Follow-Up to: On Juvenile Fiction
Related to: The Simple Truth
I quote again from JulianMorrison, who writes:
If you want people to repeat this back, write it in a test, maybe even apply it in an academic context, a four-credit undergrad course will work.
If you want them to have it as the ground state of their mind in everyday life, you probably need to have taught them songs about it in kindergarten.
Anonym adds:
Imagine a world in which 8-year olds grok things like confirmation bias and the base-rate fallacy on an intuitive level because they are reminded of their favorite childhood stories and the lessons they internalized after having the story read to them again and again. What a wonderful foundation to build upon.
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.
I wonder if poems designed to warn children against advertising could vaguely be included here?
Anyway, here's my attempt. I originally just planed it to be about confirmation bias, but it grew to encompass other things.
Little Johny thought he was very bright,
But the schoolkids did not -- they would laugh when he came in sight.
He could count, sing, and guess the weather.
Then one day, Big Bill said "Real bright boys will grow a feather."
"Ach!" he cried, "Could it be true?"
"Then I'm not bright, which makes me blue."
So he went home, and searched all over.
And then found growth on his head, clear as a clover.
"It is true, feathers are sprouting!"
"It's proof that I'm bright!" So he stopped pouting.
He ran to show his mom, nearly tripping over some eggs,
When he saw on TV "Bright boys will grow long legs."
So he waited for weeks and weeks for to find proof,
Worried over his brightness, and staying quite aloof,
Until one day, feeling in a pinch,
He grabbed a tape measure, and found his legs had grown a whole inch!
So he leaped off to school, but a scientist walked by,
And Johny overheard him say, that real bright boys could fly.
"The hair, the legs, from these I know
Of my brightness. The flying thus follows, so..."
Little Johny plotted of his grand display,
Standing high on a wall, he would proudly say
"Behold, I have proof that I'm bright!"
And he would deftly leap off, and soar into flight.
So he climbed up the wall, and made his speech,
But there his plan stopped with a screech,
For he hit the ground hard with a smack,
Leaving his leg all bloody and black.
As the other children laughed, he tried to explain,
Of the things that he heard, and why he had taken it to his brain,
"They came from on high, from people who knew
I looked at myself, and saw they were true."
They laughed, "You're too eager to believe, you fool.
Your feathers are just hair, all boys grow long legs as a rule.
Yes, if all you heard were true, you'd fly, but you'll find out,
That if you do logic with garbage, then you'll get garbage out."
So Johny thought wrongly, and got his leg in a cast,
He had sought fame in the schoolyard, but now that's all past.
He's taken the lesson to heart, no longer believes all he hears.
So he doesn't believe them when they say he's not bright -- brightness doesn't come from peers.
You can fix the spacing on the above by adding a couple of spaces to the end of each line, instead of having an empty line in-between. see documentation