I'm finally getting around to reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow". Much of it I had already learned on LW and elsewhere. Maybe that's why my strongest impression from the book is how accessible it is. Simple sentences, clear and vivid examples, easy-to-follow exercises, a remarkable lack of references to topics not explained right away.
I caught myself thinking "This is a book I should have read as a kid". In my first language, I think I could have managed it as early as 11 years old. Since measured IQ is strongly influenced by habits of thinking and cognitive returns can be reinvested, I'm sure I would be smarter now if I had.
So I have decided to buy a stack of these books and give them to kids on their, say, 12th birthdays. Then maybe Dan Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" a year later - and HPMOR a year after that? I would like to see more suggestions from you guys.
It should be obviously better to start even earlier. So how do you teach rationality to a nine-year-old? Or a seven-year-old? Has anybody done something like that? Please name books, videos or web sites.
If such media are not available, creating them should be low-hanging fruit in the quest to raise the global IQ and sanity waterline. ELI5 writing is very learnable, after all, and ELI5 type interpretations of, say, the sequences, might be helpful for adults too.
I should preface my comment with the fact that I do not have children of my own, but a lot of young cousins and nieces & nephews that I experiment teaching philosophies with.
Books can be a shaky premise in terms of getting kids interested in rationality. This next generation are filled with more stimuli than ever before and rationality, especially as a child, is a fairly dry subject matter. Of course, it depends on the child and their predisposition to reading, current reading habits and overall critical thinking skills.
Having said that, the best teaching method I find with children incorporate rational discussion on topics they enjoy or infusing it into a game they enjoy. For example, creating rules to an invented game that involve ideas dealing with honesty or other abstract ideas often gets some interesting rational discussion going on why a rule is a certain way. Then, using what you have learnt from these books such as "Thinking, Fast and Slow", throw in bits and pieces of information about rationality as a subject matter. That way, after they associate a positive relationship with learning about rationality and using it effectively in areas of life they enjoy, when you introduce books to them about the topic at a later age, the chances of them reading it and enjoying will greatly increase.
Neat! I'd be interested in more details about that, especially the invented games!
(I have a three-year-old.)