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saturn comments on Holy Books (Or Rationalist Sequences) Don’t Implement Themselves - Less Wrong
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The OP's previous post described a model of rationalist communities where you have "distillers" and "organizers" telling people to do stuff, some of which will be proselytizing. But I don't like being told what to do or telling others what to do, especially if it's proselytizing. So I would have no place in a such a community.
Also it seems to me that when a product needs to be resold by its consumers, like religion or Amway, that means the product probably isn't any good. Imagine Steve Jobs using MLM to sell the iPhone! If Eliezer's ideas about solving confusing problems actually helped, some of the many researchers who read LW would've found them useful and told us about it. And if the sequences were as useful in everyday life as they are well-written, a lot of people would have demonstrated that convincingly by now. In either case we would have an iPhone situation and would beat customers off with a stick, not struggle to attract them.
ETA: this comment is a joint reply to Vaniver, XFrequentist, fiddlemath and Davorak, because their questions were quite similar :-)
Okay, but also imagine Steve Jobs trying to sell the original iPod or iMac (before Apple's huge rebound in popularity) with no TV ads, billboards, posters, product placements, press releases, slogans, over-hyped conferences, or presence in retail stores; just a website with a bunch of extremely long articles explaining what's great about Apple products.
In our case the task is simpler because the articles themselves are the product. Perhaps another reason for our disagreement is that I think new ideas should spread by their own merit, not through people explicitly trying to convert other people. The LW worldview is based on the ideas of many people (Daniel Kahneman, Hugh Everett, E.T. Jaynes, Judea Pearl, Robin Hanson...), neither of whom ever tried to build communities of laymen for the express purpose of spreading their ideas in MLM style. It makes me cringe to even imagine this.
Actually, I agree with you. I only meant to point out that without some kind of deliberate promotion even really good ideas can be overlooked, but there are ways to do that without acting like Mormon missionaries.