Decide who your audience is (LW front page readers, or smartish but non-rationality focused recent grads)
Pick a depressingly small n (lets say 3)
Gather a group of n * (# of articles submitted + 1 control) people in the target audience, have them answer a
questionnaire about their thoughts on philanthropy.
Get n to read each submitted article. Either print it out, or leave it on less wrong, but do it consistently. Follow proper procedures (say the same thing to everyone, don’t look at which article you’re giving them, leave them be for the same amount of time).
Wait m days (7?), and have them answer a second questionnaire about their thoughts on philanthropy.
The winner is the one with the biggest delta.
In other words: don’t look to consensus… use your senses :p
If you don’t know many people in this sample, you could just buy traffic to these articles (from that target audience—facebook or google would work great, stumbleupon should also do), and then judge by the total amount of time spent reading by 100 visitors.
Or hang up the articles as flyers at your local college campus (though this assumes that audience), and see if anyone picks them up to read them (and how long they read if they do).
Better suggestion:
Decide who your audience is (LW front page readers, or smartish but non-rationality focused recent grads)
Pick a depressingly small n (lets say 3)
Gather a group of n * (# of articles submitted + 1 control) people in the target audience, have them answer a questionnaire about their thoughts on philanthropy.
Get n to read each submitted article. Either print it out, or leave it on less wrong, but do it consistently. Follow proper procedures (say the same thing to everyone, don’t look at which article you’re giving them, leave them be for the same amount of time).
Wait m days (7?), and have them answer a second questionnaire about their thoughts on philanthropy.
The winner is the one with the biggest delta.
In other words: don’t look to consensus… use your senses :p
Two more ideas:
If you don’t know many people in this sample, you could just buy traffic to these articles (from that target audience—facebook or google would work great, stumbleupon should also do), and then judge by the total amount of time spent reading by 100 visitors.
Or hang up the articles as flyers at your local college campus (though this assumes that audience), and see if anyone picks them up to read them (and how long they read if they do).