I initially had an extremely negative emotional response to this post. Then I realized you actually point out exactly why I had such a response with point number 2.

Less Wrong has a language problem.

To someone first coming to read the discussion forum with only a vague idea of what Less Wrong represents (maybe even slightly biased towards thinking of the community as an elitist cultish ivory tower exercise in intellectual masturbation), this post, to be short, doesn't help.

What makes this sort of funny is that your actual message is just, "We want more high quality content producers." which is completely harmless and the implicit goal of any fledgling online community aiming to grow. But you wrap this message in the exclusionary, "We want more smart people."

I'd argue that you achieve both goals by just attracting more people to the community. Consider something like the sprawling Somethingawful forums. The only barrier to entry is $10.00, and there's a thriving science and academics subforum.

Definitely remove the jargon. This would help on the cult side of things. And for pete's sake, don't go fishing for "Intellectual Elites", just try and grow the community--elites will come in due time.