https://www.lesswrong.com/users/brook
Thanks for making this! I also feel like I get a lot of value out of quarterly/yearly reviews, and this looks like a nice prompting tool. If you haven't seen it already, you might like to look at Pete Slattery's year-review question list too!
I think this is one reasonable avenue to explore alignment, but I don't want everybody doing it.
My impression is that AI researchers exist on a spectrum from only doing empirical work (of the kind you describe) to only doing theoretical work (like Agent Foundations), and most fall in the middle, doing some theory to figure out what kind of experiment to run, and using empirical data to improve their theories (a lot of science looks like this!).
I think all (or even a majority of) AI safety researchers moving to doing empirical work on current AI systems is unwise, for two reasons:
The first one is the biggy. I can imagine this approach working (perhaps inefficiently) in a world were (1) were false and (2) were true, but I can't imagine this approach working in any worlds where (1) holds.
I agree that publishing results of the form "it turns out that X can be done, though we won't say how we did it" is clearly better than publishing your full results, but I think it's much more harmful than publishing nothing in a world where other people are still doing capabilities research.
This is because it seems to me that knowing something is possible is often a first step to understanding how. This is especially true if you have any understanding of where this researcher or organisation were looking before publishing this result.
I also think there are worlds where it's importantly harmful to too openly critique capabilities research, but I lean towards not thinking we are in this world, and think the tone of this post is a pretty good model for how this should look going forwards. +1!
I would hope that good criticism of EA would "make the world better if taken seriously" by improving the EA ecosystem. That said, I do understand your concern-- I hope people will submit good criticism to the journal, and that it will be published!