This thread can be seen as a continuation of a previous thread (http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/33u/theoretical_target_audience_size_of_less_wrong/). I felt the need to make a new thread since this post is long and also since it is more targeted. This may help us further achieve our goals as well. EDIT: http://www.google.com/search?q=related%3Alesswrong.com is actually one of the best places to find people in the LW demographic.

Now, I'll say this - I much prefer LessWrong to other hangouts for those who are focused on rationality. But of course, posts here must be of fairly high quality (for good reasons), and some rationality-minded people may want to continue talking with other rationality-minded people in less formal settings (such as chatroom or forum settings). So that's a good reason to think about other communities too (and in addition, it can attract new visitors to our community). These communities do not necessarily have to have a focus on rationality - rather - they should just have a population of rationality-focused individuals who are not afraid to speak out.

Now, part of the strategy that we often have to use is to find the rationality-focused people in a sea of people who don't care much about rationality. So I've been always thought a lot about the demographics of each community I've joined. Most people in local gifted programs, for example, don't seem to be very interested in rationality (although it seems that interest in rationality does seem to increase with age).There are some real-life venues for meeting similar people, but it's often a lot harder since almost all rationality groups are online (and it's far easier to attract attention to low-popularity topics online). College, for example, seems to be a difficult place to locate rationality-minded individuals, unless the college has an online discussion with a significant portion of the population participating. Sometimes, facebook groups have been an excellent substitute for college, as long as the facebook groups have an audience of a large portion of the college population. Normally, this only works for smaller populations since Facebook's interface is not good for handling large groups (I've seen the Caltech freshman facebook groups, which I've really liked, but unfortunately, I go to a state university rather than Caltech).

There are numerous online venues for finding people: IRC, forums, and various other Internet communities (comment sections on blogospheres, IRC, chatrooms, reddit, Facebook, Meetup, Google Reader/Buzz (shared items), Google Groups/Yahoo Groups/Usenet, and other social networking websites), and mailing lists. Some of them are better than others for finding rationality-minded people (in particular, people who use certain services are generally more "intelligent/educated"+NT than people who use other services [see facebook vs. myspace, reddit vs digg, and gmail vs yahoo mail/hotmail]).

The venues that are easiest to find are obviously the ones that are not in the deep web. This is mostly just inclusive of the blogosphere, some forums, reddit, and a small fraction of items on Google groups. Things in facebook are also easy to find, since there's only one facebook (as opposed to numerous IRC channels/groups on google/mailing lists) and you can use facebook's internal search engine to find groups (which many people do). But there haven't been many deep discussions on facebook (whose format isn't very good for deep discussions) - and it's now harder to have these discussions than before since Facebook has recently made it difficult to find groups other people are in (as it is now making pages more prominent than groups). My impression is that the aggregated blogosphere has the largest populations of rationality-minded readers (and of quality discussions), but current blog interfaces make it difficult to view people's profiles or to follow people's posts (both features which I think are necessary for faciliating social bonding). And I always wonder - where else do these blog commenters hang out?

With forums, we can find a nice list of them at http://www.big-boards.com (which is far from comprehensive, but better than nothing)

Some forums may ostensibly seem good for discussions, but end up not being good for them. Asperger's Syndrome forums, for example, may have some rationality-minded people. But most people will "tl;dr" (or ignore) thoughtful posts (and I know this as a fact for the two most popular Asperger's Syndrome forums - both which don't seem to have particularly intelligent readers). Physics Forums also seemed attractive, but unfortunately people there don't seem to care much about rationality (and the debates are full of emotions rather than rationality). Some atheist forums also might have high populations of rational people (but richarddawkins.net forums died, and I don't know much about infidels.org). One of the main problems, anyways, is that it's a lot easier to complain about a post than to make a "good post" comment (which might be interpreted as a "+1 post count" post). There are then some forums that have very high populations of very intelligent+NT people (College Confidential and phdcomics forums [which have crashed for several weeks by now] come to mind in particular), but most "rationality" posts suited for places like this still end up completely ignored. Philosophy forums might have some rationality-minded people, but I don't know the place very well. The same applies to programming forums (it seems that many programmers are NT, but engineering majors, including computer science ones, tend towards ST styles of thinking)

I've been very surprised by the quality of some discussions that are in the deep web, but they are very difficult to locate (especially since most discussion forums are essentially dead). The calorie restriction mailing list, for example, has surprisingly good discussions (even better than many of the discussions I've seen on Imminst), and people there are more receptive to my emails than the people on Imminst (Imminst just doesn't seem to be that great of a place to discuss rationality topics - although others may disagree with me and I can be convinced).

It's possible that some foreign language sites may also have high populations of rationality-minded people. There may be a time when Google Translate may finally make people produce mutually intelligible conversations. If this happens, we may be able to increase our space of potentially rational individuals (especially from countries like Japan, Germany, and France, and countries with high %s of German speakers, like the Czech Republic). Many European countries seem to have more "rational" belief systems than the U.S., and this may apply to East Asian countries as well. Many Scandinavians+Dutch+Estonians do understand English, though, and even preferentially associate with English-speaking communities (perhaps since they have small populations)

I know that I haven't found all possible online venues for meeting rationality minded people. My criteria may be different from the criteria of most readers here, as I only feel comfortable discussing personal/daily issues with other late-teenagers (so groups like meetup don't really work for me). In any case, it may be wise to discuss options for rationality-minded teenagers, since it is from teenagers where we can expect to make the biggest increases in the rationality-minded audience (especially from this generation, which seems to have more more rational religious+social attitudes than previous generations).

Since the vast majority of available groups are unspecialized, this is where we will have to do much of our searching. I've noticed that unspecialized groups with very high average intelligence are probably the best groups to find such individuals. Unfortunately, I hang out in many of these groups, and few people in them seem to be curious enough to develop a deep desire to talk to others about rationality-minded topics. I would like to encourage a discussion of the venues that readers here have liked the most (with respect to finding other rationality-minded individuals), especially with a focus on discussion venues on the deep web (which many people here may not be aware of).

As suggested by another poster, there's a LessWrong IRC chatroom: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong_IRC_Chatroom