Maybe the proper approach to raising the worldwide sanity needs to be multi-layered, simply because different people are at different levels of sanity and education. It makes no sense to debate “frequentism vs Bayes” with someone who cannot solve a quadratic equation, which describes the majority of the population.
(No exaggeration here. Have you ever tried talking to random adult people on the street and asking them so solve a simple quadratic equation such as “x^2 + 4x + 3 = 0”? I did. The short version is that your best hope is to find a high-school math teacher, and even then the success is far from guaranteed.)
For constructing a Friendly superhuman self-improving AI, you need a relatively small team of top-notch rationalists. But for raising the sanity waterline, you need the very basics, but you need to be able to make people listen, and you need your system to scale well (if you hope to increase the sanity of millions or billions of people). Those are two quite different things.
And if we are talking about these lowest levels, such as literacy, many people are already trying to solve this problem. Maybe there are some reasons why they systematically produce subpar results. But maybe they work within a system that has bad incentives, but you could step outside of the system. -- This could be a myth, but people told me that Rowling’s Harry Potter books doubled the amount of kids that visited libraries to borrow books. I wonder if some functional literacy statistics reflect this. Maybe someone could write a book about a wizard kid who used math to achieve great powers, and suddenly the math skills would skyrocket. -- Some kind of educational intervention completely bypassing the formal educational system; maybe we could invent it, and use the internet to put it in action.
Maybe the proper approach to raising the worldwide sanity needs to be multi-layered, simply because different people are at different levels of sanity and education. It makes no sense to debate “frequentism vs Bayes” with someone who cannot solve a quadratic equation, which describes the majority of the population.
This makes sense, and I think it’s possible to boil down some concepts to simpler forms that are nonetheless still useful. In a wide variety of situations, I can help people clear up confusions about their “beliefs” by showing them how to treat all beliefs as different explanations that they are implicitly putting more or less “weight” on. It certainly helps with any confusion of the “I’m not sure what I really believe” variety, to recontextualize the problem such that the person can believe many things with a variety of certainty levels. I never have to resort to probability theory or mention Bayes.
Maybe someone could write a book about a wizard kid who used math to achieve great powers, and suddenly the math skills would skyrocket.
So, basically HPMOR with more mainstream appeal. HPMOR was actually a pretty good stab at drawing the interest of the IQ 110+ crowd, but I’ll bet a similar thing could be done for the other half of the bell curve.
Maybe the proper approach to raising the worldwide sanity needs to be multi-layered, simply because different people are at different levels of sanity and education. It makes no sense to debate “frequentism vs Bayes” with someone who cannot solve a quadratic equation, which describes the majority of the population.
(No exaggeration here. Have you ever tried talking to random adult people on the street and asking them so solve a simple quadratic equation such as “x^2 + 4x + 3 = 0”? I did. The short version is that your best hope is to find a high-school math teacher, and even then the success is far from guaranteed.)
For constructing a Friendly superhuman self-improving AI, you need a relatively small team of top-notch rationalists. But for raising the sanity waterline, you need the very basics, but you need to be able to make people listen, and you need your system to scale well (if you hope to increase the sanity of millions or billions of people). Those are two quite different things.
And if we are talking about these lowest levels, such as literacy, many people are already trying to solve this problem. Maybe there are some reasons why they systematically produce subpar results. But maybe they work within a system that has bad incentives, but you could step outside of the system. -- This could be a myth, but people told me that Rowling’s Harry Potter books doubled the amount of kids that visited libraries to borrow books. I wonder if some functional literacy statistics reflect this. Maybe someone could write a book about a wizard kid who used math to achieve great powers, and suddenly the math skills would skyrocket. -- Some kind of educational intervention completely bypassing the formal educational system; maybe we could invent it, and use the internet to put it in action.
This makes sense, and I think it’s possible to boil down some concepts to simpler forms that are nonetheless still useful. In a wide variety of situations, I can help people clear up confusions about their “beliefs” by showing them how to treat all beliefs as different explanations that they are implicitly putting more or less “weight” on. It certainly helps with any confusion of the “I’m not sure what I really believe” variety, to recontextualize the problem such that the person can believe many things with a variety of certainty levels. I never have to resort to probability theory or mention Bayes.
So, basically HPMOR with more mainstream appeal. HPMOR was actually a pretty good stab at drawing the interest of the IQ 110+ crowd, but I’ll bet a similar thing could be done for the other half of the bell curve.
Got to include porn, then.
Whether or not you’re joking, you’re right.
Ha Ha Only Serious