I admit that I honestly do consider many people insane; and I always did. Even the smarter ones seem paralyzed by some harmful memes. I mean, people argue about words that have no connection with reality, while in other parts of the world children are dying from hunger. Hoaxes of every kind circulate by e-mail, and it's hard to find someone I know personally who didn't send me them repeatedly (after being repeatedly explained that it was a hoax, and given a pointer to some sites collecting hoaxes). Smart people start speaking in slogans, when difficult problems need to be solved, and seem unable to understand where is the problem with this kind of communication. People doing bullshit that obviously doesn't and can't work, and insisting that you have to do it harder and spend more money, instead of just trying something else for a while and observing what happens. So much stupidity, so much waste. -- And the few people who know better, or at least are able to know better, are often afraid to admit it even to themselves, because the idea that we live in insane society is scary. So even they don't resist the madness; at best they don't join it, but they pretend they don't see it. This is how I saw the world decades before I found LW.

And yes, it is a bad PR. It is impolite towards the insane people, who may feel offended, and then try to punish us. But even worse, it is a bad strategy towards the sane people, who are not yet emotionally ready to admit that the rest of the world is not sane. Because it goes against our tribal instincts. We must agree with the tribe, whether it is right or wrong; especially when it is wrong. If you are able to resist this pressure, it's probably not caused by higher rationality, but by lower social skills.

So how exactly should we communicate the inconvenient truths. Because we are trying to communicate truthfully, aren't we? Should we post the information openly, and have a bad PR? Should we have a secret forum for forbidden thoughts, and appear cultish, and risk that someone exposes the information? Should we communicate certain thoughts only in person, never online? Seems to me that "bad PR" is the least wrong option.

Is there a way to disagree with the majority, be open to new members, and not seem dangerous? Perhaps we could downplay our ambitions; to stop talking about improving the world, and pretend that we are just some kind of Mensa, a few geeks solving their harmless Bayesian equations, unconnected with the real world. Or we could make a semi-secret discussion forum; it would be open to anyone after overcoming a trivial inconvenience, and it would not be indexed by google. Then the best articles (judged by quality and PR impact) would be published on a public forum. Perhaps the articles should not appear all in the same place: everyone (including Eliezer) would have their own blog with their own articles, and LW would just contain links to them (like Digg). This would be an inconvenience for publishing; but we could provide some technical help for people who have problem starting their own website. Perhaps we should split LW to multiple websites, concerned with different topics: artificial intelligence, effective philantrophy, rationality, community forum, etc. -- All these ideas are about being less open, less direct. Which is dishonest per se, but perhaps this is what good PR means: lying in socially accepted ways; pretending what other people want you to pretend.

This could be a separate topic probably. And first we would have to solve what we want to archieve, and only then discuss how.