A related request: there are a lot of goals common enough that better achieving these goals should be of interest to a large-ish portion of LW. I'm thinking here of: happiness; income; health; avoiding auto accidents; reading more effectively; building better relationships with friends, family, dating partners, or co-workers; operationalizing one's goals to better track progress; more easily shedding old habits and gaining new ones.

Could we use our combined knowledge base, and our ability to actually value empirical data and consider counter-evidence and so on, to find and share some of the better known strategies for achieving these goals? (Strategies that have already been published or empirically validated, but that many of us probably haven’t heard?) We probably don’t want to have loads and loads of specific-goaled articles or links, because we don’t want to look like just any old random internet self-help site. But a medium amount of high-quality research, backed by statistics, with the LW-community’s help noticing the flaws or counter-arguments -- this sounds useful to me. Really useful. Much of the advantage of rationality comes from, like, actually using that rationality to sort through what’s known and to find and implement existing best practices. And truth being singular, there’s no reason we should each have to repeat this research separately, at least for the goals many of us share.

Anna Salamon, 2009. So this "destruction" was at least semi-planned.

hypercontrarian archconservative clique

lulz. Why do I feel identity-feels for that phrase? I should watch out for that, but,

which might be wrong about everything

That's what I thought a few months ago. Then everything turned inside out and I <metaphor> realized there is no god </metaphor>. What a feeling! Now I see people confidently rationalizing the cultural default, and realize how far we have to go WRT epistemic rationality.

If EY didn't intend for said "destruction" to happen, he should have chosen a website model more suitable to that end.

tl;dr: The following is a non-profit fan-based parody. Less Wrong, the Singularity Institute, and the Centre for Applied Rationality are owned by Hogwarts School, Chancellor Ray Kurzweil, and the Bayesian Conspiracy. Please support the official release.

Troll Wrongosphers with Baumeister and Eddington, not Benedict and Evola

Wrongosophical trolling should be based on genuinely superior psychological insights ("Baumeister" for breakthroughs in social psychology such as those summarized in Vohs & Baumeister 2010) and on crackpot science that is nonetheless difficult to debunk ("Eddington" for the fundamental theory described in Durham 2006). Starting from reaction and religion, as many trolls still do, both (1) promotes unpleasant ideas like God and conservatism and (2) fails to connect with the pragmatic and progressive sensibility of 21st-century culture. Once young trollosophers are equipped with some of the best newthink and pseudoscience, then let them dominate the subversive paradigm. I'll bet they get farther than the other kind.