I’ve been trying to decide whether or not to pursue an opportunity to spread rationalist memes to an audience that wouldn’t ordinarily be exposed to them. I happen to be friends with the CEO and editor of an online magazine/community blog that caters to queer women, and I’m reasonably confident that with the right pitch I could convince them to let me do a column dedicated to rationality as it relates to the specific interests of queer women. I think there might be value in tailoring rationality material for specific demographics.
The issue is that, in order to make it relevant to the website and the demographic, I would need to talk about politics while trying to teach rationality, which seems highly risky. As one might imagine from the demographic, the website and associated community is heavily influenced by social justice memes, many of which I wholeheartedly endorse and many others of which I’m highly critical of. The strategy I’ve been formulating to avoid getting everybody mindkilled is to talk about the ways biases contibute to sexisim and homophobia, and then also talk about how those same bias can manifest in feminist/social justice ideas, while emphasising to death how important it is to avoid Fully General Counterarguments, but it still seems risky.
The other issue is that it might not be such a good idea to try to teach rationality when I’m still learning myself, and haven’t really participated in the rationalist community. OTOH when will I ever be done learning, and should I let this opportunity pass by?
The potential Pros are; Improving the quality of discourse within my community, providing a space for the more rationalist members of that community, and spreading rationalist memes. Also, if it works out, it would probably raise my relative status within the community, which may be clouding my judgement of how good an idea it is.
The potential Cons are; That I might mess up and mindkill everyone, that I might say something too critical that gets me socially ostracize, and that I might accidentally write something foolish on the internet that I later regret.
Thoughts?
I was planning to have one of my friends from the community around that website test read the articles for me, though I might also benefit from having a rationalist test read them, if anybody wants to volunteer.
Discussing cognitive science experiments is part of the plan. I actually performed a version of the 2-4-6 experiment on a group of people associated with the website (while dressed as a court jester!(it was during a renaissance fair)) and as predicted only 20% of them got it right. I think knowing that members of their own ingroup are just as susceptible to bias as faceless experimental subjects will help get the point across.