What we're losing

Agreed.

One person at the Paris meetup made the really interesting and AFAICT accurate observation that the more prominent a Less Wrong post was, the less likely it was to be high quality - ie comments are better than Discussion posts are better than Main (with several obvious and honorable exceptions).

I think maybe it has to do with the knowledge that anything displayed prominently is going to have a bunch of really really smart people swarming all over it and critiquing it and making sure you get very embarrassed if any of it is wrong. People avoid posting things they're not sure about, and so the things that get main-ed tend to be restatements of things that create pleasant feelings in everyone reading them without rocking any conceivable boat, and the sort of overly meta- topics you're talking about lend themselves to those restatements - for example "We should all be more willing to try new things!" or "Let's try to be more alert for biases in our everyday life!"

Potential cures include greater willingness to upvote posts that are interesting but non-perfect, greater willingness to express small disagreements in "IAWYC but" form, and greater willingness to downvote posts that are applause lights or don't present non-obvious new material. I'm starting to do this, but hitting that downvote button when there's nothing objectively false or stupid about a post is hard.

I'm somewhat puzzled by your terminology since the topics you call "meta-rationality":

about how to be rational, how to avoid akrasia, and so on.

strike me as much more practical and applied then the ones you call "applied rationality":

philosophy, value, and possible futures

which strike me as much more meta.

Going by the list of topics you're complaining about, it appears that you are the one who "would rather talk about rationality than use it."

Does the discussion of rationality techniques have a larger market than debates over Sleeping Beauty (I'm even beginning to miss those!)

Wow, I'd forgotten all about those. Those days were fun. We actually had to, well, think occasionally. Nothing remotely challenging has cropped up in a while!

I'm certainly trying to apply rationality to solve big important problems, but that is taking me a while. About half of my posts so far have been written (sneakily) for the purpose of later calling back to them when making progress in metaethics and CEV.

I share Phil's perception that LW is devoting more time to what you might call "practical rationality in everyday life" and less to the theory of rationality, and his feeling that that's less interesting (albeit perhaps more useful).

I share everyone else's opinion that Phil's terminology is bizarre.

My main concern about Less Wrong recently has been the proliferation of posts related to the Singularity and HP: MoR, which I frankly don't care about. For a site that encourages people to think outside the box, it's at times biased against unorthodox opinions, or at least, I get downvoted for arguing against the Singularity and immortality and for pointing out flaws in MoR. At these times the site seems cultish in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable.

I was drawn here both by Eliezer's meta-rationality posts and by discussions about quantum mechanics, philosophy of mathematics, game theory, and such. However, recently I've been growing increasingly skeptical about the dissociation between LW's stated goals and the actual behavior I observe here.

In my vision for the future of the rationalist community, most members are interested in the core of meta-rationality and anti-akrasia and each is interested in a set of peripheral topics (various ways of putting practicing rationality, problems like Sleeping Beauty, trading tutoring, practicing skills, helping the community in practical ways, study groups, social meetings with rationalists, etc.). Some fringe members will be involved in the peripherals and rationality applications but not theory, but they probably won't last long. LW is the core, and will be based around meta-rationality. Meetup groups will form around what local members are interested in, and start talking about those things online, maybe in their Google groups, maybe on their own websites, but probably somewhere cozier and not part of current LW, so the local communities can build their relationships. Meetup groups in different areas talking about the same things will merge their online discussions when they want to, possibly as part of LW.

But perhaps a lot of people would rather talk about rationality than use it. It's the easy thing to do. Meetups might be useful to get people to observe more evidence and encounter new problems, encouraging the use of rationality.

Or we could skip straight to that by creating subforums for specific topics like Probability, Values, AI, and Singularity for LW users, inviting more posts on the topics you're missing.

I wish there were more posts that tried to integrate math with verbal intuitions, relative to posts that are either all the way on the math side or all the way on the words side.

It seems rathrer llike Eliezer Yudkowsky's blog without (much) Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Which is unfortunate - if understandable.

I think that less Singularity discussion is the result of the related topics having been already discussed many times over. There hasn't been a new idea in AI and decision theory since a while. I'm not implying though that we've finished these topics once and for all. There is certainly a huge amount of stuff to be discovered, it's just that we don't seem to happen upon much stuff these days.

Quality is a bigger concern than subject matter. But that is easily solved by just reading posts and mainly posts by Luke. :)

Is the old concern with values, artificial intelligence, and the Singularity something for LW to grow out of?

"A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality" suggests those aren't actually the focus, and that when LW grows up it won't be about AI and the Singularity.

I do agree that some more application would be good, but that tends to go in discussion if at all. Better there than nowhere.

One of the big things about improving rationality is 'Getting Crap Done' and I think the problem is that for an online community wherein most of us are anonymous, there's not a lot on here to help us with that.

Now this site has helped me conceptualize and visualize in a way that I didn't realize was possible. It helped me to see things as they are, and how things could be. The problem is that whilst I'm flying ahead in terms of vision, I still sleep in and get to work late, I still play world of warcraft over going to the local toastmasters meetup, I still haven't opened up my online trading account.

It's like I know what to do, but in terms of generating the willpower and committment and motivation to do it, this site just becomes another of many shiny distractions. The thing is as an online community I'm not sure how much you could remedy that.

The Meetups however I think is possibly the best thing to come out of this site so far, as it has inspired me to start my own, which has come to great success, even after a somewhat rocky start, and provides a way for those who feel isolated to find a network of support.

Just my two humble cents.

Is not 'how to be rational, how to avoid akrasia' how one puts 'rationality into practice'? Without hard working producers there is no singularity.

+1 for suitable filtering, or a decent subclustering that keeps everyone happy

I would bet that we'll soon see a resurgence of discussion on decision theory, anthropics etc. in the next few months. If I'm as typical a user as I think I am, then there are a dozen or so people who were largely drawn to LessWrong by those topics, but who stayed silent as they worked on leveling up. lukeprog's recent posts will probably accelerate that process.

More and more, LessWrong's posts are meta-rationality posts, about how to be rational, how to avoid akrasia, and so on. This is probably the intended purpose of the site. But they're starting to bore me.

Agree. The part them makes them boring is that the 'how to' stuff is, basically, rubbish. There are other communities dedicated to in the moment productivity guides. By people who know far more about the subject. Albeit people who maybe don't two box and are perhaps dedicating all their 'productivity' towards 'successful' but ultimately not very important goals.