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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute - Less Wrong Discussion
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My post was mostly about how to optimize appearances, with some side speculation on how our current appearances might be filtering potential users. I agree LW rocks in general. I think we're mostly talking past each other; I don't see this discussion post as fitting into the genre of "serious LW criticism" as the other stuff you link to.
In other words, I'm talking about first impressions, not in-depth discussions.
I'd be curious where you got the idea that writing the cult sequence was what touched off the "LW cult" meme. That sounds pretty implausible to me. Keep in mind that no one who is fully familiar with LW is making this accusation (that I know of), but it does look like it might be a reaction that sometimes occurs in newcomers.
Let's keep in mind that LW being bad is a logically distinct proposition, and if it is bad, we want to know it (since we want to know what is true right?)
And if we can make optimizations to LW culture to broaden participation from intelligent people, that's also something we want to do, right? Although, on reflection, I'm not sure I see an opportunity for improvement where this is concerned, except maybe on the wiki (but I do think we could stand to be a bit nicer everywhere).
Criticism rocks dude. I'm constantly realizing that I did something wrong and thinking that if I had a critical external observer maybe I wouldn't have persisted in my mistake for so long. Let's keep this social norm up.
Okay.
I said stop talking about it and implied that maybe it shouldn't have been talked about so openly in the first place, and here you are talking about it.
Where else could it have come from? Eliezer's extensive discussion of cultish behavior gets automatically pattern-matched into helpless cries of "LW is not a cult!" (even though that isn't what he's saying and isn't what he's trying to say), and this gets interpreted as, "LW is a cult." Seriously, any time you put two words together like that, people assume they're actually related.
Elsewise, the only thing I can think of is our similar demographics and a horribly mistaken impression that we all agree on everything (I don't know where this comes from).
Okay. (I hope you didn't interpret anything I said as meaning otherwise.)
Point taken; I'll leave the issue alone for now.
Ya know, if LW and SIAI are serious about optimizing appearances, they might consider hiring a Communications professional. PR is a serious skill and there are people who do it for a living. Those people tend to be on the far end of the spectrum of what we call neurotypical here. That is, they are extremely good at modeling other people, and therefore predicting how other people will react to a sample of copy. I would not be surprised if literally no one who reads LW regularly could do the job adequately.
Edit to add: it's nice to see that they're attempting to do this, but again, LW readership is probably the wrong place to look for this kind of expertise.
People who do this for a living (effectively) cost a lot of money. Given the budget of SIAI putting a communications professional on the payroll at market rates represents a big investment. Transitioning a charity to a state where a large amount of income goes into improving perception (and so securing more income) is a step not undertaken lightly.
It's at least plausible that a lot of the people who can be good for SIAI would be put off more by professional marketing than by science fiction-flavored weirdness.
That's a good point. I'm guessing though that there's a lot of low hanging fruit, e.g. a front page redesign, that would represent a more modest (and one-time) expense than hiring a full-time flack. In addition to costing less this would go a long way to mitigate concerns of corruption. Let's use the Pareto Principle to our advantage!