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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Street action "Stop existential risks!", Union square, San Francisco, September 27, 2014 at 2:00 PM - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (23)
What does LW think of the idea of standing on the street with a sign that says "Talk to me if you like thought experiments" and trying to develop the skill of quickly overcoming inferential gaps with passerby, with a view to improving entry-level explanations of concepts like x-risk in general? If this guy can become a millionaire selling vegetable peelers, it seems like one might be able to develop a street pitch for effective altruism good enough that if one spends 8 hours standing in a public place in a high-IQ city pitching people, one creates one additional effective altruist on expectation.
It would be an improvement over turchin's plan of framing this as a protest.
Why would we do anything on the streets? Compared to a variety of online means, they're an incredibly inefficient way to reach the people most likely to be receptive to anything we want to talk about.
Hm. People seem to take ideas more seriously if they're presented by flesh-and-blood people, and you get quicker feedback loops. Also potentially serves the additional purposes of improving social skills and finding one friends and romantic partners. What do you think the most effective online means are?
Think of who else does street work like this, and the signals it may give to your target audience. I would worry that such an approach would be mistaken for Scientology street recruiting (compare it to "Discover your true potential" and other such come-ons for their introductory "personality test"), or similar street work by some other religious group, and might be avoided by exactly those people you might wish to reach.
In the evangelical days of my youth, this sort of thing is exactly what we were encouraged to do: get strangers talking about a "deep" subject that provided a natural transition to just how bleak things are without god, the fulfillment of salvation, and so on and so forth.