I've just launched WorldviewNaturalism.com, which is intended as a simple "landing page" to be used for introducing your friends to scientific naturalism. Many of the recommended readings linked there are written by LWers. Enjoy.
(This is a very old personal project on which I've spent a few hours per month, and it is not at all associated with the Singularity Institute or the Center for Applied Rationality.)
The video had high production values, but it did make me cringe a bit.
First of all, it felt very choir-preachy - like a five-minute applause light instead of a persuasive summary of naturalism. Additionally, it felt as though too much time was spent on attacking religious strawmen. This feels unnecessary - like it would suffice to go straight to an exposition of what naturalism is rather than an cursory examination of several non-naturalism points in belief-space. And if popular non-naturalist points in belief-space are to be examined, it would do well to refute their best arguments instead of an easily-dismissable strawman.
Secondly - I think there are unintentionally sexist overtones here. The (somewhat condescending) example given of activities which are less useful than developing a worldview was shopping for clothes, an activity people tend to associate with women and femininity. This was not helped by the stock footage of this section consisting almost entirely of women. Contrast this with the collage of naturalists at 4:59 - almost all men. And though the use of the male-pronoun-default is a longstanding tradition, referring to the generic platonic naturalist as "he" rubs me the wrong way. Overall, this seems likely to dissuade half of the target audience, and subtly encourage some highly undesirable patterns in the remainder.
The graphics, music, animation, editing, and most of the celebration of naturalism was very well done. This has the makings of greatness, but I would urge some edits to increase its efficacy.
Most wouldn't notice such subtle sexism, but it's still worth fending off the appearance of it.
I wouldn't change this video (except that including a female face among the "well known naturalists" is a good idea if possible); I'd create an additional one aimed at contrasting the fair treatment and respect women can expect from naturalist thinkers as opposed to naive-traditional or ideological-religious ones.
As for your first suggestion, although I don't know what it feels like to be introduced to "naturalism", I think it's a mistake to lead with maximum rigor. The level of difficulty seemed appropriate to me.
As I saw it, the purpose of this video was to suggest that naturalists might be nice, happy, cool people, as opposed to, say, baby eaters - to motivate people to actually entertain the site's writings.
On the People page, the picture next to Richard Carrier's name is the same as the picture next to Richard Boyd's.
and that's because science.
That made me smile, [edit] especially because I had just recently read the Language Log article Because NOUN.
The rest of the video made me kind of uncomfortable, though, because it felt like (and I guess sort of was) an advertisement, and you keep saying "worldview naturalism" where anyone else would have said "the naturalistic worldview" or just "naturalism".
(And this is just a personal thing, but I would have put Hofstadter's GEB and Drescher's Good & Real in the self and free will readings section.)
Overall, cool website.
The rest of the video made me kind of uncomfortable, though, because ... you keep saying "worldview naturalism" where anyone else would have said "the naturalistic worldview" or just "naturalism".
Seconded, that felt unnatural and kinda irked me.
Did you have to use the dirty napkin template? I was fighting the urge to wipe my monitor screen again and again the whole time.
I notice I am confused. I do not agree with the statement "all websites should look clean and sparse" but I have also never once thought "this website is too clean-looking".
These seems at odds with each other.
Perhaps I have not explored the right part of the website layout continuum.
Many of the links to people's Wikipedia pages simply go to the the main page of Wikipedia.
But yes, it is a great site.
Might not be worth the trouble of fixing, but there's a typo in the first question ('jouney') of the Richard Carrier interview. Good work, btw; looks like a good resource for getting into naturalism. Are you going to doing any networking for the site (e.g., interviews on podcasts like The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe)? Such a project could serve as a nice bridge between SI and the skeptic community and bring in potential donors.
Nice video. Hair got even spikier in the second half, as did my liking.
For my taste, lukeprog should speak more rapidly. Perhaps this is incompatible with the awesome smile / body language or background footage, though.
I clicked on some links and many didn't work (sorry, forgot which). Probably fixed by now.
Bleh. Using she clearly isn't neutral. Unless we are going for "boo boys, yay girls" vibe, which is dull. Also is ze really that much of a straw man considering I've seen luke and others use it here?
"They" seems appropriate, but LWers are nerds, they have far too little common sense for that. You know that two times out of three if they can be geeks about being "gender neutral" or some progressive silliness they will be.
The simple truth is that even if we go out of our way to endorse woman friendly norms, they simply won't be making up half the readership. When doing utility calculus, you need to stop thinking in "half of the intended readership" and just thinking about half the actual readership the thing can get. Lets not kid ourselves that the likely audience split will be 50-50, check out the numbers in the relevant academic philosophy departments or even on LessWrong
I'm suggesting the radical notion that a female reader is as good as a male reader and no more. We ought to be maximizing the readership period, not worrying about its demographics except in a instrumental sense. Now obviously you don't want to signal that you aren't inclusive, that is the kind of thing an inbreed toothless bigoted redneck would do, so once someone brings it up you have to do something about it, but 9 times out of 10 that person bringing it up isn't doing the "audience maximisation" goal any good at all, especially once one factors in the opportunity costs of developer/administrator/writer time!
LessWrong readers are capable of shutting up and calculating, deciding to punch their own father in the face and not talk to him for a year in order to get 500k that can save plenty of lives, but they aren't willing to give a rough look to people who suggest the building needs 500k in modifications to make it handicapped friendly. I smell a scared cow with some pseudo-utilitarian rationalization lipstick. If they where capable of doing so they would realize that often the discomfort experienced by the minority fraction of readers does not at all outweighs the investment needed to accommodate them. Worse using such efforts conspicuously is a tribal marker away from the acceptable educated crowd norm, lowering the barrier to entry to the wrong contrarian cluster. Same goes for loudly arguing against such accommodations... I think I'm just trying to balance things out, obviously such thinking is really bad in being vulnerable to creating escalating signalling arms races that eat up more and more brain CPU cycles. But tell me who started escalating by stepping away from the Schelling point of default social norms?
Pursuing inclusivity to minor details such as the default use of gender in language has costs and much more importantly opportunity costs people here don't ever want to talk about. This wasn't someone complaining that people where putting up a "no handicapped" sign on their front door or being intentionally unwelcoming to women or anything, this was someone expecting that more effort than is the society wide norm be spent on it and assuming this is a cost we have to bare for some reason.
I think it just isn't worth it.
Come to think of it this drama isn't worth it either now that the white knight brigade have been alerted, so peace out dudes.
Edit: and dudettes!
Edit: and non-gendered people!
Edit: and non-people!
Yep, I agree and specifically acknowledged that possibility. In this case, my current guess is that it's not worthwhile for lukeprog to rework his video, but it would be worthwhile to spend a few minutes thinking of gender if he was to make it again.
I've seen people on the internet use "white knight" to refer to men who take the pro-female position i... (read more)