I am a relative newbie commenter here, and my interest in this site has so far been limited to using it as a fun forum where it's possible to discuss all kinds of sundry topics with exceptionally smart people. However, I have read a large part of the background sequences, and I'm familiar with the main issues of concern here, so even though it might sound impertinent coming from someone without any status in this community, I can't resist commenting on this article.

To put it bluntly, I think the main point of the article is, if anything, an understatement. Let me speak from personal experience. From the perspective of this community, I am a sort of person who should be exceptionally easy to get interested and won over to its cause, considering both my intellectual background and my extreme openness to contrarian viewpoints and skepticism towards the official academic respectability as a criteron of truth and intellectual soundness. Yet, to be honest, even though I find a lot of the writing and discussion here extremely interesting, and the writings of Yudkowsky (in addition to others such as Bostrom, Hanson, etc.) have convinced me that technology-related existential risks should be taken much more seriously than they presently are, I still keep encountering things in this community that set off various red flags, which are undoubtedly taken by many people as a sign of weirdness and crackpottery, and thus alienate huge numbers of potential quality audience.

Probably the worst such example I've seen was the recent disturbance in which Roko was subjected to abuse that made him leave. When I read the subsequent discussions, it surprised me that virtually nobody here appears to be aware what an extreme PR disaster it was. Honestly, for someone unfamiliar with this website who has read about that episode, it would be irrational not to conclude that there's some loony cult thing going on here, unless he's also presented with enormous amounts of evidence to the contrary in the form of a selection of the best stuff that this site has to offer. After these events, I myself wondered whether I want to be associated with an outlet where such things happen, even just as an occasional commenter. (And not to even mention that Roko's departure is an enormous PR loss in its own right, in that he was one of the few people here who know how to write in a way that's interesting and appealing to people who aren't hard-core insiders.)

Even besides this major PR fail, I see many statements and arguments here that may be true, or at least not outright unreasonable, but should definitely be worded more cautiously and diplomatically if they're given openly for the whole world to see. I'm not going to get into details of concrete examples -- in particular, I do not concur unconditionally with any of the specific complaints from the above article -- but I really can't help but conclude that lots of people here, including some of the most prominent individuals, seem oblivious as to how broader audiences, even all kinds of very smart, knowledgeable, and open-minded people, will perceive what they write and say. If you want to have a closed inner circle where specific background knowledge and attitudes can be presumed, that's fine -- but if you set up a large website attracting lots of visitors and participants to propagate your ideas, you have to follow sound PR principles, or otherwise its effect may well end up being counter-productive.