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Risto_Saarelma comments on Open Thread, July 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong
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How do you upgrade people into rationalists? In particular, I want to upgrade some younger math-inclined people into rationalists (peers at university). My current strategy is:
incidentally name drop my local rationalist meetup group, (ie. "I am going to a rationalist's meetup on Sunday")
link to lesswrong articles whenever relevant (rarely)
be awesome and claim that I am awesome because I am a rationalist (which neglects a bunch of other factors for why I am so awesome)
when asked, motivate rationality by indicating a whole bunch of cognitive biases, and how we don't naturally have principles of correct reasoning, we just do what intuitively seems right
This is quite passive (other than name dropping and article linking) and mostly requires them to ask me about it first. I want something more proactive that is not straight up linking to Lesswrong, because the first thing they go to is The Simple Truth and immediately get turned off by it (The Simple Truth shouldn't be the first post in the first sequence that you are recommended to read on Lesswrong). This has happened a number of times.
This sounds like you think of them as mooks you want to show the light of enlightenment to. The sort of clever mathy people you want probably don't like to think of themselves as mooks who need to be shown the light of enlightenment. (This also might be sort of how I feel about the whole rationalism as a thing thing that's going on around here.)
That said, actually being awesome for your target audience's values of awesome is always a good idea to make them more receptive to looking into whatever you are doing. If you can use your rationalism powers to achieve stuff mathy university people appreciate, like top test scores or academic publications while you're still an undergraduate, your soapbox might be a lot bigger all of a sudden.
Then again, it might be that rationalism powers don't actually help enough in achieving this, and you'll just give yourself a mental breakdown while going for them. The math-inclined folk, who would like publication writing superpowers, probably also see this as the expected result, so why should they buy into rationality without some evidence that it seems to be making people win more?
To be honest, unless they have exceptional mathematical ability or are already rationalists, I will consider them to be mooks. Of course, I wont make that apparent, it is rather hard to make friends that way. Acknowledging that you are smart is a very negative signal, so I try to be humble, which can be awkward in situations like when only two out of 13 people pass a math course that you are in, and you got an A- and the other guy got a C-.
And by the way, rationality, not rationalism.
Incidentally, what exactly makes a person already be a rationalist in this case?