I've already made that comment somewhere else a few times, but public outreach would best be handled by incorporating rationality "classes/lessons" into the standard curriculum of schools. All other public outreach initiatives pale in terms of reach and effectiveness in comparison to making it "mandatory" for students. School is the holy grail of public outreach.
Getting something into the curriculum isn't easy obviously, but it can be done and one easy way in which I can see this implemented is by making a series of well-presented videos on rationality by a charismatic teacher and putting them up on youtube. Not too nerdy/technical, just lighthearted and entertaining/educational stuff.
First point of attack would be getting this stuff into the Khan Academy curriculum, which is a very promising new way of digital learning that is rapidly incorporated by many teachers and students. Personally I project, that Khan Academy (or something like it) will be very successful in the future and is the precursor of what the future of digital education will look like. Khan Academy being the current leader in this field (it's also being backed by Bill Gates and google) is obviously a much easier target for rationality-infusion than the rigid traditional education system.
We would just need someone who is able to represent and teach rationality lessons in an appropriate way. Volunteers should take a step forward. I'm sure if we play our cards right we might get Khan to adopt our lessons.
PS: In case you've spent last year in a cave, here's what Khan Academy is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk
I think the future of education will be a cross between Khan Academy and RSA Animate. Khan Academy bugs me whenever he takes time to slowly write down the words that he just said. RSA is basically a polished version that I find much more engaging, it just needs to the structure that Khan Academy has.
I agree that getting rationality courses in public schools would be the most effective way to promote it. I have no idea how to accomplish that, and having optional videos you can find online is... not very different from Less Wrong. (An RSA Animate style series based on the sequences might be very effective).
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: