Big one for me: cutting the Gordian knot of the philosophical antimonies, e.g., those philosophical dilemmas with no answers. Someone somewhere at Overcoming Bias commented that the "useful" parts of philosophy evolved into the natural sciences; the rest became the muted academic wordgames we see today (or something like that - the poster was much more incisive).

And just like that, my interest in those endless philosophical dilemmas dissolved. What a timesaver.

If anyone can locate that post / commenter, I'd be grateful.

On the one hand, there's some evidence that religiosity is partly heritable. On the other hand, this correlation between genes and religiosity is without manipulating the educational environment.

There's an apocryphal quote associated with the Jesuits: "Give me a child up to the age of seven and I will give you the man." Intense education would overwhelm the genetic factors.

A member of the sampling bias embarrassedly raising his hand here. I'll go post in the other comments section, please don't yell at me ;_;

EDIT: Reading good science fiction, where the heroes win by being rational, might help.

More than one of my doctors has patient notes saying not to ask me "How are you doing?" which I asked them not to do, because I dislike giving the standard nonanswer "Fine", because sometimes I'm not actually fine.

Crono, stay on that moral high horse!

Then I wish you luck.

I hope you'll be willing to share with the community how that goes. We want to learn how to build rationalist societies, and societies start with their children.

Honestly, I'm gonna have to back down from this one -- I never went to elementary school as an atheist, and I have no idea what it would be like. The more I think about it, the more it sounds pretty difficult.

One of the reasons parents often give for the Santa myth is that it is "fun" and it's good to give children a sense of wonder and joy. This is not a trivial argument.

I don't have children yet, but this post has made me wonder if a strictly no-lies-about-basic-reality policy wouldn't lead to just as much wonder. Is Santa really that necessary, even for the stated junior-level purpose it's given?

There are lots of fantastic, amazing things to wonder at, as a child and as an adult:

Everything in our universe may have started in the biggest, most gigantic-est explosion ever! BLAM!

There are millions of tiny critters living inside your tummy right now and they are helping you every day to eat your food! YUM!

All 7 billion people in the world are the great-great-great-(....)great-great grandchildren of one large-sized family of people who came from Africa! WOW!

teaching them a lesson in consideration - don't go telling all the other kids at school that Santa Claus isn't real. Part of teaching them to be members of a tolerant free society.

Telling someone not to report a fact which they know to be true has no bearing on teaching them to be members of a tolerant free society that I'm aware of...

I mean to say, "tolerance" and "freedom" have nothing to do with not telling your Christian classmate that his religion is a fairly transparent myth.

A lot of dojos preserve to some degree the social standards of Eastern countries where the sensei's sensei came from. And in Eastern countries, it's much less acceptable to try to question your teacher, or change things, or rock the boat, or show any form of weakness. I taught school in Japan for a while, and the first thing I learned was that naively asking "Any questions?" or "Any opinions on this?" or even "Anyone not understand?" was a waste of time.

Western cultures are a lot better at this, but not ideal. There's still pressure not to be the one person who asks all the questions all the time, and there's pressure not to say anything controversial out of the blue because you lose more status if you're wrong than you gain if you're right. I think part of the problem is that there really are dumb or egotistical people who, if given the chance will protest that they know a much better way to do everything and will waste the time of everyone else, and our society's decided to .make a devil's bargain to keep them under control.

The best solution to this is to found a new culture, live isolated from the rest of the world for a century developing different cultural norms, and then start the rationality dojo there. Of possible second-best solutions:

• My Favorite Liar. Tell people that you're going to make X deliberately incorrect statements every training session and they've got to catch them.

• Clickers. One of my lecturers uses these devices sort of like remote controls. You can input information into them and it gets sent wirelessly and anonymously to the lecturer's laptop. The theory is that if he says "Raise your hand if you don't understand this" or even "...if you disagree with this", no one will, but if he says "Enter whether or not you understand this into your clicker" he may get three or four "don't understand" responses. Anonymous suggestion boxes are a low-tech form of the same principle.

• I always found the concept of Crocker's Rules very interesting. I also remember hearing of a community (wish I could remember which) in which it was absolutely forbidden to give negative feedback under certain circumstances, and the odd social dynamics that created. In a dojo-like setting, there might be situations when either of these two rules could be ritually enacted - for example, a special Crocker Hat, such that anyone wearing that hat was known to be under Crocker's Rules, and a special No Negative Feedback Hat (but with a flashier name, like White Crane Hat of Social Invincibility), which someone could wear when questioning the master or something and be absolutely immune to any criticism.

The way I test the rationality of the people around me is by lying to them, generally about irrelevant things, and seeing if they can unravel the lies.

I don't believe you.