You are the brightest person I know. And I know Dan Dennett, Max Tegmark, Robert Trivers, Marcello, Minsky, Pinker and Omohundro.

Unfortunately, those are non-math geniuses, so that speaks for only some sub-areas of cognition which, less strictly categorizable than the clearly scalable domain of math, are not subject to your proposed rule of "one standard deviation above you they blurr"

In all fairness, I think Islamic fundamentalists really do hate our freedom. They hate our entire way of life, and this freedom is a part of that.

Hating the freedoms of western society doesn't preclude one from committing brave, selfless acts, though. Unfortunately for us.

I'd very much like to be more patient, humble, energetic, experienced, diversely skilled, productive, motivated, dedicated, disciplined, courageous, self reliant, systematic, efficient, cautious, pragmatic, sociable, polite, forgiving, courteous, cooperative, uninhibited, consistent, generous, expressive, coherent, observant, imaginative, adaptable, witty, inquisitive, gracious, tranquil, impartial, and sincere. Am I missing the intent of the quote?

I think this news may already be being discussed in a different thread, although they have a different starting article:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/6tu/robert_ettinger_founder_of_cryonics_now_cis_106th/

I downvoted the article not because I think it is bad, per se -- even though you're other-optimizing -- but because I want to see less of this genre of writing on LW in general.

Just to be pedantic: Enjoying being wrong probably not good.

Enjoying having been wrong, and now being (potentially) less wrong is good.

But the latter doesn't make as good a title :D.

death doesn't scare me nearly as much as old age

O_O

This closely pattern-matches ableist attitudes like "$disability is worse than death!", where people with $disability shrug and say "Enh, we're good. We can't do $thing, but we can't be knitting prodigies either - and neither can you, and you're not whining about it all that much."

Admittedly, losing abilities is no fun, and mental abilities are genuinely good and important (though how much is not that clear - people with Down's are happier), and aging then dying is strictly worse than just dying... but still, scarier than death?

It's definitely a good idea to do this.

But the way you've set about doing it isn't going to produce any worthwhile data.

I'm no expert on branding and market research, but I'm pretty sure that the best practice in the field isn't having conversations with 9 non-random strangers in a lift (asking different leading questions each time) then bunging it in Google Docs and getting other people to add more haphazard data in the hope that someone will make a website that sorts it all out.

First you need to define the question you're asking. Exactly which sub-population are you interested in? You start off asking about "the average person"'s attitude to rationality, suggesting that maybe you want to gauge attitudes across the whole (US?) population. But then you decide that the 60+ man is "outside our demographic bracket", although your 70+ grandmother apparently isn't.

Either way, the set of [people who work in your office building plus your grandmother] might not constitute a representative sample of the population of the USA, let alone everyone in the world. Getting people who frequent Less Wrong to ask people they cross paths with isn't going to be a representative sample of all people - you can see that, right?

The most efficient way to answer your question is likely to be piggybacking on existing polling organisations. Now, it's probably true that corporate marketing/branding "researchers" have a bias towards confirming what the bosses want to hear - I was just reading this Robin Hanson article about how people don't evaluate the quality of predictions after the fact: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/13/robin-hanson/who-cares-about-forecast-accuracy/ - but still, I think it would be better to at least consider that there are organisations whose job it is to find the general public reaction to a "brand".

You could find someone who works for such an organisation and suborn them to add an extra question to a proper survey. That way you could gather the reactions of 1000 or 10,000 demographically-representative people in a single action. Let's not waste our time dicking around uploading meaningless data to Google Docs.

A good target in the UK would be YouGov.

I also think it's pointless to worry about a concise definition of rationality until it's been determined that "rationality" is in fact a good brand for public consumption. What if it turns out that the term "rationality" makes 60% of people instantly hostile? Do the research first, then start proselytising.

I find it interesting that the response to this article hasn't overwhelmingly been about criticising Raemon's methodology. Is that because LessWrong members fallaciously assume that attempting to measure the public's subjective, irrational responses to a word doesn't need to be carried out in an objective, rational manner? Or is it, as I increasingly suspect as I edit and re-edit this comment, that I'm a total dick?