Yes, a blog.

For me I think it's No One Can Exempt You From Rationality's Laws.

I seem to be alone in this, but I'd say Truly Part of You is far and away the best one-article summary of the site. Unfortunately, it's not listed as part of the sequences. For me, though, it's the one that gave me the "click" and made me appreciate rationality on a gut level.

I wonder if Outside The Laboratory is a good choice?

And I hate when so-called educators try to imply Wikipedia is low status or somehow making us dumber.

How much does that happen? It is my understanding that educators don't mind students using Wikipedia to gather information, as long as they use Wikipedia's references to validate that information, and then cite those references. That is, Wikipedia is a valid tool for finding sources and summaries of those sources, but it is not a source itself.

Interesting question.

I've forgotten which page convinced me to start reading this site in earnest. It might have been "Generalization from Fictional Evidence", which is excellent, but that served a rather specific purpose for me and I'm not sure it'd do the same for others.

Looking over some of the sequences now, I think "Positive Bias: Look Into The Dark" might have the right balance of accessible and mind-blowing to hook a layman of no more than average mathematical sophistication. The 2-4-6 task is one of the more elegant ways of demonstrating both bias and possible countermeasures that I've encountered here.

Yet, in spite of these priors, the group you consider yourself member of is somehow the true best group ever?

You made up this 'true best group ever' idea yourself. "Best at a highly specific activity that is the primary focus of this group" is an entirely different claim.

I'm tempted to point to Eliezer outright making things up on costs of cryonics multiple times, and ignoring corrections from me and others, in case halo effect prevents you from seeing that he's not really extraordinarily less wrong.

Eliezer doesn't have all that much of a halo. People disagree with him and criticise him incessantly. Sometimes deserved, sometimes not. Most times I have seen Eliezer accused of having a halo effect have been when Eliezer disagrees with them on a particular subject and it happens to be the case that the majority of others here do too. Acknowledging that those who disagree with you may be doing so independently based on their own intellectual backgrounds is not nearly so psychologically rewarding as dismissing them as blind followers.

point to Eliezer outright making things up on costs of cryonics

Citation needed. Please do. I pay those costs out of pocket, they can be verified with my insurance agent if need be, and I should very much like to know what on Earth you think you are talking about.

I'm tempted to point to Eliezer outright making things up on costs of cryonics multiple times, and ignoring corrections from me and others.

Please do.

There is a big difference between something being 'the best group ever' and being 'an easier shortcut to rationality than digging through philosophical writings the old-fashioned way', which is how I interpreted this post. There is a community component to LessWrong that obviously isn't present in old books, but I don't think that's paramount for most people. For me, in the beginning, the Sequences were just a good way to read about interesting ideas in small, digestible chunks during my breaks at work. Now it's a bit more than that; LessWrong gives me a chance to post my ideas where they'll be criticized by people who don't have any social-etiquette reason not to tear apart my arguments. But there's a big difference between a group being the optimum, the best any group of its kind could be, which LessWrong obviously isn't...and between being the best out of all the options in a limited area, which is more what this post is claiming (I think).

it seems to me that for a supposedly "rationalist" community, people here seem to be far too willing to accept claims of LessWrong exceptionality based on shockingly weak evidence.

Claiming that your group is the best in the world, or among the best, is something nearly every single group in history did, and all had some anecdotal "evidence" for it. Priors are very strongly against this claim, even after including these anecdotes.

I strongly agree.

I strongly agree, and lay the blame in part on Eliezer's innate bombast, and in part on karma.

While karma is probably, on balance, a desirable effect, it's also one hell of a catalyst for the halo effect. "I agree with this post/comment", "This post/comment took a lot of work" and especially "It made me feel good" all mix into a sugary sauce of equal reward whether you provide a high-value contribution or whether you just titillate the right psychological zones.

That said, I don't think this post is a very bad one - it provides some solid arguments for its thesis, and it wouldn't be its fault if LessWrongers jumped on that +1 button on sheer self-congratulatory reflex.

Maybe I'm just being habitually contrarian here for no good reason, but it seems to me that for a supposedly "rationalist" community, people here seem to be far too willing to accept claims of LessWrong exceptionality based on shockingly weak evidence

Upvoted. For needing to be said. Badly.

I'm not saying a view point on whether I agree or not with your premise, I don't think this is the best group ever but I have not been here long enough to know if others do.

I would however like to point out

Yet, in spite of these priors, the group you consider yourself member of is somehow the true best group ever? Really? Where's hard evidence for this? I'm tempted to point to Eliezer outright making things up on costs of cryonics multiple times, and ignoring corrections from me and others, in case halo effect prevents you from seeing that he's not really extraordinarily less wrong.

is full of Ad hominem errors that to me distract from your argument

It's hard to put my finger on it, but esp. when it comes to philosophy, I think a lot of it can be summarized as philosophy through the eyes of a computer programmer -- not necessarily a bad point of view, but not the only one.

Just the only useful one. :)

I checked LessWrong's echo chamber effect when it came up by comparing the ratings of the first page of top posts to the ratings of the next page.

Using the anti-kibitzer to vote your way through an exchange, and then re-reading without the names and votes blocked is also a good method for analysing possible echo chambers.

