What’s stopping them is that by not playing by conventional rules, they will not get official kudos in the field. People like Bostrom, etc. who do play by the rules will. One might not care about official kudos per se, but one should—people with official kudos are the ones with actual sway on policy, etc. Important people read Bostrom’s book, no one important reads EY’s stuff.
I think this is the vital thing: not ‘does academia work perfectly’, but ‘can you work more effectively THROUGH academia’. Don’t know for sure the answer is yes, but it definitely seems like one key way to influence policy. Decision makers in politics and elsewhere aren’t going to spend all their time looking at each field in detail, they’ll trust whatever systems exist in each field to produce people who seem qualified to give a qualified opinion.
What’s stopping them is that by not playing by conventional rules, they will not get official kudos in the field. People like Bostrom, etc. who do play by the rules will. One might not care about official kudos per se, but one should—people with official kudos are the ones with actual sway on policy, etc. Important people read Bostrom’s book, no one important reads EY’s stuff.
I think this is the vital thing: not ‘does academia work perfectly’, but ‘can you work more effectively THROUGH academia’. Don’t know for sure the answer is yes, but it definitely seems like one key way to influence policy. Decision makers in politics and elsewhere aren’t going to spend all their time looking at each field in detail, they’ll trust whatever systems exist in each field to produce people who seem qualified to give a qualified opinion.