You might be interested in CFAR, which is focused explicitly on the project of rationality skill acquisition.
When reading blogs, people only see recent posts and those posts are not significantly revised.
LW seems to be particularly focused on people reading through old posts, and there are significant link trails, and so on. It's not clear to me that LW has the problem that people only see recent posts.
LW might have the problem that old posts are not significantly revised. This doesn't seem to be the case with collection threads, or example threads; my 4 examples of VoI spawned gwern's 8 examples of VoI, and a similar post with more examples would be likely to get upvotes now. In cases where an explanation of something could be better, it seems more likely that there should be two versions of something, to capture two audiences with systematic differences between them, rather than that one version should be improved to please everyone. If there's a sequence or a post that you think could be rewritten to reach another audience more effectively, try rewriting that post, and be explicit about it. I suspect that would get upvoted.
A wiki would allow for the creation of a large body of organized knowledge that is frequently revised.
We do have a wiki, linked on the sidebar. At present, the wiki mostly has summaries of sequences and posts, rather than separate full explanations of those ideas. I think that if the wiki were fleshed out a bit, it might see more use- but it's not clear to me that the wiki is actually a better system than the community blog structure of LW.
Should I have titled the post Instrumental Rationality Wiki that also has a Page on Rationality? Perhaps the name "Effective Rationality Training Online" does not lead people to think about self-improvement, just making good decisions type rationality.
The problem with CFAR is that there is just so much knowledge out there it cannot be shared in several days. It's an excellent starting point, but there is just so much more material out there and so many individual circumstances that it would be impossible to provide consistent high impact knowled...
Article Prerequisite: Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality
Introduction
The goal of this post is to explore the idea of rationality training, feedback and ideas are greatly appreciated.
Less Wrong’s stated mission is to help people become more rational, and it has made progress toward that goal. Members read and discuss useful ideas on the internet, get instant feedback because of the voting system, and schedule meetups with other members. Less Wrong also helps attract more people to rationality.
Less Wrong helps with sharing ideas, but it fails to help people put elements of epistemic and instrumental rationality into practice. This is a serious problem, but it would be hard to fix without altering the core functionality of Less Wrong.
Having separate websites for reading and discussing ideas and then actually using those ideas would improve the real world performance of the Less Wrong community while maintaining the idea discussion, “marketing”, and other benefits of the Less Wrong website.
How to create a useful website for self improvement
1. Knowledge Management
When reading blogs, people only see recent posts and those posts are not significantly revised. A wiki would allow for the creation of a large body of organized knowledge that is frequently revised. Each wiki post would have a description, benefits of the topic described, resources to learn the topic, user submitted resources to learn the topic, and reviews of each resource. Posts would be organized hierarchically and voted on for usefulness to help readers effectively improve what they are looking for. Users could share self-improvement plans to help others improve effectiveness in general or in a specific topic as quickly as possible.
2. Effective Learning
Resources to learn topics should be arranged or written for effective skill acquisition, and there may be different resource categories like exercises for deliberate practice or active recall questions for spaced repetition.
3. Quality Contributors
Contributors would, at the very least, need to be familiar with how to write articles that supported the skill acquisition process agreed upon by the entire community. Required writing and research skills would produce higher quality work. I am not sure if being a rationalist would improve the quality of articles.
Problems
1. Difficult requirements
The number of prerequisites necessary to contribute to and use the wiki would really lower the amount of people who will be able to benefit from the wiki. It's a trade off between effectiveness and popularity. What elements should be included to maximize the effectiveness of the website?
2. Interest
There has to be enough interest in the website, or else a different project should be started instead. How many people in the Less Wrong community, and the world at large, would be interested in self improvement and rationality?
3. Increasing the effectiveness of non altruistic people
How much of the target audience wants to improve the world? If most do not, then the wiki would essentially be a net negative on the world. What should the criteria be to view and contribute to the wiki? Perhaps only Less Wrong members should be able to view and edit the wiki, and contributors must read a quick start guide and pass a quick test before being allowed to post.