I actually mostly agree with you. I hesitated a long time before posting this because I didn't think I had enough/the-right-kind of work done to justify sharing. But ultimately, the reason I posted it is the same reason I still think it's a good idea: Action is better than inaction, and a big problem I think people in our demographic face is overthinking and underdoing. Michaelos' recent post in another thread strikes me as very true. (It may not, in fact, be true, but it definitely matches up with other things I know). If I'm taking actions to solve a problem, I can learn from my mistakes, get feedback and try new approaches. (Thank you for your feedback, by the way.)

There are already half-baked efforts to "expand the rationality movement" underway. A half-baked attempt to figure out if that's even the right goal is not ideal, but I think it's better than nothing.

I didn't spend otherwise important, productive time doing this. I was converting useless time in an elevator into:

1) Some new information about what people think about rationality 2) Some new information about how to ask people questions and get productive answers 3) Practice at talking to random people in general 4) Practice talking about rationality without evangelizing (yes, I realize I didn't do a great job at it, but it's something that I can only improve at with practice)

(I didn't see the definition as important so I could start deliberately evangelizing, but so that if the conversation went in a particular direction we'd have something ready to say)

I DID spend "potential productive" time writing up this report and setting up the google doc, but that was time that taught me how to write up a Less Wrong post and your feedback has given me things to think about to improve for next time, so thank you for that.

We talked about hiring real researchers at our meetups. We didn't end up doing it, mostly because from everything we knew, the official channels to do so were expensive and we had no idea what nonofficial channels we might successfully work with. If you do have recommendations on how to actually go about this, that'd be great.

But regardless, I think this is was a useful exercise for me and I think it would be a useful exercise for many people here. The current data set is near useless, but the experience acquiring it was not, and I think as I/we got better at acquiring data it could become less useless. Even if we got a more scientifically useful polling company to answer the specific question "What do people think about the word rationality?" I think it would still be useful for us to practice talking to people about it.

Writing everything down on a google doc might not actually be useful for the purpose of evaluating the information accurately, but it gets us into the practice of recording and checking over data.