army1987 comments on Why Academic Papers Are A Terrible Discussion Forum - Less Wrong

25 Post author: alyssavance 20 June 2012 06:15PM

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Comment author: lukeprog 20 June 2012 08:28:57PM *  8 points [-]

Your first two questions ask about evidence that I already said I'm not in a position to share yet. I know that's unsatisfying, but... are your priors on my claims being true really very low? Famous scientists, especially, are barraged with a few purported unifications of quantum theory and relativity every month, and "Did they bother to pass peer review?" is a pretty useful heuristic for them. When you visualize a busy academic receiving CFAI from one person, and The Singularity and Machine Ethics from somebody else, which one do you think they're more likely to read and take seriously, and why? (Feel free to take this as a rhetorical question.)

A lot of your points are criticisms of blog posts, like "a lot of them don't have citations", or "a lot of them are poorly organized". These are true in many cases. However, if SIAI is considering whether to publish some given idea in paper or blog post form, they could simply spend the (fairly small) effort to write a blog post which was well organized and had citations, thereby making these problems moot.

The effort required may be much larger than you think. Eliezer finds it very difficult to do that kind of work, for example. (Which is why his papers still read like long blog posts, and include very few citations. CEV even contains zero citations, despite re-treading ground that has been discussed by philosophers for centuries, as "The Singularity and Machine Ethics" shows.)

And if you've done all that work, then why not also tweak it for use in a scholarly AI risk wiki, and then combine it with a couple other wiki articles into a paper?

I've heard many stories from academics of authors spending huge amounts of time and effort trying to get stuff published. In the most recent case, which I discussed with a grad student just a few hours ago, it took hundreds of hours, over a full year. If it's usually easy to get around that sort of thing, by just publishing in a different journal, why don't more academics do so?

Because their career depends on satisfying their advisors, or on getting published in particular journals. SI researchers' careers don't depend on investing hundreds of hours making revisions. If publishing in a certain journal is going to require 30 hours of revisions that don't actually improve the paper in our eyes, then we aren't going to bother publishing in that journal.

Comment author: [deleted] 21 June 2012 09:12:01AM 0 points [-]

When you visualize a busy academic receiving CFAI from one person, and The Singularity and Machine Ethics from somebody else

Both links go to the same place.

Comment author: lukeprog 21 June 2012 05:28:47PM 0 points [-]

Fixed, thanks.