Dawkins is a very high-quality thinker, as his scientific writings reveal. The fact that he has also published "elementary" rationalist material in no way takes away from this.
He's way, way far above the level represented by the participants in his namesake forum.
(I'd give even odds that EY could persuade him to sign up for cryonics in an hour or less.)
Convincing Dawkins would be a great strategy for promoting cryonics... who else should the community focus on convincing?
Project Follow Through, the study most frequently cited as proving the benefits of Direct Instruction is far from perfect. Neither classrooms nor schools, were randomly assigned to curricula. Its not clear how students ended up in treatment vs. comparison groups but it probably happened differently in different communities. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Follow_Through#Analytical_methods for a bunch of info and more references.
Claims that the extent to which will power is exhaustible depends on one's belief about it's exhaustibility: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101014144318.htm
a meta-analysis of 15 studies
As a statistical aside, I see no strong reason to believe a meta-analysis should be any more convincing than a single, large, well-designed study. In fact, by mixing the results of rigorous studies in with the unrigorous ones, you're probably just diluting the signal to noise ratio.
We should feel good about the fact that some biases of different research designs will cancel each other out, while bad about our inability to weight each study optimally.
I take it Stanovich is doing a lot of experiments where he controls for IQ, or compares performance within and across IQ groups. Here is my concern... there is always measurement error, and the more error in his measure of IQ, the more it will appear he's measuring something distinct from IQ which he terms "rationality."
That said, I also agree that IQ, and G, are often reified. The point is, I'm not sure Stanovich has succeeded in carving cognition skills at their joints, but I don't have anything better to offer.
It seems to be common for boys to feel that they have to earn the right to consider themselves men, but I don't know how universal it is.
I don't think we should push too hard on the dichotomy of boy vs. man. I would emphasize that there is individual variation in how well men they can perform/achieve masculinity in their sub-culture. Women face the issue as well.
If men work very hard to keep women out of male roles (which seems to be the case), and women don't work especially hard to keep men out of female roles (which also seems to be the case), what do you think is going on?
For many people, their gender is an incredibly important aspect of their identity. One can think of a given subculture as having an ideal performance of masculinity. Men and women both respect that ideal. Certain occupations have been traditionally seen as very good ways of achieving that ideal. If women enter into such an occupation, the occupation is no longer seen as validating mens' manly virtues.
I oppose sex-discrimination in hiring, but there is no denying that this is a very serious loss for some men. Eventually, norms and ideals evolve in a way which allows men to continue to have their masculinity validated, and/or de-emphasizes gender as a component of one's identity, but this is a slow process. Moreover, with any change in values, there will always be winners and losers.
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Friends and family. They are the ones I care about most. (And, most likely, those that others in the community care about most too. At least the friends part. Family is less certain but more significant.)
Sure, convince those you love. I was asking who you should try to convince if your goal is convincing someone who will themselves convince a lot of other people.