At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I will self-identify as a member of the intellectual elite since no one else seems to want to.

I'm occasionally engaged in LW and I'm interested in rationality and applied psychology and the idea of FAI.

I don't think LW is necessarily the best venue for discussing big important ideas. Making a post on the internet is something I might spend 4-5 working hours on. It might even be something I'll spend a couple days on, but that's an inconsequential amount of my time. And the vast majority of the people who read whatever post I generate will spend generously 15-20 minutes thinking about it. I'm actively working on reading and checking the math in a 300 page textbook in order to make a post on LW six months from now that maybe 100 people will read and almost no one will take seriously. If my day job weren't writing academic papers with similarly dim readership prospects this would surely be overwhelmingly demoralizing. There's a commitment issue here where it doesn't make sense to invest a lot of time in impressing/convincing LW readers. I have no guarantee that anyone is seriously engaged with whatever idea I present here as opposed to just being en... (read more)

Hm. Let me throw out several points in random order:

-- I don't think LW is a "general-interest" forum. Not even "relatively". However that's fine -- there are really no such things as general-interest forums because their lack of focus kills them. What you have, actually, is online communities some of which spend their time chatting about whatever in the general section of their forums. But that general section is just for overflow, the community itself is formed and kept together by something that binds much tighter than general interest.

-- If I rephrase your post along the lines of "LW is a web-based club for smart people. How do we get more smart people to join our club?" -- would you object?

-- Size matters. In particular, online communities have certain optimal size for cohesiveness -- be too small and it's just a few old-timers making inside jokes; grow too big and you drown in a cacophony of noise. I've seen online communities mutate into something quite different from the original through massive growth. That may be fine in the grand scheme of things, but the original character is lost.

-- While attracting "elite" how are you going to g... (read more)

• Subtopics, so that FAI, personal efficency, and effective altruism, for example, could be tracked separately by people who are interested in each.
• Different functionality for different types of posts: meetup planning, casual discussion, quotes repositories, welcome threads, advice repositories, etc. You might also add a method for adding and voting on excellent articles from outside LW. As-is, all functions are handled by the same post/nested-thread format, which is not necessarily the best suited for each one.
• Better layout design. It's best to get a design expert on this, but my sense is that the front page, and also other pages, are not laid out in a clear and appealing way.
• Social-networking integration. People use Facebook, blogs, etc. to connect nowadays, so make it easy for LW members to do this. E.g., users could optionally add links to FB and other social networks in their profiles, and you could make it easy to share/like/+1 a post.
• Rework the Discussion/Main distinction. As-is, this is very unclear. Best as I can tell, those who are supposed to post to Main know it, and everyone else is supposed to post to Discussion, after which the mysterious Lords of LessWrong promote a few posts. Is that how it is? In any case, a better way can be found.

suppose it's true that Less Wrong is the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web. In that case, we're sitting on a big opportunity to grow Less Wrong into the "standard" general-interest discussion hub for people with high intelligence and high metacognition (shorthand: "intellectual elites").

I'm skeptical. Suppose it is true--it doesn't follow that there's a realistic possibility of broadening the appeal, much less making it the "standard" general-interest discussion hub. I think there are dozens of reasons it's unlikely, but off the top of my head: there are many publications and forums already motivated to do so who have deeper pockets, and it is incredibly hard to corral contributors in such a way that they generate high value content for you without wanting to captain their own ships.

But that's supposing it's true. An outside observer might reasonably see a little bit of hubris in the claim that LW is the highest-level discussion forum on the entire internet. And I think it's pretty obvious that it's not general interest. It's a very narrow set of interests: cognitive bias, AI, philosophy, cryogenics, philanthropy, evo psyc... (read more)

I don't know what an 'elite' is, but I try to engage here on narrow topics I know something about, and find it a generally frustrating experience.

Well, I'm an intellectual non-elite, but I've got an opinion.

LessWrong is great. But it isn't "general interest". There is some very solid (and entertaining) content on rationality, but transhumanism/friendly AI and all it's manifold implications set the tone for a good portion of everything on here.

To your proposed projects:

1. Isn't that called a magazine?

2. LW's jargon is part of it's charm... and, I think, it's effectiveness in communicating ideas without engaging the previous connotations and biases of it's readers. Of course, it probably does interfere with LW gaining more widespread, mainstream appeal among "intellectual elites" so, to that end, get rid of it.

Generally, I think LW is awesome. But "highest quality on the internet"? Yowza. It's a big internet and that's a big supposition. (Is there a name for a bias where you become a bit too thrilled with your own online forum's greatness?)

I'd say keep doing what ya'll are doing. By their nature, online forums seem to fill relatively narrow-interest niches and I think LW does a great job of that.

LessWrong = Highest-quality-FAI-no-politics-allowed-genius-filled-online-forum. Of 2013.

