Vaidehi and Amber—very helpful and insightful post, with good suggestions.
Another obstacle is that busy academics in EA-adjacent fields face several career incentives against forum posts—especially if they’re tenure-track, teaching big courses, or running big lab groups.
Every hour we spend writing EA Forum posts or comments is an hour that we’re not writing a grant application, a journal paper, or a book. Those count for our tenure, promotion, and annual reviews. Forum posts don’t really count for anything in our academic jobs.
How to overcome this? I’m not sure, but it might be good to brainstorm about how to lay down a smoother path from EA Forum posts to academic journal articles , e.g. for academics writing posts to flag them with something explicit like ‘This is a rough draft of some ideas I might turn into a journal article for journal X or Y; I’d especially welcome feedback that helps with that goal’.
Another option is to develop a couple of online academic journals called ‘Effective Altruism’ or ‘Longtermism’ or ‘Existential Risk Review’ or whatever, which would basically publish polished, referenced, peer-reviewed versions of EA posts. The article selection criteria and review process could be quite streamlined, but to most academics, if it looks like a journal, and has a journal-style website and submission procedure, and it’s genuinely peer-reviewed to some reasonable degree, then it’s considered a legit journal. Also, the editors of such journals could keep their eyes on which EA Forum posts look interesting, upvoted, and much commented-upon, and could invite the writers of those posts to revise their post into a contribution to the journal.
Basically, if I write a 9,000 word post for EA Forum, I can’t list it on my academic CV, and it counts for absolutely nothing in an academic career. But if I publish exactly the same post as a peer-reviewed article in an EA journal, it counts for a lot.
The downside is that formal EA academic journals would be a departure from the usual EA ethos of very fast, effective, interactive, community-wide discussion, because traditional journals involve a huge amount of wasted time and effort (non-public reviews, slow review times, slow publication times, journals behind paywalls, little opportunity for visible feedback appended to the articles, etc). So we’d need to develop some new models for ‘peer-reviewed academic articles’ that combine the best of EA Forum communication style with the career-building credibility of traditional journal articles.
There are probably some other downsides to this suggestion, e.g. it would require some pretty smart and dedicated EAs to devote a fair amount of time to being journal editors and reviewers. However, we do get academic credit for doing those jobs! And it would not be very expensive to top up an aspiring academic’s pay with an editorship supplement. (I know lots of junior academics who would happily spend 30 hours of month editing a new journal if they could make an extra $30k a year doing so.)
Vaidehi and Amber—very helpful and insightful post, with good suggestions.
Another obstacle is that busy academics in EA-adjacent fields face several career incentives against forum posts—especially if they’re tenure-track, teaching big courses, or running big lab groups.
Every hour we spend writing EA Forum posts or comments is an hour that we’re not writing a grant application, a journal paper, or a book. Those count for our tenure, promotion, and annual reviews. Forum posts don’t really count for anything in our academic jobs.
How to overcome this? I’m not sure, but it might be good to brainstorm about how to lay down a smoother path from EA Forum posts to academic journal articles , e.g. for academics writing posts to flag them with something explicit like ‘This is a rough draft of some ideas I might turn into a journal article for journal X or Y; I’d especially welcome feedback that helps with that goal’.
Another option is to develop a couple of online academic journals called ‘Effective Altruism’ or ‘Longtermism’ or ‘Existential Risk Review’ or whatever, which would basically publish polished, referenced, peer-reviewed versions of EA posts. The article selection criteria and review process could be quite streamlined, but to most academics, if it looks like a journal, and has a journal-style website and submission procedure, and it’s genuinely peer-reviewed to some reasonable degree, then it’s considered a legit journal. Also, the editors of such journals could keep their eyes on which EA Forum posts look interesting, upvoted, and much commented-upon, and could invite the writers of those posts to revise their post into a contribution to the journal.
Basically, if I write a 9,000 word post for EA Forum, I can’t list it on my academic CV, and it counts for absolutely nothing in an academic career. But if I publish exactly the same post as a peer-reviewed article in an EA journal, it counts for a lot.
The downside is that formal EA academic journals would be a departure from the usual EA ethos of very fast, effective, interactive, community-wide discussion, because traditional journals involve a huge amount of wasted time and effort (non-public reviews, slow review times, slow publication times, journals behind paywalls, little opportunity for visible feedback appended to the articles, etc). So we’d need to develop some new models for ‘peer-reviewed academic articles’ that combine the best of EA Forum communication style with the career-building credibility of traditional journal articles.
There are probably some other downsides to this suggestion, e.g. it would require some pretty smart and dedicated EAs to devote a fair amount of time to being journal editors and reviewers. However, we do get academic credit for doing those jobs! And it would not be very expensive to top up an aspiring academic’s pay with an editorship supplement. (I know lots of junior academics who would happily spend 30 hours of month editing a new journal if they could make an extra $30k a year doing so.)