At the Australia online hangout; one of the topics we discussed (before I fell asleep on camera for a bunch of people) Was writing a rationality TV show as an outreach task. Of course there being more ways for this to go wrong than right I figured its worth mentioning the ideas and getting some comments.
The strategy is to have a set of regular characters who's rationality behaviour seems nuts. Effectively sometimes because it is; when taken out of context. Then to have one "blank" person who tries to join - "rationality house". and work things out. My aim was to have each episode straw man a rationality behaviour and then steelman it. Where by the end of the episode it saves the day; makes someone happy; achieves a goal - or some other <generic win-state>.
Here is a list of notes of characters from the hangout or potential topics to talk about.
- No showers. Bacterial showers
- Stopwatches everywhere
- temperature controls everywhere, light controls.
- radical honesty person.
- Soylent only eating person
- born-again atheist
- bayesian person
- Polyphasic sleep cycles.
Come on, the audience will decide they are crazy anyway. Why not have fun with it? Like, a bunch of would-be superheroes without special powers live in the same house. They all agree that the world can be optimized and that it is not really important to be given credit for it, they agree that they have to have a platform of beliefs to start from, and a Bayesian way of updating the beliefs, and regular reviews...
And the rest of the show is them trying to live up to their goals, with lots and lots of failure and rare but joyful victories. Like, one of them wants to do charity, selects an (interesting though weird) homeless person to help and accidentally creeps the homeless out. (Insert a self-defense scene, police, parents whoddon't understand but want their rationalist kid be happy, because if only s/he were happy s/he would not do this kind of stupid stuff.) In the end, have the rationalist just as accidentally, for him/her, invent effective altruism. (Maybe when s/he is being bailed out by comrades.)
Because it's not exactly about soylent, is it?
your suggestion has been added to my list of "short gags" that could be scripted. Thanks!