Would publishing a newspaper be an efficient way to raise the sanity waterline?
More specifically, I imagine a newspaper freely distributed to people living in a given area, financed by donations and advertising. It would contain interesting topics about science, both for beginners and experts. It would explain how the stuff works. It would avoid mindkilling topics, such as politics and religion. In some situations it could provide uncontroversial background information for some hot topics. It would contains some easy rationality exercises.
Why? It could move people towards rationality, which is a good thing. Not necessarily the top priority (I am not suggesting that CFAR should stop organizing minicamps and do this instead), but a part of our long-term goals. Newspaper seems like a good tool to reach many people… the question is: how strong would be its influence? I don’t know, but I think it would be worth trying.
Why paper, instead of internet? Trivial inconveniences. When someone already has a piece of paper in their hand, it is so easy to start reading it. I don’t know how many people would actually read the newspaper, but I think it could be 10-25%. Imagine the possible impact of 10% people in your area reading texts about rationality and science. You can make a website a lot cheaper, but it will not make the same concentrated impact. Although it could be a good idea to make a web forum for discussing the articles in the newspaper.
How about costs? Exact numbers depend on your location, but I would say that newspapers are rather cheap. It’s the cheapest kind of paper, and the cheapest kind of color. The more you print, the cheaper one piece gets. I suspect the usual costs are mostly editing and distribution. And this could be done by volunteers, plus one coordinator. There is no need to print frequently; once in a month or once in two months could be enough for the beginning.
I don’t know how much money could come through the advertising, but if it would cover the costs of printing plus coordinator’s salary, there is no need for more. Some people are in this business for money; so if we won’t try to make a profit, only to cover our costs, it should be possible. If the experiment starts in the CFAR surroundings, that includes Berkeley university; here one could find the volunteers for distribution, and it could also be an interesting demographics for advertising.
The content for the newspaper could be recycled from Wikipedia, LW, what you learned at school, etc. It does not matter that it was already published online, because most readers did not read it online, even if they easily could. Trivial inconveniences, again. The goal is not to bring readers to LW. (Except for those who are likely to enjoy it. LW is controversial; this newspaper should be acceptable for most people) The goal is to raise the sanity waterline, to pick the lowest hanging fruit.
Open problem: Measuring the impact of the newspaper; at least approximately.
One idea would be to measure improving the sanity waterline in some specific topics. Select topics important for your neighborhood, where the irrational behavior contributes significantly. Make prediction about the most likely future development of this topic (ask external experts to make the prediction). Randomly select one topic, and make it the topic of the month. Compare the outcome of this topic with the predictions, and the outcome of the remaining topics. (Don’t do this publicly to avoid negative connotations of experimenting with humans.)
People have been trying to do social engineering with print for hundreds of years and trying to educate the general populace to the scientific worldview for at least a century, and yet the sanity waterline is still as low as it is. Many intellectual subcultures have published pamphlets with contents that the in-group finds very convincing, yet they generally always end up ignored.
What would the newspaper be doing differently compared to the things that came before?
People have been trying to do social engineering with print for hundreds of years and trying to educate the general populace to the scientific worldview for at least a century, and yet the sanity waterline is still as low as it is.
I’m not sure. People in 1900 or 1950 had less knowledge than we do now, but they might have had a mainstream culture that took the knowledge they had more seriously than ours does. I’d have to be more of a historian to be able to tell how much this was actually the case.
How well does having Jaynes, Kahneman & Tversky, and The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences measure up to creationism as a political platform, blank-slate leftism and postmodernism in academia, or climate denial and anti-vaccinationists getting massive media attention?
EDIT: My mental model of Robin Hanson also notes that all else being equal, you might expect people with less surplus resources to have a higher sanity waterline, since they have a smaller margin for engaging in delusional signaling before they start running out of vital resources like food.
You could always do a veil of ignorance style thought experiment and ask how crazy you would expect things to be for you if you were a person chosen at random at a given time and place to try to sum over some of the contexts.
Should differences in agency be accounted for somehow? If there’s a single god-emperor somehow able to order absolutely everyone around in minute detail, should you consider only the sanity of the god-emperor, or also of everyone else, when all they can do is obey the god-emperor? The lives of the populace are going to suck, but will be actively crazy only if the god-emperor orders them to do stuff that results in craziness. One idea of the past is that there was more overt control by some sort of small social elite caste and the general populace had less individual decision-making ability then.
We probably think about different specific examples, so I will describe the ones I have seen.
Most of free papers I get contain advertising. Pictures of products, and prices. In most cases, nothing else. In some cases, a few short boring stories are included. I think that the goal here is to sell as much stuff as possible, and the publishers probably discovered that a legible content, beyond some bare minimum, does not really help sell more.
