So what’s the fix here? If people think mailing lists work better than peer review, maybe an organization like OpenPhil should set up a mailing list for academics working on AI safety and award grants based on discussions on the mailing list? Academia has a lot of momentum behind it, and it seems more efficient to redirect that momentum than try to set up something new from scratch.
It’s probably not as simple as that. Part of why online discussions work as well as they do is probably that there’s no money riding on them. If funders start making grant decisions based on mailing list discussions, we might start seeing mailing lists becoming politicized to an uncomfortable and unproductive degree. I think for now the “fix” is just for people to monitor efforts to reform peer review in academia and adopt the ones that work well into the AI safety field, and also maintain a number of AI safety research institutions with diverse cultures instead of e.g. demanding that everyone publish in academic venues as a condition for funding.
So what’s the fix here? If people think mailing lists work better than peer review, maybe an organization like OpenPhil should set up a mailing list for academics working on AI safety and award grants based on discussions on the mailing list? Academia has a lot of momentum behind it, and it seems more efficient to redirect that momentum than try to set up something new from scratch.
It’s probably not as simple as that. Part of why online discussions work as well as they do is probably that there’s no money riding on them. If funders start making grant decisions based on mailing list discussions, we might start seeing mailing lists becoming politicized to an uncomfortable and unproductive degree. I think for now the “fix” is just for people to monitor efforts to reform peer review in academia and adopt the ones that work well into the AI safety field, and also maintain a number of AI safety research institutions with diverse cultures instead of e.g. demanding that everyone publish in academic venues as a condition for funding.