I was very unclear in what I wrote. I also find what you wrote less than perfectly clear. Efficient Scholarship will not equip one to do research in many fields but in many fields given a narrow enough goal you'd be the equal of an average maters student.
"suggests mentioning the most popular example of an idea in an article's um, history of an idea section" if you consider "Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning" to be "the first example of it"
(This comment precedes my edit) abovementioned lukeprog comment makes the point that Luke is an academic in his weighting of priority over exposure when discussing the genealogy of an idea. Apologies for my previous lack of clarity.
The overwhelming majority of LW lurkers will have barely dipped their toes in the Sequences. The more committed commenters have certainly not universally read them all. Luke has read dozens of books on rationality alone.
Upon reflection we probably disagree on very little seeing as you were originally addressing an average LW reader's view on the origins of the ideas LW talks about, not a specific person's. If you could expand upon your last paragraph I'd be grateful. The article (and as of writing, the comments) do not mention philosophy (by name) at all.
Yes, Lukeprog seems mostly academically likeable, and the text snippet in the comments on this page from the paper he's prepping is more like what I would hope for.
I was using "philosophy" as a byword for far, unlike, and what Luke may be closer to. The specific ref is that it's what Luke used (I believe) before explicitly just replacing with "Cog Sci".
Anyway, I don't disagree with you much (within the range of my having misinterpreted), so I'll skip the meta-talking and just try to say what I am thinking.
I try to imagine myself as ...
I've spent so much time in the cogsci literature that I know the LW approach to rationality is basically the mainstream cogsci approach to rationality (plus some extra stuff about, e.g., language), but... do other people not know this? Do people one step removed from LessWrong — say, in the 'atheist' and 'skeptic' communities — not know this? If this is causing credibility problems in our broader community, it'd be relatively easy to show people that Less Wrong is not, in fact, a "fringe" approach to rationality.
For example, here's Oaksford & Chater in the second chapter to the (excellent) new Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, the one on normative systems of rationality:
Is it meaningful to attempt to develop a general theory of rationality at all? We might tentatively suggest that it is a prima facie sign of irrationality to believe in alien abduction, or to will a sports team to win in order to increase their chance of victory. But these views or actions might be entirely rational, given suitably nonstandard background beliefs about other alien activity and the general efficacy of psychic powers. Irrationality may, though, be ascribed if there is a clash between a particular belief or behavior and such background assumptions. Thus, a thorough-going physicalist may, perhaps, be accused of irrationality if she simultaneously believes in psychic powers. A theory of rationality cannot, therefore, be viewed as clarifying either what people should believe or how people should act—but it can determine whether beliefs and behaviors are compatible. Similarly, a theory of rational choice cannot determine whether it is rational to smoke or to exercise daily; but it might clarify whether a particular choice is compatible with other beliefs and choices.
From this viewpoint, normative theories can be viewed as clarifying conditions of consistency… Logic can be viewed as studying the notion of consistency over beliefs. Probability… studies consistency over degrees of belief. Rational choice theory studies the consistency of beliefs and values with choices.
They go on to clarify that by probability they mean Bayesian probability theory, and by rational choice theory they mean Bayesian decision theory. You'll get the same account in the textbooks on the cogsci of rationality, e.g. Thinking and Deciding or Rational Choice in an Uncertain World.