Out of curiosity, if you’re still reading LessWrong, has this question resurfaced often since then? Do you think (or anyone think, since this is by no means a closed personal question) progress has been made on this “front”? Is the principle applicable, and is it realistic to have rationality be explicitly taught in public education? Is CFAR exactly what you had in mind back then?
I have been thinking this ever since I started the sequences. Another idea would be to try to produce children’s books, and get them distributed as widely as possible.
The hard part is that it’s one of those mental skills that can’t really be taught. You can tell people about it, but they have to learn it for themselves. Because, even once you know about it intellectually, what it “feels” like when your brain is deliberately not thinking about something is almost certainly a subjective experience that will be different for everyone.
So, like Zen, you’d have to work out a large set of training scenarios that put a person in a situation where it’ll happen and then draw their attention to it, and plan on having to run most people through quite a few of them before they grok.
Out of curiosity, if you’re still reading LessWrong, has this question resurfaced often since then? Do you think (or anyone think, since this is by no means a closed personal question) progress has been made on this “front”? Is the principle applicable, and is it realistic to have rationality be explicitly taught in public education? Is CFAR exactly what you had in mind back then?
I have been thinking this ever since I started the sequences. Another idea would be to try to produce children’s books, and get them distributed as widely as possible.
The hard part is that it’s one of those mental skills that can’t really be taught. You can tell people about it, but they have to learn it for themselves. Because, even once you know about it intellectually, what it “feels” like when your brain is deliberately not thinking about something is almost certainly a subjective experience that will be different for everyone.
So, like Zen, you’d have to work out a large set of training scenarios that put a person in a situation where it’ll happen and then draw their attention to it, and plan on having to run most people through quite a few of them before they grok.