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.
I think this is a nice insight that hadn't occurred to me before.
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 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 trusted authors can have their own areas where they exercise greater moderation power. This will also hopefully prevent new high status folks from leaving later.
I want to echo Dr_Manhattan and suggest that you take a look at LW2 beta and see what more can be done there to support your ideas. They are planning to launch on November 1 with an open beta a few weeks before, so major new features are probably out (at least until later), but things like changes to the karma or moderation system are probably still possible. The people behind LW2 are planning to write a post soon about the karma changes and ask for review/suggestions so you can hold off your ideas until then as well.
Academic credibility (including peer review) could be a key part of that funnel for us
How do you envision this? Like if we get results published in academia, that will draw more people into this community? This makes me a bit worried that if being published in academia is the ultimate marker of status in this community, that'll discourage people who have a distaste for academia (like me when I first joined). May still be a good idea though...
Yeah, I agree that the connection to academia shouldn't be the end goal, but it could be one of several factors that help.
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.