FWIW having read Goedel, Escher, Bach is the biggest common factor I've found among top-tier rationalists, much moreso than having read the heuristics and biases literature for example. E.g. Eliezer only read the heuristics and biases lit a long time after he'd already become Eliezer.
Adding to this, one of the things LWers are abnormally good at is going meta and switching between levels of abstraction without making type errors. Being able to distinguish levels of abstraction is clearly an important rationality skill, but we don't talk about it much, perhaps because we are already above-average at doing it. GEB discusses this skill at length, so the book may be both a symptom and a cause of our ability to go meta.
http://www.reddit.com/r/GEB/comments/nmy4p/starting_a_readthrough_january_17/
[Context: [1] waingro and I want to start a Reddit read-through of GEB.
I've done an [2] in-person MIT seminar where we read through the book twice before. I think a subreddit would be a great way to make the same experience available to anyone on the Internet!
My plan for when to start would be around January 17. Yes, that's almost a month from now, but it allows time for:
The read through is organized and run by Rob Speer who taught a seminar on GEB once as a senior and once as a grad student at MIT [1](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/special-programs/sp-258-goedel-escher-bach-spring-2007/). GEB is occasionally referenced on LessWrong and is considered and influential book by Eliezer Yudkowsky, the subject of a short review by LukeProg who recently claimed that it "[...] defied summary more than all the other books I had previously said "defied summary." If you are interested in reading GEB but have not taken the time to do so, I do not need to cite the research on how mechanisms such as commitment contracts are helpful to reaching goals. Joining this group would make the goal read Gödel, Escher, Bach more reachable than it otherwise would have been.