= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
[Link] Peer-Reviwed Piece on Meaning and Purpose in a Non-Religious Setting
My peer-reviewed article in a psychology journal on the topic of meaning and purpose in a non-religious setting is now accessible without a paywall for a limited time, so get it while it's free if you're interested. I'd be interested in hearing your feedback on it. For those curious, the article is not directly related to my Intentional Insights project, but is a part of my aspiration to raise the sanity waterline regarding religion, the focus of Eliezer's original piece on the sanity waterline.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Outreach Thread
Based on an earlier suggestion, here's an outreach thread where you can leave comments about any recent outreach that you have done to convey rationality-style ideas broadly. The goal of having this thread is to organize information about outreach and provide community support and recognition for raising the sanity waterline. Likewise, doing so can help inspire others to emulate some aspects of these good deeds through social proof and network effects.
Religious and Rational?
Reverend Caleb Pitkin, an aspiring rationalist and United Methodist Minister, wrote an article about combining religion and rationality which was recently published on the Intentional Insights blog. He's the only Minister I know who is also an aspiring rationalist, so I thought it would be an interesting piece for Less Wrong as well. Besides, it prompted an interesting discussion on the Less Wrong Facebook group, so I thought some people here who don't look at the Facebook group might be interested in checking it out as well. Caleb does not have enough karma to post, so I am posting it on his behalf, but he will engage with the comments.
______________________________________________________________________________
Religious and Rational?
“Wisdom shouts in the street; in the public square she raises her voice.”
Proverbs 1:20 Common English Bible
The Biblical book of Proverbs is full of imagery of wisdom personified as a woman calling and extorting people to come to her and listen. The wisdom contained in Proverbs is not just spiritual wisdom but also contains a large amount of practical wisdom and advice. What might the wisdom of Proverbs and rationality have in common? The wisdom literature in scripture was meant to help people make better and more effective decisions. In today’s complex and rapidly changing world we have the same need for tools and resources to help us make good decisions. One great source of wisdom is methods of better thinking that are informed by science.
Now, not everyone would agree with comparing the wisdom of Proverbs with scientific insights. Doing so may not sit well with some in the secular rationality community who view all religion as inherently irrational and hindering clear thinking. It also might not sit well with some in my own religious community who are suspicious of scientific thinking as undermining traditional faith. While it would take a much longer piece to try to completely defend either religion or secular rationality I’m going to try and demonstrate some ways that rationality is useful for a religious person.
The first way that rationality can be useful for a religious person is in the living of our daily lives. We are faced with tasks and decisions each day that we try to do our best in. Learning to recognize common logical fallacies or other biases, like those that cause us to fail to understand other people, will improve our decision making as much as it improves the thinking of non-religious people. For example, a mother driving her kids to Sunday School might benefit from avoiding thinking that the person who cuts her off is definitely a jerk, one common type of thinking error. Some doing volunteer work for their church could be more effective if they avoid problematic communication with other volunteers. This use of rationality to lead our daily lives in the best way is one that most would find fairly unobjectionable. It’s easy to say that the way we all achieve our personal goals and objectives could be improved, and we can all gain greater agency.
Rationality can also be of use in theological commentary and discourse. Many of the theological and religious greats used the available philosophical and intellectual tools of their day to examine their faith. Examples of this include John Wesley, Thomas Aquinas and even the Apostle Paul when he debated Epicurean and Stoic Philosophers. They also made sure that their theologies were internally, rational and logical. This means that, from the perspective of a religious person, keeping up with rationality can help with the pursuit of a deeper understanding of our faith. For a secular person acknowledging the ways in which religious people use rationality within their worldview may be difficult, but it can help to build common ground. The starting point is different. Secular people start with the faith that they can trust their sensory experience. Religious people start with conceptions of the divine. Yet, after each starting point, both seek to proceed in a rational logical manner.
It is not just our personal lives that can be improved by rationality, it’s also the ways in which we interact with communities. One of the goals of many religious communities is to make a positive impact on the world around them. When we work to do good in community we want that work to be as effective as possible. Often when we work in community we find that we are not meeting our goals or having the kind of significant impact that we wish to have. It is my experience this is often a failure to really examine and gather the facts on the ground. We set off full of good intentions but with limited resources and time. Rational examination helps us to figure out how to match our good intentions with our limited resources in the most effective way possible. For example as the Pastor of two small churches money and people power can be in short supply. So when we examine all the needs of our community we have to acknowledge we cannot begin to meet all or even most of them. So we take one issue, hunger, and devote our time and resources to having one big impact on that issue. As opposed to trying to be a little bit to alleviate a lot of problems.
One other way that rationality can inform our work in the community is to recognize that part of what a scarcity of resources means is that we need to work together with others in our community. The inter-faith movement has done a lot of good work in bringing together people of faith to work on common goals. This has meant setting aside traditional differences for the sake of shared goals. Let us examine the world we live in today though. The amount of nonreligious people is on the rise and there is every indication that it will continue to do so. On the other hand religion does not seem to be going anywhere either. Which is good news for a pastor. Looking at this situation, the rational thing to do is to work together, for religious people to build bridges toward the non-religious and vice versa.
