People have some kind of tendency to believe that if a conversation happens on the internet, it isn't very important or worthwhile. Surely the only important and worthwhile words are written in high-status media like books and journal articles. And the only important and worthwhile conversations happen in the offices of tenured professors at prestigious universities, not in the open thread of some obscure group blog.

Never mind that many useful concepts introduced in LW-sphere blog posts ("ugh fields", "moloch", "pulling the rope sideways", "Pascal's mugging") have entered the broader lexicon of hundreds or thousands of 130+ IQ high-income do-gooders. Never mind that few people read academic papers, much academic writing is terrible, and many books have a high word-to-idea ratio. Never mind that even obscure blog comments can be read by a triple-digit number of people (bigger than a typical college class) or even paraphrased by Peter Singer in a published book marketed to a wide audience (he paraphrases blog comments in The Most Good You Can Do).

Just because you find it entertaining doesn't mean you are wasting your time. Less Wrong is as good as we all make it.