it's that I think that a prize is not the perfect way to approach this: Prizes seem to be useful for very discrete problems that have a very clear solution criterion, and less useful for very long-term, open-ended endeavours (where something like certificates of impact or retroactive funding are more suited).

I should have been clearer about this: I think blogs are in an odd position in the discourse—there is much more discourse going on on Twitter/YouTube/Discord (?) than on blogs, and I believe that this will not change much (newsletters notwithstanding). On the Pareto-frontier of "produces long-term value" and "encourages discourse" I think blogs are at best in an odd spot, and encouraging good YouTube videos about effective altruism would be a much better way to enter the discourse (admittedly, this may be already happening, with the OpenPhil grant to Kurzgesagt).

salonium

I think my phrasing might have been unclear earlier – I'm Nick's colleague at Works in Progress, but not on the blog prize and don't have any involvement there.

1. I think that blogs fill a different purpose to many other formats you mention, but are also more feasible than writing long-form: for people who have other commitments, for writing short commentaries, for responding to topical events or stories, for publishing independent parts of a series in a way that makes each part more shareable. I'm sure you can think of many examples of each of these. I think it's not important for them to be searchable in the same way as it is for encyclopedia entries, although that's a bonus. YouTube videos are an alternative but they also have a different demographic audience and people who prefer to consume information in a different format, so they're not interchangeable in that way, in my opinion.

2. Those aren't quite the same as I suggested, which would be more like a prize for new blogs that are maintained in the longterm, or an additional prize for longterm maintenance.

3. (I'm not involved in this so don't have any comments)

4. I think those are a different sort of problem. Prizes for open ended endeavours – such as answering an unsolved problem – don't have a certainty of being resolved. Prizes for meeting some criteria, which involve essentially improving on existing methods, are more effective than those, as Anton Howes has written about here. But neither are the same as having a prize with the certainty that someone will win the prize out of the candidates that apply. A closer analogue of this prize is probably a competition.

Ramiro

Thanks for this post. Though I am not quite convinced by most of the reasoning, and I understand that FTX LTFF's awards aims to encourage new bloggers, instead of rewarding old successful ones (which would better be done by something like Impact Certificates, instead of awards), I really appreciate your points - particularly the critique to short content. I am afraid that blogging might too often be like preaching to the choir - and that journalism and books have a better shot at affecting new audiences (especially policy-makers).

niplav

Thanks, I'll take a closer look at impact certificates.

SamDumitriu

Small points:

"The 12 month age limit in the current prize makes little sense: If someone has been producing valuable content for a long time, they will probably continue doing so for quite a while. The current prize is unfairly excluding past effort."

Isn't the point to incentivise additional blogging activity? A $100,000 prize for Scott Alexander is unlikely to increase the quantity/quality of ACX/SSC posts.

Also, if through this prize you have developed the habit of blogging/built an audience, then I suspect you are likely to continue. Especially, given how easy it is to monetise a newsletter/blog today.

“Except for rare exceptions (Slate Star Codex being the most notable one), blogs usually don’t provide much long-term value—who cares enough to read the whole archive of a blog, unless the author is exceptionally skilled?”

The whole point is surely to find and encourage more SSCs, and within a few weeks, they seem to have had some real success with Hands and Cities/The Fitzwilliam based on your assessment.

Major point:

I think you significantly underrate the pedagogical value of a blog. Marginal Revolution has influenced the way I think about economics, longtermism, and effective altruism. But I can't easily point to the eureka post. I can think of the same with many other blogs. My knowledge of nominal GDP targeting, human capital signalling, zoning/spatial economics, optimal tax theory, etc. are all the result of reading blog after blog. I can't think of many, if any, books that have had the same impact on my worldview. Maybe I'm unusual on this front. But I suspect I'm not at all.

niplav

In the case of Scott Alexander as an example, it seems noteworthy that he was writing online from at least 2006 on his LiveJournal. This seems to be a common thread with many well-known bloggers: they build up a following over a long time, and hone their skills with repeated practice. My intuition is that the marginal Scott Alexander is more likely to already be writing online, and might have done so for a couple of years already, than to be on the fence whether to do any writing at all.