If your goal is to protect yourself from an echo-chamber effect by reading everything regardless of others' scoring, I'm not quite sure what stops you from doing that. Just browse via the "new" listing rather than the "top" listing... no?

no post makes it onto the home page unless Eliezer endorses it; and he has to my knowledge never endorsed a post that disagreed with or questioned things he has said in the past.

Here's one example of a post that criticized Eliezer and others associated with SIAI but nevertheless got promoted to the home page: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l8/existential_risk_and_public_relations/

I think there have been others, though I don't remember any specific ones off the top of my head.

There's more memetic homegeneity here than I would prefer for such a venture.

Sometimes there are right answers, and smart people will mostly aggree. I suspect your perception of "memetic homegeneity" results from your insistance on disagreeing with some obviously (at least obviously after the discussions we've had) right answers, e.g. persistance of values as an instrumental value.

Could LessWrong become such a place, if Eliezer relinquished control of the coveted green button?

No, it's the red button that makes the biggest difference.

But LessWrong shouldn't simultaneously be Eliezer's place, and a base to use to build an entire discipline, if you want that discipline to be well-built. That's like trying to build a school of journalism at Fox News.

The Sequences shouldn't simultaneously be a slowly laid out, baby-steps introduction to rationality and the main resource to learn about EY's ideas for domain specialists. They are trying to do contradictory things.

In my own attempts to study philosophy, I've found classical monologue-based instruction almost invariably suffers in comparison to dialogues between multiple people genuinely trying to convince each other of their ideas. When the author cannot interact with and respond to their audience, it's easy to become complacent. Dialogue forces one to refine both one's ideas and the presentation of one's ideas, and makes it much easier to realistically compare a point of view to the most compelling alternatives.

Definitely true. Might I add that forums/blogs are better than real life (verbal) discussions for developing insightful ideas, precisely because you must put in more time to develop a forum/blog post (and also because there are no distracting non-verbal stimuli that may make someone look "smarter" or more "authoritative" than someone else - so only the best ideas get selected, rather than the ideas from the most respected/most prestigious person), and also because it's much easier to refute individual (quoted) points that way.

Furthermore, people will forget points communicated verbally. Points communicated through forums/blogs will stay for a long time, where someone can search for them (and think about them) months later.

But by commenting on it, you can lead others (like me) to get to read it for the first time. Even better! :)

That may be why people ought to read them, but I don't think it's why they read them. Philosophy, as taught in colleges and books, places almost no emphasis on methodology, identifying errors, critiquing and disposing of extremely bad or outdated ideas, etc. It's as if the Enlightenment never happened.

Michael Vassar says philosophy is a field unconcerned with what people in college teach as philosophy, but I don't know what he means. Possibly he means philosophers now are either analytic philosophers or deconstructionists.

I've been thinking about offering lectures designed to help humanities people think. If you feel like doing something for free that may help some people but at the very least generate some interesting debate for you, I would like to offer a hand in cooperation.

I was thinking about getting together enough quality material (presentations, accompanying write up and a literature list) for about six 45 minute lectures followed by a bit of Q&A time and debate, with the early ones enticing and the later ones selecting people away. Its purpose would be to get rid of some of the activation energy needed to start thinking about being less wrong, especially about things those majors tend to think wrongly about, but would of course fall very much short of a "rationality education" or even a rationality "class".

Applause light is a phrase that is expected to invariably elicit a cheering response; it's something socially frowned upon to argue against. It is also characterized by lack of specificity and relevant arguments.

In contrast, Academian elaborates why he thinks LW is good. He provides arguments. Also, criticizing LW is not a taboo here, as the fairly upvoted such posts attest.

OP does preach to the choir and almost automatically activates the anti-cult and anti-groupthink reflexes so ingrained in the LW readership. Maybe it should be rather read by Academian's dumbstruck friends. But it isn't an applause light.

A really dissenting view from Robin Hanson.

That's not a dissenting view; Vassar is pointing out ideas that we now know to be correct, and suggesting that we study how they were created in order to be better at creating new good ideas. That would be impossible if we didn't have the present vantage point of knowing which ideas turned out correct and fruitful: at least for humans, solution checking is way easier than solution finding... that's why we still don't know if P=NP.

The history of science is very romantic and inspiring, precisely because we know which works to look to for inspiration. And of course, we should do that.

you don't have to spend thousands of hours reading through their bad ideas to find the few good ones,

What are some of Hume's "bad" ideas?

I also think Hume was pretty amazing, which is why I picked him. Accusing him in particular of "bad" "ideas" is a bit harsh, since my issue is as much with non-ideas as with "bad" ones (so thanks for pointing this out). Let me say this better:

1) First, read the Wikipedia article on Hume and his many awesome ideas.

2) Next, start reading, say Part 1 of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (including Pamphilus to Hermippus).

They're about the same length, but the density of ideas in (2) that are interesting by modern standards is extremely low in comparison to (1). This is, of course, a credit to Hume: he was so right that his writing mostly looks like overly-verbose common sense these days, at least to regular readers of LessWrong.

I think I'll edit the OP to better reflect my view here. New sentence:

... But you don't have to spend thousands of hours reading through their flawed or now-uninteresting writings to find their few truly inspiring ideas, because their best ideas have become modern scientific knowledge.

Ah, looking back I think I got it, to -> the.