Whether building a rational community is a good idea depends a lot on what you want to get out of this website and rationality in general. If you want interesting discussions with interesting people, the skewed demographics of LessWrong hardly matter, and you probably won;t care too much about building a community.
But there are a lot of benefits to a society as a whole from having a more rational outlook, and that means spreading the memes of LessWrong beyond the audience that would stumble on them naturally. I would want to participate in a rationalist parenting club (if I had kids, which I don’t) to interact in real life with other people who share my interests and values, who won’t tell my kid they’re going to hell for not believing in Jesus, who encourage curiosity and experimentation and real understanding over faith.
As for trying to engage with mainstream institutions, of course we should! I haven’t seen anyone suggest we should disengage from the rest of the world. But making mainstream institutions pro-reason isn’t more difficult than it sounds, and will get easier if we have a larger community behind the effort.
Check out the sequence “The Craft and The Community”.
Whether building a rational community is a good idea depends a lot on what you want to get out of this website and rationality in general. If you want interesting discussions with interesting people, the skewed demographics of LessWrong hardly matter, and you probably won;t care too much about building a community.
But there are a lot of benefits to a society as a whole from having a more rational outlook, and that means spreading the memes of LessWrong beyond the audience that would stumble on them naturally. I would want to participate in a rationalist parenting club (if I had kids, which I don’t) to interact in real life with other people who share my interests and values, who won’t tell my kid they’re going to hell for not believing in Jesus, who encourage curiosity and experimentation and real understanding over faith.
As for trying to engage with mainstream institutions, of course we should! I haven’t seen anyone suggest we should disengage from the rest of the world. But making mainstream institutions pro-reason isn’t more difficult than it sounds, and will get easier if we have a larger community behind the effort.