• From speaking to PhD candidates in various fields "Zombie theories" seem like a pretty big problem. my understanding is that researchers in those fields know how to read between the lines of the research and downward estimate claims. So there is some amount of translation work that is happening. The problem is that fields that are very interdisciplinary it gets a bit complicated, since every researcher doesn't have this ability for every field.
• From a community building perspective, I wonder whether insights from posts like this could be distilled and shared with academic communities, and what kind of difference it would make. I imagine effective thesis could run workshops like this, or people working on metascience field building or something. Maybe even a new way of getting people interested in EA (presumably people who worry about things like this would be good fits for EA)
• I haven't read it yet, but the linked post "Gears level models are capital investments" looks very interesting

Suggestion: include the author's username in your post.

Lighter held suggestion: be more generous with excerpting — I would have liked the excerpt to start at the start of the post and then have ellipses to get to the part you wanted to highlight. Maybe.

Anyway, thanks for doing this! 

(Skimmed)

• This is a really interesting post and seems reasonable if you're trying to rapidly build an inside view on something.
• I wish literature reviews looked more like this - I think in theory, they are meant to be holistic overviews of the literature, but in practice they tend to look more like summaries and individual assessments of existing studies.
• In general, agree that one should be more skeptical of 'sexy' research. The bigger the claim, the less time someone spends carefully thinking about each component that goes into it (or so I claim).