[Question] What's your Elevator Pitch For Rationality?

I explain to the elevator that there is no need to be afraid of heights, rationally the chances of malfunction are ignorable - and more generally examining ones own biases and neuroses and correct for them will help ver achieve ver goal of helping people move between floors in an energy efficient way.

I haven't tested this, but maybe:

"People seem to be craziest about the questions that matter most for them, like their girlfriends or boyfriends, whether it was actually a mistake to enroll in their PhD program, etc. I'd like to learn how to not be that way."

I'd start by telling them about the commuting paradox (link grabbed from Yvain's post about rational house buying )- how people end up making themselves miserable by not properly estimating/valuing their own preferences.

That's a concrete example of something that negatively affects hundreds of millions people worldwide; and its applicability to real life is much better understood than the applicability of the triplet game.

I only tried the triplet pitch once, and they got the answer, but didn't feel like "oh, I had a bias," they just felt like it was a trick question. Then I generalized from one example and stopped using it.

I've stopped pitching 'Rationality' per se, but when people ask and seem plausibly interested, I say "Rationality is basically the study of making good decisions." If they inquire further, I think the new intro to Less Wrong is approximately right, although doesn't quite translate into conversational speech.

This might be a question with no good answer. I am reminded of Chomsky's complaint in the video version of Manufacturing Consent that ideas like his can never get a hearing on television because they cannot be condensed into meaty meaningful sound bites.

The two data points worthy of consideration as I see it:

1. Elevator pitches work best for popular culture like Lady Gaga or Harry Potter. I do not think it is a coincidence that a big fraction of the new people in Less Wrong introduction threads state they came to the site through Harry Potter and the Method of. Maybe pitch only the story and not the transcendental critique?

2. The only successful advertising I have seen for any similar product is the Teaching Company. So if I wanted to write an elevator pitch for rationality or for Less Wrong I would first study the Teaching Company advertisements very closely.

Define success? ;)

I like to show people things like the Spinning Dancer and the "this is an attention test" video. I think of them as an invitation to reflect on exactly what kind of beings we are.

Not to troll, but if we're assuming someone needs LessWrong's services, shouldn't we create the least rational pitch we can, deploying the deepest of Darkest Arts and when they say "save me brother!" reply "it's good that you've seen the light, now we can work on not being blinded by it"?

Very good question!

I'm not sure it's even worth trying for a 30-second pitch. My pitches for topics on this site generally take around three minutes. I use anchoring as my cognitive bias - specifically the "anchoring Gandhi's birth date on ludicrously far-off dates" example - and say things like "it's not that we fail to hit the target - it's that all our darts fall on the same side of it" to explain systematic bias, refer to "the mathematics of consistent decision making" and then say "it's crazy that we rely on our brains so much but don't take the time to learn about the ways in which they systematically fail".

I tell one of the stories from this post about the Planning Fallacy. It's a concrete example of a familiar and relevant way we fail to make good decisions, which has an easy fix.

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My thinking-about-it-for-5-minutes pitch:

"I'm thrown in a game where nobody's told me the rules. There's no victory condition, but there's some stuff that I want to do. My most important piece is myself, so I'd like to figure out how to use it.

I currently think that my brain is pretty bad at doing a lot of important things (changing my mind, actually deciding to do things), so I'd like to get better at that. I want to learn more about how the world works, as well as how I work and what I want so that I can do things that will actually get me what I actually want, rather than just kind of doing things that occasionally kind of work for no particularly good reason."

I have not spent much time on this site, so I may have an incorrect understanding of rationality. However, I see rationality more as a vehicle for pursuing and understanding truth. The first argument is to convince people to value truth, and then the next step would be to present rationality as a different method of thinking which would be better able to pursue truth. Convincing someone to value truth is its own battle, especially to folks who have the postmodern belief that their own perception is valuable simply because they perceive it. Simply, if someone does value truth, introducing rationality should follow easily. If someone does not value truth, then they will not accept rationality.

Re: triplets, it also occurs to me that folks have a prior over triplet-rules that disfavors those that contains most or even half of triples (for any bound on all the integers), and favors those that use "interesting" (typically thought to be IQ-testing) rules. This is still no excuse, however :)

For an acquaintance that is generally interested in similar themes but unfamiliar with LW:

Thinking and deciding affect how likely we are to succeed at anything that we care about, but we've learned that people generally suck at this and fail in predictable ways. There's lots of science on this, and I'm sure you've even noticed it yourself.

Example/anecdote (personal and tailored to their interests if possible)

There's lots of info on these kinds of errors, but I find them really slippery to identify and correct in myself. LessWrong is a community designed to figure out how to do better, and design strategies to help people apply these lessons to daily life. I've found it really useful, you should check it out.

"Basically your brain is trolling you."

This reminds me of trying to find an elevator pitch for utilitarianism. More specifically, donating large amounts to a good charity. All I can think of is "Sell your house or hundreds of innocent people will die", but I have a feeling that won't work.

Maybe instead of playing the triplets "trick" on people, you could relate a story from your own life about how you made a mistake that rationality could have let you avoid.