Several weeks ago I wrote a heavily upvoted post called Don't Be Afraid of Asking Personally Important Questions on LessWrong. I've been thinking about a couple of things since I wrote that post.

• What makes LessWrong a useful website for asking questions which matter to you personally is that there is lots of insightful people here with wide knowledge base. However, for some questions, LessWrong might be too much, or the wrong kind of, monoculture to provide the best answers. Thus, for weird, unusual, or highly specific questions, there might be better discussion boards, or online communities, to query. In general, Quora might be best for some questions. Stack Overflow might be best for programming questions, Math Overflow might be best for math questions, and some subreddits best for asking questions on very specific topics. What I would like to do is generate a repository of all the best websites for asking specialized or unusual questions across a variety of deep topics. I would turn this into another Discussion post on LessWrong.

• Robin Hanson wrote:

  It seems obvious to me that almost no humans are able to force themselves to see honestly and without substantial bias on all topics. Even for the best of us, the biasing forces in and around us are often much stronger than our will to avoid bias. Because it takes effort to overcome these forces, we must choose our battles, i.e., we must choose where to focus our efforts to attend carefully to avoiding possible biases. He follows this up with problems of being a 'rationalist', and suggestions for alternatives in Don't Be A Rationalist.

Luke Muehlhauser goes over similar material on his own blog here. In short, the rationalist community can't or won't become experts for every subject it wants to extract information from, so it makes sense for it to defer to experts. If rationalists can't become experts themselves, identifying experts seems like the best strategy. This could be broken down into the skills of knowing how or where to find experts, and knowing how to identify which experts are the best or most trustworthy. Developing skills or heuristics like these could make great additions to LessWrong. I'd be willing to be part of this project, but I don't believe I'm competent enough to do it alone. However, working with LessWrong, an initial post on what are some decent sources for getting answers to questions we can't get on LessWrong could be a springboard for such a discussion.

What are your thoughts on these topics?