Hm, I think the thing I’m trying to point at is my general feeling intuition about how people tend to react (it’s just an internal model here, so feel free to counter w/ better-informed info) which says something like if you want to have people to even get to the point where they can look at written essays on rationality and think to themselves, “Wait this could apply to me!”, you need some sort of baseline of rationality to catalyze the whole thing.
My claim is that getting people to this sort of optimizing step whereupon everything else can work requires something different than what conventional wisdom might dictate (e.g. writing things and/or giving people general advice and telling them to go with it).
Something like “personally interacting with promising individuals and send off social signals that you know cool stuff and pique their interest; then, slowly get them to want to care and get them started off on their journey via slow tidbits / cultivating their interest” seems to be something that I claim is more effective than just finding someone and saying, “Hey! Read this; it’ll shatter your worldview!”
Hm, I think the thing I’m trying to point at is my general feeling intuition about how people tend to react (it’s just an internal model here, so feel free to counter w/ better-informed info) which says something like if you want to have people to even get to the point where they can look at written essays on rationality and think to themselves, “Wait this could apply to me!”, you need some sort of baseline of rationality to catalyze the whole thing.
My claim is that getting people to this sort of optimizing step whereupon everything else can work requires something different than what conventional wisdom might dictate (e.g. writing things and/or giving people general advice and telling them to go with it).
Something like “personally interacting with promising individuals and send off social signals that you know cool stuff and pique their interest; then, slowly get them to want to care and get them started off on their journey via slow tidbits / cultivating their interest” seems to be something that I claim is more effective than just finding someone and saying, “Hey! Read this; it’ll shatter your worldview!”
I agree: interactively working in person is more effective.