It is probably simply structural that the LessWrong community tends to be about armchair philosophy, science, and math. If there are people who have read through Less Wrong, absorbed its worldview, and gone out to "just do something", then they probably aren't spending their time bragging about it here. If it looks like no one here is doing any useful work, that could really just be sampling bias.

Even still, I expect that most posters here are more interested to read, learn, and chat than to thoroughly change who they are and what they do. Reading, learning, and chatting is fun! Thorough self-modification is scary.

Thorough and rapid self-modification, on the basis of things you've read on a website rather than things you've seen tested and proven in combination, is downright dangerous. Try things, but try them gradually.

And now, refutation!

So what's the solution?

To, um, what, exactly? I think the question whose solution you're describing is "What ought one do?" Of these, you say:

It wont feel like the right thing to do; your moral intuitions (being designed to operate in a small community of hunter gatherers) are unlikely to suggest to you anything near the optimal task.

That depends largely on your moral intuitions. I honestly think of all humans as people. I am always taken aback a little when I see evidence that lots of other folks don't. You'd think I stop being surprised, but it often catches me when I'm not expecting it. I'd suggest that my intuitions about my morals when I'm planning things are actually pretty good.

That said, the salient intuitions in an emotionally-charged situation certainly are bad at planning and optimization. And so, if you imagine yourself executing your plan, I would honestly expect it to feel oddly amoral. It won't feel wrong, necessarily, but it might not feel relevant to morality at all.

It will be something you can start working on right now, immediately.

This is ... sort of true, depending on what you mean. You might need to learn more, to be able to form a more efficient or more coherent plan. You might need to sleep right now. But, yes, you can prepare to prepare to prepare to change the world right away.

It will disregard arbitrary self-limitations like abstaining from politics or keeping yourself aligned with a community of family and friends.

Staying aligned with a community of family and friends is not an arbitrary limitation. Humans are social beings. I myself am strongly introverted, but I also know that my overall mood is affected strongly by my emotional security in my social status. I can reflect on this fact, and I can mitigate its negative consequences, but it would be madness to just ignore it. In my case - and, I presume, in the case of anyone else who worries about being aligned with their family and friends - it's terrifying to imagine undermining many of those relationships.

You need people that you can trust for deep, personal conversations; and you need people who would support you if your life went suddenly wrong. You may not need these things as insurance, you may not need to use friends and family in this way, but you certainly need them for your own psychological well-being. Being depressed makes one significantly less effective at achieving one's goals, and we monkeys are depressed without close ties to other monkeys.

On the other hand, harmless-seeming deviations probably won't undermine those relationships; they're far less likely to ruin relationships than they seem. Rather, they make you a more interesting person to talk to. Still, it is a terrible idea to carelessly antagonize your closest people.

Speaking about it would undermine your reputation through signaling. A true rationalist has no need for humility, sentimental empathy, or the absurdity heuristic.

No! If we're defining a "true rationalist" as some mythical entity, then probably so. If we want to make "true rationalists" out of humans, no! If you completely disregard common social graces like the outward appearance of humility, you will have real trouble coordinating world-changing efforts. If you disregard empathy for people you're talking to, you will seem rather more like a monster than a trustworthy leader. And if you ever think you're unaffected by the absurdity heuristic, you're almost certainly wrong.

People are not perfect agents, optimizing their goals. People are made out of meat. We can change what we do, reflect on what we think, and learn better how to use the brains we've got. But the vast majority of what goes on in your head is not, not, not under your control.

Which brings me to the really horrifying undercurrent of your post, which is why I stayed up an extra hour to write this comment. I mean, you can sit down and make plans for what you'll learn, what you'll do, and how you'll save billions of lives, and that's pretty awesome. I heartily approve! You can even figure out what you need to learn to decide the best courses of action, set plans to learn that, and get started immediately. Great!

But if you do all this without considering seemingly unimportant details, like having fun with friends and occasionally relaxing, then you will fail. Not only will you fail, but you will fail spectacularly. You will overstress yourself, burn out, and probably ruin your motivation to change the world. Don't go be a "rationalist" martyr, it won't work very well.

So, if you're going to decompartmentalize your global aspirations and your local life, then keep in mind that only you are likely to look out for your own well-being. That well-being has a strong effect on how effective you can be. So much so that attempting more than about 4 hours per day of real, closely-focused mental effort will probably give you not just diminishing returns, but worse efficiency per day. That said, almost nobody puts in 4 hours a day of intense focus.

So, yes, billions are miserable, people die needlessly, and the world is mad. I am still going out tomorrow night and playing board games with friends, and I do not feel guilty about this.

Speaking about it would undermine your reputation through signaling. A true rationalist has no need for humility, >sentimental empathy, or the absurdity heuristic.

