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sark comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong
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Increased attention span is certainly a good thing to have. But one must be wary of insisting on a difficult path to enlightenment.
Morality can sometimes be more about how moral you are and how the rest of the world are not, than about actually doing good. If it is about signaling how good your are, then a costly signal would be preferable, since it is hard for infidels to fake. But if you want good things to happen, then you should strive toward making good acts as easy to accomplish as possible.
Short attention span seems to be a general problem, but it is not a general problem of which irrationality is a special case. The case here is distinct from the case of religion and raising the sanity waterline.
We might want to solve the problem of having a short attention span, but let us not pretend that this will automatically solve, or even simply be the deciding factor in solving, the problem of irrationality
There's room for debate here in my book, but my argument is:
We can try to deal with this in two ways:
I think both look like promising lines of attack. It is, of course, always desirable to keep arguments as simple as possible.
I think what we should do is to try getting a foot in the door. We want to intrigue people enough such that they will seek further knowledge of rationality. People have the capacity for attention if they want something badly enough.
These people will not yet be very rational (by definition of target audience). Therefore they are likely to judge arguments on emotional grounds.
So I suggest that we need to find short arguments that promote rationality, but make an essentially emotional case for it. Ideally one would find something that overlaps - it persuades at both the emotional and rational levels.