(I’ll respond in not-specifically-double-cruxing mode first of all, and then move on to the crux-refining bit at the end. I shall note that arguably I could simply declare victory because you end up by saying that we should do something less visibly-weird than making HPMOR prominent on the front page, but arguments aren’t meant to be about winning and losing around here and as you’ll see when I return to the topic later I think our positions do still differ.)
OK, there’s some good stuff here and we can already identify some things we (not very surprisingly) agree on.
We are agreed that neither HPMOR nor any other “legacy content” should be taking up a big chunk of the front page for established LW users. (And I think we’re broadly agreed on roughly what the situation should be for those users.) So we’ve refined the question to: Should HPMOR be displayed prominently on the front page as it is shown to newcomers?
We are agreed that a community doesn’t have to be appealing to everyone in order to be useful, and that the LW community will probably never be appealing to everyone. In particular, we are agreed that “some people will be put off by having HPMOR prominently on the front page” is not on its own a strong argument against. (I think I’ve made it clear that that wasn’t my argument, and I think you understood that, but no harm in making it explicit again.)
We are agreed that if LW has value beyond merely being a fun place to chat (which ain’t nothing, but the ambitions were always higher than that) its value has something to do with helping people to become good thinkers who are effective in getting valuable things done. I think I might give some weight to goals less ambitious than yours, though; aside from trying to produce intellectual heavy hitters who Change The World, if LW helps a bunch of people to think a bit better in ways that are somewhat useful then it is doing one of the good things it is meant to be here for. And I think it’s at least possible that LW may do more good by helping lots of not-so-world-changing people a bit than by fostering world-changers. Obviously this is a side-issue, but in the context of the HPMOR-on-the-front-page question it may play the same role as a difference in moral values might in a discussion of (say) economic policy.
So, in this context you say: HPMOR is valuable not merely because it may attract people to LW or to rationality but also because it may change its readers for the better, inspiring them to combine rationality and ambition to improve the world. That’s a thing I hadn’t taken into account in my analysis, and in so far as it’s true it does give more reason to make it prominent because now we have to consider the scenario where someone arrives at the LW front page, the presence of HPMOR isn’t going to make a difference to whether they hang around, but it might affect how useful they are afterwards.
I’m skeptical about the strength of this effect—I suspect the great majority of HPMOR readers are not inspired by it in a way that makes a substantial difference to their lives, and that those who are were probably already rationalist types before they read HPMOR—but I’m aware that this is not based on any actual information. Is anything known about how many people who weren’t already rationalists have been inspired by HPMOR to make a serious effort at being rational and changing the world, and (even harder to find out) what they have actually done as a result?
The other thing I’d like to point out about this line of argument is that on the face of it it’s arguing for a proposition like “HPMOR is valuable” rather than one like “HPMOR should be on the front page”. (Hence my emphasis in the paragraph above on HPMOR readers who weren’t already rationalists.)
Then you move on to another couple of related arguments: that putting HPMOR proudly on centre stage is a way of saying “here, we don’t care too much about traditional signals of prestige” and that while it may make some people bounce off they’re mostly going to be people we don’t want here anyway because they care about the wrong things. Acknowledgement of the second of those was meant to be implicit in some of what I wrote above, but going back and rereading I see that that’s not very clear. Anyway, I agree that the first point has some merit but … not very much. I mean, if someone came up to you and asked “What are the most important ideas that distinguish LW-style rationalism from other ways of thinking, and how would you convey them to casual readers?” I’m guessing that “don’t pay too much attention to traditional prestige markers” wouldn’t be that near the top of the list, and even if it were “put some Harry Potter fanfiction on the front page of our website” probably wouldn’t be near the top of the list of the ways to say it.
Perhaps at this point we’ve got something like the right consequentialist question to ask, and it goes something like this. Consider all the people who come to the LW front page without already being LW users. We are interested in five subsets of them, and the effects of them of having HPMOR prominently on the front page.
People who see HPMOR there and take a look, and end up being inspired to be like HJPEV in caring deeply about the world and making a serious effort to think as well as possible so as to improve the world more effectively. Benefits: these people may improve the world; they may be good people to have around LW.
People who see HPMOR there and take a look, who merely enjoy it, and who decide to hang around LW as a result. Benefits: these people may also turn out to improve the world, especially if LW helps them think better; they may be good people to have around LW. Harms: more of these than of the first set may turn out not to be good people to have around LW.
