But it’s difficult to escape the fact that information posted on LW, the EA forum, or Twitter (by certain accounts) makes its way down the grapevine to relevant decision-makers surprisingly often, given how little overhead is involved.
This isn’t necessarily a good thing, if the information being passed down is flawed or incorrect, due to the lack of rigor involved.
The judges of quality for peer reviewed papers are domain level experts who contribute their relevant expertise. The judges of quality for blog posts are a collection of random people on the internet, often few of which have relevant expertise and who are often unable to distinguish between actual truth and convincing sounding BS.
The ideal situation would be to write peer reviewed papers and then communicate their results on blogs, but this won’t be a good fit for a lot of things, given that some fields are not well established and some points are too small or obvious to be worth writing up academically.
This isn’t necessarily a good thing, if the information being passed down is flawed or incorrect, due to the lack of rigor involved.
The judges of quality for peer reviewed papers are domain level experts who contribute their relevant expertise. The judges of quality for blog posts are a collection of random people on the internet, often few of which have relevant expertise and who are often unable to distinguish between actual truth and convincing sounding BS.
The ideal situation would be to write peer reviewed papers and then communicate their results on blogs, but this won’t be a good fit for a lot of things, given that some fields are not well established and some points are too small or obvious to be worth writing up academically.