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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.