I don't see what exactly you think academia failed at.
For the sanity and consistently good ideas, you got to redefine sanity as beliefs in stuff like foomism and consider sane doing some sort of theology with god replaced by 'superintelligence', clearly useless pass time if you ask me.
edit: note on the superintelligence stuff: one could make some educated guesses about what computational process that did N operations could do, but that will involve a lot of difficult mathematics. For example of low hanging fruit - one can show that even scary many operations (think jupiter brain thinking for hours) given perfect knowledge won't let you predict weather very far - length of prediction is ~log(operations) or worse. The powers of prediction though are the easiest to fantasise about.
I don't see what exactly you think academia failed at.
Accessibility, both in the sense that much of the published information is NOT freely available to everyone, and in the sense that it tends to be very difficult to approach without a solid grounding in the field (the Sequences are aimed at smart people with maybe a year or two of college under their belt. Academia doesn't have any such obligation to write clearly, and thus tends to collapse in to jargon, etc.)
...For the sanity and consistently good ideas, you got to redefine sanity as beliefs in stuff
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.