I have not a clue whether this sort of marketing is a good idea. Let me be clear what I mean: I think there's maybe a 30-40% chance that Gleb is having a net positive impact through these outreach efforts. I also think there's maybe a 10-20% chance that he's having a horrific long-term negative impact through these outreach efforts. Thus the whole thing makes me uncomfortable.

So here's some of the concerns I see; I've gone to some effort to be fair to Gleb, and not assume anything about his thoughts or motivations:

• By presenting these ideas in weakened forms (either by giving short or invalid argumentation, or putting it in venues or contexts with negative associations), he may be memetically immunizing people against the stronger forms of the ideas.
• By teaching people using arguments from authority, he may be worsening the primary "sanity waterline" issues rather than improving them. The articles, materials, and comments I've seen make heavy use of language like "science-based", "research-based" and "expert". The people reading these articles in general have little or no skill at evaluating such claims, so that they effectively become arguments from authority. By rhetorically convincing them to adopt the techniques or thoughts, he's spreading quite possibly helpful ideas, but reinforcing bad habits around accepting ideas.
• Gleb's writing style strikes me as very unauthentic feeling. Let me be clear I don't mean to accuse him of anything negative; but I intuitively feel a very negative reaction to his writing. It triggers emotional signals in me of attempted deception and rhetorical tricks (whether or not this is his intent!) His writing risks associating "rationality" with such signals (should other people share my reactions) and again causing immunization, or even catalyzing opposition.

An illustration of the nightmare scenario from such an outreach effort would be that, 3 years from now when I attempt to talk to someone about biases, they respond by saying "Oh god don't give me that '6 weird tips' bullshit about 'rational thinking', and spare me your godawful rhetoric, gtfo."

Like I said at the start, I don't know which way it swings, but those are my thoughts and concerns. I imagine they're not new concerns to Gleb. I still have these concerns after reading all of the mitigating argumentation he has offered so far, and I'm not sure of a good way to collect evidence about this besides running absurdly large long-term "consumer" studies.

I do imagine he plans to continue his efforts, and thus we'll find out eventually how this turns out.

Thank you for bringing this up as a topic of discussion! I'm really interested to see what the Less Wrong community has to say about this.

Let me be clear that my goal, and that of Intentional Insights as a whole, is about raising the sanity waterline. We do not assume that all who engage with out content will get to the level of being aspiring rationalists who can participate actively with Less Wrong. This is not to say that it doesn't happen, and in fact some members of our audience have already started to do so, such as Ella. Others are right now reading the Sequences and are passively lurking without actively engaging.

I want to add a bit more about the Intentional Insights approach to raising the sanity waterline broadly.

The social media channel of raising the sanity waterline is only one area of our work. The goal of that channel is to use the strategies of online marketing and the language of self-improvement to get rationality spread broadly through engaging articles. To be concrete and specific, here is an example of one such article: "6 Science-Based Hacks for Growing Mentally Stronger." BTW, editors are usually the ones who write the headline, so I can't "take the credit" for the click-baity nature of the title in most cases.

Another area of work is publishing op-eds in prominent venues on topical matters that address recent political matters in a politically-oriented manner. For example, here is an article of this type: "Get Donald Trump out of my brain: The neuroscience that explains why he’s running away with the GOP."

Another area of work is collaborating with other organizations, especially secular ones, to get our content to their audience. For example, here is a workshop we did on helping secular people find purpose using science.

We also give interviews to prominent venues on rationality-informed topics: 1, 2.

Our model works as follows: once people check out our content on other websites and venues, some will then visit the Intentional Insights website to engage with its content. As an example, after the article on 6 Science-Based Hacks for Growing Mentally Stronger appeared, it was shared over 2K times on social media, so it probably had views in the tens of thousands if not hundreds. Then, over 1K people visited the Intentional Insights website directly from the Lifehack website. In other words, they were interested enough to not only skim the article, but also follow the links to Intentional Insights, which was listed in my bio. Of those, some will want to engage with our content further. As an example, we had a large wave of new people follow us on Facebook and other social media and subscribe to our newsletter in the week after the article came out. I can't say how many did so as a result of seeing the article or other factors, but there was a large bump. So there is evidence of people wanting to get more thoroughly engaged.

