I really appreciate you sharing your concerns. It helps me and other involved in the project learn more about what to avoid going forward and optimize our methods. Thank you for laying them out so clearly! I think this comment will be something that I will come back to in the future as I and others create content.

I want to see if I can address some of the concerns you expressed.

In my writing for venues like Lifehack, I do not speak of rationality explicitly as something we are promoting. As in this post, I talk about growing mentally stronger or being intentional - euphemisms that do not associate rationality as such with what we're doing. I only incidentally mention rationality, such as when I speak of Rationality Dojo as a noun. I also generally do not talk of cognitive biases, and use other euphemistic language, such as referring to thinking errors, as in this article for Salon. So this gets at the point of watering down rationality.

I would question the point about arguing from authority. One of the goals of Intentional Insights is to convey what science-based itself means. For example, in this article, I specifically discuss research studies as a key way of validating truth claims. Recall that we are all suffering from a position of curse of knowledge on this point. How can we expect to teach people who do not know what science-based means without teaching it to them in the first place? Do you remember when you were at a stage when you did not know the value of scientific studies, and then came to learn about them as a useful way of validating evidence? This is what I'm doing in that article above. Hope this helps address some of the concerns about arguing from authority.

I hear you about the inauthentic feeling writing style. As I told Lumifer in my comment below, I cringed at that when I was learning how to write that way, too. You can't believe how weird that feels to an academic. My Elephant kicks and screams and tries to throw off my Rider whenever I do that. It's very ughy. This writing style is much more natural for me. So is this.

However, this inauthentic-feeling writing style is the writing style needed to get into Lifehack. I have been trying to change my writing style to get into venues like that for the last year and a half, and only succeeded in changing my writing style in the last couple of months sufficiently to be published in Lifehack. Unfortunately, when trying to spread good ideas to the kind of people who read Lifehack, it's necessary to use the language and genre and format that they want to read, and that the editors publish. Believe me, I also had my struggles with editors there who cut out more complex points and links to any scientific papers as too complex for their audience.

This gets at the broader point of who reads these articles. I want to quote a comment that Tem42 made in response to Lumifer:

Unless you mean simply the site that it is posted on smells of snake oil. In that case I agree, but at the same time, so what? The people that read articles on that site don't smell snake oil, whether they should or not. If the site provides its own filter for its audience, that only makes it easier for us to present more highly targeted cognitive altruism.

Indeed, the site itself provides a filter. The people who read that site are not like you and me. Don't fall for the typical mind fallacy here. They have complete cognitive ease with this content. They like to read it. They like to share it. This is the stuff they go for. My articles are meant to go higher than their average, such as this or this, conveying both research-based tactics applicable to daily life and frameworks of thinking conducive to moving toward rationality (without using the word, as I mentioned above). Hope this helps address the concerns about the writing style and the immunization of people to good ideas, since the readers of this content are specifically looking for this kind of writing style.

Does this cause any updating in decreasing the likelihood of nightmare scenarios like the one you described?