If you think the goal is to get people to read the sequences, you may be setting yourself up to fail.
The sequences are HUGE. The indexes for just the four "core sequences" are somewhere north of 10,000 words. Those link to over a hundred and fifty 2,000-3,000-word posts. That's about 300,000-450,000 words for those four. And there are eighteen sequences in all. For comparison, Lord Of The Rings is 454,000 words.
So what you're asking for is: How many people would invest their time to closely read several thick self-published volumes of philosophy writing by someone they've never heard of if they were introduced to them?
I fear this number may be rather small.
In addition, people tend to avoid reading large philosophical treatises intended to infect them with memes, presented to them by people wanting to infect them with memes. This is because these sort of people tend to wake them up by knocking on their door too early on a Sunday morning. You know it's not a cult, but they don't.
And they're not being just foolish or refusing to learn because they won't privilege the hypothesis of your personal favoured infectious meme cluster being good for them rather than a sucker shoot ...
So, I was directed toward this post, in no small part because I am, demographically, a bit unusual for LW. At times, I'm quite optimistic about LW and rationality-in-general's prospects, but then I remember that my being here, and participating, is the product of happenstance. But then again, I actually have been pointed to LW from three different sources, so perhaps it was inevitable.
Ah, but here comes my embarrassing admission:
Most people who are already awesome enough to have passed through all these filters are winning so hard at life (by American standards of success) that they are wayyy too busy to do boring, anti-social & low-prestige tasks like reading online forums in their spare time (which they don’t have much of).
The above is a much more influential factor in my considering how much to participate than I feel happy admitting. I'll openly admit that being rational is not my default mode; I wasn't even targeted as "bright" as a kid. No out-of-ordinary test scores came from me. I have had to really work to get my thoughts to avoid being immediately processed through a Is this the kind of belief that will get me social status? filter. So, I do have this ma...
Considering we have 6,438 Less Wrong logins created and a daily readership of around 5,500 people between logged in and anonymous readers, I now actually find it believable that we may have already reached a very large fraction of all the people in the world who we could theoretically convince to read the sequences.
I can think of about a dozen personal acquaintances who fit all of your criteria and for whom I think LW would be appropriate. Of these, three read Less Wrong - one because I referred her, one because he referred me, and one because he was referred by the same mutual friend who referred me.
I think I've referred about five or six of the remaining nine over here at some point or other and it just didn't take for some reason.
Of these dozen people, the number whom I talked to about Less Wrong who were already reading it by coincidence (ie not in a way causally linked to me reading Less Wrong) was zero. Despite moving in circles that are mostly made up of people from the groups above, I've never just randomly met another LW reader.
Even though that's anecdotal evidence, I think it's pretty unlikely that most of our potential readers are already here.
I think there is a certain obsession with The Sequences. To be rational is not the same as to read The Sequences, and having read them is not a necessary condition to read and understand what is written on LW. It is a bad habit of some Lesswrongers to use "read The Sequences" as an advice to an apparently irrational commenter. Linking to a specific Sequences article is fine, bud demanding to read the whole huge bulk of text in order to be worth of participating in LW discussions is silly. After all, rationality is not a religion, and it doesn't have one source of concentrated wisdom.
(Personally I have read parts of The Sequences, probably more than half, because they were fun to read, well written, with important and interesting insights. I wouldn't do it if it was presented as a necessary work that one must do to become a rationalist, and this is the way how a lot of people present them in the discussions.)
Also, I don't believe in the IQ 130 lower limit.
Am I the only one dying to know what explanation for the existence of complex life is endorsed by the 24% of atheists who don't believe in evolution?!
Two categories of comments:
Argument about which categories to choose
Atheism is, in almost every way, a harder choice to make than rejecting creationism, your "second place." The oft-cited example of "smart guy who believes in god" 'round here is Robert Aumann. Another thing to consider is that only looking for people who already agree with the site is bad - we want people who don't agree or don't know, but who are willing to listen. So although highly correlated with being on LW, reporting as atheist/agnostic is not a good category, and you should probably find something else.
The NT distinction is reasonable when looking at the current audience of LessWrong, but probably too strict when talking about the potential audience, for the same reason as above. We don't want to "permanently disqualify" anyone from being rational for 1 category - we want to peach the gospel, in a sense.