People who see HPMOR there and are put off because they are attached to traditional prestige markers and HPMOR trips their low-status alarms, so they don’t hang around when they otherwise might have. Benefits: we lose some people who are less likely to be good thinkers. Harms: we lose the opportunity to help them become better thinkers.
People who see HPMOR there and are put off because they specifically don’t care for fanfiction, even though in general they’re able to see past traditional prestige markers. Benefits and harms: we lose the opportunity to help these people and the opportunity for them to help us.
People who see HPMOR there, think “ha ha, these people are silly”, and badmouth us to others as a result. Harms: while these people were probably never going to gain anything from, or contribute anything to, LW, their badmouthing may put others off.
And then the question is: when we add up all these benefits and harms, how do they balance out? You reckon the wins outweigh the losses, pointing out 1 and 3 in particular but also acknowledging the harms from 2. I reckon the losses outweigh the wins, pointing out 3, 4, and 5 in particular.
Something like this is probably a double-crux. It’s not clear to me how useful it is, though. The empirical questions (how many people are there in each group? how much more ambitious are people in group 1? etc.) seem very difficult to answer, and weighing up the various costs and benefits is hard even conditional on answers to the empirical questions (how do we compare one person who’s a bit more ambitious to improve the world, with five people producing a little more low-quality chat in discussion threads?) and I worry that what we’ve done here is akin to the Fully General Answer to all questions about what’s best: you just look at all the consequences, and see which one comes out better :-). Considering your point 1 does move my estimate of the net effect a little in the “beneficial” direction, but my previous estimate was that having HPMOR on the front page is clearly harmful on net and my current guess is that 1 isn’t close to being enough to change this.
Finally, I’ll note again that your “Having said all that” comment seems like it ends up quite close to my position; but I don’t want to overstate the extent of our agreement. I’m not sure that a similarly-prominent “Rational Fiction” box would be an improvement on the HPMOR box; anyone actually investigating will see HPMOR as soon as they do, and the other stuff that would be at the far end of the link is probably mostly weirder than HPMOR (and mostly lower in quality, too). My guess is that it’s also less likely to inspire than HPMOR is, so one of the more intriguing pro-HPMOR arguments gets weaker if what’s being proposed is a “Rational Fiction” collection rather than just HPMOR.
Cool. I’m going to attempt to wrap up threads where possible (avoiding this turning into a many-headed-hydra). I think we’re mostly in agreement about what the problem is.
Things that still stand out as worth noting:
Arguably I could simply declare victory because you end up by saying that we should do something less visibly-weird than making HPMOR prominent on the front page
I want to push back a bit on “declare victory” being a thing that’s relevant here. (This is sort of semantic but I think it’s actually pretty important). A key element of Productive Disagreement is shifting away from “someone gets to win” to “we get to figure out the right/true/most-useful thing.”
And in this case I think we have similar enough goals that we’re actually able to do that (whereas in some disagreements, you have to recurse all the way to “do we even both believe in consequentialism?” or “do we even both believe in objective measurable truth, or on what counts as evidence about that?”)
I suspect the great majority of HPMOR readers are not inspired by it in a way that makes a substantial difference to their lives, and that those who are were probably already rationalist types before they read HPMOR
I’m not sure about the total numbers either, but this point is very salient to me because HPMOR radically changed my life trajectory, when several previous “why not change the world?” type people and books failed to do so. I read HPMOR before sequences and am not sure what it’d have been like if it’d been reversed, but my sense is “The Sequences are the System 2 content of LessWrong, HPMOR is the System 1 content.”
I’m guessing that “don’t pay too much attention to traditional prestige markers” wouldn’t be that near the top of the list, and even if it were “put some Harry Potter fanfiction on the front page of our website” probably wouldn’t be near the top of the list of the ways to say it.
I pretty much agree with this. Insofar as HPMOR is necessary to have easily-accessible, I think it is a solvable problem to make it look somewhat classier. (I’m not committed to replacing it with the “rationalist fiction” page, but I’ll note an advantage of that is if you aren’t trying to explain it in a single paragraph in a quarter-of-the-front-page, you have more room to set the context of why HPMOR exists and why to give it a second look if you have an allergic reaction to it)
Sum Consequences
(Or, converting this into an empirical question that’s answerable)
I don’t think either of us would consider this definitive, but I think we’d at least both consider it evidence if a LW Survey attempted to solicit questions about how big an effect size reading the Sequences, HPMOR and Slatestar have been on people’s ambition, life goals, etc.
