META: Who Have You Told About LW?
I’ve been lurking on LW since shortly after it started, and on OB for about six months before that. In that time, I’ve told four or five people about it. I would make a terrible evangelist.
I’m curious as to whether other people have the same problem. I’d like to tell lots of people about LW, but I don’t think they’re ready for it. If they read a statement like “purchase utilons and warm fuzzies separately” their eyes would glaze over, and they’d walk away thinking LW was some sort of crackpot site.
I have found certain posts and topics to be fairly good hooks for getting people interested. An Alien God is a good suggested read for people with an interest in evolutionary theory and the Cthulhu mythos (surprisingly high crossover in my experience). HP:MoR is also a pretty popular hook. The site itself isn’t really optimised for word-of-mouth, though, and not everyone likes child wizards and blasphemous horrors.
How many people have you introduced to LW? Who were they, how do you do it and what was their reaction? How could we do it better?
I’ve avoided linking people here due to weirdness signalling. Cryonics, FAI, and Singularity are all crazy relative to the mainstream, and they’re not why I read the site.
I just read the survey from May 2009 than jimrandomh posted a link to. I found it extremely interesting. I would guess, from the postings I’ve read, that the demographics haven’t changed drastically since that survey was taken.
Re: IQ’s- I remember from one of my psychology classes that the 98th percentile is an IQ of 130 and the 99th is 150. I find it quite believable that the average IQ on this board is in the 140′s. I know my IQ is in the 98th or 99th percentile, based on how I did on other standardized tests and I feel like the dumbest person on the board when I read many of the posts.
I recommend being selective about recommending this board. If someone fits into the demographics and seems like he would like discussing the common topics, go ahead- but it is definitely not for most people.
I prefer to link people to Three Worlds Collide, and sometimes HP:MoR, or just to You Are Not So Smart. None of my friends and relatively few of my acquaintances are either “aspie” enough or Internet-savvy enough to not get put off by LW’s Singularitarianism, lingo, and complexity (in that order).
A few friends and acquaintances who are already into skeptical outlook and critical thinking. I can’t think of any who’s followed up.
Not everyone out there follows an explicit policy of seeking places where they can hope to be the dumbest person in the room.
A friend recommended it (and to look at the posts of some of his friends here). But I would like to know more about how the participants are, how many and what backgrounds. Many contributions look to me like from male teenagers with deficient education, but being hobby comuter users with interest in popular science. Correct guess?
It’s a bit out of date, but there was a survey on Less Wrong’s demographics.
We should do another one of these, Less Wrong has grown a lot since May 2009...
Who exactly are you asking to appraise your guess?
Those who can provide information. What is “OB”? Have you data on the level of knowledge in sciences and mathematics? “Libertarians”—is that not an other name for right-extremists? Then, “Singularity” is the 21st century libertarian’s “Wunderwaffe”-myth?
I don’t think anyone’s in a position to conclusively confirm or deny your speculation on LW-participant demographics, although you might find useful the link to the survey results jimrandomh posted above.
OB is Overcoming Bias, formerly a blog on rationality with multiple contributors, including Eliezer Yudkowsky, now the personal blog of Robin Hanson.
The only data on maths/science knowledge in the LW community I know to exist can be found in the aforementioned survey results. It is probably out of date.
“Right-extremists” is probably not a helpful way to think of how the term “libertarian” is used here. It refers more to advocacy of individual liberty than a position on a classical 1-dimensional political spectrum. I wouldn’t describe myself as a libertarian, though, and I’m certainly not an authority on them, so other people are probably better-placed to answer that question.
“Singularity” is probably a bit too big to elaborate on in a couple of sentences, but it’s conceptually distinct from libertarianism. I like to describe it as follows: there are technological achievements which we know to be theoretically possible, but which, if developed, would entirely rewrite the rules by which human beings exist. I don’t believe this is comparable to the wunderwaffe concept.
I generally avoid telling people I’m here because I’m a bit embarrassed about spending time on the internet at all. Two exceptions so far: one a friend of mine who essentially thinks like Robin Hanson, and one a friend who’d have a really interesting perspective to add.
“Spending time on the internet” (as opposed to “wasting time on various things when you’re supposed to be working on something productive”) seems like an odd thing to be embarrassed of in today’s world. Can you elaborate?
I’ve pointed one friend I thought might appreciate it to the OB archives, which are my primary draw to this site at the moment. (I’ve been here less than a month.)
