Hi Luke! Thanks for replying. Quick counterpoints:

• Probably most importantly, what do you view as the purpose of SIAI's publishing papers? Or, if there are multiple purposes, which do you see as the most important?

• If in-person conversations (despite all their limitations) are still the much preferred way to discuss things, instead of papers, that's evidence in favor of papers being bad. (It's also evidence of SIAI being effective, which is great, but that isn't the point under discussion.) If papers were a good discussion forum, there'd be fewer conversations and more papers.

• If, as you say, the main audience for papers written by SIAI is through SIAI's website and not through the journals themselves, why spend the time and expense and hassle to write them up in journal form? Why not just publish them directly on the site, in (probably) a much more readable format?

• The problem with conformity in academia isn't that it's impossible to find someplace to publish. You can always find somewhere, given enough effort. The problem is that a) it restricts the sorts of things you can say, b) restricts you, in many cases, to an awkward way of wording things (which I believe you've written about at http://lesswrong.com/lw/4r1/how_siai_could_publish_in_mainstream_cognitive/), and c) it makes academia a less fertile ground for recruiting people. Those are probably in addition to other problems.

• I agree that we care more about prestige within academia than we do about prestige in almost all similarly sized groups. However, it seems fairly strongly that we aren't going to have that much prestige in academia anyway, given that the main prestige mechanism is elite university affiliations, and most of us don't have those.

• Which people have come through Eliezer and Bostrom's papers? (That isn't a rhetorical question; given how large our community is compared to Dunbar's number, it's likely there is someone and it's also likely I've missed them, and they might be really cool people to know.)

• Using my own personal experiences is generalizing from a single dataset, and that's indeed biased in some ways. However, it's very far from generalizing from a single example; it's generalizing from the many thousands of arguments that I've read and accepted at some point in the past. It's still obviously better to use multiple datasets, if you can get them.... but in this case they're difficult to get, because it's hard to know where your friends got all their beliefs.

• Sure, it's easier to get people to read a single paper than all of the Sequences. But that's a totally unfair comparison: the Sequences are much, much longer, and it's always easier to read something shorter than something longer. How hard would it be to get someone to read a paper, vs. a single Sequence post of equal length, or a bunch of Sequence posts that sum to an equal length?

• If all new areas of research are developed through in-person conversations and mailing lists, that doesn't imply that papers are a good way to do FAI research; it implies that papers are a bad way to do all those other kinds of research. If what you say is true, then my argument equally well applies to those fields too.

• Of course, there are some instances of academic moderation being net good rather than net bad. However, to quote of your earlier arguments, "don't generalize from one example". I'm sure that there are some well-moderated journals, just as I'm sure there are Mafia bosses who are really nice helpful guys. However, that doesn't imply that hanging out with Mafia bosses is a good idea.