Critical thinking courses may increase students’ rationality, especially if they do argument mapping.

The following excerpts are from “Does philosophy improve critical thinking skills?”, Ortiz 2007.

1 Excerpts

This thesis makes a first attempt to subject the assumption that studying [Anglo-American analytic] philosophy improves critical thinking skills to rigorous investigation.

…Thus the second task, in Chapter 3, is to articulate and critically examine the standard arguments that are raised in support of the assumption (or rather, would be raised if philosophers were in the habit of providing support for the assumption). These arguments are found to be too weak to establish the truth of the assumption. The failure of the standard arguments leaves open the question of whether the assumption is in fact true. The thesis argues at this point that, since the assumption is making an empirical assertion, it should be investigated using standard empirical techniques as developed in the social sciences. In Chapter 4, I conduct an informal review of the empirical literature. The review finds that evidence from the existing empirical literature is inconclusive. Chapter 5 presents the empirical core of the thesis. I use the technique of meta-analysis to integrate data from a large number of empirical studies. This meta-analysis gives us the best yet fix on the extent to which critical thinking skills improve over a semester of studying philosophy, general university study, and studying critical thinking. The meta-analysis results indicate that students do improve while studying philosophy, and apparently more so than general university students, though we cannot be very confident that this difference is not just the result of random variation. More importantly, studying philosophy is less effective than studying critical thinking, regardless of whether one is being taught in a philosophy department or in some other department. Finally, studying philosophy is much less effective than studying critical thinking using techniques known to be particularly effective such as LAMP.

If you want to carry a brimming cup of coffee without spilling it, you may want to "change" your goal to instead primarily concentrate on humming. This is an example of a general pattern. It sometimes helps to focus on a nearby artificial goal rather than your actual goal. Let me call that strategy "gamification". There is a business strategy, also named "gamification", of adding game mechanics to a website in order to achieve various business goals. This is related but different. Here I'm referring to a strategy for problem solvers.

We sometimes fail, and sometimes one failure is very similar to another failure. That is, there are characteristic ways that we fail. One of the primary ways that we can improve is to learn our failure modes and create external structures (pieces of paper, software tools) that check, protect against, or head off those forms of failure.

For example, imagine this plan of checklist improvement:

1. Change your normal way of working to include an explicit checklist (that starts empty).
2. When you make a mistake:
   1. Analyze what went wrong
   2. Try to generalize the particular incident to a category
   3. Add an item to your checklist.

This is very simple and generic, but it is reasonable to believe that if you carefully and diligently followed this plan, your reliability would go up (with diminishing returns because your errors are also your opportunities for improvement).  I have not read Mayo, but her "error-theoretic" philosophy of science might be applicable here.

We can try to build a correspondence between failure modes, and game mechanics that attempt to cope for that failure mode.

Crunchcourse is a free website that might be of use to people trying to learn things outside the normal classroom setting. It aims to get together groups of people interested in the same topic and use our social instincts to motivate us to do the work.

It is in its early stages. If it proves useful, it might be useful to standardize on it as the place to learn the various prerequisites that lesswrong has.

Stigmergy is a notion that an agent's behavior is sometimes best understood as coordinated by the agent's environment. In particular, social insects build nests, which have a recognizable standard pattern (different patterns for different species). Does the wasp or termite have an idea of what the standard pattern is? Probably not. Instead, the computation inside the insect is a stateless stimulus/response rule set. The partially-constructed nest catalyzes the next construction step.

An unintelligent "insect" clambering energetically around a convoluted "nest", with the insect's local perceptions driving its local modifications is recognizably something like a Turing machine. The system as a whole can be more intelligent than either the (stateless) insect or the (passive) nest. The important computation is the interactions between the agent and the environment.

This is an account of downloading and using SMILE, a free-as-in-beer-but-not-open-source bayes net library. SMILE powers GENIE, a graphical bayes net tool. SMILE can do a lot of things, but I only used the simplest features - building a network and, given evidence, inferring probability distributions on the unobserved features.

In the post Outlawing Anthropics, there was a brief and intriguing scrap of reasoning, which used the principle of reflective inconsistency, which so far as I know is unique to this community:

If your current system cares about yourself and your future, but doesn't care about very similar xerox-siblings, then you will tend to self-modify to have future copies of yourself care about each other, as this maximizes your expectation of pleasant experience over future selves.

This post expands upon and attempts to formalize that reasoning, in hopes of developing a logical framework for reasoning about reflective inconsistency.

In reply to: Community Epistemic Practice

There are software tools, possibly helpful for community truth-seeking. For example, truthmapping.com is described very well here. Also, debategraph.org, and I'm sure there are others.