PROPOSAL: LessWrong for Teenagers
What about an online group for high schoolers devoted to refining the art of human rationality?
Discovering LessWrong had a profound effect on me, shedding light on the way I study thought processes and helping me with a more rational approach. As a teenager in high school, I wish I could share LessWrong’s teachings and philosophies with others at my level.
It would be awesome if we could create a list for the interests of LessWrong readers who are in their teens/in high school. I think this would allow a rational online community such as LessWrong to help develop more rationalists whether by outlining some plans to start rationality clubs in high school or discussing ways teenagers an approach rationality. I also think it would help more timid readers to express themselves and talk with other teenagers about common interests (adults could be allowed in to, if they are deemed appropriate for the community). Correct me if I’m wrong, but rationality training should start as soon as possible in the development process and what better age group to target than teenagers? Adolescence is a crucial transitional phase psychologically, biologically and culturally. I would love to see more collected articles on the evolution of rationality in the amazing, flexible mind of an adolescent. If the goal of this blog is to train humans to be rational-minded, more importance should be allocated to training teenagers. I do not think it hasn’t happened yet for want of need among teenagers and if we concentrate some resources, gather a list of interested individuals and garner some interest we can make this work. This article is a good example of something that could be distributed in the proposed group:
For LW readers under 20: Note that the Thiel Fellowships (20 under 20) are now open for their next round of applications, and as they put it, “you have a huge readership of folk who would make great applicants”. More info here. (from http://lesswrong.com/lw/f9r/weekly_lw_meetups_austin_berlin_cambridge_uk/)
There is also this LessWrong Highschoolers Facebook group created by Curtis SerVaas:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/201577993258819/
I recently Skyped (not officially a verb yet?) Anna Salamon who is the Executive Director of CFAR (Center for Applied Rationality). We had begun to develop this proposal. She is on the e-mail list and will be involved as a quasi-supervisor person. You can reach her at anna [at] appliedrationality [dot] org. Drop me a one-line e-mail with your name, age, and situation at [deleted] if you’d like to join the list. Speak up! Teenagers should be the subject of concentrated effort on LessWrong. We are the future, help us to reach the fruits of human rationality.
It’s my understanding that most people at 15 want to be treated as being adults. When I was 15 I certainly didn’t want to read “political philosophy for 15 year olds” but I read Hobbes, Machiavelli and Rousseau.
I doubt teenagers who are really interested in rational thinking would go into a “rational thinking for teenagers”-group.
I agree. And the “total immersion” effect of LessWrong is really healthy for young minds, but I am not sure you have understood the purpose of this would-be project. If you were an English teacher, would you not be interested in a “rational thinking for teachers” group? I know that if I was an English teacher with access to the rationality training resources found on LessWrong I would spend a while thinking about “Guessing the Teacher’s Password.” I would want to iron out as many of the logical fallacies, teaching errors and understanding errors that can take place in a classroom, such as “Guessing the Teacher’s Password.” I would want to work in the best possible environment for learning and be the best possible teacher. I can still read Hobbes, Machiavelli and Rousseau. No one is going to stop me. But as a teacher I am particularly interested in making sure that I am doing my job in a way that trains thinkers and not answer-anticipating machines. Would it be helpful to have a rationality group devoted to helping me do my job rationally? Yes. I think most people would like to be able to know how to go about their jobs in a rational way. Would you?
The same goes for teenagers. Most of us are students. Many of us aspire to be musicians, some of us aspire to be rationalists. When you were 15, would you have been interested in understanding the inner-workings of a teenage brain through puberty? Would approaching college applications in a rational way be a useful tool for 15 year old ChristianKl? Maybe, maybe not. But it would be nice to be able to make that choice, to have the resources available to you. Being a teenager is a job, sometimes a tough job. Some of us would like to understand how to approach it rationally. What are some good thought-provokign ways to spend your summer vacation? What enrichment opportunities are there for teenagers? How to reason with parents? And as for doubting rational teenagers would join such a group, I am not sure but I think I have experimental evidence disproving that statement. A LessWrong Highschoolers Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/201577993258819/). You can check if they are really interested in rational thinking, but it is my understanding that they are. So, possibly, we can put your doubts at ease. You can cater to someone’s needs without dumbing things down and continue to treat them as adults. Because even though we want to be treated as adults, we want to be rational adults and LessWrong can and (probably) should help us in that endeavor. Or does “A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality” not apply if your under 20? It is possible to help someone without damaging their (admittedly inflated) self-esteem. And Hobbes, Machiavelli and Rousseau would be equally at home in a LessWrong for Teenagers section. Your teenager hood seems to have been full of beautiful philosophical readings, don’t you want everyone to have that chance?
