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:
What if the question were phrased "I'm doing some market research. What thoughts come to mind when you hear the word 'rationality'?". Honest and to the point. To me the phrase "I'm just curious" leads immediately to suspicion (i.e. You're not 'just curious', you have a reason for asking. What is that reason? ... (drifting thoughts of your reasons for asking)). "If someone were to describe themselves as a Rationalist...", my first thought, "You mean yourself, don't you?". "what stereotypes would come to your mind about that person?" immediately puts me in a negative mindset since I already associate the word 'stereotype' with negative characteristics of a certain group. I know 'stereotype' doesn't always mean 'negative stereotype' but, to me, it signals an inaccurate map warning, and I think most people first associate that word with something like "Asians can't drive" instead of "Asians are really good at math".