Assuming that “it” is attracting useful contributors without being overwhelmed by clutter, I recommend linking in your own social space (blog, Facebook, email to friends, conversations) to specific articles you think exemplify the virtues of the site/community (NB: I said “exemplify,” not “discuss”).
People who like it will look around near it. People who don’t like it will wander off. Which is basically what you want.
I wrote large chunks of the RationalWiki article, which has actually attracted RW readers. LW is an interesting site even for lurkers. Someone started an EY article too.
So, start an article or post a relevant link in your preferred social space as relevant. Taking care to set a good example, since humans tend to judge ideas by their advocates before they judge the content, irrational or not.
(I myself consume LW as a work-avoidance amusement somewhere in with Slashdot, RW and answering all my email (one of my most effective recent life hacks was to actually keep Gmail closed and not check it more often than hourly), so I may not be the best example to follow.)
I’ve persuaded my very smart ex to start reading, but AFAICT reading the sequences after the fact is quite a lot more work than reading them was at the time, so unless I get around to scraping all the content and turning it into an eBook, it may be easier to wait until the book comes out.
If you want to convince averagely-rational people of something, be a living example of it working. Use that blog like the Internet native you are. Kill the Buddha and write your own understanding of it—you don’t own the material until you could teach it, after all. You can expect people who know you to listen to you personally, because they know you. Give success stories—think of them as worked examples rather than anecdotes, if that helps.
Attract, don’t push—EY didn’t do a sales push for OB/LW.
(This is what I meant when I said I didn’t understand your idea of publicity, and I still don’t understand why I had to dredge for three months for your video rather than you doing the obvious and publicising it on your increasingly dusty blog or even in the same place where you publicised the talk. But this comment indicates you do in fact have an interest in spreading these ideas, rather than a cunning plan I don’t understand that involves not doing so.)
Handing your friends a book full of interesting memes doesn’t work, because people don’t take advice in general, and they particularly don’t take advice by reference—handing them a book is expecting them to convince themselves of your arguments for you.
It does work well enough in some examples, which is why people with a particularly compelling memetic infection wake you up far too early on a Saturday morning wanting to give you a book. But doing this to your friends is, I suspect, more likely to lead to them categorising you with the people waking them up far too early on a Saturday morning, thus losing both you and the book valuable reputation points.
(That said, knocking on doors and giving free books on rationality to strangers strikes me as an amusing idea. Though not amusing enough to do it myself.)
It is heuristically justifiable not to take on others’ meme infections lightly, and even to avoid doing so. Western culture is made of the most virulent obtainable memes, and they’re usually selling toothpaste or car insurance. Beliefs should pay rent in one’s head; an apparently infectious meme, producing the “convert” effect in its host, is one to avoid more than less infectious ones. Being a living success story is a very convincing counterargument. Worked for EY.
Er, have you watched the video? I haven’t publicized it because I basically want to redo it from the top.
Ya got me there. I haven’t watched it. (Watching video? Painful. Must read transcript.) And that is indeed a good reason. (Though one of the reasons I ask is that blog.ciphergoth.org ends on an unresolved note, looking like something untoward has happened to you.) Hope the rest of the comment is useful.
Got my brother obsessed with MoR.
Habitually link to relevant sequence posts in threads on imageboards, reddit, etc.
In the days of OB, gushed about the blog to random acquaintances, but I don’t think they got it.
I’ve linked to it a few times on other blogs. Other than that, I’ve mostly told family members...
I have introduced a few of my friends to LW, but as far as I know none of them read it regularly. I need cooler friends.
I don’t know if I can descrigbe my meme spreading endevaours as “introduced” about my meme spreading endeavors, more like occasionally name dropping when discussing things like politics (craziness), technological progress, the scientific method, evolution, logic or space travel.
I don’t think I’m actually making a difference, the activation energies appear to be too high, the “best” result I have to show is my best friend having a temporary affective death spiral around my beliefs (which are heavily LW influenced), he reverted later, I don’t think I really made him rational in any real way (even during the height of the death spiral I didn’t think he was really becoming more rational, the death spiral was just that, a death spiral not founded on reasoned thought).
I’ve actually had difficulty even having a discussion with my GF on this (because of the number of cached thoughts from LW that I’ve assimilated and the added difficulty of translating the memes on the fly from English) after she expressed skepticism about human minds being implementable (to my best estimate she expressed concerns about the feasibility of measurement) in a different medium as well as her aversion to cryonics (which mostly boiled down to “I would be too lonley” and “why do you want to spend an eternity without me?”).