Wisdom still stands on the street calling and imploring us to be improved--not in the form of rationalist street preachers, though that idea has a certain appeal-- but in the form of the growing number of tools being offered to help us improve our capacity for logic, for reasoning, and for the tools that will enable us take part in the world we live in.
Everyone wants to make good decisions. This means that everyone tries to make rational decisions. We all try but we don’t always hit the mark. Religious people seek to achieve their goals and make good decisions. Secular people seek to achieve their goals and make good decisions. Yes, we have different starting points and it’s important to acknowledge that. Yet, there are similarities in what each group wants out of their lives and maybe we have more in common than we think we do.
On a final note it is my belief that what religious people and what non-religious people fear about each other is the same thing. The non-religious look at the religious and say God could ask them to do anything... scary. The religious look at the non-religious and say without God they could do anything... scary. If we remember though that most people are rational and want to live a good life we have less to be scared of, and are more likely to find common ground.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Bio: Caleb Pitkin is a Provisional Elder with the United Methodist Church appointed to Signal Mountain United Methodist Church. Caleb is a huge fan of the theology of John Wesley, which ask that Christians use reason in their faith journey. This helped lead Caleb to Rationality and participation in Columbus Rationality, a Less Wrong meetup that is part of the Humanist Community of Central Ohio. Through that, Caleb got involved with Intentional Insights. Caleb spends his time trying to live a faithful and rational life.
[Link] Huffington Post article about dual process theory
Published a piece in The Huffington Post popularizing dual-process theory in layman's language.
P.S. I know some don't like using terms like Autopilot and Intentional to describe System 1 and System 2, but I find from long experience that these terms resonate well with a broad audience. Also, I know dual process theory is criticized by some, but we have to start somewhere, and just explaining dual process theory is a way to start bridging the inference gap to higher meta-cognition.
Teaching rationality to kids?
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.
TED-Ed Launch
TED has launched a new initiative: TED Education
TED-Ed's mission is to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world. We do this by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to produce a new library of curiosity-igniting videos.
So maybe we could get someone to do a short talk/lecture on rationality related topic(s) (maybe cognitive biases?)? Or anything else that is related to raising the sanity waterline. Or at least just suggest the idea.
Limitations of eyewitness testimony
Eyewitness testimony isn't reliable-- it degrades rapidly with time (significant fading in 20 minutes), is easily overridden by circumstances (people are apt to assume that the guilty person is in a line-up unless they're specifically told the guilty person might not be there-- there's a risk of saying the best match is it rather than looking for a genuinely satisfying match), cross-racial identification is less competent than within race identification[1], the presence of a weapon makes accurate identification less likely....
It goes on-- if you have any interest in this sort of thing, I recommend reading the whole article.
[1] I wonder if this has been tested in societies with different classification systems. For example, I've been told by someone who lived there that in Ireland, everyone is classified as Catholic or Protestant-- even if they're Jewish. Would Irish people have problems doing identification across the Catholic-Protestant line, even if all the people involved would be considered white in America and not set off the identification problem?
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Hi all, I’m a social entrepreneur, professor, and aspiring rationalist. My project is Intentional Insights. This is a new nonprofit I co-founded with my wife and other fellow aspiring rationalists in the Columbus, OH Less Wrong meetup. The nonprofit emerged from our passion to promote rationality among the broad masses. We use social influence techniques, create stories, and speak to emotions. We orient toward creating engaging videos, blogs, social media, and other content that an aspiring rationalist like yourself can share with friends and family members who would not be open to rationality proper due to the Straw Vulcan misconception. I would appreciate any advice and help from fellow aspiring rationalists. The project is described more fully below, but for those for whom that’s tl;dr, there is a request for advice and allies at the bottom.
Since I started participating in the Less Wrong meetup in Columbus, OH and reading Less Wrong, what seems like ages ago, I can hardly remember my past thinking patterns. Because of how much awesomeness it brought to my life, I have become one of the lead organizers of the meetup. Moreover, I find it really beneficial to bring rationality into my research and teaching as a tenure-track professor at Ohio State, where I am a member of the Behavioral Decision-Making Initiative. Thus, my scholarship brings rationality into historical contexts, for example in my academic articles on agency, emotions, and social influence. In my classes I have students engage with the Checklist of Rationality Habits and other readings that help advance rational thinking.
