I wonder what other negative responses we have had from friends we (tried to) introduce to LessWrong. And what can be learned from that.
I will start with one expererience: A friend which I tried to introduce was sceptical about the (hidden) agenda of LW. He pried what the purpose was and how well-founded the content was. His impression was one of superficiality. He found some physical and philosophical posts to be off the mark (being a well-read physicist). He didn't say cult, but I guess he suspected manipulation. And tried to locate the ends of that. We was interested in the topics themselves but the content just didn't match up.
Several people I've tried to introduce the site to have been turned off at the title: they interpreted "Less Wrong" to mean something akin to "We are a community of arrogant internet atheists who are Less Wrong than all of those stupid people".
I believe the potshots at religion in major articles also fed into this view for at least one person; he was interested in some of the articles, but used those potshots and selected comments to argue that the community was terrible. He now is interested in many of the ideas, but is semi-actively ...
I told an intelligent, well-educated friend about Less Wrong, so she googled, and got "Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own thinking." and gave up immediately because she'd never heard of the biases.
While hers might not be the best possible attitude, I can't see that we win anything by driving people away with obscure language.
Possible improved introduction: "Less Wrong is a community for people who would like to think more clearly in order to improve their own and other people's lives, and to make major disasters less likely."