Previously: Online discussion is better than pre-publication peer review, Disincentives for participating on LW/AF
Recently I've noticed a cognitive dissonance in myself, where I can see that my best ideas have come from participating on various mailing lists and forums (such as cypherpunks, extropians, SL4, everything-list, LessWrong and AI Alignment Forum), and I've received a certain amount of recognition as a result, but when someone asks me what I actually do as an "independent researcher", I'm embarrassed to say that I mostly comment on other people's posts, participate in online discussions, and occasionally a new idea pops into my head and I write it down as a blog/forum post of my own. I guess that's because I imagine it doesn't fit most people's image of what a researcher's work consists of.
Once I noticed this, the tension is easy to resolve - in this post I'm going to proclaim/endorse forum participation (aka commenting) as a productive research strategy that I've managed to stumble upon, and recommend it to others (at least to try). Note that this is different from saying that forum/blog posts are a good way for a research community to communicate. It's about individually doing better as researchers.
Benefits of Forum Participation (FP)
FP takes little effort / will power
In other words it feels more like play than work, which means I rarely have issues with not wanting to do something that I think is important to do (i.e., akrasia), the only exception being that writing posts seems to take more effort so occasionally I spend my time writing comments when I perhaps should write posts instead. (This is the part of this post that I think may be least likely to generalize to other people. It could be that I'm an extreme outlier in finding FP so low-effort. However it might also be the case that it becomes low effort for most people to write comments once they've had enough practice in it.)
FP is a good way to notice missing background knowledge and provides incentives to learn missing knowledge
If you read a post with an intention to question or comment on it, it's pretty easy to notice that it assumes some background knowledge that you lack. The desire to not ask a "stupid" question or make a "stupid" comment provides powerful incentive to learn the miss knowledge.
FP is a good way to stay up to date on everyone else's latest research
It's often a good idea to stay up to date on other people's research, but sometimes one isn't highly motivated to do so. FP seems to make that easier. For example, I wasn't following Stuart's research on counterfactual oracles, until the recent contest drew my attention and desire to participate, and I ended up reading the latest posts on CO in order to understand the current state of the art on that topic, which turned out to be pretty interesting.
Arguments that are generated in reaction to some specific post or discussion can be of general value
It's not infrequent that I come up with an argument in response to some post or discussion thread, and later expand or follow up that argument into a post because it seems to apply more generally than to just that post/discussion. Here is one such example.
FP generates new ideas via cross-fertilization
FP incentivizes one to think deeply about many threads of research, and often (at least for me) an idea pops into my head that seems to combine various partial ideas floating in the ether into a coherent or semi-coherent whole (e.g., UDT), or is the result of applying or analogizing someone else's latest idea to a different topic (e.g., "human safety problem", "philosophy as high complexity class").
FP helps prepare for efficiently communicating new ideas
FP is a good way to build models of other people's epistemic states, and also a good way to practice communicating with fellow researchers, both of which are good preparation for efficiently communicating one's own new ideas.
My Recommendations
Comment more
To obtain the above benefits, one just has to write more comments. It may be necessary to first overcome disincentives to participate. If you can't, please speak up and maybe the forum admins will do something to help address whatever obstacle you're having trouble with.
Practice makes better
If it seems hard to write good comments, practice might make it easier eventually.
Think of FP as something to do for yourself
Some people might think of commenting as primarily providing a service to other researchers or to the research community. I suggest also thinking of it as providing a benefit to yourself (for the above reasons).
Encourage and support researchers who adopt FP as their primary research strategy
I'm not aware of any organizations that explicitly encourage and support researchers to spend most or much of their time commenting on forum posts. But perhaps they should, if it actually is (or has the potential to be) a productive research strategy? For example this could be done by providing financial support and/or status rewards for effective forum participation.
Interesting. I think you're probably right that our model should have a parameter for "researcher quality", and if a researcher is able to correctly predict the outcome of an experiment, that should cause an update in the direction of that researcher being more knowledgable (and their prior judgements should therefore carry more weight--including for this particular experiment!)
But the story you're telling doesn't seem entirely compatible with your comment earlier in this thread. Earlier you wrote: "However, it is often the case that you could get a lot more high-quality evidence that basically settles the question, if you put in many hours of work." But in this recent comment you wrote: "the experiment provides the last little bit of evidence needed to confirm [the hypothesis]". In the earlier comment, it sounds like you're talking about a scenario where most of the evidence comes in the form of data; in the later comment, it sounds like you're talking about a scenario where most of the evidence was necessary "just to think of the correct answer - to promote it to your attention" and the experiment only provides "the last little bit" of evidence.
So I think the philosophical puzzle is still unsolved. A few more things to ponder if someone wants to work on solving it:
If Bob is known to be an excellent researcher, can we trust HARKing if it comes from him? Does the mechanism by which hindsight bias works matter? (Here is one possible mechanism.)
In your simplified model above, there's no possibility of a result that is "just noise" and not explained by any particular hypothesis. But noise appears to be a pretty big problem (see: replication crisis?) In current scientific practice, the probability that a result could have been obtained through noise is a number of great interest that's almost always calculated (the p-value). How should this number be factored in, if at all?
Note that p-values can be used in Bayesian calculations. For example, in a simplified universe where either the null is true or the alternative is true,
p(alternative|data) = p(data|alternative)p(alternative) / (p(data|alternative)p(alternative) + p(data|null)p(null))My solution was focused on a scenario where we're considering relatively obvious hypotheses and subject to lots of measurement noise, but you convinced me this is inadequate in general.
I'm unsatisfied with the discussion around "Alice didn't think of all of them". I know nothing about relativity, but I imagine a big part of Einstein's contribution was his discovery of a relatively simple hypothesis which explained all the data available to him. (By "relatively simple", I mean a hypothesis that didn't have hundreds of free parameters.) Presumably, Einstein had access to the same data as other contemporary physicists, so it feels weird to explain his contribution in terms of having access to more evidence.