We could have “rational thinking for teachers”, a “rational thinking for programmers”, a “rational thinking for musicians”, a “rational thinking for women” and a “rational thinking for teenagers” group. At the end you have 10 different groups. I don’t think that’s a good way to proceed.
I don’t see how that discussion would be unwelcome on LessWrong. If you have such a discussion on LessWrong it’s likely that people who aren’t teenagers contribute their knowledge. That’s a good thing for the discussion.
A rational teenager who speaks about how parents are in general overcontroling doesn’t need another teenager with the same perspective to agree with him. He profits much more if someone with a different opinion than him contributes to the discussion.
Given that I live in Germany a discussion about US college applications wouldn’t have been more valuable to me back then, then it’s now.
That’s a bit different. The fact that the group exist doesn’t show that the people who are members of the group don’t feel welcome on LessWrong. 23 people are also not enough to have a functioning LessWrong forum.
Of course it applies. Come and open your discussions about college applications and the workings of the teenage brain right here. You are welcome on LessWrong proper and don’t need a separate room to have that discussion.
Not to mention that it carries the implication that the default rationalist is not a member of any of these categories.
It depends.
If the Discussion page gets flooded by dozen “rationality for musicians” articles, it could make the members without musical interests feel excluded. One such article in a few months would not have the same effect. And it could make the musicians very happy.
One can be more specific about “applied rationality for musicians” than about “applied rationality for artists”, which is still more specific than “applied rationality” in general. Perhaps we should replace “rational” with “optimal” here. But anyway, the goal of rationality is to win. We can win more by sharing the fruit we already found; even if doing that does not directly increase one’s fruit-seeking skills.
(Personally, I would love to see the “rational thinking for programmers” topic, but I am afraid that this topic has a very high chance of jumping to a dozen articles per month when the taboo is broken, so I will rather not break that taboo. But writing for teenagers seems much safer.)
If you do have the discussion page flooded by dozen of “rationality for musicians” articles it’s time to open a separate forum for them. I don’t see a reason to open that forum before that happens.
Maybe “optimizing” rather than “optimal”? It’s hard to be sure you’ve gotten something as right as possible.
This may have been true back in the day, but with the way our culture has progressed, I would think that LW could be like Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Rousseau for a new generation. Instead of needing to browse the bookstores for this type of material teenagers could congregate on these forums. I would just use a term that was not “teenagers.”
Can you make LW flyers and pass them out at your school, perhaps? Do you have a school newspaper? Maybe you could give this site a plug? Start attending meetups?
I agree with everyone who’s said that an LW for teenagers isn’t needed. A tag “of special interest to teenagers” might be a good idea. It’s possible that there should be some way of awarding the tag by acclamation rather than the tag being put on by the poster so that there’s a good chance that the post will actually be of interest to teenagers.
I don’t know if it will eventually be a good thing to have a LW teenage hangout so that they can get away from their parents, but if so, the teenagers can set it up for themselves.
I wonder why the founders of LessWrong didn’t just let the people with less rationality-training than themselves set LessWrong up for themselves. Asking for help is a compliment, you know, we look up to the more-rational population than can be found on LessWrong. Either that or there are too many lazy teenagers.
If you run a community you don’t want that community to be split.
Writing three discussion posts about pro-teenager topics is a much better first step than thinking about setting up a new forum.
I wasn’t suggesting that teenagers should invent LessWrong for themselves, just that if they want a no-adults spinoff, they’d probably want to do it for themselves.
This sounds like “hey, I’m starting up a special-interest listserv. Suggestions?”, and I encourage any special-interest listservs, thanks to the long tail.
A listserv is a different medium. It needs less users to reach critical mass.
