My rationale is that the point of research, unless you work at a lab, is that someone will read it and do something with it, if you publish to LW or X you would get faster feedback than on arxiv, where someone would only read it if they were doing a literature review or reading your resume. I imagine posting on arxiv works if you only care about references or building a resume, but for AI safety where speed matters waiting for citations is very slow. On LW I haven’t got technical advice but got questions and DMs about how someone used my research. And on X (I didn’t post but a collaborator did) we got technical advice. But the point is that even just a little indirect feedback is better than nothing.
Also another thing is that on papers one might be incentivized to only write technical results and leave out the informal “intuitions” which might end up being important, while LW has more of a “rubber duck debugging” effect.
My rationale is that the point of research, unless you work at a lab, is that someone will read it and do something with it, if you publish to LW or X you would get faster feedback than on arxiv, where someone would only read it if they were doing a literature review or reading your resume. I imagine posting on arxiv works if you only care about references or building a resume, but for AI safety where speed matters waiting for citations is very slow. On LW I haven’t got technical advice but got questions and DMs about how someone used my research. And on X (I didn’t post but a collaborator did) we got technical advice. But the point is that even just a little indirect feedback is better than nothing.
Also another thing is that on papers one might be incentivized to only write technical results and leave out the informal “intuitions” which might end up being important, while LW has more of a “rubber duck debugging” effect.