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:
I'm curious how varying the "opener" will affect the responses. Here are a few off the top of my head:
Opener #1: "Hey, what would you think of someone who calls themselves a rationalist? I was interviewing this guy the other day, and I asked him what words he'd use to describe himself, and that was the first thing out of his mouth. I've never heard that response before, and don't know what to think."
Opener #2: "Hey, so, I met this guy the other day, and he was going on and on about how he was a huge rationalist. That's not really something I've seen anyone do. What would you make of someone like that?"
Opener #3: "So, I have a friend who's thinking about joining/starting a 'Rationality Club.' I don't really know what to say about that, other than that it sounds a bit [pause] unique. What kind of people would you expect at a 'Rationality club?'"
These are designed to do several things. First, by describing a specific incident, it puts them in near mode, and gets them to imagine what they'd actually think. Second, they have a livelier and more conversational phrasing, which should help in getting people to open up. Third, by distancing yourself from the label, it makes them free to not be polite to the word.
These are completely untested, though I might give them a try tonight.
In general I like this idea, although this feels a little weirder to me as a way to start a conversation with a random person I don't know. And not just in a "people don't normally talk like that" way, but a "people don't normally talk like that and therefore this guy smells fishy to me.... why is he suddenly talking to me about this guy he was interviewing?"