I'm convinced that the research on decision-making we have available, as summarized here and in other places, is better than logic, anecdotes, and personal experimentation.
As a member of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, I'm glad that more and more research is being produced. If you'll pardon a little plug, I'm especially proud that the society makes its journal freely available, and that all people who are capable of reading such high-level content - which would include pretty much all active Less Wrongers - can access it without a paywall. I think these articles, and the book I linked to above, illustrate the availability of high-quality research. What Intentional Insights tries to do is take such content and spread it to a broad audience.
Now, is the research perfect? Nope. We're just at the start of exploring how our brains work, and there's plenty of reasons to be pessimistic. However, what I resonate with is trying to take what we do know, and try to popularize and improve it, so that we can use what we can to become the best we can be, within the limits of what we know.
We at Intentional Insights, the nonprofit devoted to promoting rationality and effective altruism to a broad audience, are finalizing our Theory of Change (a ToC is meant to convey our goals, assumptions, methods, and metrics). Since there's recently been extensive discussion on LessWrong of our approaches to promoting rationality and effective altruism to a broad audience, one that was quite helpful for helping us update, I'd like to share our Theory of Change with you and ask for your feedback.
Here's the Executive Summary:
Here is the full version.
I'd appreciate any feedback on the full version from fellow Less Wrongers, on things like content, concepts, structure, style, grammar, etc. I look forward to updating the organization's goals, assumptions, methods, and metrics based on your thoughts. Thanks!