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 it's what actually matters in the world - not simply the ability to come up with an idea, but to actually put the work in to implementing it. "Genius is one percent inspiration, 99% perspiration"
I don't care about someone who has had a single idea that happens to be smarter than Eliezer's best - it's easy to have a single outlier, it's much harder to have consistently good ideas. And without those other, consistently good ideas, I have no real reason to pay attention to that one idea.
My first reaction to "Bayesian" this and that was, "too many words about too trivial topic".
laughs Okay, here we agree! Except... the sequences aren't just about high-level concepts. They're about raising the sanity line of society. They're about teaching people who didn't come up with this one on their own in 5th grade.
I'm not saying Eliezer is the messiah, or the smartest man on Earth. I'm just saying, he's done some clearly fairly bright things with his life. I think he's under-educated in some areas, and flat-out misguided in others, but I can say that about an incredible number of intelligent people.
I don't care about someone who has had a single idea that happens to be smarter than Eliezer's best - it's easy to have a single outlier, it's much harder to have consistently good ideas
You are answering to someone who thinks that FOOM description is misguided, for example. And there is not so much evidence for FOOM - inferences are quite shaky there. There are many ideas Eliezer has promoted that dilute the "consistently good" definition unless you agree with his priors.
...They're about teaching people who didn't come up with this one on their
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.