You never engage period, or you think that it's a bad plan for market research in particular?
I generally don't bother people on subways because they'll be trapped with me for 10+ minutes, which can be uncomfortable/intimidating. I don't think it's as big an issue on an elevator. By the time they've determined that they don't want to talk to me, it's not much longer before they get off. I don't think the 30 seconds of awkward silence ruined the woman's day in the third-to-last example.
(I also just greet people in the elevator in general when I'm not doing rationality-market research. I generally get good responses, and when I don't I just shrug and let them be. I could be persuaded that this is overall bad-for-the-world, but I doubt it)
As for the actual market-research effectiveness, it'd take a lot of data to see if people tend to have different responses in elevators vs. on the street. I'd be interested in seeing the difference, but most of the responses I got on the elevator matched up with my assumptions about the types of responses I'd be getting.
You never engage period, or you think that it's a bad plan for market research in particular?
I never initiate conversations with strangers in elevators period.
. . . subways . . .
I can recall at least 3 times that I have initiated conversations with strangers on what passes for subways in the Bay Area (Bay Area Rapid Transit) during non-commute hours. It is always easy for a non-handicapped person on what passes for subways out here during non-commute hours to walk to the next train.
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: