I didn’t look deeply in to the material, but good branding gives people a good feeling about a thing, and I think rationality could use some better branding. In my experience a lot of people bounce off a lot of the material cause they have negative associations with it or it’s not packaged in a way that appeals. I think even if (I didn’t check) the material is too superficial to be useful as content, it’s still useful to increase people’s affinity / positive association with rationality.
That’s a complicated topic—how useful are positive associations of “rationality” (the word) if they do not come with the right content?
On one hand, it seems like not really; we are promoting the word, but not the thing that the word represents. We might even be teaching people to associate the word with a wrong thing.
On the other hand, it’s not like negative associations would be better, so...
I don’t know.
(Someone should review that Amazon book, but I am not going to buy it.)
Hmm, so improving the ‘brand’ of rationality isn’t really the aim of our organization, but rather to help make critical thinking, scientific literacy, and rationality itself more popular and instantiated in minds / culture / politics etc. Having said that, I think the ways that both myself and other rational skeptics have gone about promoting this cause in the past has been counter-productive. In the oughts when I called myself a militant atheist, I naively flattered myself that my hitch-slap smackdowns of what I deemed to be irrational nonsense were serving the noble cause of promoting rationality. Oh the irony. It is, imo, deeply irrational to think that attacking people and using a tone of contempt will result in anything other than profoundly negative outcomes in most situations.
Just for the record, the book we link to is titled ‘How Minds Change’ and is written by one of our directors David McRaney – we don’t benefit from it as an organization, but its contents are highly relevant to this discussion. Also, we’re a registered 501c3 non profit, and currently we are 100% volunteer based i.e. no one is paid a salary (though I have previously paid myself, years ago, on a contract basis for design work, though even then at about 10% of my usual rates).
Thanks for the explanation! Are you familiar with the community here and around Astral Codex Ten (ACX)? There are meetups and events (and a lot of writers) who focus on the art and skill of rationality. That was what led to my question originally.
Yes, absolutely – I’ve always been a rationalist (or at least attempted to be). I read a lot of the new atheists’ work early on, and have been involved in various rationalist-type communities on the internets. I really ought to be more involved in the community and seek to make the School of Thought more involved too. Thanks for making this post!
I didn’t look deeply in to the material, but good branding gives people a good feeling about a thing, and I think rationality could use some better branding. In my experience a lot of people bounce off a lot of the material cause they have negative associations with it or it’s not packaged in a way that appeals. I think even if (I didn’t check) the material is too superficial to be useful as content, it’s still useful to increase people’s affinity / positive association with rationality.
That’s a complicated topic—how useful are positive associations of “rationality” (the word) if they do not come with the right content?
On one hand, it seems like not really; we are promoting the word, but not the thing that the word represents. We might even be teaching people to associate the word with a wrong thing.
On the other hand, it’s not like negative associations would be better, so...
I don’t know.
(Someone should review that Amazon book, but I am not going to buy it.)
Hmm, so improving the ‘brand’ of rationality isn’t really the aim of our organization, but rather to help make critical thinking, scientific literacy, and rationality itself more popular and instantiated in minds / culture / politics etc. Having said that, I think the ways that both myself and other rational skeptics have gone about promoting this cause in the past has been counter-productive. In the oughts when I called myself a militant atheist, I naively flattered myself that my hitch-slap smackdowns of what I deemed to be irrational nonsense were serving the noble cause of promoting rationality. Oh the irony. It is, imo, deeply irrational to think that attacking people and using a tone of contempt will result in anything other than profoundly negative outcomes in most situations.
Just for the record, the book we link to is titled ‘How Minds Change’ and is written by one of our directors David McRaney – we don’t benefit from it as an organization, but its contents are highly relevant to this discussion. Also, we’re a registered 501c3 non profit, and currently we are 100% volunteer based i.e. no one is paid a salary (though I have previously paid myself, years ago, on a contract basis for design work, though even then at about 10% of my usual rates).
Thanks for the explanation! Are you familiar with the community here and around Astral Codex Ten (ACX)? There are meetups and events (and a lot of writers) who focus on the art and skill of rationality. That was what led to my question originally.
Yes, absolutely – I’ve always been a rationalist (or at least attempted to be). I read a lot of the new atheists’ work early on, and have been involved in various rationalist-type communities on the internets. I really ought to be more involved in the community and seek to make the School of Thought more involved too. Thanks for making this post!