LessWrong has a dual nature. On one hand, it's a place where anyone can post, and where almost any idea can get a hearing.

On the other hand, LessWrong promotes the ideas of Eliezer Yudkowsky. This is inevitable, and fair, since it was originally based on Eliezer's posts. This is also intentional; no post makes it onto the home page unless Eliezer endorses it; and he has to my knowledge never endorsed a post that disagreed with or questioned things he has said in the past.

I'm not complaining. I applaud Eliezer for opening up top-level posting to everyone; he could have just kept it as his blog. But LessWrong shouldn't simultaneously be Eliezer's place, and a base to use to build an entire discipline, if you want that discipline to be well-built. That's like trying to build a school of journalism at Fox News.

Could LessWrong become such a place, if Eliezer relinquished control of the coveted green button? I don't know. There's more memetic homegeneity here than I would prefer for such a venture. But I don't see any more likely candidates at present.

The other dual nature of LessWrong is that it's about rationality, and it's about Friendly AI. The groupthink exists mainly within the FAI aspect of LessWrong. Perhaps someday these two parts should split into separate websites?

(Or perhaps, before that happens, we will develop a web service interface enabling two websites to interact so seamlessly that the notion of "separate websites" will dissolve.)