I’m surprised by two implicit claims you seem to be making.
And if your research is confined to arXiv or the Alignment Forum, it can be really hard to get any sort of deep feedback on it.
Is your experience that peer-review is a good source of deep feedback?
I have a few peer-reviewed physics publications. The only useful peer-review feedback I got was a reviewer who pointed out a typo in one of my equations. Everything else have been gatekeeping related comments, which is no surprise given that peer-review mainly is a status gate keeping function. I got the impression that others physicists have the same experience. Is it different in other fields?
If I where to try to solve the lack of feedback problem I would create something like this or this or this or this.
But maybe peer-review is great if done right, and physics is just doing it wrong? I’m open to this possibility.
Alignment Forum, which is not the best for openness to new ideas.
Do you think a journal would have lower bar for publication than AF? This seems probably wrong to me, but of course depends on who is making the decisions.
Or maybe you are just saying that having a second AI Safety publication platform would increase diversity? This does seem true to me.
In what way is AF not open to new ideas? I think it is a bit scary to publish a post here, but that has more to do with it being very public, and less to do with anything specific about the AF. But if AF has a culture of being non welcoming of new ideas, maybe we should fix that?
Update: I’m shifting towards thinking that peer-review could be good if done right, because:
I’m told it does work well in practice some times, creating a proof of concept.
I can see how being asked specifically to review some specific work could make me motivated to put in more work than I would do in a more public format (talk or blogpost).
In what way is AF not open to new ideas? I think it is a bit scary to publish a post here, but that has more to do with it being very public, and less to do with anything specific about the AF. But if AF has a culture of being non welcoming of new ideas, maybe we should fix that?
It’s not that easy to justify a post from a year ago, but I think that what I meant was that the alignment forum has a certain style of alignment research, and thus only reading it means you don’t see stuff like CHAI research or other works that are and aim at alignment without being shared that much on the AF.
I’m surprised by two implicit claims you seem to be making.
Is your experience that peer-review is a good source of deep feedback?
I have a few peer-reviewed physics publications. The only useful peer-review feedback I got was a reviewer who pointed out a typo in one of my equations. Everything else have been gatekeeping related comments, which is no surprise given that peer-review mainly is a status gate keeping function. I got the impression that others physicists have the same experience. Is it different in other fields?
If I where to try to solve the lack of feedback problem I would create something like this or this or this or this.
But maybe peer-review is great if done right, and physics is just doing it wrong? I’m open to this possibility.
Do you think a journal would have lower bar for publication than AF? This seems probably wrong to me, but of course depends on who is making the decisions.
Or maybe you are just saying that having a second AI Safety publication platform would increase diversity? This does seem true to me.
In what way is AF not open to new ideas? I think it is a bit scary to publish a post here, but that has more to do with it being very public, and less to do with anything specific about the AF. But if AF has a culture of being non welcoming of new ideas, maybe we should fix that?
Update: I’m shifting towards thinking that peer-review could be good if done right, because:
I’m told it does work well in practice some times, creating a proof of concept.
I can see how being asked specifically to review some specific work could make me motivated to put in more work than I would do in a more public format (talk or blogpost).
It’s not that easy to justify a post from a year ago, but I think that what I meant was that the alignment forum has a certain style of alignment research, and thus only reading it means you don’t see stuff like CHAI research or other works that are and aim at alignment without being shared that much on the AF.