When I saw the title, "Engaging Intellectual Elites at Less Wrong" I thought -- woohoo, they're interested in being interesting again!
I return to Less Wrong very frequently but the topics don't seem to interest me as much as they did years ago. Most articles seem to be about meet-ups, and with some thought I could identify why some of the other topics (such as the ones about optimal charity) are less interesting to me.
I thought the topics on metaphysics were really fascinating. I'm not sure that's the correct term but metaphysical what-is-the-structure-of-the-universe-possibly-like and what are different ways I can imagine my role in the system in ways that stretch my brain? This seemed something very unique about the content here at Less Wrong when I started spending time here.
I find interesting stuff on the 'Recent on Rationality Blogs' section often and enjoy watching TED talks.
...I've been wondering for a while if this disconnect in interest means I'm belonging to a different subset than the typical target of this blog.
(The last sentence the most sincere and subtle way I could think of to distance myself from the immodesty of self-identifying as an intellectual elite. In contrast, I appreciate leplen's cavalier approach in the opening sentence.)
Fascinating topics include:
considering death and exploring ways that can be felt about it at different emotional/cognitive distances
the simulation hypothesis, levels of reality, layers of maps verses territory, etc
understanding values, stability of values, subjective verses extrinsic morality, wire-heading
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.