Several weeks ago, the NYC Rationality Meetup Group began discussing outreach, both for rationality in general and the group in particular. A lot of interesting problems were brought up. Should we be targeting the average person, or sticking to the cluster of personality-types that Less Wrong already attracts? How quickly should we introduce people to our community? What are the most effective ways to spread the idea of rationality, and what are the most effective ways of actually encouraging people to undertake rational actions?
Those are all complex questions with complex answers, which are beyond the scope of this post. I ended up focusing on the question: "Is ' Rationality' the word we want to use when we're pitching ourselves?" I do not think it's worthwhile to try and change the central meme of the Less Wrong community, but it's not obvious that the new, realspace communities forming need to use the same central meme.
This begat a simpler question: "What does the average person think of when they hear the word ' Rationality?' What positive or negative connotations does it have?" Do they think of straw vulcans and robots? Do they think of effective programmers or businessmen? Armed with this knowledge, we can craft a rationalist pitch that is likely to be effective at the average person, either by challenging their conception of rationality or by bypassing keywords that might set off memetic immune systems.
This question has an empirical answer. A few weeks ago I made some effort to answer it. I did not get a huge array of data, but I got enough that I thought I should share it, and I'd encourage others to go out and find their own data points. Ideally someone would make a website that somehow sorts that data (and in the process hopefully get a more structured experimental setup, since mine was rather freeform.)
I work in a tall office building in NYC. Each day, I ride an elevator up to the 30th floor. At least some of those times, I find myself alone with people for 30 seconds. I started asking those people what they thought about " Rationality." My first encounter went like this:
It's definitely a good idea to do this.
But the way you've set about doing it isn't going to produce any worthwhile data.
I'm no expert on branding and market research, but I'm pretty sure that the best practice in the field isn't having conversations with 9 non-random strangers in a lift (asking different leading questions each time) then bunging it in Google Docs and getting other people to add more haphazard data in the hope that someone will make a website that sorts it all out.
First you need to define the question you're asking. Exactly which sub-population are you interested in? You start off asking about "the average person"'s attitude to rationality, suggesting that maybe you want to gauge attitudes across the whole (US?) population. But then you decide that the 60+ man is "outside our demographic bracket", although your 70+ grandmother apparently isn't.
Either way, the set of [people who work in your office building plus your grandmother] might not constitute a representative sample of the population of the USA, let alone everyone in the world. Getting people who frequent Less Wrong to ask people they cross paths with isn't going to be a representative sample of all people - you can see that, right?
The most efficient way to answer your question is likely to be piggybacking on existing polling organisations. Now, it's probably true that corporate marketing/branding "researchers" have a bias towards confirming what the bosses want to hear - I was just reading this Robin Hanson article about how people don't evaluate the quality of predictions after the fact: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/13/robin-hanson/who-cares-about-forecast-accuracy/ - but still, I think it would be better to at least consider that there are organisations whose job it is to find the general public reaction to a "brand".
You could find someone who works for such an organisation and suborn them to add an extra question to a proper survey. That way you could gather the reactions of 1000 or 10,000 demographically-representative people in a single action. Let's not waste our time dicking around uploading meaningless data to Google Docs.
A good target in the UK would be YouGov.
I also think it's pointless to worry about a concise definition of rationality until it's been determined that "rationality" is in fact a good brand for public consumption. What if it turns out that the term "rationality" makes 60% of people instantly hostile? Do the research first, then start proselytising.
I find it interesting that the response to this article hasn't overwhelmingly been about criticising Raemon's methodology. Is that because LessWrong members fallaciously assume that attempting to measure the public's subjective, irrational responses to a word doesn't need to be carried out in an objective, rational manner? Or is it, as I increasingly suspect as I edit and re-edit this comment, that I'm a total dick?
Upvoted for having a very good point, downvoted for being a dick, then upvoted again for having attempted to edit out dickishness :D