Rationalist house

Elo

At the Australia online hangout; one of the topics we discussed (before I fell asleep on camera for a bunch of people) Was writing a rationality TV show as an outreach task. Of course there being more ways for this to go wrong than right I figured its worth mentioning the ideas and getting some comments.

The strategy is to have a set of regular characters who's rationality behaviour seems nuts. Effectively sometimes because it is; when taken out of context. Then to have one "blank" person who tries to join - "rationality house". and work things out. My aim was to have each episode straw man a rationality behaviour and then steelman it. Where by the end of the episode it saves the day; makes someone happy; achieves a goal - or some other <generic win-state>.

Here is a list of notes of characters from the hangout or potential topics to talk about.

No showers. Bacterial showers
Stopwatches everywhere
temperature controls everywhere, light controls.
radical honesty person.
Soylent only eating person
born-again atheist
bayesian person
Polyphasic sleep cycles.

I have not written much in my life and certainly never anything for TV but it sounds like a fun project. I figured I would pick a pilot idea; roll with it and see if I can make a script. I could probably also get Sydney folk to act for a first-round web-cast version.

I was wondering if anyone had any other rationality topics that can be easily strawmanned then steelmanned worth adding to the list. And if anyone had experience worth sharing with writing for TV, as well as anyone interested in joining the project to write or be a sounding board...

Here is a list of notes of characters from the hangout or potential topics to talk about.

No showers. Bacterial showers
Stopwatches everywhere
temperature controls everywhere, light controls.
radical honesty person.
Soylent only eating person
born-again atheist
bayesian person
Polyphasic sleep cycles.

Comfort zone expansion?

An epistemic example instead of an instrumental one: looking up look-up-able facts instead of bickering or speculating about them.

COZE is a good inclusion... People going out and doing un-fun things and then later being all like, "I tried a rave once, and I don't usually like it. How about we go to pizza instead"

Have a coffee table "the lookup table" so that you can look things up and talk about learning about them when you discover new things. Or some way to put arguments on hold till you look them up...

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