I continue to think [AF(p) · GW(p)] that there aren't many benefits to a journal (yet).

But we can also look at past examples -- there's the AGI journal, in which some past safety work has been published. I have heard safety people saying things like "oh, that was published at AGI, it's probably not worth reading", and others saying "yeah, if you can't get your work into a real conference, then send it to AGI so that it's published somewhere". (Not going to name names for the obvious reasons.) Doesn't seem like a great precedent.

I think this is a good idea. If you go ahead with it, here's a suggestion.

Reviewers often procrastinate for weeks or months. This is partly because doing a review takes an unbounded amount of time, especially for articles that are long or confusing. So instead of sending the reviewers a manuscript with a due date, book a calendar event for 2 hours with the reviewers. The reviewers join a call or group chat and read the paper and discuss it. They can also help clear each other's confusions. They aim to complete the review by the end of the time window.

This idea has been discussed before. Though it's an important one, so I don't think it's a bad thing for us to bring it up again. My perspective now and previously is that this would be fairly bad at the moment, but might be good in a couple of years time.

My background understanding is that the purpose of a conference or journal in this case (and in general) is primarily to certify the quality of some work (and to a lesser extent, the field of inquiry). This in-turn helps with growing the AIS field, and the careers of AIS researchers.

This is only effective if the conference or journal is sufficiently prestigious. Presently, publishing AI safety papers in Neurips, AAAI, JMLR, JAIR serves to certify the validity of the work, and boosts the field of AI safety whereas publishing in (for example) Futures or AGI doesn't. If you create a new publication venue, by default, its prestige would be comparable to, or less than Futures or AGI, and so wouldn't really help to serve the role of a journal.

Currently, the flow of AIS papers into the likes of Neurips and AAAI (and probably soon JMLR, JAIR) is rapidly improving. New keywords have been created there at several conferences, along the lines of "AI safety and trustworthiness" (I forget the exact wording) so that you can nowadays expect, on average, to receive reviewer who average out to neutral, or even vaguely sympathetic to AIS research. Ten or so papers were published in such journals in the last year, and all these authors will become reviewers under that keyword when the conference comes around next year. Yes, things like "Logical Inductors" or "AI safety via debate" are very hard to publish. There's some pressure to write research that's more "normie". All of that sucks, but it's an acceptable cost for being in a high-prestige field. And overall, things are getting easier, fairly quickly.

If you create a too low-prestige journal, you can generate blowback. For example, there was some criticism on Twitter about Pearl's "Journal of Causal Inference", even though his field is somewhat more advanced than hours.

In 1.5-3 years time, I think the risk-benefit calculus will probably change. The growth of AIS work (which has been fast) may outpace the virtuous cycle that's currently happening with AI conferences and journals, such that a lot of great papers are getting rejected. There could be enough tenure-track professors at top schools to make the journal decently high-status (moreso than Futures and AGI). We might even be nearing the point where some unilateral actor will go and make a worse journal if we don't make one. I'd say when a couple of those things are true, that's when we should pull the trigger and make this kind of conference/journal.

In the spirit of open peer review, here are a few thoughts:

First, overall, I was convinced during earlier discussions that this is a bad idea - not because of costs, but because the idea lacks real benefits, and itself will not serve the necessary functions. Also see this earlier proposal [LW · GW] (with no comments). There are already outlets that allow robust peer review, and the field is not well served by moving away from the current CS / ML dynamic of arXiv papers and presentations at conferences, which allow for more rapid iteration and collaboration / building on work than traditional journals - which are often a year or more out of date as of when they appear. However, if this were done, I would strongly suggest doing it as an arXiv overlay journal, rather than a traditional structure.

One key drawback you didn't note is that allowing AI safety further insulation from mainstream AI work could further isolate it. It also likely makes it harder for AI-safety researchers to have mainstream academic careers, since narrow journals don't help on most of the academic prestige metrics.

Two more minor disagreement are about first, the claim that  "If JAA existed, it would be a great place to send someone who wanted a general overview of the field." I would disagree - in field journals are rarely as good a source as textbooks or non-technical overview. Second, the idea that a journal would provide deeper, more specific, and better review than Alignment forum discussions and current informal discussions seems farfetched given my experience publishing in journals that are specific to a narrow area, like Health security, compared to my experience getting feedback on AI safety ideas.

I think this is a great idea and would be happy to help in any way with this.

An idea for having more AI Alignment peer review without compromising academic careers or reputation: create a review system in the Alignment Forum. What I had in mind is that people who are okay with doing a review can sign up somewhere. Then someone who posted something and wants a review can use a token (if they have some, which happens in a way I explain below) to ask for one. Then some people (maybe AF admins, maybe some specific administrator of the thing) assign one of the reviewers to the post.

The review has to follow some guidelines, like summarizing the paper, explaining the good parts and the issues, proposing new ideas. Once the review is posted and validated by the people in charge of the system, the reviewer gets a token she can use for asking a review of her own posts.

How do you bootstrap? For long time users of the AF it makes sense to give them some initial tokens maybe. And for newcomers (who really have a lot to win for reviews), I was thinking of asking them to do a nice distillation post for some token.

While not as ambitious as a journal, I think a system like that might solve two problems at once:

• The lack of public feedback and in-depth peer review in most posts here
• The lack of feedback at all for newcomers who don't have private gdocs with a lot of researchers on them.

There's probably a way to be even better for the second point, by for example having personal mentorship for something like three tokens.

I also believe that the incentives would be such that people would participate, and not necessarily try to game the system (being limited to the AF which is a small community also helps).

What do you think?

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?

Strongly agree.  I would be happy to help.  Here are three academic AI alignment articles I have co-authored. https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02911  https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.10536 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.00812

How big is the first-mover advantage in journals? That is, how important is the possibility that if you don't make an open-access journal first, Elsevier may come and create a closed-access one instead?

I think there's a lot of really good responses, that I won't repeat.

I think the traditional model of journals has a lot of issues, not the least of which are bad incentives.

The new model used by eLife is pretty exciting to me, but very different than what you proposed.  I think it's worth considering:

• only reviewing works that have already been published as preprints (I think LW/AF should count for this, as well as ArXiV)
• publishing reviews -- this lets the rest of the community benefit more from the labor of reviewing, though it does raise the standard for reviewers
• curate the best / highest reviewed articles to be "published"

The full details of their new system is here in an essay they published describing the changes and why they made them.