teaching thousands of people how to organize their study time better.
Given the amount of akrasia in this community I'm not sure we are at a point where we have a good basis on lecturing other people about this.
Given the current urge propagtion exercise a lot of people who got it taught in person and who have the CFAR texts can't do it successfully. Iterating on it till it reaches a form that people can take and use would be good.
But I still suspect that the CFAR approach is to a large degree influenced by "how we expect people in academia to behave".
From my understanding CFAR doesn't want to convince academia directly and isn't planning on running any trials themselves at the moment that they will publish.
Actually, the whole current CFAR could continue to be the first group; the only necessary thing would be to cooperate with the second one.
I would appreciate if CFAR would publish their theories publically in writting sooner but I hope the will publish in the next year. I don't have access to the CFAR mailing list and I understand that they do get feedback on their writing via the mailing list at the moment.
The first group would keep inventing better and better advice (more or less what CFAR is doing now).
CFAR very recently renamed implentation intentions into Trigger Action Plans (TAP's). If we already would have marketed implentation intentions widely as vocabulary it would be harder to change the vocabulary.
You should multiply the benefit from the advice by the number of people that will receive the advice.
Landmark reaches quite a lot of people and most of their core ideas aren't written down in small articles. Scientology would be another organisation that tries to do most idea communication in person. It still reached a lot of people.
When doing Quantified Self community building in Germany, the people who came to our meetups mostly didn't came because of mainstream media but other sources. It got to the point of another person telling me that giving media interviews is just for fun and not community building.
What is your opinion on rationality-promoting articles by Gleb Tsipursky / Intentional Insights? Here is what I think:
Trying to teach someone to think rationally is a long process -- maybe even impossible for some people. It's about explaining many biases that people do naturally, demonstrating the futility of "mysterious answers" on gut level; while the student needs the desire to become stronger, the humility of admitting "I don't know" together with the courage to give a probabilistic answer anyway; resisting the temptation to use the new skills to cleverly shoot themselves in the foot, keeping the focus on the "nameless virtue" instead of signalling (even towards the fellow rationalists). It is a LW lesson that being a half-rationalist can hurt you, and being a 3/4-rationalist can fuck you up horribly. And the online clickbait articles seem like one of the worst choices for a medium to teach rationality. (The only worse choice that comes to my mind would be Twitter.)
On the other hand, imagine that you have a magical button, and if you press it, all not-sufficiently-correct-by-LW-standards mentions of rationality (or logic, or science) would disappear from the world. Not to be replaced by something more lesswrongish, but simply by anything else that usually appears in the given medium. Would pressing that button make the world a more sane place? What would have happened if someone had pressed that button hundred years ago? In other words, I'm trying to avoid the "nirvana fallacy" -- I am not asking whether those articles are the perfect vehicle for x-rationality, but rather, whether they are a net benefit or a net harm. Because if they are a net benefit, then it's better having them, isn't it?
Assuming that the articles are not merely ignored (where "ignoring" includes "thousands of people with microscopic attention spans read them and then forget them immediately), the obvious failure mode is people getting wrong ideas, or adopting "rationality" as an attire. Is it really that wrong? Aren't people already having absurdly wrong ideas about rationality? Remember all the "straw Vulcans" produced by the movie industry; Terminator, The Big Bang Theory... Rationality already is associated with being a sociopathic villain, or a pathetic nerd. This is where we are now; and the "rationality" clickbait, however sketchy, cannot make it worse. Actually, it can make a few people interested to learn more. At least, it can show people that there is more than one possible meaning of the word.
To me it seems that Gleb is picking the low-hanging fruit that most rationalists wouldn't even touch for... let's admit it... status reasons. He talks to the outgroup, using the language of the outgroup. But if we look at the larger picture, that specific outgroup (people who procrastinate by reading clickbaity self-improvement articles) actually aren't that different from us. They may actually be our nearest neighbors in the human intellectual space. So what some of us (including myself) feel here is the uncanny valley. Looking at someone so similar to ourselves, and yet so dramatically different in some small details which matter to us strongly, that it feels creepy.
Yes, this whole idea of marketing rationality feels wrong. Marketing is like almost the very opposite of epistemic rationality ("the bottom line" et cetera). On the other hand, any attempt to bring rationality to the masses will inevitably bring some distortion; which hopefully can be fixed later when we already have their attention. So why not accept the imperfection of the world, and just do what we can.
As a sidenote, I don't believe we are at risk of having an "Eternal September" on LessWrong (more than we already have). More people interested in rationality (or "rationality") will also mean more places to debate it; not everyone will come here. People have their own blogs, social network accounts, et cetera. If rationality becomes the cool thing, they will prefer to debate it with their friends.
EDIT: See this comment for Gleb's description of his goals.