Lyyce comments on Open thread, Mar. 14 - Mar. 20, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Looking for advice with something it seems LW can help with.
I'm currently part of a program the trains highly intelligent people to be more effective, particularly with regards to scientific research and effecting change within large systems of people. I'm sorry to be vague, but I can't actually say more than that.
As part of our program, we organize seminars for ourselves on various interesting topics. The upcoming one is on self-improvement, and aims to explore the following questions: Who am I? What are my goals? How do I get there?
Naturally, I'm of the opinion that rationalist thought has a lot to offer on all of those questions. (I also have ulterior motives here, because I think it would be really cool to get some of these people on board with rationalism in general.) I'm having a hard time narrowing down this idea to a lesson plan I can submit to the organizers, so I thought I'd ask for suggestions.
The possible formats I have open for an activity are a lecture, a workshop/discussion in small groups, and some sort of guided introspection/reading activity (for example just giving people a sheet with questions to ponder on it, or a text to reflect on).
I've also come up with several possible topics: How to Actually Change Your Mind (ideas on how to go about condensing it are welcome), practical mind-hacking techniques and/or techniques for self-transparency, or just information on heuristics and biases because I think that's useful in general.
You can also assume the intended audience already know each other pretty well, and are capable of rather more analysis and actual math than is average.
Ideas for topics or activities, particularly ones that include a strong affective experience because those are generally better at getting poeple to think about this sort of thing for the first time, are welcome.
Idea that might or might be relevant depending on how smart / advanced your group is.
You could introduce some advanced statistical methods and use it to derive results from everyday life, a la Bayes and mammography.
If you can show some interesting or counter intuitive results (that you can't obtain with intuition) it would give the affective experience you want, and if they want to do scientific research, the more they know about statistics the better.
Statistics are also a good entry door for rationalist thinking.