I Need Your Help
Hello LessWrong!
I am Jaivardhan Nawani, a 14 year old enthusiast of the ideas and mental models that stem from rationality. I want to spread this means of thinking amongst people my age.
I am by no means an expert, and I need your help and experience. I am working on setting up a course with simple teaching aids and handouts during lessons, with multiple batches. While sourcing students on its own is not a problem, it helps to have those that work or research this field actively on my side to teach. It would be amazing if anyone was willing to connect me to a university or a professor to whom I could pitch this to. Even students actively studying this subject are ideal.
Any more general advice from those that have done this already is always welcome.
Thanks in advance for all of your help!
For a course:
The Guild of the Rose has a bunch of workshops and a skill tree that may be of some use. There also exists the CFAR handbook, though I believe it’s formatted on the assumption that it’s an aid for a class with a teacher who knows what they’re doing. I’m also interested in this problem, and so there’s bits and pieces of useful stuff scattered throughout Meetup In A Box in the form of games or activities.
For universities or professors:
It would help to hear a bit more about your goal and use case for them. If you’re trying to get a class or club going, it’ll help a lot if it’s a teacher in a university you’re attending or plausibly would attend. If you’re looking for classroom material to copy from, you might start with some psych classes; I think a lot of biases get covered there. A bit of statistics or the right probability textbook would also help. If you’re looking for help learning the skill of teaching, just about any university will have some advice- it’s remarkably transferable. In particular I’d pay attention to public speaking (try toastmasters?) and technical writing classes.
For general advice:
I think it’s really useful to have some kind of concrete measurable thing in mind. Start with, say, calibration training and mess around with what helps people get better scores there. You’ll be able to notice what works and doesn’t work easier since you have a cleaner signal on what works and doesn’t.
I also think it’s generally easier to meet people where they’re at. Minimize the number of interim steps and inferential distance to cross, make it as fun and engaging as possible without losing the important core, pay attention to every point of friction and try to minimize or eliminate it. More people read books or watch Youtube videos than read sprawling sequences of blog posts, and now we have Scout Mindset and If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and Rational Animations and Robert Miles AI. If I could get a core package of rationality training into high schools I’d jump at that.
That’s not observably a majority opinion though.
Best of luck and skill. You’re not alone working on the problem.