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Wei_Dai comments on What bothers you about Less Wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
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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 ).
High status people tend to be those whose actions are optimized to maximize status. Participating on Internet forums is not an optimal way to gain status in general. (Of course it can be a good way to gain status within particular forums, but by high-status people you clearly meant more widely-recognized status.)
(I disagree with Vladimir_M that "arguing on public internet forums is not an effective way to accomplish anything much in practice". In my experience it is a good way to get people interested in your ideas, further develop them and/or check them for correctness.)
Probably not much we can do unless LW somehow gains widespread recognition among the public (but then we probably won't care so much about "not enough high status people"). I note that even the philosophers at FHI rarely participate here.
I would be very interested in hearing why this is true, and the resource is at hand.
You can see here an explanation from Toby Ord why he decided not to continue a discussion despite some of us begging him to.
By the way, how far is (a saner rendering of) "moral realism" from simply a focus on "objective" in "subjectively objective values"? That is, any given agent can't escape from fixed moral truths no more than physical reality, even though there are other physical realities and agents with other goals. This doesn't look like a disagreement.
Toby mentioned that moral realism went together with value simplicity, so presumably he meant a version of moral realism that implies value simplicity, from which I infer that his position is not close to "subjectively objective values".
Toby's comment doesn't strongly imply that he believes in value simplicity though. On the other hand, "value simplicity" can be parsed as correct as well, in the sense of pointing to human minds or even to own intuition and saying "values like this" (I weakly guess a moral realist would just use own intuition in this case instead of noticing it), so this needs further disambiguation. :-)