The following two paragraphs got me thinking some rather uncomfortable thoughts about our community's insularity:

We engineers are frequently accused of speaking an alien language, of wrapping what we do in jargon and obscurity in order to preserve the technological priesthood. There is, I think, a grain of truth in this accusation. Defenders frequently counter with arguments about how what we do really is technical and really does require precise language in order to talk about it clearly. There is, I think, a substantial bit of truth in this as well, though it is hard to use these grounds to defend the use of the term "grep" to describe digging through a backpack to find a lost item, as a friend of mine sometimes does. However, I think it's human nature for members of any group to use the ideas they have in common as metaphors for everything else in life, so I'm willing to forgive him.

The really telling factor that neither side of the debate seems to cotton to, however, is this: technical people like me work in a commercial environment. Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me -- marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers -- none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I'm constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. My success in my job depends to a large degree on my success in so communicating. At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I'm doing is worth having them pay for it.

 - Chip Morningstar, "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure"

The LW/MIRI/CFAR memeplex shares some important features with postmodernism, namely the strong tendency to go meta, a large amount of jargon that is often impenetrable to outsiders and the lack of an immediate need to justify itself to them.  This combination takes away the selective pressure that stops most groups from going totally crazy.  As far as I can tell, we have not fallen into this trap, but since people tend to fail to notice when their in-group has gone crazy, this is at best weak evidence that we haven't; furthermore, even assuming that we are in fact perfectly sane now, it will still take effort to maintain that state.

Based on the paragraphs quoted above, having to use our ideas to produce something that outsiders would value, or at least explain them in ways that intelligent outsiders can understand well enough to criticize would create this sort of pressure.  Has anyone here tried to do either of these to a significant degree?  If so, how, and how successfully?

What other approaches can we take to check (and defend) our collective sanity?

Article: Can investors make money in social services?

According to the article, six states are experimenting with funding social programs using "social impact bonds", which only pay out if the programs achieve their official objectives.  The project is in its early stages, so it's not clear what will happen if the market decides that a program isn't worth funding, but this looks quite promising.

Nate Silver of the New York Times's political prediction blog fivethirtyeight has posted an excerpt of his upcoming book on predictions in various disciplines, The Signal and the Noise.  The excerpt describes how meteorologists, in contrast to prognosticators in other domains, have substantially improved the accuracy of their predictions by understanding the limitations of both intuition and computer models, enabling them to combine them intelligently rather than relying excessively on one or the other.

The excerpt is available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/magazine/the-weatherman-is-not-a-moron.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all, and a summary is available at http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/why-weather-forecasters-are-role-models/

Side note: if you are running up against NYT's 10 article per month limit, opening the links in Incognito Mode will get around it.

I am a relative new-comer to LW, and I have read ~half the articles in the core sequences, but I think I have not been optimizing for comprehension/retention while reading them.  Could some more experienced members of the community give some recommendations on how best to read them \(both in terms of in which posts in which order and in terms of the actual reading process\)?

I will periodically edit this post to include some of the suggestions in order to provide the most benefit to future newcomers.

EDIT: Here are the most popular suggestions:

Order:

• Chronological order (5 or 6 comments)
• Whatever method you will actually do or already doing (1.5 comments)

How to read them:

• e-reader or smartphone (3 comments)
• Text-to-speech (1 comment)
• Read How to Read a Book and implement its suggestions (1 comment) (note: the link is a 9-page PDF, so it shouldn't be too hard to read and see what's useful)
• Mind-mapping (1 comment)
• Try to guess what the links go to (1 comment)