Question: Someone(Such as me, but it seems likely others may feel the same) reads this and asks themselves "Am I an intellectual elite?" or "Am I engaging enough on Less Wrong?"
How do you want that person to answer those questions?
I mean, there are at least a few modes of failure I can think people may have upon seeing that appeal:
A: Someone isn't really all that intellectually elite, and they think "Ah! I'm elite, Luke wants me to post more." Posts More, increases noise, decreases quality of discussion
B: Someone really is that intellectually elite, and they think "Well, I may have coauthored a paper, but I'm no elite like Yudkowsky." Lurks, stays disengaged.
C: Someone really is that intellectually elite, and they really are engaging plenty, and they think "Lukeprog still wants more? I'm spending too much time posting at work as it is!" Disengages from exhaustion.
How do you avoid those problems, bearing in mind that not all of them are necessarily equally problematic or likely, and that it seems likely the list isn't exhaustive?
(Ninja Edit) As an example of the list not being exhaustive, a quick review of comments that had occurred after I typed most of this but before I submitted implies I should add the following:
D: Those questions are ill formed, and the premise behind them needs to be rejected all together.
Note, personally, D is actually one of the reasons I comment less often on a thorough level. It can be fairly time consuming to cover all of the bases for a comment and make sure I'm not assuming things that aren't in evidence before I even start talking. But as per the above, I'm not even sure if me trying to check my comments for unwarranted assumptions to that level is desired.
E: Someone who thinks of themselves as intellectually elite, thinks of Eliezer and LW as not intellectually elite (no degree; writes fanfic), and considers the request to be Luke seeking to borrow "elite" credibility for non-credible ideas. Posts yet another blog post demeaning LW.
F: Someone who thinks of the notion of "intellectual elite" as a social problem, an effort to privilege some kinds of mental work (getting rich people to pay you to write philosophy papers) over other mental work (say, organizing religious charities, labor uni...
Is Less Wrong, despite its flaws, the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web? It seems to me that, to find reliably higher-quality discussion, I must turn to more narrowly focused sites, e.g. MathOverflow and the GiveWell blog.
Many people smarter than myself have reported the same impression. But if you know of any comparably high-quality relatively-general-interest forums, please link me to them!
In the meantime: suppose it's true that Less Wrong is the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web. In that case, we're sitting on a big opportunity to grow Less Wrong into the "standard" general-interest discussion hub for people with high intelligence and high metacognition (shorthand: "intellectual elites").
Earlier, Jonah Sinick lamented the scarcity of elites on the web. How can we get more intellectual elites to engage on the web, and in particular at Less Wrong?
Some projects to improve the situation are extremely costly:
Code changes, however, could be significantly less costly. New features or site structure elements could increase engagement by intellectual elites. (To avoid priming and contamination, I'll hold back from naming specific examples here.)
To help us figure out which code changes are most likely to increase engagement on Less Wrong by intellectual elites, specific MIRI volunteers will be interviewing intellectual elites who (1) are familiar enough with Less Wrong to be able to simulate which code changes might cause them to engage more, but who (2) mostly just lurk, currently.
In the meantime, I figured I'd throw these ideas to the community for feedback and suggestions.