That’s a great idea, Thank you!

And here it is: https://manifold.markets/keltan/will-there-be-a-lessonline-2025

“Whiteboards everywhere” and my non-ironic favourite band are debuting songs!!!

But, I’m only a year old rationalist and I live in Australia on a uni student budget. Still… I’m considering flying out. It would be pretty incredible to run some abstract improv workshops with other truth seeking nerds. I think I need to sit down and calculate.

Is this the type of event that a first year rationalist could attend and get value from/be welcome at? What is the likelihood that it will run again next year? Is there a prediction market for that?

Edit: There is now. https://manifold.markets/keltan/will-there-be-a-lessonline-2025

That’s a great question! I’ve been teaching arts classes for a youth charity for 5 years now. Ages range from 5-18. I myself am 23.

I’d say this has happened twice? I’m counting a one off lesson with some 16-18 year olds a few years ago. And a series of weeks in which I had extremely little control over some 8-10 year olds. In that case I was able to control individuals if they had my full attention. But would ‘lose’ them when I focused on the next kid.

Your question caused me to think of why these things may have happened. Though I’m curious to hear what you think before I spill my guts.

The moment that I dread as a teacher and that has happened to me a few times. Is when the students realise that your authority is totally made up. I guess this is why we don’t teach philosophy in schools. I have never figured out a way to recover from this blunder. If anyone has any advice, I’d love to hear it.

Related to your principals comment. I can’t speak too much about the situation. Though am close with a former principal of a mid sized rural town. A real tricky job, and they knew that taking it on. It happened to be a town that (if I understand correctly) our government was sending a lot of refugees to. This resulted in a school where a large minority couldn’t speak English. In top of that, it’s a rural school. Notorious for horrible shit. Anyway, this principal made a small slip up and publicly apologised in a video. It then went locally viral and the state wide news picked it up. This principle was dragged through the mud for half a year. They couldn’t go to the grocery store or walk down the street. The news just kept going. I live pretty far away from them, but people know I know them. I had people come up and give condolences because of how harsh the treatment had been in the media.

I’m not sure how much this adds to the discussion. But I hope it helps to update someone’s model. A principle is a public figure with power over a tiny domain. They are sometimes attacked in the same way as a politician, but without the defences that politicians have.

Teacher here, can confirm.

Very quick google search. But something like this link for the “targeted NIR interference therapy”?

https://www.eegshopping.com/heg-nir

Duct-tape fixes are common in the wake of anything that goes publicly wrong. When people get hurt, they demand change, and they pressure whoever is in charge to give it to them. But implementing a proper fix is generally more complicated (since you have to perform a root cause analysis), less visible (therefore not earning the leader any social credit), or just plain unnecessary (if the risk was already priced in). So the incentives are in favor of quickly slapping something together that superficially appears to be a solution, without regards for whether it makes sense.

Wow, I kinda already knew this. But it had never been said so clearly and brought to the front of my mind in this way. It perfectly describes the strategies YouTube has used through its various apocalypses.

I rewrote this as lyrics and fed it into Udio for 5 hours until it gave me this. I think music helps internalize rationalist skills.