I guess I can see how it might be too much effort if you’re trying to participate in online discussions in addition to academia (and your main effort by necessity has to be in academia because that’s your livelihood). If you only had to do the former though, it doesn’t seem that bad, at least in my experience. (Would appreciate a link to Scott Aaronson’s post if you can find it.)
EDIT: Maybe as a busy academic, just look at posts that are already highly upvoted or have positive comments from people you trust. Is it still too much effort if you did that?
It takes a lot of effort, so much so that academics just gave up (Scott Aaronson had a post on this). I gave up doing this here.
I agree that peer review has a lot of problems, though.
I guess I can see how it might be too much effort if you’re trying to participate in online discussions in addition to academia (and your main effort by necessity has to be in academia because that’s your livelihood). If you only had to do the former though, it doesn’t seem that bad, at least in my experience. (Would appreciate a link to Scott Aaronson’s post if you can find it.)
EDIT: Maybe as a busy academic, just look at posts that are already highly upvoted or have positive comments from people you trust. Is it still too much effort if you did that?
Point 2 is related to your edit, and is important to LW2: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/pds/online_discussion_is_better_than_prepublication/dwwr