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Nornagest comments on Open thread, 3-8 June 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (153)
For all the emphasis on Slytherin-style interpersonal competence (not so much on the main site anymore, but it's easy to find in the archive and in Methods), LW's historically had a pretty serious blind spot when it comes to PR and other large-scale social phenomena. There's probably some basic typical-minding in this, but I'm inclined to treat it mostly as a subculture issue; American geek culture has a pretty solid exceptionalist streak to it, and treats outsiders with pity when it isn't treating them with contempt and suspicion. And we're very much tied to geek culture. I've talked to LWers who don't feel comfortable exercising because they feel like it's enemy clothing; if we can't handle something that superficial, how are we supposed to get into Joe Sixpack's head?
Ultimately I think we focus on contrarian technocrat types, consciously or not, because they're the people we know how to reach. I include myself in this, unfortunately.
A very fair assessment.
I would also note that often when people DO think about marketing LW, they speak about the act of marketing with outright contempt. Marketing is just a set of methodologies to draw attention to something. As a rationalist, one should embrace that tool for anything they care about rather than treating it as vulgar.
A better question is what exactly we are supposed to do inside Joe Sixpack's head?
Make him less stupid? No one knows how. Give him practical advice so that he fails less epically? There are multiple shelves of self-help books at B&N, programs run by nonprofits and the government, classes at the local community college, etc. etc. Joe Sixpack shows very little interest in any of those I don't see why the Sequences or some distillation of them would do better.
Nice example of geek exceptionalism there, dude.
To be fair, it might have some merit if we were literally talking about the average person, though I'm far from certain; someone buys an awful lot of mass-market self-help books and I don't think it's exclusively Bay Aryans. But I was using "Joe Sixpack" there in the sense of "someone who is not a geek", or even "someone who isn't part of the specific cluster of techies that LW draws from", and there should be plenty of smart, motivated, growth-oriented people within that set. If we can't speak to them, that's entirely on us.
Nah, just plain-vanilla arrogance :-D I am not quite sure I belong to the American geek culture, anyway.
Ah. I read "Joe Sixpack" as being slightly above "redneck" and slightly below "your average American with 2.2 children".
So do you mean people like engineers, financial quants, the Make community, bright-eyed humanities graduates? These people are generally not dumb. But I am still having trouble imagining what would you want to do inside their heads.
The first group of people I thought of was lawyers, who have both a higher-than-average baseline understanding of applied cognitive science and a strong built-in incentive to get better at it. I wouldn't stop there, of course; all sorts of people have reasons to improve their thinking and understanding, and even more have incentives to become more instrumentally effective.
As to what we'd do in their heads... same thing as we're trying to do in ours, of course.
Um. Speaking for myself, what I'm trying to do in my own head doesn't really transfer to other heads, and I'm not trying to do anything (serious) inside other people's heads in general.