Doing this properly is tricky. The ideal version of it would be a legit randomized control trial that included people outside this community. I think that’s impractical, but it should be tease out something.
I agree that it’s wrap-up time, so just a few comments on your few comments.
First, let me push back on your push-back on the “declare victory” comment. In the very same sentence as that comment I added: “but arguments aren’t meant to be about winning and losing around here”. Please don’t try to make it look as if I don’t appreciate this, when I’ve made it explicit that I do. Thanks.
The fact that you read HPMOR before the Sequences and found that it changed your life is very interesting, and is evidence for your inspiration theory (though obviously less evidence than it would be if someone else reported the same experience).
I agree that one advantage of putting the link to HPMOR somewhere less space-constrained is that you get to explain it better when it’s first seen.
And yes, I agree that we might get useful information from an LW survey if for some reason it prioritized this. Perhaps if no one but you reported having their life changed by HPMOR you’d change your mind; perhaps if 10% of readers did I’d change mine. I think it would be really difficult to get any handle on how many people see HPMOR on the front page, decide “I want nothing to do with these people”, and badmouth rationalism to their friends, from any sort of survey, but perhaps it’s fair to guess that the number who overreact so dramatically won’t be large.
> First, let me push back on your push-back on the “declare victory” comment. In the very same sentence as that comment I added: “but arguments aren’t meant to be about winning and losing around here”.
Yeah, I think my comment came across stronger/differently than I meant it to (and re-reading both your comment and mine I think that’s a mistake on my part).
I meant something like “I see that we’re both arguing in good faith and trying to do a good thing, but it feels a little sad that the ‘victory’ mindset from traditional debate is still lingering at all.”
For comparison: there were multiple times when I wrote recent comments on Double Crux that I accidentally wrote “your opponent.” In both cases, you and I generally were approaching things in the right mindset, but I think it’s a good habit, when one notices creeping “opposition-mindness” to flag it and let it pass.
Rereading your comment I think that is what you were intended to do, I just didn’t initially read it that way. Sorry.
Wrapping Up
So it sounded like some final things potentially worth doing are:
a) Actually put some effort into operationalizing the survey thing. (It so happens that the survey is in-the-zeitgeist right now, but it looks like this year’s survey was already pretty long).
I am interested in talking to the survey-folk about doing something with this next year. It doesn’t feel pressing to me to continue with this in the immediate future but seemed at least worth considering.
b) Potentially, take what we’ve written here and turn it into something more easily digestible (or maybe just more easily findable) as a publicly-available transcript. (Basically, I think turning our series of comments into a single top-level post would be useful. Is that something you’d be okay with and/or interested in doing?)
I’ve no objection to making our comments into a top-level post. My only concern (which has nothing to do with its being our comments rather than anyone else’s) is that this would fall firmly into the category of discussion of the community rather than discussion of the things the community is about, and maybe that’s a thing we want less of rather than more.
It occurs to me that I said something ambiguous. By “I’ve no objection to making our comments into a top-level post” I meant “I’ve no objection to our comments being made into a top-level post”; I wasn’t saying anything about my willingness or unwillingness to do the work myself.
… I suppose I should answer the obvious followup question. I don’t mind doing the work myself but if I do it’s likely to be quite some time before I get round to it. If someone else does the work I don’t mind offering constructive criticism, corrections, etc., and would probably be quicker about doing that.
Is anything known about how many people who weren’t already rationalists have been inspired by HPMOR to make a serious effort at being rational and changing the world, and (even harder to find out) what they have actually done as a result?
I have been keeping track of which people have read at least parts of HPMOR either directly or indirectly because of my recommendation, so I think I can give at least a rough idea of what the answer may look like.
All of this is as far as I know, I haven’t directly asked many of the people about this.
Including myself, I know of 14 people who read (parts of) HPMOR (excluding the people I’ve met through LW/EA of course). Of those:
3 (including myself) I would consider actively involved in the LW community, having read a lot of the rationalist materials and going to real-life meetups
3 are interested in rationality but haven’t actually looked into it that much
6 don’t seem interested in learning more about rationality
2 I don’t know anything about
The first group of people is probably has the highest percentage of “people who […] have been inspired by HPMOR to make a serious effort at being rational and changing the world”, but it’s not inconceivable that those people also exist in the other groups. And it is only the first group, that it would be possible to capture with a LW survey.
Thanks! Just to check I’ve understood, these are all people who had no previous exposure to the LW community before you said “hey, why don’t you read this thing”?
