Sure you could, you just have other stuff you'd rather do, which is totally okay :)

Actually, a huge problem I have with LW is the sheer amount of discussions-inside-discussions we have. Especially in the Sequences, there's just too many comments to humanly read. If we could make summaries of the consensus on any specific topic, and keep them updated as discussions progress...

I endorse intimidating people who demonstrate mean-spirited behavior into silence

Have to be careful about that -- if you're being trolled there is noticeable potential for an epic fail :-)

I guess I'd say that it counts if you're willing to treat Unitarian Universalism as an actual religious denomination. Whether it counts or not would probably depend on how you identify such things, since it's missing qualities which one might consider important, such as formal doctrines.

In my experience Unitarian Universalism, at least in its modern form, is mainly a conglomeration of liberal progressive ideals used as an umbrella to unite people with religious beliefs ranging from moralistic therapeutic deism to outright atheism.

All of the Unitarian Universalists I've known well enough to ask have also identified themselves as secular humanists, so I certainly wouldn't regard it as an alternative to secular humanism which carries that value.

much of the inner circle actually draws a paycheck from the organizations members are encouraged to donate to

Would LW be improved if paid employees/consultants of those organizations were barred from membership? (I do realize there are other ways to address this concern, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise... for example, we could re-institute the moratorium on discussing those organizations, or a limited moratorium on fundraising activitiies here, or various other things. I'm just curious about your opinion about that specific solution.)

That and the polyamory commune are the two sketchiest things IMO

I get a kick out of this, because my social circle is largely polyamorous but would mostly consider LW a charming bunch of complete nutjobs on other grounds. Polyamory really isn't all that uncommon in communities anchored around high-tech development/elite tech schools, IME.

That and the polyamory commune are the two sketchiest things IMO

Don't forget treating the writings of the charismatic founder as a sacred text and ritually quoting them :-)

Wouldn't you expect that if the cause actually made sense though? (and not only if this is a cult)

Given how much LWers seem to care about effective charity, I'd expect more scrutiny, and a stronger insistence on measurable outcomes. I guess you're right though; the money isn't inherently a problem.

Less than 0.01% of the users have played an ai-box game (to my knowledge) and even less have played it for money.

It seems like a defining characteristic; it's one place where the site clearly differs from more "mainstream" AI research (though this may be a distorted perception since it was how I first heard of LW)

if you mean that evidence-based reasoning helped them find an intervention designed to increase sleep quality you are grasping for straws.

Shrug. It looks dodgy to me. It pattern-matches with e.g. the unverifiable stories people tell of their personal experience of Jesus.

We are not supposed to write out the actual basilisk (there is only one) on lesswrong.com. There is no problems with talking about it in public

That's not at all clear. I've never seen any explicit rules. I've seen articles that carefully avoid saying the name.

There are just respected users and no clear-cut hierarchy - that's what happens at most places.

Even on internet forums there's usually an explicit distinction between mod and not, and often layers to it. (The one exception I know is HN, and even there people know who pg is, who's part of YC and who's not, and stories are presented differently if they're coming from YC members). And it's unusual and suspicious for the high-ups to all be on first name terms with each other. It raises questions over objectivity, oversight, conflict resolution.

This sort of point-by-point refutation is the same sort of thing that would happen in a church that was trying to defend against allegations of cultyness.

I don't think lmm's list of reasons was utterly compelling -- good, but not utterly compelling -- but I don't think it would matter if it were a perfect list, because there will always be a defense for accusations of cultyness that satisfies the church/forum.

It is more interesting watching it happen here vs. the church IMO because LW is all about rationality, where the church can always push the "faith" button when they are backed into a logical corner.

At the end of the day, it is just an online forum. But it does sound to me (based on what I can gather from perusing) like there are a group of people here who take this stuff seriously enough so as to make cultyness possible.

I'm sure the "LW/cryonics/transhumanism/basilisk stuff is so similar to how religion works" bit got old a long time ago, but Dear Lord is it apparent and fascinating to me.

