If you think the goal is to get people to read the sequences, you may be setting yourself up to fail.
The sequences are HUGE. The indexes for just the four “core sequences” are somewhere north of 10,000 words. Those link to over a hundred and fifty 2,000-3,000-word posts. That’s about 300,000-450,000 words for those four. And there are eighteen sequences in all. For comparison, Lord Of The Rings is 454,000 words.
So what you’re asking for is: How many people would invest their time to closely read several thick self-published volumes of philosophy writing by someone they’ve never heard of if they were introduced to them?
I fear this number may be rather small.
In addition, people tend to avoid reading large philosophical treatises intended to infect them with memes, presented to them by people wanting to infect them with memes. This is because these sort of people tend to wake them up by knocking on their door too early on a Sunday morning. You know it’s not a cult, but they don’t.
And they’re not being just foolish or refusing to learn because they won’t privilege the hypothesis of your personal favoured infectious meme cluster being good for them rather than a sucker shoot - there’s good reason to pay attention to one’s mental hygiene before decompartmentalising too early, particularly for the average human who not only has the biases but is largely unaware of them. Memetic parasites are real, so one must in fact make the effort not to inadvertently present oneself as looking like the victim of one.
I hope you can look at the numbers and understand why, when someone answers a newbie’s question on something with “You should try reading the sequences”, it’s pretty much an extremely rude dismissal.
Possible useful approach: you don’t really know the material until you own it in your own head and could rewrite it. So. Make rationality posts on your own blog too, for outreach. Copy good ones here for LW’s consumption. But get your friends interested in rationality.
BTW, I’m Myers-Briggs ENFP. And no, I haven’t ploughed through the sequences. Though I have been reading books again of late, so it’s in the plausible range.
If you think the goal is to get people to read the sequences, you may be setting yourself up to fail.
The sequences are HUGE. The indexes for just the four “core sequences” are somewhere north of 10,000 words. Those link to over a hundred and fifty 2,000-3,000-word posts. That’s about 300,000-450,000 words for those four. And there are eighteen sequences in all. For comparison, Lord Of The Rings is 454,000 words.
So what you’re asking for is: How many people would invest their time to closely read several thick self-published volumes of philosophy writing by someone they’ve never heard of if they were introduced to them?
I fear this number may be rather small.
In addition, people tend to avoid reading large philosophical treatises intended to infect them with memes, presented to them by people wanting to infect them with memes. This is because these sort of people tend to wake them up by knocking on their door too early on a Sunday morning. You know it’s not a cult, but they don’t.
And they’re not being just foolish or refusing to learn because they won’t privilege the hypothesis of your personal favoured infectious meme cluster being good for them rather than a sucker shoot - there’s good reason to pay attention to one’s mental hygiene before decompartmentalising too early, particularly for the average human who not only has the biases but is largely unaware of them. Memetic parasites are real, so one must in fact make the effort not to inadvertently present oneself as looking like the victim of one.
I hope you can look at the numbers and understand why, when someone answers a newbie’s question on something with “You should try reading the sequences”, it’s pretty much an extremely rude dismissal.
Possible useful approach: you don’t really know the material until you own it in your own head and could rewrite it. So. Make rationality posts on your own blog too, for outreach. Copy good ones here for LW’s consumption. But get your friends interested in rationality.
BTW, I’m Myers-Briggs ENFP. And no, I haven’t ploughed through the sequences. Though I have been reading books again of late, so it’s in the plausible range.
Here is someone doing something like this: blogging about reading all of LessWrong from the start.
The other thing is, if I were picking the best 450,000 words on Less Wrong I wouldn’t just pick the sequences.