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.