My reply, in the context of Singularity Institute research:

academic papers are a terrible way to discuss Friendly AI

Almost all FAI discussion happens outside of papers. It happens on mailing lists, forums like Less Wrong, email threads, personal conversations, etc. Yesterday I had a three hour discussion about FAI with Eliezer, Paul Christiano, and Anna Salamon where we covered more ground than we possibly could in a 20-page paper because there's so much background material that we all agree on but hasn't been written up. Nobody is waiting around for papers to come out to advance FAI theory; that's not what papers are for.

The time lag is huge

Most SI papers borrow heavily from material that originated from mailing list discussions or LW posts, and most peer-reviewed SI publications are posted in preprint version when they are written instead of months later when they are published by the academic publisher.

Most academic publications are inaccessible outside universities

All SI publications are published on our website, which is open to everyone. Same goes for all of Nick Bostrom's papers.

Virtually no one reads most academic publications.

Not via the journals and academic books themselves, no. That's why SI and FHI publish their papers to our own websites, where they are read by far more people than read them in the journals themselves.

It's very unusual to make successful philosophical arguments in paper form. I honestly can't think of a single instance where I was convinced of an informal, philosophical argument through an academic paper.

Don't generaltize from one example. I'm slowly surveying a good chunk of the "player characters" in the x-risk reduction space, and a good chunk of them were hugely influenced by Eliezer's two GCR chapters or by Bostrom's Astronomical Waste.

Papers don't have prestige outside a narrow subset of society.

But we care unusually much about that narrow subset of society. Also, I don't write papers so much for prestige as for the fact that it forces me to write in a way that is unusually clear, well-referenced (so that people can check what other people are saying about each individual element), well-structured, careful, and so on. In contrast, people read the Hanson-Yudkowsky debate and there are 5 different ways to interpret every other paragraph and no references by which to check anything and they have no idea what to think.

Getting people to read papers is difficult.

Not as hard as getting them to read The Sequences. Also, many of the people we care about (e.g. me) find it easier to read papers than to read a few blog posts, because papers tend to be clearer written and point the reader to related sources.

Academia selects for conformity.

No problem; there are plenty of journals that are likely to publish the kinds of papers SI publishes, and some already have.

What has been successful, so far, at bringing new people into our community? I haven't analyzed it in depth, but whatever the answer is, the priors are that it will work well again.

As said previously, most FAI discussion still happens outside of papers, but in fact it turns out that several important people did come through Eliezer's and Bostrom's papers.

it's important to note that our current ideas about Friendly AI ... were not developed through papers, but through in-person and mailing list discussions (primarily).

Same goes for all new areas of research. They're developed in person and on mailing lists long before they end up in journal articles.

Academic moderation is both very strict and badly run.

This is sometimes a problem, sometimes not. Communications of the ACM might reject the paper Nick Bostrom and I wrote for it because it's too philosophical and we don't have the space to respond to all common objections. So we may end up publishing it somewhere else. But with my two TSH chapters, all that happened was that I got a bunch of feedback, some of it useful and some of it not, so I incorporated the useful feedback and ignored the useless feedback and published significantly improved papers as a result. Other people I've spoken to about this have reported a similar spread of experiences.

Also see two of my previous posts on the topic, neither of which I agree with anymore: How SIAI could publish in mainstream cognitive science journals and Reasons for SIAI to not publish in mainstream journals.