Winners of the Creative Writing Contest

From the announcement of the contest: 

Stories are a key part of how EA has grown since its beginning. Some examples:

• The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle, which probably did more to launch the EA movement than any other piece of writing
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which introduced many readers to important ideas about good epistemics and AI risk
• 500 Million, But Not A Single One More, which has been read aloud in conference halls for hundreds of people and is one of the first essays in the EA Handbook
• The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, which seems to have been extremely influential for one of the world’s most prominent entrepreneurs (who has since given tens of millions of dollars to various EA-adjacent causes)

There’s a lot of “rational fiction” out there — stories about people thinking clearly to solve problems. Many of those stories also incorporate EA themes. But they tend to reveal their ideas over dozens of chapters, making it hard for someone to pick up on those themes unless they’re willing to dedicate many hours of time.

We’d like to see creative work that “gets to the point” quickly — stories that, in a single sitting, might inspire someone to find out more about effective altruism, whether that means the whole movement or a single idea/cause area/intervention.

So we’re running a contest! We want to see you write or share stories and creative nonfiction with EA themes. And we’ve added prizes to sweeten the deal.^[1]

Notably, your work doesn’t have to use EA jargon or cover a popular cause area, as long as it gets across the core idea of "using evidence and reason to help others effectively".