This. If less wrong had been introduced to an audience of self-improvement health buffs and business people instead of nerdy booksmart Harry Potter fans, things would have been drastically different. it is possible to become more effective at optimizing for other goals besides just truth. People here seem to naively assume so as long as they have enough sufficiently accurate information everything else will simply fall into place and they’ll do everything else right automatically without needing to really practice or develop any other skills. I will be speaking more on this later.
I would replace “introduced” to “sold” or “made interesting” here. It’s not enough to introduce a group of people to something—unless their values are already in sync with said something’s _appearance_ (and the appearance, aka elevator pitch, aka hook, is really important here), you would need to apply some marketing/Dark Arts/rhetorics/whatever-you-call-it to persuade them it’s worth it. And, for all claims of “Rationalists should win”, Yudkowsky2008 was too much of a rhetorics-hater (really, not noticing his own pattern of having the good teachers of Defence against the Dark Arts in Hogwarts themselves practicing Dark Arts (or, in case of Lupin, *being* Dark Arts)?) to perform that marketing, and thus the blog went to attract people who already shared the values—nerdy booksmarts (note that a)to the best of my knowledge, HPMoR postdates Sequences; b)Harry Potter isn’t exactly a booksmart-choosing fandom, as is shown by many factors including the gross proportion of “watched-the-films-never-read-the-books” fans against readers AND people who imagine Draco Malfoy to be a refined aristocrat whose behavior is, though not nice, perfectly calibred instead of the petty bully we see in both books and films AND—I should stop here before I go on a tangent; so I am not certain how much “Harry Potter fans” is relevant).
This. If less wrong had been introduced to an audience of self-improvement health buffs and business people instead of nerdy booksmart Harry Potter fans, things would have been drastically different. it is possible to become more effective at optimizing for other goals besides just truth. People here seem to naively assume so as long as they have enough sufficiently accurate information everything else will simply fall into place and they’ll do everything else right automatically without needing to really practice or develop any other skills. I will be speaking more on this later.
I would replace “introduced” to “sold” or “made interesting” here. It’s not enough to introduce a group of people to something—unless their values are already in sync with said something’s _appearance_ (and the appearance, aka elevator pitch, aka hook, is really important here), you would need to apply some marketing/Dark Arts/rhetorics/whatever-you-call-it to persuade them it’s worth it. And, for all claims of “Rationalists should win”, Yudkowsky2008 was too much of a rhetorics-hater (really, not noticing his own pattern of having the good teachers of Defence against the Dark Arts in Hogwarts themselves practicing Dark Arts (or, in case of Lupin, *being* Dark Arts)?) to perform that marketing, and thus the blog went to attract people who already shared the values—nerdy booksmarts (note that a)to the best of my knowledge, HPMoR postdates Sequences; b)Harry Potter isn’t exactly a booksmart-choosing fandom, as is shown by many factors including the gross proportion of “watched-the-films-never-read-the-books” fans against readers AND people who imagine Draco Malfoy to be a refined aristocrat whose behavior is, though not nice, perfectly calibred instead of the petty bully we see in both books and films AND—I should stop here before I go on a tangent; so I am not certain how much “Harry Potter fans” is relevant).