NancyLebovitz comments on May Outreach Thread - Less Wrong
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Comments (29)
Quoting Eliezer2009:
There were a few articles about akrasia; and CFAR is working on a curriculum for teaching rationality.
I have an idea about a sequence I would love to see, but only if it is written well (because it would be very easy and tempting!!! to make it wrong in various ways): Starting with scientifically describing human emotions, social behavior, and sexual behavior. Progressing to social skills. And culminating with community building.
I believe that these issues are so interconnected that it is almost meaningless trying to discuss them separately. They also happen to be places where the popular stereotypes say the nerds have blind spots. I suspect these may be areas where being "half correct" may harm you a lot. Which poses a problem because non-nerds usually don't care much about their maps matching the territory, and nerds talking about these topics will probably suffer from the curse of Dunning and Kruger; so we need to be extra careful here. However, without mastering this part of Art we will never achieve larger-scale rationalist communities.
(My beliefs here are a result of many pieces of evidence coming from different sources, so I am not able to disentangle them all within a comment. But generally, there are two levels here: The more superficial is that people are naturally drawn towards attractive people, and repelled from "creepy" people. This is a strong force to be ignored only at one's own peril, and it's even more true on the community level; even the wannabe rationalists are no exception to this. Some degree of social savviness is necessary for merely not having a group fall apart; even higher level is required to attract new members. These skills are learnable, but the fresh students tend to be overconfident and creepy. We also need communication skills and norms that are conductive to solving problems, because sooner or later the problems will appear. On a deeper level, many uniquely human skills are probably a result of sexual selection, even if they are not consciouslly connected. Understanding this may help to better understand "prestige", which is a required component for social success. Yeah, am I aware that this explanation is probably not very helpful.)
Another thing, we need some good introduction for newbies. At this moment, giving them Rationality: from AI to Zombies is my favorite choice, but something shorter and easier to read would be even better. I imagine 50-100 pages of text written for a above-average-IQ high-school audience. (At the end, the text should point them towards further literature, including the Rationality, but also many other books. Simply imagine that you are looking at a smart high-school bookworm who is going to read 20 or 50 books in the following years anyway; if your only influence on their life would be replacing their reading list, which specific books would you recommend?) This shorter text could then be printed and distributed among the smart high-school or college students.
My notion for outreach is to start with the planning fallacy because it's straightforward and something a lot of people have experience with, and see how much can be built from there.
I like this. Then I would also suggest selection bias. (Specifically to students I'd say that for every school dropout who became famous, there are thousand others who didn't.)