I get the vague 'hidden argument' feeling that I get from seeing Dark Arts in action.

That leads me to believe I have been insufficiently transparent about my motivations for writing, so let me try to rectify that insufficiency:

This site (and OB before it and the SL4 mailing list) has always been an congenial place for altruists, and I wanted to preserve that quality.

Now that I have the comments, it occurs to me that my post was probably too heavy-handed in how it went about that goal, but I still think that an effective way to achieve that goal is to write a post that altruists will like and non-altruists will find pointless or even slightly off-putting. if too high a fraction of the recent posts on this site have nothing interesting to say to altruists, that is a problem because most readers will not read a lot of the content written in previous years because that is the way the web is. (the post I was replying to starts by wondering whether LW should have more posts about recursive human self-improvement, and recursive human self-improvement short of whole brain emulation or similar long-range plans is not a potent enough means to altruistic end to be interesting to altruists.) But my post was too heavy-handed in that it was a reply to a post not of interest to altruists rather than being a post that stands on its own and is of interest to altruists and not of interests to non-altruists.

Another motivation I had was to persuade people to become more altruistic, but now that I see it written out like that, it occurs to me that probably the only way to do that effectively on LW is to set a positive personal example. also, it occurs to me that my post did engage in some exhortation or even cheer-leading, and exhortation and cheer-leading are probably ineffective.