Yes, Lukeprog seems mostly academically likeable, and the text snippet in the comments on this page from the paper he’s prepping is more like what I would hope for.
I was using “philosophy” as a byword for far, unlike, and what Luke may be closer to. The specific ref is that it’s what Luke used (I believe) before explicitly just replacing with “Cog Sci”.
Anyway, I don’t disagree with you much (within the range of my having misinterpreted), so I’ll skip the meta-talking and just try to say what I am thinking.
I try to imagine myself as a reviewer of a Singularity Institute paper. I’m not an expert in that field, so I’m trying to translate myself, and probably failing. Nonetheless, sometimes I would refuse to review the paper. In the SI institute’s case, basically that would happen because I thought the journal wasn’t worth my time or the intro was such a turn-off, I decided the paper was not worth deciphering. I’m assuming, in these cases, that I’m a well meaning but weak reviewer in the sense that this is not my exact area of expertise. In these cases, I really need a good intro, and typically I would skim all the cited papers in the intro once I committed to reviewing. Reading those papers should make me feel like the paper I then review is an incremental improvement over that collection. People talk about “least publishable units” a lot, but there’s probably also a most publishable unit. With rare exceptions. If it’s one of those exceptions, then it should be published in Science, say (or another high-profile general interest journal).
So, I now imagine myself as a researcher at the Singularity Institute (again, badly translating myself). I have ideas I think are pretty good that are also a little too novel and maybe a little too contrarian. I have a problem in that the points are important enough to be high-profile, but my evidence is maybe not correspondingly fantastic (no definitive experiments, etc); in other words, I’m coming out of left field, a bit. I’d first submit to quite high profile journals that occasionally publish wacky stuff (PNAS is the classic example). One such publication would be a huge deal, and failure often leads to PLoS ONE (which is why its impact factor is relatively high despite its acceptance rate being very high; not perfectly on topic for you, depending). I would simultaneously put out papers that had lesser but utterly inarguable results in appropriately specialist journals; this would convince people I was sane (but would probably diverge pretty strongly from my true interests). So, this may seem a bit like what the Singularity Institute is doing (publishing more mainstream articles outside FAI), but the bar seems (to me, in my ignorance of this area) set too low. A lot of really low impact articles do not help. I’d look for weird areas of overlap where I could throw my best idea into a rigorous framework and get published because the framework is sane and the wackiness of the premise is then fine (two Singularity-ish examples I’ve seen: economics of upload, computational neuroscience of uploads)
If this is all totally redundant to your thinking already, no worries, and I won’t be shocked. Cheers and small apologies to Luke.
Something dumb people say an awful lot: If only you read blank, you’d agree with me.
It’s also something LessWrongians say a lot. Even the better breed of cat hereabouts has this tendency. The top post is something of an example, without the usual implied normative: If only other people read LessWrong more closely, they’d realize it’s mainstream (in parts). Luke, kindly, places the onus on himself, doubtless as an act of (instrumentally rational) noblesse oblige.
That’s background. I feel it is background most LessWrongians are somewhat aware of. I feel Luke’s attitude in the top post (placing the onus on himself) is an extension of the principle that lightly or easily telling people to read the sequences is dopey.
So, now to the converation.
Romeo: People are idiots. Me: You’re an idiot. Romeo: You can’t read. Me: Just who isn’t reading, you or me? Or more generally, LessWrong or the rest of the world? Seems like a common problem.
I enjoyed casting myself in the part of “the rest of the world”.