Another potential difference is that you don’t get do-overs: the more senior person can’t later write a paper that follows exactly the same idea but that’s written to a much higher standard, because there’s more of a requirement that each paper brings original ideas.
Hmm taking a step back, I wonder if the crux here is that you believe(?) that the natural output for research is paper-shaped^, whereas I would guess that this would be the exception rather than the norm, especially for a field that does not have many very strong non-EA institutions/people (which I naively would guess to be true of EA-style TAI governance).
This might be a naive question, but why is it relevant/important to get papers published if you’re trying to do impactful research? From the outside, it seems unlikely that all or most good research is in paper form, especially in a field like (EA) AI governance where (if I understand it correctly) the most important path to impact (other than career/skills development) is likely through improving decision quality for <10(?) actors.
If you are instead trying to play the academia/prestige game, wouldn’t it make more sense to optimize for that over direct impact? So instead of focusing on high-quality research on important topics, write the highest-quality (by academic standards) paper you can in a hot/publishable/citable topic and direction.
^ This is a relevant distinction because originality is much more important in journal articles than other publication formats, you absolutely can write a blog post that covers the same general idea as somebody else but better, and AFAIK there’s nothing stopping a think tank from “revising” a white paper covering the same general point but with much better arguments.
Hmm taking a step back, I wonder if the crux here is that you believe(?) that the natural output for research is paper-shaped^, whereas I would guess that this would be the exception rather than the norm, especially for a field that does not have many very strong non-EA institutions/people (which I naively would guess to be true of EA-style TAI governance).
This might be a naive question, but why is it relevant/important to get papers published if you’re trying to do impactful research? From the outside, it seems unlikely that all or most good research is in paper form, especially in a field like (EA) AI governance where (if I understand it correctly) the most important path to impact (other than career/skills development) is likely through improving decision quality for <10(?) actors.
If you are instead trying to play the academia/prestige game, wouldn’t it make more sense to optimize for that over direct impact? So instead of focusing on high-quality research on important topics, write the highest-quality (by academic standards) paper you can in a hot/publishable/citable topic and direction.
^ This is a relevant distinction because originality is much more important in journal articles than other publication formats, you absolutely can write a blog post that covers the same general idea as somebody else but better, and AFAIK there’s nothing stopping a think tank from “revising” a white paper covering the same general point but with much better arguments.
One reason to publish papers (specifically) about AI governance (specifically) is if you want to build an academic field working on AI governance. This is good both to get more brainpower and to get more people (who otherwise wouldn’t read EA research) to take the research seriously, in the long term. C.f. the last section here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/42reWndoTEhFqu6T8/ai-governance-opportunity-and-theory-of-impact