In the OP, there’s a lot of talk about joining a list- it’s not clear if it’s a list of issues or a list of people. It looked to me like a list of people organized as a listserv, but that’s not the only option that fits with the OP as written. So, if that wasn’t the intention, that’s my formal suggestion: make a listserv first, and see what grows out of that.
I am 16 and I think I started reading this site 13. I think there is no need for another site. I also oppose any new forum/category of LW simply because interesting content here is getting thinner and thinner, half the discussion page is [META] (“Italics formatting is broken!”) or [SEQ RERUN] and a new forum would dilute that even further.
I think this is a good idea. I wish LW had existed when I was a teenager; maybe I could have got started on the path to enlightenment earlier, instead of spending more than half a decade as one of those smirking, sarcastic, self-congratulatory Atheists that now make me cringe. But it does seem likely that LW could be intimidating to teenagers, and this seems to me to be a demographic we should be trying to reach.
Perhaps we could make an effort to produce some more accessible, entry-level posts that provide a gentler introduction to the material of the sequences and LW community memes, without assumed prereading, as part of this...
Hell that would be good for attracting more readers of any age. No marketer would recommend requiring hours of reading to use your product. And often its simple things like using common words or including simple definitions rather than LW shibboleths.
There’s a new text on the time of Roman dominion over the British Isles that begins each chapter with a piece of historical fiction as a hook. Perhaps micro-fiction introducing various topics would supplement the Sequences in the same way.
I also think comprehensive citations and notes would signal legitimacy, which is of value if for their continued ease of perusal someone needs a judgmental superior to approve of educational site content.
I agree that teens and preteens are the most important audience, but I don’t understand what LW lacks that you need. When OB started I didn’t want it to be more targeted at my age range. Maybe more mental health advice?
What is specific for teenagers (and could be emphasized by a specialized LW part)?
They attend school; more specifically: elementary or grammar school. What are good strategies for learning? What are good strategies to get good grades without learning too much? Which subjects and which topics are most important and worth focusing? How to deal with problems in school, e.g. with bullies?
They don’t have to work to survive. Many of them have a lot of free time (less than they will have in university, but more than in the decades following the university); what would be the best use of this time?
How to choose a college/university? When the choice is made, how to prepare best for that choice?
They are dependent on parents. How to negotiate with the parents? What are the best ways to get independence?
How to deal with irrational classmates and other friends? Where to find rational people? What are the dangers typical for this age (e.g. joining a cult), and how to best avoid them?
Sexuality, mood swings, and other strong powers associated with puberty. How to cope with them?
...and any other questions asked by the teenagers themselves.
Only speaking for myself here, but if OB had been “how to get good grades” rather than “Hal Finney predicts Peak Oil” I’d have been less likely to start reading, and if it had been “sound advice for all walks of life” rather than “Eliezer Yudkowsky takes human psychology apart to the molecular level” I’d have been less likely to keep reading.
Poll time!
[pollid:203]
Personally, I devoured the Sequences out of personal interest, but I had stumbled across a few of the articles on Overcoming Bias before, and it was reading Lost Purposes, which felt tremendously relevant to the education I was pursuing, that hooked me enough that I immediately felt compelled to check out Eliezer’s whole body of work.
Hm. This poll data won’t falsify the hypothesis that we can expand our teenage audience by writing Hints from Heloise-style stuff.
Yay false dilemma! I did not realize that talking about teenagers could be mindkilling, so here comes my list of disclaimers...
Of course the “LW articles for teenagers” should be nothing like the typical articles for teenagers. For exactly the same reason that LW articles today are not like the typical articles for N-years-old people for any value of N.
I advocate having some content focused on teenagers, but not a separate website for them. Best solution could be to use tags and/or later collect the teenager-oriented articles into a new sequence. (This is my personal opinion, I don’t speak for other “teenage LW” advocates here.) People who come here to read Eliezer writing about X will continue to come here, because Eliezer will continue to write about X. There will be no filter to remove Eliezer’s articles from the teenage readers’ starting pages.
Even if we assume that (aspiring) rational teenagers have exactly the same minds as (aspiring) rational adults, they still live in different conditions. An article about a job choice is more relevant to a person in a job market, and less relevant for a teenager; not because the teenager wouldn’t understand it, but simply because for a teenager, job choice is not a present-day problem, unlike for an adult. Teenagers have different present-day problems.
