[Third, because current "rationalists" have trouble working in groups: of this I shall speak more.]

Yes, this is the most important part. Rationalists apply rationality along a hierarchical level. And, they must optimize their goal structure according to a socially-irrational world. (The entire world, where the thinking of large numbers of other people determines the outcome. In perhaps narrow engineering worlds that are solely dependent on the outcomes of the innovator, and there is ALREADY an existing rational and competitive market, the rationalist slips in, and occupies a dominant position. But what happens when he has to beg for a business permit? What happens when he has to get licensed, or prevent his competition from stealing his intellectual property? What happens when he has to defend against the irrational world? Unless he's recognized the threat, and identified a complete goal structure for dealing with the irrational, he must accomplish this task IN ADDITION TO the massive work and time he's spent on his rational goal structure, and its implementation.)

Also: life hands you bad genes. It hands you cancer. There is a lot of "noise." In a community of rationalists, there are enough rationalists who have prioritized their top goal to be the same as your top goal, and you naturally start working with them. ...But if you're poor, you have to spend most of your time at your day job, so your first prioritization has, once again, been to deal with the irrational masses, and part them from their Federal Reserve Notes.

And then there's the problem of personalities amongst rationalists. Many of them aren't going to get along with each other.

This is why libertarianism is so important: if you don't first recognize that it's irrational to attack your neighbor and cofiscate his wealth, he probably isn't going to like you very much. ...And lesswrong has 50 people that identify themselves as communists, with a majority identifying themselves as "liberals." (My guess is that they're not the "Hayek" kind of liberal when they say that. LOL)

What I'm saying amounts to: "To study rationality, you must first master the irrational." Oooh, deep thought du jour.

A round table discussion amongst Libertarian Party ballot access activists/petitioners STARTS with this knowledge, but generally lacks the formalized training in rationality that is available here at less wrong. It's very interesting to see how a group of people who has rationally prioritized their lives can optimize their existences based on the introduction of new information.

As far as being "motivated enough to pick up your phone and call your broker," ...have you joined Casey Research yet? You should allocate your stock-picking decisions to him, because he takes into account the irrationality of the masses --which is your most difficult, time-wasting computation. His mining stock picks have returned something like a 250% return over the last few years. Compounding your initial investment returns with that kind of return would have made you very wealthy, had you simply begun allocating your excesses to his picks, assuming a salary with an excess of $15,000 to invest per year. However, given unlimited investments, you're forced to invest in a noise and irrationality-filled field, especially if you didn't have time to applying your rationality to finding (fellow libertarian, fellow rationalist, natural ally) Doug Casey.

If you haven't even reached out to the most highly-successful other rationalists, and decided who is best to delegate to, it sounds to me like you're irrationally estimating your bandwidth (cranium space) to be greater than what it is. This isn't a slur, you're clearly a smart guy. ...But you're also human, and more limited than what you might believe yourself to be after some successes.

I think this post of yours asks the right questions. I will address it point-by-point later on (since some of my points here seem trivial, out of context to the original statement. I've always hated "general replies" that miss the heart of the most important questions and address the ones the author thought most trivial). Until then, the gist of what I argue for is what lesswrong is already trying to do, but with MUCH more feedback, (or better interactivity programming) to eliminate conflicting personalities: typing is a waste of time, it's hard to quickly see/know who your allies are here. There isn't a +10 or -10 ranking system that is as good as one single phone conversation. You exclude many of Kevin Kelly, Freidrich Hayek's, and Monica Anderson's primary points, regarding the logic of decentralization, and emergent allocation of resources, here with this limited blog format.

(And you ban newbies, who may carry disproportionate value, by "lack of Karma." If you want adoption, you may need to eliminate the barrier to entry to your market.)

For a phone conversation, people are welcome to call me. Jake Witmer: 312-730-4037. That way, you'll be able to figure out more quickly if I'm an idiot, if I'm a useful idiot, or if I'm a potential strong ally in a certain area, or all areas. And, I'll be able to quickly find our the same about you. Naturally, if you're calling from here, you're out of the idiot category, (unless you're an infiltrator whose purposes are contrary to the site's). The last "paranoia part" is not something I think is likely, I just mentioned it because you had 50 communists on here, and over 300 "liberals." One doesn't have to be a knowing infiltrator, to be an infiltrator.

Also: Let's say you've decided to steal for a living, so that you could be in a socially dominant position, with a long term goal of making society more rational. So you joined the NWO, and became a multi-billionaire by trading "carbon credits." This is essentially theft, but it's put you in a position to be a strong rational actor. Well, it would be rational for all the rationalists here, without your additional knowledge, to attack you. They didn't know your long-term goals, or that you profiled yourself as "unable to compete, mathematically," and "not worth competing for less than billions of FRN influence." ...So, natural allies can seem like antagonists, and natural antagonists can seem like allies.

It's a lot to sort out, before you set up a laboratory work environment with someone. Also, since you're not continually filtering people here via feedback, you're not isolating out who is going to wind up working with you on a daily basis. Maybe that's what you need. A hotline full of people trained to profile high-level, highly-motivated rationalists. Perhaps you could even have Peter Voss's AGI do it, based on Watson-like heuristics. (Ie: If they stay on the line more than 20 minutes and direct the conversation to these repeated keywords, we might want to call them back.)