Which parts of academia? There is zero experimental research that is up to any academic standards, There is no numerical modeling in any areas that I can think of. There is some foundational AI alignment work which is mostly math and any interesting results there will likely be published. There are some interesting philosophical ideas, I suppose, not sure if they are good enough to be published in academic journals. There is plenty of "raising the sanity waterline" efforts, but those hardly qualify as research. What am I missing?
LessWrong doesn't use academic terminology for a lot of things, so translation could be an issue. There have been a couple of posts featuring academic quality experimental research. Of course most of those were concurrently being published.
I feel that a lot of what's in LW (written by Eliezer or others) should be in mainstream academia. Not necessarily the most controversial views (the insistence on the MW hypothesis, cryonics, the FAI ...), but a lot of the work on overcoming biases should be there, be criticized there and be improved there.
For example, a few debiasing methods and a more formal explanation of LW's peculiar solution to free will (and more, these are only examples).
I don't really get why LW's content isn't in mainstream academia to be honest.
I get that peer review is not the best (far from it, although it's still the best we have, and post-publication peer-review is also improving, see PubPeer), that some would too readily dismiss LW's content, but not all. Lots would play by the rules and provide genuine criticisms during peer-review (which will lead to the alteration of the content of course), along with criticisms post publication. This is in my opinion something that has to happen.
LW, Eliezer, etc, can't stay on the "crank" level, not playing by the rules, publishing books and no papers. Blogs are indeed faster and reach a bigger amount of people, but I'm not arguing for only publishing in academia. Blogs can (and should) continue.
Tell me what you think, as I seem to have missed something with this topic.