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Gleb_Tsipursky comments on Marketing Rationality - Less Wrong
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Not sure if it makes any difference, but instead of "stupid people" I think about people reading articles about 'life hacking' as "people who will probably have little benefit from the advice, because they will most likely immediately read hundred more articles and never apply the advice"; and also that the format of the advice completely ignores the inferential distances, so pretty much the only useful thing such article could give you is a link to a place that provides the real value. And if you are really really lucky, you will notice the link, follow the link, stay there, and get some of the value.
If I'd believe the readers were literally stupid, then of course I wouldn't see much value in advertising LW to them. LW is not useful for stupid people, but can be useful to people... uhm... like I used to be before I found LW.
Which means, I used to spend a lot of time browsing random internet pages, a few times I found a link to some LW article that I read and moved on, and only after some time I realized: "Oh, I have already found a few interesting articles on the same website. Maybe instead of randomly browsing the web, reading this one website systematically could be better!" And that was my introduction to the rationalist community; these days I regularly attend LW meetups.
Could Gleb's articles provide the same gateway for someone else (albeit only for a tiny fraction of the readership)? I don't see a reason why not.
Yes, the clickbait site will make money. Okay. If instead someone would make paper flyers for LW, then the printing company would make money.
Indeed, the people who read one of our articles, for example the Lifehack article, are not inherently stupid. They have that urge for self-improvement that all of us here on Less Wrong have. They just way less education and access to information, and also of course different tastes, preferences, and skills. Moreover, the inferential gap is huge, as you correctly note.
The question is what will people do: will they actually follow the links to get more deep engagement? Let's take the Lifehack article as an example to describe our broader model, which assumes that once people check out our content on other websites and venues, some will then visit the Intentional Insights website to engage with its content. So after the Lifehack article on 6 Science-Based Hacks for Growing Mentally Stronger appeared, it was shared over 2K times on social media, so it probably had views in the tens of thousands if not hundreds.
Then, over 1K people visited the Intentional Insights website directly from the Lifehack website. In other words, they were interested enough to not only skim the article, but also follow the links to Intentional Insights, which was listed in my bio and elsewhere. Of those, some will want to engage with our content further. As an example, we had a large wave of new people follow us on Facebook and other social media and subscribe to our newsletter in the week after the article came out. I can't say how many did so as a result of seeing the article or other factors, but there was a large bump. So there is evidence of people wanting to get more thoroughly engaged.
The articles are meant to provide a gateway, in other words. And there is evidence of people following the breadcrumbs. Eventually, after they receive enough education, we would introduce them to ClearerThinking, CFAR, and LW. We are careful to avoid Endless September scenarios by not explicitly promoting Less Wrong heavily. For more on our strategy, see my comment below.