130 IQ? Really? Predictably Irrational was the #23 selling book on Amazon in 2008. It is astronomically unlikely that every single person who read the book had IQ over 130. Some filter for intelligence is needed, sure. But not 1.5 standard deviations, single tailed
People who are S instead of N take things at face value and resist using induction or intuition to extend their reasoning. These people can guess the teacher’s password, but they're not doing the same thing that you call "thinking". And if you’re not a T (Thinking), then that means you’re F (Feeling). And if you’re using feelings to chose beliefs in lieu of thinking, there’s nothing we can do for you -- you’re permanently disqualified from enjoying the blessings of rationality.
I've spent the past 24h thinking this over, but I can't find a d...
Mixing together international statistics with American statistics is probably not a good idea, at least in those fields where you can expect some difference between the two - the "free time" test, and especially the "believes in evolution" test (where the USA are among the most prominent outliers).
Again, great work. This has been going around in my mind for a day or so and here's some observations:
And 130 isn’t all that “special“ once you find yourself being a white (+6IQ) college graduate (+5IQ) atheist (+4IQ) who's ”NT” on Myers-Briggs (+5IQ).
If IQ correlates with all that, why are we filtering by all that AND IQ as if they were orthogonal?
Also, you may want to try filtering by age groups. Younger people tend to be more atheist and have time on computers and the internet. And if we get to them before they join a hedge fund, then they won't end...
Interesting idea, but as the comment debate demonstrates, it's probably pretty hard to figure out how correlated these features are. For example, I imagine being 130+ IQ is well correlated with spending 30 minutes a day reading on computers.
It might be useful to keep percolation theory in mind if you're trying to model the spread of the meme that LW exists and is worth checking out in a small population buffered by a larger population that is unlikely to find the message true enough to pass along.
Think of the social graph as a crystal lattice. Now imagine that some percentage, p, of the nodes in the lattice are likely to pass the message along because they find it useful. The message is like a fluid trying to spread through the medium via the nodes that will pass it along.
See here for an im...
Some of the claims made within this article are too strong and unnecessarily inflammatory:
Not Atheist/Agnostic: ... you probably don’t use thinking to guide the formation of your beliefs anyway so lessons in rationality are a complete wasted of time for you.
People compartmentalize and can be very rational in some domains of their lives while being much less so in others. The statement "the lessons in rationality are a complete wasted [sic] of time for you" is too broad and sweeping. Also, religion may be instrumentally rational for some peopl...
Intuition would suggest that P(30 min/day reading or on computers|IQ 130+) >> P(30 min/day reading or on computers). I doubt that atheism and NT personality type are independent, either.
Also, there are people who are specifically worried about what happens when one reads the sequences. I have one friend who loves HPMoR but refuses to read the sequences because she has "heard that the Less Wrong archives are like TVTropes on crack." I don't know what to do about that and I don't know how common that situation is.
(Rather, they both strike me as incorrect and intentionally annoying. Lovingly annoying, says David Gerard, but still.)
"The only ways I see out of this dilemma are 1) being in a relatively unstructured period of your life (ie, unemployed, college student, semi-retired, etc) or 2) having a completely broken motivation system which keeps you in a perpetually unstructured life against your will (akrasia) or perhaps 3) being a full-time computer professional who can multi-task and pass off reading online during your work day as actually working. "
I really don't see this. While I am (at present) in category three, until two years ago I was working first in a bank and ...
It's surprising nobody has brought up HPatMoR. Look at the comments in the welcome thread. Harry Potter is a very effective recruiter.
As a rough feel (and not a statistical inference), looks like HPatMoR attracts a much more diverse readership to LW than the takers of that old survey.
Example: look at me. You'd filter me off on two of those categories, both of which happen to be 92+% filters, and one is specifically mentioned in the welcome thread as a warning to turn back. And yet this blog is one of the most addictive finds on the internet.
Maybe you shoul...
Most of the complaints have centered around the US Time Use Survey I've been using. I'm looking for a more helpful data set that can replace them and serve a similar function. I found this:
http://www.visualeconomics.com/how-the-world-spends-its-time-online_2010-06-16/
But yet, I can't locate the raw data from the Pew surveys or Nielsen to see any of the breakdowns of internet usage. It's interesting to see that supposedly 10% of all American read blogs every day. That's kind of surprising... I would venture to say it's unbelievable in fact. My guess is...
[Note: My last thread was poorly worded in places and gave people the wrong impression that I was interested in talking about growing and shaping the Less Wrong community. I was really hoping to talk about something a bit different. Here's my revision with a completely redone methodology.]
