My default assumption for any story that ends with "And this is why our ingroup is smarter than everyone else and people outside won't recognize our genius" is that the story is self-serving nonsense, and this article isn't giving me any reason to think otherwise.

A "userbase with probably-high intelligence, community norms about statistics and avoiding predictable stupidity" describes a lot of academia. And academia has a higher barrier to entry than "taking the time to write some blog articles". The average lesswrong user doesn't need to run an RCT before airing their latest pet theory for the community, so why would it be so much better at selectively spreading true memes than academia is?

I would need a much more thorough gears-level model of memetic spread of ideas, one with actual falsifiable claims (you know, like when people do science) before I could accept the idea of LessWrong as some kind of genius incubator.

Claim: memeticity in a scientific field is mostly determined, not by the most competent researchers in the field, but instead by roughly-median researchers. [...] Sure, the most competent people in the field may recognize the problems, but the median researchers don’t, and in aggregate it’s mostly the median researchers who spread the memes.

This assumes the median researchers can't recognize who the competent researchers are, or otherwise don't look to them as thought leaders.

I'm not arguing that this isn't often the case, just that it isn't always the case. In engineering, if you're more competent than everyone else, you can make cooler shit. If you're a median engineer trying to figure out which memes to take on and spread, you're going to be drawn to the work of the more competent engineers because it is visibly and obviously better.

In fields where distinguishing between bad research and good research has to be done by knowing how to do good research, rather than "does it fly or does it crash", then the problem you describe is much more difficult to avoid. I argue that the difference between the fields which replicate and those which don't is as much about the legibility of the end product as it is about the quality of the median researcher.

Curated. I think this model is pretty useful and well-compressed, and I'm glad to be able to concisely link to it.

Insofar as it is accurate, the policy implications are still much open to debate, for here on LessWrong and for other ecosystems in the world.

People did in fact try to sound the alarm about poor statistical practices well before the replication crisis, and yet practices did not change, 

This rings painfully true. As early as the late 1950s, at least one person was already raising a red flag about the risks that psychology^[1] might veer into publishing a sea of false claims:

There is some evidence that in fields where statistical tests of significance are commonly used, research which yields nonsignificant results is not published. Such research being unknown to other investigators m

community norms which require basically everyone to be familiar with statistics and economics

I disagree. At best, community norms require everyone to in principle be able to follow along with some statistical/economic argument. 
That is a better fit with my experience of LW discussions. And I am not, in fact, familiar with statistics or economics to the extent I am with e.g. classical mechanics or pre-DL machine learning. (This is funny for many reasons, especially because statistical mechanics is one of my favourite subjects in physics.) But it remain... (read more)

I think the central claim is true in some fields and not particularly true in others. But one variation of the claim that interests me is, if we consider memeticity relative to public opinions/awareness, then I agree with this more strongly, where the opinions of median researchers are disproportionately more popular than more correct opinions. In some sense, I think the "most correct opinions" are basically never the most popular to the public, though perhaps I wouldn't invoke the median researcher problem to explain this edge case, but a more specific hy... (read more)

I happened to read a Quanta article about equivalence earlier, and one of the threads is the difficulty of a field applying a big new concept without the expository and distillation work of putting stuff into textbooks/lectures/etc.

That problem pattern-matches with the replication example, but well-motivated at the front end instead of badly-motivated at the back end. It still feels like exposition and distillation are key tasks that govern the memes-in-the-field passed among median researchers.

I strongly suspect the crux of the replication crisis example ... (read more)

I think one thing that's missing here is that you're making a first-order linear approximation of "research" as just continually improving in some direction. I would instead propose a quadratic model where there is some maximal mode of activity in the world, but this mode can face certain obstacles that people can remove. Research progress is what happens when there's an interface for removing obstacles that people are gradually developing familiarity with (for instance because it's a newly developed interface).

Different people have different speeds by whi... (read more)

Prototypical example: imagine a scientific field in which the large majority of practitioners have a very poor understanding of statistics, p-hacking, etc. Then lots of work in that field will be highly memetic despite trash statistics, blatant p-hacking, etc. Sure, the most competent people in the field may recognize the problems, but the median researchers don’t, and in aggregate it’s mostly the median researchers who spread the memes.

Complicated analysis (like going far beyond p-values) is easy for anyone to see and it is evidence of effort. Comple... (read more)

How do you think competent people can solve this problem within their own fields of expertise? 

For example, the EA community is a small & effective community like you've referenced for commonplace charity/altruism practices. 

How could we solve the median researcher problem & improve the efficacy & reputation of altruism as a whole?

Personally, I suggest taking a marketing approach. If we endeavor to understand important similarities between "median researchers", so that we can talk to them in the language they want to hear, we may be a... (read more)

Well, I hope that the self-importance shown in this post is not a true reflection of the community; although unfortunately I think it might well be.

Spurious correlation here, big time, imho.

Give me the natural content of the field and I bet I easily predict whether it may or may not have replication crisis, w/o knowing the exact type of students it attracts.

I think it's mostly that the fields where bad science may be sexy and less-trivial/unambiguous to check, or, those where you can make up/sell sexy results independently of their grounding, may, for whichever reason, also be those that attract the non-logical students.

Agree though with the mob overwhelming the smart outliers, but I just think how much that mob creates a replication crises is at least in large part dependent on the intrinsic nature of the field rather than due to the exact IQs.

We argue that memeticity—the survival and spread of ideas—is far more complex than the influence of average researchers or the appeal of articulate theories. Instead, the persistence of ideas in any field depends on a nuanced interplay of feedback mechanisms, boundary constraints, and the conditions within the field itself.

In fields like engineering, where feedback is often immediate and tied directly to empirical results, ideas face constant scrutiny through testing and validation. Failed practices here are swiftly corrected, creating a natural selection ... (read more)