Did other smart people put as much time and fail? It's not about size... find the post that you think required the most intelligence to make, that's from where you estimate intelligence, from size you estimate persistence. With regards to topics, it also covers his opinions, many of which have low independent probability of being correct. That's not very good - think what the reactions very smart people would have - it may be that the community is smarter than average but has an intelligence cut off point. Picture a much narrower bell curve centred at 115.
My first reaction to "Bayesian" this and that was, "too many words about too trivial topic". We have coolest presidents on lowest denomination coins, and we have many coolest mathematician names on things that many 5th graders routinely reinvent on a math olympiad.
Did other smart people put as much time and fail?
Well, we have the entirety of academia. Harvard can't afford academic journals, so it seems fair to say that academic journals fail entirely at this goal, and one assumes that the people publishing there are, on average, at least 1 standard deviation above norm (IQ 115+)
It's not about size...
I think this idea sabotages more intelligent people than anything else. Yes, it is about size. Intelligence is useless if you don't use it. Call it "applied intelligence" or some such if you want, but i...
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.