Then I get a free newspaper from our house caretaker. In this case the goal is to provide us some basic house-related info, and to remind us about how lucky we are to have this specific caretaker. This is the nearest example to free newspaper education I have seen, but it is extremely limited in scope.
Sometimes I get a municipal newspaper (usually when the municipal election is near), which provides some info about what happenned around us (culture, construction, problems) and gently reminds us about how much our municipal representatives did for us and why we should vote for them again.
At university I have seen some free newspaper for students, rather boring. My suspicion was that it was just a pretext to get some government funding, put money in editors’ pockets, and generate some output with random content. Anyway, it was supposed to be about fun and opportunities (such as travelling), not education.
None of these had general education as a goal. And those are the only examples of free newspapers I have seen repeatedly. -- But the situation may be different in other places.
People have been trying to do social engineering with print for hundreds of years and trying to educate the general populace to the scientific worldview for at least a century
I guess it is just a century or two that enough people are literate. And newspapers were considered powerful and dangerous; this is why censorship existed. (Though it does not prove that newspapers are efficient in education, specifically.)
The education of general population is typically done in schools. I think it works rather well… depending on what you compare it with. Compared with situation centuries ago, people can read and write, do some simple math, don’t believe in witches, etc. That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Perhaps the schools could be more efficient (that is a separate discussion I would love to have once, but not now). But the side effect of free mandatory general education is that it stopped being a status symbol. And it’s usually boring. The newspaper could avoid some of that boredom, because people would read it voluntarily and individually; and the articles would not be followed by exams.
Why paper, instead of internet? Trivial inconveniences. When someone already has a piece of paper in their hand, it is so easy to start reading it.
I dunno… People often throw away paper that’s handed to them for free without even taking more than a glance at it; OTOH, web pages can be shared on Facebook.
They give away the fat Sunday edition at the park where I jog. And yeah, I shelved it, read a few pages a week later, then tossed it. I agree, low impact, and paper is low status. Cool people are on the internet.
I agree, but one factor here might be that they are generally really bad—boring, poorly-written local news amid scads of badly-designed adverts. You might easily be able to get somewhat higher numbers by having consistently interesting content.
I’m not familiar with the Chicago Reader (I’m British), and I had no idea there was a paper version of the Onion! Do they have decent readerships? If so that supports the notion that good free papers can get people to read them.
Do we want to associate ourselves with the sort of people who hand on leaflets on their beliefs in public places? There’s a non-trivial stigma attached.
I’d like to see something which supplies a small daily dose of established science, but you’d probably need a writer who’s as engaging as Asimov—and even then, not that many people are interested.
The writing at Wikipedia tends not to be engaging. Admittedly, I’m generalizing from one example.
I’m not sure that this is a full-time job for just one person. If nothing else, getting advertising is work.
I think the Philadelphia Weekly is a pretty good free paper, but I read most of the articles and ignore the advertising.
I don’t think the basic idea is bad, but I’d start with a website—lower investment, more flexibility, and better feedback about what people read. It would be a better way to find out what actually engages people.
The problem with website is: how do you make people look at it? Especially those not already interested in topics you want to write about. The competition is huge.
(With free newspaper, the answer is: reading the paper you already have in your hand is easier than reading any other paper.)
You can’t make anyone look at anything. Ok, maybe a bright flashing light, but that’s not a lot of information.
Consent is essential. Look at how people dodge advertisements most of the time.
I suspect that raising the sanity waterline (possibly a bad metaphor, because it leaves out the minds of the people we’re trying to influence) needs to be thought about more clearly—which people are we trying to influence, and what exactly are we trying to accomplish?
What makes you think that your efforts to put a newspaper in my hand will be more successful than those of the local bible study group that occasionally camps out in front of my college library and try to put copies of their Jesus newsletter in my hand?
(With free newspaper, the answer is: reading the paper you already have in your hand is easier than reading any other paper.)
Not reading any paper at all is even easier. (How much easier depends on the distance from the nearest waste bin, and on whether you’re wearing a handbag or something to store it into for later reading while keeping your hands free.)
Through your mailbox. (Oh, do we have a cultural difference here? I can imagine that somewhere putting unwanted papers in other peoples’ mailboxes could be illegal. Actually, I would prefer that.)
In the US, I believe it’s not legal to put anything in a mailbox which hasn’t been mailed. There’s a free hyperlocal newsetter which is left on my doorstep in a plastic bag. I don’t read it. There are at least two local free papers which are left in coffee shops and some stores, and also available from metal boxes on the street.
Would publishing a newspaper be an efficient way to raise the sanity waterline?
