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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong
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I suspect you need to travel some (most?) of the inferential distance to becoming a rationalist (one way or another) before you can start clicking on ideas and concepts you're hearing for the first time.
Maybe you could devise a click-test and give it to different groups to see what kinds of people click more often?
At age eight? Even I wasn't much of a rationalist until nine or so.
What I had in mind is that people will click more often if they've gone through some of the inferential distance already and are in a mindset in which, when they first encounter cryonics/AI/whatever, it appears obviously/intuitively possible. Which is why you have 25% computer industry people and 25% scientists (i.e. it's obviously not a random sample of people). Scientists are more likely than most people to be atheists, believe in the possibility of AI, etc, and also more likely to click when they first hear about cryonics on the radio.
As you've said, the chain of reasoning followed by a click is very short. But it's only short for those people that don't have other (longer) chains of reasoning and beliefs that seem to contradict the original statement. And in order to connect the short chain, you have to dissolve the long one first. It seems to me that people need to have already accepted to a certain extent the naturalistic/scientific worldview in order to click immediately on cryonics.
Now, I'm not sure how much of this applies to children, but I don't see why kids can't have a similar (albeit based on simpler reasoning chains) mindset, i.e. they already accept most of the prerequisites for cryonics.
I wonder if we should just use the word Bayesian and drop "Rationalist". It has an entrenched meaning opposite to empiricist. We can also use words like Skeptic, Scientists, Popperian, and the like in their traditional meanings.
But no one can be a Bayesian except in the statistical-method-advocacy sense of the term.
I think the traditional "rationalist/empiricist" dichotomy is most likely a confusion. I don't mind at all if we end up helping to displace this terminology by spreading our sense of "rationalist".
That's weird. Do you actually remember your thoughts from that age?
I remember writing absolutely unthinkably awful science fiction, and reading Jerry Pournelle's A Step Farther Out.
Hmm. Things like that I remember, at least in the sense that I have flashes of memory of reading a few books, or discussing a film with somebody, or some things I liked to draw. (Writing never quite attracted me, but I doodled all the time.)
However, I have almost no memory of my mental state. All my memories are almost like flashes of third-person-view scenes of my life; which tempts me to believe they're “re-constructed views” rather than memories, otherwise I'd expect them to be first-person.
(Also, the flashes of memories are not associated with moments. I might reconstruct when a memory was about by deducing from what I see in the flashes with things I can track down the age of, but otherwise I don't have a mental “when” something happened. All this of course applies only memories older than a few years.)