Even if I worded a description of LW quite carefully, I'd eventually get to something which would be intractable to some everyday dude off the street. My guess is that those intractable topics would include cryonics, MWI QM and existential risk posed by AI.
When they walk away from that conversation, the intractable parts are what they'll remember, and how they'll characterise it. I don't have to lie or misrepresent in any way, shape or form. I just have to be not careful enough.
Agreed, I tried to explain Less Wrong to my father and now he thinks we're some doomsday cult concerned that AI's will wipe out humanity and rearrange our atoms in smiley faces. He concluded that everyone here has "way to much imagination" and now he won't listen to anything that comes from this blog.
Let's say you are interviewing a candidate for a job. In casual conversation, the candidate mentions that he is a member of a rather old and prestigious country club. You've never heard the name of the club before.
You look up the country club afterwards, and are surprised by what you read. The club refuses membership to homosexuals. It revokes the membership of couples who use birth control. Leadership positions are reserved to unmarried males.
The candidate is otherwise competent. Under what conditions would you hire him? Would you want a law passed banning hiring discrimination based on country club membership?
(The country club is analogous to a nicer version of the Catholic church. I left out a couple bad things.)
Religious discrimination is illegal in many parts of the world, and I think that's probably a good thing. Still, keeping this at the object level (no meta-rules or veils of ignorance) it seems to me that discriminating against religious people is fine. I'm curious what other people think.