Note that I played a part in convincing MIRI to create IAF, and wrote the only comment on the IAF post you linked, so rest assured that I'm watching you folks :-) My thinking has changed over time though, and probably diverged from yours. I'll lay it out here, hopefully it won't sound too harsh.
First of all, if your goal is explaining math using simpler math, I think there's a better way to do it. In a good math explanation, you formulate an interesting problem at level n whose solution requires level n+1. (Ideally n should be as low as possible.) In a bad math explanation, you assume the reader understands level n, then write out the basic definitions of level n+1 and formulate a problem using those. That loses the reader, unless they are already interested in level n+1.
But that's still underestimating the problem by a couple orders of magnitude. To jumpstart engagement, you need something as powerful as this old post by Eliezer. That's a much more complicated beast. The technical content is pretty much readable to schoolchildren, yet somehow readers are convinced that something magical is going on and they can contribute, not just read and learn. Coming back to that post now, I'm still in awe of how the little gears work, from the opening sentence to the "win" mantra to the hint that he knows the solution but ain't telling. It hits a tiny target in manipulation-space that people don't see clearly even now, after living for a decade inside the research program that it created.
Apart from finding the right problem and distilling it in the right manner, I think the next hardest part is plain old writing style. For example, Eliezer uses lots of poetic language and sounds slightly overconfident, staying mostly in control but leaving dozens of openings for readers to react. But you can't reuse his style today, the audience has changed and you'll sound phony. You need to be in tune with readers in your own way. If I knew how to do it, I'd be doing it already. These comments of mine are more like meta-manipulation aimed at people like you, so I can avoid learning to write :-)
Note that I ... wrote the only comment on the IAF post you linked
Yes, I replied to it :)
Unfortunately, I don't expect to have more Eliezer-level explanations of these specific lines of work any time soon. Eliezer has a fairly large amount of content on Arbital that hasn't seen LW levels of engagement either, though I know some people who are reading it and benefiting from it. I'm not sure how LW 2.0 is coming along, but it might be good to have a subreddit for content similar to your recent post on betting. There is an audience for it, as that post demonstrated.
The Peloponnesian War was a war between two empires: the seadwelling Athenians, and the landlubber Spartans. Spartans were devoted to duty and country, living in barracks and drinking the black broth. From birth they trained to be the caste dictators of a slaveowning society, which would annually slay slaves to forestall a rebellion. The most famous Spartan is Leonidas, who died in a heroic last stand delaying the invasion of the Persians. To be a Spartan was to live a life devoted to toughness and duty.
Famous Athenians are Herodotus, inventor of history, Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, Hippocrates of the oath medical students still take, all the Greek playwrights, etc. Attic Greek is the Greek we learn in our Classics courses. Athens was a city where the students of the entire known Greek world would come to learn from the masters, a maritime empire with hundreds of resident aliens, where slavery was comparable to that of the Romans. Luxury apartments, planned subdivisions, sexual hedonism, and free trade made up the life of the Athenian elite.
These two cities had deeply incompatible values. Spartans lived in fear that the Helots would rebel and kill them. Deeply suspicious of strangers, they imposed oligarchies upon the cities they conquered. They were described by themselves and others cautious and slow to act. Athenians by contrast prized speed and risk in their enterprises. Foreigners could live freely in Athens and even established their own temples. Master and slave comedies of Athens inspired PG Woodhouse.
All intellectual communities are Athenian in outlook. We remember Sparta for its killing and Athens for its art. If we want the rationalist community to tackle the hard problems, if we support a world that is supportive of human values and beauty, if we yearn to end the plagues of humanity, our values should be Athenian: individualistic, open, trusting, enamoured of beauty. When we build social technology, it should not aim to cultivate values that stand against these.
High trust, open, societies are the societies where human lives are most improved. Beyond merely being refugees for the persecuted they become havens for intellectual discussion and the improvement of human knowledge and practice. It is not a coincidence that one city produced Spinoza, Rubens, Rembrandt, van Dyke, Huygens, van Leeuwenhoek, and Grotius in a few short decades, while dominating the seas and being open to refugees.
Sadly we seem to have lost sight of this in the rationality community. Increasingly we are losing touch as a community with the outside intellectual world, without the impetus to study what has been done before and what the research lines are in statistics, ML, AI, epistemology, biology, etc. While we express that these things are important, the conversation doesn't seem to center around the actual content of these developments. In some cases (statistics) we're actively hostile to understanding some of the developments and limitations of our approach as a matter of tribal marker.
Some projects seem to me to be likely to worsen this, either because they express Spartan values or because they further physical isolation in ways that will act to create more small-group identification.
What can we do about this? Holiday modifications might help with reminding us of our values, but I don't know how we can change the community's outlook more directly. We should strive to stop merely acting on the meta-level and try to act on the object level more as a community. And lastly, we should notice that our values are real and not universal, and that they need defending.