My understanding is that peer review is somewhat less common in computer science fields because research is often published in conference proceedings without extensive peer review. Of course, you could say that the conference itself is doing the vetting here, and computer science often has the advantage of easy replication by running the supplied code. This applies to some of the papers people are providing… but certainly not all of them.
Peer review is far from perfect, but if something isn’t peer reviewed I won’t fully trust it unless it’s gone through an equivalent amount of vetting by other means. I mean, I won’t fully trust a paper that has gone through external peer review, so I certainly won’t immediately trust something that has gone through nothing.
I’m working on an article about this, but I consider the lack of sufficient vetting to be one of the biggest epistemological problems in EA.
Actually, computer science conferences are peer reviewed. They play a similar role as journals in other fields. I think it’s just a historical curiosity that it’s conferences rather than journals that are the prestigious places to publish in CS!
Of course, this doesn’t change the overall picture of some AI work and much AI safety work not being peer reviewed.
My understanding is that peer review is somewhat less common in computer science fields because research is often published in conference proceedings without extensive peer review. Of course, you could say that the conference itself is doing the vetting here, and computer science often has the advantage of easy replication by running the supplied code. This applies to some of the papers people are providing… but certainly not all of them.
Peer review is far from perfect, but if something isn’t peer reviewed I won’t fully trust it unless it’s gone through an equivalent amount of vetting by other means. I mean, I won’t fully trust a paper that has gone through external peer review, so I certainly won’t immediately trust something that has gone through nothing.
I’m working on an article about this, but I consider the lack of sufficient vetting to be one of the biggest epistemological problems in EA.
Actually, computer science conferences are peer reviewed. They play a similar role as journals in other fields. I think it’s just a historical curiosity that it’s conferences rather than journals that are the prestigious places to publish in CS!
Of course, this doesn’t change the overall picture of some AI work and much AI safety work not being peer reviewed.