Previously: Online discussion is better than pre-publication peer review, Disincentives for participating on LW/AF

Recently I've noticed a cognitive dissonance in myself, where I can see that my best ideas have come from participating on various mailing lists and forums (such as cypherpunks, extropians, SL4, everything-list, LessWrong and AI Alignment Forum), and I've received a certain amount of recognition as a result, but when someone asks me what I actually do as an "independent researcher", I'm embarrassed to say that I mostly comment on other people's posts, participate in online discussions, and occasionally a new idea pops into my head and I write it down as a blog/forum post of my own. I guess that's because I imagine it doesn't fit most people's image of what a researcher's work consists of.

Once I noticed this, the tension is easy to resolve - in this post I'm going to proclaim/endorse forum participation (aka commenting) as a productive research strategy that I've managed to stumble upon, and recommend it to others (at least to try). Note that this is different from saying that forum/blog posts are a good way for a research community to communicate. It's about individually doing better as researchers.

Benefits of Forum Participation (FP)

FP takes little effort / will power

In other words it feels more like play than work, which means I rarely have issues with not wanting to do something that I think is important to do (i.e., akrasia), the only exception being that writing posts seems to take more effort so occasionally I spend my time writing comments when I perhaps should write posts instead. (This is the part of this post that I think may be least likely to generalize to other people. It could be that I'm an extreme outlier in finding FP so low-effort. However it might also be the case that it becomes low effort for most people to write comments once they've had enough practice in it.)

FP is a good way to notice missing background knowledge and provides incentives to learn missing knowledge

If you read a post with an intention to question or comment on it, it's pretty easy to notice that it assumes some background knowledge that you lack. The desire to not ask a "stupid" question or make a "stupid" comment provides powerful incentive to learn the miss knowledge.

FP is a good way to stay up to date on everyone else's latest research

It's often a g

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