Comment author: gwern 17 December 2012 10:33:43PM 3 points [-]

This is hardly a radical thought, and I’m far from the first to think it. For decades, there have been pushes to teach these skills formally, which have ebbed and flowed with the educational tides. The Association for Informal Logic & Critical Thinking and the Foundation for Critical Thinking, for example, have long been advocating for better critical thinking instruction. Where standalone critical thinking courses exist, however, they are mostly found within the humanities and social sciences. Those courses often center on argumentation and literary criticism, or instead on the philosophy of logic, but there are opportunities to expand this— particularly by giving science a larger presence. I think there is an enormous amount of untapped value in a broader model.

Worth pointing out that these really do seem to work, in varying degrees: http://lesswrong.com/lw/dhe/to_learn_critical_thinking_study_critical_thinking/

Comment author: Despard 19 December 2012 06:07:15PM 0 points [-]

Yes indeed. I thought people here, especially those connected to CFAR, might find it interesting. Critical thinking is only one part of rationality training of course, but its is a very useful one.

Comment author: [deleted] 14 December 2012 04:29:27PM 0 points [-]

Hopefully. Will you be around for the weekend after new years?

In response to comment by [deleted] on Meetup : Vancouver Last call for 2012
Comment author: Despard 15 December 2012 01:21:37AM 0 points [-]

I can be, though I'll want to be heading to Seattle around that time. No restrictions on travel really except I'd like to be in LA within two weeks of New Year.

Comment author: Despard 13 December 2012 07:24:23PM 0 points [-]

I'll be in Vancouver for New Year and shortly afterwards - any meetups planned for that time?

Comment author: michaelcurzi 04 December 2012 06:47:10PM 0 points [-]

It looks like we only have one question - still I think a lot of people (me included) would like to see it answered. Would you mind contacting your friend?

Comment author: Despard 04 December 2012 07:24:56PM 0 points [-]

No problem. Sent him a message, hopefully he has time!

Comment author: Despard 03 December 2012 09:13:02PM 8 points [-]

I actually know one of the guys working on it - I could ask him to come over here if you like.

Comment author: Despard 29 November 2012 07:30:57PM 0 points [-]

Note for following meetups - I'll be in Seattle in early January, would be good to meet some of you!

Comment author: maia 24 November 2012 10:00:06AM 0 points [-]

DC has meetups on Sundays; if you're there at a different time, there are at least two of us here interested in meeting up with you. Any idea how long you'll be in our area, if at all?

Comment author: Despard 26 November 2012 12:15:14AM 0 points [-]

Not sure for this trip; I'm mostly going West from Detroit, and I'll be back in the States (to NYC) next year but probably not heading to DC. All plans can change however!

Comment author: Despard 19 November 2012 05:30:02AM 1 point [-]

Nice! I'm actually doing something similar in December, bussing though various cities in the States (thread at http://lesswrong.com/lw/e9t/the_wandering_rationalist/) before going, mildly ironically, to Australia. I actually think I'm going to be in Austin around the same time as you, though not for as long. I'll be reposting my message with dates shortly.

Comment author: GeraldMonroe 03 October 2012 09:17:12PM 0 points [-]

How would registry of the trials work?

When I heard a lecture on this subject (there is pretty damning statistical evidence that drug trials are always slanted towards the company paying for the trials) the only viable proposal I heard discussed was to have the testing completely performed and controlled by an unbiased third party. (probably the government)

Comment author: Despard 04 October 2012 03:05:54PM 4 points [-]

It's not necessary to have them completely performed and controlled by a third party - but the idea is if you want to do a drug trial, you sign up with an independent register saying which drug you're testing and what your methodology is. Then when the trial is done, you must report your results publicly.

That stops companies hiding negative trials and only publishing positive ones. It doesn't stop the data being manipulated, but that's another problem.

Comment author: Despard 03 October 2012 08:35:26PM 2 points [-]

Nice article. Much of psychology suffers from the failure to replicate experiments, for various reasons like funding, time pressure, and difficulties in obtaining the population required. I've worked in sensorimotor control for several years and recently some researchers have come up with the idea of putting together a database of studies on perturbations during reaching (which is a very widely used paradigm) because they can so often be divergent due to tiny changes in the experiments.

I'd love to see more of this kind of thing in psychology in general, just as I'd like to see registration of medical trials from pharmaceutical companies (with both negative and positive results published) to avoid the all-too pervasive publication bias.

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