What percentage of “EA intellectual work” is done as part of the standard academic process? From your perspective, how far away is it from the optimal distribution?
I’d guess that somewhere between 10% and 30% is done as part of something that we’d naturally call the “standard academic process” ?
I think that there are some good reasons for deviation, and some things that academic norms provide that we may be missing out on.
I think academia is significantly set up as a competitive process, where part of the game is to polish your idea and present it in the best light. This means:
It encourages you to care about getting credit, and people are discouraged from freely-sharing early stage ideas that they might turn into papers, for fear of being scooped
This seems broadly bad
It encourages people to put in the time to properly investigate the ins and outs of an idea, and find the clearest framing of it, making it more efficient for later readers
This seems broadly good
I’d like it if we could work out how to get more of the good here with less of the bad. That could mean doing a larger proportion of things within some version of the academic process, or could mean working out other ways to get the benefits.
There’s also a credentialing benefit to doing things within the academic process. I think this is non-negligible, but also that if you do really high-quality work anywhere, people will observe this and come, so I don’t think it’s necessary to rest on that credentialing.
What percentage of “EA intellectual work” is done as part of the standard academic process? From your perspective, how far away is it from the optimal distribution?
Gee, this is really hard to measure.
I’d guess that somewhere between 10% and 30% is done as part of something that we’d naturally call the “standard academic process” ?
I think that there are some good reasons for deviation, and some things that academic norms provide that we may be missing out on.
I think academia is significantly set up as a competitive process, where part of the game is to polish your idea and present it in the best light. This means:
It encourages you to care about getting credit, and people are discouraged from freely-sharing early stage ideas that they might turn into papers, for fear of being scooped
This seems broadly bad
It encourages people to put in the time to properly investigate the ins and outs of an idea, and find the clearest framing of it, making it more efficient for later readers
This seems broadly good
I’d like it if we could work out how to get more of the good here with less of the bad. That could mean doing a larger proportion of things within some version of the academic process, or could mean working out other ways to get the benefits.
There’s also a credentialing benefit to doing things within the academic process. I think this is non-negligible, but also that if you do really high-quality work anywhere, people will observe this and come, so I don’t think it’s necessary to rest on that credentialing.