Friendly-HI comments on Teachable Rationality Skills - Less Wrong

52 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 May 2011 09:57PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (257)

Sort By: Controversial

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Friendly-HI 11 June 2011 05:03:01PM *  4 points [-]

I have another suggestion - not with respect to the content of those rationality lessons, but regarding one means of propagating this knowledge: Khan Academy

I'm sure many of you are aware of it by now and I am pretty convinced that Khan Academy is a predecessor of what the future of education will look like. So my suggestion is to get someone charismatic with the skill to explain the skills of rationality in a down-to-earth non-nerdy way and put these explanations up on youtube. If they are good enough and fit the style of Khan Academy lessons, they may have a shot of getting picked up by Khan Academy. (Whether it's the original lessons or an adaptation by Khan wouldn't matter much).

Even if they're not picked up, it would obviously be great to have these lessons up on youtube. But if you could get a foot in the door at KA and make rationality skills an integral part of the many lessons that are available there, it would be an awesome achievement and probably go a long way, considering how fast KA is picking up speed right now. If you want to get serious about teaching rationality skills, the top-level goal must obviously be to get them into the regular school curriculum. KA isn't there yet but give it 5 years time and it may very well be.