A while back I did a couple of posts on the care and feeding of young rationalists. Though it is not new, I recently found a truly excellent post on this topic, in Dale Mcgowan's blog, The Meming of Life. The post details a survey carried out on ordinary citizens of Hitler's Germany, searching for correlations between style of upbringing, and adult moral decisions. 

Everyday Germans of the Nazi period are the focus of a fascinating study discussed in the PBB seminars and in the Ethics chapter of Raising Freethinkers. For their book The Altruistic Personality, researchers Samuel and Pearl Oliner conducted over 700 interviews with survivors of Nazi-occupied Europe. Included were both “rescuers” (those who actively rescued victims of persecution) and “non-rescuers” (those who were either passive in the face of the persecution or actively involved in it). The study revealed interesting differences in the upbringing of the two groups — specifically the language and practices that parents used to teach their values.

Non-rescuers were 21 times more likely than rescuers to have been raised in families that emphasized obedience—being given rules that were to be followed without question—while rescuers were over three times more likely than non-rescuers to identify “reasoning” as an element of their moral education. “Explained,” the authors said, is the single most common word used by rescuers in describing their parents’ ways of talking about rules and ethical ideas.

Thought the community might enjoy this:

Jinnetic Engineering

Alt-rockers They Might Be Giants explain/advocate empiricism in a record aimed at young children.

[...] before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.

The idea that giant-brained people were not so long ago walking the dusty plains of South Africa was sufficiently shocking to draw in the luminaries back in England. Two of the most prominent anatomists of the day, both experts in the reconstruction of skulls, weighed in with opinions generally supportive of Haughton’s conclusions.

The Scottish scientist Robert Broom reported that “we get for the corrected cranial capacity of the Boskop skull the very remarkable figure of 1,980 cc.” Remarkable indeed: These measures say that the distance from Boskop to humans is greater than the distance between humans and their Homo erectus predecessors.

What Happened to the Hominids who were Smarter than Us?

I'm strongly inclined to defy the data -- true superintelligence should have just dominated our ancestors -- but given the expense of large skull size (primarily in difficult birthing) it also seems profoundly unlikely that a lineage would see expansion like this that wasn't buying them something mentally.

From the UK Telegraph:

A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.

To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research from all walks of life: the youngest is an 18-year-old student, the oldest an 84-year-old retired accountant.

Be lucky -- it's an easy skill to learn

On reading the article, the takeaway message seems to be that the 'unlucky' systematically fail to take advantage of high-expected-but-low-median value opportunities.

2:45:24 PM Katja Grace: The main thing that puts me off in online dating profiles is lack of ambition to save the world
2:45:35 PM Katja Grace: Or do anything much
2:48:03 PM Michael Blume: *nods*
2:48:07 PM Michael Blume: this is indeed a problem
2:57:55 PM Katja Grace: Maybe there is a dating site for smart ambitious nerds somewhere
2:58:25 PM Katja Grace: Need to set up lw extension perhaps
2:59:02 PM Michael Blume: haha, yes ^^
3:00:40 PM Katja Grace: Plenty of discussion on why few girls, how to get girls, nobody ever says 'oy, girls on lw, want to get together some time?'
3:01:14 PM Michael Blume: somebody really should say that
3:01:34 PM Michael Blume: hell, I'm tempted to just copy that IM into a top-level post and click 'submit'
3:01:48 PM Katja Grace: Haha dare you to