For example, what would be inappropriately off topic to post to LessWrong discussion about?
I couldn't find an answer in the FAQ. (Perhaps it'd be worth adding one.) The closest I could find was this:
What is Less Wrong?
Less Wrong is an online community for discussion of rationality. Topics of interest include decision theory, philosophy, self-improvement, cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence, game theory, metamathematics, logic, evolutionary psychology, economics, and the far future.
However "rationality" can be interpreted broadly enough that rational discussion of anything would count, and my experience reading LW is compatible with this interpretation being applied by posters. Indeed my experience seems to suggest that practically everything is on topic; political discussion of certain sorts is frowned upon, but not due to being off topic. People often post about things far removed from the topics of interest. And some of these topics are very broad: it seems that a lot of material about self-improvement is acceptable, for instance.
The actual conclusions are crowd think. The fact of the matter, as they discussed, is they had no empirical basis to assess the toxicity of injected aluminum in neo-nates, or even adults for that matter, in spite of having done it for 70 years. They had never bothered looking. They still have no empirical basis for claiming its safe, in fact, just the opposite. In fact, they are injecting 100's of times as much aluminum into neo-nates as they get from diet in the first six months, bypassing numerous evolved filters that served to keep it out. When people actually did animal experiments on neo-nates, they reported this was very toxic to development. When people actually look at any epidemiology that's sensitive to it, they find its very toxic to development. Its highly correlated to autism, for example, as well as infant mortality.
Incidentally, when they talk about "low incidence of adverse events", they are talking about adverse events within 72 hours. I am talking about the impact of aluminum on development and the immune system and the development of the brain. Much of the aluminum gets stuck in the muscle and only leaks out over periods longer than 72 hours. The total load infants get from vaccines over the first six months is hundreds of times the total load they get from diet, taking into account that the dietary system filters 99.75% of ingested aluminum but virtually all parenterally injected aluminum eventually makes its way into systemic flow.
The results of the various medical surveys are crowd think. The summaries as a general rule present blather that soothes the soul. If you look at the actual empirical results published in the scientific literature, the situation is clear, even though it is the opposite of what all the surveys tell you in their summaries. If you ignore this, you are destined to fail to realize that committees of doctors or government officials are incapable of understanding a scientific literature or making medical decisions that are better for health than random, and more generally that crowd think is an important phenomenon in the world.
On the contrary,
While infants receive about 4.4 milligrams of aluminum in the first six months of life from vaccines, they receive more than that in their diet. Breast-fed infants ingest about 7 milligrams, formula-fed infants ingest about 38 milligrams, and infants who are fed soy formula ingest almost 117 milligrams of aluminum during the same period.