I was thinking not that compressing LW concepts into sign slogans would directly help people’s rationality, but that they would be interesting and unusual-sounding enough that people would want to find out more, and might ask the person holding the sign for more information. (Having a concept explained first-hand is probably better than being given a URL; even if the URL contains a more refined explanation than you can generate off the top of your head, it’s less likely that anyone will bother reading it.)
Well, “Advanced Sanity Techniques” conveys an important message: sanity is a scale with no upper limit, and a skill to study, rather than a distinction between damaged and undamaged minds, which is how most people think of it. That insight alone is worth quite a bit. And it’s very short; that’s important, because bigger fonts mean visibility from longer distances, and fewer tl;dr responses.
Of course, going around talking to people and explaining rationality concepts is great, for promoting rationality, for meeting people and just for fun, but I suspect the bottleneck will be the number of conversations you have time for, not the number of people attracted by your sign.
I was thinking not that compressing LW concepts into sign slogans would directly help people’s rationality, but that they would be interesting and unusual-sounding enough that people would want to find out more, and might ask the person holding the sign for more information. (Having a concept explained first-hand is probably better than being given a URL; even if the URL contains a more refined explanation than you can generate off the top of your head, it’s less likely that anyone will bother reading it.)
Well, “Advanced Sanity Techniques” conveys an important message: sanity is a scale with no upper limit, and a skill to study, rather than a distinction between damaged and undamaged minds, which is how most people think of it. That insight alone is worth quite a bit. And it’s very short; that’s important, because bigger fonts mean visibility from longer distances, and fewer tl;dr responses.
Of course, going around talking to people and explaining rationality concepts is great, for promoting rationality, for meeting people and just for fun, but I suspect the bottleneck will be the number of conversations you have time for, not the number of people attracted by your sign.