My post was mostly about how to optimize appearances, with some side speculation on how our current appearances might be filtering potential users.

Okay.

If we want to win, it might not be enough to have a book length document explaining why we're not a cult. We might have to play the first impressions game as well.

I said stop talking about it and implied that maybe it shouldn't have been talked about so openly in the first place, and here you are talking about it.

I'd be curious where you got the idea that writing the cult sequence was what touched off the "LW cult" meme.

Where else could it have come from? Eliezer's extensive discussion of cultish behavior gets automatically pattern-matched into helpless cries of "LW is not a cult!" (even though that isn't what he's saying and isn't what he's trying to say), and this gets interpreted as, "LW is a cult." Seriously, any time you put two words together like that, people assume they're actually related.

Elsewise, the only thing I can think of is our similar demographics and a horribly mistaken impression that we all agree on everything (I don't know where this comes from).

Criticism rocks dude.

Okay. (I hope you didn't interpret anything I said as meaning otherwise.)