[Epistemic status: Was originally going to be a comment, but I decided to make a post because the topic seemed to be of general interest.]
I'm not sure how I feel about the idea that people should familiarize themselves with the literature on a topic before blogging about it. Here are some perspectives I've seen on each side:
My current hunch is that it's good for people to write blog posts about things even if they aren't familiar with the literature (though it might be even better if they wrote their post, then became familiar with the literature, then edited their post accordingly and published it).
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In machine learning, "bagging" approaches where we combine the output of lots of classifiers which are each trained on a subset of the training data often outperform a single complex model with access to all the data. This isn't necessarily an argument for the wisdom of the crowd per se, but it seems like an argument for the wisdom of a reasonably informed crowd of people coming at something from a variety of perspectives.
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When I read about highly creative people (Turing award winner types--this might be more true in computer science than other fields), a recurring theme is the importance of reinventing things from scratch without reading the thoughts other people have already had about a topic, applying ideas from apparently unrelated fields, and more generally bringing a novel perspective to bear.
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Even absent the benefits of originality, I think reasoning things out for oneself can be a great way to internalize them. ("What I cannot create, I do not understand" - Richard Feynman.) The argument for publishing is less clear in this case, but you could think of a forum discussion as serving a similar purpose as a recitation or discussion section in a university course, where one gets to examine a topic through conversation. You and the people who comment on your post get some social reward in the process of thinking about a topic.
However, I'm also worried that if a blog post about a topic is more accessible than a journal paper, it might end up being read by more people and factored into our collective decision-making more than it deserves on a purely epistemic basis. Of course, people are already spending much more time reading Facebook posts than journal papers--probably including people in the EA movement--so it's not clear how to think about the harms here in general. (For example, if reading the EA Forum usually funges against Facebook for people, and EA Forum posts are generally higher quality than Facebook posts, that seems like an argument for more EA Forum posts.)
In any case, you can mitigate these risks by marking your blog post with an epistemic status before publishing. It certainly seems acceptable to me to link to a relevant paper in the comments of a blog post about a topic that has been covered in the literature (e.g. "Author X [disagrees] with you"). But I think it can be even better to additionally summarize the argument that Author X makes in a way that feels personally compelling to you and take the opportunity to re-examine the argument with fresh eyes--see my previous complaints about information cascades in the context of Effective Altruism.
I agree with Huemer, and liked his post.
Regarding your question, I think one definitely should familiarize oneself with the literature before writing an EA post. While there could be benefits to not having read about other people's thoughts, I think they are on average substantially outweighed by the benefits to having read about them. Most uninformed posts are not creative, but simply miss key considerations, and therefore fail to contribute.
Posts which are written by people who haven't familiarized themselves with the literature will probably be quite high variance: lots of low-value posts, with the chance of the odd novel insight. I fear that time-pressed readers wouldn't want to take part of such a forum, because the ratio of reward to effort would be too poor. I certainly wouldn't find it enjoyable.
In fact, I'd like the average EA Forum post to more thoroughly discuss the existing literature than is the case at present.
(Upvoted)
Maybe it's possible to develop more specific guidelines here. For example, your comment implies that you think it's essential to know all the key considerations. OK... but I don't see why ignorance of known key considerations would prevent someone from pointing out a new key consideration. And if we discourage them from making them post, that could be very harmful, because as you say, it's important to know all the key considerations.
In other words, maybe it's worth differentiating the act of generating intellectual raw material, and the act of drawing conclusions.
I see your intuition, but in practice I think most uninformed posts are poor. (In principle, that could be studied empirically.) That's also my experience from academia; that lack of knowledge usually is more of a problem than an advantage.
I agree that sometimes outsiders make breakthroughs in scientific fields, but would guess that even those outsiders are usually relatively well acquainted with the field they're entering into. They've normally familiarized themselves with it. So I'm not sure whether it's right to view those cases as evidence that forum participants shouldn't familiarize themselves with the literature. I might guess that they more point to the value of intellectual diversity and a multiplicity of perspectives.
One possible synthesis comes from Turing award winner Richard Hamming's book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering. He's got chapters at the end on Creativity and Experts. The chapters are somewhat rambly and I've quoted passages below. My attempt to summarize Hamming's position: Having a deep intellectual toolkit is valuable, but experts are often overconfident and resistant to new ideas.
Chapter 25: Creativity
Chapter 26: Experts
Hamming shares a number of stories from the history of science to support his claims. He also says he has more stories which he didn't include in the chapter, and that he looked for stories which went against his position too.
A couple takeaways:
Survivorship bias regarding stories of successful contrarians - most apparent crackpots actually are crackpots.
Paradigm shifts - if an apparent crackpot is not actually a crackpot, their idea has the potential to be extremely important. So shutting down all the apparent crackpots could have quite a high cost even if most are full of nonsense. As Jerome Friedman put it regarding the invention of bagging (coincidentally mentioned in the main post):
However, even if one accepts the premise that apparent crackpots deliver surprisingly high expected value, it's still not obvious how many we want on the Forum!
"Breakthroughs" feel like the wrong thing to hope for from posts written by non-experts. A lot of the LW posts that the community now seems to consider most valuable weren't "breakthroughs". They were more like explaining a thing, such that each individual fact in the explanation was already known, but the synthesis of them into a single coherent explanation that made sense either hadn't previously been done, or had been done only within the context of an academic field buried in inferential distance. Put another way, it seems like it's possible to write good popularizations of a topic without being intimately familiar with the existing literature, if it's the right kind of topic. Though I imagine this wouldn't be much comfort to someone who is pessimistic about the epistemic value of popularizations in general.
The Huemer post kind of just felt like an argument for radical skepticism outside of one's own domain of narrow expertise, with everything that implies.