Talking to people afterwards, I could tell they thought it was a really fun program and a good addition to their event. They seemed to feel that the content was deep.

Unfortunately, many of them seemed to not grasp the central principles. When I asked them what they thought the main idea was, they said something like: "Your experience is what you make of it, like how you feel in social situations is under your control" -- apparently rounding to the nearest cached wisdom (although not a bad one).

I consider that a failure on my part to make the concepts clear and accessible enough. It was unreasonable to think that people would remember the definition of "heuristic", for example, the way I presented it in passing during the original presentation.

After I did the presentation, I spent a couple more hours tweaking and reorganizing the slides before posting to LW. Now that I've improved the slides, and now that I've had practice with presenting the material, I'm optimistic about being able to achieve more comprehension the next time I find an audience for this.

And even when the ideas are over some people's heads, I think that as long as they're entertained, it's good to expose them to an impressive display of realist philosophy at an early age.