Depending on your goal (rationality is always dependend on a goal, after all), I might disagree. Rational behaviour is whatever makes you win. If you view your endeveaur as a purely theoretical undertaking, I agree, but if you consider reality as a whole you have to take into account how your behaviour comes across. There are many forms of behaviour that would be rational but would make you look like an ass if you don't at least take your time to explain the reasons for your behaviour to those that can affect your everyday life.

LessWrongers as a group are often accused of talking about rationality without putting it into practice

Evidence? Who accuses them of this? One post (on Less Wrong itself!) is not evidence enough for this claim.

who gets to be in our CEV

Since this barb is directed at me, I should respond. When I come across a superb intellect like Yudkowsky, I first shut up and read the bulk of what he has to say (in Yudkowsky's case, this is helpfully packaged in the sequences). Then I apply my modest intellect to exploring the areas of his thinking that I do not find convincing.

Note that the essay is not about "who gets to be in our CEV"; it is about whether the CEV should include all of humanity, or not. The ability to distinguish between these questions should be within the capability of a rationalist - although I expect your distortion is an intentional attempt to trivialise the subject for rhetorical effect.

Otherwise, what you have written boils down to this: “we should shut up and multiply. You people aren't shutting up and multiplying.”

Unfortunately, we are not consistent expected utility maximisers, so "shut up and multiply" can never be more than an ideal for unmodified and unextrapolated human beings. It is actually impossible to implement "shut up and mutliply" literally, if you aren't accurately described by a utility function.

Furthermore our introspective limitations, knowledge limitations and computational limitations give us no particular way of resolving conflicts between our values, even if we were expected utility maximisers. For example the value of enjoying an argument for its own sake and the value of arguing things in a strictly optimal attempt to minimise existential risk are somewhat opposed to one another. Yet even if I did have a personal utility function such that there existed an optimal way for my unmodified and unextrapolated self to resolve this conflict and maximise utility, I wouldn't know what it was!

It is sometimes fair to recommend that someone shut up and multiply, but I would only do so (I hope!) when the stakes are extreme enough that they outweigh this inconsistency. I might also do so in a specific discussion in which someone was conflicted about whether they should do something, because SUAM seems like the best possible answer if someone is going to ask what they "should" do.

But since neither of these conditions applies, there is really no basis for you saying that I or anyone else should not have arguments and discussions for enjoyment's sake alone, unless you have good reason to think that the consequences are really extreme (for example, I criticised Eliezer for not shutting up and multiplying in his proposals for CEV. Those are extreme consequences).

That said, setting aside the fact that my ability to contribute intellectually is modest, can you really see no benefit in discussing important concepts such as CEV? Why is discussion of overcoming biases worthwhile, but not discussion of important strategies for the future of humanity?

Finally, although it scarcely seems necessary to say this, you cannot expect to be taken seriously with this kind of portentousness ("billions are suffering" - "become an optimization process") unless you have some serious achievements of your own to point to. If you do in fact have something to boast about, please go ahead and tell us about it.

If nothing else, the assertion that the right and rational think will not feel like the right thing to do really needs support. Our moral intuitions may not be perfect, but there are definite parallels between small communities of hunter-gatherers and modern society, that make a fair portion of those intuitions applicable presently.

That it was just laid out without even a reference to back it up… come on, here.

I declare Crocker's rules on the writing style of this post.

Okay then:

in an affective death spiral

I think a more appropriate buzzword might be evaporative cooling of group beliefs. It's not immediately clear how "armchair rationalists" would be more predisposed to affective death spirals than instrumental rationalists.

altruism such as "efficient charity"

altruism such as Efficient Charity. (Note the period.)

It wont feel

It won't feel

being designed to

having evolved to

This behavior is particularly insidious because it is self-reinforcing

As I understand your post, the behavior you mean is talking about rationality without putting it into practice. But the way it is written sound to me like you mean accusing LW oftalking about rationality without putting it into practice.

A recent attempt to counter this trend or at least make us feel better about it was a series of discussions on "leveling up": [...] stands in stark contrast to articles emphasizing practical altruism such as "efficient charity"

Instead of "leveling up" you could have taken "efficient charity" as an example. I think you like that article better, so it seems more honest to me to take it as an example of a more practical post. Mentioning both articles like that makes it too obvious that you singled out "leveling up" for rhetoric reasons.

So what's the solution? I don't know. However I can tell you a few things about the solution, whatever it may be:

I'm very skeptical about those following points. You did not give convincing arguments for them.

Whatever you may decide to do, be sure it follows these principles. If none of your plans align with these guidelines then construct a new one, on the spot, immediately

That seems like bad advice. I think your guidelines are advocating reversed stupidity.

I declare Crocker's rules on the writing style of this post.

I think you are doing it wrong. Declaring Crocker's rule allows others to be harsh to you, it doesn't allow you to be harsh to others.

I checked TwistingFingers's post history, and I noticed that he is also the author of a post entitled LessWrong gaming community.

Choice quote: "Many of us enjoy expressing ourselves through electronic games."

Quite how this squares with his aspiration to become an optimization process is beyond me. Optimizing for lulz, maybe.