Oooh, pick me!

I do the IB, finishing this November. It's true that ToK is a complete waste of time in general. I didn't learn anything from it. I spent pretty much the whole course thinking "Less Wrong has already thought of this problem, and solved it."

I gave my speech on the morality of abortion, using such concepts as the least convenient possible world, Shut Up and Multiply, playing rationalist taboo, and so on. I got perfect marks, which indicates that even though ToK teaches you nothing, it can grade you usefully.

I'm actually talking to the ToK teacher about giving a seminar to the year 11 students some time. I feel that in an hour or a bit more, you could really usefully go through the fundamentals of rationality.

If you were to go talk to the ToK class, it would be useful to know something of the curriculum. The two basic concepts are Ways of Knowing and Areas of Knowledge. The ways of knowing are intuition, sense perception, reason, and language. You could talk about each of those easily, just quoting from Less Wrong canon. (I quoted LukeProg on intuition in my essay, as it happens.) Areas of knowledge are like english, human sciences, natural sciences, and art. In the IB you have to do one subject from each of the six subject areas, so the students are likely to be well rounded. Also, they're smart kids on average, so you could talk at a fairly high level.