You know what I will say, yall should stay in your lane, re: incentives.
I don't understand this. Please clarify? (Urban dictionary says "stay in your lane" means mind your own business, which is exactly what we're doing, namely trying to figure out what direction to push our own culture.)
and publish basically nothing
He's publishing mostly on Arbital these days. See this and this for examples. I'm not sure why he doesn't at least post links elsewhere to draw people's attention though. Hopefully that will change after LW 2.0 goes live.
So as far as the mainstream is concerned his footprint does not exist.
I'm not sure what you mean by this either. Certainly the people who work on AI safety at Berkeley, OpenAI, and DeepMind all know about Eliezer and MIRI's approach to AI alignment, even if they don't agree that it's the most promising one. Are you saying that if Eliezer had published in academia, they'd be more inclined to follow that approach, as opposed to the more ML-based approaches that they're currently following?
MIRI has the same problem everyone else has: if it grows it will become a non-aligned ecosystem
I think having "aligned" human institutions is too much to hope for. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, perhaps the best we can do is to have different bad incentives / inefficiencies in different institutions so that they're able to reach different sets of low hanging fruit, and not all suffer from the same collective blind spots.
Please clarify?
I get super annoyed by criticisms of mainstream academia out of the rationality-sphere, I suppose (mostly because it falls into either stuff that every academic already knows about that's very hard to fix, or just vastly misinformed stuff). Roko the other day on facebook: "academia produces nothing of value."
I'm not sure what you mean by this either.
I suppose what I mean by this is that academia functions on a dual currency/kudos system. "Academic kudos" is acquired by playing certain formal games within mainstre...
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.