I think it's both true that LessWrong (LW) has a bunch of issues and that it would be better if much more discourse happened there rather than on X/Twitter.

Some claims that all seem true to me despite being in tension:

• Many people thinking about AGI/ASI/related post on X but not on LW
  • This is partially due to LW being scary/aversive
• X is more insane and adversarial than LW
• The quality of discourse on LW is way better than on X
• The LW scene has specific unreasonable biases, is somewhat tribal, and is somewhat of an echo chamber, but on net LW seems way more reasonable than all of the AI parts of X
• It would be good if way more of the important discussion about AI happened on LW or at least happened in a forum less messed up than X (or X got less messed up)
• Epistemics of AI company employees seem pretty important and are quite bad, with some of the more important influences being internal chatter (with strong biases, influence from leadership, and echo chambers) or X for some of the companies
• Public discourse/argumentation seems like it could improve epistemics, especially of AI company employees
• LW is often hostile and aversive to AI company employees and some of this seems unhealthy/bad (as in, indicates insufficient decoupling/soldier-mindset/motivated-reasoning and corresponds to people piling on in unhelpful ways). But a bunch of this is a natural consequence of reasonable views of people on LW and the behavior of AI companies and employees at AI companies
  • E.g., it would be better if people on LW applied something more like typical researcher norms to research outputs. ^[1] (E.g., for many types of issues, it's good to first email the author with the issue and let them comment or say they are going to fix it before posting publicly. ^[2] ) And it would be good if people on LW tried to avoid their criticism being unnecessarily rude (though not necessarily less hostile). I also wish LW had more (measured, thoughtful) praise of good things AI companies / some employees at AI companies did. (More thoughtful criticism would also be good.)
• It would be good if many more AI company employees were interested in seriously trying to form detailed views about the future of AI and consequences of this. It would be good if a bunch of this happened via engagement and discussion on LW.
• A serious limiting factor on the quality of discussion anywhere is that there is a limited supply of thoughtful and reasonable people and there is some adverse selection for who posts on online platforms frequently. The adverse selection for popular X accounts (that talk about AI) seems especially bad.
• Most people rarely change their somewhat formed opinions based on arguments on the internet, but settings where people are more likely to change their mind are expensive and rare.
• LW's problems/biases are unlikely to get way better in the future
• Making LW better at the margin by participating in a reasonably high-effort way is good (and moderately leveraged for many people)

1. This applies even to research outputs from AI companies so long as the output is associated with particular individuals rather than being something more like a model card. But this is a spectrum and the more something seems like it's speaking for the company or is propaganda/comms/opinion rather than a research output, the less I think this applies. ↩︎

2. As Zach notes, this is less clear for timely criticism. I'm sympathetic to something like "send your criticism to the authors, but don't actually give them that long to respond before posting" if things are timely. And not waiting and just posting can often be reasonable. Note that I edited this bullet a bit and I don't feel like my overall view is that stable. ↩︎