“Consume rationalist and effective altruist content” makes sense but some more specific advice would be helpful, like what material to introduce, when, and how to encourage their interest if they’re not immediately interested. Have any parents done this and can share their experience?
I don’t have kids (yet) and I’m planning to delay any potential detailed research until I do have kids, so I don’t have specific advice. You could talk to James Miller and his son. Bryan Caplan seems to also be doing well in terms of keeping his sons’ views similar to his own; he does homeschool, but maybe you could learn something from looking at what he does anyway. There are a fewotherrationalist parents, but I haven’t seen any detailed info on what they do in terms of introducing rationality/EA stuff. Duncan Sabien has also thought a lot about teaching children, including designing a rationality camp for kids.
I can also give my own data point: Before discovering LessWrong (age 13-15?), I consumed a bunch of traditional rationality content like Feynman, popular science, online philosophy lectures, and lower quality online discourse like the xkcd forums. I discovered LessWrong when I was 14-16 (I don’t remember the exact date) and read a bunch of posts in an unstructured way (e.g. I think I read about half of the Sequences but not in order), and concurrently read things like GEB and started learning how to write mathematical proofs. That was enough to get me to stick around, and led to me discovering EA, getting much deeper into rationality, AI safety, LessWrongian philosophy, etc. I feel like I could have started much earlier though (maybe 9-10?) and that it was only because of my bad environment (in particular, having nobody tell me that LessWrong/Overcoming Bias existed) and poor English ability (I moved to the US when I was 10 and couldn’t read/write English at the level of my peers until age 16 or so) that I had to start when I did.
I don’t have kids (yet) and I’m planning to delay any potential detailed research until I do have kids, so I don’t have specific advice. You could talk to James Miller and his son. Bryan Caplan seems to also be doing well in terms of keeping his sons’ views similar to his own; he does homeschool, but maybe you could learn something from looking at what he does anyway. There are a few other rationalist parents, but I haven’t seen any detailed info on what they do in terms of introducing rationality/EA stuff. Duncan Sabien has also thought a lot about teaching children, including designing a rationality camp for kids.
I can also give my own data point: Before discovering LessWrong (age 13-15?), I consumed a bunch of traditional rationality content like Feynman, popular science, online philosophy lectures, and lower quality online discourse like the xkcd forums. I discovered LessWrong when I was 14-16 (I don’t remember the exact date) and read a bunch of posts in an unstructured way (e.g. I think I read about half of the Sequences but not in order), and concurrently read things like GEB and started learning how to write mathematical proofs. That was enough to get me to stick around, and led to me discovering EA, getting much deeper into rationality, AI safety, LessWrongian philosophy, etc. I feel like I could have started much earlier though (maybe 9-10?) and that it was only because of my bad environment (in particular, having nobody tell me that LessWrong/Overcoming Bias existed) and poor English ability (I moved to the US when I was 10 and couldn’t read/write English at the level of my peers until age 16 or so) that I had to start when I did.