Below is the current text (without links). I agree your sentence is helpful. Do you want to add it to the current page or replace the bias sentence?
In the past four decades, behavioral economists and cognitive psychologists have discovered many cognitive biases human brains fall prey to when thinking and deciding.
Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own thinking.
Bayesian reasoning offers a way to improve on the native human reasoning style. Reasoning naively, we tend not to seek alternative explanations, and sometimes underrate the influence of prior probabilities in Bayes’ theorem.
Less Wrong users aim to develop accurate predictive models of the world, and change their mind when they find evidence disconfirming those models, instead of being able to explain anything.
This is written with highly self-reflective math geeks as the target audience. The first inclination of normal people would be to run away. Lemme demonstrate—where is my Normal Neurotypical Person hat? -- aha, here it is:
“in order to fix their own thinking”—this site is for broken people? I’m not broken!
“evidence disconfirming those models”—people don’t talk like that. Is “disconfirming” even a word?
“prior probabilities in Bayes’ theorem”—it’s all about math?? Run away!!
A mass market written message would almost immediately turn off this site’s core audience… I have two sites that have decently written, high converting copy. Both of them have been described by LWers as having great content , but too “salesy”.
I think a better approach might to be just go with less copy, but more design that conveys the message. Think apple, but selling “smart and winning” instead of “hip and cutting edge”.
I might try to put together a cool looking landing page that took this approach if there was enough interest.
One of the core ideas of effective marketing is that you craft a message that excites your target—and as a result, that that message will necessarily turn away others who are not in that target audience.
If we wanted to go mass market, then we should craft a landing page for that market.
If we wanted to go for math geeks, we should keep the site as it is.
If we wanted to attract neither, we could go to a middle ground.
I’m afraid design has the same problems as copy—I, at least, find the design of your sites below as off-puttingly ‘salesy’ as the copy. I think we might be dealing with a hipsterish phenomenom of acquired aversion to anything with mass-market effectiveness, which I’m not sure how to deal with.
I wouldn’t use similar design to those two sites—It doesn’t fit the brand or message of lesswrong. Like I said, I envision something more like the large white spaces and slick graphics of Apple.
It feels to salesy to me too and now I would like to understand this feeling better, namely why some people like and some dislike “salesy” things.
I think the idea is that I am used to judging the value of things for myself based on the technical facts. So a message like “THIS IS A VERY GOOD PRODUCT FOR YOU” is a turn-off. It looks like the advertisement is making a value judgement instead of letting me make it. Generally I respond best to advertisements that are strictly factual, even when the facts are obviously trying to be impressive. A “this car can go faster than 400 km/h!!!” would be effective on me, because it is a fact, not a value, and it is leaving me to decide if I value it.
So it seems, we who dislike “salesy” things generally dislike if others seem to be pushing value judgements on us. We prefer facts. Of course, facts can be grouped and displayed just as manipulatively, but in this kind of manipulation you are left more room, more freedom to decide on whether you care and thus how you value it.
Since almost everybody I know would dislike your sites and salesy things in general, and for me this is the normal, now I need to form a hypothesis how “normal” people, who like them, think. I think “normal people” are somehow okay with others pushing value judgements on them. For example, unlike me, they do not get annoyed if people say “Metallica is really great!” Unlike me, they do not reply “you should just say you really like Metallica”. They are not bothered by others communicating value judgements, not even if it is in a pushy way.
Which suggests they are really secure in their own value judgements :)
I think you yourself are pushing value judgments on these normal people (which isn’t bad BTW, pushing value judgements on others is a cornerstone of democracy) - but it is important to recognize that this is what’s happening (I think).
One way I like to think about people is on a sliding scale from an asethetic preference for System 1 (commonly called left brained or intuitive) to an aesthetic preference for System 2 commonly called right brained or logical). Most people in LW fall quite few standard deviations towards the System 2 side.
Despite all the talk about “straw vlucans”,it seems to me there’s a huge blindspot on LW for alleving that System 2 thinking is good, and System 1 thinking is bad—instead of realizing that each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and their own beauty.
I tend to fall more towards the center, and tend to see congruency as beautiful—when your intuitions and logic line up.
