Speaking for myself, I know of at least four people who know of Less Wrong/SI but are not enthusiasts, possibly due to atmosphere issues.
An acquaintance of mine attends Less Wrong meetups and describes most of his friends as being Less Wrongers, but doesn't read Less Wrong and privately holds reservations about the entire singularity thing, saying that we can't hope to say much about the future more than 10 years in advance. He told me that one of his coworkers is also skeptical of the singularity.
A math student/coder I met at an entrepreneurship event told me Less Wrong had good ideas but was "too pretentious".
I was interviewing for an internship once, and the interviewer and I realized we had a mutual acquaintance who was a Less Wronger and SI donor. He asked me if I was part of that entire group, and I said yes. His attitude was a bit derisive.
A math student/coder I met at an entrepreneurship event told me Less Wrong had good ideas but was "too pretentious".
This person might have been in the same place as a math grad student I know. They read a little Less Wrong and were turned off. Then they attended a LW-style rationality seminar and responded positively, because it was more "compassionate". What they mean is this: A typical epistemology post on Less Wrong might sound something like
There are laws of probability; you can't just make up beliefs.
(That's not a quote.) Wh...
I have several questions related to this:
If you visit any Less Wrong page for the first time in a cookies-free browsing mode, you'll see this message for new users:
Here are the worst violators I see on that about page:
And on the sequences page:
This seems obviously false to me.
These may not seem like cultish statements to you, but keep in mind that you are one of the ones who decided to stick around. The typical mind fallacy may be at work. Clearly there is some population that thinks Less Wrong seems cultish, as evidenced by Google's autocomplete, and these look like good candidates for things that makes them think this.
We can fix this stuff easily, since they're both wiki pages, but I thought they were examples worth discussing.
In general, I think we could stand more community effort being put into improving our about page, which you can do now here. It's not that visible to veteran users, but it is very visible to newcomers. Note that it looks as though you'll have to click the little "Force reload from wiki" button on the about page itself for your changes to be published.