Well, from what I remember, LW has always been diverse. There is a core that has been interested in AI risk since EY's early writing and the SL4 mailing list. There is a newer group that HMPOR brought in, and so on. Some of these groups explicitly complained about too many posts in categories they were not interested in.

One of the proposed solutions was to fork LW into subreddits. That's what reddit does after all, and it seems to works for them.

What happened instead was the exodus - a fork into separate sites. The EA people have their own forum now. The rationality bloggers hang out on blogs/facebook. The MIRI AI risk people have their own forum as well.

My worry is about the lack of centrality,

How does centrality in particular help? I mean it helps a little to have less pages to load to get the content that you want, but on the other hand when posts are too frequent its annoying to have to wade through a bunch of stuff you are not interested in. LW of course is now pretty low volume - but if you look back at the history, there was a time when people were complaining (numerous people at various times) that there was too much stuff they didn't like (at least this is how I remember it, but I'm not even bothering to search to find some example posts).

strategists and thinkers can start to be seen and dinosaurs can come to post their new ideas

I just saw Jurassic World - so my mind is having some extra trouble interpreting your use of 'dinosaurs'. I guess you mean old high quality posters who no longer post?

If you have some ideas you want to write and communicate and get feedback on, then your best bet is probably to write them up first on your own blog, and then submit them for discussion on multiple sites, and then gently link the resulting discussions together. Also, directly emailing people and asking for comment is sometimes useful - totally depends on your goals.

The other strategy is to just write stuff and let the internet figure it out. I dont blog so much recently, but when I used to blog more I just wrote articles and never bothered with promoting them or even telling anybody about them in anyway (not even my friends). Surprisingly, people somehow found some of the better articles regardless, and this even lead to some very interesting discussions - basically I met John Smart that way. I even made a little money when one of my articles was turned into a column on game developer magazine.

So anyway - it's not clear to me that centralization helps enormously. It has some advantages, but also some serious disadvantages. For example LW is open, but that does not mean that it is completely free of top-down influence from MIRI/EY - which some writers of very different viewpoint would find annoying/unacceptable.

Why did you frame it that way, rather than that AspiringKnitter wasn't a Christian, or was someone with a long history of trolling, or somesuch? It's much less likely to get a particular identity right than to establish that a poster is lying about who they are.

I don't have concrete information about the state of MetaMed that goes beyond publically available information.

Or is there some reason to not admit a startup has failed?

Maybe the bankruptcy proceedings aren't yet through. A bunch of the MetaMed people are still listed as MetaMed on their LinkedIn accounts.

It appears that MetaMed has since gone out of business.

It appears that MetaMed has gone out of business. Wikipedia uses the past tense "was" in their page for MetaMed, and provides this as a source for it.

Key quote from the article:

Tallinn learned the importance of feedback loops himself the hard way, after seeing the demise of one of his startups, medical consulting firm Metamed.

I think you will find interesting Steve Sailer's article on cousin marriage.

The short version of it is that universalism and nationalism are both probably caused by weak close family ties and narrow family trees. If I have twelve brothers to call upon in times of need, why would I want an impersonal state? If I have zero, well, paying taxes for police protection starts to sound very nice. Relatedness is linear, and so the amount of care that one should bestow based on relatedness will probably also scale linearly.

Perhaps not that rare, dependent upon where you live and who you mix with. But in my experience, the left tries to frame everything as heroic rebels vs the evil empire, with an almost complete refusal to discuss or consider actual policies.

I'm personally not entirely convinced about the usefulness of personality variables, but I've lately become interested in Altemeyer's concept of Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA). RWA is characterized by submission to authority and strong defense of established norms.

RWA is unsurprisingly correlated strongly with conservatism and right-wing orientation in politics, but characterizing people as RWA or non-RWA may be misleading. Karen Stenner suggested that "RWA is best understood as expressing a dynamic response to external threat, not a static disposition based only on the traits of submission, aggression, and conventionalism." It was shown that when faced with possible future threats or fears, people tended to display RWA tendencies more strongly. For instance, when told there will be droughts or mass migrations in the future, people tend to be more strongly RWA.

This may help explain why talking about the damaging future effects of maintaining the status quo does not seem to be effective in bringing about change to address problems. My reasoning is this: The threat of future disaster causes people to become more RWA and this may in turn paradoxically cause them to adopt a stance more strongly in favor of established ways, hampering change. This may explain the current situation with climate change and other things.

Another one: You see a way to do things that in theory might work better that what everyone else is doing, but in practice no one seems to use. Do you investigate it and consider exploiting it?

Example: You're trying to get karma on reddit. You notice that http://www.reddit.com/r/randomization/ has almost a million subscribers but no new submissions in the past two months. Do you think "hm, that's weird" and keep looking for a subreddit to submit your link in, or do you think "oh wow, karma feast!"