What gives LessWrong staying power?

On the surface, it looks like this community should dissolve. Why are we attracting bread bakers, programmers, stock market investors, epidemiologists, historians, activists, and parents?

Each of these interests has a community associated with it, so why are people choosing to write about their interests in this forum? And why do we read other people's posts on this forum when we don't have a prior interest in the topic?

Rationality should be the art of general intelligence. It's what makes you better at everything. If practice is the wood and nails, then rationality is the blueprint. 

To determine whether or not we're actually studying rationality, we need to check whether or not it applies to everything. So when I read posts applying the same technique to a wide variety of superficially unrelated subjects, it confirms that the technique is general, and helps me see how to apply it productively.

This points at a hypothesis, which is that general intelligence is a set of defined, generally applicable techniques. They apply across disciplines. And they apply across problems within disciplines. So why aren't they generally known and appreciated? Shouldn't they be the common language that unites all disciplines?

Perhaps it's because they're harder to communicate and appreciate. If I'm an expert baker, I can make another delicious loaf of bread. Or I can reflect on what allows me to make such tasty bread, and speculate on how the same techniques might apply to architecture, painting, or mathematics. Most likely, I'm going to choose to bake bread.

This is fine, until we start working on complex, interdisciplinary projects. Then general intelligence becomes the bottleneck for having enough skill to get the project done. Sounds like the 21st century. We're hitting the limits of what's achievable through sheer persistence in a single specialty, and we're learning to automate them away.

What's left is creativity, which arises from structured decision-making. I've noticed that the longer I practice rationality, the more creative I become. I believe that's because it gives me the resources to turn an intuition into a specified problem, envision a solution, create a sort of Fermi-approximation to give it definition, and guidance on how to develop the practical skills and relationships that will let me bring it into being.

If I'm right, human application of these techniques will require deliberate practice with the general techniques - both synthesizing them and practicing them individually, until they become natural.

The challenge is that most specific skills lend themselves to that naturally. If I want to become a pianist, I practice music until I'm good. If I want to be a baker, I bake bread. To become an architect, design buildings.

What exactly do you do to practice the general techniques of rationality? I can imagine a few methods:

1. Participate in superforecasting tournaments, where Bayesian and gears/policy level thinking are the known foundational techniques.
2. Learn a new skill, and as you go, notice the problems you encounter along the way. Try to imagine what a general solution to that problem might look like. Then go out and build it.
3. Pick a specific rationality technique, and try to apply it to every problem you face in your life.