Do you have any conjectures about how the results might have been different if HPMOR hadn’t existed and instead you’d pointed them at the LW website, or the “Sequences”, or some non-LW resource with related content (e.g., one of the various books about irrationality and cognitive biases and the like)?
(I’ll respond in not-specifically-double-cruxing mode first of all, and then move on to the crux-refining bit at the end. I shall note that arguably I could simply declare victory because you end up by saying that we should do something less visibly-weird than making HPMOR prominent on the front page, but arguments aren’t meant to be about winning and losing around here and as you’ll see when I return to the topic later I think our positions do still differ.)
OK, there’s some good stuff here and we can already identify some things we (not very surprisingly) agree on.
We are agreed that neither HPMOR nor any other “legacy content” should be taking up a big chunk of the front page for established LW users. (And I think we’re broadly agreed on roughly what the situation should be for those users.) So we’ve refined the question to: Should HPMOR be displayed prominently on the front page as it is shown to newcomers?
We are agreed that a community doesn’t have to be appealing to everyone in order to be useful, and that the LW community will probably never be appealing to everyone. In particular, we are agreed that “some people will be put off by having HPMOR prominently on the front page” is not on its own a strong argument against. (I think I’ve made it clear that that wasn’t my argument, and I think you understood that, but no harm in making it explicit again.)
We are agreed that if LW has value beyond merely being a fun place to chat (which ain’t nothing, but the ambitions were always higher than that) its value has something to do with helping people to become good thinkers who are effective in getting valuable things done. I think I might give some weight to goals less ambitious than yours, though; aside from trying to produce intellectual heavy hitters who Change The World, if LW helps a bunch of people to think a bit better in ways that are somewhat useful then it is doing one of the good things it is meant to be here for. And I think it’s at least possible that LW may do more good by helping lots of not-so-world-changing people a bit than by fostering world-changers. Obviously this is a side-issue, but in the context of the HPMOR-on-the-front-page question it may play the same role as a difference in moral values might in a discussion of (say) economic policy.
So, in this context you say: HPMOR is valuable not merely because it may attract people to LW or to rationality but also because it may change its readers for the better, inspiring them to combine rationality and ambition to improve the world. That’s a thing I hadn’t taken into account in my analysis, and in so far as it’s true it does give more reason to make it prominent because now we have to consider the scenario where someone arrives at the LW front page, the presence of HPMOR isn’t going to make a difference to whether they hang around, but it might affect how useful they are afterwards.
I’m skeptical about the strength of this effect—I suspect the great majority of HPMOR readers are not inspired by it in a way that makes a substantial difference to their lives, and that those who are were probably already rationalist types before they read HPMOR—but I’m aware that this is not based on any actual information. Is anything known about how many people who weren’t already rationalists have been inspired by HPMOR to make a serious effort at being rational and changing the world, and (even harder to find out) what they have actually done as a result?
The other thing I’d like to point out about this line of argument is that on the face of it it’s arguing for a proposition like “HPMOR is valuable” rather than one like “HPMOR should be on the front page”. (Hence my emphasis in the paragraph above on HPMOR readers who weren’t already rationalists.)
Then you move on to another couple of related arguments: that putting HPMOR proudly on centre stage is a way of saying “here, we don’t care too much about traditional signals of prestige” and that while it may make some people bounce off they’re mostly going to be people we don’t want here anyway because they care about the wrong things. Acknowledgement of the second of those was meant to be implicit in some of what I wrote above, but going back and rereading I see that that’s not very clear. Anyway, I agree that the first point has some merit but … not very much. I mean, if someone came up to you and asked “What are the most important ideas that distinguish LW-style rationalism from other ways of thinking, and how would you convey them to casual readers?” I’m guessing that “don’t pay too much attention to traditional prestige markers” wouldn’t be that near the top of the list, and even if it were “put some Harry Potter fanfiction on the front page of our website” probably wouldn’t be near the top of the list of the ways to say it.
Perhaps at this point we’ve got something like the right consequentialist question to ask, and it goes something like this. Consider all the people who come to the LW front page without already being LW users. We are interested in five subsets of them, and the effects of them of having HPMOR prominently on the front page.
People who see HPMOR there and take a look, and end up being inspired to be like HJPEV in caring deeply about the world and making a serious effort to think as well as possible so as to improve the world more effectively. Benefits: these people may improve the world; they may be good people to have around LW.
People who see HPMOR there and take a look, who merely enjoy it, and who decide to hang around LW as a result. Benefits: these people may also turn out to improve the world, especially if LW helps them think better; they may be good people to have around LW. Harms: more of these than of the first set may turn out not to be good people to have around LW.
