My expertise, strictly speaking, is in programming and closely related technological topics; those are the only subjects where I can personally vouch for the correctness etc. of the content instead of relying on references. Everywhere else I'd be repeating what other people write, or at best providing anecdotal evidence.
But programming is an immensely wide subject. Most of the LW regulars are themselves programmers or have experience with programming (in the Israeli LW meetup there's only one 'core' / regular member who's not a programmer). I fear that most technical things I might write would be obvious to some and incomprehensible or irrelevant to others, and only useful and interesting to a minority in the middle.
On the other hand, I read a lot in subjects which I think would interest many people. I could write about those, but the epistemic status would be "I read this somewhere, here's the reference, I can't verify this for myself and I probably don't even have a good prior and neither do you unless you're already an expert in the subject." For example, at a recent Israeli LW meetup I presented a summary of biologist Nick Lane's books on the role of mitochondria in the evolution of other properties of eukaryotes. I'm not sure the two people in the audience with formal biological education liked it as much as everyone else did; one of them said something to the effect of "even if it's not necessarily true, it's a nice story".
In general, having articles accessible for everyone is nice, but it isn't necessary. We already had very math-heavy LW articles. Just as well we could have anything-else-heavy articles, as long as enough people here understand the topic, so they can express their opinions on whether it makes sense or is a bullshit.
You can always ask in the open thread: "Hi, I am going to write a topic about X (be quite specific here), what do you think about it?" Add options like "I wouldn't understand it", "I already know that", "I would...
Thanks to the reaction to this article and some conversations, I'm convinced that it's worth trying to renovate and restore LW. Eliezer, Nate, and Matt Fallshaw are all on board and have empowered me as an editor to see what we can do about reshaping LW to meet what the community currently needs. This involves a combination of technical changes and social changes, which we'll try to make transparently and non-intrusively.
Technical Changes
Changes will be tracked as issues on the LW issue tracker here. Volunteer contributions very welcome and will be rewarded with karma, and if you'd like to be paid for spending a solid block of high-priority time on this get in touch with me. If you'd like to help, for now I recommend setting up a dev environment (as laid out here and here).
Some technical changes (links to the issues in the issue tracker):
--Nick_Tarleton
This is something I care about quite a bit! Ideally, the three people above would scrutinize every change and determine whether or not it's worthwhile. In practice, they're all extremely busy, and as I'm only very busy I've been deputized to handle whether or not change will be accepted. If you're unsure about a change, talk to me.
Trike still maintains the site, and so it's still a Trike dev's call when a change will make its way to production (or if it's too buggy to accept). We've got a turnaround time guarantee from Matt for any time-sensitive changes (which I imagine few changes will be).
Social Changes
The rationalist community is a different beast than it was years ago, and many people have shifted away from Less Wrong. Bringing them back needs to involve more than asking nicely, or the same problems will appear again.
Epistemic rationality will remain a core focus of LessWrong, and the sorts of confusion that you find elsewhere will continue to not fly here. But the forces that push people from Main to Discussion to Open Threads to other sites need to be explicitly counteracted.
One aspect is that just like emotion is part of rationality, informality is part of the rationalist community.
--Alicorn
Another aspect is dealing with the deepening and specializing interests of the community.
A third aspect is focusing on effective communication. One of the core determinants of professional and personal success is being able to communicate challenging topics and emotions effectively with other humans. The applications for both instrumental and epistemic rationality are clear, and explicitly seeking to cultivate this skill without losing the commitment to rationality will both make LW a more pleasant place to visit and (one hopes) allow LWers to win more in their lives. But this is a long project, whose details this paragraph is too short to contain. I don't have a current anticipated date for when I'll be ready to talk more about this.
I expect to edit this post over the coming days, and as I do, I'll make comments to highlight the changes. Thanks for reading!