My post was mostly about how to optimize appearances, with some side speculation on how our current appearances might be filtering potential users. I agree LW rocks in general. I think we're mostly talking past each other; I don't see this discussion post as fitting into the genre of "serious LW criticism" as the other stuff you link to.
In other words, I'm talking about first impressions, not in-depth discussions.
I'd be curious where you got the idea that writing the cult sequence was what touched off the "LW cult" meme. That sounds pretty implausible to me. Keep in mind that no one who is fully familiar with LW is making this accusation (that I know of), but it does look like it might be a reaction that sometimes occurs in newcomers.
Let's keep in mind that LW being bad is a logically distinct proposition, and if it is bad, we want to know it (since we want to know what is true right?)
And if we can make optimizations to LW culture to broaden participation from intelligent people, that's also something we want to do, right? Although, on reflection, I'm not sure I see an opportunity for improvement where this is concerned, except maybe on the wiki (but I do think we could stand to be a bit nicer everywhere).
XiXiDu regularly posts SIAI criticism, and it always gets upvoted, no matter how wrong. Not to mention all the other posts disagreeing with claims in what are usually called the Sequences, all highly upvoted by Less Wrong members.
Criticism rocks dude. I'm constantly realizing that I did something wrong and thinking that if I had a critical external observer maybe I wouldn't have persisted in my mistake for so long. Let's keep this social norm up.
Ya know, if LW and SIAI are serious about optimizing appearances, they might consider hiring a Communications professional. PR is a serious skill and there are people who do it for a living. Those people tend to be on the far end of the spectrum of what we call neurotypical here. That is, they are extremely good at modeling other people, and therefore predicting how other people will react to a sample of copy. I would not be surprised if literally no one who reads LW regularly could do the job adequately.
Edit to add: it's nice to see that they're attemptin...
I have several questions related to this:
If you visit any Less Wrong page for the first time in a cookies-free browsing mode, you'll see this message for new users:
Here are the worst violators I see on that about page:
And on the sequences page:
This seems obviously false to me.
These may not seem like cultish statements to you, but keep in mind that you are one of the ones who decided to stick around. The typical mind fallacy may be at work. Clearly there is some population that thinks Less Wrong seems cultish, as evidenced by Google's autocomplete, and these look like good candidates for things that makes them think this.
We can fix this stuff easily, since they're both wiki pages, but I thought they were examples worth discussing.
In general, I think we could stand more community effort being put into improving our about page, which you can do now here. It's not that visible to veteran users, but it is very visible to newcomers. Note that it looks as though you'll have to click the little "Force reload from wiki" button on the about page itself for your changes to be published.