What's up with this dichotomy between LW and academia? I'm sure plenty of people on here have high-level degrees or work in some academic field.
Some of the people on LW have academic degrees or work at academic jobs, but I can't think of many active posters who seem to be on the track of becoming the sort of academician whom other academicians will recognize and pay attention to.
My impression of the typical LessWronger is someone who might be clever enough to be a run-of-the-mill academic worker, but who didn't get on with the program where they'd basically need to put the majority of their time and output into the academic machine to get any hope of establishing a career. The equally clever people in academia don't have spare time to hang out at LW and actually do eventually get quite a lot better at their chosen thing than the average LW'er at any of their miscellaneous interesting things of the week. Meanwhile, LW is the akrasia culture, where the sort of highly focused and high-achieving people who end up making a name for themselves in modern academia are invisible, and the people hanging out here have no way of picking up their cultural habits. Instead, there's a large peer group of low-achieving procrastinators who like to post interesting forum messages to identify with and unconsciously learn habits from.
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.