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gwern comments on Doing Important Research on Amazon's Mechanical Turk? - Less Wrong
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Just a small quibble: in order to avoid misleading connotations and biasing intuitions, you should use more plausible numbers which are an order of magnitude (or more) smaller. You can barely get people to click on a banner ad 1% of the time, never mind rearrange their entire lives & forever give up a major source of pleasure & nutrition.
Funny you should say that because others have given me a minor quibble that the conversion number I provide is actually too small and prefer 2% or 3%.
The current (admittedly terrible) studies suggest 2%. Is this wildly optimistic? Very probably, which is why are being done. But it does give slightly more credence to my pick than a wildly lower pick.
But this is irrelevant to the greater point of this essay. Instead, it would be worth trying MTurk enough to get actual numbers on it's impact.
I'd disagree; the 2% only come from an absurd overreading:
So in the context of winning a contest with clear demand expectations and going only on cheap talk, without any measure of persistency over time, you only get 2% by counting anyone who claimed to be affected however 'slightly'? I think the more honest appraisal of that little experiment would be '0%'.
I think debating the merits of this particular percentage is not relevant enough to my topic to discuss further here. If you think that I am in error (or, worse, actively trying to manipulate the data to make my case look good), we could continue this conversation via PM or on a more relevant thread.
How is this a good thing? If it were that easy to indoctrinate large numbers of people it would be scary.
Well, you could at least indoctrinate people to better behavior from a utilitarian standpoint.
Whether we can indoctrinate large numbers of people is a fact about the world, and we should believe what is correct. After we discover accept the truth, we then can figure out how to work with it.
You're the one who used the word "optimistic".
For example, Reading a book can change your mind, but only some changes last for a year: food attitude changes in readers of The Omnivore's Dilemma, Hormer et al 2013, suggests pretty minimal attitude change from reading an entire (pretty good) book, which implies even less effect on actions.