I think you're missing the broader point I was making: writing your own articles is like changing the oil in your own car. It's what you do when you are poor, unimportant, have low value of time, or it's your hobby.
Once you become important, you start outsourcing work to research assistants, personal assistants, secretaries, PR employees, vice presidents, grad students, etc. Musk is a billionaire and a very busy one at that and doesn't write his own books because it makes more sense for him to bring in someone like WBW to talk to for a few hours and have his staff show them around and brief them, and then they go off and a while later ghostwrite what Musk wanted to say. Zuckerberg is a billionaire and busy and he doesn't write all his own stuff either, he tells his PR people 'I want to predictably waste $100m on a splashy donation; write up the press release and a package for the press etc and send me a final draft'. Jobs didn't write his own autobiography, that's what Isaacson was for. Memoirs or books by famous politicians or pundits - well, if they're retired they may have written most or all of it themselves, but if they're active...? Less famously, superstar academics will often have written little or none of the papers or books published under their names; examples here would be invidious, but I will say I've sometimes looked at acknowledgements sections and wondered how much of the book the author could have written themselves. (If you wonder how it's possible for a single person to write scores of high-quality papers and books and opeds, sometimes the answer is that they are a freak of nature blessed with shortsleeping genes & endless willpower; and sometimes the answer is simply that it's not a single person.) And this is just the written channels; if you have access to the corridors of power, your time may well better be spent networking and having in-person meetings and dinners. (See the Clinton Foundation for an example of the rhizomatic nature of power.)
I'm not trying to pass judgment on whether these are appropriate ways for the rich and powerful to express their views and influence society, but it is very naive to say that just because you cannot go to the bookstore and buy a book with Musk's name on it as author, that he must not be actively spreading his views and trying to influence people.
Tl;dr: Articles on LW are, if unchecked (for now by you), heavily distorting a useful view (yours) on what matters.
[This is (though in part only) a five-year update to Patrissimo’s article Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality. However, I wrote most of this article before I became aware of its predecessor. Then again, this reinforces both our articles' main critique.]
I claim that rational discussions in person, conferences, forums, social media, and blogs suffer from adverse selection and promote unwished-for phenomena such as the availability heuristic. Bluntly stated, they do (as all other discussions) have a tendency to support ever worse, unimportant, or wrong opinions and articles. More importantly, articles of high relevancy regarding some topics are conspicuously missing. This can be also observed on Less Wrong. It is not the purpose of this article to determine the exact extent of this problem. It shall merely bring to attention that “what you get is not what you should see." However, I am afraid this effect is largely undervalued.
This result is by design and therefore to be expected. A rational agent will, by definition, post incorrect, incomplete, or not at all in the following instances:
This list is not exhaustive. If you do not find a factor in this list that you expect to accounts for much of the effect, I will appreciate a hint in the comments.
There are a few outstanding examples pointing in the opposite direction. They appear to provide uncensored accounts of their way of thinking and take arguments to their logical extremes when necessary. Most notably Bostrom and Gwern, but then again, feel free to read the latter’s posts on endured extortion attempts.
A somewhat flippant conclusion (more in a FB than LW voice): After reading the article from 2010, I cannot expect this article (or the ones possibly following that have already been written) to have a serious impact. It thus can be concluded that it should not have been written. Then again, observing our own thinking patterns, we can identify influences of many thinkers who may have suspected the same (hubris not intended). And step by step, we will be standing on the shoulders of giants. At the same time, keep in mind that articles from LW won’t get you there. They represent only a small piece of the jigsaw. You may want to read some, observe how instrumental rationality works in the “real world," and, finally, you have to draw the critical conclusions for yourself. Nobody truly rational will lay them out for you. LW is great if you have an IQ of 140 and are tired of superficial discussions with the hairstylist in your village X. But keep in mind that the instrumental rationality of your hairstylist may still surpass yours, and I don’t even need to say much about the one of your president, business leader, and club Casanova. And yet, they may be literally dead wrong, because they have overlooked AI and SENS.
A final personal note: Kudos to the giants for building this great website and starting point for rationalists and the real-life progress in the last couple of years! This is a rather skeptical article to start with, but it does have its specific purpose of laying out why I, and I suspect many others, almost refrained from posting.