More specifically, I imagine a newspaper freely distributed to people living in a given area, financed by donations and advertising. It would contain interesting topics about science, both for beginners and experts. It would explain how the stuff works. It would avoid mindkilling topics, such as politics and religion. In some situations it could provide uncontroversial background information for some hot topics. It would contains some easy rationality exercises.
Why? It could move people towards rationality, which is a good thing. Not necessarily the top priority (I am not suggesting that CFAR should stop organizing minicamps and do this instead), but a part of our long-term goals. Newspaper seems like a good tool to reach many people… the question is: how strong would be its influence? I don’t know, but I think it would be worth trying.
Why paper, instead of internet? Trivial inconveniences. When someone already has a piece of paper in their hand, it is so easy to start reading it. I don’t know how many people would actually read the newspaper, but I think it could be 10-25%. Imagine the possible impact of 10% people in your area reading texts about rationality and science. You can make a website a lot cheaper, but it will not make the same concentrated impact. Although it could be a good idea to make a web forum for discussing the articles in the newspaper.
How about costs? Exact numbers depend on your location, but I would say that newspapers are rather cheap. It’s the cheapest kind of paper, and the cheapest kind of color. The more you print, the cheaper one piece gets. I suspect the usual costs are mostly editing and distribution. And this could be done by volunteers, plus one coordinator. There is no need to print frequently; once in a month or once in two months could be enough for the beginning.
I don’t know how much money could come through the advertising, but if it would cover the costs of printing plus coordinator’s salary, there is no need for more. Some people are in this business for money; so if we won’t try to make a profit, only to cover our costs, it should be possible. If the experiment starts in the CFAR surroundings, that includes Berkeley university; here one could find the volunteers for distribution, and it could also be an interesting demographics for advertising.
The content for the newspaper could be recycled from Wikipedia, LW, what you learned at school, etc. It does not matter that it was already published online, because most readers did not read it online, even if they easily could. Trivial inconveniences, again. The goal is not to bring readers to LW. (Except for those who are likely to enjoy it. LW is controversial; this newspaper should be acceptable for most people) The goal is to raise the sanity waterline, to pick the lowest hanging fruit.
Open problem: Measuring the impact of the newspaper; at least approximately.
One idea would be to measure improving the sanity waterline in some specific topics. Select topics important for your neighborhood, where the irrational behavior contributes significantly. Make prediction about the most likely future development of this topic (ask external experts to make the prediction). Randomly select one topic, and make it the topic of the month. Compare the outcome of this topic with the predictions, and the outcome of the remaining topics. (Don’t do this publicly to avoid negative connotations of experimenting with humans.)
People have been trying to do social engineering with print for hundreds of years and trying to educate the general populace to the scientific worldview for at least a century, and yet the sanity waterline is still as low as it is. Many intellectual subcultures have published pamphlets with contents that the in-group finds very convincing, yet they generally always end up ignored.
What would the newspaper be doing differently compared to the things that came before?
Is it as low as it was?
I’m not sure. People in 1900 or 1950 had less knowledge than we do now, but they might have had a mainstream culture that took the knowledge they had more seriously than ours does. I’d have to be more of a historian to be able to tell how much this was actually the case.
How well does having Jaynes, Kahneman & Tversky, and The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences measure up to creationism as a political platform, blank-slate leftism and postmodernism in academia, or climate denial and anti-vaccinationists getting massive media attention?
EDIT: My mental model of Robin Hanson also notes that all else being equal, you might expect people with less surplus resources to have a higher sanity waterline, since they have a smaller margin for engaging in delusional signaling before they start running out of vital resources like food.
I also think it’s inaccurate to say there’s A sanity waterline as opposed to different waterlines in different contexts.
You could always do a veil of ignorance style thought experiment and ask how crazy you would expect things to be for you if you were a person chosen at random at a given time and place to try to sum over some of the contexts.
Should differences in agency be accounted for somehow? If there’s a single god-emperor somehow able to order absolutely everyone around in minute detail, should you consider only the sanity of the god-emperor, or also of everyone else, when all they can do is obey the god-emperor? The lives of the populace are going to suck, but will be actively crazy only if the god-emperor orders them to do stuff that results in craziness. One idea of the past is that there was more overt control by some sort of small social elite caste and the general populace had less individual decision-making ability then.
We probably think about different specific examples, so I will describe the ones I have seen.
Most of free papers I get contain advertising. Pictures of products, and prices. In most cases, nothing else. In some cases, a few short boring stories are included. I think that the goal here is to sell as much stuff as possible, and the publishers probably discovered that a legible content, beyond some bare minimum, does not really help sell more.
Then I get a free newspaper from our house caretaker. In this case the goal is to provide us some basic house-related info, and to remind us about how lucky we are to have this specific caretaker. This is the nearest example to free newspaper education I have seen, but it is extremely limited in scope.
