I think allowing discussion to go to much to being low effort was one of the ways LW1.0 failed over time. People were spending less energy on effortful posts and then more on effortless posts.
On the readership side – if every LessWrong post required booting up deep thinking mode, then people would only come to LessWrong when they felt able to Deep Think, which is actually pretty rare.
The fact that LW1.0 drew a readership with an average IQ of 140 (in the census) does suggest that it drew readers that have an ability to think deeply that’s quite rare. That’s no bug.
I think allowing discussion to go to much to being low effort was one of the ways LW1.0 failed over time. People were spending less energy on effortful posts and then more on effortless posts.
The fact that LW1.0 drew a readership with an average IQ of 140 (in the census) does suggest that it drew readers that have an ability to think deeply that’s quite rare. That’s no bug.
You seem (to me) to be making an extremely strong claim that the number of posts like this should be zero (as opposed to like 1-3 per year).
I’m still pretty uncertain about whether this post should be frontpaged, but that just seems like an extremely strong claim to me.