I don't think online contribution has much to do with estimation of your own ability. Contributing is just a habit. Someone might learn his contributing habit on reddit. Afterwards when he reads something on LessWrong where he has an opinion, he will also write a comment if he has the time.
Precommitted to publishing this in Discussion to fight publication bias. It looks like intelligence (as measured by IQ, SAT scores, etc.) isn't meaningfully related to how much one posts to LW. Probably in the ideal case, they would be related and higher-IQ people would post more, but that doesn't appear to be going on either.
How well-educated you are doesn't seem to be much related to participation either. I'm not controlling for hours spent on LW for any of this, though.
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