Page views are worth a lot less than an entire book sale, IMO

Agreed, especially if deciding things like whether to invest in publishing a particular author's new book. However, my purpose was just to make the number seem more real. Humans have problems with that - "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." as they say. I think it was an okay metaphor for that purpose.

I'm not trying to say Luke's article is a "bestseller" (in fact it has a bounce rate of about 90%), just that LW posts can get a lot of exposure so even if it is the standard that LW members should be rational enough not to mindkill on posts like that one, we should probably care about it if non-rationalists from the world at large are mind-killing on stuff written here.