The articles we put out on other media channels and on which we collaborate with other groups are more oriented toward entertainment and less oriented toward education in rationality, although they do convey some rationality ideas. For those who engage more thoroughly with out content, we then provide resources that are more educationally oriented, such as workshop videos, online classes, books, and apps, all described on the "About Us" page. Our content is peer reviewed by our Advisory Board members and others who have expertise in decision-making, social work, education, nonprofit work, and other areas.

Finally, I want to lay out our Theory of Change. This is a standard nonprofit document that describes our goals, our assumptions about the world, what steps we take to accomplish our goals, and how we evaluate our impact. The Executive Summary of our Theory of Change is below, and there is also a link to the draft version of our full ToC at the bottom.

Executive Summary 1) The goal of Intentional Insights is to create a world where all rely on research-based strategies to make wise decisions and lead to mutual flourishing. 2) To achieve this goal, we believe that people need to be motivated to learn and have broadly accessible information about such research-based strategies, and also integrate these strategies into their daily lives through regular practice. 3) We assume that:

• Some natural and intuitive human thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns are flawed in ways that undermine wise decisions.
• Problematic decision making undermines mutual flourishing in a number of life areas.
• These flawed thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns can be improved through effective interventions.
• We can motivate and teach people to improve their thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns by presenting our content in ways that combine education and entertainment. 4) Our intervention is helping people improve their patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior to enable them to make wise decisions and bring about mutual flourishing. 5) Our outputs, what we do, come in the form of online content such as blog entries, videos, etc., on our channels and in external publications, as well as collaborations with other organizations. 6) Our metrics of impact are in the form of anecdotal evidence, feedback forms from workshops, and studies we run on our content.

Here is the draft version of our Theory of Change.

Also, about Endless September. After people engage with our content for a while, we introduce them to more advanced things on ClearerThinking, and we are in fact discussing collaborating with Spencer Greenberg, as I discussed in this comment. After that, we introduce them to CFAR and Less Wrong. So those who go through this chain are not the kind who would contribute to Endless September.

The large majority we expect would not go through this chain. They instead engage in other venues with rational thinking, as Viliam mentioned above. This fits into the fact that my goal, and that of Intentional Insights as a whole, is about raising the sanity waterline, and only secondarily getting people to the level of being aspiring rationalists who can participate actively with Less Wrong.

Well, that's all. Look forward to your thoughts! I'm always looking looking for better ways to do things, so very happy to update my beliefs about our methods and optimize them based on wise advice :-)

EDIT: Added link to comment where I discuss our collaboration with Spencer Greenberb's ClearerThinking and also about our audience engaging with Less Wrong such as Ella.

My main update from this discussion has been a strong positive update about Gleb Tsipursky's character. I've been generally impressed by his ability to stay positive even in the face of criticism, and to continue seeking feedback for improving his approaches.

In writing this I considered the virtue of silence, and decided to voice something explicitly.

If rationality is ready to outreach it should be doing it in an as bulletproof way as possible.

Before today I hadn't read deeply into the articles published by Gleb. Owing to this comment:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/mze/marketing_rationality/cwki

and

http://lesswrong.com/lw/mz4/link_lifehack_article_promoting_lesswrong/cw8n

I explicitly just read a handful of Gleb's articles. Prior to this I have just avoided getting in his way (virtue of silence - avoid reading means avoiding being critical and avoid judging someone who is trying to make progress)

These here (to be clear):

• http://intentionalinsights.org/7-surprising-science-based-hacks-to-build-your-willpower
• http://intentionalinsights.org/take-the-outside-view
• http://intentionalinsights.org/the-easiest-trick-to-breaking-out-of-wrong-ideas
• http://intentionalinsights.org/is-kevin-mccarthy-the-smartest-man-in-washington
• http://intentionalinsights.org/are-we-wired-for-trump
• http://intentionalinsights.org/you-can-predict-the-future
• http://intentionalinsights.org/meaning-and-purpose-quantified-and-customized
• http://intentionalinsights.org/what-do-politics-have-to-do-with-meaning-and-purpose-in-life

