Excellent points.
I observe this in regard to religion and it's memes, and I think it applies to the non-rationalist community generally.
I think most people will be averse to LW-style rationality as part of a general aversion to things that seem too weird...
It perhaps makes more sense to replace "too weird" with "too different from the cultural norm". Christianity, for instance, has very weird beliefs compared to what science and common sense tells us. Adherents persist in believing in large part to continue conforming to the cultural norm, despite it's weirdness.
The interesting question (to me) is whether someone who is not predisposed to enjoying LW-style rationality ought to pursue it if they seek to optimize their happiness. If you are a happy Christian who believes God is madly in love with you and can't wait to bring up to your mansion in heaven post mortem, then LW is going to be depressing.
Even if you're just a regular old None or agnostic who likes to believe in warm fuzzy concepts like "everything happening for a reason" and Karm and Serendipity, then LW's deterministic, magic-killing, purely materialist views are a bit of a buzzkill.
It is possible that rationality training is a net bad for ceratin individuals because ignorance really is bliss in many circumstances.
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.