Sorry, didn’t see this until now (didn’t get a notification, since it was a reply to Buck’s comment).
I’m guessing your take is like “I, Buck/Rohin, could write a review that was epistemically adequate, but I’m busy and don’t expect it to accomplish anything that useful.”
In some sense yes, but also, looking at posts I’ve commented on in the last ~6 months, I havewrittenseveraltechnicalreviews (and nontechnicalreviews). And these are only the cases where I wrote a comment that engaged in detail with the main point of the post; many of my other comments review specific claims and arguments within posts.
(I would be interested in quantifications of how valuable those reviews are to people other than the post authors. I’d think it is pretty low.)
I’d be very surprised if there weren’t at least some clusters of research that Rohin/Buck/etc are more optimistic about.
Yes, but they’re usually papers, not LessWrong posts, and I do give feedback to their authors—it just doesn’t happen publicly.
(And it would be maybe 10x more work to make it public, because (a) I have to now write the review to be understandable by people with wildly different backgrounds and (b) I would hold myself to a higher standard (imo correctly).)
(Indeed if you look at the reviews I linked above one common thread is that they are responding to specific people whose views I have some knowledge of, and the reviews are written with those people in mind as the audience.)
I also think “people incrementally do more review work each year as it builds momentum” is pretty realistic
I broadly agree with this and mostly feel like it is the sort of thing that is happening amongst the folks who are working on prosaic alignment.
If the highest review-voted work is controversial, I think it’s useful for the field orienting to know that it’s controversial. [...] if the alignment field is full of controversy and people who think each other are confused, I think this is a fairly reasonable fact to come out of any kind of review process
We already know this though? You have to isolate particular subclusters (Nate/Eliezer, shard theory folks, IDA/debate folks, etc) before it’s even plausible to find pieces of work that might be uncontroversial. We don’t need to go through a review effort to learn that.
(This is different from beliefs / opinions that are uncontroversial; there are lots of those.)
(And when I say that they are controversial, I mean that people will disagree significantly on whether it makes progress on alignment, or what the value of the work is; often the work will make technical claims that are uncontroversial. I do think it could be good to highlight which of the technical claims are controversial.)
I’m skeptical that the actual top-voted posts trigger this reaction.
What is “this reaction”?
If you mean “work being conceptually confused, or simply stating points rather than arguing for them, or being otherwise epistemically sketchy”, then I agree there are posts that don’t trigger this reaction (but that doesn’t seem too relevant to whether it is good to write reviews).
If you mean “reviews of these posts by a randomly selected alignment person would not be very useful”, then I do still have that reaction to every single one of those posts.
Sorry, didn’t see this until now (didn’t get a notification, since it was a reply to Buck’s comment).
In some sense yes, but also, looking at posts I’ve commented on in the last ~6 months, I have written several technical reviews (and nontechnical reviews). And these are only the cases where I wrote a comment that engaged in detail with the main point of the post; many of my other comments review specific claims and arguments within posts.
(I would be interested in quantifications of how valuable those reviews are to people other than the post authors. I’d think it is pretty low.)
Yes, but they’re usually papers, not LessWrong posts, and I do give feedback to their authors—it just doesn’t happen publicly.
(And it would be maybe 10x more work to make it public, because (a) I have to now write the review to be understandable by people with wildly different backgrounds and (b) I would hold myself to a higher standard (imo correctly).)
(Indeed if you look at the reviews I linked above one common thread is that they are responding to specific people whose views I have some knowledge of, and the reviews are written with those people in mind as the audience.)
I broadly agree with this and mostly feel like it is the sort of thing that is happening amongst the folks who are working on prosaic alignment.
We already know this though? You have to isolate particular subclusters (Nate/Eliezer, shard theory folks, IDA/debate folks, etc) before it’s even plausible to find pieces of work that might be uncontroversial. We don’t need to go through a review effort to learn that.
(This is different from beliefs / opinions that are uncontroversial; there are lots of those.)
(And when I say that they are controversial, I mean that people will disagree significantly on whether it makes progress on alignment, or what the value of the work is; often the work will make technical claims that are uncontroversial. I do think it could be good to highlight which of the technical claims are controversial.)
What is “this reaction”?
If you mean “work being conceptually confused, or simply stating points rather than arguing for them, or being otherwise epistemically sketchy”, then I agree there are posts that don’t trigger this reaction (but that doesn’t seem too relevant to whether it is good to write reviews).
If you mean “reviews of these posts by a randomly selected alignment person would not be very useful”, then I do still have that reaction to every single one of those posts.