Yes, Lukeprog seems mostly academically likeable, and the text snippet in the comments on this page from the paper he's prepping is more like what I would hope for.
I was using "philosophy" as a byword for far, unlike, and what Luke may be closer to. The specific ref is that it's what Luke used (I believe) before explicitly just replacing with "Cog Sci".
Anyway, I don't disagree with you much (within the range of my having misinterpreted), so I'll skip the meta-talking and just try to say what I am thinking.
I try to imagine myself as a reviewer of a Singularity Institute paper. I'm not an expert in that field, so I'm trying to translate myself, and probably failing. Nonetheless, sometimes I would refuse to review the paper. In the SI institute's case, basically that would happen because I thought the journal wasn't worth my time or the intro was such a turn-off, I decided the paper was not worth deciphering. I'm assuming, in these cases, that I'm a well meaning but weak reviewer in the sense that this is not my exact area of expertise. In these cases, I really need a good intro, and typically I would skim all the cited papers in the intro once I committed to reviewing. Reading those papers should make me feel like the paper I then review is an incremental improvement over that collection. People talk about "least publishable units" a lot, but there's probably also a most publishable unit. With rare exceptions. If it's one of those exceptions, then it should be published in Science, say (or another high-profile general interest journal).
So, I now imagine myself as a researcher at the Singularity Institute (again, badly translating myself). I have ideas I think are pretty good that are also a little too novel and maybe a little too contrarian. I have a problem in that the points are important enough to be high-profile, but my evidence is maybe not correspondingly fantastic (no definitive experiments, etc); in other words, I'm coming out of left field, a bit. I'd first submit to quite high profile journals that occasionally publish wacky stuff (PNAS is the classic example). One such publication would be a huge deal, and failure often leads to PLoS ONE (which is why its impact factor is relatively high despite its acceptance rate being very high; not perfectly on topic for you, depending). I would simultaneously put out papers that had lesser but utterly inarguable results in appropriately specialist journals; this would convince people I was sane (but would probably diverge pretty strongly from my true interests). So, this may seem a bit like what the Singularity Institute is doing (publishing more mainstream articles outside FAI), but the bar seems (to me, in my ignorance of this area) set too low. A lot of really low impact articles do not help. I'd look for weird areas of overlap where I could throw my best idea into a rigorous framework and get published because the framework is sane and the wackiness of the premise is then fine (two Singularity-ish examples I've seen: economics of upload, computational neuroscience of uploads)
If this is all totally redundant to your thinking already, no worries, and I won't be shocked. Cheers and small apologies to Luke.
I try to imagine myself as a reviewer of a Singularity Institute paper. I'm not an expert in that field, so I'm trying to translate myself, and probably failing.
To become an expert in the field you will have to at least once build an AI going FOOM or instead read Omohundro's 'The Basic AI Drives' paper and cite it as corroborative evidence for any of your claims suffering from a lack of knowledge of how actual AGI is to come about :-)
I've spent so much time in the cogsci literature that I know the LW approach to rationality is basically the mainstream cogsci approach to rationality (plus some extra stuff about, e.g., language), but... do other people not know this? Do people one step removed from LessWrong — say, in the 'atheist' and 'skeptic' communities — not know this? If this is causing credibility problems in our broader community, it'd be relatively easy to show people that Less Wrong is not, in fact, a "fringe" approach to rationality.
For example, here's Oaksford & Chater in the second chapter to the (excellent) new Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, the one on normative systems of rationality:
Is it meaningful to attempt to develop a general theory of rationality at all? We might tentatively suggest that it is a prima facie sign of irrationality to believe in alien abduction, or to will a sports team to win in order to increase their chance of victory. But these views or actions might be entirely rational, given suitably nonstandard background beliefs about other alien activity and the general efficacy of psychic powers. Irrationality may, though, be ascribed if there is a clash between a particular belief or behavior and such background assumptions. Thus, a thorough-going physicalist may, perhaps, be accused of irrationality if she simultaneously believes in psychic powers. A theory of rationality cannot, therefore, be viewed as clarifying either what people should believe or how people should act—but it can determine whether beliefs and behaviors are compatible. Similarly, a theory of rational choice cannot determine whether it is rational to smoke or to exercise daily; but it might clarify whether a particular choice is compatible with other beliefs and choices.
From this viewpoint, normative theories can be viewed as clarifying conditions of consistency… Logic can be viewed as studying the notion of consistency over beliefs. Probability… studies consistency over degrees of belief. Rational choice theory studies the consistency of beliefs and values with choices.
They go on to clarify that by probability they mean Bayesian probability theory, and by rational choice theory they mean Bayesian decision theory. You'll get the same account in the textbooks on the cogsci of rationality, e.g. Thinking and Deciding or Rational Choice in an Uncertain World.