If you are not an expert, what made you think that Nick Lane's books are better than random garbage? I see two options: either you trust his credentials, or you have already read enough books in biology that there is a chance that you would notice something off.
Let's run with this, not because I need to decide this case, but as an example:
He has reasonable credentials: he's Reader in Evolutionary Biochemistry (the exact subject of his books), University College, London. He has written several books on the subject with high Amazon rank. Most things he says aren't original to him and he's careful to cite the origins of each idea.
But with all that, I have no real idea of how other people in his field perceive him or his theories. All the reviews I found with Google were positive but also weren't by experts in that particular field. I also don't have a sense of how much counterevidence there might be that he doesn't mention.
I have read many tens of books popularizing biology, paleontology, history of evolution, etc. And I studied undergrad biology for three semesters. But I don't have a professional understanding, and I haven't read technical literature relevant to Lane's theories.
I do sometimes notice 'something being off'. But in most of these cases I don't think I'm capable of distinguishing the author being wrong from myself being wrong.
I'm afraid of spreading misinformation that only an expert would notice, because there may not be any experts in the audience (and also my reputation would take a big hit). So the question is: how (meta-)certain should I be before publishing something on LW?
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!