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:
Reaction to Methods seems highly polarized: almost every review of it I've seen either falls over itself to gush or sees it as pretentious and self-indulgent. Age and gender seem to matter less, by that stage, than contrarian tendencies and tolerance for what tvtropes calls an author tract, but the demographics of fanfiction readers are weighted heavily towards people in their teens and twenties already, so samples of older readers are small. The particular characteristics of Methods do probably push it towards the older end of the scale.
Since that's more or less the demographic that LW attracts already, I'd say that Methods, and the rational fic meme more generally, are effective as advertising but ineffective in broadening the site's appeal.
Your first paragraph rings true to me: the complaints I've heard are basically those you mentioned.
My friends are mostly fairly contrarian late-twenties male engineering, computing science and math people. I think that apart from not enjoying Methods, they're pretty much the usual LW demographic. That's part of the reason I was surprised when they didn't like Methods. There are lots of possible reasons for this (to me) surprising result. Maybe they thought I didn't like it, and wanted to mirror that back. Maybe they're a group already biased agains... (read more)