So I guess the "save the world" part should get dropped then. Entirely.
Upon further reflection, it seems like a lot of people are already trying to do that (biomedical research, environmental causes, various anti-poverty charities, etc).
So now the question is "How do you teach rationality to people in a way that helps them do what they're doing in a no-strings attached way such that they actually use the information to improve". People still do whatever they were choosing to do, just more effectively.
Would that work better?
The kind of rationality we're investigating is inextricably bound to improvement; if it's being transmitted effectively, we don't need to attach extra semantic content to it to get people to adopt better practices, look at the future through critical rather than ideological eyes, et cetera. I'd actually strongly advise against attaching that sort of content; doing that would implicitly carry the message that rationality is tribal, like Lysenkoism or intelligent design.
This is true, at least, for improving in terms of habits of thought; improvement in habits of action has to do with instrumental rationality, and hasn't received much attention here. That does seem to be changing, though.
I'm putting this through discussion because I’ve never written a main section post before… If you have helpful criticism please comment with it, and if it does well I’ll post it in the main section when I get back from school tomorrow.
Things between the bars are intended to be in the final post, the rest are comments
There’s lots of things which can end the world. There’s even more things which can help improve or save the world. Having more people working more effectively on these things will make the world progress and improve faster, or better fight existential risks, respectively.
And yet for all of my intention to help do those things, I haven’t gotten a single other person to do it as well. Convincing someone else to work towards something is like devoting another lifetime to it, or doubling your efforts. And you only need to convince them once.
So there’s two things I want to learn how to do:
I think that the rationalist community as a whole isn’t particularly good at doing these. Small efforts are made by individuals, but I think that most of the people who do try to do these run into the same problems.
I propose that we do more to centralize and document the solutions to these problems in order for our individual efforts to be more effective. This thread is for people who encounter problems and solutions for convincing other people.