As another published academic, I’ll add another downside and another upside:
My downside is that the tone of academic articles tends to incredibly dry. Humour and conversational tone are not unheard of, but are generally frowned upon, and it can make papers a bummer to read and write. Casual audiences will be less likely to read your work as a result. To remedy this, it might be worth doing a summary post of your work that is more accessible to general audiences.
My upside is that peer review really forces you to engage with the existing literature on a subject. Yes, this is often time consuming and painful (which is why most people wouldn’t do it otherwise), but it a) forces you to back up your claims, and b) forces you to check what’s actually been done before. EA (and especially Rationalists) can have a bad habit of not invented here syndrome, reinventing the wheel when very smart people have already spent years working on a subject.
It gets paid back as well: next time an academic is looking at the same subject, they are forced to consider your research and perspective, and may add or expand on it in a way you never thought to do.
As another published academic, I’ll add another downside and another upside:
My downside is that the tone of academic articles tends to incredibly dry. Humour and conversational tone are not unheard of, but are generally frowned upon, and it can make papers a bummer to read and write. Casual audiences will be less likely to read your work as a result. To remedy this, it might be worth doing a summary post of your work that is more accessible to general audiences.
My upside is that peer review really forces you to engage with the existing literature on a subject. Yes, this is often time consuming and painful (which is why most people wouldn’t do it otherwise), but it a) forces you to back up your claims, and b) forces you to check what’s actually been done before. EA (and especially Rationalists) can have a bad habit of not invented here syndrome, reinventing the wheel when very smart people have already spent years working on a subject.
It gets paid back as well: next time an academic is looking at the same subject, they are forced to consider your research and perspective, and may add or expand on it in a way you never thought to do.