I don't think most people misunderstood your post; I think a bigger factor was that the content wasn't seen as particularly novel or interesting. ('My joke alludes to something important!' can only do so much to make up for a rubbish joke.) To the extent they did misunderstand, you can probably do more to prevent such misunderstandings by modifying your own behavior than by telling them to modify theirs. And to the extent you can usefully modify their behavior, using 'stupid' and 'autistic' as terms of abuse isn't an effective way to do it.

I think you are wrong. The persona you set up is a straw-man, and I think that is why most people voted it down. I doubt very many people thought you were being serious.

Phil,

I downvoted because it's an obvious troll. The entire post could have been an integral part of a larger document with an intro/discussion/conclusion and been upvoted; but in isolation, it's of very little value.

I don't think Less wrong is too stupid to communicate with, but I do think a weird social norm against saying things in interesting ways has taken over. It reminds me a bit of Wikipedia, where the enforced style is very dry and dull--without having the advantage of being simple and easy to understand.

"Communicating badly then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness."

people have been making stupid posts that get downvoted and then commenting about how that shows how dumb lesswrong is for YEARS.

Considering the most active people over those years are some of the same people, is it more likely that lesswrong is now really stupid or that you made a really stupid post?

Even taking completely at face value your intent to portray a fictional persona, you didn't actually say what anyone should or can do about such a persona or anything of any use. This was no better than copy-pasting apologetics as an exercise in trying to get us to understand the mind of christians.

Downvoted the post for being such a ridiculous straw man.... then downvoted this comment for not getting why other people are downvoting. When I saw you had a post at -12, knowing you were a respected member of the community, I initially assumed the community had gone crazy; after reading the post I concluded otherwise.