I find it difficult to believe that houseboats are inherently less expensive. It seems more likely that there's some reason house boats cannot be made as large and expensive as regular houses, so the average houseboat is much cheaper than the average house, even if it's more expensive than a house of the same quality.

The internet gets much more difficult if you don't live in cities. While it mitigates the costs of people not living near each other, it does not remove them. There are still lots of people putting large amounts of time into physically commuting.

Why not use mobile homes? They can't be stacked in three dimensions like apartments, but at least you can put them in two-dimensional grids.

According to the 2013 LW survey, the when asked their opinion of feminism, on a scale from 1 (low) to 5 (high), the mean response was 3.8 , and social justice got a 3.6. So it seems that "feminism is a good thing" is actually not a contrarian view.

If I might speculate for a moment, it might be that LW is less feminist that most places, while still having an overall pro-feminist bias.

I think you missed the argument.

If you have a subculture or other group of people whose experience is strongly correlated with one another, and their conduct repels or silences anyone whose experience disagrees with theirs, then their view of the world will be missing a lot of information and will contain systematic biases.

We have words for this in various areas, such as "groupthink", "filter bubble", "circlejerk" ....

The grandparent overgeneralizes -- Soviet genetics was pretty much absent, but the rest of biology was fine (well, at least as fine as it could be expected to be under the Soviet regime).

Your comment seems to make many good points. However, I identified a few evident falsehoods in areas I know something about, which leads me to suspect a similar laxity with the truth in areas I know less about.

For instance:

This means someone who wants to practice Law or Marketing needs to go $120,000 in debt and waste four years of their life getting a degree in Art History to present at their interview.

If you want to practice law, you're best served by studying lab sciences, math, or government in undergrad. (Those are the undergraduate majors with the highest admittance rate to law school.) Then you go to law school, which is where you incur the goatloads of debt.

The fact that you can't get admitted to the bar (in most of the U.S.) without going to law school is not a result of anyone's ideology about intelligence. This policy change was adopted explicitly by states in response to pressure by the American Bar Association beginning in the 1890s. IQ testing didn't even exist then. (And for what it's worth, scientific racism was at that time deemed progressive.)

But the 'safe space' policy also repels potential participants - so, it's basically a wash.

When you repel one member of an over-represented group and attract a member of a previously-absent group, you keep the same number of participants but increase the amount of information present in the discussion.

BTW, I'm not actually that intelligent (IQ about 92 or 96 if I remember right) but pretending to adopt a meta-contrarian position might be a useful social tactic for me. Any advice from those who know the area on how to use it?

Better: randomly select a group of users (within some minimal activity criteria) and offer the test directly to that group. Publicly state the names of those selected (make it a short list, so that people actually read it, maybe 10-20) and then after a certain amount of time give another public list of those who did or didn't take it, along with the results (although don't associate results with names). That will get you better participation, and the fact that you have taken a group of known size makes it much easier to give outer bounds on the size of the selection effect caused by people not participating.

You can also improve participation by giving those users an easily accessible icon on Less Wrong itself which takes them directly to the test, and maybe a popup reminder once a day or so when they log on to the site if they've been selected but haven't done it yet. Requires moderate coding.

Note that there is a subtler mechanism than brute suppression that puts strict limits on our effective thoughtspace: the culture systematically distracts us from thinking about the deep, important questions by loudly and constantly debating superficial ones. Here are some examples:

• Should the US go to war in Iraq? vs. Should the US have an army?
• Should we pay teachers more? vs. Should public education exist?
• Should healthcare guaranteed by the federal government? vs Should the federal government be disbanded?
• Should we bail out the banks? vs. Should we ban long term banking?
• Should we allow same-sex marriage? vs. Should marriage have any legal relevance?

Notice how the sequence of psychological subterfuge works. First, the culture throws in front of you a gaudy, morally charged question. Then various pundits present their views, using all the manipulative tactics they have developed in a career of professional opinion-swaying. You look around yourself and find all the other primates engaged in a heated debate about the question. Being a social animal, you are inclined to imitate them: you are likely to develop your own position, argue about it publicly, take various stands, etc. Since we reason to argue, you will spend a lot of time thinking about this question. Now you are committed, firstly to your stand on the explicit question, but also to your implicit position that the question itself is well-formulated.

Link to original essay for the lazy