Agreed.
One person at the Paris meetup made the really interesting and AFAICT accurate observation that the more prominent a Less Wrong post was, the less likely it was to be high quality - ie comments are better than Discussion posts are better than Main (with several obvious and honorable exceptions).
I think maybe it has to do with the knowledge that anything displayed prominently is going to have a bunch of really really smart people swarming all over it and critiquing it and making sure you get very embarrassed if any of it is wrong. People avoid posting things they're not sure about, and so the things that get main-ed tend to be restatements of things that create pleasant feelings in everyone reading them without rocking any conceivable boat, and the sort of overly meta- topics you're talking about lend themselves to those restatements - for example "We should all be more willing to try new things!" or "Let's try to be more alert for biases in our everyday life!"
Potential cures include greater willingness to upvote posts that are interesting but non-perfect, greater willingness to express small disagreements in "IAWYC but" form, and greater willingness to downvote posts that are applause lights or don't present non-obvious new material. I'm starting to do this, but hitting that downvote button when there's nothing objectively false or stupid about a post is hard.
As the author of one of the rehash posts, I agree that these sorts of topics are generally pretty boring and uninteresting to read. There's nothing surprising or new in them, and they seem pretty obvious when you read them.
But the point (of mine at least) wasn't really to expose any new material, so much as to try to push people into doing something useful. As far as I can tell, a large portion of the readers of LW don't implement various easy life-improvement methods, and it was really more intended as a push to encourage people to use them.
On the one han...
More and more, LessWrong's posts are meta-rationality posts, about how to be rational, how to avoid akrasia, in general, without any specific application. This is probably the intended purpose of the site. But they're starting to bore me.
What drew me to LessWrong is that it's a place where I can put rationality into practice, discussing specific questions of philosophy, value, and possible futures, with the goal of finding a good path through the Singularity. Many of these topics have no other place where rational discussion of them is possible, online or off. Such applied topics have almost all moved to Discussion now, and may be declining in frequency.
This isn't entirely new. Applied discussions have always suffered bad karma on LW (statistically; please do not respond with anecdotal data). I thought this was because people downvote a post if they find anything in it that they disagree with. But perhaps a lot of people would rather talk about rationality than use it.
Does anyone else have this perception? Or am I just becoming a LW old geezer?
At the same time, LW is taking off in terms of meetups and number of posts. Is it finding its true self? Does the discussion of rationality techniques have a larger market than debates over Sleeping Beauty (I'm even beginning to miss those!) Is the old concern with values, artificial intelligence, and the Singularity something for LW to grow out of?
(ADDED: Some rationality posts are good. I am also a lukeprog fan.)