Knowing about your biases does not automatically make you immune to them, and saying "but I told them the bias I was exploiting" doesn't excuse you from responsibility for knowingly exploiting a bias.
I didn't claim automatic immunity, I said "can". While deontologists might object to "knowingly exploiting a bias" full stop and virtue ethicists might claim that a person who does such things is probably vicious, a consequentialist must determine whether, in this case, using the Dark Arts might lead to better or worse outcomes (which seems non-obvious to me).
When I showed up at the Singularity Institute, I was surprised to find that 30-60 papers' worth of material was lying around in blog posts, mailing list discussions, and people's heads — but it had never been written up in clear, well-referenced academic articles.
Why is this so? Writing such articles has many clear benefits:
Of course, there are costs to writing articles, too. The single biggest cost is staff time / opportunity cost. An article like "Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import" can require anywhere from 150-800 person-hours. That is 150-800 paid hours during which our staff is not doing other critically important things that collectively have a bigger positive impact than a single academic article is likely to have.
So Louie Helm and Nick Beckstead and I sat down and asked, "Is there a way we can buy these articles without such an egregious cost?"
We think there might be. Basically, we suspect that most of the work involved in writing these articles can be outsourced. Here's the process we have in mind:
If this method works, each paper may require only 50-150 hours of SI staff time per paper — a dramatic improvement! But this method has additional benefits:
This is, after all, more similar to how many papers would be produced by university departments, in which a senior researcher works with a team of students to produce papers.
Feedback? Interest?
(Not exactly the same, but see also the Polymath Project.)