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All of Babson's Comments + Replies

Welcome to Less Wrong! (9th thread, May 2016)
Babson00

"to compare, teaching critical thinking at universities actually does not increase the critical thinking abilities of the students"

That's sad to hear.

Thank you for the advice. My primary concern is definitely to establish more rational habits. And then also to learn how to better learn.

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0Viliam
Just like the Sequences say somewhere, putting a label "cold" on a refrigerator will not actually make it cold. Similarly, calling a lesson "critical thinking" does not do anything per se. When I studied psychology, we had a lesson called "logic". It was completely unconnected to anything else; all I remember is drawing tables for boolean expressions "A and B", "A or B", "A implies B", "not A", and filling them with ones and zeroes. If you were able to fill the table correctly for a complex expression, you passed. It was a completely mechanical action; no one understood why the hell are we doing that; it was completely unconnected to anything else. So, I guess this kind of lesson actually didn't make anyone more "logical". Instead we could have spent the time learning about cognitive biases, even the trivial ones, and how it applies to the specific stuff we study. For example, psychologists are prone to see "A and B" and conclude "A implies B" if it fits their prejudice. Just having one lesson that would give you dozen examples of "A and B", and you would have to write "maybe A causes B, or maybe B causes A, or maybe some unknown C causes both A and B, or maybe it's just a coincidence" would probably be more useful then the whole semester of "logic"; it could be an antidote against all that "computer games cause violence / sexism" stuff, if someone would remember the exercise. But even when teaching cognitive biases, people are likely to apply them selectively to the stuff they want to disbelieve. I am already tired of seeing people abusing Popper this way (for example, any probabilistic hypothesis can be dismissed as "not falsifiable" and therefore "not scientific"), I don't want to give them even more ammunition. I suspect that on some level this is an emotional decision to make -- you either truly care about what is true and what is bullshit, or you prefer to seem clever and be popular. A university lesson cannot really make you change this.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (9th thread, May 2016)
Babson00

Right, that's a good example. And then the normal people stigmatize that sort of thing, as if Montessori kids are weird.

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5Viliam
Sometimes I suspect that the teaching profession may attract the wrong kind of people. (Speaking about the elementary and high schools. Universities are a bit different, e.g. they do research, they deal with adults, etc.) When you think about it, teacher is a servant of the government, nominated to impart the cultural wisdom to children. Think about what psychological type would this job description attract most. To say it mildly, probably not the "open to experience" ones. (In the youngest classes, it also gets mixed with the "loves little children" ones.) I was a teacher shortly, and I remember how shocked were my students, when I answered one of their questions with "I don't know". It was like I broke some taboo. I asked: "Guys, you asked me something which is outside the scope of the lesson, outside the scope of what is taught at this school, so it's not an incompetence on my part to not know that. And it's impossible to know everything, even within the subject one teaches. So if you ask me a question and I don't know the answer, what exactly did you expect me to do?" After a while the students concluded that they would expect me to just make something up, because in their experience that's what an ordinary teacher would do. It's not because they would prefer to get a bullshit answer, but because they accepted "teachers being unable to admit not knowing something" to be a perfectly normal part of the world. Now try to take this kind of people and make them admit that, essentially, they were doing their whole jobs wrong. That many things they believe necessary are actually harmful, a large part of their "knowledge about teaching" is actually a myth, and the part that isn't a myth is probably still somehow exaggerated and dogmatized. They are not going to take it well. Now think about the people above them in the power ladder. The school inspection is former teachers, probably the most dogmatic of them, who already don't even have the feedback that comes from
Welcome to Less Wrong! (9th thread, May 2016)
Babson00

Good points. I guess why I'm ultimately interested in education is that these individual inclinations begin early, and one can foster them or beat them out, as with curiosity. I could see why outreach for adults would be more difficult. And of course if a child benefits from an EA intervention, then they might become more interested in their own education if they have rationalist role models, and so on and so on until they discover rationality of their own accord.

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0ChristianKl
It's not easy to provide education for children if neither the government nor their parents want it. At the moment there aren't rationality interventions for which a solid evidence base exists that proves that they work in a way that would make it easy to pitch those interventions to the school system. The first step is to create effective interventions. There's nothing to be gained by holding classes where children are taught the names of the logical fallacies. There's no evidence that it helps. Pushing such classes would be about trying to push an ideology while ignoring the the core of what rationality is actually about.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (9th thread, May 2016)
Babson10

"No, I don't think so. Self-reported IQs from a self-selected group have a bias. I'll let you guess in which direction :-)"

Of course, but I guess that I would expect a site helping its members to "Overcome Bias" would provide more trustworthy data! :)

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0Lumifer
"More trustworthy" != trustworthy.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (9th thread, May 2016)
Babson00

Thank you (for the information)!

