I was also unimpressed by the T-shirts. It’s just… I think it’s easier to move from “bad shirts” to “good shirts” than from “no shirts” to “good shirts”. It’s just a different bitmap to print.
(My personal preference about shirts is “less is better”. I would like to have a T-shirt only saying “LessWrong.com″, and even that with smaller letters, not across the whole body. And preferably not a cheap looking shirt; not being white would probably be a good start.)
Generally, what I would really like is something between the Intentional Insights approach, and what we are doing now. Something between “hey, I’m selling something! look here! look here! gimme your money and I will teach you the secret!” and “uhm, I’m sitting here in the corner, bumbling something silently, please continue to ignore me, we are just a small group of nerds”. And no, the difference is not between “taking money” and “not taking money”; CFAR lessons aren’t free either.
Seems to me that nerds have the well-known bias of “too much talking, no action”. That’s not a reason to go exactly the opposite way. It’s just… admirable what a single dedicated person can do.
Thanks for the positive sentiment about the single dedicated person!
Just FYI, there’s much more that Intentional Insights does than the click-bait stuff on Lifehack. We try to cover the whole range between CFAR’s targeting of the top 5%, and ClearerThinking’s targeting of techy young people in the coastal cities already interested in decision-making (the latter is from my conversations with Spencer Greenberg). We’ve been heavily orienting toward the skeptic/secular market as a start, and then right now are going into the self-improvement sector and also policy/politics commentary. We offer a wide variety of content, much of it higher-level than the self-improvement articles. I talk more about this topic in my comment about our strategy.
To be clear about taking money, Intentional Insights is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, not a for-profit company. The vast majority of our content is free, and we make our way mainly on donations.
P.S. Will keep in mind your preferences for a shirt. We currently have one that looks a lot like what you describe, here Can you let me know how that looks compared to your ideal?
I was also unimpressed by the T-shirts. It’s just… I think it’s easier to move from “bad shirts” to “good shirts” than from “no shirts” to “good shirts”. It’s just a different bitmap to print.
(My personal preference about shirts is “less is better”. I would like to have a T-shirt only saying “LessWrong.com″, and even that with smaller letters, not across the whole body. And preferably not a cheap looking shirt; not being white would probably be a good start.)
Generally, what I would really like is something between the Intentional Insights approach, and what we are doing now. Something between “hey, I’m selling something! look here! look here! gimme your money and I will teach you the secret!” and “uhm, I’m sitting here in the corner, bumbling something silently, please continue to ignore me, we are just a small group of nerds”. And no, the difference is not between “taking money” and “not taking money”; CFAR lessons aren’t free either.
Seems to me that nerds have the well-known bias of “too much talking, no action”. That’s not a reason to go exactly the opposite way. It’s just… admirable what a single dedicated person can do.
Thanks for the positive sentiment about the single dedicated person!
Just FYI, there’s much more that Intentional Insights does than the click-bait stuff on Lifehack. We try to cover the whole range between CFAR’s targeting of the top 5%, and ClearerThinking’s targeting of techy young people in the coastal cities already interested in decision-making (the latter is from my conversations with Spencer Greenberg). We’ve been heavily orienting toward the skeptic/secular market as a start, and then right now are going into the self-improvement sector and also policy/politics commentary. We offer a wide variety of content, much of it higher-level than the self-improvement articles. I talk more about this topic in my comment about our strategy.
To be clear about taking money, Intentional Insights is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, not a for-profit company. The vast majority of our content is free, and we make our way mainly on donations.
P.S. Will keep in mind your preferences for a shirt. We currently have one that looks a lot like what you describe, here Can you let me know how that looks compared to your ideal?
Colors: great.
(The grey-brown and pink versions are also okay. I guess any version other than white is okay.)
Font size: still too large.
By how many percent smaller would be good?
Two inches high at most. However, feel free to ignore me; I almost surely won’t buy the shirt, and other people may have different preferences.
Anyway, this is off-topic, so I won’t comment here about the shirts anymore.
I think quite the reverse. Inertia is a thing and bad shirts are “we already have them”.
Making some shirts is a low-effort endeavour -- just throw the design at CafePress or Zazzle and you’re done.
I prefer the experimental approach, of experimenting and then figuring out better ways to do things. This is how the most successful startups work.
Besides, we are doing new t-shirts now based on the feedback. Your thoughts on these two options would be helpful 1 and 2.
For this you need a way to measure and assess outcomes. What is the metric that you are using to figure out what’s “better”?
Feedback from aspiring rationalists :-)