Intellectual insularity is because we don't en masse read other sources. So we can't discuss them. Sure, good books are mentioned in the post, but that didn't create a collective action. What could?

Proposal: At the beginning of the month, let's choose and announce a "book of the month". At the end of the month, we will discuss the book. (During the month, discussing the book should probably be forbidden, to avoid spoilers and discouraging people who haven't read it yet.)

Have we grown as a website? I don't know -- what metric do you use? I guess the number of members / comments / articles is growing, but that's not exactly what we want. So, what exactly do we want? First step could be to specify the goal. Maybe it could be the articles -- we could try to create more high-quality articles that would be very relevant to science and rationality, but also accessible for a random visitor. Seems like the "Main" part of the site is here for this goal, except that it also contains things like "Meetups" and "Rationality Quotes".

Proposal: Refactor LW into more categories. I am not sure how exactly, but the current "Main" and "Discussion&q... (read more)

Speaking of OB, We have an expansive list of Eliezer's posts organized by topic but no such sequence exists for Robin Hanson. His posts on status seeking are incredibly important for human rationality.

I purpose that we produce a sequence devoted to RH's posts. If someone who read most of his posts can point me in the right direction I volunteer to do it. My summer's off from classes, I just have work and then my private projects and public project would be good for me to signal usefulness to LW, OB and the communities associated with them.

EDIT: RH gave me his blessing. I'm reading OB. Just crossed through to 2007. Writing major themes and interconnections as I go.

Either I'm badly misunderstanding you, or your post is at odds with a great many facts about LessWrong and other internet communities. A few examples:

we very seldom seem to adopt useful vocabulary or arguments or information from outside of LessWrong

What??? LW is constantly citing and discussing science, philosophy, and other stuff that didn't originate on LW. Indeed, most of The Sequences consists in stuff that didn't originate on LW, as do almost all of my posts, as do lots of other LW content.

in topics that Eliezer did not explicitly cover in the sequences (and some that he did), LW has made zero progress in general

LW has made progress on many topics that Eliezer talked about on LW: decision theory, the science of human values, and more. Finding examples outside the topics Eliezer raised may be difficult because (1) Eliezer covered so many topics, and (2) Eliezer's Sequences define the major subject matter of the blog. (E.g. we haven't made progress on French politics because that's not a topic of the blog.)

I was checking out a blogroll and saw LessWrong listed as Eliezer's blog about rationality. I realized that essentially it is. And worse this makes it a very crappy

Thanks for writing this post! This is something that I've noticed and have been trying to actively fight. (DA sequence, Thinking and Deciding review.)

A pithy way to express this is along the lines of a sense that more is possible: we have a sense that more is out there. For example, I was researching an entirely unrelated post which began with a reference to the Litany of Gendlin, and from that learned who Eugene Gendlin was, found and read his book on therapy, which seems like it might be as useful for dealing with akrasia as it is for other problems. There was this whole well of value there- and far as I can tell the most LW drew out of that well was a paragraph that made for a nice poem.

Right now, LW is very philosophical, and seems like it's for AGI researchers by AGI researchers. I think that's a very good foundation to build off of, but it doesn't feel complete to me. I would very much like to see more types of people involved in rationality- decision analysts, psychologists, atheist activists, scientists in general, etc.- as active participants in the conversations here. It would be awesome for us if Jonathan Baron started posting here, for example, but he's not going to unl... (read more)

1) Insularity: I actually don't think LW is all that insular. Users often link to science articles, ask for opinions on other writers, discuss films and books, etc. Exactly what set of sites or communities is LW being compared to here when you call it insular?

2) Growth (in terms of users): This is quantifiable. http://www.google.com/trends/?q=less+wrong Looks like a big jump at the beginning of 2011, perhaps when HPMoR took off, and fairly constant since. Anyway, I'm not sure that becoming big in terms of raw users is all that much of a goal, although high-quality users certainly is (at least to me).

3) Growth (in terms of articles): I agree this is a problem. There are weird incentives with karma for main vs discussion for getting promoted and such, which probably turns off people from writing a "series" of posts.

4) Organization of content in useful chunks: Also agree that this is a problem. Though we often talk about Anki, the actual Anki flashcards available are quite poor (as I found when I tried to download ones for cognitive bias). Same with the organization of the so-called sequences.