I don't like any of them. I find the quality of the rationality to be weak; I find the prose to be varying degrees of spider-creepy (although not as bad as OrphanWilde finds things). If I had a button that I could push to make these go away today I would. I would also be disheartened if Gleb stopped trying to do what he is trying to do. (this is a summary of my experiences with these articles. I can break them down but that would take longer to do)

I believe in spreading rationality; I just need the material to pass my bullshit meters and preferably be right up there as Bulletproof if it can be done. Unfortunately the process of generating material is literally hard work that I want to not do (for the most part), and I expect other people also want to avoid doing hard work. (I sometimes do hard work, and sometimes find work-arounds for doing it anyway, but it's still hard. If rationality were easy/automatic; more would already be doing it)

Hopefully this adds volume to the side of the discussion opposing Gleb's work so far; without sounding like it's attacking...

Something said earlier:

[an article Gleb wrote...] was shared over 2K times on social media, so it probably had views in the tens of thousands if not hundreds. Then, over 1K people visited the Intentional Insights website directly from the Lifehack website.

I wanted to add that this is a pretty low number for clickbait. almost worth considering a "failed clickbait" to me.

I'll talk about marketing, actually, because part of the problem is that, bluntly, most of you are kind of inept in this department. By "kind of" I mean "have no idea what you're talking about but are smarter than marketers and it can't be nearly that complex so you're going to talk about it anyways".

Clickbait has come up a few times. The problem is that that isn't marketing, at least not in the sense that people here seem to think. If you're all for promoting marketing, quit promoting shit marketing because your ego is entangled in complex ways with the idea and you feel you have to defend that clickbait.

GEICO has good marketing, which doesn't sell you on their product at all. Indeed, the most prominent "marketing" element of their marketing - the "Saves you 15% or more" bit - mostly serves to distract you from the real marketing, which utilizes the halo effect, among other things, to get you to feel positively about them. (Name recognition, too.) The best elements of their marketing don't get noticed as marketing, indeed don't get noticed at all.

The issue with this entire conversation is that everybody seems to think marketing is noticed, and uses the examples they notice as examples of good marketing. Those are -terrible- examples, as demonstrated by the fact that you think of them when you think of marketing - and anybody you market to will, too. And then you justify these examples of marketing by relying on an unrealistically low opinion of average people - which many average people share.

Do you think somebody clicking on a "One Weird Trick" tries it out? No, they click on clickbait to see what it says, then move on, which is exactly its goal - be attractive enough to get someone's attention, entertaining enough to keep them interested, and no more. Clickbait doesn't impart anything - its goal isn't to be remembered or to change minds or to sell anything except itself, because its goal is to serve up ads to a steady stream of readers.

And if you click on Clickbait to see what stupid people are being tricked into believing - guess what, you're the "stupid person". You were the target audience, which is anybody they can get to click on their stuff, for any reason at all. The author of "This One Weird Trick" doesn't want to convince you to use it, they want you to add a little bit of traffic to the site, and if they can do that by crafting an article and headline that makes intelligent people want to click to see what gullible morons will buy into, they'll do it.

Clickbait isn't the answer. "Rationalist's One Weird Trick To a Happy Life" isn't the answer - indeed, it's the opposite of the answer, because it's deliberately setting rationality up as a sideshow to sell tickets to so people can laugh at what gullible morons buy into.

/writes post

/reads link to The Virtue of Silence

/deletes post

My overall updating from this thread has been:

Learning a lot more about the diversity of opinions and concerns among Less Wrongers.

• 1) Learning that there are a lot more risk-averse people on LW who are opposed to experimenting with new things, learning from experience, improving going forward, and optimizing the world, than I had previously thought.

• 2) Learned a lot about Less Wrongers' "ew" experiences and flinching away from [modern marketing], despite some getting it

• 3) Learned that many Less Wrongers are strongly oriented toward perfectionism and bulletproof arguments at the expense of clarity and bridging inference gaps.
• 4) Surprised to see positive updates on my character (1, 2)as the result of this discussion, and will pay more attention to issues of character in the future - I think I paid too much attention to content previously and insufficient attention to character.

