I wrote a blog post that popularizes the "false consensus effect" and the debiasing strategy of "imagining the opposite" and "avoiding failing at other minds." Thoughts on where the post works and where it can be improved would be super-helpful for improving our content and my writing style. Especially useful would be feedback on how to make this post more shareable on Facebook and other social media, as we'd like people to be motivated to share these posts with their friends. For example, what would make you more likely to share it? What would make others you know more likely to share it?
For a bit of context, the blog post is part of the efforts of Intentional Insights to promote rational thinking to a broad audience and thus raise the sanity waterline, as described here. The target audience for the blog post is reason-minded youth and young adults who are either not engaged with rationality or are at the beginning stage of becoming aspiring rationalists. Our goal is to get such people interested in exploring rationality more broadly, eventually getting them turned on to more advanced rationality, such as found on Less Wrong itself, in CFAR workshops, etc. The blog post is written in a style aimed to create cognitive ease, with a combination of personal stories and an engaging narrative, along with citations of relevant research and descriptions of strategies to manage one’s mind more effectively. This is part of our broader practice of asking for feedback from fellow Less Wrongers on our content (this post for example). We are eager to hear from you and revise our drafts (and even published content offerings) based on your thoughtful comments, and we did so previously, as you see in the Edit to this post. Any and all suggestions are welcomed, and thanks for taking the time to engage with us and give your feedback – much appreciated!
This is really helpful for a meta-perspective, thank you! Let me answer the questions by turn.
First, some statistics. We've had increasing success over time with the engagement for our posts. For example, this latest post got 104 hits on the website on Monday, which was the highest one-day hit for our content (the previous highest was 76). We've had quite a bit of success with promoting our content through other channels, for example the Richard Dawkins Foundation promoted our content and it got a lot of "Likes" and reshares. Our 38-minute video of a workshop we did has over 600 views, and over 4,600 minutes watched.
Second, intentions to revise our blog style and content in general. We are right now gathering feedback for some revision in the style of our blog posts, including by talking to our target audience, both folks who read our blog posts for a while and also ones who did not. The engagement with Less Wrong is also intended to help us gain feedback in order to optimize our content. The main feedback we got so far is to make our content less hyperlinked, more specific and concrete, more visually appealing, and actually more self-helpy, to present ourselves as science-based self-improvement providers. We also got a lot of feedback that we should make short videos, and we intend to work on that as well, although that's a harder task due to us lacking appropriate equipment and software.
Regarding promoting the organization on LW: we're doing that for Less Wrongers who are not familiar with us or what we do. We don't want to fall under the curse of knowledge :-) Perhaps there can be a better way of doing so - any suggestions would be welcomed. Also, any other ideas for how to engage better with the LW community would be great.
We are also in talks with the Secular Student Alliance, the American Ethical Union, the Unitarian Universalist Humanist Association, the American Humanist Association, and other organizations to promote our rationality-oriented content through their channels. In fact, we will be appearing on the American Humanist Association's popular podcast, The Humanist Hour, tomorrow. We are also collaborating to produce resources for local affiliates of these national organizations to use as a means of promoting rationality.
So that's where we are so far. Any suggestions on how to optimize our approach would be great.