Sometimes I’ll let my System 2 drive the congruency, such as when I decide on the best habit, and then read lots of stories and brainwash myself to be excited for that habit. Sometimes I’ll let my system 1 drive, such as realizing that I would hate living for other people, so consciously choosing not to adopt all the facets of effective altruism.
I tend to be a BIT more more towards aeshetic preference for System 2 - so I do get that inherent revulsion to for instance, using your peer group as a heuristic for what you like—but I also understand the opposite aesthetic preference to EG not overthinking things.
One way I like to think about people is on a sliding scale from an asethetic preference for System 1 (commonly called left brained or intuitive) to an aesthetic preference for System 2 commonly called right brained or logical).
Yes, but I intuitively dislike “salesy” stuff and then turn on System 2, put my revulsion aside and investigate if it still may be an objectively good product. To my System 1 it feels cheezy, dishonest and so on.
Let me propose another theory. It is all about being a spergy (Asperger) autistic misanthropic (so not only low social skills but more like disliking people) nerd geek who has fuck for social life and dislikes it in general. Social life is simply not honest. You are supposed to smile at people even though you are not always glad to see them yet you must say glad to see ya, and you must ask how are you even if you don’t care at all and when they ask the same you cannot give a true answer but must put up a smile and say great and so on. This disgusts people like me on a System 1 level, our System 1 is not wired for socialization and thus dislike the smell of untruth. It was very very hard for me to learn that people do not always mean everything literally they say. Often just saying things because it is expected to say those. And I did not like it one bit, I valued truth (not LW type super Bayesian truth, just expressing how you actually feel ) over kindness or conformity on a System 1 level.
And “salesy” stuff feels like all this socialization—but on steroids. For example salespeople in person act as as super-extroverted, and act like liking people very much. And advertisements feel like that too.
Note that “cheezy” is an entirely aesthetic term… this is what I’m talking about in terms of blind spots. Dishonest is not necessarily an aesthetic term… but in the sense you’re using it, it does seem to be more a value judgement than an evaluation that means “advertisements are lies because they tell you things that aren’t true.”
I agree with the rest of your analysis—one of the things I almost wrote about in my original answer is the relation between your aesthetic preferences and your social skills and desire for social interaction. hat you call “spergy” I call “an aesthetic preference for system 2.”
Wait, I don’t understand the relationship between system 2 preference and social interaction desire / skill. You saying social interaction is almost fully System 1? Come to think of it, I too see a correlation between them, but have not seen any sort of a theory that connects them causally.
I don’t think social interaction is fully system one—there’s a lot of political games and navigating relationships that are under the domain of system 2. But the act of socializing, in the moment, I see as largely system 1 driven.
A lot of this comes from a place where I didn’t understand social interactions at all… As I came to be able to interact more normally, one of the key things I learned is that in most cases of social interaction, the interaction is not about a logical exchange of information or ideas—it’s taking place on an emotional level.
System 1 is built for social interaction. It helps us with the tiny subcommunications that reveal things about our emotions and status, and it’s built to read other’s subcommunications that communicate the same things, and give us feelings about other people based on those subcommunications.
One of the reasons that people have “aspy” behavior is either that this part of their system 1 is not very powerful—they have trouble empathizing, reading those social cues, etc. AND/OR, they simply dislike that form of communication—they have an aesthetic preference for logical, factual conversations, instead of the empathy based emotional exchange that most “normal” interactions hinge on.
now I need to form a hypothesis how “normal” people, who like them, think.
Easy.
Forming judgements is hard. Evaluating facts and converting them to your preferences takes time, energy, and some qualifications. Taking the ready-made value judgment someone is offering you with a ribbon on top is a low-effort path.
Why is it self-serving? I do the same thing myself if, say, I need to buy something I don’t care much about. Let’s say I need to buy X, I run a quick Google search, so… people say they like brand Y, second review? they still like brand Y, OK, whatever, done. Quick and easy.
“in order to fix their own thinking” is worse than that—“fix” is just plain wrong, since it implies a permanent repair. “Improve” would be better as well as less hostile.
