1. Too much emphasis on "altruism" and treatment of "altruists" as a special class. (As opposed to the rest of us who "merely" enjoy doing cool things like theoretical research and art, but also need the world to keep existing for that to continue happening.) No one should have to feel bad about continuing to live in the world while they marginally help to save it.
2. Not enough high-status people, especially scientists and philosophers. Do Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett know about LW? If not, why not? Why aren't they here? What can we do about it? Why aren't a serious-looking design and the logo of an Oxford institute enough to gain credibility? (Exception that proves the rule: Scott Aaronson has LW on his blogroll, but he was reading OB before he was high-status, and so far as I am aware, hasn't ever commented on LW as opposed to OB.)
3. Too much downvoting for disagreement, or for making non-blatant errors.
4. It's not that there are too many meetup posts, it's that there are too few content posts by comparison.
5. I sometimes feel that LW is not quite nice enough (see point 3.). Visiting other internet forums quickly snaps me out of this and puts things into perspective; but I still think we could probably do better.
6. Related to 3. and 5.: sometimes people don't read things carefully before reacting (and voting).
7. Art-related topics don't get enough respect. This fact manifests itself both in blatant ways (low scores for comments that discuss them) and in subtle ways (people make assumptions about what subtopic- and position-space look like in these domains, and show impatience with discussions about whether these assumptions are correct ).
Too much emphasis on "altruism" and treatment of "altruists" as a special class. (As opposed to the rest of us who "merely" enjoy doing cool things like theoretical research and art, but also need the world to keep existing for that to continue happening.) No one should have to feel bad about continuing to live in the world while they marginally help to save it.
Are people doing specific things to make you feel bad about "continuing to live in the world", or does mere discussion of altruist-relevant topics among LW altruists make you feel that way?
Or, what do you want to see more or less of from Less Wrong?
I'm thinking about community norms, content and topics discussed, karma voting patterns, et cetera. There are already posts and comment sections filled with long lists of proposed technical software changes/additions, let's not make this post another one.
My impression is that people sometimes make discussion posts about things that bother them, and sometimes a bunch of people will agree and sometimes a bunch of people will disagree, but most people don't care that much (or they have a life or something) and thus don't want to dedicate a post just to complaining. This post is meant to make it socially and cognitively easy to offer critique.
I humbly request that you list downsides of existing policies even when you think the upsides outweigh them, for all the obvious reasons. I also humbly request that you list a critique/gripe even if you don't want to bother explaining why you have that critique/gripe, and even in cases where you think your gripe is, ahem, "irrational". In general, I think it'd be really cool if we erred on the side of listing things which might be problems even if there's no obvious solution or no real cause for complaint except for personal distaste for the color green (for example).
I arrogantly request that we try to avoid impulsive downvoting and non-niceness for the duration of this post (and others like it). If someone wants to complain that Less Wrong is a little cultish without explaining why then downvoting them to oblivion, while admittedly kind of funny, is probably a bad idea. :)