Is there any sort of FAQ or guideline about which topics "are about rationality" and which "are not about rationality"? I think it's a little disingenuous to downvote because it doesn't satisfy your definition of being "about rationality," as opposed to merely writing a comment that says, "I am not sure that this post is sufficiently on topic."
I am also curious how much of the regular LW reading community feels the same way. I would like to restrict top-level posts to being directly about rationality and the topics discussed in the sequences, but I am also glad there is a sort of "overflow" area where the topics of posts are free to have higher variance. I also conjecture that by opening up the Discussion part of LW to more haphazard posts, readers can get a higher sense of affiliation with other readers and this has a positive effect on the effort expended by the marginal reader (at the expense of lowering the site's overall signal-to-noise ratio). My view is that that trade-off is clearly worth it, but you seem to prefer a different view.
Why is it disingenuous?
Downvoting/upvoting is how the community signals, in a low-bandwidth easily-aggregated distributed fashion, that certain things are desired by its members and other things aren't.
As for how I feel about it personally... hm.
I expect that as the topics discussed on this forum become of more general interest to the Internet community, the forum will attract a membership that more closely resembles the Internet community. Personally, I consider that a net loss, but I don't see a plausible Schelling point on this slippery slope that we'r...
This is interesting, I wonder if there's anything to it: International variation in IQ – the role of parasites (paper) by Christopher Hassall of U. Carleton.
It strikes me as the sort of thing that could be as big an issue as lead in the environment. Raise the sanity waterline: improve health!