How much is it necessary to focus on everyone’s present-day problems? Well, this is a site for both epistemic and instrumental rationality. It’s about winning. And what one does during their average day usually contributes to their winning. Ignoring one’s everyday life and focusing on the meaning of Peano’s Fifth Axiom instead may be high status, but ultimately self-deceiving.
Yes, typical advice for teenagers is a pure far-mode “obey the authorities, don’t ask questions, and everything will magically be fine” crap. I am not suggesting anything like this here. Litany of Tarski etc.
But perhaps the best way to make sure at least some teenagers will want to read those articles, is to ask them.
I voted 3. Its not like we have a limited amount on space on here, the overall problem is a lack of content full stop. We can have both, and if we are someday in the fortunate position that we have so much quality content it is difficult to sort we can start using the tagging system properly.
I think effort to write a type of content is largely displaced from effort to write another. I may be wrong.
If you are attracting more teenage rationalists-in-training, that increases demand. But training these teenagers also creates a larger body of rationalists who can contribute and create content. I don’t know if it weighs out.
The opportunity to talk with and get advice from other people who are your own age is often very valuable. For one, older people may have forgotten what it was like to be a teenager, or their knowledge may be out of date even if they haven’t. Talking with others your age can also be far less intimidating than talking with people many years your senior, especially if you look up to the adults and don’t want appear foolish in their eyes. It’s much harder to admit that you don’t understand something and to ask for clarification if there are high-status individuals present.
In saying this, I am in no way saying that the average teenager is stupid, or lacks the cognitive abilities to full read and appreciate Less Wrong.
However, the readability of the Core Sequences isn’t at a low reading level. To make them more teen-friendly, we may wish to consider how to make them more accessible. This may mean making them shorter, summarizing the main ideas more frequently, and using applicable real-life examples more.
I’d be interested in knowing what kind of help we’re looking for to make this happen. I’d be willing to help with the writing of the new articles if I knew which were most wanted, and had a few people (and some teens) to bounce them off of when completed.
In general, we need rationality materials for people of ordinary intelligence. The vast majority of people are part of the rationality waterline we’re trying to raise. And it wouldn’t surprise me if writing materials for them would lead to clearer, simpler explanations which are just as sound as the ones we have.
Essentially what I was trying to say, only put more succinctly and better than I did. Thanks. ^_^
You’re welcome.
I have a proof of concept of sorts about improved explanations—the jump from roman numerals to Arabic. I’ve also heard that the first notation for calculus was much harder to work with than the current notation.
My impression is that adults who can understand the sequences could have understood them as teenagers, though I don’t know how you could prove that.
Question, only for teenagers: Is there a topic, somehow relevant to your age group, which you would like to see rationally discussed on LW?
Please, be specific.
I’m a freshman in college now, but a post or two analyzing the reasons for choosing an (expensive, high status) private college versus an (essentially free, low status) state college, or going to school in America versus Europe versus somewhere else, would have been immensely valuable to me a year ago.
This would belong on LessWrong because typical advice on this topic is either “follow your dreams, do what you love, everything will work out”, or “you’re an idiot to take on debt, if you can’t pay your own way through college you’re a lazy, entitled brat”.
A post describing how to make such a decision based on expected-value calculations, discussing value of information and college visits, and dissecting the research into the income effects of attending top colleges would be very nice.
(I could write such a post, if others think it would be of enough general interest).
I think it would be a good idea for a post, not just for the specifics but also because it would relate to making decisions which involve long range predictions.
From the upvotes I’m concluding it’s worthwhile to go ahead and write it: I agree it serves as a pretty decent example of applying rationality concepts for long-term decision making. It’ll have to wait a week until Thanksgiving Break, though.
I can share some of my teenage-concerns, current and former, which advice may (or may not?) be appropriate for.
How to decide what to do with my life, if even possible. What makes me happy? What is important to me? Maybe I do not need to attend college to satisfy my interests? What happens if my model for my future is different from my parents’ model of my future?
