I initially had an extremely negative emotional response to this post. Then I realized you actually point out exactly why I had such a response with point number 2.
Less Wrong has a language problem.
To someone first coming to read the discussion forum with only a vague idea of what Less Wrong represents (maybe even slightly biased towards thinking of the community as an elitist cultish ivory tower exercise in intellectual masturbation), this post, to be short, doesn't help.
What makes this sort of funny is that your actual message is just, "We want more high quality content producers." which is completely harmless and the implicit goal of any fledgling online community aiming to grow. But you wrap this message in the exclusionary, "We want more smart people."
I'd argue that you achieve both goals by just attracting more people to the community. Consider something like the sprawling Somethingawful forums. The only barrier to entry is $10.00, and there's a thriving science and academics subforum.
Definitely remove the jargon. This would help on the cult side of things. And for pete's sake, don't go fishing for "Intellectual Elites", just try and grow the community--elites will come in due time.
I'm a 2001-regged user on Something Awful and I recently quit entirely (after having been drifting away for a while) due to frustration with how irrational that place is. I don't want LW to become like that.
Is Less Wrong, despite its flaws, the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web? It seems to me that, to find reliably higher-quality discussion, I must turn to more narrowly focused sites, e.g. MathOverflow and the GiveWell blog.
Many people smarter than myself have reported the same impression. But if you know of any comparably high-quality relatively-general-interest forums, please link me to them!
In the meantime: suppose it's true that Less Wrong is the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web. In that case, we're sitting on a big opportunity to grow Less Wrong into the "standard" general-interest discussion hub for people with high intelligence and high metacognition (shorthand: "intellectual elites").
Earlier, Jonah Sinick lamented the scarcity of elites on the web. How can we get more intellectual elites to engage on the web, and in particular at Less Wrong?
Some projects to improve the situation are extremely costly:
Code changes, however, could be significantly less costly. New features or site structure elements could increase engagement by intellectual elites. (To avoid priming and contamination, I'll hold back from naming specific examples here.)
To help us figure out which code changes are most likely to increase engagement on Less Wrong by intellectual elites, specific MIRI volunteers will be interviewing intellectual elites who (1) are familiar enough with Less Wrong to be able to simulate which code changes might cause them to engage more, but who (2) mostly just lurk, currently.
In the meantime, I figured I'd throw these ideas to the community for feedback and suggestions.