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IlyaShpitser comments on Open thread, January 25- February 1 - Less Wrong
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Even if you know that signaling is stupid, it doesn't escape the cost of not signaling.
It's a longstanding trope that Eliezer gets a lot of flack for having no formal education. Formal education is not the only way to gain knowledge, but it is a way of signaling knowledge, and it's not very easy to fake (Not so easy to fake that it falls apart as a credential on its own). Has anyone toyed around with the idea of sending him off to get a math degree somewhere? He might learn something, and if not it's a breezy recap of what he already knows. He comes out the other side without the eternal "has no formal education" tagline, and a whole new slew of acquaintances.
Now, I understand that there may be good reasons not to, and I'd very much appreciate someone pointing me to any previous discussion in which this has been ruled out. Otherwise, how feasible does it sound to crowdfund a "Here's your tuition and an extra sum of money to cover the opportunity cost of your time, I don't care how unfair it is that people won't take you seriously without credentials, go study something useful, make friends with your professors, and get out with the minimum number of credits possible" scholarship?
I think the bigger issue w/ people not taking EY seriously is he does not communicate (e.g. publish peer reviewed papers). Facebook stream of consciousness does not count. Conditional on great papers, credentials don't mean that much (otherwise people would never move up the academic status chain).
Yes it is too bad that writing things down clearly takes a long time.
Somehow I doubt I will ever persuade Eliezer to write in a style fit for a journal, but even still, I'll briefly mention that Eliezer is currently meeting with a "mathematical exposition aimed at math researchers" tutor. I don't know yet what the effects will be, but it seemed (to Eliezer and I) a worthwhile experiment.
Presumably if MIRI were awash with funding you'd pay experts to make papers out of Eliezer's work, freeing Eliezer up for other things?
That's basically what another of our ongoing experiments is.
True. It seems like the great-papers avenue is being pursued full-steam these days with MIRI, but I wonder if they're going to run out of low-hanging fruit to publish, or if mainstream academia is going to drag their heels replying to them.