Working on papers submitted to peer-reviewed scientific journals is not marketing but research.
If SIAI wants to build some credibility then it needs some publications in scientific journals. Doing so could help to ensure further funding and development of actual implementations.
I think that it is a very good idea to first formulate and publish the theoretical basis for the work they intend to do, rather than just saying: we need money to develop component X of our friendly AI.
Of course a possible outcome will be that the scientific community will deem the research shallow, unoriginal or unrealistic to implement. However, it is necessary to publish the ideas before they can be reviewed.
So my take on this is that SIAI is merely asking for a chance to demonstrate their skills rather than for blind commitment.
On October 29th, I asked Eliezer and the LW community if they were interested in doing a video Q&A. Eliezer agreed and a majority of commenters were in favor of the idea, so on November 11th, I created a thread where LWers could submit questions. Dozens of questions were asked, generating a total of over 650 comments. The questions were then ranked using the LW voting system.
On December 11th, Eliezer filmed his replies to the top questions (skipping some), and sent me the videos on December 22nd. Because voting continued after that date, the order of the top questions in the original thread has changed a bit, but you can find the original question for each video (and the discussion it generated, if any) by following the links below.
Thanks to Eliezer and everybody who participated.
Update: If you prefer to download the videos, they are available here (800 MB, .wmw format, sort the files by 'date created').
Link to question #1.
Link to question #2.
Link to question #3.
Link to question #4.
Eliezer Yudkowsky - Less Wrong Q&A (5/30) from MikeGR on Vimeo.
Link to question #5.
(Video #5 is on Vimeo because Youtube doesn't accept videos longer than 10 minutes and I only found out after uploading about a dozen. I would gladly have put them all on Vimeo, but there's a 500 MB/week upload limit and these videos add up to over 800 MB.)
Link to question #6.
Link to question #7.
Link to question #8.
Link to question #9.
Link to question #10.
Link to question #11.
Link to question #12.
Link to question #13.
Link to question #14.
Link to question #15.
Link to question #16.
Link to question #17.
Link to question #18.
Link to question #19.
Link to question #20.
Link to question #21.
Link to question #22.
Link to question #23.
Link to question #24.
Link to question #25.
Link to question #26.
Link to question #27.
Link to question #28.
Link to question #29.
Link to question #30.
If anything is wrong with the videos or links, let me know in the comments or via private message.