Yes, I meant cryonics. Thanks.
You realize best and better are subjective in this case, right? I mean, you could maybe make an argument about "higher-level" being objective, but you're never going to win that fight. People will just walk away, which is the higher-level response.
EDSBS and Power and Bulk focus on college football and powerlifting, respectively. TNC's Horde pulls in commentary on everything from the Thirty Years War to Egypt's current conflict. They all shade into occasional discussions of Poetry and the Human Condition. I'm not a contributing member at any of these sites, so I don't have a dog in this fight. But LW is not even the only site with extensive, didactic, deeply felt fanfiction. All forums developed past a certain point express their values through epic.
I read a tiny fraction of the internet, like most of us, so I'm sure there are myriad discussions out there I would enjoy even more.
There's no disputing taste, and higher-level sounds a lot like an expression of taste to me so, by all means, enjoy LW. This seems like a great place for people interested in the things LW is interested in. I would totally buy a claim that this is the best forum for rationalist transhumanists interested in AI. Just remember, whenever you think that everyone would acknowledge your place's awesomeness if only they knew about it, that, as is true for each person, The Place Where You Are From Sucks.
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.