People who see HPMOR there and are put off because they are attached to traditional prestige markers and HPMOR trips their low-status alarms, so they don’t hang around when they otherwise might have. Benefits: we lose some people who are less likely to be good thinkers. Harms: we lose the opportunity to help them become better thinkers.
People who see HPMOR there and are put off because they specifically don’t care for fanfiction, even though in general they’re able to see past traditional prestige markers. Benefits and harms: we lose the opportunity to help these people and the opportunity for them to help us.
People who see HPMOR there, think “ha ha, these people are silly”, and badmouth us to others as a result. Harms: while these people were probably never going to gain anything from, or contribute anything to, LW, their badmouthing may put others off.
And then the question is: when we add up all these benefits and harms, how do they balance out? You reckon the wins outweigh the losses, pointing out 1 and 3 in particular but also acknowledging the harms from 2. I reckon the losses outweigh the wins, pointing out 3, 4, and 5 in particular.
Something like this is probably a double-crux. It’s not clear to me how useful it is, though. The empirical questions (how many people are there in each group? how much more ambitious are people in group 1? etc.) seem very difficult to answer, and weighing up the various costs and benefits is hard even conditional on answers to the empirical questions (how do we compare one person who’s a bit more ambitious to improve the world, with five people producing a little more low-quality chat in discussion threads?) and I worry that what we’ve done here is akin to the Fully General Answer to all questions about what’s best: you just look at all the consequences, and see which one comes out better :-). Considering your point 1 does move my estimate of the net effect a little in the “beneficial” direction, but my previous estimate was that having HPMOR on the front page is clearly harmful on net and my current guess is that 1 isn’t close to being enough to change this.
Finally, I’ll note again that your “Having said all that” comment seems like it ends up quite close to my position; but I don’t want to overstate the extent of our agreement. I’m not sure that a similarly-prominent “Rational Fiction” box would be an improvement on the HPMOR box; anyone actually investigating will see HPMOR as soon as they do, and the other stuff that would be at the far end of the link is probably mostly weirder than HPMOR (and mostly lower in quality, too). My guess is that it’s also less likely to inspire than HPMOR is, so one of the more intriguing pro-HPMOR arguments gets weaker if what’s being proposed is a “Rational Fiction” collection rather than just HPMOR.
Cool. I’m going to attempt to wrap up threads where possible (avoiding this turning into a many-headed-hydra). I think we’re mostly in agreement about what the problem is.
Things that still stand out as worth noting:
I want to push back a bit on “declare victory” being a thing that’s relevant here. (This is sort of semantic but I think it’s actually pretty important). A key element of Productive Disagreement is shifting away from “someone gets to win” to “we get to figure out the right/true/most-useful thing.”
And in this case I think we have similar enough goals that we’re actually able to do that (whereas in some disagreements, you have to recurse all the way to “do we even both believe in consequentialism?” or “do we even both believe in objective measurable truth, or on what counts as evidence about that?”)
I’m not sure about the total numbers either, but this point is very salient to me because HPMOR radically changed my life trajectory, when several previous “why not change the world?” type people and books failed to do so. I read HPMOR before sequences and am not sure what it’d have been like if it’d been reversed, but my sense is “The Sequences are the System 2 content of LessWrong, HPMOR is the System 1 content.”
I pretty much agree with this. Insofar as HPMOR is necessary to have easily-accessible, I think it is a solvable problem to make it look somewhat classier. (I’m not committed to replacing it with the “rationalist fiction” page, but I’ll note an advantage of that is if you aren’t trying to explain it in a single paragraph in a quarter-of-the-front-page, you have more room to set the context of why HPMOR exists and why to give it a second look if you have an allergic reaction to it)
Sum Consequences
(Or, converting this into an empirical question that’s answerable)
I don’t think either of us would consider this definitive, but I think we’d at least both consider it evidence if a LW Survey attempted to solicit questions about how big an effect size reading the Sequences, HPMOR and Slatestar have been on people’s ambition, life goals, etc.
Doing this properly is tricky. The ideal version of it would be a legit randomized control trial that included people outside this community. I think that’s impractical, but it should be tease out something.
I agree that it’s wrap-up time, so just a few comments on your few comments.
First, let me push back on your push-back on the “declare victory” comment. In the very same sentence as that comment I added: “but arguments aren’t meant to be about winning and losing around here”. Please don’t try to make it look as if I don’t appreciate this, when I’ve made it explicit that I do. Thanks.