Updated toward some different strategies with Intentional Insights

• 1) Orienting Intentional Insights content more toward providing breadcrumbs of links toward more higher-quality materials than the people on Lifehack and The Huffington Post are currently reading
• 2) Teaching our audience about the dangers of overconfidence sooner.
• 3) Taking more concrete steps to minimize the risk of Endless September and tainting the term "rationality" by decreasing mentions of Less Wrong and rationality in our content.
• 4) Being more clear and specific in communicating scientific thinking to our audiences.
• 5) Learned more about The Virtue of Silence and need to keep this virtue in mind.
• 6) Learned to consider more the trade-offs of using and simplifying certain terms and concepts
• 7) Updating more toward taking well-considered action despite opposition, and avoiding falling into status-quo bias and information bias.
• 8) Stopping unproductive conversations sooner
• 9) Overall, I need to focus more on striving to learn things even from highly negative feedback, and avoid the instinct to flinch away or swing back. This is my aspiration, and I did not always succeed in the course of this discussion. However, I believe this experience will help me grow stronger in this domain.

Thanks all for your participation. As you see, you all taught me something. I appreciate you revealing your mental maps to the extent you chose to do so, and now my territory is clearer. My gratitude to you.

EDIT: Edited for formatting, the bullet points did not come out right away.

Okay well it seems like I'm a bit late to the discussion party. Hopefully my opinion is worth something. Heads up: I live in Columbus Ohio and am one of the organizers of the local LW meetup. I've been friends with Gleb since before he started InIn. I volunteer with Intentional Insights in a bunch of different ways and used to be on the board of directors. I am very likely biased, and while I'm trying to be as fair as possible here you may want to adjust my opinion in light of the obvious factors.

So yeah. This has been the big question about Intentional Insights for its entire existence. In my head I call it "the purity argument". Should "rationality" try to stay pure by avoiding things like listicles or the phrase "science shows"? Or is it better to create a bridge of content that will move people along the path stochastically even if the content that's nearest them is only marginally better than swill? (<-- That's me trying not to be biased. I don't like everything we've made, but when I'm not trying to counteract my likely biases I do think a lot of it is pretty good.)

Here's my take on it: I don't know. Like query, I don't pretend to be confident one way or the other. I'm not as scared of "horrific long-term negative impact", however. Probably the biggest reason why is that rationality is already tainted! If we back off of the sacred word, I think we can see that the act of improving-how-we-think exists in academia more broadly, self-help, and religion. LessWrong is but a single school (so to speak) of a practice which is at least as old as philosophy.

Now, I think that LW style rationality is superior than other attempts at flailing at rationality. I think the epistemology here is cleaner than most academic stuff and is at least as helpful as general self-help (again: probably biased; YMMV). But if the fear is that Intentional Insights is going to spoil the broth, I'd say that you should be aware that things like https://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits.php already exist. As Gleb has mentioned elsewhere on the thread, InIn doesn't even use the "rationality" label. I'd argue that the worst thin InIn does to pollute the LW meme-pool is that there are links and references to LW (and plenty of other sources, too).

In other words, I think at worst* InIn is basically just another lame self-help thing that tells people what they want to hear and doesn't actually improve their cognition (a.k.a. the majority of self-help). At best, InIn will out-compete similar things and serve as a funnel which pulls people along the path of rationality, ultimately making the world a nicer, more sane place. Most of my work with InIn has been for personal gain; I'm not a strong believer that it will succeed. What I do think, though, is that there's enough space in the world for the attempt, the goal of raising the sanity waterline is a good one, and rationalists should support the attempt, even if they aren't confident in success, instead of getting swept up in the typical-mind fallacy and ingroup/outgroup and purity biases.

* - Okay, it's not the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that the presence of InIn aggravates the lords of the matrix into torturing infinite copies of all possible minds for eternity outside of time. :P

(EDIT: If you want more evidence that rationality is already a polluted activity, consider the way in which so many people pattern-match LW as a phyg.)

Do you believe that the "one weird trick to effortlessly lose fat" articles promote healthy eating and are likely to lead people to approach nutrition scientifically?