Related: Why Academic Papers Are A Terrible Discussion Forum, Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation
During a recent discussion about (in part) academic peer review, some people defended peer review as necessary in academia, despite its flaws, for time management. Without it, they said, researchers would be overwhelmed by "cranks and incompetents and time-card-punchers" and "semi-serious people post ideas that have already been addressed or refuted in papers already". I replied that on online discussion forums, "it doesn't take a lot of effort to detect cranks and previously addressed ideas". I was prompted by Michael Arc and Stuart Armstrong to elaborate. Here's what I wrote in response:
My experience is with systems like LW. If an article is in my own specialty then I can judge it easily and make comments if it’s interesting, otherwise I look at its votes and other people’s comments to figure out whether it’s something I should pay more attention to. One advantage over peer review is that each specialist can see all the unfiltered work in their own field, and it only takes one person from all the specialists in a field to recognize that a work may be promising, then comment on it and draw others’ attentions. Another advantage is that nobody can make ill-considered comments without suffering personal consequences since everything is public. This seem like an obvious improvement over standard pre-publication peer review, for the purpose of filtering out bad work and focusing attention on promising work, and in practice works reasonably well on LW.
Apparently some people in academia have come to similar conclusions about how peer review is currently done and are trying to reform it in various ways, including switching to post-publication peer review (which seems very similar to what we do on forums like LW). However it's troubling (in a "civilizational inadequacy" sense) that academia is moving so slowly in that direction, despite the necessary enabling technology having been invented a decade or more ago.
Thank you for not giving up on this discussion! Many people have mentioned the intellectual benefits of peer review, but I just thought of another argument that might be new to you.
Many of us agree that solving problems together is great fun. But what if it's just rationalization? What if we really want to participate in some status economy, and will come up with smart things to say only if we're paid with status in return? I know it's not true for you, because you came up with UDT on your own. But it's definitely true for me. Posting something like this and getting no response feels very discouraging to me, even if the topic is exciting. And since I'm close to the top of the LW heap, I imagine it's even more true for others.
The question then becomes, how do we set up a status economy that will encourage research? Peer review is one way, because publications and citations are a status badge desired by many people. Participating in a forum like LW when it's "hot" and frequented by high status folks is another way, but unfortunately we don't have that anymore. From that perspective it's easy to see why the massively popular HPMOR didn't attract many new researchers to AI risk, but attracted people to HPMOR speculation and rational fic writing. People do follow their interests sometimes, but mostly they try to find venues to show off.
Of course you could be happy with a system that's optimized for people like you, with few status rewards. But I suspect you'd miss out on many good contributors (think of all the smart people who drifted away from LW in recent years). I'd prefer to have something more like a pyramid or funnel, with popular appeal on one end and intellectual progress on the other. Academic credibility (including peer review) could be a key part of that funnel for us, and a central forum like LW would also help a lot. There are probably other measures that could work in synergy with these.
I wonder if people at MIRI think the same way. In a sense, the funnel idea was there from the beginning, as "raising the sanity waterline". CFAR can also be seen as part of that. But these efforts are mostly aimed at outreach, and I'm not sure they ever consciously tried to build a mechanism for converting status to research. What would it take to build such a mechanism today?
I think this is a nice insight that hadn't occurred to me before.
From looking around on the LW 2.0 closed beta, it will have some features specifically designed to attract some of the people that left, like truste... (read more)