How does the choice to publish MIRI’s main views as LessWrong posts rather than, say, articles in peer-reviewed journals or more pieces in the media, square with the need to convince a much broader audience (including decision-makers in particular)?
There is no button you can press on demand to publish an article in either a peer-reviewed journal or a mainstream media outlet.
Publishing pieces in the media (with minimal 3rd-party editing) is at least tractable on the scale of weeks, if you have a friendly journalist. The academic game is one to two orders of magnitude slower than that. If you want to communicate your views in real-time, you need to stick to platforms which allow that.
I do think media comms is a complementary strategy to direct comms (which MIRI has been using, to some degree). 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.
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.
Publishing pieces in the media (with minimal 3rd-party editing) is at least tractable on the scale of weeks, if you have a friendly journalist. The academic game is one to two orders of magnitude slower than that.
Given that MIRI has held these views for decades, I don’t quite see how the timeline for academic publication is of issue here.
How does the choice to publish MIRI’s main views as LessWrong posts rather than, say, articles in peer-reviewed journals or more pieces in the media, square with the need to convince a much broader audience (including decision-makers in particular)?
There is no button you can press on demand to publish an article in either a peer-reviewed journal or a mainstream media outlet.
Publishing pieces in the media (with minimal 3rd-party editing) is at least tractable on the scale of weeks, if you have a friendly journalist. The academic game is one to two orders of magnitude slower than that. If you want to communicate your views in real-time, you need to stick to platforms which allow that.
I do think media comms is a complementary strategy to direct comms (which MIRI has been using, to some degree). 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.
Given that MIRI has held these views for decades, I don’t quite see how the timeline for academic publication is of issue here.
We’ve also been doing media and we’re working on building capacity and gaining expertise to do more of it more effectively.
Publishing research in more traditional venues is also something we’ve been chatting about internally.