I agree with Nesov and can offer a personal example here. I have a crypto design that was only "published" to a mailing list and on my homepage, and it still got eighty-some citations according to Google Scholar.

Also, just because you (Eliezer) don't like playing status games, doesn't mean it's not rational to play them. I hate status games too, but I can get away with ignoring them since I can work on things that interest me without needing external funding. Your plans, on the other hand, depend on donors, and most potential donors aren't AI or decision theory experts. What do they have to go on except status? What Nesov calls "a bureaucratic formality in the funding/hiring process" is actually a human approximation to group rationality, I think.

That's fair enough. In which case I can only answer that some things are higher-priority than others, which is why I'm writing that book and not a TDT paper.

Eh? TDT was explained in enough detail for Dai and some others to get it. It might not make sense to a lay audience but any philosophically competent fellow who's read the referenced books could reconstruct TDT out of Ingredients of Timeless Decision Theory.

I don't understand your concept of "shipping". There are many things I want to understand, some I understand already, a few of those that I've gone so far as to explain for the sake of people who are actually interested in them, and anything beyond that falls under the heading of PR and publicity.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I find that no matter how much I do, the people who previously told me that I hadn't yet achieved it, find something else that I haven't yet achieved to focus on. First it's "show you can invent something new", and then when you invent it, "show you can get it published in a journal", and if my priority schedule ever gets to the point I can do that, I have no doubt that the same sort of people will turn around and say "Anyone can publish a paper, where are the prominent scholars who support you?" and after that they will say "Does the whole field agree with you?" I have no personal taste for any part of this endless sequence except the part where I actually figure something out. TDT is rare in that I can talk about it openly and it looks like other people are actually making progress on it.

Responding to both Zack and Tiredoftrolls:

The similarity of DS3618 and my posts is coincidental. As for mormon1 or psycho also coincidental. The fact that I have done work with DARPA in no way connects me unless you suppose only one person has ever worked with DARPA nor does AI connect me.

For Tiredoftrolls specifically: The fact that you are blithely unaware of the possibility of and the reality of being smart enough to do a PhD without undergrad work is not my concern. The fact that I rail against EY and his lack of math should be something that more people do here. I do not agree with now nor have I ever agreed with ID or creationism or whatever you want to call that tripe.

To head off the obvious question why mormon2 because mormon and mormon1 was not available or didn't work. I thought about mormonpreacher but decided against it.