Kids under five anecdotally have a harder time learning to count, learning that there's still the same number of balls after you re-arrange them than before (many pre-schoolers will count them all over again), etc. So a math program for pre-schoolers needs to be built from smaller building-blocks than a program for adults. I imagine it's similar with rationality.
That needn't mean teaching math or rationality to pre-schoolers is silly. My mom played a lot of math games with me in the zero to five years, and while it's hard to tell effects without larger sample-sizes, and despite the Judith Rich Harris results, it seems plausible that this gave me math farther into my bones than I would otherwise have gotten it. (E.g., a large fraction of my pre-age-eight memories involve mathematical concepts, usually ones I was just sponaneously thinking about.)
As to the feeling of safety, there're a lot of early rationalist thinking skills that can be taught without eroding the kid's trust in their parents and stable home. Math, noticing how you're feeling and what effect that has on your actions, asking why gadgets work and enjoying the exploration, turning questions into testable hypotheses...
A couple of people asked about the games your mum put you through as a kid. I'm really interested too.
Care to share? :)
Follow-Up to: On Juvenile Fiction
Related to: The Simple Truth
I quote again from JulianMorrison, who writes:
Anonym adds:
With this in mind, here is my challenge:
Look through Eliezer's early standard bias posts. Can you convey the essential content of one of these posts in a 16-page picture book, or in a nursery rhyme children could sing while they skip rope?
Write the story, and post it here. Let's see what we can come up with.
This is not, by any means intended to be a simple challenge. On the one hand, we are compressing a lot of information into a small space. On the other, good fiction is not easy, and children's fiction is no exception.
We have two options. We can humbly admit that we are not skilled writers of children's fiction and walk away, or we can determine that this is a task which needs to be completed, produce lots of really bad fiction, and begin the process of criticizing one another, learning from our mistakes, and growing stronger.
When I was a boy, I had a thick book of 365 short stories, some not even taking up a full page. Each was self-contained, and I could flip open the book at random and find a story I hadn't read before.
How quickly would our community grow, both in strength and in numbers, if we could crowdsource a
Rationalist's Book of Tales?I know, I know. It's optimistic. It's ambitious. Most of all, it seems really silly.
Let's do it anyway.