Do you think that having your kids consume rationalist and effective altruist content and/or doing homeschooling/unschooling are insufficient for protecting your kids against mind viruses? If so, I want to understand why you think so (maybe you’re imagining some sort of AI-powered memetic warfare?).
Eliezer has a Facebook post where he talks about how being socialized by old science fiction was helpful for him.
For myself, I think the biggest factors that helped me become/stay sane were spending a lot of time on the internet (which led to me discovering LessWrong, effective altruism, Cognito Mentoring) and not talking to other kids (I didn’t have any friends from US public school during grades 4 to 11).
Do you think that having your kids consume rationalist and effective altruist content and/or doing homeschooling/unschooling are insufficient for protecting your kids against mind viruses?
Homeschooling takes up too much of my time and I don’t think I’m very good at being a teacher (having been forced to try it during the current school closure). Unschooling seems too risky. (Maybe it would produce great results, but my wife would kill me if it doesn’t. :) “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?
and not talking to other kids (I didn’t have any friends from US public school during grades 4 to 11)
Yeah that might have been a contributing factor for myself as well, but my kids seem a lot more social than me.
“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.
If you’re looking for a datapoint, I found and read this ePub of all of Eliezer’s writing when I was around 13 or 14. Would read it late into the night every day (1am, 2am) on the tablet I had at the time, I think an iPhone.
Before that… the first book I snuck out to buy+read was Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation” when I was 12-13, and I generally found his talks and books to be really exciting and mind-expanding.
Do you think that having your kids consume rationalist and effective altruist content and/or doing homeschooling/unschooling are insufficient for protecting your kids against mind viruses? If so, I want to understand why you think so (maybe you’re imagining some sort of AI-powered memetic warfare?).
Eliezer has a Facebook post where he talks about how being socialized by old science fiction was helpful for him.
For myself, I think the biggest factors that helped me become/stay sane were spending a lot of time on the internet (which led to me discovering LessWrong, effective altruism, Cognito Mentoring) and not talking to other kids (I didn’t have any friends from US public school during grades 4 to 11).
Homeschooling takes up too much of my time and I don’t think I’m very good at being a teacher (having been forced to try it during the current school closure). Unschooling seems too risky. (Maybe it would produce great results, but my wife would kill me if it doesn’t. :) “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?
Yeah that might have been a contributing factor for myself as well, but my kids seem a lot more social than me.
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.
If you’re looking for a datapoint, I found and read this ePub of all of Eliezer’s writing when I was around 13 or 14. Would read it late into the night every day (1am, 2am) on the tablet I had at the time, I think an iPhone.
Before that… the first book I snuck out to buy+read was Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation” when I was 12-13, and I generally found his talks and books to be really exciting and mind-expanding.