I'm going, but I'm local and hosting a bunch of friends coming into the area, so not likely to be wandering off to other meetups.
(And contemplating writing "Politics Is The Mind-Killer" on my picket sign...)
I did in fact go, and carried a double-sided sign, one side with "Politics is the Mind-Killer" and one side with "[citation needed]".
"Citation Needed" much more frequently commented on. "Politics is the Mind-Killer" got a few appreciative comments from Dune fans, after which I got to comment that it was doubly geeky because it also referred to this website called Less Wrong and give the elevator pitch; not more than 10 people though.
Sanity can be a quantity measured relative to some standard value, just like elevation.
If we're 100 meters below sea level and fall an additional 20 meters, we can have a rally to restore height to get back up to -100.
Strictly speaking you're correct, but I think in this case "Rally to Restore Sanity" is less accurate but substantially more concise than "Rally to Promote a More Deliberative Discourse" or something similar that would be more accurate.
I'm not so sure. Its main promoter, John Stewart, seems to switch from funny to serious whenever he needs to make a point. The Rally to Restore Sanity seems to be meant more to alter the American media discourse than to entertain. Of course, those goals aren't mutually exclusive; but there's no reason to let the goal of entertaining people undermine the goal of promoting sanity in politics.
I'm probably going. I asked about this in a previous open thread and there were a few responses, including a couple of people who have not posted here. (I had been thinking of organizing this as a meetup myself, but decided against it at the time because (1) I don't know where to meet up in DC, and (2) I don't trust myself to be good at organizing anything, for now. I am glad you're arranging it.)
Is anyone else interested in making signs with LW themes? I feel like a lot of this rally is going to be fake wise neutrality (and a lot of the signs highly rated on their SaneOrNot site fit that description; others seem to be about signaling politeness rather than actual epistemic rationality). So it seems like a good idea to counter those with signs that actually communicate good heuristics for thinking, but I only plan to do so if I expect I'll be with others doing the same, as I am not strong enough to go there wearing a clown suit (figuratively or literally).
Hearing one sound bite will, at best, only help someone's rationality a little bit. But a link can help a lot, if they get around to following it. So the best sign would say something like "Advanced Sanity Techniques: lesswrong.com". (Or link to somewhere more specific, like the Sequences or your favorite article, but then people are likely to forget the URL.)
If anybody does this, I'd also suggest coordinating with a front page post linking directly to the sequenceds; this place can be intimidating to the un-initiated.
I was thinking not that compressing LW concepts into sign slogans would directly help people's rationality, but that they would be interesting and unusual-sounding enough that people would want to find out more, and might ask the person holding the sign for more information. (Having a concept explained first-hand is probably better than being given a URL; even if the URL contains a more refined explanation than you can generate off the top of your head, it's less likely that anyone will bother reading it.)
Well, "Advanced Sanity Techniques" conveys an important message: sanity is a scale with no upper limit, and a skill to study, rather than a distinction between damaged and undamaged minds, which is how most people think of it. That insight alone is worth quite a bit. And it's very short; that's important, because bigger fonts mean visibility from longer distances, and fewer tl;dr responses.
Of course, going around talking to people and explaining rationality concepts is great, for promoting rationality, for meeting people and just for fun, but I suspect the bottleneck will be the number of conversations you have time for, not the number of people attracted by your sign.
I like the idea of going, but I'm not sure about the practicality. I don't have my own car and I'm currently about 3 hours from DC, so I'd have to somehow work up the will to tell my parents I'll be borrowing one of their cars (they don't like my even talking on the phone with Internet people), then stand my ground long enough to convince them I'll actually do it.
Hey everyone. If anyone else is heading to Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity on the National Mall on Oct. 30th, please comment or contact me at pphysics141@gmail.com so we can arrange an LW meetup.