I think you hit nail on the head. It seems to me that LW represent bracketing by rationality - i.e. there's lower limit below which you don't find site interesting, there is the range where you see it as rationality community, and there's upper limit above which you would see it as self important pompous fools being very wrong on some few topics and not interesting on other topics.

Dangerously wrong, even; the progress in computing technology leads to new cures to diseases, and misguided advocacy of great harm of such progress, done by people with no understanding of the limitations of computational processes in general (let alone 'intelligent' processes) is not unlike the anti-vaccination campaigning by people with no solid background in biochemistry. Donating for vaccine safety research performed by someone without solid background in biochemistry, is not only stupid, it will kill people. The computer science is no different now, that it is used for biochemical research. No honest moral individual can go ahead and speak of great harms of medically relevant technologies without first obtaining a very very solid background with solid understanding of the boring fundamentals, and with independent testing of oneself - to avoid self delusion - by doing something competitive in the field. Especially so when those concerns are not shared by the more educated or knowledgeable or accomplished individuals. The only way it could be honest is if one is to honestly believe oneself to be a lot, lot, lot smarter than the smartest people on Earth, and one can't honestly believe such a thing without either accomplishing something impressive that great number of smartest people failed to accomplish, or being a fool.

Popularizing ideas from contemporary cognitive science and naturalized philosophy seems like a pretty worthy goal in and of itself. I wonder to what extent the "Less Wrong" identity helps this (by providing a convenient label and reference point), and to what extend it hurts (by providing an opportunity to dismiss ideas as "that Less Wrong phyg"). I suspect the former dominates, but the latter might be heard from more.

For my part, when I discovered the LW material (via MoR, as it turns out, though I had independently found "Creating Friendly AI" years earlier and thought it "pretty neat"), I was thrilled to see a community that apparently understood and took seriously what I had long felt were uncommonly known but in truth rather intuitive facts about the human condition, and secretly hoped to find a site full of Nietzschean ubermenschen/frauen/etc. who were kind and witty and charming and effortlessly accomplished and vastly intelligent.

It wasn't quite like that but it's still pretty neat.