Spreading the Word prompted me to report back as promised.
I have two sisters aged 17 and 14, and mom and dad aged 40-something. I'm 22, male. We're all white and Latvian. I translated the articles as I read them.
I read Never Leave Your Room to the oldest sister and she expressed great interest in it.
I read Cached Selves to them all. When I got to the part about Greenskyers the older sister asserted "the sky is green" for fun. Later in the conversation I asked her, "Is the sky blue?", and her answer was "No. I mean, yes! Gah!" They all found real life examples of this quickly - it turns out this is how the older sister schmoozes money and stuff out of dad ("Can I have this discount cereal?" followed by "Can I have this expensive yogurt to go with my cereal?").
I started reading The Apologist and the Revolutionary to them but halfway through the article they asked "what's the practical application for us?", and I realized that I couldn't answer that question - it's just a piece of trivia. So I moved on.
I tried reading about near-far thing to them, but couldn't find a single good article that describes it concisely. Thus I stumbled around, and failed to convey the idea properly.
In the end I asked whether they'd like to hear similar stuff in the future, and the reply was an unanimous yes. I asked them why, in their opinion, haven't they found this stuff by themselves and the reason seems to be that they have have no paths that lead to rationality stuff in their lives. Indeed, I found OB through Dresden Codak, which I found through Minus, which I found through some other webcomic forum. Nobody in my family reads webcomics not to mention frequenting their forums.
The takeaway, I think, is this: We must establish non-geeky paths to rationality. Go and tell people how to not be suckers. Start with people who would listen to you. You don't have to advertise LW - just be +5 informative. Rationality stuff must enter the mass media: radio, TV, newspapers. If you are in a position to make that happen, act!
I would also like to see more articles like this one on LW - go, do something, report back.
There are two types of thinking: sensory experience, and abstractions about sensory experience. Each type of thinking has strengths and weaknesses.
Sensory thinking lets you leverage a high degree of unconscious knowledge and processing power, applied to detailed models. Abstract thinking can jump several steps at a time, but lacks precision.
A major distinction between the two systems is that our actions are actually driven almost exclusively by the sensory system, and only indirectly influenced by the abstract system. The abstract system, in contrast, exists primarily to fulfill social goals: it's the brain's "spin doctor", whose job is to come up with plausible-sounding explanations that make you seem like an attractive ally, mate, etc.
Thus, each system has different biases: the sensory system is optimized for caring about what happens to you, right now, whereas the abstract system is optimized for thinking about how things "ought" to be for the whole group in the future... in ways that just "coincidentally" turn out to be for your own good. ;-)
The two systems can work together or against each other. In a typical dysfunctional scenario, the sensory system alerts you to a prediction of danger associated with a thought (e.g. of a task you're about to complete), and the abstract system then invents a plausible reason for not following up on that thought, perhaps followed by a plausible reason to do something else.
Unfortunately, once people notice this, they have a tendency to respond by having their abstract system think, "I shouldn't do that" or "I should do X instead"... which then does nothing. Or they invent reasons for how they got that way, or why other people or circumstances are against them, or whatever.
What I teach people to do is observe what the sensory machinery is doing, and retrain it to do other things. As I like to put it, "action is not an abstraction". The only time that our abstract thoughts lead to behavior changes is when they cause us to make connections in the sensory machinery...
Which is why one little story like "Stuck In The Middle With Bruce" has so much more impact on people than just talking in an abstract way about self-defeating behavior.
But what does that have to do with the adjectives of 'near' and 'far'?