A related anecdote: Recent months I am translating Sequences to Slovak, because I expect written word to be more effective recruitment tool than my person; simply because my time doesn't scale, but I can write put a free PDF online and link it from a blog or facebook or mention it in e-mail. (Also, I believe that Eliezer did think and discuss with other smart people about spreading rationality much more than me; so if he considered writing the Sequences an efficient use of his time, some of those reasons probably apply to using my time to translate it. Sure, the audience is much smaller, but so seem to be my opportunity costs, at least at this moment.)
So, I was talking with a friend, a religious girl, and although there is only epsilon chance of ever converting her, I told her about my already completed parts of translation anyway, simply because it didn't cost me anything. And she was like: "Yeah, translating is cool. I am translating this book by Chesterton." And I felt like: Damn, whatever tools of conversion I try, religion is already doing it, and much better. But then I realized I could treat this as an evidence that I am probably doing something that works, so it's...
I'm not sure that the target audience that can be won for LW that lives in Slovakia speaks no English.
Well, how else could I answer this question? But my expectation is that most people in the target audience will have English skills somewhere at level: "can read a longer text, but it's uncomfortable, and wouldn't decide to read hundreds of pages just for curiosity". Translation can overcome an inconvenience for these people and possibly reach some other people.
(Fun fact: Out of curiosity, my Mom recently started reading my translation, and so far she seems to like it. Which I would never expect. She is completely not the audience I would try to reach. Well, I'll see what happens when she gets to the "politics is the mindkiller" and the "quantum physics" parts. The book has a chance to reach an unexpected audience. And who knows, maybe she will forward the PDF to her friends. And somewhere along the chain a person I could never reach can be converted.)
And I completely agree that at this point it would be more efficient to find new audience at universities. Not sure how difficult it would be to find speakers on rationality-related topics. (Need to fi...
Speaking as a former Evangelical Christian, I was always perplexed by why my particular sect—which was pretty damned radical about spreading the Gospel—wasn't much more radical. In my mind, it was very rational to be radical with our 65-90 year temporary lifespan on earth in order to "save" as many people from infinite torture as possible (sell all possessions, focus money in unevangelized areas, etc.)...but many people didn't seem to behaving in ways that signalled they understood this.
In retrospect, here is why IMO that happens:
They don't understand (50% of people) - Eternity just doesn't register conceptually. They see hell as bad, but cannot fathom the degree of badness, certainly not enough to be radical about "witnessing" to others.
They don't care (10-40% of people) - They don't think spending their lives helping others get saved is that important because it benefits them relatively little. (No one ever says this out loud.) It seems to me to be an empathy disposition issue.
They don't think being radical will be effective (10-40%) - Some in this group are sincere—they believe a more nuanced, patient approach to evangelism will yield the best results.
I have the impression that a lot of people convert to religions while finding the doctrinal content of those religions to be almost an afterthought. They make the identity claim after clearing some threshold that sets the one religion apart from other live options, then find out what their new "we" believes and what their new "we" is supposed to do about it on a day to day basis, up to a lay member's understanding without detailed theological contemplation of any kind. This serves a few purposes for the growth and stability of the religions:
1) Domino effect - if you get enough or a significant enough part of somebody's in-group, it's much easier to shift their "we".
2) Marketability - if practicing the religion requires irritating practices or sacrifices, you can introduce them later after you've got commitment.
3) Some ability to operate as a bloc - whoever's producing or interpreting doctrine can say "we believe X" without a thousand amateur theologians bikeshedding the details based on their own understanding.
4) Ability to appeal to the general population - if you look hard at even the most popular religions, they are complicated, detailed...
We speak often of borrowing from religion, but these conversations mostly touch on social bonding, rather than what it means to spread ideas so important that the fate of the human race depends on them.
I think you underrate the importance of social bonding. It's the most important thing. Creating more LW meetups and making sure that the people on those meetups have a great time so that they come back is more important than trying to convince strangers with no previous interest.
