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A'ight, one final 2021 Review Roundup post – awarding prizes. I had a week to look over the results. The primary way I ranked posts was by a weighted score, which gave 1000+ karma users 3x the voting weight. Here was the distribution of votes:

I basically see two strong outlier posts at the top of the ranking, followed by a cluster of 6-7 posts, followed by a smooth tail of posts that were pretty good without any clear cutoff.

Post Prizes

Gold Prize Posts

Two posts stood noticeably out above all the others, which I'm awarding $800 to.

Strong Evidence is Common by Mark Xu
“PR” is corrosive; “reputation” is not, by Anna Salamon.
- I also particularly liked Akash's review.

Silver Prize Posts

And the second (eyeballed) cluster of posts, each getting $600, is:

Your Cheerful Price, by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
- This notably had the most reviews – a lot of people wanted to weigh in and say "this personally helped me", often with some notes or nuance.
ARC's first technical report: Eliciting Latent Knowledge by Paul Christiano, Ajeya Cotra and Mark Xu.
This Can't Go On by Holden Karnofsky
Rationalism before the Sequences, by Eric S Raymond.
- I liked this review by A Ray who noted one source of value here is the extensive bibliography.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options, by Duncan Sabien
Fun with +12 OOMs of Compute, by Daniel Kokotajlo.
- Nostalgebraist's review was particularly interesting.
What 2026 looks like by Daniel Kokotajlo
Ngo and Yudkowsky on alignment difficulty. This didn't naturally cluster into the same group of vote-totals as the other silver-prizes, but it was in the top 10. I think the post was fairly hard to read, and didn't have easily digestible takeaways, but nonetheless I think this kicked off some of the most important conversations in the AI Alignment space and warrants inclusion in this tier.

Bronze Prize Posts

Although there's not a clear clustering after this point, when I eyeball how important the next several posts were, it seems to me appropriate to give $400 to each of:

How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor, by John Wentworth
Science in a High-Dimensional World by John Wentworth
How factories were made safe by Jason Crawford
Cryonics signup guide #1: Overview by Mingyuan
Making Vaccine by John Wentworth
Taboo "Outside View" by Daniel Ko...

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