I’m probably going. I asked about this in a previous open thread and there were a few responses, including a couple of people who have not posted here. (I had been thinking of organizing this as a meetup myself, but decided against it at the time because (1) I don’t know where to meet up in DC, and (2) I don’t trust myself to be good at organizing anything, for now. I am glad you’re arranging it.)
Is anyone else interested in making signs with LW themes? I feel like a lot of this rally is going to be fake wise neutrality (and a lot of the signs highly rated on their SaneOrNot site fit that description; others seem to be about signaling politeness rather than actual epistemic rationality). So it seems like a good idea to counter those with signs that actually communicate good heuristics for thinking, but I only plan to do so if I expect I’ll be with others doing the same, as I am not strong enough to go there wearing a clown suit (figuratively or literally).
Hearing one sound bite will, at best, only help someone’s rationality a little bit. But a link can help a lot, if they get around to following it. So the best sign would say something like “Advanced Sanity Techniques: lesswrong.com″. (Or link to somewhere more specific, like the Sequences or your favorite article, but then people are likely to forget the URL.)
If anybody does this, I’d also suggest coordinating with a front page post linking directly to the sequenceds; this place can be intimidating to the un-initiated.
I was thinking not that compressing LW concepts into sign slogans would directly help people’s rationality, but that they would be interesting and unusual-sounding enough that people would want to find out more, and might ask the person holding the sign for more information. (Having a concept explained first-hand is probably better than being given a URL; even if the URL contains a more refined explanation than you can generate off the top of your head, it’s less likely that anyone will bother reading it.)
Well, “Advanced Sanity Techniques” conveys an important message: sanity is a scale with no upper limit, and a skill to study, rather than a distinction between damaged and undamaged minds, which is how most people think of it. That insight alone is worth quite a bit. And it’s very short; that’s important, because bigger fonts mean visibility from longer distances, and fewer tl;dr responses.
Of course, going around talking to people and explaining rationality concepts is great, for promoting rationality, for meeting people and just for fun, but I suspect the bottleneck will be the number of conversations you have time for, not the number of people attracted by your sign.
I’m probably going. I asked about this in a previous open thread and there were a few responses, including a couple of people who have not posted here. (I had been thinking of organizing this as a meetup myself, but decided against it at the time because (1) I don’t know where to meet up in DC, and (2) I don’t trust myself to be good at organizing anything, for now. I am glad you’re arranging it.)
Is anyone else interested in making signs with LW themes? I feel like a lot of this rally is going to be fake wise neutrality (and a lot of the signs highly rated on their SaneOrNot site fit that description; others seem to be about signaling politeness rather than actual epistemic rationality). So it seems like a good idea to counter those with signs that actually communicate good heuristics for thinking, but I only plan to do so if I expect I’ll be with others doing the same, as I am not strong enough to go there wearing a clown suit (figuratively or literally).
Hearing one sound bite will, at best, only help someone’s rationality a little bit. But a link can help a lot, if they get around to following it. So the best sign would say something like “Advanced Sanity Techniques: lesswrong.com″. (Or link to somewhere more specific, like the Sequences or your favorite article, but then people are likely to forget the URL.)
If anybody does this, I’d also suggest coordinating with a front page post linking directly to the sequenceds; this place can be intimidating to the un-initiated.
I was thinking not that compressing LW concepts into sign slogans would directly help people’s rationality, but that they would be interesting and unusual-sounding enough that people would want to find out more, and might ask the person holding the sign for more information. (Having a concept explained first-hand is probably better than being given a URL; even if the URL contains a more refined explanation than you can generate off the top of your head, it’s less likely that anyone will bother reading it.)
Well, “Advanced Sanity Techniques” conveys an important message: sanity is a scale with no upper limit, and a skill to study, rather than a distinction between damaged and undamaged minds, which is how most people think of it. That insight alone is worth quite a bit. And it’s very short; that’s important, because bigger fonts mean visibility from longer distances, and fewer tl;dr responses.
Of course, going around talking to people and explaining rationality concepts is great, for promoting rationality, for meeting people and just for fun, but I suspect the bottleneck will be the number of conversations you have time for, not the number of people attracted by your sign.