EA - Winners of the EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest by Lizka

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Winners of the EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest, published by Lizka on October 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. We’re excited to announce the winners of the EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest. We had 341 submissions and are awarding $120,000 in prizes to our top 31 entries. We set out with the primary goals of identifying errors in existing work in effective altruism, stress-testing important ideas, raising the average quality of criticism (in part to create examples for future work), and supporting a culture of openness and critical thinking. We’re pleased about the progress submissions to this contest made, though there’s certainly still lots of work to be done. We think the winners of the contest are both valuable in their own right as criticisms, and as helpful examples of different types of critique. We had a large judging panel. Not all panelists read every piece (even among the winners), and some pieces have won prizes despite being read by relatively few people or having some controversy over their value. Particularly when looking at challenges to the basic frameworks of effective altruism, there can be cases where there is significant uncertainty about whether a contribution is ultimately helpful. But if it is, it’s often very important, so we didn’t want to exclude cases like this from winning prizes when they had some strong advocates. You can read about our process and overall thoughts on the contest at the end of this post. Prize distribution logistics are also discussed at the end of this post. An overview of the winners Top prizes [see more] A critical review of GiveWell's 2022 cost-effectiveness model and Methods for improving uncertainty analysis in EA cost-effectiveness models by Alex Bates (Froolow) ($25,000 total) Biological Anchors external review by Jennifer Lin ($20,000) Population Ethics without Axiology: A Framework by Lukas Gloor ($20,000) Second prizes (runners up) — $5,000 each [see more] Are you really in a race? The Cautionary Tales of Szilárd and Ellsberg by Haydn Belfield Against Anthropic Shadow by Toby Crisford An Evaluation of Animal Charity Evaluators by eaanonymous1234 Red Teaming CEA’s Community Building Work by AnonymousEAForumAccount A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform by Nuño Sempere Effective altruism in the garden of ends by Tyler Alterman Notes on effective altruism by Michael Nielsen Honorable mentions — $1,000 for each of the 20 in this category [see more] Top prizes A critical review of GiveWell's 2022 cost-effectiveness model and Methods for improving uncertainty analysis in EA cost-effectiveness models by Alex Bates (Froolow) ($25,000 prize in total) We’re awarding a total of $25,000 for these two submissions by the same author covering similar ground. A critical review of GiveWell’s 2022 cost-effectiveness model is a deep dive into the strengths and weaknesses of GiveWell’s analysis, and how it might be improved. Methods for improving uncertainty analysis in EA cost-effectiveness models extracts some more generalizable lessons. Summary of A critical review of GiveWell’s 2022 cost-effectiveness model: The submission replicates GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness models, critiques their design and structure, notes some minor errors, and suggests some broader takeaways for GiveWell and effective altruism. The author emphasizes GiveWell’s lack of uncertainty analysis as a weakness, notes issues with the models’ architectures (external data sources appear as inputs on many different levels of the model, elements from a given level in the model “grab” from others on that level, etc.), and discusses ways in which communication of the models is confusing. Overall, though, the author seems impressed with GiveWell’s work. You can also see the author’s own picture-based summary of thei...