More Anglo prevalence than I would have expected for a site like this.
Are there any English-language discussion sites that aren't very Anglo-centric? The more troubling thing for me is the feel that we're just bouncing around ideas that flow out of Silicon Valley instead of having multiple cultural centers generating new ideas with their own slant on stuff and having a back-and-forth. There could be interesting communities that are in Russian, Chinese, German, French or Spanish which are producing interesting ideas and could be aligned with LW if someone would bother to translate stuff, or then we could just be in a situation where the interesting new stuff that's roughly compatible with the LW meme cluster just happens to emerge mostly from the Anglosphere.
The split between analytic philosophy done in English and continental philosophy done in French and German is a bit similar. And that seems to have led into mutual unintelligibility at some conceptual level, not because of language. As far as I can tell, the two schools of philosophy don't have much use or appreciation for each others' stuff even when it gets translated. There seems to be some weird deep intertwining going on with language, culture and the sort of philosophy that gets produced, and LW stuff might be subject to it as well.
It's odd in general that I feel like I have a much better idea about what's going on in the US than in most of Europe since the primary language of most Americans is one I can understand and the primary language of most Europeans is one I can't.
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. :)