Your points on this issue are excellent. And this is potentially a very productive approach to raising sanity waterline, however my concerns are more or less covered by this comment I made to a similar proposal.
But I will add that I fear you may be implicitly overestimating the cognitive capacity of say the average 12 year old. I’m pretty sure many children in primary schools can get a lot of out of learning the “methods of rationality”, but I’m not that sure they would be the majority. For most at that age I believe you would get more people just internalizing right answers rather than fixing their thinking. It was Aristotle I think who said that often the people with the most correct opinions don’t make the most correct decisions.
Kids have less invested in their beliefs. If you’re married to a theist and raising your kids in the tradition of a particular religion, it’s a lot harder to suddenly change your mind about the foundations of your life. Similarly, people who’ve already experienced the loss of people close to them seem to have a lot more invested in the idea that death is the natural cycle of life.
Your opinions converging with those of someone who is above average in rationality on a number of particular issues, such as say Atheism or P-zombies will probably be a net boost, but its hard to figure out if this is getting us anywhere at building skills that let people make their own better maps rather than just trusting or being impressed by someone more capable than themselves . School is nominally partially about teaching kids a whole bunch of true beliefs. But does it markedly improve rationality?
Also on a unrelated note, I hope what you learned here will produce practical benefits for you as well as that you will continue to try and be well… less wrong. :-)
The reason I say this is because we live in a pretty insane society, and we’re pretty crazy ourselves. So I wanted to warn you that eventually you will hit on something that will cause you quite a bit of mental anguish or at least risk the socially approved self image you have of yourself… or you most likley are nottrying to be as strong as you can be.
I would agree that teaching elementary schoolers proper “rationality” is probably impossible, but I think there would be a lot of benefits to encouraging curiosity and interest in the world generally. When I was 12, my science teacher gave us all pendulums and told us to figure out how they worked. Everyone was annoyed at him—we’d plodded dutifully through the public school system for years by then, and everyone knew that the teacher had to tell you what variables to test, and which one was independent, and which one was dependent. We ended up testing lots of different stuff: how is the period of a pendulum affected by string length? weight? starting position? In the end, I learned a lot about pendulums—and even more about how to do science when you don’t even know what you’re testing. I think most 12 year old could benefit from a lesson like that.
At least some high school kids could learn (and understand) everything on LessWrong. I’ll focus in my next few posts on how to tell which ones, and how to reach them.
I would agree that teaching elementary schoolers proper “rationality” is probably impossible
In 3rd or 4th grade, we learned about biases, how to think creatively, and how to remember things. We were also taught how to do social negotiations (for instance, convincing your parents to buy you a new toy), and a number of other skills.
I was seriously irked when I hit 7th grade, and we did some logic puzzles as a group, and no one but me could reach the correct conclusions. At this point in my life I’ve concluded that said 3rd grade class may well represent the most rational group I’ve encountered outside of LessWrong.
So, while you might not be able to teach everything, I think you seriously under-estimate how teachable a kid is if you get to them before they’ve been ruined by the public school system. Doubly so if you have teachers that bother to teach their students how to learn about a pendulum before forcing them to deal with one (I applaud the teacher for trying but, eesh, that just doesn’t strike me as an effective lesson for a regular class of students)
We were a honors class in a gifted school, so once we got over our initial shock it worked pretty well. But you may be right this isn’t a viable approach for your average student. Your third grade class is impressive; do you remember what they covered? Was it curriculum or initiative on the part of your teacher?
It was a special program, run by three teachers, who got to set their own curriculum, so class that as you will. It was absolutely wonderful compared to public school. Aside from what I mentioned above, we covered all the usual subjects, and a lot of random ones—we learned how to play the stock market for our economics lessons, we went and saw bridges to learn about them, and we did a lot of arts and crafts.
Your points on this issue are excellent. And this is potentially a very productive approach to raising sanity waterline, however my concerns are more or less covered by this comment I made to a similar proposal.
But I will add that I fear you may be implicitly overestimating the cognitive capacity of say the average 12 year old. I’m pretty sure many children in primary schools can get a lot of out of learning the “methods of rationality”, but I’m not that sure they would be the majority. For most at that age I believe you would get more people just internalizing right answers rather than fixing their thinking. It was Aristotle I think who said that often the people with the most correct opinions don’t make the most correct decisions.
Your opinions converging with those of someone who is above average in rationality on a number of particular issues, such as say Atheism or P-zombies will probably be a net boost, but its hard to figure out if this is getting us anywhere at building skills that let people make their own better maps rather than just trusting or being impressed by someone more capable than themselves . School is nominally partially about teaching kids a whole bunch of true beliefs. But does it markedly improve rationality?
Also on a unrelated note, I hope what you learned here will produce practical benefits for you as well as that you will continue to try and be well… less wrong. :-)
The reason I say this is because we live in a pretty insane society, and we’re pretty crazy ourselves. So I wanted to warn you that eventually you will hit on something that will cause you quite a bit of mental anguish or at least risk the socially approved self image you have of yourself… or you most likley are not trying to be as strong as you can be.
I would agree that teaching elementary schoolers proper “rationality” is probably impossible, but I think there would be a lot of benefits to encouraging curiosity and interest in the world generally. When I was 12, my science teacher gave us all pendulums and told us to figure out how they worked. Everyone was annoyed at him—we’d plodded dutifully through the public school system for years by then, and everyone knew that the teacher had to tell you what variables to test, and which one was independent, and which one was dependent. We ended up testing lots of different stuff: how is the period of a pendulum affected by string length? weight? starting position? In the end, I learned a lot about pendulums—and even more about how to do science when you don’t even know what you’re testing. I think most 12 year old could benefit from a lesson like that.
At least some high school kids could learn (and understand) everything on LessWrong. I’ll focus in my next few posts on how to tell which ones, and how to reach them.
In 3rd or 4th grade, we learned about biases, how to think creatively, and how to remember things. We were also taught how to do social negotiations (for instance, convincing your parents to buy you a new toy), and a number of other skills.
I was seriously irked when I hit 7th grade, and we did some logic puzzles as a group, and no one but me could reach the correct conclusions. At this point in my life I’ve concluded that said 3rd grade class may well represent the most rational group I’ve encountered outside of LessWrong.
So, while you might not be able to teach everything, I think you seriously under-estimate how teachable a kid is if you get to them before they’ve been ruined by the public school system. Doubly so if you have teachers that bother to teach their students how to learn about a pendulum before forcing them to deal with one (I applaud the teacher for trying but, eesh, that just doesn’t strike me as an effective lesson for a regular class of students)
We were a honors class in a gifted school, so once we got over our initial shock it worked pretty well. But you may be right this isn’t a viable approach for your average student. Your third grade class is impressive; do you remember what they covered? Was it curriculum or initiative on the part of your teacher?
It was a special program, run by three teachers, who got to set their own curriculum, so class that as you will. It was absolutely wonderful compared to public school. Aside from what I mentioned above, we covered all the usual subjects, and a lot of random ones—we learned how to play the stock market for our economics lessons, we went and saw bridges to learn about them, and we did a lot of arts and crafts.
This.