LW should go into mainstream academia ?

A lot of LW content is based on stuff already in academia.

In addition to things mentioned in other comments, knowing about biases can hurt people. If you try to teach rationality to people who don't care about rationality... well, most of them will just memorize your passwords and use them to impress people... and most of the remaining ones will twist the lessons to better defend their existing irrational views.

That means, if you could make (a modified version of) LessWrong a part of curriculum, ten years down the line I would expect not multitudes of rationalists, but rather... people writing blogs and books using "Bayesian" arguments for Jesus, people using their "priors" to defend homeopathy against scientific research, and people claiming they can calculate Solomonoff Induction and that it proves whatever crazy idea they want to prove.

Okay, this argument is not completely absurd -- I know a person who after reading a few LW articles produced a "theory" containing Tegmark multiverses, quantum mumbo jumbo, et cetera, to prove that evolution does not exist and the Catholic Church was right about everything; and insisted that as a rationalist I should agree with and accept his idea. Then he started promoting his version of "rationality" on Facebook among his religious friends, but luckily, the theory was too complicated for them to follow -- however, the same argument could also be used against publishing LessWrong content online, where anyone can read it. And I wouldn't argue against having LW online; but still having LW at schools feels wrong. How much rational is this?

One argument could be that LW selects for the kind of people who would voluntarily read LW despite having many other alternatives on the internet. Most people who would be hurt by LW choose to read some other website instead. If we bring LW to schools, we lose this filter. But that does not prove that having LW at schools would be a net loss. Maybe it is better to have 1000 people using LW correctly and 9000 people using LW incorrectly, than having 100 people using LW correctly and 50 people using LW incorrectly. Maybe the absolute number of rationalists is more important than the fraction of people exposed to LW material who get it right. There are already many kinds of fools, but we would benefit from having a larger rationalist community.

Maybe it's using LW material at school that seems wrong. In addition to the influence of the materials themselves, you also have the influence of the teacher, and of the classmates. The teacher may happen to be the "clever arguer" who abuses LW material to support their stupid ideas; or the classmates may come with conclusions the teacher will not disprove. Imagine all kinds of political mindkilling that could use LW as a soldier, insisting that it's only people who disagree with them who are mindkilled. -- But again, this seems like an argument against having schools in general.

Well, I don't know... I guess we could try this once. Just don't get your hopes high.

I don't really get why LW's content isn't in mainstream academia to be honest.

This is a very good question to think about :).

LW itself isn't an organisation. It's a blog. There are associated organisations such as MIRI, CFAR and FHI. There are also a bunch of members of LW who do publish academic papers.

To the extend that we have working debiasing methods as far as I understand CFAR is supposed to formalize these and publish studies to show that they work.

MIRI does publish more papers than it used to do.

If you think that an idea on LW that isn't in academia should be in academia, you can also see that as your mission. Write an academic article to present the idea.

work on overcoming biases, LW's peculiar solution to free will

None of that is novel, or even peculiar. The point of Lesswrong is to make it fresh, accessable, and well written. The bias writings are derived from academic work on biases, published by people doing experiments. The "solution to free will" is just basic clear thinking - if you were confused about free will upon entering, you're encouraged to not read the solution and solve it yourself as an exercise, and then check to see if that solution matches your own - it's not claiming to be novel philosophy or anything. This is primarily a hub for the dispersal of existing good ideas in a better format.

Novel ideas tend to be more narrow, more specific formulations. Timeless decision theory, for example, is specific and fairly novel, and MIRI published it.

Which parts of academia? There is zero experimental research that is up to any academic standards, There is no numerical modeling in any areas that I can think of. There is some foundational AI alignment work which is mostly math and any interesting results there will likely be published. There are some interesting philosophical ideas, I suppose, not sure if they are good enough to be published in academic journals. There is plenty of "raising the sanity waterline" efforts, but those hardly qualify as research. What am I missing?

Well, good news, the topic of getting rationality into academia is something I'm actually working on myself as an academic. For example, I just published an op-ed in one of the most premier higher education media channels on how I as a professor used rationality-informed strategies to deal with mental illness in the classroom. Earlier, I published some research informed by rationality concepts, such as agency.

As part of my broader project of promoting rationality widely, I'm also starting up a research project on debiasing the planning fallacy using rationality-informed strategies and on finding life goals using rationality strategies. I'm planning to publish research papers on these topics, naturally.

So I'm guessing some of the reasons why rationality is just beginning to enter mainstream academia is because of the very long cycle of conducting research and then publishing. Another set of reasons has to do with academics like myself taking time to figure out how to integrate rationality into their research fields.

LW, Eliezer, etc, can't stay on the "crank" level, not playing by the rules, publishing books and no papers.

Why not? What's stopping them?

One of the rules is that beginning academics must not publish work like this. They have to publish cutting edge research for a long time before they are allowed to synthesize or popularize.

Lots would play by the rules and provide genuine criticisms during peer-review (which will lead to the alteration of the content of course), along with criticisms post publication.

Do you have any experience with peer review? In the most functional fields, peer review does a good job of assessing what is valuable, but provides no improvement in quality. In most fields it demands edits to make things worse.

Maybe LW's content would be in mainstream academia if all the grad students on LW didn't drop out of grad school to "overcome the sunk cost fallacy" :P

(I worry about the people who decide they're really interested in rationality self-selecting themselves out of one of society's most powerful institutions.)

I don't really get why LW's content isn't in mainstream academia to be honest.

Or, people here should read more of the primary sources that EY draws from (and others he doesn't), academic or not.

That's why I came here - I took the references to Jaynes and "The Map is Not the Territory" as indications of good intellectual taste, which gave me enough trust to read other works by Cialdini and Kahneman cited here.

There's a whole sea of work descended from Korzybski of The Map is Not the Territory fame, put out by a couple General Semantics groups, much of it organized around bite sized concepts, similar to the Sequences, but more of an organic whole, IMO.