"Target audience" size for the Less Wrong sequences

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 - there's good reason to pay attention to one's mental hygiene before decompartmentalising too early, particularly for the average human who not only has the biases but is largely unaware of them. Memetic parasites are real, so one must in fact make the effort not to inadvertently present oneself as looking like the victim of one.

I hope you can look at the numbers and understand why, when someone answers a newbie's question on something with "You should try reading the sequences", it's pretty much an extremely rude dismissal.

Possible useful approach: you don't really know the material until you own it in your own head and could rewrite it. So. Make rationality posts on your own blog too, for outreach. Copy good ones here for LW's consumption. But get your friends interested in rationality.

BTW, I'm Myers-Briggs ENFP. And no, I haven't ploughed through the sequences. Though I have been reading books again of late, so it's in the plausible range.

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 massive fear that being rational is just not natural for me. Nor is my IQ, I suspect, anywhere near the high end of the spectrum here....though that filter for social status has been, I think, obscuring my intelligence for most of my life.

Does socializing on the internet feel low-status to me? Yeah, it does....and had I not basically grown up on the internet, I doubt I'd ever give a community like this a second glance. It's been really tough divorcing society's ideal of what is status-y from what I actually want to do. I love the internet, and I spend a vast amount of time on it, but it still feels low status to me, and so it's not something I advertise. Despite my ability to find more interesting conversation here than I can possibly hope to find in real life!

So, even though I was pointed to LW multiple times independently, I probably would never have actually become an active participant (insofar as I am one) had I not had the personal endorsement of my brother, who is an active member, that this was a very intelligent place. Honestly, I wasn't properly calibrated to identify this place as, well, what it actually is. I don't know what to suggest to get this to be more appealing to people that are like me - that is, smart enough to benefit from the sequences, but not likely to seek it out on their own. The rationality book is probably the best bet.

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! Or, more anecdotally: I know plenty of average (less than 1 s.d. above mean) people who like reading interesting things.

Statistical things to fix

• You did a generally good job controlling for correlations, with a few gaps on (30 minutes on computer)|(all the other stuff)

• The real problem with "no free time": you assume everyone's average rather than accounting for variation, which would increase the numbers there.

• Yvain's survey. I think you're underestimating the awesome power of response bias. And also neglecting the extra factor that all those people signed up for LW, not just spent some time reading.

I'll try and be a bit more constructive when I have more time.

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 different way to say it and I still think it needs to be said: the four sentences above strike me as among the most offensively stupid things I've come across on LW.

You're totally missing the point of MBTI and I wouldn't be comfortable trusting you with any other psychometric instrument until I saw evidence you'd understood your mistake. MBTI is supposed to measure preference and not ability; and like any other similar instrument should be used to help bridge over communication difficulties rather than to pigeonhole people. It freaks the hell out of me when I see people doing that pigeonholing thing; it's the same problem as with horoscopes - people just aren't that damn simple!

More directly adressing the nonsense above, absolutely nothing I've ever read about MBTI has led me to the conclusion that people with an S preference "take things at face value and resist using induction or intuition" or that people with an F preference are "using feelings to chose beliefs in lieu of thinking".

A typical reference on MBTI would say that an S preference means you "approach situations with an eye to the facts" or "work from the facts to the big picture", both things that strike me as being perfectably compatible with a community which prides itself on "updating on the evidence". Someone with an F preference would take into account others' feelings when making a decision, when someone with a T preference would tend to discount their own as well as others' feelings. In many situations the former can be a more (instrumentally) rational thing to do and the latter less rational. (As for epistemic rationality: feelings are facts, and denying that people have feelings is not a mark of rationality but a caricature of it.)

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 up 'winning so hard they won't have time to do anything meaningful'.

Moreover, you may want to add some gray to your filters. If 5% of lesswrongers self-reported to be outside the 130+ IQ bracket, and maybe sampling bias makes that 10%, then perhaps this should be reflected in the filter.

Another one that I just thought about, what about people who read and understand -some- of the sequences, and get some value out of them but don't end up signing up and participating? Are they a waste of resources? As far as I know from experiences, people who participate in a community tend to be the peak of the iceberg (1-10%?), and the effects of this this self-selection should not be ignored.

