Most people go through life using cultural memes that they soak up from their environment. These cultural memes have had lots of selective pressure acting on them, so most of the time they won't be obviously harmful: for example, most cultures don't have memes advocating that you stick your hand in fires. Following these cultural memes is a low-variance strategy: you might not become overwhelmingly successful this way, but you'll also avoid many failure modes.
A basic aspect of LW-style rationality involves questioning and rethinking everything, including these cultural memes. As such, it's a high-variance strategy: you might end up with new memes that are much better or much worse than standard memes. This might be okay if you're quite good at questioning and rethinking things, but if you aren't (and even if you are!), you might afflict yourself with a memetic immune disorder and head towards all sorts of failure modes as a result (joining a cult being the sort of stereotypical thing).
I think most people will be averse to LW-style rationality as part of a general aversion to things that seem too weird, and I think this is probably overall a reasonable aversion for most people to have, as it helps them avoid many failure modes.
This is a good observation. It still leaves open the question of helping (or self-help advise) for people of sufficient intelligence to perceive that LW-style "rationality" is correct in some sense, but cannot quite put it together themselves into a useful framework from a bunch of blog posts :). I do think CFAR has a role in this, Stanford's Ron Howard took it all the way to (non gifted-) high school level:
http://www.orms-today.org/orms-8-04/teaching.html
The two things this can accomplish is to create better "no...
This post is to raise a question about the demographics of rationality: Is rationality something that can appeal to low-IQ people as well?
I don't mean in theory, I mean in practice. From what I've seen, people who are concerned about rationality (in the sense that it has on LW, OvercomingBias, etc.) are overwhelmingly high-IQ.
Meanwhile, HPMOR and other stories in the "rationality genre" appeal to me, and to other people I know. However I wonder: Perhaps part of the reason they appeal to me is that I think of myself as a smart person, and this allows me to identify with the main characters, cheer when they think their way to victory, etc. If I thought of myself as a stupid person, then perhaps I would feel uncomfortable, insecure, and alienated while reading the same stories.
So, I have four questions:
1.) Do we have reason to believe that the kind of rationality promoted on LW, OvercomingBias, CFAR, etc. appeals to a fairly normal distribution of people around the IQ mean? Or should we think, as I suggested, that people with lower IQ's are disposed to find the idea of being rational less attractive?
2.) Ditto, except replace "being rational" with "celebrating rationality through stories like HPMOR." Perhaps people think that rationality is a good thing in much the same way that being wealthy is a good thing, but they don't think that it should be celebrated, or at least they don't find such celebrations appealing.
3.) Supposing #1 and #2 have the answers I am suggesting, why?
4.) Making the same supposition, what are the implications for the movement in general?
Note: I chose to use IQ in this post instead of a more vague term like "intelligence," but I could easily have done the opposite. I'm happy to do whichever version is less problematic.