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sixes_and_sevens comments on Open thread, Sept. 29 - Oct.5, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Many of you are probably familiar with the Alpha Course, which uses the evangelistic technique of identifying common philosophical questions people might have about their life ("what's the point of it all?", "how can I be truly happy?", etc.) and answering it with something about finding the everlasting love of Jesus Christ.
It occurs to me that many aspiring rationalists probably have an analogous set of questions turning around in their heads before they find a like-minded group. For example: "I notice that a lot of people make silly mistakes when thinking about things; how can I stop myself from making these same mistakes?"
Hypothetically, if we (as in the broader rationalist community) were to construct an effective campaign to capture people in this state, what would it look like?
Also, where would we send them? I think that if we're going to do any kind of outreach we should set up a good subsidiary forum, to try and minimize Eternal September effects.
(As a model, the HPMoR subreddit seems to be something like this (albeit with a narrower focus) for a lot of people. The Less Wrong Lounge or something, maybe?)
I've long been of the opinion that Less Wrong itself is weird enough to be offputting to a lot of people, but it's not the only obvious landing page any more. You could point people to Less Wrong or CFAR or Effective Altruism, or to the discourse-o-sphere for which SSC is an exemplar, or whatever other places I've forgotten. Hell, a reading list with a dozen popular books would be enough for the drive-by inquisitive lay-person.
What's SSC? I doubt it's one of these.
Others have already explained what it stands for and provided a link; it may be worth adding that the author of that blog is also known on LW as Yvain, who once upon a time was one of the best and most prolific LW contributors; his particularly highly rated posts include one on the notion of "disease", one about metacontrarianism, one clarifying what it means when a model says something is almost certainly true, one on efficient charity, one introducing prospect theory, one about buying houses, one about Schelling fences, one about the worst argument in the world. (He's still one of the best but participates rather little.) He's also the guy who does the annual Less Wrong survey.
Yeah. I actually have read a fair bit of Yvain's blog. I just had never thought of abbreviating its name before, so I blanked when I saw "SSC."
That said, I am sure a lot of other readers of this thread may not have known about Yvain's contributions.
Especially new readers who might find LW to abstract ;) It's good to avoid using too much abbreviations.
http://slatestarcodex.com/
Thanks.
SlateStarCodex.
I think it's usually written with spaces, though.
All excellent points. Now that I think about it, in practice I'm pretty sure I direct people more towards SSC.
At the moment I don't think we have good answers for the core questions. Good reasoning is hard. Pretending that it's possible by following a few quick fixes might make it easier to reach more people but it brings in people who don't belong.
I take it the point is to bring in people who don't belong yet but who might turn out to belong when they've thought about it some more.
(Not necessarily to Less Wrong as such -- which might do best to remain a forum for sometimes-intimidatingly-technical discussion that preferentially attracts the very clever -- but to "the broader rationalist community".)
I'm not sure to what degree we should deliberately constitute a "rationalist community" if we want to raise the sanity waterline among the population at large rather than make friends with other nerds who like all the same stuff as us.
Well, firstly, I'd start handing out copies of Good and Real, because the kinds of people who join LW largely have the same big-picture questions in our heads as everyone else.