Does this cause any updating in decreasing the likelihood of nightmare scenarios like the one you described?
Effectively no. I understand that you're aware of these risks and are able to list mitigating arguments, but the weight of those arguments does not resolve my worries. The things you've just said aren't different in gestalt from what I've read from you.
To be potentially more helpful, here's a few ways the arguments you just made fall flat for me:
I only incidentally mention rationality, such as when I speak of Rationality Dojo as a noun. I also generally do not talk of cognitive biases, and use other euphemistic language, such as referring to thinking errors, as in this article for Salon. So this gets at the point of watering down rationality.
Connectivity to the rationalist movement or "rationality" keyword isn't necessary to immunize people against the ideas. You're right that if you literally never use the word "bias" then it's unlikely my nightmare imaginary conversational partner will have a strong triggered response against the word "bias", but if they respond the same way to the phrase "thinking errors" or realize at some point that's the concept I'm talking about, it's the same pitfall. And in terms of catalyzing opposition, there is enough connectivity for motivated antagonists to make such connections and use every deviation from perfection as ammunition against even fully correct forms of good ideas.
For example, in this article, I specifically discuss research studies as a key way of validating truth claims. Recall that we are all suffering from a position of curse of knowledge on this point. How can we expect to teach people who do not know what science-based means without teaching it to them in the first place? Do you remember when you were at a stage when you did not know the value of scientific studies, and then came to learn about them as a useful way of validating evidence? This is what I'm doing in that article above. Hope this helps address some of the concerns about arguing from authority.
I can't find any discussion in the linked article about why research is a key way of validating truth claims; did you link the correct article? I also don't know if I understand what you're trying to say; to reflect back, are you saying something like "People first need to be convinced that scientific studies are of value, before we can teach them why scientific studies are of value." ? I ... don't know about that, but I won't critique that position here since I may not be understanding.
(...) Hope this helps address the concerns about the writing style and the immunization of people to good ideas, since the readers of this content are specifically looking for this kind of writing style.
You seem to be saying that since the writing is of the form needed to get on Lifehack, and since in fact people are reading it on Lifehack, that they will then not suffer from any memetic immunization via the ideas. First, not all immunization is via negative reactions; many people think science is great, but have no idea how to do science. Such people can be in a sense immunized from learning to understand the process; their curiosity is already sated, and their decisions made. Second, as someone mentioned somewhere else on this comment stream, it's not obvious that the Lifehack readers who end up looking at your article will end up liking or agreeing with your article.
You're clearly getting some engagement, which is suggestive of positive responses, but what if the distribution of response is bimodal, with some readers liking it a little bit and some readers absolutely loathing it to the point of sharing their disgust with friends? Google searches reveal negative reactions to your materials as well. The net impact is not obviously positive.
use every deviation from perfection as ammunition against even fully correct forms of good ideas.
As a professional educator and communicator, I have a deep visceral experience with how "fully correct forms of good ideas" are inherently incompatible with bridging the inferential distance of how far the ordinary Lifehack reader is from the kind of thinking space on Less Wrong. Believe me, I have tried to explain more complex ideas from rationality to students many times. Moreover, I have tried to get more complex articles into Lifehack and elsew...
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.