That’s putting it mildly.
The problems are well known. The mystery is why the community doesn’t implement obvious solutions. Hiring PR people is an obvious solution. There’s a posting somewhere in which Anna Salamon argues that there is some sort of moral hazard involved in professional PR, but never explains why, and everyone agrees with her anyway.
If the community really and literally is about saving the world, then having a constant stream of people who are put off, or even becoming enemies is incrementally making the world more likely to be destroyed. So surely it’s an important problem to solve? Yet the community doesn’t even like discussing it. It’s as if maintaining some sort of purity, or some sort of impression that you don’t make mistakes is more important than saving the world.
The does everything wrong by the usual standards of rational epistemology, but will be warmly received anyway.
Wherever two or three Rationalists are gathered together, they will moan about the education system. But not in a very rational way. It’s a topic that rationalists are predictably irrational about. They don’t build up a step by step fact based critique, they make sweeping ,emotive claims about how generally terrible it is.
The hard problem of education is how to educate everybody. (Or what to do with them otherwise) That’s the problem governments face. It’s easy for smart people to come up with educational methods that work for smart people. Smart people can educate themselves with a library and a computer. That’s good enough for the top 20% , but what about the bottom 20%, who aren’t naturally academic, and don’t have parents capable of home schooling? I have heard no suggestion from the rationalsphere.