[adroniser]

peer review would encourage less hand wavy language and more precise claims. They would penalize the authors for bringing up bizarre analogies to physics concepts for seemingly no reason. They would criticize the fact that they spend the whole post talking about features without a concrete definition of a feature.

The sloppiness of the circuits thread blog posts has been very damaging to the health of the field, in my opinion. People first learn about mech interp from these blog posts, and then they adopt a similarly sloppy style in discussion.

Frankly, the whole field currently is just a big circle jerk, and it's hard not to think these blog posts are responsible for that.

I mean do you actually think this kind of slop would be publishable in NeurIPS if they submitted the blog post as it is?

[PeterStuer]

"peer review would encourage less hand wavy language and more precise claims"

In theory, yes. Lets not pretend actual peer review would do this.

[adroniser]

So you think that this blog post would make it into any of the mainstream conferences? I doubt it.