I think to some extent this is a chicken-and-egg problem. If there were already a venue for only polished accounts of ideas, with a scope that included mine, and if I posted there I’d be much more likely to get people like Wei Dai criticizing my stuff, I’d be much happier to post there. I think the way to do this might be to reach out on the individual level and coordinate a specific group of people, including people willing to serve as editorial staff, of something more like an academic journal.
To some extent the old Overcoming Bias was like an academic journal for the nascent rationality community, with Robin Hanson as editor. The comments weren’t uniformly high quality, but the posts were great. However, it was still dual-purpose, serving both as a venue for high-quality exploration and things more like finished products. We need at least one of each, probably multiple exploration venues.
Slightly meta: I believe “Chicken-and-egg problem” is what we call a coordination problem with exactly 2 moving parts. (Or at least, that’s how I was framing this problem internally when writing the OP.) And yeah, when you say ‘reach out on the individual level’, I think that’s definitely a part of how to get it started—I think of it as adding free energy and doing things that don’t scale, which is often the correct way to jump to a new Nash equilibrium. (Though I want to think carefully about the initial conditions before initiating, so that the new state unfolds well in the long run.)
On the object level, I feel like you underestimated the desired number of exploration venues by a couple orders of magnitude. Analogous perhaps to the ratio of math departments to math journals, say. Or subgroups-within-math-departments, to math journals.
This would be really cool. Perhaps the greatest danger is that such a journal might suck all the energy out of Less Wrong and/or the EA forum if it were to release articles too regularly?
I think to some extent this is a chicken-and-egg problem. If there were already a venue for only polished accounts of ideas, with a scope that included mine, and if I posted there I’d be much more likely to get people like Wei Dai criticizing my stuff, I’d be much happier to post there. I think the way to do this might be to reach out on the individual level and coordinate a specific group of people, including people willing to serve as editorial staff, of something more like an academic journal.
To some extent the old Overcoming Bias was like an academic journal for the nascent rationality community, with Robin Hanson as editor. The comments weren’t uniformly high quality, but the posts were great. However, it was still dual-purpose, serving both as a venue for high-quality exploration and things more like finished products. We need at least one of each, probably multiple exploration venues.
Slightly meta: I believe “Chicken-and-egg problem” is what we call a coordination problem with exactly 2 moving parts. (Or at least, that’s how I was framing this problem internally when writing the OP.) And yeah, when you say ‘reach out on the individual level’, I think that’s definitely a part of how to get it started—I think of it as adding free energy and doing things that don’t scale, which is often the correct way to jump to a new Nash equilibrium. (Though I want to think carefully about the initial conditions before initiating, so that the new state unfolds well in the long run.)
On the object level, I feel like you underestimated the desired number of exploration venues by a couple orders of magnitude. Analogous perhaps to the ratio of math departments to math journals, say. Or subgroups-within-math-departments, to math journals.
This would be really cool. Perhaps the greatest danger is that such a journal might suck all the energy out of Less Wrong and/or the EA forum if it were to release articles too regularly?