I do it in a roundabout way. I’ve gotten far fewer people started off by trying to teach them about biases directly than by saying “dude check out this fanfic it’s awesome HARRY’S A SCIENTIST,” or by showing them Crab Canon from Godel Escher Bach and telling them the rest of the book’s just as much fun, or by showing them the game of life. Once they’re hooked on these marvelous new ways of thinking, I show them the blog.
The goal here isn’t to spread the rationality meme—it’s to figure out whether “rationality” is a good word to use to describe the set of ideas contained within the rationality meme.
Methods of Rationality and the Game of Life are only interesting to a narrow portion of the population. My dad’s a rational guy and I thought he’d like Methods of Rationality—he hated it. The people who’ve liked it that I’ve shown it to are almost exactly in my demographic − 20 something males who already nerdy, geeky, and have similar sense of humor to me.
I think Rationality is important enough that we should not be limiting ourselves to that demographic. At the very least it warrants our consideration.
I’m thinking of doing a followup post that takes a step back and talks about the questions I set aside in my first paragraph, to discuss the overall problem more thoroughly before getting too attached to particular solutions.
I’ve had mostly negative reactions to Methods of Rationality from 20-something males (and a few females) who are nerdy and geeky and mostly already like GEB, so I agree that this community needs other methods of marketing.
Reaction to Methods seems highly polarized: almost every review of it I’ve seen either falls over itself to gush or sees it as pretentious and self-indulgent. Age and gender seem to matter less, by that stage, than contrarian tendencies and tolerance for what tvtropes calls an author tract, but the demographics of fanfiction readers are weighted heavily towards people in their teens and twenties already, so samples of older readers are small. The particular characteristics of Methods do probably push it towards the older end of the scale.
Since that’s more or less the demographic that LW attracts already, I’d say that Methods, and the rational fic meme more generally, are effective as advertising but ineffective in broadening the site’s appeal.
Your first paragraph rings true to me: the complaints I’ve heard are basically those you mentioned.
My friends are mostly fairly contrarian late-twenties male engineering, computing science and math people. I think that apart from not enjoying Methods, they’re pretty much the usual LW demographic. That’s part of the reason I was surprised when they didn’t like Methods. There are lots of possible reasons for this (to me) surprising result. Maybe they thought I didn’t like it, and wanted to mirror that back. Maybe they’re a group already biased against LW. Maybe they actually just dislike the writing style. Who knows? If they don’t enjoy Eliezer’s writing style, then maybe LW is not a good place for them to hang out, so it doesn’t matter that it didn’t work as advertising on them.
Do you think that LW doesn’t need other methods of marketing?
There are people on Less Wrong who dislike Methods. But I suspect Eliezer’s other book will do a decent job of attracting those that don’t like cock!Harry.
20 something males who already nerdy, geeky, and have similar sense of humor to me.
You can add 20-30-something females that are nerdy, geeky and probably have a similar sense of humour to you ;)
I have a minimum of two data points for that demographic ;)
That being said—I agree it should not be our only avenue or our only target demographic. But even if we expand readership/membership in just the geek demographic we can considerably improve our numbers.
From such experience, this might be a fruitful approach to trying to shift the gender imbalance in the community. It’s unfortunate that describing oneself as a rationalist can have the potential to come across as having a superiority complex, and doubly unfortunate is how common-place is the meme of rationality being a “men’s” thing (all women are slaves to their bleeding vaginas, amirite?)
A possible consequence of this is that, when it’s phrased explicitly as such, the idea of a “rationality community” conjures up images of boorish men talking about how “you’re irrational if you get offended when I say women are sluts who always cheat! IT’S SCIENCE!”, which is not at all an inviting atmosphere.
Stuff like that is something that does itself need to be combated, but in the meantime, books like GEB perfectly illustrate how whimsical and fun—AND WELCOMING—real rationality can be, introducing important concepts and making the reader feel brilliant and excited to learn, without the triggering the defensiveness that can occur through the implication that, if I want to teach you rationality it must mean I think you’re “not good enough” the way you are.
Totally agree. I’ll also add the invalid sterotype of “rationality is emotionless” slams smack bang into the equally invalid stereotype of “women are supposed to be emotional beings”… which doesn’t help.
So far I’ve encountered that people think rationalists are “smarter” and perhaps “intellectual snobs.” I have not come across anyone saying they would disapprove of a rationalist community, but so far have not found anyone that thinks the idea of being around those people would be a good thing. I think the exact quote would be “they would analyze everything I say.” or something to that effect.
The intellectual snob bit needs to be weeded out, along with the idea that it’s not a welcoming place to discuss ideas.
