Jesse Richardson
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Jesse Richardson has not written any posts yet.
Jesse Richardson has not written any posts yet.
Hmm, so improving the 'brand' of rationality isn't really the aim of our organization, but rather to help make critical thinking, scientific literacy, and rationality itself more popular and instantiated in minds / culture / politics etc. Having said that, I think the ways that both myself and other rational skeptics have gone about promoting this cause in the past has been counter-productive. In the oughts when I called myself a militant atheist, I naively flattered myself that my hitch-slap smackdowns of what I deemed to be irrational nonsense were serving the noble cause of promoting rationality. Oh the irony. It is, imo, deeply irrational to think that attacking people and using... (read more)
Hey Viliam, founder here – thanks for the feedback and I think your criticisms are quite valid. When we started this non-profit about 10 years ago my hypothesis was that making critical thinking more engaging through the use of design methodologies i.e. making critical thinking more accessible, could help to popularize it and promulgate a more rational mindset en masse.
I don't think that hypothesis is exactly wrong, but I've quite substantially changed my thinking in the intervening time. Specifically with regard to the fallacies and biases materials that we were quite successful in popularizing (around 30m people reached worldwide under creative commons licenses). I share your skepticism about the efficacy of learning... (read more)
Hello there, founder of The School of Thought here. There's a more expansive answer to your question at our main website https://schoolofthought.org but in a nutshell: we are a non-profit that seeks to popularize critical thinking, reason, and understanding by using the power of design and creativity to amplify academic, scientific, and rational ways of understanding the universe and ourselves.
Yes, absolutely – I've always been a rationalist (or at least attempted to be). I read a lot of the new atheists' work early on, and have been involved in various rationalist-type communities on the internets. I really ought to be more involved in the community and seek to make the School of Thought more involved too. Thanks for making this post!