Sometimes I get a municipal newspaper (usually when the municipal election is near), which provides some info about what happenned around us (culture, construction, problems) and gently reminds us about how much our municipal representatives did for us and why we should vote for them again.
At university I have seen some free newspaper for students, rather boring. My suspicion was that it was just a pretext to get some government funding, put money in editors’ pockets, and generate some output with random content. Anyway, it was supposed to be about fun and opportunities (such as travelling), not education.
None of these had general education as a goal. And those are the only examples of free newspapers I have seen repeatedly. -- But the situation may be different in other places.
I guess it is just a century or two that enough people are literate. And newspapers were considered powerful and dangerous; this is why censorship existed. (Though it does not prove that newspapers are efficient in education, specifically.)
The education of general population is typically done in schools. I think it works rather well… depending on what you compare it with. Compared with situation centuries ago, people can read and write, do some simple math, don’t believe in witches, etc. That’s not bad. It’s just not enough. Perhaps the schools could be more efficient (that is a separate discussion I would love to have once, but not now). But the side effect of free mandatory general education is that it stopped being a status symbol. And it’s usually boring. The newspaper could avoid some of that boredom, because people would read it voluntarily and individually; and the articles would not be followed by exams.
I dunno… People often throw away paper that’s handed to them for free without even taking more than a glance at it; OTOH, web pages can be shared on Facebook.
I can’t remember the last time I read a newspaper.
Have you ever lived in a place with free newspapers? Nowhere near 10% read them.
They give away the fat Sunday edition at the park where I jog. And yeah, I shelved it, read a few pages a week later, then tossed it. I agree, low impact, and paper is low status. Cool people are on the internet.
I agree, but one factor here might be that they are generally really bad—boring, poorly-written local news amid scads of badly-designed adverts. You might easily be able to get somewhat higher numbers by having consistently interesting content.
Maybe the typical free paper is bad, but the best papers, such as the Chicago Reader and the Onion, are free.
I’m not familiar with the Chicago Reader (I’m British), and I had no idea there was a paper version of the Onion! Do they have decent readerships? If so that supports the notion that good free papers can get people to read them.
The Onion has been scaling back, though things can’t be that bad in print if they were trying to expand to Toronto just last year.
Do we want to associate ourselves with the sort of people who hand on leaflets on their beliefs in public places? There’s a non-trivial stigma attached.
I’d like to see something which supplies a small daily dose of established science, but you’d probably need a writer who’s as engaging as Asimov—and even then, not that many people are interested.
The writing at Wikipedia tends not to be engaging. Admittedly, I’m generalizing from one example.
I’m not sure that this is a full-time job for just one person. If nothing else, getting advertising is work.
I think the Philadelphia Weekly is a pretty good free paper, but I read most of the articles and ignore the advertising.
I don’t think the basic idea is bad, but I’d start with a website—lower investment, more flexibility, and better feedback about what people read. It would be a better way to find out what actually engages people.
The problem with website is: how do you make people look at it? Especially those not already interested in topics you want to write about. The competition is huge.
(With free newspaper, the answer is: reading the paper you already have in your hand is easier than reading any other paper.)
You can’t make anyone look at anything. Ok, maybe a bright flashing light, but that’s not a lot of information.
Consent is essential. Look at how people dodge advertisements most of the time.
I suspect that raising the sanity waterline (possibly a bad metaphor, because it leaves out the minds of the people we’re trying to influence) needs to be thought about more clearly—which people are we trying to influence, and what exactly are we trying to accomplish?
What makes you think that your efforts to put a newspaper in my hand will be more successful than those of the local bible study group that occasionally camps out in front of my college library and try to put copies of their Jesus newsletter in my hand?
Not reading any paper at all is even easier. (How much easier depends on the distance from the nearest waste bin, and on whether you’re wearing a handbag or something to store it into for later reading while keeping your hands free.)
How does it get into my hand?
Through your mailbox. (Oh, do we have a cultural difference here? I can imagine that somewhere putting unwanted papers in other peoples’ mailboxes could be illegal. Actually, I would prefer that.)
It’s legal here (the UK). I receive a free local newspaper every week. It goes straight in the bin.
Maybe leaving a pile of them in coffee shops would be a more promising way to get readers. But I’m guessing based on a sample of myself.
In the US, I believe it’s not legal to put anything in a mailbox which hasn’t been mailed. There’s a free hyperlocal newsetter which is left on my doorstep in a plastic bag. I don’t read it. There are at least two local free papers which are left in coffee shops and some stores, and also available from metal boxes on the street.
I think there’s something missing after “the” in the penultimate paragraph.
Thanks. The url needed http://.