A general and potentially serious problem with your analysis is that you're excluding populations based on what the average such member of the population is like, ignoring small minorities which may be highly significant because the number that you've ended up with is so small.

Fair enough. They still aren’t part of our target audience since Atheists/Agnostics are 125x more likely than a Theist to read LW. No response bias to the survey could be extreme enough to fully account for this.

•Less Wrong is currently read by many times more atheists/agnostics than theists. I would hesitate to read too much into what this says about the potential readership of Less Wrong. There could be a selection effect which resulted in "early adopters" of Less Wrong being more likely to be atheists than potential readers of Less Wrong.

•The relevant quantity is not the relative frequencies of potential LW readers within atheist/agnostic populations and theist populations, but the absolute frequency of potential LW readers among atheist/agnostic populations and theist populations. This difference is actually significant insofar only around 12% of the world population describes itself as nonreligious.

There could be people like that. But there’s no reason to think there should be many. I’m not counting being “unsure” about evolution against people -- only being opposed to it. I think there’s good evidence that being an outright evolution denialist makes you MUCH more likely to be the type of person who is hostile towards science and reason in general.

I agree that evolution denialists are much more likely to be hostile toward science and reason in general than others. However:

•Some people are probably evolution denialists not because they have a strong anti-evolution agenda but because they heuristically adopt the beliefs about those around them about things that they haven't thought very much about.

For example, I believe that HIV causes AIDS despite having no direct exposure to the evidence that HIV causes AIDS. Serge Lang has suggested that HIV does not cause AIDS and this could be true - certainly I have no object level evidence against his claim - but I find it quite unlikely.

Some evolution denialists who's acquaintances are all or mostly evolution denialists may be in a similar situation with respect to evolution.

•There aren't many Less Wrong readers altogether, so that even if there aren't many evolution denialists who are potential Less Wrong readers, it's conceivable that the number is greater than the number of current Less Wrong readers!

That said, most people can’t use their non-dominant traits that well. Heck, most people can’t use their dominant traits that well! Even being exceptionally smart doesn’t turn someone into a “fully developed”, multi-modal savant who can switch from feelings to thought and sensing to intuition naturally. Most people seem to emulate their non-dominate trait using their dominant one. I’m not particularly impressed by most people’s ability to emulate... especially when it comes to emulating thought with feelings.

I agree; the issues that I had with your remarks on this point are:

•The general issue that I mentioned above of small minorities of given populations potentially being highly significant to the sort of analysis that you're trying to do.

•I could imagine the phrasing (which is missing the disclaimers that you've since given) being offensive to newcomers who identify with the MBTI sensing and feeling types. For example, they seem to have rubbed Morendil the wrong way.

That's a fascinating strategy! Pitting your biases against each other! I like the idea of focusing my irrationalities on each other in a way that annihilates them.

Yes, me too :-)

Are you planning to write more about this in other contexts?

Possibly; I have to think about whether I have more useful stuff to say about this that I can articulate in words.

Although, in a way, this may be a common technique since this is how a typical person keeps their life from falling apart. They just manage their irrationalities with their other irrationalities since that’s all they have to work with.

I have a similar impression. This strategy may work well for some people when it comes to self-interested motivations and near-mode altruism. When it comes to far-mode altruism the situation is of course very bleak.

The number of people who will change their personalities in that context is pretty much noise.

Again, possibly not relative to the potential LW readership.

Choosing individual actions based on feelings probably isn’t irrational. That’s you just quickly distilling your beliefs so that you can act quickly without thinking. But using your feelings to choose your beliefs (which are the inputs to your feelings) is certainly not optimal. It’s ungrounded and circular, and it only works if you have a belief system you don’t want to change over time.

Yes, but some people do want to have a belief system that doesn't change with time (at least on some matters!) in line with Vladimir_M's comment here. They may not realize what the cost of having such a belief system is on account of inferential distance.

I agree that people who currently want to have a belief system that does not change with time are at best "high hanging fruit" from the point of view of potential Less Wrong readership.

I thought they were funny at the time that I wrote them. Maybe it's too snarky. Why would you complain about those but not “Dawkins coming into [someone’s] heart”?

I had a similar reaction to the "Dawkins coming into [someone's] heart passage; not sure why I didn't mention it; maybe because it seemed less self-serving.

I think here there's an issue of you attempting to countersignal Things You Can't Countersignal. There are issues of contingencies making Less Wrong prone to being perceived as a cult as come across in a comment by Vladimir_M and the RationalWiki article on Less Wrong.

As Alicorn says, there's no problem with saying such things in person with friends who one knows well, but I think that one should be careful when an intended countersignal is easily read as a signal.

Remember, I’m not trying to setup a litmus test to prevent people from joining LW. I don’t want anyone who falls outside of my narrowly defined “core target audience” to feel like they’re not welcome on the site or they are less desirable members. I’d love more diversity of personality, thought, and opinion within the rationalist community here. I think we could stand to have wayyy more diversity than we do. And I’m expecting people who fall outside of these filters to show up here and love it and want to stay forever! That would be great.

Great to hear :-). Again, I think there was an issue of you attempting to countersignal Things You Can't Countersignal by using overly strong language and omitting to include the disclaimer that you just wrote in your original post.

All I want from this is a way to find the majority of potential readers within as narrow of a definition as I can create. I’m only using it to decide which promotion strategies to undertake, so it’s OK if it’s imprecise and doesn't capture everyone. I just want the right order of magnitude.

Again, it's not clear to me that your strategy is capturing the right order of magnitude and focusing on the right audiences! :-)

I'd be happy to correspond with you about promotion strategies. I know a number of people who may be potential Less Wrong readers and may have useful remarks.

My tone here probably contributed a lot to people being critical of the time section. Sorry about that. Of course, I do still think the facts there are justified. It makes complete sense that having a spouse lowers the absolute amount of time someone engages in solitary leisure activities like “reading” or “using computers”. The time you spend with a spouse or doing things for a spouse usually comes out of the time you used to spend alone or with other people. Same for having a child or having a job. Of course, I understand how having those things can also boost motivation and engagement with the world so perhaps it’s a bit harsh to dismiss them with words like “unlucky”. I went too far trying to be ironic on the internet.

I agree with everything here.