In roughly decreasing order of annoyance:
A varying degree of belief in utilitarianism (ranging from a confused arithmetic altruism to hardcore Benthamism) seems to be often taken for granted, and rarely challenged. The feeling I get when reading posts and comments that assume the above is very similar to what an atheist feels when frequenting a community of religious people. The fix is obvious, though: I should take the time to write a coherent, organised post outlining my issues with that.
A little Singularitarianism, specifically the assumption that self-improving AI = InstantGod®, and that donating to SIAI is the best possible EV for your cash. This isn't a big deal because they tend to be confined to their own threads. (Also, in the thankfully rare instance that someone brings up the Friendly AI Rapture even when it brings nothing to the conversation, I get to have fun righteously snarking at them, and usually get cheap karma too, perhaps from the other non-Singularitarians like me.) But it does make me feel less attached and sympathetic to other LessWrongers.
Of late, there's a lot of concern about what content should be on this site and about how to promote the site and its mentality to the 'muggles'. This kind of puzzles me, because I treat LW as just a place where mostly smart INTJ people hang out and flex their philosophical muscles when they feel like it, and I don't feel particularly interested in missionary work. While I do find it desirable to make more people more rational, I thought everyone here - except for those who get their paycheck from SIAI/FHI, I guess - had better and more efficient purposes to which to dedicate their precious, precious willpower-to-do-stuff-I-don't-enjoy than writing posts they don't really feel like writing. If providing "hardcore" content to LW feels like a chore, then we have a tragedy of the commons situation at hand, and is the site important enough to implement one of the standard workarounds to it?
Eliezer's reduced presence. Other contributors' posts are even more productive and useful than his, but none are quite as enjoyable to read.
Some top contributors regularly get double-digit karma for utterly trivial comments. Can't think of a fix that would be less annoying than the issue.
More Anglo prevalence than I would have expected for a site like this.
No Auto-Pager script for people's histories.
More Anglo prevalence than I would have expected for a site like this.
Are there any English-language discussion sites that aren't very Anglo-centric? The more troubling thing for me is the feel that we're just bouncing around ideas that flow out of Silicon Valley instead of having multiple cultural centers generating new ideas with their own slant on stuff and having a back-and-forth. There could be interesting communities that are in Russian, Chinese, German, French or Spanish which are producing interesting ideas and could be aligned with LW if someon...
Or, what do you want to see more or less of from Less Wrong?
I'm thinking about community norms, content and topics discussed, karma voting patterns, et cetera. There are already posts and comment sections filled with long lists of proposed technical software changes/additions, let's not make this post another one.
My impression is that people sometimes make discussion posts about things that bother them, and sometimes a bunch of people will agree and sometimes a bunch of people will disagree, but most people don't care that much (or they have a life or something) and thus don't want to dedicate a post just to complaining. This post is meant to make it socially and cognitively easy to offer critique.
I humbly request that you list downsides of existing policies even when you think the upsides outweigh them, for all the obvious reasons. I also humbly request that you list a critique/gripe even if you don't want to bother explaining why you have that critique/gripe, and even in cases where you think your gripe is, ahem, "irrational". In general, I think it'd be really cool if we erred on the side of listing things which might be problems even if there's no obvious solution or no real cause for complaint except for personal distaste for the color green (for example).
I arrogantly request that we try to avoid impulsive downvoting and non-niceness for the duration of this post (and others like it). If someone wants to complain that Less Wrong is a little cultish without explaining why then downvoting them to oblivion, while admittedly kind of funny, is probably a bad idea. :)