“One really does want to try it from age seven, but I’m not sure how much of this stuff even I could have gotten at age seven. It’d be worth trying, though.”
I fully intend to teach my children (when I eventually have them, that is) about cognitive biases and rationality from the time they are born. I think that we greatly underestimate what children are capable of understanding. (It is also possible that I am biased, since I was an unusual child and so I can’t generalize my experience across all children—but even if that’s true, there is at least a good chance it will work with MY children, so much the better for them.) In the future, our children might be taught concepts in their earliest books that we have not even discovered today.
As a soon to be father for the first time I have every intention to similarly teach my future child, I certainly won’t count on the culture—much less the educational system—to do it for me, even here in Cambridge UK.
As a theatre practitioner I do have some hope and ambition that rationalist principles might begin to find their way into the arts by the time my child is old enough to notice. The arts may not be the most obvious vector for the rationalist meme, but they may well prove surprisingly effective over time.
Hopefully Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality will spawn a new generation of kids books that are fun and useful.
If you figure out some good ways to teach kids, Add them to the site—I think it’d be great to build up a repository of that kind of thing.. after all, I’m sure lots of us will have kids some day and will want to use and build on this knowledge.
“One really does want to try it from age seven, but I’m not sure how much of this stuff even I could have gotten at age seven. It’d be worth trying, though.”
I fully intend to teach my children (when I eventually have them, that is) about cognitive biases and rationality from the time they are born. I think that we greatly underestimate what children are capable of understanding. (It is also possible that I am biased, since I was an unusual child and so I can’t generalize my experience across all children—but even if that’s true, there is at least a good chance it will work with MY children, so much the better for them.) In the future, our children might be taught concepts in their earliest books that we have not even discovered today.
As a soon to be father for the first time I have every intention to similarly teach my future child, I certainly won’t count on the culture—much less the educational system—to do it for me, even here in Cambridge UK. As a theatre practitioner I do have some hope and ambition that rationalist principles might begin to find their way into the arts by the time my child is old enough to notice. The arts may not be the most obvious vector for the rationalist meme, but they may well prove surprisingly effective over time. Hopefully Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality will spawn a new generation of kids books that are fun and useful.
If you figure out some good ways to teach kids, Add them to the site—I think it’d be great to build up a repository of that kind of thing.. after all, I’m sure lots of us will have kids some day and will want to use and build on this knowledge.
I look forward to starting the rationalist education of my first child soon :)