Thanks for writing this, it was genuinely informative and interesting. I thought the description of urges as intrusive thoughts was especially helpful for developing empathy for addiction, and I think provides a useful contrast to the picture of irresistible urges, which I think dominates the common view. Hope the trajectory continues well, and kudos for sharing.

That's very helpful, thank you!

You note above that you encourage posting the entry as a forum post. Do have preferences regarding entries to be written primarily as research papers or as forum posts? I imagine this making some difference to style and referencing.

Thanks for a great answer! That's very helpful.

Thank you for organizing this! I have two questions. First, is there any update regarding when the official announcement will be made? Second, will essays submitted to other competitions, or for publication, be eligible? In other other words, is there any risk that submitting research elsewhere prior to the announcement of the competition will render it ineligible for the competition?

I'm not sure that this responds to the objection. Specifically, I think that we would need to clarify what is meant by 'risk' here. It sounds like what you're imagining is having credences over objective chances. The typical case of that would be not knowing whether a coin was biased or not, where the biased one would have (say) 90% chance of heads, and having a credence about whether the coin is biased. In such a case the hypotheses would be chance-statements, and it does make sense to have credences over them.

However, it's unclear to me whether we can view either the house example or AGI risk as involving objective chances. The most plausible interpretation of an objective chance usually involves a pretty clear stochastic causal mechanism (and some would limit real chances to quantum events). But if we don't want to allow talk of objective chances, then all the evidence you receive about Smith's electricity skills, and the probability that they built the house, is just more evidence to conditionalize your credences on, which will leave you with a new final credence over the proposition we ultimately care about: whether your house will burn down. If so, the levels wouldn't make sense, I think, and you should just multiply through.

I'm not sure how this affects the overall method and argument, but I do wonder whether it would be helpful to be more explicit what is on the respective axes of the graphs (e.g. the first bar chart), and what exactly is meant by risk, to avoid risks of equivocation.

Is it permitted to submit more than one entry if the entries are on different topics?

(Apologies if this has been answered somewhere already.)