The cults are always wrong, and not just a little wrong, but systematically wrong, with whole anti-epistemologies developing to bear the load. LW rationality activism can be eccentric, in the sense of paying attention to things that most folk don't see as particularly interesting or important, but it's interesting where a social movement would go, whose primary directive is to actually protect itself from error (instead of just keeping up the appearances) and to seek better methods for doing so. This is almost unexplored territory, if you don't count global scientific community as a preceding example (one point, hard to draw generalizations from).

I believe we are significantly below a critical mass where the community becomes unlikely to fizzle out into obscurity, but given the non-arbitrary focus of the activism, it's possible that the movement will persist, or get reincarnated elsewhere.

I enjoyed reading this post, in no small part due to the narcissistic pleasure of discussing a small community I am (to some degree) a part of. If there was some option to split a comment into a thread it seems like an ideal use would be found here.

At the very least, lesswrong provides a fairly high quality forum for discussion of topics appealing to nerdy types. Similar communities include stackexchange and math/science blogs, which are 'harder' than lesswrong; sites like reddit and xkcd forums tend to be on the 'softer' side of the spectrum. Lesswrong, so far, is the best open forum for the discussion of 'futurist' issues.

What lesswrong lacks in comparison to 'harder' sites is a broad base of subject specialists. The scope of discussion on lesswrong is quite broad; however, the base of expertise on lesswrong is very narrow as it consists mainly of SIAI members. It would be hard to argue that lesswrong would not benefit from the active participation of more experts from domains relevant to its interests: economics, psychology, computer science, mathematics, statistics. However, up to now, LW has attracted few such users, due perhaps to its low profile and the fact that the core members of the community do not seem to prioritize subject expertise. Yet until LW has that kind of userbase, it seems unlikely any high impact developments will arise from activity on LW (excluding efforts from SIAI members themselves.) In contrast, mathoverflow.net seems like precisely the recipe for combining expertise through the internet for the advancement of the sciences.

Perhaps what is more important is the emergence of the lesswrong "rationalist" subculture itself. Future historians might lump this subculture with the larger "atheism" subculture, which has much in common with the LW community in terms of demographic composition. What would be much more interesting is if the LW community grew to incorporate a much more demographically diverse userbase.

I would say lesswrong has had a moderate impact on my intellectual development since I started reading it as a college student. It was satisfying to see that others (such as Yudkowsky) were able to notice "what was wrong with philosophy" and in fact, this allowed me to divert my attention to preparing for statistics; on the whole, I probably would have spent more time arguing about various issues on the internet if Yudkowsky had not already argued those points (and probably much better than I could have.) Lesswrong/OB did not alert me to concerns about artificial intelligence (I was already thinking about them before encountering this site) and so far it has not succeeded in dissuading me from intending to do research that may contribute to the eventual development of artificial general intelligence.

It's not too late for me to edit my post!

From a marketing perspective, when introducing something novel it is frequently a good idea to name things descriptively, so that if someone lacks the right keywords but has a felt need for "your thing" they find you anyway because you already use those keywords in your name or associated description. This is potentially a project in itself because you have to do market research and figure out what inferentially distant potential "customers" think, when they think about your stuff.

Looking at the tag cloud for the discussion area I would say that what we actually do in the discussion area is "talk and share links about psychologically rational meta-philosophy concerned with artificial intelligence and the singularity". Based on the tag cloud, the front page is for "meetup scheduling and discussion of a bayesian moral meta-philosophy inspired by science and artificial intelligence, with specific concern for the psychology of self deception and akrasia".

Another possible angle: Sometimes it's useful to identify and reclaim the name applied to you by your critics, who are likely to have a good handle on what about you is distinctive enough to object to. (I've heard that Christian sects like the Puritans did this sort of epithet reclamation back in the 1600's.) If that's a useful strategy we might impatiently adopt Jaron Lanier's term "cybernetic totalism" or if we have more patience then wait until someone else comes up with a more piercing criticism :-)

If we follow Lanier's term maybe we could be said to be a community of cybernetic totalists dedicated to refining the human art of "cybernetic efficacy"?

Sometimes I actively appreciate the fuzziness of the status quo. Sometimes if you have a stable name for something it causes people to go crazy about it in specific ways and imagine it has an "essence" that grows out of its dictionary definition and then you have this whole stupid conversation about words instead of talking about regularities within the world and expectations about them. The name of the site is "less wrong" and that phrase pretty hard hard to go wrong with. The stoics were named after the fact that they hung out around a specific building in Athens called the "Stoa Poecile". Maybe instead we could just talk about "that which is praised and cultivated by LessWong commenters", and let the substantive claims dominate the interpretative processes rather than have the pre-existing dictionary definition of a term appropriated by us for discussion purposes?

The rationalism-empiricism philosophical debate is somewhat dead. I see no problem in using "rationalism" to mean LW rationalism. "Rationality" (1989) by Rescher defines rationality in the way LW uses the word, but doesn't use "rationalism", ostensibly because of the risk of confusion with the rationalism-empiricism debate. Neither LW nor average people are subject to similar limitations as the academic Rescher, so I think it is prudent to overwrite the meaning of the word "rationalism" now.

Maybe "rationalism" used to mean "rationalism in the rationalism-empiricsm debate", but the concept of "rationality" has become very important during the past century, and that "rationality" means the LW type rationality. Yet, "rationality" is only a method. What LW clearly advocates is that this method is somehow the best, the only right method, the only method, a superior method, or a method that ought to be used. Hence, LW is somewhat founded on a prescriptive belief that "rationality" is a good method. It is very reasonable to call such a belief "rationalism", as someone without belief in the superiority of rationality could still use rationality without being a rationalist.