What about an online group for high schoolers devoted to refining the art of human rationality?
Discovering LessWrong had a profound effect on me, shedding light on the way I study thought processes and helping me with a more rational approach. As a teenager in high school, I wish I could share LessWrong's teachings and philosophies with others at my level.
It would be awesome if we could create a list for the interests of LessWrong readers who are in their teens/in high school. I think this would allow a rational online community such as LessWrong to help develop more rationalists whether by outlining some plans to start rationality clubs in high school or discussing ways teenagers an approach rationality. I also think it would help more timid readers to express themselves and talk with other teenagers about common interests (adults could be allowed in to, if they are deemed appropriate for the community). Correct me if I'm wrong, but rationality training should start as soon as possible in the development process and what better age group to target than teenagers? Adolescence is a crucial transitional phase psychologically, biologically and culturally. I would love to see more collected articles on the evolution of rationality in the amazing, flexible mind of an adolescent. If the goal of this blog is to train humans to be rational-minded, more importance should be allocated to training teenagers. I do not think it hasn't happened yet for want of need among teenagers and if we concentrate some resources, gather a list of interested individuals and garner some interest we can make this work. This article is a good example of something that could be distributed in the proposed group:
For LW readers under 20: Note that the Thiel Fellowships (20 under 20) are now open for their next round of applications, and as they put it, "you have a huge readership of folk who would make great applicants". More info here. (from http://lesswrong.com/lw/f9r/weekly_lw_meetups_austin_berlin_cambridge_uk/)
There is also this LessWrong Highschoolers Facebook group created by Curtis SerVaas:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/201577993258819/
I recently Skyped (not officially a verb yet?) Anna Salamon who is the Executive Director of CFAR (Center for Applied Rationality). We had begun to develop this proposal. She is on the e-mail list and will be involved as a quasi-supervisor person. You can reach her at anna [at] appliedrationality [dot] org. Drop me a one-line e-mail with your name, age, and situation at [deleted] if you'd like to join the list. Speak up! Teenagers should be the subject of concentrated effort on LessWrong. We are the future, help us to reach the fruits of human rationality.
Yay false dilemma! I did not realize that talking about teenagers could be mindkilling, so here comes my list of disclaimers...
Of course the "LW articles for teenagers" should be nothing like the typical articles for teenagers. For exactly the same reason that LW articles today are not like the typical articles for N-years-old people for any value of N.
I advocate having some content focused on teenagers, but not a separate website for them. Best solution could be to use tags and/or later collect the teenager-oriented articles into a new sequence. (This is my personal opinion, I don't speak for other "teenage LW" advocates here.) People who come here to read Eliezer writing about X will continue to come here, because Eliezer will continue to write about X. There will be no filter to remove Eliezer's articles from the teenage readers' starting pages.
Even if we assume that (aspiring) rational teenagers have exactly the same minds as (aspiring) rational adults, they still live in different conditions. An article about a job choice is more relevant to a person in a job market, and less relevant for a teenager; not because the teenager wouldn't understand it, but simply because for a teenager, job choice is not a present-day problem, unlike for an adult. Teenagers have different present-day problems.
How much is it necessary to focus on everyone's present-day problems? Well, this is a site for both epistemic and instrumental rationality. It's about winning. And what one does during their average day usually contributes to their winning. Ignoring one's everyday life and focusing on the meaning of Peano's Fifth Axiom instead may be high status, but ultimately self-deceiving.
Yes, typical advice for teenagers is a pure far-mode "obey the authorities, don't ask questions, and everything will magically be fine" crap. I am not suggesting anything like this here. Litany of Tarski etc.
But perhaps the best way to make sure at least some teenagers will want to read those articles, is to ask them.