We don’t have a church, whether centralized like Mormonism/Catholicism or decentralized like Protestantism/Islam. No one dedicates their life to rationalism.
What do you think CFAR staff are doing instead of decidating their lifes to rationalism?
No one spends real time, energy or effort evangelizing rationalism. There are some arguments for why this isn’t done more, but I think the reason we don’t proselytize isn’t that we find the arguments against proselytize convincing. Rather it’s that no one get’s around to doing it. it’s a shame.
I don’t think that’s a good way to look at it. The limiting factor to growing the rationality community isn’t about convincing outsiders to join the rationality community but about creating events inside the community that the existing community wants to attend.
When it comes to Christianity it’s easy to convince people to attend the ritual of being at Church on Sunday as providing no special value besides the ritual. If you want to get rationalists to come to an event you have to make a better case that the event provides them value.
Then there’s the question of funding community. Currently, a lot of the free donation capital flows into EA causes and not in funding the rationalist community.
I doubt even 0.01% of people matching the intellectual profile of today’s lessWrongers have been exposed to rationalism.
That depends a lot on what you mean with intellectual profile of today’s lessWrongers. There are plenty of people that I know from intellectual contexts outside of LessWrong (and EA) that I meet again on LessWrong. For people who engage in a certain amount of exploring new ideas LessWrong is hard to miss. People might not end up integrating into LessWrong for various reasons.
Out of the old StevePavlina forum (that existed between 2006-2011) for example I think there are at least 3 of the top 100 posters very active in the rationalist community (and a good portion of the rest doesn’t belong in the rationalist community).
If we would start evangelizing and get people who aren’t of the mental type that finds LessWrong on their own that does involve getting people who are on average a different intellectual profile.
What do you think CFAR staff are doing instead of decidating their lifes to rationalism?
I don’t think that’s a good way to look at it. The limiting factor to growing the rationality community isn’t about convincing outsiders to join the rationality community but about creating events inside the community that the existing community wants to attend.
When it comes to Christianity it’s easy to convince people to attend the ritual of being at Church on Sunday as providing no special value besides the ritual. If you want to get rationalists to come to an event you have to make a better case that the event provides them value.
Then there’s the question of funding community. Currently, a lot of the free donation capital flows into EA causes and not in funding the rationalist community.
That depends a lot on what you mean with intellectual profile of today’s lessWrongers. There are plenty of people that I know from intellectual contexts outside of LessWrong (and EA) that I meet again on LessWrong. For people who engage in a certain amount of exploring new ideas LessWrong is hard to miss. People might not end up integrating into LessWrong for various reasons.
Out of the old StevePavlina forum (that existed between 2006-2011) for example I think there are at least 3 of the top 100 posters very active in the rationalist community (and a good portion of the rest doesn’t belong in the rationalist community).
If we would start evangelizing and get people who aren’t of the mental type that finds LessWrong on their own that does involve getting people who are on average a different intellectual profile.