This is not a comment about this post itself, but about your approach more generally. I know you’ve had some negative responses/downvotes from LW members about aspects of your approach, and I join them to some extent, particularly concerning the tone/style of your blogposts: heavily hyperlinked and with a voice highly reminiscent of the “non rational” self-help arena. More specifically, evangelical Christian self-help which I see a lot of, as my extended family is deeply involved with this sort of material.
I appreciate that I am not your target audience, with your aim of bringing rationality to the masses, but perhaps it’s appropriate to take an analytical approach to evaluate progress, now that you’ve been at it for three months. Have people been sharing your posts? If so, which posts have been shared, or attracted the most conversation? Have you engaged the masses in some other ways? And if not, how do you intend to adapt your approach to do so more effectively? Perhaps follow-up with people who have engaged with your content might be useful—are they still with you? If not, why did they stop?
I also wonder whether your posting style here is getting in the way of better engagement with the LW community, and thus constructive advice.… particularly the repetition/redundancy in promoting your organisation.
This is really helpful for a meta-perspective, thank you! Let me answer the questions by turn.
First, some statistics. We’ve had increasing success over time with the engagement for our posts. For example, this latest post got 104 hits on the website on Monday, which was the highest one-day hit for our content (the previous highest was 76). We’ve had quite a bit of success with promoting our content through other channels, for example the Richard Dawkins Foundation promoted our content and it got a lot of “Likes” and reshares. Our 38-minute video of a workshop we did has over 600 views, and over 4,600 minutes watched.
Second, intentions to revise our blog style and content in general. We are right now gathering feedback for some revision in the style of our blog posts, including by talking to our target audience, both folks who read our blog posts for a while and also ones who did not. The engagement with Less Wrong is also intended to help us gain feedback in order to optimize our content. The main feedback we got so far is to make our content less hyperlinked, more specific and concrete, more visually appealing, and actually more self-helpy, to present ourselves as science-based self-improvement providers. We also got a lot of feedback that we should make short videos, and we intend to work on that as well, although that’s a harder task due to us lacking appropriate equipment and software.
Regarding promoting the organization on LW: we’re doing that for Less Wrongers who are not familiar with us or what we do. We don’t want to fall under the curse of knowledge :-) Perhaps there can be a better way of doing so—any suggestions would be welcomed. Also, any other ideas for how to engage better with the LW community would be great.
We are also in talks with the Secular Student Alliance, the American Ethical Union, the Unitarian Universalist Humanist Association, the American Humanist Association, and other organizations to promote our rationality-oriented content through their channels. In fact, we will be appearing on the American Humanist Association’s popular podcast, The Humanist Hour, tomorrow. We are also collaborating to produce resources for local affiliates of these national organizations to use as a means of promoting rationality.
So that’s where we are so far. Any suggestions on how to optimize our approach would be great.
BTW, here’s the link to the Humanist Hour that just came out. What are your thoughts on how I presented rational thinking there, and any suggestions for improvement? Keep in mind this was aiming at humanist audiences, so even before the interview the hosts steered me to orient specifically toward what they thought the audience would find valuable. Thus, the interview focused more on secular humanist issues, such as finding meaning and purpose. Still, I got to talk about map and territory and other rationality strategies, as well as cognitive biases such as planning fallacy and sunken costs.
This is not a comment about this post itself, but about your approach more generally. I know you’ve had some negative responses/downvotes from LW members about aspects of your approach, and I join them to some extent, particularly concerning the tone/style of your blogposts: heavily hyperlinked and with a voice highly reminiscent of the “non rational” self-help arena. More specifically, evangelical Christian self-help which I see a lot of, as my extended family is deeply involved with this sort of material.
I appreciate that I am not your target audience, with your aim of bringing rationality to the masses, but perhaps it’s appropriate to take an analytical approach to evaluate progress, now that you’ve been at it for three months. Have people been sharing your posts? If so, which posts have been shared, or attracted the most conversation? Have you engaged the masses in some other ways? And if not, how do you intend to adapt your approach to do so more effectively? Perhaps follow-up with people who have engaged with your content might be useful—are they still with you? If not, why did they stop?
I also wonder whether your posting style here is getting in the way of better engagement with the LW community, and thus constructive advice.… particularly the repetition/redundancy in promoting your organisation.
This is really helpful for a meta-perspective, thank you! Let me answer the questions by turn.
First, some statistics. We’ve had increasing success over time with the engagement for our posts. For example, this latest post got 104 hits on the website on Monday, which was the highest one-day hit for our content (the previous highest was 76). We’ve had quite a bit of success with promoting our content through other channels, for example the Richard Dawkins Foundation promoted our content and it got a lot of “Likes” and reshares. Our 38-minute video of a workshop we did has over 600 views, and over 4,600 minutes watched.
Second, intentions to revise our blog style and content in general. We are right now gathering feedback for some revision in the style of our blog posts, including by talking to our target audience, both folks who read our blog posts for a while and also ones who did not. The engagement with Less Wrong is also intended to help us gain feedback in order to optimize our content. The main feedback we got so far is to make our content less hyperlinked, more specific and concrete, more visually appealing, and actually more self-helpy, to present ourselves as science-based self-improvement providers. We also got a lot of feedback that we should make short videos, and we intend to work on that as well, although that’s a harder task due to us lacking appropriate equipment and software.
Regarding promoting the organization on LW: we’re doing that for Less Wrongers who are not familiar with us or what we do. We don’t want to fall under the curse of knowledge :-) Perhaps there can be a better way of doing so—any suggestions would be welcomed. Also, any other ideas for how to engage better with the LW community would be great.
We are also in talks with the Secular Student Alliance, the American Ethical Union, the Unitarian Universalist Humanist Association, the American Humanist Association, and other organizations to promote our rationality-oriented content through their channels. In fact, we will be appearing on the American Humanist Association’s popular podcast, The Humanist Hour, tomorrow. We are also collaborating to produce resources for local affiliates of these national organizations to use as a means of promoting rationality.
So that’s where we are so far. Any suggestions on how to optimize our approach would be great.
BTW, here’s the link to the Humanist Hour that just came out. What are your thoughts on how I presented rational thinking there, and any suggestions for improvement? Keep in mind this was aiming at humanist audiences, so even before the interview the hosts steered me to orient specifically toward what they thought the audience would find valuable. Thus, the interview focused more on secular humanist issues, such as finding meaning and purpose. Still, I got to talk about map and territory and other rationality strategies, as well as cognitive biases such as planning fallacy and sunken costs.