How many people would invest their time to read the LW sequences if they were introduced to them?
So in other words, I’m trying to estimate the theoretical upper-bound on the number of individuals world-wide who have the ability, desire, and time to read intellectual material online and who also have at least some pre-disposition to wanting to think rationally.
I’m not trying to evangelize to unprepared, “reach” candidates who maybe, possibly would like to read parts of the sequences. I’m just looking for likely size of the core audience who already has the ability, the time, and doesn’t need to jump through any major hoops to stomach the sequences (like deconverting from religion or radically changing their habits -- like suddenly devoting more of their time to using computers or reading.)
The reason I’m investigating this is because I want to build more rationalists. I know some smart people whose opinions I respect (like Michael Vassar) who contend we shouldn’t spend much time trying to reach more people with the sequences. They think the majority of people smart enough to follow the sequences and who do weird, eccentric things like “read in their spare time”, are already here. This is my second attempt to figure this out in the last couple days, and unlike my rough 2M person figure I got with my previous, hasty analysis, this more detailed analysis leaves me with a much lower world-wide target audience of only 17,000.
Filter |
Total Population |
Filters Away (%) |
Everyone |
6,880,000,000 |
|
Speaks English + Internet Access |
536,000,000 |
92.2% |
Atheist/Agnostic |
40,000,000 |
92.55% |
Believes in evolution | Atheist/Agnostic |
30,400,000 |
24% |
“NT” (Rational) MBTI |
3,952,000 |
87% |
IQ 130+ (SD 15; US/UK-Atheist-NT 108 IQ) |
284,544 |
92.8% |
30 min/day reading or on computers |
16,930 |
94.05% |
Yep, that’s right. There are basically only a few thousand relatively bright people in the world who think reason makes sense and devote at least 2% of their day to arcane activities like “reading” and "using computers".
Considering we have 6,438 Less Wrong logins created and a daily readership of around 5,500 people between logged in and anonymous readers, I now actually find it believable that we may have already reached a very large fraction of all the people in the world who we could theoretically convince to read the sequences.
This actually matters because it makes me update in favor of different, more realistic growth strategies than buying AdWords or doing SEO to try and reach the small number of people left in our current target audience. Like translating the sequences into Chinese. Or creating an economic disaster that leaves most of the Westerner world unemployed (kidding!). Or waiting until Eliezer publishes his rationality book so that we can reach the vast majority of our potential, future audience who currently still reads but doesn’t have time to do anti-social, low-prestige things like “reading blogs”.
For those of you who want to consider my methodology, here’s the rationale for each step that I used to disqualify potential sequence readers:
Doesn’t Speak English or have Internet Access: The sequences are English-only (right now) and online-only (right now). Don’t think there’s any contention here. This figure is the largest of the 3 figures I've found but all were around 500,000,000.
Not Atheist/Agnostic: Not being an Atheist or Agnostic is a huge warning sign. 93% of LW is atheist/agnostic for a reason. It’s probably a combo of 1) it’s hard to stomach reading the sequences if you’re a theist, and 2) you probably don’t use thinking to guide the formation of your beliefs anyway so lessons in rationality are a complete waste of time for you. These people really needs to have the healing power of Dawkins come into their hearts before we can help them. Also, note that even though it wasn't mentioned in Yvain's top-level survey post, the raw data showed that around 1/3rd of LW users who gave a reason for participating on LW cite "Atheism".
Evolution denialist: If you can’t be bothered to be moved to correct beliefs about the second most obvious conclusion in the world by the mountains of evidence in favor of it, you’re effectively saying you don’t think induction or science can work at all. These people also need to go through Dawkins before we can help them.
Not “NT” on the Myers-Briggs typology: Lots of people complain about the MBTI. But in this case, I don’t think it matters that the MBTI isn’t cleaving reality perfectly at the joints or that these types aren’t natural categories. I realize Jung types aren’t made of quarks and aren’t fundamental. But I’ve also met lots of people at the Less Wrong meet-ups. There’s an even split of E/I and P/J in our community. But there is a uniform, overwhelmingly strong disposition towards N and T. And we shouldn’t be surprised by this at all. People who are S instead of N take things at face value and resist using induction or intuition to extend their reasoning. These people can guess the teacher’s password, but they're not doing the same thing that you call "thinking". And if you’re not a T (Thinking), then that means you’re F (Feeling). And if you’re using feelings to chose beliefs in lieu of thinking, there’s nothing we can do for you -- you’re permanently disqualified from enjoying the blessings of rationality. Note: I looked hard to see if I could find data suggesting that being NT and being Atheist correlated because I didn’t want to “double subtract” out the same people twice. It turns out several studies have looked for this correlation with thousands of participants... and it doesn’t exist.
