I have felt for a long time that LW is short of discussion of what you might call "collective rationality": the art of effective collaborative truth-seeking. Of course LW is itself an attempt at collective rationality; but most of us, much of the time, are engaged in activities that (1) involve multiple people, (2) would benefit from better truth-finding techniques, and (3) are not Less Wrong.
Definitely agreed.
Of course LW is itself an attempt at collective rationality
In particular, it seems like it is a remarkably unexamined, unplanned attempt. Surely we've learned some ways to improve it. Surely there are better approaches out there than "hey, Reddit seems to work ok, let's modify a couple things, call it good, and leave it alone for a while".
Not that I know how to improve it. Predictably, I have a few complaints and a few minor tweaks to suggest, but I'd really prefer a more evidence-based approach than that. Actually, I don't ...
As many people have noted, Less Wrong currently isn't receiving as much content as we would like. One way to think about expanding the content is to think about which areas of study deserve more articles written on them.
For example, I expect that sociology has a lot to say about many of our cultural assumptions. It is quite possible that 95% of it is either obvious or junk, but almost all fields have that 5% within them that could be valuable. Another area of study that might be interesting to consider is anthropology. Again this is a field that allows us to step outside of our cultural assumptions.
I don't know anything about media studies, but I imagine that they have some worthwhile things to say about how we the information that we hear is distorted.
What other fields would you like to see some discussion of on Less Wrong?