You’re mainly arguing against my point about weirdness, which I think was less important than my point about user testing with people outside of the community. Perhaps I could have argued more clearly: the thing I’m most concerned about is that you’re building lesswrong 2.0 for the current rationality community rather than thinking about what kinds of people you want to be contributing to it and learning from it and building it for them. So it seems important to do some user interviews with people outside of the community who you’d like to join it.
On the weirdness point: maybe it’s useful to distinguish between two meanings of ‘rationality community’. One meaning is the intellectual of community of people who further the art of rationality. Another meaning is more of a cultural community: a set of people who know each other as friends, have similar lifestyles and hobbies, like the same kinds of fiction, in jokes, etc. I’m concerned that less wrong 2.0 will select for people who want to join the cultural community, rather than people who want to join the intellectual community. But the intellectual community seems much more important. This then gives us two types of weirdness: weirdness that comes out of the intellectual content of the community is important to keep—ideas such as existential risk fit in here. Weirdness that comes more out of the cultural community seems unnecessary—such as references to HPMOR.
We can make an analogy with science here: scientists come from a wide range of cultural, political, and religious backgrounds. They come together to do science, and are selected on their ability to do science, not their desire to fit into a subculture. I’d like to see lesswrong 2.0 to be more like this, i.e. an intellectual community rather than a subculture.
Have you done user interviews and testing with people who it would be valuable to have contribute, but who are not currently in the rationalist community? I’m thinking people who are important for existential risk and/or rationality such as: psychologists, senior political advisers, national security people, and synthetic biologists. I’d also include people in the effective altruism community, especially as some effective altruists have a low opinion of the rationalist community despite our goals being aligned.
You should just test this empirically, but here are some vague ideas for how you could increase the credibility of the site to these people:
My main concern is that lesswrong 2.0 will come across as (or will actually be) a bizarre subculture, rather than a quality intellectual community. The rationality community is offputting to some people who on the face of it should be interested (such as myself). A few ways you could improve the situation:
Reduce the use of phrases and ideas that are part of rationalist culture but are inessential for the project, such as references to HPMOR. I don’t think calling the moderation group “sunshine regiment” is a good idea for this reason.
Encourage the use of standard jargon from academia where it exists, rather than LW jargon. Only coin new jargon words when necessary.
Encourage writers to do literature reviews to connect to existing work in relevant fields.
It could also help to:
Encourage quality empiricism. It seems like rationalists have a tendency to reason things out without much evidence. While we don’t want to force a particular methodology, it would be good to nudge people in an empirical direction.
Encourage content that’s directly relevant to people doing important work, rather than mainly being abstract stuff.