My main concern about Less Wrong recently has been the proliferation of posts related to the Singularity and HP: MoR, which I frankly don't care about. For a site that encourages people to think outside the box, it's at times biased against unorthodox opinions, or at least, I get downvoted for arguing against the Singularity and immortality and for pointing out flaws in MoR. At these times the site seems cultish in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable.
I was drawn here both by Eliezer's meta-rationality posts and by discussions about quantum mechanics, philosophy of mathematics, game theory, and such. However, recently I've been growing increasingly skeptical about the dissociation between LW's stated goals and the actual behavior I observe here.
If you want to talk about about quantum mechanics, philosophy of mathematics, game theory, and such, why not start threads about those topics instead of arguing against the Singularity and immortality and pointing out flaws in MoR—things you don't even care about?
More and more, LessWrong's posts are meta-rationality posts, about how to be rational, how to avoid akrasia, in general, without any specific application. This is probably the intended purpose of the site. But they're starting to bore me.
What drew me to LessWrong is that it's a place where I can put rationality into practice, discussing specific questions of philosophy, value, and possible futures, with the goal of finding a good path through the Singularity. Many of these topics have no other place where rational discussion of them is possible, online or off. Such applied topics have almost all moved to Discussion now, and may be declining in frequency.
This isn't entirely new. Applied discussions have always suffered bad karma on LW (statistically; please do not respond with anecdotal data). I thought this was because people downvote a post if they find anything in it that they disagree with. But perhaps a lot of people would rather talk about rationality than use it.
Does anyone else have this perception? Or am I just becoming a LW old geezer?
At the same time, LW is taking off in terms of meetups and number of posts. Is it finding its true self? Does the discussion of rationality techniques have a larger market than debates over Sleeping Beauty (I'm even beginning to miss those!) Is the old concern with values, artificial intelligence, and the Singularity something for LW to grow out of?
(ADDED: Some rationality posts are good. I am also a lukeprog fan.)