All of mkmkmk's Comments + Replies

The large prize size and other contest choices might be more principled and have a better explanation than it appears.   So my headcanon about what is going on is that they are aiming for the “tail value” of a strong publication. So the prize amount is to get writing of that quality.  Getting into these places could be incredibly valuable. But this access is not fungible by design (you shouldn’t be able to buy it with money). This explains why they don’t say this explicitly.  So that's basically a response to your comment. Maybe to see this another way, imagine telling someone, “Hey, want to get a prize for writing? It just has to be an interesting blog that is consistent with this thing called EA.” A lot of talented people might perk up and ask, what’s “interesting/EA”? I think that could be super valuable if well executed. With this amount, you can go into any community of writers in the world with that story. More headcanon: * Another model is to use many small grants. But there's less splashy publicity. It would also be harder to allocate smaller prizes, so many would go to existing EAs or their friends. That has a different theory of impact and seems less virtuous. * A big prize is easier to observe, and the results give an unusually clear feedback loop for the project. It's bad to add a lot of pressure to a new project, but the ceiling for the possible winners is high. * For disciplines/domains with lower funding, this sort of prize could be paradoxically more appropriate. It’s harder to see many other fields where this amount would be the top prize. Another reason the OP might be shy, is that “tail value” and “flow through effects” are spicier motivations, for a new project, even if the EV is large.   There are a lot of things going on, and maybe what I wrote above isn’t the heart of your question. If you care about the bigger issue of comp and history, there are some principled answers. But I'm just some random dude and it's not clear it's appro

I've been in EA for 5+years and I agree this is a shocking amount of money. Even assuming that starting a blog is useful, I doubt that the incentive for someone to start a blog would be substantially different if the prize was let's say $15,000