For the Wiki, I actually think the articles we have and the Wiki article serve different purposes. The Wiki article explains things in a complex and long-form way, and it should still be there, very much so. Our goal is to get people interested in Rationality in the first place, and then direct them to other helpful sources for more advanced stuff, including not only Wikipedia, but also Less Wrong, CFAR, etc. - we have a bunch listed on our resource page and will add more over time.
my main point was that you need to get feedback from the kinds of people you want to benefit from your work—not LWers. Maybe do it evolution-style: create three or four variants, let a bunch of people vote which they like best, create another three or four variants off of that, let a (different) bunch of people vote on those, etc.
Yup, good point! We plan to do something like that—start with an outreach to the secular audience, who we figure are most likely to be the lowest-hanging fruit for early adopters as audience members. Then, they can give us helpful feedback on how to appeal to their friends and family, and thus help provide outreach to a broader audience.
Of course your articles and the Wiki’s serve different purposes. But I’m not talking about purposes, I’m talking about effects. I think that at the end of the day, when people summarize what they got from either, the summaries of people who read one won’t be easily distinguished from the summaries of people who read the other.
More mundanely, I did an intro to rationality presentation yesterday, and much of it was dual process theory. I found what really helped people “get it” was very detailed real-life examples, not only of which system does what, but also of how they interact. I had diagrams, animations, the elephant and rider metaphor… but what really did it for people were short stories with many “this is a system 1 action”, “here’s where system 2 integrates pieces of information” and so on thrown in.
Hm, that’s actually a testable theory about the InIn article and the Wiki. That’s something we can actually do, and get some real-world results. Thanks for the idea!
Good point about the short stories, that’s something to think about. Much appreciated!
For the Wiki, I actually think the articles we have and the Wiki article serve different purposes. The Wiki article explains things in a complex and long-form way, and it should still be there, very much so. Our goal is to get people interested in Rationality in the first place, and then direct them to other helpful sources for more advanced stuff, including not only Wikipedia, but also Less Wrong, CFAR, etc. - we have a bunch listed on our resource page and will add more over time.
Yup, good point! We plan to do something like that—start with an outreach to the secular audience, who we figure are most likely to be the lowest-hanging fruit for early adopters as audience members. Then, they can give us helpful feedback on how to appeal to their friends and family, and thus help provide outreach to a broader audience.
Of course your articles and the Wiki’s serve different purposes. But I’m not talking about purposes, I’m talking about effects. I think that at the end of the day, when people summarize what they got from either, the summaries of people who read one won’t be easily distinguished from the summaries of people who read the other.
More mundanely, I did an intro to rationality presentation yesterday, and much of it was dual process theory. I found what really helped people “get it” was very detailed real-life examples, not only of which system does what, but also of how they interact. I had diagrams, animations, the elephant and rider metaphor… but what really did it for people were short stories with many “this is a system 1 action”, “here’s where system 2 integrates pieces of information” and so on thrown in.
Hm, that’s actually a testable theory about the InIn article and the Wiki. That’s something we can actually do, and get some real-world results. Thanks for the idea!
Good point about the short stories, that’s something to think about. Much appreciated!