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Swimmer963 comments on Making Rationality General-Interest - Less Wrong
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Is it just me, or does your comment sound like a retreat from "we need to spread rationality because it's a good idea" to "we need to spread rationality to figure out if it's a good idea"?
If yes, then note that LW has existed for years and has thousands of users. Yvain was among the first contributors to LW and his early posts were already excellent. Many other good contributors, like Wei Dai (invented UDT, independently invented cryptocurrency) or Paul Christiano (IMO participant), were also good before they joined... As Yvain's post said, it seems hard to find people who benefited a lot from LW-rationality.
I'm not sure we need more information about the usefulness of LW-rationality before we can make a conclusion. We already have a lot of evidence pointing one way, look at all the LWers who didn't benefit. Besides, what makes you think that a study with more participants and longer duration would give different results? If anything, it's probably going to be closer to the mean, because LW folks are self-selected, not randomly selected from the population.
I would say that rationality is worth trying to spread because it may be a good idea, and because it's something I know about and can think and plan about. Do you know of another community that has a similar level of development to LW (i.e. fairly cohesive but still quite obscure) that I should also investigate? (AFAIK, CFAR is looking for such organizations for new ideas anyway.)
Also, I'm going to update from your comment in the direction of rationality outreach turning out not being the best use of my time.
For a while I satisfied my idea-spreading urges by teaching math to talented kids on a volunteer basis. If you're very good at something (e.g. swimming), you could try teaching that, it's a lot of fun.
Or you could spend some effort on figuring out how to measure rationality and check if someone is making progress. That's much harder though, once you get past the obvious wrong answers like "give them a multiple choice test about rationality". Eliezer and Anna have written a lot about this problem.
I do teach swimming; I did for many years as a job, and now I do it for fun (and for free) to the kids of my friends (and several of the CFAR staff when I was in San Francisco). It's something I'm very good at (I may be more at teaching swimming to others than swimming myself), and it fulfills an urge, but not the idea-spreading one.
If CFAR is looking for help trying to make a rationality test, I would be happy to help, too...