Finally, to add to the uncertainty, an anecdote: Some people tend to be open to convincing if they find the right arguments. I self-identified as a christian when I started reading the sequences and came out an atheist, and I think there's quite a few of us if I recall correctly from the rationalist origin story thread. Given that, I think the religion filter needs a fair bit of gray added to it.

Overall I think this estimate has swung in the opposite direction. I would be very surprised if the sequences had reached 50% of everyone who would benefit from them. At the very least, this fact would imply something counter-intuitive about the habits of our target audience. (e.g. that they tend to cluster and so LW has saturated word-of-mouth or news outlets where the target audience gathers, without even trying, but further trying would be unproductive.)

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 image of a percolation theoretic display of the square lattice in two dimensions with percolation probability p=0.51.

If p is high enough and/or the lattice has a lot of connections, then you get a sea of transmissibility with islands of isolation (because they are surrounded by buffer nodes) that need an unusual effort to reach. If p is too low and/or the network is too sparse then you have islands of opportunity and each separate island needs to be contacted by extraordinary means in order of the message to reach it.

Given the way you've specified the target demographic, I'd guess that we're dealing with the island scenario. LW is probably an island. It may not even be the largest island there is. My naive guess would be that outreach to other islands would be tricky... like... how does one entire community Aumann update with another entire community?

This is likely to matter to our outreach strategy.

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 people.

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.

Again, this statement is too sweeping; there may be evolution denialists who ascribe to induction and science but who haven't carefully considered the evidence for evolution on account of being involved in other (possibly valuable) things.

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).

One can be primarily sensing and still have very good intuition and one can be primarily feeling while still being very good at thinking. So your exclusion of people who are primarily sensing or primarily feeling seems unjustified, at least in the absence of further supporting evidence.

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.

1. Reason is not the only means of overcoming bias.

2. Just because somebody currently chooses beliefs based on feeling rather than thinking doesn't mean that he or she will persist in doing, so the use of "permanently" is inappropriate here.

3. It's not clear that choosing beliefs based on feeling rather than thinking is irrational.

4. The phrase "there's nothing that we can do for you" conjures images of tribalism and I find the use of "blessings of rationality" uncomfortably religious/cultish in tone.

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.

Even assuming that the vast majority of those with IQ < 130 are unable to benefit from Less Wrong articles/sequences, there may be people with IQ < 130 who are statistical outliers in other ways and who can consequently benefit from Less Wrong articles/sequences.

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.

Your use of "unlucky" in describing those who have full-time jobs and those who are married with children seems unjustified.

And again, even if most people in the demographic of those who have full-time jobs and/or are married with children don't have time to read, there may be some people in this demographic who are statistical outliers in other ways (e.g. naturally low in their need for sleep) which leave them with free time for reading.

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.

"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 then as a nursing assistant, both more-than-full-time jobs, and also married. I still managed to read a few books a week, two broadsheet newspapers a day, and spend a couple of hours reading and writing stuff online.

Admittedly, I'm in the UK, so have/had a relatively short commute and also decent public transport (so can read on the 'bus/train), but I really don't think having a job stops people spending half an hour a day on their interests (in fact I did the above while doing part-time university studies and being in a band).

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 shouldn't underestimate the readership by the periphery.

Speaking of filters, what do you mean by

Believes in evolution | Atheist/Agnostic: 24%

Should I take it to mean that 24% of Atheists / Agnostics don't believe in evolution? That's a surprising number.

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 the methodology was a phone survey and it only include the "All Americans" who have stable land lines in urban and suburban areas. So the "All Americans" is probably about as representative as psychology studies done on a group of only psychology students. Also, I can't find what kind of blogs people are reading or for how long... and Pew normally does surveys in English and Spanish so that's another reason I need to find the raw data to see the breakdown. Can someone help me locate the original Pew Research or Nielsen data used to make this graphic?

This data would be really helpful because it might allow me to combine the English Speaking screen + 30 minutes reading / using computers screen into a single, more precise filter for English + 30 online reading time / day which would be cleaner for purposes like avoiding double counting and more accurately track what I care about.