Upvoted for sounding a lot like the kinds of complaints I've heard people say about LW and SIAI.

There is a large barrier to entry here, and if we want to win more, we can't just blame people for not understanding the message. I've been discussing with a friend what is wrong with LW pedagogy (though he admits that it is certainly getting better). To paraphrase his three main arguments:

• We often use nomenclature without necessary explanation for a general audience. Sure, we make generous use of hyperlinks, but without some effort to bridge the gap in the body of our text, we aren't exactly signalling openness or friendliness.

• We have a tendency to preach to the converted. Or as the friend said:

  It's that classic mistake of talking in a way where you're convincing or explaining something to yourself or the well-initiated instead of laying out the roadwork for foreigners.

  He brought up an example for how material might be introduced to newly exposed folk.

  If This American Life explained the financial crisis in an hour so that four million people improved on a written test on the subject, it's clear you can explain complicated material from near-scratch.

The curse of knowledge can be overcome, but it takes desire and some finesse.

• If we intend to win the hearts and minds of the people (or at least make a mark in the greater world), we might want to work on evocative imagery that isn't immediately cool to futurists and technophiles and sci-fi geeks. Sure, keep the awesome stuff we have, but maybe look for metaphors that work in other domains. In my mind, ideally, we should build a database of ideas and their parallels in other fields (using some degree of field work to actually find the words that work). Eliezer has done some great work this way, like with HP:MoR, and some of his short stories. Maybe the SIAI could shell out money to fund focus groups and interviews a la Luntz, who in my mind is a great Dark Side example of winning.

Edit for formatting and to mention that outreach and not seeming culty seem to be intertwined in a weird way. It is obvious to me that being The Esoteric Order Of LessWrong doesn't do the world any favors (or us, for that matter), but that by working on outreach, we can be accused of proselytizing. I think it comes down to doing what works without doing the death spiral stuff. And it seems to me that no matter what is done, detractors are going to detract.