If you ask me, the term “instrumental rationality” has been subject to inflation. It’s not supposed to mean better achieving your goals, it’s supposed to mean better achieving your goals by improving your decision algorithm itself, as opposed to by improving the knowledge, intelligence, skills, possessions, and other inputs that your decision algorithm works from. Where to draw the line is a matter of judgment but not therefore meaningless.
Skills other than rationality matter a lot, and a rational person will seek to learn those skills (to the extent that they’re sufficiently useful/easy), and it isn’t implausible that those skills should be discussed on LW, but that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with our conception of rationality.
ETA: I guess you could argue that there’s different skills involved in being rational about nerd topics and being rational about non-nerd topics, and we haven’t focused enough on the latter.
As I wrote earlier on LW:
Skills other than rationality matter a lot, and a rational person will seek to learn those skills (to the extent that they’re sufficiently useful/easy), and it isn’t implausible that those skills should be discussed on LW, but that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with our conception of rationality.
ETA: I guess you could argue that there’s different skills involved in being rational about nerd topics and being rational about non-nerd topics, and we haven’t focused enough on the latter.