When it comes more to advertising to the outside I think HPMOR is a good too...
I've met plenty of Christians who exude the same optimism and conviviality as a Rick Warren or a Ned Flanders....what's stopping us from teaching ourselves to live the same way?
Availability bias. How often are you actually visualizing that future? Focusing on it? Experiencing it? Then again, likely some people just have a greater capacity for that kind of thing than others.
I watched a series of interesting youtubes from a woman who is an atheist now, but grew up in a pentecostal family, and was very devout. The interesting thing here was that she shar...
The evangelism techniques of unspecified "religion" are actually pretty ineffective. Religions have a poor record of converting new believers who are already adults; religions spread by being the religion of the oppressor (so that the oppressed can join and gain more political power), focusing on children, and/or the precursor memes of the society that one is evangelizing in already point towards some of the religion's tenets. What religions do have are thought patterns and social sanctions that prevent one from thinking too far outside of that r...
I can't find the comment of Eliezer that inspired this but:
The "If-you-found-out-that-God-existed scale of ambition".
1) "Well obviously if I found out God exists I'd become religious, go to church on Sundays etc."
2) "Actually, most religious people don't seem to really believe what their religion says. If I found out that God existed I'd have to become a fundamentalist, preaching to save as many people from hell as I could."
3) "Just because God exists, doesn't mean that I should worship him. In fact, if Hell exists then G...
A master was once unmoved by the complaints of his disciples that, though they listened with pleasure to his parables and stories, they were also frustrated for they longed for something deeper. To all their objections he would simply reply: "You have yet to understand, my friends, that the shortest distance between a human being and truth is a story."
You need a good story. That's all. A good story.
2 things come to my mind as examples:
The first one is about the past and comes from a novel called "Quo Vadis" which is about early christ...
At the risk of sounding naive, we have one big advantage, which is that our core dogma doesn't sound batshit ridiculous on its face.
When you're competing to get people to believe in (and fund) your invisible goblin over the other guy's invisible dragon, you're going to need to rely on violence, intimidation, social pressure and anti-epistemology.
When you're just trying to convince people that the sky is in fact blue, and then go on to show them that you can build rockets and Internets out of such simple facts, and that goblins and dragons don't actually fi...
At the risk of sounding Deeply Wise, I'm unconvinced that having a core dogma that doesn't sound batshit ridiculous is an advantage.
Getting money for the invisible goblin doesn't need violence or intimidation. You tell your followers that the goblin commands we help those less fortunate, and they open up their wallets. You tell them that the goblin must have churches, and they vote to set aside land and exempt you from taxes. You may call this social pressure or anti-epistemology if you want, but they want a goblinist present when they die, and they want to be buried on the goblin's soil.
It isn't about proving that the sky is blue. The goblin doesn't dispute that. Rockets and Internets probably won't kill religion any more than boats and telephones did. The man in the lab coat can invent as much stuff as he wants, and the people will buy it and use it and go to the man in the goblin outfit every Holy Day to hold their snake sticks aloft. They don't see a contradiction. (For the most part. Obviously their are a few dragons whose priests forbid modern technology to their followers, but they are not usually your competition).
Atheist says The God Of Physics can tell you everyth...
Maybe this is off-base, but it seems like a lot of the people who one might want to preach rationality evangelism to, like liberal science-supporting policy-makers and upper-class liberals are very wary of anything that sounds like prosthelytizing (I am not talking about atheist technophiles who haven't found LW yet. That's an easier audience). A lot of them are vague atheists/agnostics who have a vague sense that extreme doctrines about a vastly different future for the human race are scary and weird and fanatical. I think they would strongly reject re...
It's worth considering that people who believe in Very Bad Future Outcomes have been working to prevent those outcomes for thousands of years, and have stumbled upon formidable techniques for doing so.
