While this may be a settled point in your mind, it is not in general a settled point in the mind of your audience. Inasmuch as you’re trying to convince other people of your beliefs, it’s best to meet them where they are, and not ask them to suspend their sense of disbelief in directions that are more or less orthogonal to your primary argument.
MNT is not widespread in the meme pool. Inasmuch as FAI assumes or appears to rely on MNT, it will pay a fitness cost in individuals who do not subscribe to the MNT meme.
Now maybe FAI is particularly convincing to people who already have the MNT meme, and including MNT in possible FAI futures gives it a huge fitness advantage in the “already believes MNT” subpopulation. Maybe the trade-off for FAI of reduced fitness in the meme pool at large (or the computational-materials-scientist meme-pool) is worth it in exchange for increased fitness in the transhumanist meme pool. I don’t know. I certainly haven’t done nearly the work publicizing FAI that you have, and obviously you have some idea of what you’re doing. I’m not trying to argue that it should be taken out, or never used as an example again. I will say that I hope you take this post/argument as weak counter-evidence on the effectiveness of this particular example, and update accordingly.
At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I will self-identify as a member of the intellectual elite since no one else seems to want to.
I’m occasionally engaged in LW and I’m interested in rationality and applied psychology and the idea of FAI.
I don’t think LW is necessarily the best venue for discussing big important ideas. Making a post on the internet is something I might spend 4-5 working hours on. It might even be something I’ll spend a couple days on, but that’s an inconsequential amount of my time. And the vast majority of the people who read whatever post I generate will spend generously 15-20 minutes thinking about it. I’m actively working on reading and checking the math in a 300 page textbook in order to make a post on LW six months from now that maybe 100 people will read and almost no one will take seriously. If my day job weren’t writing academic papers with similarly dim readership prospects this would surely be overwhelmingly demoralizing. There’s a commitment issue here where it doesn’t make sense to invest a lot of time in impressing/convincing LW readers. I have no guarantee that anyone is seriously engaged with whatever idea I present here as opposed to just being entertained, and most of the people reading this forum are not looking for things to seriously engage with. There’s a limit to how many, how big, and how strange the ideas you encounter once a week in a blog can be. They might be entertaining, they might be interesting, but they can’t all change the way you see the world. It takes a lot of time (for my mind at least) to process new ideas and work through all the implications.
LW is set up in such a way that it’s a constant stream of updates, and any given post can expect a week or two of attention, at which point it fades into the background with all the other detritus. But big ideas are hard to grapple with in a week, and so most LW responses are the sort of off the cuff suggestions that you get when you expose people to a new idea they don’t fully understand. I’ve been reading LW for 9 months now and I’m still on the fence about FAI. The internet makes publishing much easier, but it doesn’t make thinking any easier. This is I think one of the reasons that science hasn’t abandoned publishing in journals and why there aren’t many elites on the web. Accessing content is already much much easier than digesting that content. I have whole binders full of papers I need to read and digest that I don’t have time for. And so does everyone else probably. LW posts are primarily entertainment and most of the people who post here are doing it for a brief applause or to float an idea they haven’t seriously worked on yet.
I’m also less clear as to what sort of content you want that you don’t have. What’s your end goal?
If I had to make code suggestions, I would say that discussions on a single post get too long before anything is resolved. There seems to be no point in commenting once there’s a certain number of comments, and so discussion tends to sort of stall out. I’d be interested to see what the distribution of # of comments on high karma posts looks like and whether there’s a specific number of comments which seems to function as a sort of glass ceiling. I also think that as time goes on things get pushed down the queue and become invisible. The fact that no matter how brilliant your idea is it’s basically got a week in the limelight and then will be forgotten forever isn’t super conducive to using LW to seriously discuss difficult problems.
And this is all off the top of my head, because of course I haven’t seriously thought about this.