What I try to do is improve outcomes for the children of relatives and friends. I want to use readymade teaching materials and the authority of their authors precisely because I won't have much time with those kids and they have no reason to take me seriously.
If three out of ten actually read it and one out of those three starts to think more rationally at an age where such a shift has amplified impact, I estimate the cost of ten copies well worth that.
What I try to do is improve outcomes for the children of relatives and friends. I want to use readymade teaching materials and the authority of their authors precisely because I won't have much time with those kids and they have no reason to take me seriously.
Unfortunately, the kids don't have much reason to take the authors or their materials seriously either, unless you give them one. Schoolkids generally learn the contents of their study materials (to the extent that they do so at all) because the authority figures in their own lives make them, not b...
I'm finally getting around to reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow". Much of it I had already learned on LW and elsewhere. Maybe that's why my strongest impression from the book is how accessible it is. Simple sentences, clear and vivid examples, easy-to-follow exercises, a remarkable lack of references to topics not explained right away.
I caught myself thinking "This is a book I should have read as a kid". In my first language, I think I could have managed it as early as 11 years old. Since measured IQ is strongly influenced by habits of thinking and cognitive returns can be reinvested, I'm sure I would be smarter now if I had.
So I have decided to buy a stack of these books and give them to kids on their, say, 12th birthdays. Then maybe Dan Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" a year later - and HPMOR a year after that? I would like to see more suggestions from you guys.
It should be obviously better to start even earlier. So how do you teach rationality to a nine-year-old? Or a seven-year-old? Has anybody done something like that? Please name books, videos or web sites.
If such media are not available, creating them should be low-hanging fruit in the quest to raise the global IQ and sanity waterline. ELI5 writing is very learnable, after all, and ELI5 type interpretations of, say, the sequences, might be helpful for adults too.