Lower than IQ 130: Another non-natural category that people like to argue about. Plus, this feels super elitist, right? Excluding people just because they're "not smart enough". But it’s really not asking that much when you consider that IQ 100 means you’re buying lottery tickets, installing malware on your computer, and spending most of your free time watching TV. Those aren’t the “stupid people” who are way down on the other side of the Gaussian -- that’s what a normal 90 - 110 IQ looks like. Real stupid is so non-functional that you never even see it... probably because you don’t hang out in prisons, asylums and homeless shelters. Really. And 130 isn’t all that “special“ once you find yourself being a white (+6IQ) college graduate (+5IQ) atheist (+4IQ) who's ”NT” on Myers-Briggs (+5IQ). In Yvain’s survey, the average IQ on LW was 145.88. And only 4 out of 68 LWers reported IQs below 130... the lowest being 120. I find it inconceivable that EVERYONE lied on this survey. I also find it highly unlikely that only the top 1/2 reported. But even if everyone who didn’t report was as low as the lowest IQ reported by anyone on Less Wrong, the average IQ would still be over 130. Note: I took the IQ boost from being atheist and being MBTI-“N” into account when figuring out the proportion of 130+ IQ conditional on the other traits already being factored in.
Having no free time: So you speak English, you don’t hate science, you don’t hate reason, and you’re somewhat bright. Seem like you’re a natural part of our target audience, right? Nope... wrong! There’s at least one more big hurdle: Having some free time. Most people who are already awesome enough to have passed through all these filters are winning so hard at life (by American standards of success) that they are wayyy too busy to do boring, anti-social & low-prestige tasks like reading online forums in their spare time (which they don’t have much of). In fact, it’s kind of like how knowing a bit about biases can hurt you and make you even more biased. Being a bit rational can skyrocket you to such a high level of narrowly-defined American-style "success" that you become a constantly-busy, middle-class wage-slave who zaps away all your free time in exchange for a mortgage and a car payment. Nice job buddy. Thanks for increasing my GDP epsilon%... now you are left with whatever rationality you started out with minus the effects of your bias dragging you back down to average over the ensuing years. The only ways I see out of this dilemma are 1) being in a relatively unstructured period of your life (ie, unemployed, college student, semi-retired, etc) or 2) having a completely broken motivation system which keeps you in a perpetually unstructured life against your will (akrasia) or perhaps 3) being a full-time computer professional who can multi-task and pass off reading online during your work day as actually working. That said, if you're unlucky enough to have a full-time job or you’re married with children, you’ve already fallen out of the population of people who read or use computers at least 30 minutes / day. This is because having a spouse cuts your time spent reading and using computers in half. Having children cuts reading in half and reduces computer usage by 1/3rd. And having a job similarly cuts both reading and computer usage in half. Unfortunately, most people suffer from several of these afflictions. I can’t find data that’s conditional on being an IQ 130+ Atheist but my educated guess is employment is probably much better than average due to being so much more capable and I’d speculate that relationships and children are about the same or perhaps a touch lower. All things equal, I think applying statistics from the general US civilian population and extrapolating is an acceptable approximation in this situation even if it likely overestimates the number of people who truly have 30 minutes of free time / day (the average amount of time needed just to read LW according to Yvain’s survey). 83% of people are employed full-time so they’re gone. Of the remaining 17% who are unemployed, 10% of the men and 50% of the women are married and have children so that’s another 5.1% off the top level leaving only 11.9% of people. Of that 11.9% left, the AVERAGE person has 1 hour they spend reading and ”Playing games and computer use for leisure“. Let’s be optimistic and assume they somehow devote half of their entire leisure budget to reading Less Wrong, that still only leaves 5.95%. Note: These numbers are a bit rough. If someone wants to go through the micro-data files of the US Time Use Survey for me and count the exact number of people who do more than 1 hour of "reading" and "Playing games and computer use for leisure", I welcome this help.
Anyone have thoughtful feedback on refinements or additional filters I could add to this? Do you know of better sources of statistics for any of the things I cite? And most importantly, do you have new, creative outreach strategies we could use now that we know this?
