I liked that article! The main takeaway is separating "knowing how to think" from various trivia, but the exercise is fun too:
I'd talk about how difficult it is to actually figure things out, to get correct beliefs in science, history, politics etc. About the times I've changed my minds, about the things I must admit I don't know enough about to have a much of an opinion (like economics), while still knowing that there probably is a right answer, and that I have to avoid the toxic ambient anti-epistemology (things like "everyone can hold the opinion he wants", or "changing your mind is a sign of weakness", or "you have to listen to your heart"), or the cheap way out of taking a middle ground position on everything.
I'd talk about various subjects where I suspect the conventional wisdom is wrong, about what the alternatives are, and about how likely those are to be wrong too.
I'd talk about the unfortunate fact that even scientists don't tend to update their beliefs enough, and that we have to wait for them to die out before new views can be accepted. I'd talk about various ways of correcting that (betting markets, open-access journals, various schemes of debate tools I've come up with back in the days when I was interested in that), and caution about whether those would really improve things.
I'd talk about the failure modes of smart people, and how to try correcting for those.
Today's post, Archimedes's Chronophone was originally published on March 23, 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Useless Medical Disclaimers, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.