I'm legitimately worried about the money and the incentives it creates. What would a self-interested agent (LW seems to use "agent" in exactly the opposite sense to what I'd expect it to mean, but I hope I'm clear) in the position of the LW leadership do? My cynical view is: write some papers about how the problems they need to solve are really hard; write enough papers each year to appear to be making progress, and live lives of luxury. So what's stopping them? People in charities that provide far more fuzzies than LW have become disenchanted. People far dumber than Yudkowsky have found rationalizations to live well for themselves on the dime of the charity they run. Corrupt priests of every generation have professed as much faith that performing their actual mission would result in very high future utility, while in fact neglecting those duties for earthly pleasures.

Even if none of the leadership are blowing funds on crack and hookers, if they're all just living ascetically and writing papers, that's actually the same failure mode if they're not being effective at preventing UFAI. When founding the first police force, one of Peel's key principles was that the only way they could be evaluated was the prevalence of crime - not how much work the police were seen to be doing, not how good the public felt about their efforts. It's very hard to find a similar standard with which to hold LW to account.

It occurs to me as I write that I have no idea what the LW funding structure is - whether the site is funded by the CFAR, MIRI, SIAI or something else. Even having all these distinct bodies with mostly the same members smells fishy, seems more likely to be politics than practicalities.

The kookiness... if LW were really more rational than others, I'd expect them to do some weird-but-not-harmful-to-others things. So I suspect this is more a perception than reality thing (Though if there are good answers to "what's the empirical distinction between real and fake cryonics" and "why do you expect polyamory to turn out better for you lot than it did for the '60s hippie communes" it'd be nice to see them). IMO the prime counter would be visible effectiveness. A rich person with some weird habits is an eccentric genius; a poor person with weird habits is just a crank.

It would be really nice to have more verifiable results that say LW-style rationality is good for people (or to know that it isn't and respond accordingly). The failure mode here is that we do a bunch of things that feel good and pat each other on the back and actually it's all placebos. We actually see a fair few articles here claiming that reading LW is bad for you, or that rationality doesn't make people happier. On thinking it through this would be the kind of cult that's basically harmless, so I'm not too concerned. On the perception side, IMO discussing health is not worth the damage it does to the way the community is seen (the first weight-loss thread I saw caused a palpable drop in my confidence in the site). I've no idea how to practically move away from doing so though.

Secrets and bans rub me very strongly the wrong way, and seem likely to damage our efforts in nonobvious ways (to put it another way, secretive organizations tend to become ineffective at their original aims, and I'm worried about this failure mode). I certainly don't think the ban on the basilisk is effective at its purported aim, given that it's still talked about on the internet. And just having this kind of deception around immediately sets off a whole chain of other doubts - what if it's banned for other reasons? What else is banned?

If there really is a need for these bans, there should be a clear set of rules and some kind of review. That would certainly address the perception, and hopefully the actuality too.

I think the use of fictional evidence is actually dangerous. Given the apparently high value of LW-memetic fiction in recruiting, I don't know where the balance is. I think overuse of jargon is just a perceptual problem (though probably worth addressing).

I have... unusual views on diversity, so I don't think setting people against their less-rational friends is an actual problem (in the sense of being damaging to the organization's aims); I file this as a perceptual problem. The most obvious counter I can think of is more politeness about common popular misbeliefs, and less condescension when correcting each other. But I suspect these are problems inherent to internet fora (which doesn't mean they're not real; I would suggest that e.g. reddit has a (minor) cultish aspect to it, one that's offputting to participation. But there may not be any counter).

The hierarchy: in the short term it's merely annoying, but long-term I worry about committee politics. If some of the higher-ups fell out in private (and given that several of them appear to be dating each other that seems likely) and began sniping at each other in the course of their duties, and catching innocent users in the crossfire... I've seen that happen in similar organizations and be very damaging. Actual concern.

So in summary: actual concern: where the money goes, any secrets the organization keeps, clarity of the leadership hierarchy, overuse of fiction. superficial issues: overuse of jargon. The rest of my list is on reflection probably not worth worrying about.