I’m not sure that most people would recognize “prior probabilities in Bayes’ theorem” as math—it might just come through as way too technical to be worth the trouble.
It sounds like you’re trying to reapply a principle from software development to online community building?
LW has scaled. Lots of people read this site. Our last survey got over 1000 respondents. (This may not sound like much compared to e.g. reddit, but there are lots of dead little online communities that no one sees because they’re dead; being dead is the default state for an online community. The relevant norm is /r/LessWrongLounge, not reddit as a whole.)
Well, the scaling problem in software development was specifically about getting a lot of users, so it seems relevant.
Anyway, if we have scaled, and we’re not having Eternal September, that suggests we’re doing something right.
Is that thing we’re doing ‘right’… keeping out the normal people? If so, that’s not so great. It’s important to get through to normal people.
My (inadequately stated) point was, we’re much more likely to have problems attracting enough normal people than having trouble dealing with a flood of them. A little change to the header isn’t going to make that big a difference.
I think the value of attracting users to LW has a power law distribution. Both Luke Muehlhauser and Nate Soares were “discovered” through their writing for LW, and both went on to be MIRI’s executive director. I think the core target audience for LW should be extremely intelligent people who, for one reason or another, haven’t managed to find an IRL cluster of other extremely intelligent people to be friends with. (Obviously I welcome math grad students at Caltech who want to contribute, but I think they’ll be substantially less motivated to find a community than someone of equivalent intellectual caliber who decided school was bullshit and dropped out at 17.)
Given that, I think LW’s marketing should be optimized for very smart people with finely tuned bullshit detectors who may be relatively uneducated but are probably budding autodidacts. (That’s part of the reason I added prominent links to the best textbooks thread/Anki when I wrote the about page.)
I think LW’s marketing should be optimized for very smart people with finely tuned bullshit detectors who may be relatively uneducated but are probably budding autodidacts.
That sounds like an excellent approach.
However it will make unhappy a bunch of people here who want to carry the torch of rationality into the masses and start raising waterlines :-/
Below is the current text (without links). I agree your sentence is helpful. Do you want to add it to the current page or replace the bias sentence?
This is written with highly self-reflective math geeks as the target audience. The first inclination of normal people would be to run away. Lemme demonstrate—where is my Normal Neurotypical Person hat? -- aha, here it is:
“in order to fix their own thinking”—this site is for broken people? I’m not broken!
“evidence disconfirming those models”—people don’t talk like that. Is “disconfirming” even a word?
“prior probabilities in Bayes’ theorem”—it’s all about math?? Run away!!
Is there a marketing major in the house? X-)
A mass market written message would almost immediately turn off this site’s core audience… I have two sites that have decently written, high converting copy. Both of them have been described by LWers as having great content , but too “salesy”.
I think a better approach might to be just go with less copy, but more design that conveys the message. Think apple, but selling “smart and winning” instead of “hip and cutting edge”.
I might try to put together a cool looking landing page that took this approach if there was enough interest.
What are the other two sites?
Newgradblueprint.com selfmaderenegade.net
Maybe, but we don’t have to stick to extremes and go from “math geek” directly to “used car salesman” :-)
Then who exactly is your target audience?
One of the core ideas of effective marketing is that you craft a message that excites your target—and as a result, that that message will necessarily turn away others who are not in that target audience.
If we wanted to go mass market, then we should craft a landing page for that market.
If we wanted to go for math geeks, we should keep the site as it is.
If we wanted to attract neither, we could go to a middle ground.
I like JMIV’s suggestions here.
I’m afraid design has the same problems as copy—I, at least, find the design of your sites below as off-puttingly ‘salesy’ as the copy. I think we might be dealing with a hipsterish phenomenom of acquired aversion to anything with mass-market effectiveness, which I’m not sure how to deal with.
I wouldn’t use similar design to those two sites—It doesn’t fit the brand or message of lesswrong. Like I said, I envision something more like the large white spaces and slick graphics of Apple.
It feels to salesy to me too and now I would like to understand this feeling better, namely why some people like and some dislike “salesy” things.
