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All of secretsquirrel's Comments + Replies

For-Profit Rationality Training
secretsquirrel00

Thanks for your input. I'm not sure whether you are saying that it is a waste of time (both mine and theirs) to try to teach people about Bayesian inference, or whether there was a better way I could have explained it and made it relevant to them. If the latter, do you have any ideas as to how I could improve my treatment of the topic?

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0juliawise
I'm not sure there's a way to make it relevant to a previously uninterested audience in 5 minutes. I think your speech was well done for the constraints you had, but I don't have ideas for how to make that topic work given the constraints. I might have picked a simpler cognitive bias to talk about instead.
For-Profit Rationality Training
secretsquirrel00

So, I presented a five-minute speech to my community college class on the base rate fallacy. Unfortunately, it went over their heads at about the same apparent distance as airplanes usually pass over my own. Here is the text of the speech, if anyone would be so kind as to offer criticism.

"I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass...and I'm all out of bubblegum". You might remember this line from the 80s sci fi movie They Live. In the movie, society is controlled by aliens who are using up Earth's natural resources. They're in politics... (read more)

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2juliawise
What are you hoping that people will do with this information? Most of these folks will never run the TSA, so they can't do much except gripe about being made to take their shoes off in airports. Even in the breast cancer example, the most that your average person would take away from the speech is "you're supposed to multiply something by...something, and somehow the test might be wrong." What advice are they supposed to give their friend? Most women with a scary-looking mammogram who hear their friend say, "You're probably fine" are going to doubt whether the friend takes their health seriously. The problem with supposedly practical applications of Bayes' theorem is that you usually don't have the data to do the math even if you know how, and there's usually not much practical action you can take based on it anyway. It's an interesting idea, and the people who like that sort of thing may want to learn more about it, but there's no information in this lecture that would let them trace the idea (other than talking to you afterwards). But I gather this was not the kind of audience who goes home and googles Bayes' theorem, so mentioning the name probably wouldn't have done much. In most of the cases where knowing about base rates would help us, we don't actually know the base rate. If I know my child's preschool teacher is being investigated for child abuse, is that strong evidence that she really abuses children? I suspect most preschool teachers do not abuse children, but that many are accused of it at some point in their careers, but I don't know the rates of either. So I can't really draw useful conclusions.
For-Profit Rationality Training
secretsquirrel20

Excellent advice, thank you very much. I had not considered that option for some reason.

Yes, I am relatively new to rationalism as a whole, I started seriously studying it about a year ago. Nonetheless, it's pretty easy to stay enthusiastic - I just have to read a page of failblog or try to talk to a friend...about anything...lol

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0beoShaffer
Also, if you remain interested and, specifically like LW's vision of rationality you could try using the curriculum thats currently being developed here http://lesswrong.com/lw/9hb/position_design_and_write_rationality_curriculum/
For-Profit Rationality Training
secretsquirrel10

Please forgive me if this post doesn't belong here. I want to start a non-profit teaching rationality to a broad audience, starting off as one-day workshops on the weekends. Initially as a hobby, and then see where it goes from there. Can anyone give me practical advice, insofar as market research (nonprofits don't tend to post their annual reports), advertising (how do I make this look good to the average guy who says, "There's nothing wrong with the way I think/I'm not stupid/My life is fine the way it is") and how to present Bayes' Theorem ... (read more)

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4orthonormal
Welcome! You might be interested in the welcome thread, first of all. If you're interested in volunteering to speak about rationality topics, there may be easier ways to try it out than starting and advertising a new organization. (Plenty of smaller humanist/philosophy/discussion groups are happy when someone volunteers to present.) Also, since you have a new account, can I ask whether you've picked up Less Wrong-style rationality fairly recently? It's worth noting that the earliest burst of enthusiasm isn't as reliable as it seems, and one should often scale down one's initial ambition accordingly. There's always opportunity to add more responsibilities later if it goes well. (This Kaj Sotala post touches on that phenomenon.)