As do many aspiring rationalists, I think rationality can bring such benefits to the lives of many others, and also help improve our society as a whole by leveling up rational thinking, secularizing society, and thus raising the sanity waterline. For that, our experience in the Columbus Less Wrong group has shown that we need to get people interested in rationality by showing them its benefits and how it can solve their problems, while delivering complex ideas in an engaging and friendly fashion targeted at a broad public, and using active learning strategies and connecting rationality to what they already know. This is what I do in my teaching, and is the current best practice in educational psychology. It has worked great with my students when I began to teach them rationality concepts. Yet I do not know of any current rationality trainings that do this. Currently, such education in rationality is available mainly through excellent, intense 4-day workshops the Center for Applied Rationality, usually held in the San Francisco area, which are aimed at a "select group of founders, hackers, and other ambitious, analytical, practically-minded people." We are targeting a much broader and less advanced audience, the upper 50-85%, while CfAR primarily targets the top 5-10%. We had great interactions with Anna Salamon, Julia Galef, Kenzi Amodei, and other CFAR folks, and plan to collaborate with them on various ways to do Rationality outreach. Besides CfAR, there are also some online classes on decision-making from Clearer Thinking, as well as some other stuff we list on the Intentional Insights resources page. However, we really wanted to see something oriented at the broad public, which can gain a great deal from a much lower level of education in rationality made accessible and relevant to their everyday lives and concerns, and delivered in a fashion perceived as interesting, fun, and friendly by mass audiences, as we aim to do with our events.
Intentional Insights came from this desire. This nonprofit explicitly orients toward getting the broad masses interested in and learning about rationality by providing fun and engaging content delivered in a friendly manner. What we want to do is use various social influence methods and promote rationality as a self-improvement/leadership development offering for people who are not currently interested in rational thinking because of the Straw Vulcan image, but who are interested in self-improvement, professional development, and organizational development. As people become more advanced, we will orient them toward more advanced rationality, at Less Wrong and elsewhere. Now, there are those who believe rationality should be taught only to those who are willing to put in the hard work and effort to overcome the high barrier to entry of learning all the jargon. However, we are reformers, not revolutionaries, and believe that some progress is better than no progress. And the more aspiring rationalists engage in various projects aimed to raise the sanity waterline, using different channels and strategies, the better. We can all help and learn from each other, adopting an experimental attitude and gathering data about what methods work best, constantly updating our beliefs and improving our abilities to help more people gain greater agency.
The channels of delivery locally are classes and workshops. Here is what one college student participant wrote after a session: “I have gained a new perspective after attending the workshop. In order to be more analytical, I have to take into account that attentional bias is everywhere. I can now further analyze and make conclusions based on evidence.” This and similar statements seem to indicate some positive impact, and we plan to gather evidence to examine whether workshop participants adopt more rational ways of thinking and how the classes influence people’s actual performance over time.
We have a website that takes this content globally, as well as social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The website currently has: - Blog posts, such as on agency; polyamory and cached thinking; and life meaning and purpose. We aim to make them easy-to-read and engaging to get people interested in rational thinking. These will be targeted at a high school reading level, the type of fun posts aspiring rationalists can share with their friends or family members whom they may want to get into rationality, or at least explain what rationality is all about. - Videos with similar content to blog posts, such as on evaluating reality clearly, and on meaning and purpose - A resources page, with links to prominent rationality venues, such as Less Wrong, CFAR, HPMOR, etc.
It will eventually have: - Rationality-themed merchandise, including stickers, buttons, pens, mugs, t-shirts, etc. - Online classes teaching rationality concepts - A wide variety of other products and offerings, such as e-books and apps
Now, why my wife and I, and the Columbus Less Wrong group? To this project, I bring my knowledge of educational psychology, research expertise, and teaching experience; my wife her expertise as a nonprofit professional with an MBA in nonprofit management; and other Board members include a cognitive neuroscientist, a licensed therapist, a gentleman adventurer, and other awesome members of the Columbus, OH, Less Wrong group.
Now, I can really use the help of wise aspiring rationalists to help out this project:
1) If you were trying to get the Less Wrong community engaged in the project, what would you do?
2) If you were trying to promote this project broadly, what would you do? What dark arts might you use, and how?
3) If you were trying to get specific groups and communities interested in promoting rational thinking in our society engaged in the project, what would you do? What dark arts might you use, and how?
4) If you were trying to fundraise for this project, what would you do? What dark arts might you use, and how?
5) If you were trying to persuade people to sign up for workshops or check out a website devoted to rational thinking, what would you do? How would you tie it to people’s self-interest and everyday problems that rationality might solve? What dark arts might you use, and how? What dark arts might you use, and how?
6) If you were trying to organize a nonprofit devoted to doing all the stuff above, what would you do to help manage its planning and organization? What about managing relationships and group dynamics?
Besides the advice, I invite you to ally with us and collaborate on this project in whatever way is optimal for you. Money is very helpful right now as we are fundraising to pay for costs associated with starting up the nonprofit, around $3600 through the rest of 2014, and you can donate directly through our website. Your time, intellectual capacity, and any specific talents would also be great, on things such as giving advice and helping out on specific tasks/projects, developing content in the form of blogs, videos, etc., promoting the project to those you know, and other ways to help out.
Leave your thoughts in comments below, or you can get in touch with me at gleb@intentionalinsights.org. I hope you would like to ally with us to raise the sanity waterline!
EDIT: Based on your feedback, we've decided that this post on polyamory and cached thinking is probably a bad fit for what we want to promote right now. We've removed it from the main index of our site. Thanks for helping!