Yeah, I had a psychologist do a full battery of tests to determine if I did indeed have ADD. (Isn't it funny how regular physicians can just prescribe you drugs as a kid for behavioral/mental conditions?!)

I feel like I have heard of the Harry Potter fanfic before, also oddly enough tied to my memory of the SSA conference where CFAR had a table... Hmm.

As far as professorships go, I study German where any tenure-track job will have dozens upon dozens of applicants. I also study Classics. I'm more interested in education in ge... (read more)

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0Viliam
You probably already know it, but just to be sure, there are alternative approached to teaching, e.g. the Montessori education. But it seems that most of the education system just continues by inertia. So, a few people do stop and think how to make things differently, it's just that the majority ignores them.
Welcome to Less Wrong! (9th thread, May 2016)
Babson70

I discovered SSC and LW a ~couple months ago, from (I think) a Startpage search which led me to Scott's lengthy article on IQ. Only browsed for a while, but last night rediscovered this after I read Doing Good Better and went to the EA website. I remember CFAR from a Secular Student Alliance conference two years ago.

I like Scott's writing, but I have no hard science training unfortunately.

I have realized that I've become rather used to my comfort zone, and have sort of let my innate intelligence stagnate, when I like to think it still has room to grow. I ... (read more)

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2Viliam
I think the most important part of rationality is doing the basic stuff consistently. Things like noticing the problem that needs to be solved and actually spending five minutes trying to solve it, instead of just running on the autopilot. At some level of IQ, having the right character traits (or habits, which can be trained) could provide more added value than extra IQ points; and I believe you are already there. Does it also make you actually do something in your life differently? Otherwise it's merely "insight porn". (This is not a criticism aimed specifically at you; I suspect this is how most readers of this website use it.) I think the main problem is that we don't actually know how to make people more rational. Well, CFAR is doing some lessons, trying to measure the impact on their students and adjusting the lessons accordingly; so they probably already do have some partial results at the moment. That is not a simple task; to compare, teaching critical thinking at universities actually does not increase the critical thinking abilities of the students. So, at this moment we want to attract people who have a chance of contributing meaningfully to the development of the Art of how to make people more rational. And then, when we have the Art, we can approach the average people and apply it on them.
0ChristianKl
When trying to influence people on a meaningful level it's seldom useful to simple try to address the average person. There are people in this community who do outreach. Gleb tries to do outreach via http://intentionalinsights.org/. http://www.clearerthinking.org does a bit of out-reach that's near to this community. James Miller has his podcast. In general there also a need for research. CFAR doesn't see it's mission primarily as outreach but primarily as developing a new way to do rationality. The mission of this website is "refining the art of rationality". There no inherent reason to do outreach and developing new ideas at the same time. Both are worthy causes and idea development isn't just about focusing on one's own growth and happiness. A lot of energy that goes into compassionate outreach also goes into EA and not rationality as such.
1Lumifer
No, I don't think so. Self-reported IQs from a self-selected group have a bias. I'll let you guess in which direction :-) There's Gleb Tsipursky and his Intentional Insights, but from my point of view this whole endeavour looks quite unfortunate. YMMV, of course.
5gjm
Welcome to Less Wrong! I think a properly tested IQ of 131 would put you more or less in the middle for the LW community. (It would put you a little below the average self-report for LW members who have had proper professional IQ tests done, but I would guess that having such tests done correlates with higher IQ in this community. And, alas, people sometimes make mistakes, or report things that flatter them while ignoring things that don't, or just flat-out lie, and all those things will introduce a bit of upward bias in the results.) An IQ of 131 would also put you solidly in the region where for most things less outrageously IQ-heavy than, say, theoretical physics IQ is unlikely to be what limits you. I think there's a reasonable amount of rationalist outreach going on. * You already mentioned CFAR, which does it on a relatively large scale, formally, for money. * One LW member, Gleb Tsipursky, has an organization called "Intentional Insights" whose stated goal is to spread rationality to more "ordinary" people. * (Gleb and his organization are rather controversial around here for various reasons, and in particular there is not widespread agreement that they are actually doing any good, but they're certainly doing outreach.) * EY wrote a big Harry Potter fanfic to bring rationalist ideas (and Less Wrong, and MIRI) to the attention of a wider audience. * Various rationalists have blogs with an outreachy component. For instance, Put a Number on it!. * As any religious fanatic will tell you, the most effective outreach is often done at an individual level. There are, e.g., plenty of rationalists on Facebook just being conspicuously reasonable. I'm sure most rationalists' friends are far from being a random sample of "average individuals", of course. Are you still on the path to becoming a professor? It seems to me that being a professor in any field has to score pretty highly on the "intellectually stimulating career" metric.