One issue that has been discussed here before is whether Less Wrong is causing readers and participants to behave more rationally or is primarily a time-sink. I recently encountered an example that seemed worth pointing out to the community that suggested mixed results. The entry for Less Wrong on RationalkWiki says " In the outside world, the ugly manifests itself as LessWrong acolytes, minds freshly blown, metastasising to other sites, bringing the Good News for Modern Rationalists, without clearing their local jargon cache." RationalWiki has a variety of issues that I'm not going to discuss in detail here (such as a healthy of dose of motivated cognition pervading the entire project and having serious mind-killing problems) but this sentence should be a cause for concern. What they are essentially talking about is LWians not realizing (or not internalizing) that there's a serious problem of inferential distance between people who are familiar with many of the ideas here and people who are not. Since inferential distance is an issue that has been discussed here a lot, this suggests that some people who have read a lot here are not applying the lessons even when they are consciously talking about material related to those lessons. Of course, there's no easy way to tell how representative a sample this is, how common it is, and given RW's inclination to list every possible thing they don't like about something, no matter how small, this may not be a serious issue at all. But it did seem to be serious enough to point out here.
Yes. Even if, as is the case, RW loves LW really.
(I'm somewhat disconcerted that this quickly dashed off comment is so popular, given the several comments I made yesterday that I thought were quite important and worked hard on. Goldman's Law applies.)
It is possible LessWrong is feeling the effects of too little outside feedback. The HP:MOR readers are drifting in. Would a publicity push for LessWrong be appropriate, to get it better feedback and make the Wikipedia link not just a redirect to EY's article? What approach would best refine the art of human rationality?
(Related exercise for Wikipedians reading: WIkipedia put pretty much no effort into publicity or popularity, stumbled along with little or no outside feedback and suddenly found itself ridiculously famous and, indeed, mainstream. Was developing for a few years with no feedback a good idea? Should LessWrong ignore outside discussion in the same manner? Are there approaches Wikipedia could have reasonably taken that would have arguably worked out better? I've been in the guts of Wikipedia since 2004 and I have no damn idea. Over to you.)
Did Wikipedia really have no outside feedback? After all, it had a regular influx of new editors ... I don't really see what other kind of "outside feedback" you would have wanted to happen - it's not as if there was a lot of people with experience on how to make a wiki work (a lot of those that did - c2 and MeatballWiki people - were already aware of and involved with wikipedia).
(I've also been on Wikipedia since 2004 (though not really 'in the guts', though I was involved in a few disputes), and was on MeatballWiki before that)