Can we teach Rationality at the University of Reddit?

23 Lightwave 20 August 2012 09:59PM

This was posted a few hours ago. Basically, the reddit admins have decided to promote the so-called "University of Reddit", a subreddit where people can offer and teach any course they'd like, or just attend a course. This is official website for all courses. At the time of this posting the subreddit had ~38,400 subscribers, but I expect it will grow significantly.

Given the reddit demographics, a Rationality course has the potential to become extremely popular. The exposure can popularize CFAR and LessWrong, and can be used to recruit fresh minds for rationality-related causes. Also maybe run experiments with curricula or methods of teaching rationality?

What do you guys think?

'Thinking, Fast and Slow' Chapter Summaries / Notes [link]

17 Lightwave 15 April 2012 09:14AM

I recently read Kahneman's 'Thinking Fast and Slow' (actually listened to the audiobook) and I wanted to find a summary of the experiments he describes and I stumbled upon this: http://sivers.org/book/ThinkingFastAndSlow. It has a summary of the interesting/important points of each chapter. Most of the statements seem to be direct quotes from the book, so if you have it in an electronic format (it can easily be obtained from uh, various sources) you can search for those quotes and find the context.

Bonus: Notes from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational and also many other books.

TED-Ed Launch

8 Lightwave 12 March 2012 09:20PM

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.

http://education.ted.com/

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.

Weak supporting evidence can undermine belief

11 Lightwave 29 September 2011 10:11AM

Article: Weak supporting evidence can undermine belief in an outcome

Defying logic, people given weak evidence can regard predictions supported by that evidence as less likely than if they aren’t given the evidence at all.

...

Consider the following statement: “Widespread use of hybrid and electric cars could reduce worldwide carbon emissions. One bill that has passed the Senate provides a $250 tax credit for purchasing a hybrid or electric car. How likely is it that at least one-fifth of the U.S. car fleet will be hybrid or electric in 2025?”

That middle sentence is the weak evidence. People presented with the entire statement — or similar statements with the same three-sentence structure but on different topics — answered the final question lower than people who read the statement without the middle sentence. They did so even though other people who saw the middle statement in isolation rated it as positive evidence for, in this case, higher adoption of hybrid and electric cars.

 

Paper: When good evidence goes bad: The weak evidence effect in judgment and decision-making

Abstract:

An indispensable principle of rational thought is that positive evidence should increase
belief. In this paper, we demonstrate that people routinely violate this principle when pre-
dicting an outcome from a weak cause. In Experiment 1 participants given weak positive
evidence judged outcomes of public policy initiatives to be less likely than participants
given no evidence, even though the evidence was separately judged to be supportive.
Experiment 2 ruled out a pragmatic explanation of the result, that the weak evidence
implies the absence of stronger evidence. In Experiment 3, weak positive evidence made
people less likely to gamble on the outcome of the 2010 United States mid-term Congres-
sional election. Experiments 4 and 5 replicated these findings with everyday causal
scenarios. We argue that this ‘‘weak evidence effect’’ arises because people focus dispro-
portionately on the mentioned weak cause and fail to think about alternative causes.

Some ideas on communicating risks to the general public

2 Lightwave 05 December 2010 10:44AM