From Costanza's original thread (entire text):
This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.
Meta:
- How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.
- Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.
Welcome to LW! You pose an interesting question.
I think there is a purely sociological explanation. LW was started by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is a transhumanist and an AI researcher very concerned about the singularity, and his writings at Overcoming Bias (the blog from which LW was born by splitting) naturally tended to attract people with the same interests. But as LW grows and attracts more diverse people, I don't see why transhumanism/futurism related topics must necessarily stay at the forefront, though they might (path-dependence effect). I guess time will tell.
If you have something interesting to say about these topics and the application of rationality to them, by all means do! However, about topic (c) you must bear in mind that there is a community consensus to avoid political discussions, which often translates to severely downvoting any post that maps too closely to an established political/ideological position.