Cynically,[2] not publishing is a really good way to create a moat around your research… People who want to work on that area have to come talk to you, and you can be a gatekeeper. And you don’t have to worry about somebody with more skills and experience coming along and trashing your work or out-competing you and rendering it obsolete...
I don’t understand this part. They don’t have to come talk to you, they just have to follow a link to Alignment Forum to read the research. And aren’t forum posts easier to read than papers on arXiv? I feel like if the moat exists anywhere it is around academic journals which often do not make their papers freely accessible, use more cryptic writing norms and insist on using PDF which are not as user-friendly to read as webpages.
To be sure, I’m not disagreeing with your overall point. It would be great if at least the best research from Alignment Forum/LessWrong were on arXiv or in journals, and I think you’re right we’re leaving value on the table there. I have wondered about if someone just made it their job to do these conversions/submissions for top alignment research on the forums, because there are probably economies of scale for one person doing this vs. every researcher interrupting their work flow to learn how to jump through the hoops of paper conversion/submission.
I don’t understand this part. They don’t have to come talk to you, they just have to follow a link to Alignment Forum to read the research. And aren’t forum posts easier to read than papers on arXiv? I feel like if the moat exists anywhere it is around academic journals which often do not make their papers freely accessible, use more cryptic writing norms and insist on using PDF which are not as user-friendly to read as webpages.
To be sure, I’m not disagreeing with your overall point. It would be great if at least the best research from Alignment Forum/LessWrong were on arXiv or in journals, and I think you’re right we’re leaving value on the table there. I have wondered about if someone just made it their job to do these conversions/submissions for top alignment research on the forums, because there are probably economies of scale for one person doing this vs. every researcher interrupting their work flow to learn how to jump through the hoops of paper conversion/submission.
A lot of work just isn’t made publicly available
When it is, it’s often in the form of ~100 page google docs
Academics have a number of good reasons to ignore things that don’t meet academic standards or rigor and presentation
In my experience people also often know their blog posts aren’t very good.