The problem with rationality is that unless you are at some level, you don’t feel like you need to become more rational. And I think most people are not there, even the smart ones. Seems to me that smart people often realize they miss some specific knowledge, but they don’t go meta and realize that they miss knowledge-gathering and -filtering skills. (And that’s the smart people. The stupid ones only realize they miss money or food or something.) How do you sell something to a person who is not interested in buying?
Perhaps we could make a selection of LW articles that can be interesting even for people not interested in rationality. Less meta, less math. The ones that feel like “this website could help me make more money and become more popular”. Then people become interested, and perhaps then they become interested more meta—about a culture that creates this kind of articles.
(I guess that even for math-inclined people the less mathy articless would be better. Because they can find math in thousand different places; why should they care specifically about LW?)
The problem with rationality is that unless you are at some level, you don’t feel like you need to become more rational. And I think most people are not there, even the smart ones. Seems to me that smart people often realize they miss some specific knowledge, but they don’t go meta and realize that they miss knowledge-gathering and -filtering skills. (And that’s the smart people. The stupid ones only realize they miss money or food or something.) How do you sell something to a person who is not interested in buying?
Perhaps we could make a selection of LW articles that can be interesting even for people not interested in rationality. Less meta, less math. The ones that feel like “this website could help me make more money and become more popular”. Then people become interested, and perhaps then they become interested more meta—about a culture that creates this kind of articles.
(I guess that even for math-inclined people the less mathy articless would be better. Because they can find math in thousand different places; why should they care specifically about LW?)
As a first approximation: The Science of Winning at Life and Living Luminously.