Another of my friends said that he "hates rationalism with a passion"—and I have no idea which of these five things is the one he hates!

Hehehe...this reminds me of responses I get from people who I link to LW. On Twitter I recently got this one:

... what is the bloody point? Philosophizing to death?

A comment on one of my blogs:

Well I'd figured out most of the above just fine already without any help from LessWrong. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's a great resource but it's still just one collection of peoples ideas on the internet, not the single bright shining hope for the redemption of the humanities collective intellect.

I've seen & flagged some interesting stuff in the couple of hours I've already killed on there, but there's also a whole bunch of crummy anecdotes, academic grandstanding & incredibly boring logic arguments to wade through. I think it was folkert who had that Bertrand Russel quote up on his site about wishing thinking would come back in style, if that's ever going to happen then places like LessWrong need to figure out how to distill their subject matter and make it more palatable for the average person who really doesn't care about being part of the Bayesian in-crowd.

If that's something they're already discussing but I just haven't come across yet then by all means, link me up. It's far more interesting (imo) than reading about how someone flexed their superior rationality in order to one-up a god botherer at a dinner party. ;)

It is most often along the lines of interesting but useless and nothing new. Using 'rationalism' will appall even more, I already had a few conversations where people told me that they mainly perceive LW to be a place for geeks to collectively fill themselves with confidence.