if we aren't more successful or interesting than other people then we probably don't have much worth talking to them about
and
I would like to convince other people to play the same game as me. Rather than having very smart people thinking about how to solve some arbitrarily selected hard problem, I would rather they take a step back and make a desperate effort on humanity's behalf.
I don't think that these two ideas are at all contradictory. Ideally, we'd want people to to step back and try and help humanity, but in reality I think it would probably be very helpful to the goal of getting more rationalists (maybe even necessary?) for rationalists to be clearly successful.
So as I read around the discussion section I keep coming across ideas (like this, this, this, or this) which all seem to be very related to the same topics:
Other posts talk about similar things.
I have been interested in this for a while now, and have gotten some great feedback.
But now I'm wondering how many groups, other than SIAI, are trying to do this. It seems like it would be silly to have something like this stagnate because of a simple coordination problem.
So if you are, please come forth and comment. If you're interested, do the same. Share what you know, learn from others, maybe maybe maybe get the ball rolling a bit more.
Note:
I changed the title (originally "Rationality Activism Groups") to reflect the more discussion-oriented nature of this thread.