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Viliam_Bur 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.
The problem with rationality is that unless you are at some level, you don't feel like you need to become more rational. And I think most people are not there, even the smart ones. Seems to me that smart people often realize they miss some specific knowledge, but they don't go meta and realize that they miss knowledge-gathering and -filtering skills. (And that's the smart people. The stupid ones only realize they miss money or food or something.) How do you sell something to a person who is not interested in buying?
Perhaps we could make a selection of LW articles that can be interesting even for people not interested in rationality. Less meta, less math. The ones that feel like "this website could help me make more money and become more popular". Then people become interested, and perhaps then they become interested more meta -- about a culture that creates this kind of articles.
(I guess that even for math-inclined people the less mathy articless would be better. Because they can find math in thousand different places; why should they care specifically about LW?)
As a first approximation: The Science of Winning at Life and Living Luminously.