And, is this something most LW members would want? After all LW has long had a strongly-defended reputation as an outsider organisation -- would more involvement by "mainstream elite" take away those aspects of LW that make it what it is?
I don't see much downside in being seen as becoming more mainstream. LW isn't itself a mainstream academic organization, but it's not like we're all fundamentalist hipsters.
There also seems to be some kind of tension here - LW would like to attract more intellectual elites while at the same time MIRI is reducing efforts in the same direction MIRI 2013 strategy due to developments in the academic mainstream.
That's not actually true. MIRI is putting less effort into grassroots movement-building, but is actually putting more effort into attracting people from the academic elite. The name change was partially motivated by the need to appeal to mainstream academics, and MIRI has been fairly successful at attracting academics with little or no prior exposure to LW to their logic research workshops.
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.