I haven't meant it as a dilemma "mutual admiration society" vs. "indiscriminate battle against wrongness", that would hardly make sense. I am even not really afraid of becoming mutual admiration society or cult or something like.

I only intended to ask a question (more or less unrelated to the original discussion): how reliably do we know that the s/n ratio is really high? There is a lot of room for bias here, since "this is an exceptionally rational community" is what we like to hear, while people with different opinion aren't heard: why would they participate in a rationalist community, if they thought it weren't so much rational after all? Put in another way, any community which values rationality - independently on how do they define it and whether they really meet their needs - is likely to produce such self-assuring statements.

So when I hear about how LW is great, I am a little bit worried that my (and everybody else's) agreement may be biased. As always, a good thing would be to have either an independent judge, or a set of objective criteria and tests. That could also help to determine whether the LW standards are improving or deteriorating in time.