Judaism has a formidable technique. If someone tries to get you to worship another god, "thou shalt surely kill him, thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death." D'varim 13:6-10
Christianity has a formidable technique. Jesus said: "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them b...
Not "rationality evangelism", which CFAR is doing already if I understand their mission. "Rational evangelism", which is what CFAR would do if they were Catholic missionaries.
If you believe in Hell, as many people very truly do, it is hard for Hell not to seem like the world's most important problem.
To some extent, proselytizing religions treat Hell with respect--they spend billions of dollars trying to save sinners, and the most devout often spend their lives preaching the Gospel (insert non-Christian variant).
But is Hell given enough respect? Every group meets with mixed success in solving its problems, but the problem of eternal suffering leaves little room for "mixed success". Even the most powerful religions are stuck in patterns that make the work of salvation very difficult indeed. And some seem willing to reduce their evangelism* for reasons that aren't especially convincing in the face of "nonbelievers are quite possibly going to burn, or at least be outside the presence of God, forever".
What if you were a rationalist who viewed Hell like certain Less Wrongers view the Singularity? (This belief would be hard to reconcile with rationalism generally, but for the sake of argument...) How would you tackle the problem of eternal suffering with the same passion we spend on probability theory and friendly AI?
I wrote a long thought experiment to better define the problem, involving a religion called "Normomism", but it was awkward. There are plenty of real religions whose members believe in Hell, or at least in a Heaven that many people aren't going to (also a terrible loss). Some have a stated mission of saving as many people as possible from a bad afterlife.
So where are they falling short?
If you were the Pope, or the Caliph, or the supreme dictator of some smaller religion, what tactics would you use to convince more people to do and believe exactly the things that would save them--whether that's faith or good works? Why haven't these tactics been tried already? Is there really much room for improvement?
Spreading the Word
This post isn't a dig at believers, though it does seem like many people don't act on their sincere belief in an eternal afterlife. (I don't mind when people try to convert me--at least they care!)
My main point: It's worth considering that people who believe in Very Bad Future Outcomes have been working to prevent those outcomes for thousands of years, and have stumbled upon formidable techniques for doing so.
I've thought for a while about rational evangelism, and it's surprisingly hard to come up with ways that people like Rick Warren and Jerry Lovett could improve their methodology. (Read Lovett's "contact me" paragraph for the part that really impressed me.)
We speak often of borrowing from religion, but these conversations mostly touch on social bonding, rather than what it means to spread ideas so important that the fate of the human race depends on them. ("Raising the Sanity Waterline" is a great start, but those ideas haven't been the focus of many recent posts.)
I'm not saying this is a perfect comparison. The rationalist war for the future won't be fought one soul at a time, and we won't save anyone with a deathbed confession.
But cryogenic freezing does exist. And on a more collective level, convincing the right people that the far future matters could be a coup on the level of Constantine's conversion.
CFAR is doing good things in the direction of rationality evangelism. How can the rest of us do more?
Living Like We Mean It
This movement is going places. But I fear we may spend too much time (at least proportionally) arguing amongst ourselves, when bringing others into the fold is a key piece of the puzzle. And if we’d like to expand the flock (or, more appropriately, the herd of cats), what can we learn from history’s most persuasive organizations?
I often pass up my chance to talk to people about something as simple as Givewell, let alone existential risk, and it's been a long time since I last name-dropped a Less Wrong technique. I don't think I'm alone in this.**
I've met plenty of Christians who exude the same optimism and conviviality as a Rick Warren or a Ned Flanders. These kinds of people are a major boon for the Christian religion. Even if most of us are introverts, what's stopping us from teaching ourselves to live the same way?
Still, I'm new here, and I could be wrong. What do you think?
* Text editor's giving me some trouble, but the link is here: http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/practical-faith/evangelism-interfaith-world
** Peter Boghossian's Manual for Creating Atheists has lots to say about using rationality techniques in the course of daily life, and is well worth reading, though the author can be an asshole sometimes.