Awesome work.

One thing that disappointed, but didn't really surprise me, was the lack of diversity in the community

"160 (96.4%) were male, 5 (3%) were female, and one chose not to reveal their gender.

The mean age was 27.16, the median was 25, and the SD was 7.68. The youngest person was 16, and the oldest was 60. Quartiles were <22, 22-25, 25-30, and >30.

Of the 158 of us who disclosed our race, 148 were white (93.6%), 6 were Asian, 1 was Black, 2 were Hispanic, and one cast a write-in vote for Middle Eastern. Judging by the number who put "Hinduism" as their family religion, most of those Asians seem to be Indians."

The thing that particularly worries me is our low age. Now it's to be expected as internet communities are a young person's game but I'd be more comfortable with an average age closer to 30.

Combine that with the fact that most of us seem to be in Computers or Engineering (I'd really like to know what those "Other Hard Sciences" were) I do worry about our rationality as a group. One thing I've noticed with junk science is that Engineers and to a lesser extent Computer Scientists seem to be overrepresented. I'm not sure of all the reasons for this, I suspect that part of the problem is that we regularly work with designed systems that have a master plan that can be derived from a small amount of evidence. The problem being if you take that tendency to problem spaces that aren't designed you have a tendency to go flying off in the wrong direction.

I'm worried that we could start turning into an echo-chamber where a localized consensus masks a growing dissonance with the outside world. The Shangri-la diet sounds interesting (I'm even giving it a try) but it also sounds a bit like pseudo-science. There could be a completely different mechanism at work, it could even be the good old fashioned placebo effect. I worry that we'll develop a tendency to believe our rationality is strong enough to wade outside of our fields of expertise, the halls of kookdom are filled with brilliant scientists who wandered into a neighbouring discipline and I worry we could risk the same fate.

I'm not saying Less Wrong is a doomed cause or anything, the topics we explore (oh that crazy old Omega!) we seem to do fairly well on and I've picked up many useful lessons and insights. I just worry since we all want to apply our rationality and find answers, but regardless of how rational you are you can't unravel the secrets of the universe just from analysing a piece of cake.

ps Oh yeah, how many of us 83.4% Libertarians/Liberals were very torn because while we really liked the free-market and social liberty ideals of libertarians there were just too many crackpots over there so we considered giving up some economic freedom for the mainstream democrats.