Brainstorming help request: teaching rationality basics in an RPG setting

7 MarkusRamikin 14 June 2012 07:05PM

EDIT: Minor updates happened.

 


 

I'd like to ask you all for thoughts on a certain idea I'm toying with. Especially any of you who are familiar with the Wheel of Time fantasy series by Robert Jordan.

I play a MUD (multi-user dungeon, basically a text-based MMORPG), based on that series. One of my characters is a member of the White Tower, which is basically a mage organisation/school, and as part of our roleplay activities we sometimes hold classes (example, long, probably not worth your time) for lower rank members. These typically last an hour or two and sometimes get used to convey interesting real life knowledge. For instance there has been a class on mnemonic techniques.

I see an opportunity to spread rationality a little. One of the Ajah (subdivisions) of the Tower is specifically concerned with pursuing truth, logic etc. which means if I joined it, I would have no trouble teaching a class or two with some material from the Sequences. I wonder if any of us here have done things like that in the past?

What sort of essentials would you pack into a class or at most a few classes 1-2 hours each (not just me reading stuff out but including a discussion), for people without technical backgrounds? Conducted at typing speed, so basically imagine you're going to spend two hours talking to 3-6 people about rationality on IRC chat or some such setting.

Also, should I involve or steer away from the metaphysics of the Wheel of Time setting (the Creator/Dark One, the Pattern etc)?

My ideas so far:

Part 1: "Cognitive biases, or why you, yes you, are an idiot".
- which ones would be most interesting/simple/useful to teach about?
- Obviously i need to start with how knowing about biases can hurt you...
- Confirmation bias: I might try the 2-4-6 game, though it'll be a bit of a mess in a group setting.
- what other biases and examples would you use?

Part 2: Truth and evidence
- truth, map/territory
- what is evidence
- rational evidence vs other kinds of evidence
- what is not evidence (instead of UFO cults I'd speak of False Dragon followers)

A question I anticipate coming up: Is there rational evidence for the Creator/Dark One/the Pattern? Ideas for handling this needed.
Note: I am NOT aiming at atheism at all costs, like a Force Skeptic approach. It's neither very rational if we're in WoT, nor practical for my character. In fact I intend to not talk about religion if possible. Wrong setting, wrong audience for that.

Part 3: Bayes' theorem
- the wedding in the desert example looks easily adaptable (Aiel!)
- more examples of practical Bayes Theorem application needed!

Or is the very idea of teaching Bayes in such a setting an outrageous underestimation of the inferential distance?

So yeah. Any ideas or advice that might help me give this shape and make it interesting and successful would be appreciated.

Open thread, October 2011

5 MarkusRamikin 02 October 2011 09:05AM

This thread is for discussing anything that doesn't seem to deserve its own post.

If the resulting discussion becomes impractical to continue here, it means the topic is a promising candidate for its own thread.

I hate TL;DR

21 MarkusRamikin 20 September 2011 09:23AM

It's a minor annoyance but perhaps I am not the only one who feels this way.

I dislike it when we summarize our posts and articles with a "tl;dr". There's a perfectly good English word for it, namely "summary".

"tl;dr", besides being an ugly internetism, seems to me to convey a certain additional meaning, over the neutral "summary". If, as happens on the rest of the web, a commenter responds to a post with "tl;dr", it expresses an expectation to be entertained without exercising the reader's attention span or making him think. It's also an easy and insulting way to respond to someone you disagree with, avoiding having to process their argument and maybe change your mind.

If an author uses it in their own article, it seems to me to be pandering to the same expectation, apologising for actually having something to say that takes a few paragraphs to explore properly. Less Wrong, a community consisting largely of above average people in terms of intelligence and ability to follow detailed arguments, is the last place I'd like or expect to see that attitude validated. If your post has substance and says something I didn't know/think before, of course it will take work - apparently even in the thermodynamic sense - to process it...

It's particularly jarring to see a tl;dr appended to posts that took me only a few seconds to read in full anyway.

Or maybe it's just me. I don't know.

/rant

Two barrels problem from the Intuitive Explanation (answered)

1 MarkusRamikin 13 July 2011 07:11AM

I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong here. EDIT: Yup, I'm allowing myself to be tricked.

I've finally sat down to reading http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes carefully, and I solved all story problems so far with no trouble. However, now I'm at this one:

Q.  Suppose that there are two barrels, each containing a number of plastic eggs.  In both barrels, some eggs are painted blue and the rest are painted red.  In the first barrel, 90% of the eggs contain pearls and 20% of the pearl eggs are painted blue.  In the second barrel, 45% of the eggs contain pearls and 60% of the empty eggs are painted red.  Would you rather have a blue pearl egg from the first or second barrel?
A.  Actually, it doesn't matter which barrel you choose!  Can you see why?

This doesn't look right to me.

In the first barrel, we have 18% blue eggs that contain pearls, and an unknown number of blue eggs that do not contain pearls, anywhere between 10% (worst case) and 0%. Depending on that, the proportion of blue eggs with pearls among all blue eggs can only be between 18/(18+10) = 64ish% in the worst case, to 100% in the best.

In the second barrel, we don't know how many pearls eggs are blue. We do know there are 45% eggs with pearls altogether, therefore 55% without pearls, and out of the latter 60% are red therefore 40% are blue. That means we have 40%*55% = 22% empty blue eggs. Pearl blue eggs are anywhere between 0 and 45%, so from 0% to 45/(45+22) = 67ish%.

Were we just supposed to conclude that there isn't enough information to answer that problem? But I'd say "anywhere between 64% and 100%" is a better shot than "anywhere between 0% and 67%". If I actually had to choose, and there were valuable pearls at stake, I'd choose the first barrel. Am I making some sort of a mistake?

Preview button

5 MarkusRamikin 26 June 2011 04:29PM

Surely I can't be the first person to have thought of it, but Uncle Google suggests this hasn't been discussed before. Would it be difficult to make a preview button available when posting comments? Was it lacking from the software being used or is it just disabled? This blog uses different ways of text formatting than I think a lot of us are used to from other discussion forums, so if it happens to be easy to do, it'd be good to be able to experiment and see the results before making one's comment available.

I just tried that sandbox linked to from the wiki and it doesn't seem trustworthy, what should come out as italics comes out as some sort of a highlight...

Funny, I felt that bystander reluctance thing while posting this. "Why hasn't anyone posted this before? Is it because nobody wants to be the one asking for something? Or is it a silly request in some way I don't see now?"

 

EDIT:

I see Uncle Google failed me. Or is it that I failed Uncle Google? ;)

Thanks for the reponses, all.