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.
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.