I think the idea is that I am used to judging the value of things for myself based on the technical facts. So a message like “THIS IS A VERY GOOD PRODUCT FOR YOU” is a turn-off. It looks like the advertisement is making a value judgement instead of letting me make it. Generally I respond best to advertisements that are strictly factual, even when the facts are obviously trying to be impressive. A “this car can go faster than 400 km/h!!!” would be effective on me, because it is a fact, not a value, and it is leaving me to decide if I value it.
So it seems, we who dislike “salesy” things generally dislike if others seem to be pushing value judgements on us. We prefer facts. Of course, facts can be grouped and displayed just as manipulatively, but in this kind of manipulation you are left more room, more freedom to decide on whether you care and thus how you value it.
Since almost everybody I know would dislike your sites and salesy things in general, and for me this is the normal, now I need to form a hypothesis how “normal” people, who like them, think. I think “normal people” are somehow okay with others pushing value judgements on them. For example, unlike me, they do not get annoyed if people say “Metallica is really great!” Unlike me, they do not reply “you should just say you really like Metallica”. They are not bothered by others communicating value judgements, not even if it is in a pushy way.
Which suggests they are really secure in their own value judgements :)
I think you yourself are pushing value judgments on these normal people (which isn’t bad BTW, pushing value judgements on others is a cornerstone of democracy) - but it is important to recognize that this is what’s happening (I think).
One way I like to think about people is on a sliding scale from an asethetic preference for System 1 (commonly called left brained or intuitive) to an aesthetic preference for System 2 commonly called right brained or logical). Most people in LW fall quite few standard deviations towards the System 2 side.
Despite all the talk about “straw vlucans”,it seems to me there’s a huge blindspot on LW for alleving that System 2 thinking is good, and System 1 thinking is bad—instead of realizing that each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and their own beauty.
I tend to fall more towards the center, and tend to see congruency as beautiful—when your intuitions and logic line up.
Sometimes I’ll let my System 2 drive the congruency, such as when I decide on the best habit, and then read lots of stories and brainwash myself to be excited for that habit. Sometimes I’ll let my system 1 drive, such as realizing that I would hate living for other people, so consciously choosing not to adopt all the facets of effective altruism.
I tend to be a BIT more more towards aeshetic preference for System 2 - so I do get that inherent revulsion to for instance, using your peer group as a heuristic for what you like—but I also understand the opposite aesthetic preference to EG not overthinking things.
Yes, but I intuitively dislike “salesy” stuff and then turn on System 2, put my revulsion aside and investigate if it still may be an objectively good product. To my System 1 it feels cheezy, dishonest and so on.
Let me propose another theory. It is all about being a spergy (Asperger) autistic misanthropic (so not only low social skills but more like disliking people) nerd geek who has fuck for social life and dislikes it in general. Social life is simply not honest. You are supposed to smile at people even though you are not always glad to see them yet you must say glad to see ya, and you must ask how are you even if you don’t care at all and when they ask the same you cannot give a true answer but must put up a smile and say great and so on. This disgusts people like me on a System 1 level, our System 1 is not wired for socialization and thus dislike the smell of untruth. It was very very hard for me to learn that people do not always mean everything literally they say. Often just saying things because it is expected to say those. And I did not like it one bit, I valued truth (not LW type super Bayesian truth, just expressing how you actually feel ) over kindness or conformity on a System 1 level.
And “salesy” stuff feels like all this socialization—but on steroids. For example salespeople in person act as as super-extroverted, and act like liking people very much. And advertisements feel like that too.
Note that “cheezy” is an entirely aesthetic term… this is what I’m talking about in terms of blind spots. Dishonest is not necessarily an aesthetic term… but in the sense you’re using it, it does seem to be more a value judgement than an evaluation that means “advertisements are lies because they tell you things that aren’t true.”
I agree with the rest of your analysis—one of the things I almost wrote about in my original answer is the relation between your aesthetic preferences and your social skills and desire for social interaction. hat you call “spergy” I call “an aesthetic preference for system 2.”
Wait, I don’t understand the relationship between system 2 preference and social interaction desire / skill. You saying social interaction is almost fully System 1? Come to think of it, I too see a correlation between them, but have not seen any sort of a theory that connects them causally.
