Hmm. If you want people you know to get into LessWrong, don’t undermine the value of your own enthusiasm. When I told my family about this site, I was all excited, like “I found this amazing new site, and I learned X, and they talk all about Y, which is so relevant to my life, and don’t you hate when people do Z? Well they talk about that too!” Now my dad and little sister are hooked on the rationality ebook, even though they both generally read nothing more than fiction/fantasy. My little sister is fascinated by it despite still being a strong Christian and “weeding out the anti-Christian stuff.”
As for the homepage… I think it’s really good to mention the biases. But had I stumbled here randomly rather than from this being at the top of SSC’s recommended blog list, I might have been turned away by all the jargon, too. Maybe just put super brief summaries in parentheses next to them?
I was thinking about summaries—that would help a lot. It might also be possible to choose biases with more intuitive names, like the sunk cost fallacy.
Yeah… scope insensitivity is probably the best from the list, since it sounds intuitive but isn’t commonly known like the sunk cost fallacy. Then again, completely new ones would make people more curious, and as long as there were summaries, they probably wouldn’t be turned off by the unfamiliar names.
Hmm. If you want people you know to get into LessWrong, don’t undermine the value of your own enthusiasm. When I told my family about this site, I was all excited, like “I found this amazing new site, and I learned X, and they talk all about Y, which is so relevant to my life, and don’t you hate when people do Z? Well they talk about that too!” Now my dad and little sister are hooked on the rationality ebook, even though they both generally read nothing more than fiction/fantasy. My little sister is fascinated by it despite still being a strong Christian and “weeding out the anti-Christian stuff.”
As for the homepage… I think it’s really good to mention the biases. But had I stumbled here randomly rather than from this being at the top of SSC’s recommended blog list, I might have been turned away by all the jargon, too. Maybe just put super brief summaries in parentheses next to them?
I was thinking about summaries—that would help a lot. It might also be possible to choose biases with more intuitive names, like the sunk cost fallacy.
Yeah… scope insensitivity is probably the best from the list, since it sounds intuitive but isn’t commonly known like the sunk cost fallacy. Then again, completely new ones would make people more curious, and as long as there were summaries, they probably wouldn’t be turned off by the unfamiliar names.