A number of EA orgs have invested considerable time and effort into the conventional peer review process and found it disappointing for a number of reasons. If you think it would be an effective method of persuasion it would be good to hear some evidence of this. My impression is that this is not the case; the power of institutional gatekeepers has fallen dramatically over time, and what matters is producing high quality work. (And the fact that your recommended provider appears to be a scam seems like evidence against as well!)
The philosopher David Thorstad has an exemplary post on peer review, with strong evidence and arguments for its effectiveness — both as a means of increasing research quality and as a means of persuasion of expert communities.
Why did the EA organizations find it disappointing? I’m afraid you’re going to say they didn’t like that peer reviewers didn’t agree with them, and therefore they decided the peer reviewers were wrong, and peer review is a waste of time.
Not all EA organizations are consistently producing high-quality work. That’s part of the problem. For instance, the problems with the METR time horizons graph are numerous and severe. Many of them were entirely avoidable, and should have at least been better disclosed. I can’t get over that most of the longer tasks, on which the 2025 segment of the graph depends, don’t have empirically measured human baselines. The baselines are just guesses by the authors. Surely if you don’t even bother to measure data that doesn’t qualify as high-quality? This also wasn’t disclosed until 2026 — a major omission.
What I would recommend to people at this point is to not believe any of METR’s claims, research, or analysis going forward unless and until it can be independently verified by a reliable source. You don’t know if METR’s data is data or just guesstimates. You don’t know that the typical best practices of scientific research have been followed. You don’t know that flaws or shortcomings or limitations that METR is aware of will be disclosed with sufficient emphasis, consistently across all communications.
Very few people outside of EA consider EA’s idiosyncratic ideas to be serious and credible. What is the strategy for gaining credibility outside the EA echo chamber? Right now, it seems to be a media strategy that counts on people not fact checking EA’s messaging. This could work — a lot of misinformation misleads a lot of people a lot of the time — but it also might rightly damage EA’s reputation if people eventually learn EA is not telling them the truth. It’s a risky strategy that depends on being able to fool people, rather than intellectually convince them.
80,000 Hours’ abysmal video on AI 2027 is an example of this. It misinforms its audience about AI experts’ views and insinuates there is a consensus in support of AI 2027’s core claims that doesn’t exist. Either 80,000 Hours knew this and misled its audience anyway, or it didn’t do a proper fact check of its script before producing the video. I was a lifelong fan of 80,000 Hours until that video. Now I no longer trust 80,000 Hours about anything. Not even career advice. I was in the top 1% or 0.1% of biggest supporters of 80,000 Hours. Now I’ve been completely polarized in the opposite direction. This is anecdotal, but, also, most people become angry when they feel as if they’ve been misled. It’s not a stretch to think this strategy could really blow up in an ugly way.
In my opinion, EA is aggressively burning down its reputation and risks being correctly labelled as a purveyor of misinformation. Steps should be taken to at least stop the bleeding.
I don’t know for sure that peer review would help move idiosyncratic EA ideas outside the EA echo chamber. I also don’t know that there isn’t a better strategy for doing so. It just seems like a good idea to me.
The economist Tyler Cowen was actually the first person who I heard suggest this. I believe he was talking about AGI/AGI safety. It was on a podcast, either his or someone else’s. I remember he said: publish, publish, publish.
The provider I originally mentioned in this post definitely looks like a shady company that I definitely wouldn’t recommend. I was wrong to mention that company and, in retrospect, the signs were obvious that it wasn’t a trustworthy company. I only gave it a few cursory glances. I’m grateful to Clara for giving it a second look and realizing that both Google Gemini 3.1 Pro (with “Extended thinking”) and I had been duped by some devious SEO.
The trustworthiness of that provider — or indeed any similar company offering a convenient, off-the-shelf service — is beside the point of whether peer review is a good idea or not. There are scam companies selling fake Ozempic online. That has nothing to do with whether genuine Ozempic is a good drug or not.
Why did the EA organizations find it disappointing? I’m afraid you’re going to say they didn’t like that peer reviewers didn’t agree with them
Nope. There have been a variety of issues. One is speed, and another is the difficulty of finding relevant experts. Thinking back to MIRI’s experience with the Damascus paper, my recollection (possibly incorrect) is their final conclusion was the getting published in a good journal took a lot of time, didn’t really improve the fundamental quality of the work much, and also didn’t yield a lot of prestige/outreach benefits.
Very few people outside of EA consider EA’s idiosyncratic ideas to be serious and credible. What is the strategy for gaining credibility outside the EA echo chamber? Right now, it seems to be a media strategy that counts on people not fact checking EA’s messaging.
