This is a complex issue. It probably deserves its own post, but I'll give it a go here.

Here's a few relevant beliefs which have traction in the community, which I don't necessarily agree with. Related ideas vaguely clustered together:

1) The world would be better if people were more rational 2) People can be taught to be more rational 3) Less Wrong's brand of rationality is (at least among the) best examples we have

4) Less Wrong, as a website, benefits from having more quality members posting more (and more varied along certain axis) quality content 5) There are people on the internet who already have something close to the Less Wrong mindset, but who don't know about Less Wrong.

6) Real Life Communities (of some sort) are in general valuable for increasing quality of life 7) Communities are also useful for fighting akrasia, and rationalist communities in particular are valuable for encouraging people to maintain rational practices in their daily lives. 8) Putting together a rationalist community in your area can be hard if you don't know any rationalists there.

9) Acquiring more members online is one method by which to allow real life rationality communities to form, as members from given areas start to reach critical mass. This works especially well for large cities. 10) Less Wrong, both the online and associated meat-space (meet-space?) communities, suffer somewhat from groupthink (and related issues stemming from a narrow target demographic). One way to fix that is to acquire new members with a more diverse range of opinions and interests. 11) Individuals in both the online and meet-space communities benefit from being able to find other individuals with similar interests. Partly because they can just be friends, but also so they can begin working together on bigger projects.

I agree with most of these. The only two that I have issue with is 2 and 3. There's a range on how much people can be taught to be rational. I know people whose brains are simply wired differently than ours. Maybe they could have been shaped differently during childhood, but I suspect there are fundamental biological differences as well.

I also think there are plenty of smart, left-brained people for whom the Less Wrong brand is not well suited.

The upshot to all of this is that I DO think there are lots of good reasons for us to strive for the following:

1) Less Wrong (the blog) should make an effort to reach people who would particularly benefit from it, or might rapidly self-modify into the sort of person who would particularly benefit from it. But Less Wrong's value as a community also depends on a certain focus and quality of discourse. We'd prefer people who can contribute to that focus, or at least don't detract from it too much.

(I'm a little on the fence about how to target people like me, in particular. I do not have the interest nor particular aptitude to contribute meaningfully to decision-theory posts, although I derive value from them. I've ended up posting about art-related things a lot, partly because I think there are useful, rationality-related things to say about them and partly because they are a heretofore low-supply-medium-demand subject that I'm able to contribute regarding. I'd like there to be more artist-types on Less Wrong, but if we all continued posting in the volume that I've been recently it would drown out the more traditional content.)

2) Meet-space rationality communities should be encouraged, and these can have wider range of members. Meetspace communities need inspirational organizers, a category of person that the blog doesn't need as much, and there's a much greater benefit there if individuals sharing a particular interest (art, politics, programming, etc) can meet up and start collaborating.

3) In both cases, we should not be trying to convert EVERYONE to our cause, we should be identifying people who would particularly benefit from our community and who we would benefit from including. This is harder to do in a targeted fashion online - you put advertisements on websites that are similar and you get whoever naturally shows up. In meet-space you can find particular people and just invite them.

"Get more members" is a crude metric that doesn't address the nuance of what we want. This is particularly dangerous because we DO want more members, and it's hard to do so with the nuance required to do so safely and productively. So we need to be hovering near the razor-edge that separates hollow-self-perpetuating organizations and actual good quality organizations, and actively remaining on that edge requires a lot of diligence and effort.

I have more thoughts but they're less fully formed.