I think #1 and #2 are not that important. I think #3 and #4 are ultimately site ... (read more)

I agree with pretty much all of this. This is slightly off-topic, but:

I don't just think we should be discussing new arguments that fall within our cluster of topics--IMO, we should be branching out even more. For a while now, a handful of LWers have been arguing in comments like this one that we need a much wider range of scholarship, and that subjects outside of LW's typical math/science cluster--yes, even those icky-looking liberal artsy ones--are worth studying. This seems like a pretty reasonable suggestion. After all, the site is overwhelmingly male, white, atheist, young, consequentialist (or wannabe-consequentialist), transhumanist and heavily math/science focused. Heck, that's a near-perfect description of me. As a result, there's a natural tendency for us to be ignorant of certain subjects, and consequently to discount them. E.g., for me, subjects like anthropology are unknown unknowns: I don't know what the field is even about or how relevant it is to LW-style rationality topics.

Trouble is, we run the risk of falling into the typical autodidact failure mode of being recklessly overconfident about these topics after reading introductory material or opinion pieces on eac... (read more)

Your post is all generalizations, with almost no specific examples. I think I disagree with most of the generalizations, but it would take an equally long post for me to explore why for each generalization.

In any case, you don't make any recommendations for how Less Wrong users should change their behavior. I might agree with those if you had made them. Here are some possible policy prescriptions based on your complaints:

• If you come across a cool concept Less Wrong is unfamiliar with, share it. I agree with this prescription.
• If you want to write about something, consider doing some scholarship and figure out what people outside Less Wrong have already said about it, and citing it. I agree with this prescription.
• Systematically assign Less Wrong users to consume other reading materials and discussion sites to find the best concepts and share them on Less Wrong. This seems like it might be promising, I don't know.
• Stop voting up posts unless they look like a typical EY sequence post. I disagree with this prescription. A typical EY sequence post is way longer than it needs to be and doesn't cite any studies.
• Try harder to write posts about topics EY covered. This seems like a silly

Thanks for this post. I agree with a lot of it, and that with which I disagree, I still think is important to discuss. I have several tangential thoughts. I'm not sure how coherently organized this comment will be, but I'll try.

Intellectual Productivity: I agree this is a problem. I think there are a number of factors about LW that, in some ways, discourage intellectual productivity. I've said it before, but if I want to read something technical, I'll read the sequences, since I haven't finished them. As a result, I read very little of main. Raemon mention... (read more)

I concur. I read the sequences, then I read every post from the end of the sequences until that time (May 2011). I was amazed just how little seemed to have been taken in even from the posts on LW since the end of the sequences.

I have faint hopes the Center for Modern Rationality can seed a new set of community norms.

As per our discussion on irc, I agree!

I am a defender of "read the sequences". People should!

One step I've found often interesting that builds on EY's posts is to... read some of the stuff he mentions! For example, Influence is a great book.

In particular, we need more maths around here. I am totally displaying the problem I'm complaining about, but for example there is a great shortage of game theory. And I'd like to see people work through Khan Academy or similar.

One reason people aren't so big on linking the sequences is that Eliezer has, for some time now, been writing a book consolidating the sequences into a much more readable text. I think people are waiting until that comes out to bug everyone to read Eliezer's work.

Posting my idea from irc here too. We should look for ways to make the claims of this post more concrete and testable. I propose crawling the site to create a LW citation index. We can then make measurements - which new posts are picked up by the LW community? Does everyone always refer back to EY, or do we talk about the new stuff? etc

And mysteriously the author of this article leaves the site, after he finds himself advised by a "top poster" to do so since his contributions are "harmful". Gee what convenient timing.

Maybe he failed a private struggle session? Though obviously new reasons are probably in the works, who knows they may even be posted here! Joy.

we very seldom seem to adopt useful vocabulary or arguments or information from outside of LessWrong.

This motivates me to not postpone further the small discussion post I was thinking to write about a useful bit of vocabulary (from outside of Less Wrong) for suggested adoption. Expect it later tonight. Don't expect anything too special mind you.

Edit to add: Actually it seems I'll have to postpone this a day or two, apologies.

The community seems to not update on ideas and concepts that didn't originate here.

This seems obviously wrong to me, so I probably don't understand what you mean. Once you remove the ideas of Hofstadter, Jaynes, Drescher, Kahneman, Pearl, Dawkins, Asimov, Nozick, etc... from Less Wrong, there isn't a whole lot left. Am I wrong?