In terms of spreading rationality it might be best to take the indirect approach.
I was thinking about that a bit, how increasing something like economic prosperity seems to help a lot of things (education, governmental stability, decreased violent crime, etc.) as well as other effects like decreasing religiosity. Note: I’m not going to try and cite these claims, it was more the general idea than these specifics. If anyone wants to make a rationality promoting-plan based on this strategy then more research needs to be done.
Consider, the people that invented the computers we use meant that lots of us know computer programming and have the vocabulary to talk about bayes theory.
I think that you’re right that inventing computers made considerably more people learn computer programming, but I’m not sure how much it’s raised the sanity waterline for non-programmers.
So one possibility is to invent very useful technologies that require people to have a rationalist mind set in order for them to use.
This was, to me, the most intriguing idea. Do you have any vague ideas of technologies which require rationality to use? It seems pretty easy to get a cargo-cult understanding of something and be able to use it without understanding how it works.
I guess it could also happen with something that only rationalists would want to use, like cryonics or mind uploading. Though, I feel like part of the reason to want to promote rationality is to speed up development of things like that.
I found these ideas pretty interesting.
I was thinking about that a bit, how increasing something like economic prosperity seems to help a lot of things (education, governmental stability, decreased violent crime, etc.) as well as other effects like decreasing religiosity. Note: I’m not going to try and cite these claims, it was more the general idea than these specifics. If anyone wants to make a rationality promoting-plan based on this strategy then more research needs to be done.
I think that you’re right that inventing computers made considerably more people learn computer programming, but I’m not sure how much it’s raised the sanity waterline for non-programmers.
This was, to me, the most intriguing idea. Do you have any vague ideas of technologies which require rationality to use? It seems pretty easy to get a cargo-cult understanding of something and be able to use it without understanding how it works.
I guess it could also happen with something that only rationalists would want to use, like cryonics or mind uploading. Though, I feel like part of the reason to want to promote rationality is to speed up development of things like that.