I'll research the BLTC Research sites (hedweb.com and its sister sites) to identify the jargon terms most likely to trip up a lay reader.

Let me pull the core BLTC/Hedonistic Imperative texts to mine their characteristic jargon.

Good — the mission statement and site index give me a strong picture of the characteristic vocabulary. Let me check two more key pages to confirm how the trickier terms are actually used.

Here are the 20 terms most likely to trip up a general reader on hedweb.com and the BLTC family of sites ( BLTC Research,  The Hedonistic Imperative,  Wirehead Hedonism,  Superhappiness). I've prioritised words that are either deceptively familiar (they sound like everyday English but mean something specific here) or outright technical coinages.

Deceptively familiar terms (highest confusion risk)

1. Abolitionism / The Abolitionist Project — Not the anti-slavery movement. Pearce's project to abolish suffering ("the biological substrates of suffering") in humans *and all sentient life, via biotechnology. Readers who don't catch this assume a history topic.
2. Post-Darwinian — Sounds like a rejection of evolution. It actually means an era in which natural selection no longer controls the genome because humans rewrite it deliberately.
3. Superhappiness — A deliberate coinage for mood-enrichment far beyond the normal human range, not just "being very happy." Easily read as hype or metaphor.
4. Superhealth — Not "great fitness." A BLTC term for lifelong, genetically pre-programmed well-being free of mental and physical pain.
5. Soma — Huxley's fictional pleasure-drug from Brave New World, used constantly as a foil. Readers unfamiliar with the novel miss the point of whole passages.
6. Paradise-engineering — BLTC's name for a proposed "rigorous academic discipline" for engineering well-being. Reads as religious or utopian rhetoric rather than a term of art.
7. Utopian pharmacology — Pearce's phrase for the intentional design of better mood-drugs; "utopian" here is a technical ambition, not a synonym for unrealistic.
8. Wireheading / wirehead — From rat experiments where animals self-stimulated reward electrodes, ignoring food. BLTC uses it for crude euphoria-maximisation that abandons goals — not, as many assume, a recommendation.

Coinages and signature concepts

9. Gradients of well-being (gradients of bliss) — Pearce's signature answer to the wirehead problem: instead of uniform euphoria, a civilisation whose states range from "very happy" to "ecstatic." Not a maths term.
10. High-tech Jainism — The proposal to apply the Jain principle of non-harm to the whole biosphere using CRISPR gene drives and the like. Both halves of the phrase can lose a lay reader.
11. Pan-species welfare state — Extending the idea of a welfare state to all sentient creatures, including wild animals.
12. Non-materialist physicalism — Pearce's position in philosophy of mind: experience is physical, but not identical to anything today's physics describes. Sounds self-contradictory without explanation.
13. Carbon chauvinism — The bias that intelligence or well-being must run on carbon-based biology (a cousin of "speciesism").
14. Compassionate biology — The programme of actively managing ecosystems to reduce wild-animal suffering, rather than leaving Nature alone — the opposite of what many readers expect "conservation" to mean.

Technical and philosophical jargon

15. Hedonic set-point / hedonic treadmill — The psychology finding that mood largely returns to baseline after ups and downs; central to BLTC's claim that happiness must be raised genetically, not by circumstance.
16. Hedonic tone — The technical term for the pleasantness/unpleasantness dimension of experience (not "tone of voice" or musical timbre).
17. Negative utilitarianism — The ethical view that reducing suffering matters more than increasing happiness. Not "negative thinking," and easily confused with classical utilitarianism.
18. Gene drives — CRISPR-based constructs that force a trait to spread through a wild population, the proposed tool for reprogramming predators. Genuinely obscure to lay readers.
19. Germline engineering — Editing genes in a way that's inherited by descendants (as opposed to "somatic" therapy affecting only the patient). The whole reproductive-revolution argument rests on this distinction.
20. Incentive salience ("wanting" vs "liking") — The neuroscience distinction between the drive to pursue something and the pleasure of having it; BLTC's answer to why happiness and motivation must be rewired together, not separately.

Worth considering as reserves: pain asymbolia (pain without distress), immunocontraception (contraceptive vaccines, proposed for wildlife fertility control), obligate carnivore (predators that can't survive without meat), and wetware/legacy-wetware (the brain as old biological "hardware") — all also appear on the sites and would likely need glossing for the same audience.

If you'd like, I can draft full glossary entries (etymology, usage examples from the sites, cross-references) as a reusable document.