You know what... I was missing the "look for a third option" bit. There are more options than the two obvious ones -- doing this, and not doing this.

I've been having trouble making myself do the rationalisty projects that I came up with for myself, and this article suggested a way to use group pressures to make me do these things. Since I really wanted a way to make myself do these projects, the article seemed like a really, really good idea. But instead of making the whole community do this, I can actually just ask some fellow rationalists at my meetup to do this, just to me. That way I can use group pressures to help impose my own rationally determined second order desires on myself. The only thing I think I lose this way is the motivation via a sense of community, where everyone else is doing it too...

Of course, this still doesn't resolve the problem of whether or not the community at large should adopt the ideas put forth in this article. I still can't seem to think rationally about it. But at least this is a way for me to get what I want without having to worry about the negative side effects of the whole community adopting this policy.

But one specific thing I already said I'm afraid of is that of LW becoming a "rational" community instead of a rational community, differing from other communities only by the flag it rallies around.

If you took a typical community and replaced its flag with one that said "be rational", would you expect the effect to be positive, negative, and neutral?