Congrats to everyone!
Feedback for next year though: To be honest, including Eliezer Yudkowsky in the competition feels a bit silly given that he founded the site. But I don't know, maybe he feels that the existence of this competition would greatly increase his motivation to actually write things here?
Eliezer should be in the competition so everyone else on LW has a financial incentive to blow him out of the water with the quality of their posts.
I don't know. It feels a bit like competing against Taylor Swift in a song competition on a Taylor Swift fan site. That's an exaggeration of course, but I don't think it's too much of one.
I do agree that it feels somewhat weird. But it's worth noting he didn't actually win the top spot. I also think it's fairly important for the competition to be grounded in "we're actually trying to produce the best stuff", and for us to have an evaluation process that's actually checking what the best stuff is.
I think the metaphor here is if Taylor Swift goes and founds a community about songwriting, aiming at writing literally the best songs in the world because the fate of the world is at stake and there's an alien god asking us to Show It What We Got. And, well, yeah it's hard to compete with Taylor Swift but man it's even harder to compete with reality, and that's what the competition is actually about.
I mostly don't think it seems weird. He got 2 of the top 10 slots. That's like, a fine amount. He might not even get any this year.
Also, I noticed that only some of the prize-winning reviews were linked. Is there a reason for this?
I think this was mostly "I was busy and there were a lot of reviews, and I ended up linking to the ones where the user had a couple high-profile reviews, and less to the ones where they had done a largeish number of reviews that were difficult to track down", for which I am sorry. :(
About a year ago, LessWrong held it's first annual review, where we looked over the best posts from 2018. The LessWrong team offered $2000 in prizes for the top post authors, and (up to) $2000 in prizes for the best reviews of those posts.
For our top post authors, we have decided to award.... *drumroll*
For Reviews, there are three tiers of prize ($300, $200, $100):
Not for reviews, but for discussion in the review, $50 apiece goes to Richard Ngo and Rohin Shah.
Prizewinners, we'll reach out to you in a week or so to give you your prize-money.
Congratulations to all the winners!