There's very little attempt to provide any "outside" evidence that this confidence is correctly-placed (e.g. by subjecting these idiosyncratic views to serious falsification tests).
Offhand, can you think of a specific test that you think ought to be applied to a specific idiosyncratic view?
My read on your comment is: LWers don't act humble, therefore they are crackpots. I agree that LWers don't always act humble. I think it'd be a good idea for them to be more humble. I disagree that lack of humility implies crackpottery. In my mind, crackpottery is a function of your reasoning, not your mannerisms.
Your comment is a bit short on specific failures of reasoning you see--instead, you're mostly speaking in broad generalizations. It's fine to have general impressions, but I'd love to see a specific failure of reasoning you see that isn't of the form "LWers act too confident". For example, a specific proposition that LWers are too confident in, along with a detailed argument for why. Or a substantive argument for why SI's approach to AI is "extremely dangerous". (I personally know pretty much everyone who works for SI, and I think there's a solid chance that they'll change their approach if your argument is good enough. So it might not be a complete waste of time.)
you can do this with pretty much every entry in the sequences
Now it sounds like you're deliberately trying to be be inflammatory ಠ_ಠ
Offhand, can you think of a specific test that you think ought to be applied to a specific idiosyncratic view?
Well, for example, if EY is so confident that he's proven "MWI is obviously true - a proposition far simpler than the argument for supporting SIAI", he should try presenting his argument to some skeptical physicists. Instead, it appears the physicists who have happened to run across his argument found it severely flawed.
How rational is it to think that you've found a proof most physicists are wrong and then never run it by any physicis...
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.