I don’t think social interaction is fully system one—there’s a lot of political games and navigating relationships that are under the domain of system 2. But the act of socializing, in the moment, I see as largely system 1 driven.
A lot of this comes from a place where I didn’t understand social interactions at all… As I came to be able to interact more normally, one of the key things I learned is that in most cases of social interaction, the interaction is not about a logical exchange of information or ideas—it’s taking place on an emotional level.
System 1 is built for social interaction. It helps us with the tiny subcommunications that reveal things about our emotions and status, and it’s built to read other’s subcommunications that communicate the same things, and give us feelings about other people based on those subcommunications.
One of the reasons that people have “aspy” behavior is either that this part of their system 1 is not very powerful—they have trouble empathizing, reading those social cues, etc. AND/OR, they simply dislike that form of communication—they have an aesthetic preference for logical, factual conversations, instead of the empathy based emotional exchange that most “normal” interactions hinge on.
Easy.
Forming judgements is hard. Evaluating facts and converting them to your preferences takes time, energy, and some qualifications. Taking the ready-made value judgment someone is offering you with a ribbon on top is a low-effort path.
No, this is too self-serving. The most realistic interpretation is usually the one that does not make you feel better than others. I would propose this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/m7l/we_should_introduce_ourselves_differently/ce51
Why is it self-serving? I do the same thing myself if, say, I need to buy something I don’t care much about. Let’s say I need to buy X, I run a quick Google search, so… people say they like brand Y, second review? they still like brand Y, OK, whatever, done. Quick and easy.
“in order to fix their own thinking” is worse than that—“fix” is just plain wrong, since it implies a permanent repair. “Improve” would be better as well as less hostile.
I’m not sure that most people would recognize “prior probabilities in Bayes’ theorem” as math—it might just come through as way too technical to be worth the trouble.
Is that a bug or a feature?
Bug, definitely. Why would you even ask that? Even if normal people can’t contribute, we would definitely like everyone to think more clearly.
Eternal September is a thing...
Sure, but what was the saying? “The most likely scaling problem is that you aren’t going to have any scaling problems.”
So why would you ask any questions about scaling, right? X-/
It sounds like you’re trying to reapply a principle from software development to online community building?
LW has scaled. Lots of people read this site. Our last survey got over 1000 respondents. (This may not sound like much compared to e.g. reddit, but there are lots of dead little online communities that no one sees because they’re dead; being dead is the default state for an online community. The relevant norm is /r/LessWrongLounge, not reddit as a whole.)
Well, the scaling problem in software development was specifically about getting a lot of users, so it seems relevant.
Anyway, if we have scaled, and we’re not having Eternal September, that suggests we’re doing something right.
Is that thing we’re doing ‘right’… keeping out the normal people? If so, that’s not so great. It’s important to get through to normal people.
My (inadequately stated) point was, we’re much more likely to have problems attracting enough normal people than having trouble dealing with a flood of them. A little change to the header isn’t going to make that big a difference.
Eternal September is normal people.
(It’s a bit more selective than Soylent Green).
No, Eternal September is being overwhelmed by clueless noobs.
If the pace of growth is moderate enough that newbies acculturate before their population dominates, then you don’t enter that condition.
I think we’re in broad agreement :-D but let me stress the Eternal part...
I think the value of attracting users to LW has a power law distribution. Both Luke Muehlhauser and Nate Soares were “discovered” through their writing for LW, and both went on to be MIRI’s executive director. I think the core target audience for LW should be extremely intelligent people who, for one reason or another, haven’t managed to find an IRL cluster of other extremely intelligent people to be friends with. (Obviously I welcome math grad students at Caltech who want to contribute, but I think they’ll be substantially less motivated to find a community than someone of equivalent intellectual caliber who decided school was bullshit and dropped out at 17.)
Given that, I think LW’s marketing should be optimized for very smart people with finely tuned bullshit detectors who may be relatively uneducated but are probably budding autodidacts. (That’s part of the reason I added prominent links to the best textbooks thread/Anki when I wrote the about page.)
That sounds like an excellent approach.
However it will make unhappy a bunch of people here who want to carry the torch of rationality into the masses and start raising waterlines :-/