I'm not sure how easy it is to monetize a blog/newsletter today—afaik, most bloggers make not enough money to be worth it the additional hassles with taxes. But I might be wrong, I've never tried it.

Minor point: Hands and Cities/The Fitzwilliam were created before the prize, so I would put them in the "found" category, but I don't think Hands and Cities would technically qualify for the prize—it's older than 12 months (having been created October 2020). (The Fitzwilliam does, but only because Sam Enright switched platforms—his blog was started in november 2020, which would disqualify it for the prize; but that's where all the good content is!)

I definitely don't underestimate the pedagogical value of blogs! I've read a fair share of them over the years, and learned nearly everything I value knowing from them. My complaint is that blogs often capture the outer loop of a community in a way that is far from optimal, and that most blogs are just really inefficient (such as Marginal Revolution or Econlog or Overcoming Bias) because their information is just scattered over many posts and not fully organized anywhere, as opposed to sites such as Gwerns (other positive examples are Essays on Reducing Suffering, An Anarchist FAQ, Ethan Morse's site, Metaculus, XXIIVV, nintil, FAQs and of course Wikipedia).

Perhaps we'd need a third outer loop to distill findings from blogs into long content, then?

Comments

Nick Whitaker

Central points:

If I understand correctly, your core point is about the value of blogging relative to other forms of content. First on the object-level value of blogging you like:

Except for rare exceptions (Slate Star Codex being the most notable one), blogs usually don't provide much long-term value—who cares enough to read the whole archive of a blog, unless the author is exceptionally skilled?

I could see an EA newspaper as a good idea: having an institutionalized content & Discourse-producing machine à la Works in Progress or Jacobin will reach a different kind of people who demand the air of respectability of a newspaper

You make a similar point about books:

What advantage, if any, do blogs have over other media? Books can be (and usually are) far more comprehensive and high-status, instant messaging and social media are more engaging, but move from one fashionable topic onto another, and imageboards—well, we don't talk about imageboards here.

You make a good point about web content being lost, more generally. I think I’ll look into finding a way to preserve, either in print or on a website, the best content that the prize generates.

Some assorted comments:

Even in the case of Scott Alexander, additional effort had to be made to curate the best posts and order them by topic, something still sorely missing for blogs like Overcoming Bias and Marginal Revolution or econlog.

We’re curating posts via our Twitter feed and monthly newsletter.

But I looking over those lists, I don't get the impression that there's a dearth of blogs about effective altruism, but rather a lack of discoverability or aggregation (why doesn't everyone of those post their texts to the EA forum?).

There's also more experimental structures available: Don't give out prizes; instead perform credit assignment for past work.

This might be worth someone doing, but I see it as a separate project from this—the sort of credit an established writer deserves or could benefit from would be unique in comparison to new writers.

FTX Long Term Future Fund announced the Ideas Project: a $500,000 prize for new blogs.

As a point of clarification, this project was funded by FTX Future Fund, but isn’t connected beyond that.

As a final note: so far, we’ve been very happy with the response from the prize. It has already generated two very successful blog posts:

Erik Hoel’s Why We Stopped Making Einsteins
Dwarkesh Patel’s The Mystery of the Miracle Year

Moreover, I’ve been generally happy with how many applicants are coming in from outside the EA community and are beginning to blog about EA and longtermism.

Part of our approach is to try multiple ideas, in the expectation that some will fail and some will succeed. Thank you again for your comments.

Central points:

Some assorted comments:

Central points:

Some assorted comments:

[UNENDORSED] Reward Long Content

Epistemic Status

Critique

Blogs Are Short Content

Did Anybody Think About The Incentives?

Long-Term Prizes for New Blogs

Examples: “A Few Of Our Bloggers” Sections

Counter-Arguments

There's Not That Many Longtermist Blogs Around

Counter-counter-argument

Blogs are for Discourse

Counter-counter-argument

Suggestions for Improvement

Small Changes

Drop the Age Limit

Alternative Prizes

The Outstanding Wikipedians Prize

The Gwern Prize

Conclusion