The social bookmarking site metafilter has a sister site called metatalk, which works the same way but is devoted entirely to talking about metafilter itself. Arguments about arguments, discussions about discussions, proposals for changes in site architecture, etc.
Arguments about arguments are often less productive than the arguments they are about, but they CAN be quite productive, and there's certainly a place for them. The only thing wrong with them is when they obstruct the discussion that spawned them, and so the idea of splitting off metatalk into its own site is really quite a clever one.
Lesswrong's problem is a peculiar one. It is ENTIRELY devoted to meta-arguments, to the extent that people have to shoehorn anything else they want to talk about into a cleverly (or not so cleverly) disguised example of some more meta topic. It's a kite without a string.
Imagine if you had been around the internet, trying to have a rational discussion about topic X, but unable to find an intelligent venue, and then stumbling upon lesswrong. "Aha!" you say. "Finally a community making a concerted effort to be rational!"
But to your dismay, you find that the ONLY thing they talk about is being rational, and a few other subjects that have been apparently grandfathered in. It's not that they have no interest in topic X, there's just no place on the site they're allowed to talk about it.
What I propose is a "non-meta" sister site, where people can talk and think about anything BESIDES talking and thinking. Well, you know what I mean.
Yes?
The standard one goes something like, "The dangerous disease itchyballitis has a frequency of 1% in the general population of men. The test for the disease has an accuracy of 95% (for both false positives and false negatives). A randomly selected dude gets tested and the result is positive. What's the probability he has the disease?"
But most people get that wrong. A correct answer is more likely when the problem is phrased in equivalent but more concrete terms as follows: "The dangerous disease itchyballitis affects 100 out of 10,000 men. The test for the disease gives the correct answer 95 times out of 100. A randomly selected dude gets tested and the result is positive. What's the chance he has the disease?"
Or, for the approximate answer, just compare the base rate with the false positive rate (multiplying by .9something has small impacts that mostly cancel out). About 1% of people test positive due to having the disease (a bit less, actually), about 5% of people test positive because of an inaccurate test (a bit less, actually), so a person with a positive test has about a 1 in 6 chance of having the disease.