The fact that you read HPMOR before the Sequences and found that it changed your life is very interesting, and is evidence for your inspiration theory (though obviously less evidence than it would be if someone else reported the same experience).
I agree that one advantage of putting the link to HPMOR somewhere less space-constrained is that you get to explain it better when it’s first seen.
And yes, I agree that we might get useful information from an LW survey if for some reason it prioritized this. Perhaps if no one but you reported having their life changed by HPMOR you’d change your mind; perhaps if 10% of readers did I’d change mine. I think it would be really difficult to get any handle on how many people see HPMOR on the front page, decide “I want nothing to do with these people”, and badmouth rationalism to their friends, from any sort of survey, but perhaps it’s fair to guess that the number who overreact so dramatically won’t be large.
> First, let me push back on your push-back on the “declare victory” comment. In the very same sentence as that comment I added: “but arguments aren’t meant to be about winning and losing around here”.
Yeah, I think my comment came across stronger/differently than I meant it to (and re-reading both your comment and mine I think that’s a mistake on my part).
I meant something like “I see that we’re both arguing in good faith and trying to do a good thing, but it feels a little sad that the ‘victory’ mindset from traditional debate is still lingering at all.”
For comparison: there were multiple times when I wrote recent comments on Double Crux that I accidentally wrote “your opponent.” In both cases, you and I generally were approaching things in the right mindset, but I think it’s a good habit, when one notices creeping “opposition-mindness” to flag it and let it pass.
Rereading your comment I think that is what you were intended to do, I just didn’t initially read it that way. Sorry.
Wrapping Up
So it sounded like some final things potentially worth doing are:
a) Actually put some effort into operationalizing the survey thing. (It so happens that the survey is in-the-zeitgeist right now, but it looks like this year’s survey was already pretty long).
I am interested in talking to the survey-folk about doing something with this next year. It doesn’t feel pressing to me to continue with this in the immediate future but seemed at least worth considering.
b) Potentially, take what we’ve written here and turn it into something more easily digestible (or maybe just more easily findable) as a publicly-available transcript. (Basically, I think turning our series of comments into a single top-level post would be useful. Is that something you’d be okay with and/or interested in doing?)
Apology accepted, obviously.
I’ve no objection to making our comments into a top-level post. My only concern (which has nothing to do with its being our comments rather than anyone else’s) is that this would fall firmly into the category of discussion of the community rather than discussion of the things the community is about, and maybe that’s a thing we want less of rather than more.
Ah, gotcha. Maybe make it a Meta post in this case.
Yeah, I think it should be Meta.
It occurs to me that I said something ambiguous. By “I’ve no objection to making our comments into a top-level post” I meant “I’ve no objection to our comments being made into a top-level post”; I wasn’t saying anything about my willingness or unwillingness to do the work myself.
… I suppose I should answer the obvious followup question. I don’t mind doing the work myself but if I do it’s likely to be quite some time before I get round to it. If someone else does the work I don’t mind offering constructive criticism, corrections, etc., and would probably be quicker about doing that.
I actually went ahead and did it last night (wording was ambiguous but seemed to imply you weren’t up for it in near future anyway)
So here it is. If you feel any of my commentary is misrepresenting you let me know.
I have been keeping track of which people have read at least parts of HPMOR either directly or indirectly because of my recommendation, so I think I can give at least a rough idea of what the answer may look like.
All of this is as far as I know, I haven’t directly asked many of the people about this.
Including myself, I know of 14 people who read (parts of) HPMOR (excluding the people I’ve met through LW/EA of course). Of those:
3 (including myself) I would consider actively involved in the LW community, having read a lot of the rationalist materials and going to real-life meetups
3 are interested in rationality but haven’t actually looked into it that much
6 don’t seem interested in learning more about rationality
2 I don’t know anything about
The first group of people is probably has the highest percentage of “people who […] have been inspired by HPMOR to make a serious effort at being rational and changing the world”, but it’s not inconceivable that those people also exist in the other groups. And it is only the first group, that it would be possible to capture with a LW survey.
Thanks! Just to check I’ve understood, these are all people who had no previous exposure to the LW community before you said “hey, why don’t you read this thing”?
Do you have any conjectures about how the results might have been different if HPMOR hadn’t existed and instead you’d pointed them at the LW website, or the “Sequences”, or some non-LW resource with related content (e.g., one of the various books about irrationality and cognitive biases and the like)?