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:
Yes, the primitive way Khan uses his "virtual chalkboard" bothers me too, but I think the lessons will be updated eventually.
Personally I don't find that RSA Animate adds that much value in terms of communicating something more efficiently - I find myself occasionally distracted by the illustration process. Personally I think the best way to teach topics like math and all the natural sciences from biology to physics would be a virtual reality setting... imagine putting on glasses and being totally immersed in a kind of virtual reality, where you can see molecules and electrons and where you can manipulate them or take notes in the air (imagine xbox kinect implemented in your glasses, facing outward and tracking your hands).
Not everything would need to be interactive though, the lectures could be 10-15m long and drive home a point with maximum force. (In a way a virtual chalkboard couldn't). So yes, Khan Academy needs to evolve - but RSA animate style lectures wouldn't be the most effective for retention and interest, compared to other forms of presenting and interacting with things that could be implemented nowadays if the money and interest was present.
This is going to vary from person to person, and I have no idea what will turn out to work best for the most people. But I strongly prefer RSA - I find it engaging, and the visuals help reinforce concepts through multiple avenues in my brain. Simple podcasts leave me bored, but the visual/audio combo keeps giving me new information at just the right rate.
Interactivity would allow for kinesthetic learning as well. An education program for iPad that incorporated audio/visual/kinesthetic learning styes and could adapt itself to the student's preferences would probably be ideal.