I do it in a roundabout way. I’ve gotten far fewer people started off by trying to teach them about biases directly than by saying “dude check out this fanfic it’s awesome HARRY’S A SCIENTIST,” or by showing them Crab Canon from Godel Escher Bach and telling them the rest of the book’s just as much fun, or by showing them the game of life. Once they’re hooked on these marvelous new ways of thinking, I show them the blog.
The goal here isn’t to spread the rationality meme—it’s to figure out whether “rationality” is a good word to use to describe the set of ideas contained within the rationality meme.
Methods of Rationality and the Game of Life are only interesting to a narrow portion of the population. My dad’s a rational guy and I thought he’d like Methods of Rationality—he hated it. The people who’ve liked it that I’ve shown it to are almost exactly in my demographic − 20 something males who already nerdy, geeky, and have similar sense of humor to me.
I think Rationality is important enough that we should not be limiting ourselves to that demographic. At the very least it warrants our consideration.
I’m thinking of doing a followup post that takes a step back and talks about the questions I set aside in my first paragraph, to discuss the overall problem more thoroughly before getting too attached to particular solutions.
I’ve had mostly negative reactions to Methods of Rationality from 20-something males (and a few females) who are nerdy and geeky and mostly already like GEB, so I agree that this community needs other methods of marketing.
Reaction to Methods seems highly polarized: almost every review of it I’ve seen either falls over itself to gush or sees it as pretentious and self-indulgent. Age and gender seem to matter less, by that stage, than contrarian tendencies and tolerance for what tvtropes calls an author tract, but the demographics of fanfiction readers are weighted heavily towards people in their teens and twenties already, so samples of older readers are small. The particular characteristics of Methods do probably push it towards the older end of the scale.
Since that’s more or less the demographic that LW attracts already, I’d say that Methods, and the rational fic meme more generally, are effective as advertising but ineffective in broadening the site’s appeal.
Your first paragraph rings true to me: the complaints I’ve heard are basically those you mentioned.
My friends are mostly fairly contrarian late-twenties male engineering, computing science and math people. I think that apart from not enjoying Methods, they’re pretty much the usual LW demographic. That’s part of the reason I was surprised when they didn’t like Methods. There are lots of possible reasons for this (to me) surprising result. Maybe they thought I didn’t like it, and wanted to mirror that back. Maybe they’re a group already biased against LW. Maybe they actually just dislike the writing style. Who knows? If they don’t enjoy Eliezer’s writing style, then maybe LW is not a good place for them to hang out, so it doesn’t matter that it didn’t work as advertising on them.
Do you think that LW doesn’t need other methods of marketing?
There are people on Less Wrong who dislike Methods. But I suspect Eliezer’s other book will do a decent job of attracting those that don’t like cock!Harry.
I’m a 50-something woman, and pretty fond of Methods. I like the earlier (more contrarian) parts best.
You can add 20-30-something females that are nerdy, geeky and probably have a similar sense of humour to you ;)
I have a minimum of two data points for that demographic ;)
That being said—I agree it should not be our only avenue or our only target demographic. But even if we expand readership/membership in just the geek demographic we can considerably improve our numbers.
From such experience, this might be a fruitful approach to trying to shift the gender imbalance in the community. It’s unfortunate that describing oneself as a rationalist can have the potential to come across as having a superiority complex, and doubly unfortunate is how common-place is the meme of rationality being a “men’s” thing (all women are slaves to their bleeding vaginas, amirite?)
A possible consequence of this is that, when it’s phrased explicitly as such, the idea of a “rationality community” conjures up images of boorish men talking about how “you’re irrational if you get offended when I say women are sluts who always cheat! IT’S SCIENCE!”, which is not at all an inviting atmosphere.
Stuff like that is something that does itself need to be combated, but in the meantime, books like GEB perfectly illustrate how whimsical and fun—AND WELCOMING—real rationality can be, introducing important concepts and making the reader feel brilliant and excited to learn, without the triggering the defensiveness that can occur through the implication that, if I want to teach you rationality it must mean I think you’re “not good enough” the way you are.
Totally agree. I’ll also add the invalid sterotype of “rationality is emotionless” slams smack bang into the equally invalid stereotype of “women are supposed to be emotional beings”… which doesn’t help.
What does “GEB” stand for?
So far I’ve encountered that people think rationalists are “smarter” and perhaps “intellectual snobs.” I have not come across anyone saying they would disapprove of a rationalist community, but so far have not found anyone that thinks the idea of being around those people would be a good thing. I think the exact quote would be “they would analyze everything I say.” or something to that effect.
The intellectual snob bit needs to be weeded out, along with the idea that it’s not a welcoming place to discuss ideas.
Gödel, Escher, Bach.
It looks interesting. I will pick it up and read it.