Come on, I understand you have objections to METR’s methodology—though to my knowledge you have not published those objections in a peer-reviewed journal—but blithely accusing them of a deliberate strategy of misinformation seems low.
A number of EA orgs have invested considerable time and effort into the conventional peer review process and found it disappointing for a number of reasons. If you think it would be an effective method of persuasion it would be good to hear some evidence of this. My impression is that this is not the case; the power of institutional gatekeepers has fallen dramatically over time, and what matters is producing high quality work. (And the fact that your recommended provider appears to be a scam seems like evidence against as well!)
The philosopher David Thorstad has an exemplary post on peer review, with strong evidence and arguments for its effectiveness — both as a means of increasing research quality and as a means of persuasion of expert communities.
Why did the EA organizations find it disappointing? I’m afraid you’re going to say they didn’t like that peer reviewers didn’t agree with them, and therefore they decided the peer reviewers were wrong, and peer review is a waste of time.
Not all EA organizations are consistently producing high-quality work. That’s part of the problem. For instance, the problems with the METR time horizons graph are numerous and severe. Many of them were entirely avoidable, and should have at least been better disclosed. I can’t get over that most of the longer tasks, on which the 2025 segment of the graph depends, don’t have empirically measured human baselines. The baselines are just guesses by the authors. Surely if you don’t even bother to measure data that doesn’t qualify as high-quality? This also wasn’t disclosed until 2026 — a major omission.
What I would recommend to people at this point is to not believe any of METR’s claims, research, or analysis going forward unless and until it can be independently verified by a reliable source. You don’t know if METR’s data is data or just guesstimates. You don’t know that the typical best practices of scientific research have been followed. You don’t know that flaws or shortcomings or limitations that METR is aware of will be disclosed with sufficient emphasis, consistently across all communications.
Very few people outside of EA consider EA’s idiosyncratic ideas to be serious and credible. What is the strategy for gaining credibility outside the EA echo chamber? Right now, it seems to be a media strategy that counts on people not fact checking EA’s messaging. This could work — a lot of misinformation misleads a lot of people a lot of the time — but it also might rightly damage EA’s reputation if people eventually learn EA is not telling them the truth. It’s a risky strategy that depends on being able to fool people, rather than intellectually convince them.
80,000 Hours’ abysmal video on AI 2027 is an example of this. It misinforms its audience about AI experts’ views and insinuates there is a consensus in support of AI 2027’s core claims that doesn’t exist. Either 80,000 Hours knew this and misled its audience anyway, or it didn’t do a proper fact check of its script before producing the video. I was a lifelong fan of 80,000 Hours until that video. Now I no longer trust 80,000 Hours about anything. Not even career advice. I was in the top 1% or 0.1% of biggest supporters of 80,000 Hours. Now I’ve been completely polarized in the opposite direction. This is anecdotal, but, also, most people become angry when they feel as if they’ve been misled. It’s not a stretch to think this strategy could really blow up in an ugly way.
In my opinion, EA is aggressively burning down its reputation and risks being correctly labelled as a purveyor of misinformation. Steps should be taken to at least stop the bleeding.
I don’t know for sure that peer review would help move idiosyncratic EA ideas outside the EA echo chamber. I also don’t know that there isn’t a better strategy for doing so. It just seems like a good idea to me.
The economist Tyler Cowen was actually the first person who I heard suggest this. I believe he was talking about AGI/AGI safety. It was on a podcast, either his or someone else’s. I remember he said: publish, publish, publish.
The provider I originally mentioned in this post definitely looks like a shady company that I definitely wouldn’t recommend. I was wrong to mention that company and, in retrospect, the signs were obvious that it wasn’t a trustworthy company. I only gave it a few cursory glances. I’m grateful to Clara for giving it a second look and realizing that both Google Gemini 3.1 Pro (with “Extended thinking”) and I had been duped by some devious SEO.
The trustworthiness of that provider — or indeed any similar company offering a convenient, off-the-shelf service — is beside the point of whether peer review is a good idea or not. There are scam companies selling fake Ozempic online. That has nothing to do with whether genuine Ozempic is a good drug or not.
Nope. There have been a variety of issues. One is speed, and another is the difficulty of finding relevant experts. Thinking back to MIRI’s experience with the Damascus paper, my recollection (possibly incorrect) is their final conclusion was the getting published in a good journal took a lot of time, didn’t really improve the fundamental quality of the work much, and also didn’t yield a lot of prestige/outreach benefits.
Come on, I understand you have objections to METR’s methodology—though to my knowledge you have not published those objections in a peer-reviewed journal—but blithely accusing them of a deliberate strategy of misinformation seems low.