I do agree we’re leaving lots of value on the table and even causing active harm by not writing things up well, at least for Arxiv, for a bunch of reasons including some of the ones listed here.
I thought the response to “Your Posts Should be On Arxiv” was “Arxiv mods have stated pretty explicitly they do not want your posts on Arxiv” (unless you have jumped through a bunch of both effort-hoops and formatting hoops to make them feel like a natural member of the Arxiv-paper class)
Yeah, I didn’t mean to be responding to that point one way or another. It just seemed bad to be linking to a post that (seems to still?) communicate false things, without flagging those false things. (post still says “it can be as easy as creating a pdf of your post”, which my impression maybe technically true on rare occasions but basically false in practice?)
This feels like a really adversarial quote. Concretely, the post says:
Sometimes, I think getting your forum post ready for submission can be as easy as creating a pdf of your post (although if your post was written in LaTeX, they’ll want the tex file). If everything goes well, the submission takes less than an hour.
However, if your post doesn’t look like a research article, you might have to format it more like one (and even then it’s not guaranteed to get in, see this comment thread).
This looks correct to me; there are LW posts that already basically look like papers. And within the class of LW posts that should be on arXiv at all, which is the target audience of my post, posts that basically look like papers aren’t vanishingly rare.
However, if your post doesn’t look like a research article, you might have to format it more like one (and even then it’s not guaranteed to get in, see this comment thread).
I interpreted this as saying something superficial about style, rather than “if your post does not represent 100+ hours of research work it’s probably not a good fit for archive.” If that’s what you meant I think the post could be edited to make that more clear.
If the opening section of your essay made it more clear which posts it was talking about I’d probably endorse it (although I’m not super familiar with the nuances of arXiv gatekeeping so am mostly going off the collective response in the comment section)
I wrote this post. I don’t understand where your claim (“Arxiv mods have stated pretty explicitly they do not want your posts on Arxiv”) is coming from.
I think this point was really overstated. I get the impression the rejected papers were basically turned into the arXiv format as fast as possible and so it was easy for the mods to tell this. However, I’ve seen submissions to cs.LG like this and this that are clearly from the alignment community. These posts are also not stellar by standards of preprint formatting, and were not rejected, apparently
There have also been plenty of other adapatations, ones which were not low-effort. I worked on 2, the Goodhart’s law paper and a paper with Issa Rice on HRAD. Both were very significantly rewritten and expanded into “real” preprints, but I think it was clearly worthwhile.
See also: Your posts should be on Arxiv
I do agree we’re leaving lots of value on the table and even causing active harm by not writing things up well, at least for Arxiv, for a bunch of reasons including some of the ones listed here.
I thought the response to “Your Posts Should be On Arxiv” was “Arxiv mods have stated pretty explicitly they do not want your posts on Arxiv” (unless you have jumped through a bunch of both effort-hoops and formatting hoops to make them feel like a natural member of the Arxiv-paper class)
And I think the post here is saying that you should jump through those effort and editing hoops far more often than currently occurs.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to be responding to that point one way or another. It just seemed bad to be linking to a post that (seems to still?) communicate false things, without flagging those false things. (post still says “it can be as easy as creating a pdf of your post”, which my impression maybe technically true on rare occasions but basically false in practice?)
That seems right.
This feels like a really adversarial quote. Concretely, the post says:
This looks correct to me; there are LW posts that already basically look like papers. And within the class of LW posts that should be on arXiv at all, which is the target audience of my post, posts that basically look like papers aren’t vanishingly rare.
I interpreted this as saying something superficial about style, rather than “if your post does not represent 100+ hours of research work it’s probably not a good fit for archive.” If that’s what you meant I think the post could be edited to make that more clear.
If the opening section of your essay made it more clear which posts it was talking about I’d probably endorse it (although I’m not super familiar with the nuances of arXiv gatekeeping so am mostly going off the collective response in the comment section)
I wrote this post. I don’t understand where your claim (“Arxiv mods have stated pretty explicitly they do not want your posts on Arxiv”) is coming from.
I think this point was really overstated. I get the impression the rejected papers were basically turned into the arXiv format as fast as possible and so it was easy for the mods to tell this. However, I’ve seen submissions to cs.LG like this and this that are clearly from the alignment community. These posts are also not stellar by standards of preprint formatting, and were not rejected, apparently
There have also been plenty of other adapatations, ones which were not low-effort. I worked on 2, the Goodhart’s law paper and a paper with Issa Rice on HRAD. Both were very significantly rewritten and expanded into “real” preprints, but I think it was clearly worthwhile.