How to cope with being stuck in high-school, with a limited degree of freedom and mobility, a lack of tolerance for worthless tasks like chores, a largely immature crowd of peers surrounding me, and no IRL friends who are also rationalists
Existential depression: feeling overtly depressed over the realization that life is meaningless, short, etc
Not actually understanding where I fit in intellectually due to conflicting judgments (school performance vs. personal thinking, learning, and interaction)
Most often, the advice I get is to wait for college. The concerns get dismissed because they’re juvenile and temporary in nature. However, I choose to assert the importance of the present.
I think maybe an introductory sequence—simple, straightforward, easily contemplated and applied, for new people. Especially teenagers, then—I’d have LOVED to read Guessing the Teacher’s Password when I was 15, but it wasn’t among the first I read. Hard to find unless you knew what you were looking for. So simple things to find their own answer to—do we have free will, figure out why the people arguing about trees making sounds are arguing in the first place, stuff like that. A place to discuss this without anyone spoiling it would be great for newcomers, I think.
Maybe tips on how to combat procrastination, getting efficient at studying and social insights. Do we have a wiki entry for basic expressions used here, that might not be so basic to teens? We should expect intelligent people with zero knowledge on rationality here, so we prepare for that. That’s all I can think of now, I’ll add more if I think of anything.
I agree with Spectral Dragon. There are two main areas I’m thinking of: the first are introductions:: rationality ideas for people with no rationality background, presented clearly and not dependant on having read ALL of EY’s posts, and also introductions to major topics related to science, maths, computer science and the like, written by rationalists—Like the Causal Disgrams post from the new Epistemology sequence. For instance, explaining what maths and physics are without referring to a ‘non-natural platonic realm of being’ etc. Clear and not confused, rather than clearly confused. Also, applying rationality to (teenage) life—that is, life rationality for newcomers to that particular field. All types of interpersonal relationships, how signalling and status fit into everything, how to organise your life now that you need to think for yourself (etc).
That would be brilliant :)
I’m 15, and I would really like to be part of a community of teenage rationalists-in-training/LessWrongers. Also, I think a couple of people have over-read into this post. I don’t think Josephthink is proposing a whole new blog and site, I think this is a call out to any LW teenagers to get in contact. I have, and so have three others as far as I know. And I think that’s a great idea.
Also, I think the small community could come up with posts (or post ideas) useful to them, and other people (as certain kind members below have offered) could help with the writing. Teenagers are often still getting used to life in the big wide world, and loads of different discussions taken from a rationalist standpoint about basic things ( I found this really useful: Social Status Hacks ) and aspects of academic knowledge (maths, science etc.) would be interesting to everyone, I think.
Or not. I’m certainly glad for this post, I now know of three other teenage rationalists after two days.
I joined LessWrong at age 18, and noticed no massive hurdles apart from not having read enough math to comprehend the math-ier sequences, but I can see where you’re going with this. I’d have been incredibly eager to start thinking better at age 16 or so already. I would LOVE to introduce my more intelligent friends to this, but it can be pretty terrifying here at first. Your idea sounds perfect for that purpose. I’ll join that other site too, and provide feedback if I can.
Edit: Ah, must’ve skipped a paragraph. Not interested in skipping college, ignore. I’d just be interested in, as with me, casual refinement beside my normal education, as for the people I’d recommend this site to.
I’m so jealous. All I got at 15 was Nietzsche, TOOL, and trolling AOL chatrooms.
I’m no longer in my teens (I’m 31), but I think this is a great idea, and if I can be of any help, let me know. Are you interested only in teenagers for now, or “old” people who are willing to help are interesting for you too ?
24, I would also be willing to help. Several people seem concerned that special effort to reach out to teenagers and help them address their problems will interfere with the status-quo style and quality of less wrong. I would encourage being sure that isn’t the case, and explaining why. If it would require current users to wade through teenage problems, I would vote not to do that. But I see no reason we can’t expand as per John_Maxwell_IV’s comment. http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/fch/proposal_lesswrong_for_teenagers/7sfk
I’m mostly done with my operations research post, which I imagine will (among other things) be useful to teenagers considering different college majors. It may be useful to have other people write similar posts for other subjects- it may not be helpful to have someone explain what it’ll be like to be a physics or engineering major, since there’s already a lot out there about that, but it might be helpful to have a guide to “this is how you can position yourself to research to anti-aging or uploading or FAI theory.”
If you have any witty names for a teenager rationality group at school, I would appreciate it if you shared your idea.