There's a skill I learned in a creative writing class once: the ability to shut up completely and accept feedback. If someone said they felt your character was unsympathetic, you weren't allowed to explain the deeper aspects of his/her personality you were hinting at, or accuse the reader of missing the point. The reason being that in general authors don't get a chance to argue with their readers: your writing stands or falls on its own merit. So hearing a person's unmassaged reaction was useful and valuable feedback that you could use to actually improve the text and do better next time. Trying to change their mind was a waste of everybody's time.
The only reason I bother relating the whole anecdote is that I think it generalizes to a useful life skill. My specific point is just that I think it would be good to keep separate the attempt to discover a person's natural reaction to the word 'rationality' and the attempt to change their conception of it. Obviously changing a person's mind about rationality is something we'll want to get better at eventually, but we should first focus on learning what our starting point is. Resist the urge to defend rationality, and focus on getting as much useful information as possible about just what we're up against.
Lastly, as others have noted, props for actually going out and getting data. Arguing is fun, but empiricism is a much greater ally.
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: