Actually, I believe the optimal utilitarian attitude would be to make fun of them. If you don't take them at all seriously, they will grow to doubt themselves. If you're persistently humorous enough, some of them, thinking themselves comedians, will take your side in poking fun at the rest. In time, LW will have assembled its own team of Witty Defenders responsible for keeping non-serious accusations at bay. This will ultimately lead to long pages of meaningless back and forth between underlings, allowing serious LWians to ignore these distracting subjects altogether. Also, the resulting dialogue will advertize the LW community, while understandably disgusting self-respecting thinkers of every description, thus getting them interested in evaluating the claims of LW on its own terms.
Personally, I think all social institutions are inevitably a bit cultish, (society = mob - negative connotations) and they all use similarly irrational mechanisms to shield themselves from criticism and maintain prestige. A case could be made that they have to, one reason being that most popular "criticism" is of the form "I've heard it said or implied that quality X is to be regarded as a Bad Thing, and property Y of your organization kind of resembles X under the influence of whatever it is that I'm smoking," or of equally abysmal quality. Heck, the United States government, the most powerful public institution in the world, is way more cultish than average. Frankly, more so than LW has ever been accused of being, to my knowledge. Less Wrong: Less cultish than America!
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.