Having read through the Sequences, Methods of Rationality, related blogs and books and so on, and having changed my mind a few times on at least a few ideas that I'd been fairly sure about... I feel that I finally have enough of a grasp of the basics of LessWrong-style rationality to start trying to introduce it to other people. And while the Sequences form a good set of basics, getting someone interested enough in rationality to start reading them is a step of its own... and, as best as I can tell, one that needs to be custom-tailored to a particular audience.
For my first attempt, I've focused on two online subcultures which I'm at least somewhat familiar with: furries and a certain subset of libertarians. For example, a large number of furry fans are fairly easy to please - give them a short comic to read involving a cute anthropomorphic animal, throw in a bit of sex appeal and maybe a message that's compatible with tolerance of all people, and that comic will be happily read by a lot of them. Trying to avoid "politics is the mind-killer" derailment, the community of libertarians I'm aiming for tend to have their own quirks about what attracts their attention.
The result I came up with was the creation of Rationality Matters, a couple of comics pages that introduce some LW-type thoughts in an audience-compatible fashion without beating the readers' heads with them. I've already received some positive feedback from members of both target groups, indicating that I've accomplished my goal with at least a few individuals... so now I'm posting the link here, for whatever feedback I can get that could improve the existing pages (mainly for the text, since re-doing the art at this stage is impractical), and to make any future pages (should I decide to create them) better than I would have made them without such help.
(And yes, I try to follow Crocker's Rules.)
The final image is nsfw. I appreciate that your survey does show that most of the target audience are attracted to women, but the downside of trying to appeal to the majority is you can alienate the minority. Still, its not the worst approach in the world.
My issue with the second comic is that I'm not sure its about rationality. Are the things in that compact new to your audience? You mention the prisoners dilemma, which is a good way to extrapolate some of those principles, but don't really argue how one acheives that. I also would argue that applying rationality to morality isn't actually that interesting for a lay observer, because generally speaking what you're going to end up with are results which were intuitive to begin with. If you go up to someone and say "hey, you're a libertarian, you want goal x. Well cognitive bias y is stopping you from acheiving x!" then (I believe) that will be persuasive. If instead, as I feel like you are in the comic, you say "hey, you're a libertarian, you want goal x. Well rationality leads to desiring x!" You're just appealing to their ego. After all, most people tend to consider themselves rational, so if you get to an intuitively obvious conclusion using clear thinking not many people are going to impressed
[small note, I'm not saying that getting an intuitive result using clear thinking isn't useful, but I don't believe its that persuasive]
Hrm. I'd been using the rule of thumb "swimwear okay, lingerie not okay". I can see that some workplaces wouldn't allow even bikinis, but I'm not familiar with the specifics of such codes, or how widespread they might be. Do you have any references to help me determine a better rule of thumb?
I've recently exchanged some email with a prominent libertarian authour, and while there are similar sorts of ideas, such as the Covenant of Unanimous Consent , none seem to fi... (read more)