Forgive me, but the premise of this post seems unbelievably arrogant. You are interested in communicating with "intellectual elites"; these people have their own communities and channels of communication. Instead of asking what those channels are and how you can become part of them, you instead ask how you can lure those people away from their communities, so that they'll devote their limited free time to posting on LW instead.

I'm in academia (not an "intellectual elite", just a lowly grad student), and I've often felt torn between my allegiances to the academic community vs. the LessWrong community. In part, the conflict exists because LessWrong frames itself as an alternative to academia, as better than academia, a place where the true intellectuals can congregate, free from the constraints of the system of academic credibility, which unfairly penalizes autodidacts, or something. Academia has its problems, of course, and I agree with some of the LessWrong criticisms of it. But academia does have higher standards of rigor: peer review, actual empirical investigation of phenomena instead of armchair speculation based on the contents of pop science books, an... (read more)

Increasingly I post my thoughts to Facebook for the following very simple reason: If I don't like a comment on my status thread, I click 'x' on it, and then it's gone without a trace. Intellectual elites who are not teenagers living in Wyoming will often have other mailing lists, or even other live human beings, from whom they can get consistently high-quality conversation with none of the dreck that emerges when all of real life's checks and balances are disengaged.

This isn't to say that to engage intellectual elites you must offer an 'x' button on all comments on their post, just like Facebook does - though that would be a good start at not having them walk away and go someplace where there's only intelligent people to talk to. I've been wondering if it would be possible to design a less democratic karma system which would serve the same function, though more in a context of "What is the successor to Wikipedia?" or "What is the successor to peer review?" with trying it as a successor to Less Wrong just being one possible way of testing out the latter more important functions. One also notes that many academic types have self-contradictory beliefs about 'ce... (read more)

The term "intellectual elite" rubs me the wrong way. It makes me think of Mensa and other groups with too much ego for their own good. Isn't there something more neutral? "Elitism" is not a good label to be stuck with.

• Ignore user feature.

This gives most of the benefit of the "give people facebook censorship power" preference of Eliezer without the catastrophic game theoretic implications of doing that in an environment where you cannot choose who you subscribe to. I expect the ability to block users to drastically cut down both on perceived and actual low value content on the site and significantly improve user experience.

Question: Someone(Such as me, but it seems likely others may feel the same) reads this and asks themselves "Am I an intellectual elite?" or "Am I engaging enough on Less Wrong?"

How do you want that person to answer those questions?

I mean, there are at least a few modes of failure I can think people may have upon seeing that appeal:

A: Someone isn't really all that intellectually elite, and they think "Ah! I'm elite, Luke wants me to post more." Posts More, increases noise, decreases quality of discussion

B: Someone really is that intellectually elite, and they think "Well, I may have coauthored a paper, but I'm no elite like Yudkowsky." Lurks, stays disengaged.

C: Someone really is that intellectually elite, and they really are engaging plenty, and they think "Lukeprog still wants more? I'm spending too much time posting at work as it is!" Disengages from exhaustion.

How do you avoid those problems, bearing in mind that not all of them are necessarily equally problematic or likely, and that it seems likely the list isn't exhaustive?

(Ninja Edit) As an example of the list not being exhaustive, a quick review of comments that had occurred ... (read more)

Is the "engaging" in the title a verb or an adjective?

One issue, and I haven't read the other comments to see whether it's already been brought up, is that it seems hard to justify time expenditure on LessWrong to elites whose time is valuable, or at least to the people that elites need to justify their time expenditure to. For example, time on MathOverflow can be justified to research mathematicians (and/or to grant committees) by the promise that it is a space to ask and answer questions in research mathematics and therefore to advance the cause of mathematics in general. It's less clear to me what the justification for spending time on LessWrong is to, say, a smart business executive. (Or is this not the kind of audience you have in mind by the term "intellectual elite"?)

If one thinks of LW not as the final destination to which intellectual elites should be attracted, but a useful and productive entry point for LW-associated organisations (whether formally affiliated or loosely linked) also including LW itself, it seems to me that things are largely on the right track. Judging from the welcome threads there seems to have been a great deal of success in recruiting young members especially, but not only, through HPMoR. And often there is a youthful feel to discussions here, quite appropriately as many young members are di... (read more)

I initially had an extremely negative emotional response to this post. Then I realized you actually point out exactly why I had such a response with point number 2.

Less Wrong has a language problem.

To someone first coming to read the discussion forum with only a vague idea of what Less Wrong represents (maybe even slightly biased towards thinking of the community as an elitist cultish ivory tower exercise in intellectual masturbation), this post, to be short, doesn't help.

What makes this sort of funny is that your actual message is just, "We want mor... (read more)

I think LW would profit immensely from a team of professional moderators who

• take a thread with lots of comments and turn it into a structured overview of arguments and counterarguments (and give an evaluation of how open or complete the discussion is)

  • and mark open discussion points and important aspects that haven't gotten propper attention yet

• rate comments in a way that is more informative than mere up/downvotes, possibly in more than one dimension ( Relevance / logical structure of the comment / Quality of the central argument)

• promote high q