Here's two more samples for you. Both subjects are Indian, male, late twenties, highly educated and fluent in English. These are chat transcripts (used with permission):
Roshni: if someone were to describe themselves as a Rationalist to you, what stereotypes would come to your mind about that person?
X:Logical ?
Roshni: anything else?
X: Analytical ?
Roshni: would that be positive or negative?
X: Grey area... positive in some case - but in extreme cases, it can be negative
Roshni: if some one person identified that way, which part of the spectrum would you place him on?
X: I need more info
Roshni: let's say there's a club
called the Rationality club
and a group of people attend it twice in a month to discuss various things, do various club activities together etc
X:I'll term them crazy
But I consider most of these stuff as crazy
So I can be wrong
Roshni: there's no right or wrong answer, i'm looking for general impressions only
so negative
X:Yes
..................................................
Roshni:if someone were to describe themselves as a Rationalist to you, what stereotypes would come to your mind about that person?
V:ayn rand first
Roshni:what else?
V: that's about it i suppose. all that would be in my mind is "this is one person i can get along with easily"
Roshni: what if they told you they thought Ayn Rand was a nutcase? well, not a nutcase, just wrong mostly
V: sure
don't matter
Roshni :what if they told you they belong to a Rationality Club
first impressions on the club?
V:........i would really wonder if such a place really adds any value to anyone..........i would consider going to a rationality club albeit with a lot of skepticism
Roshni: figuring out if 'rationality' has a negative connotation to people who hear it
V:nah, rationality has no negative connotation to me. i love the idea.
the negative connotation for me is with the word "club"
Personally club has implications similar to clique and social group to me, it implies the people identify themselves as similar. Whereas I would think something like "Rationality class," "rationalism training" (or dojo) implies that the people are working towards a goal within a structure. [Compare the implications of 'book club' and 'literature class']
Several weeks ago, the NYC Rationality Meetup Group began discussing outreach, both for rationality in general and the group in particular. A lot of interesting problems were brought up. Should we be targeting the average person, or sticking to the cluster of personality-types that Less Wrong already attracts? How quickly should we introduce people to our community? What are the most effective ways to spread the idea of rationality, and what are the most effective ways of actually encouraging people to undertake rational actions?
Those are all complex questions with complex answers, which are beyond the scope of this post. I ended up focusing on the question: "Is ' Rationality' the word we want to use when we're pitching ourselves?" I do not think it's worthwhile to try and change the central meme of the Less Wrong community, but it's not obvious that the new, realspace communities forming need to use the same central meme.
This begat a simpler question: "What does the average person think of when they hear the word ' Rationality?' What positive or negative connotations does it have?" Do they think of straw vulcans and robots? Do they think of effective programmers or businessmen? Armed with this knowledge, we can craft a rationalist pitch that is likely to be effective at the average person, either by challenging their conception of rationality or by bypassing keywords that might set off memetic immune systems.
This question has an empirical answer. A few weeks ago I made some effort to answer it. I did not get a huge array of data, but I got enough that I thought I should share it, and I'd encourage others to go out and find their own data points. Ideally someone would make a website that somehow sorts that data (and in the process hopefully get a more structured experimental setup, since mine was rather freeform.)
I work in a tall office building in NYC. Each day, I ride an elevator up to the 30th floor. At least some of those times, I find myself alone with people for 30 seconds. I started asking those people what they thought about " Rationality." My first encounter went like this: