[This isn’t a direct response to Mark, but a reply to encourage more responses]
To add another helpful framing, if you don’t have children, but think as an adult part of your attraction to LessWrong was based on how your parents raised you with an appreciation with rationality, how did that go? Obvious caveats about how memories of childhood are unreliable and fuzzy, and personal perspectives on how your parents raised you will be biased.
I was raised by secular parents, who didn’t in particular put a special emphasis on rationality when raising me, compared to other parents. However, for example, Julia and Jesse Galef have written on their blog of how their father raised them with rationality in mind.
Thanks for the call to action. In my own case I became a rationalist in spite of my upbringing. So people like me who don’t have that background could really use advice from those who do :)
They left Scientific American lying around a lot. The column that had the fewest prerequisites was Michael Shermer’s skepticism column. Also, people around me kept trying to fix my brain, and when I ran into cognitive bias and other rationality topics, they were about fixing your own brain, so then I assumed that I needed to fix it.
In terms of religion stuff: My parents raised me with something between Conservative and Reform Judaism, but they talked about other religions in a way that implied Judaism was not particularly special, and mentioned internal religious differences, and I got just bored enough in religious services to read other parts of the book, which had some of the less appealing if more interesting content. (It wasn’t the greatest comparative religious education: I thought that the way Islam worked was that they had the Torah, the New Testament, and the Qur’an as a third book, sort of the way the Christians had our religious text as well as the New Testament as a second book.)
Thank for putting up this branch Evan, I don’t have children. I think my raising helped my rationality, but the lens of time is known to distort, so take it with a grain of salt.
Most of my rationality influence was a lead by example case. Accountability and agency were encouraged too, they may have made fertile soil for rational thought.
Ethics conversations were had and taken seriously (paraphrase: ‘Why does everyone like you?’ ‘Cause I always cooperate’ ‘Don’t people defect against you?’ ‘Yes, but defectors are rare and I more than cover my losses when dealing with other cooperators’).
Thinking outside the box was encouraged (paraphrase: ‘interfering the receiver is a 10 yard penalty, I can’t do that.’ ‘What’s worse, 10 yards or a touchdown?’ ‘But it is against the rules.’ ‘Why do you think the rule is for only 10 yards, and not kicked from the game? Do you think the rule, and penalty, are part of the game mechanics?’).
Goal based action was encouraged, acting on impulse was treated as being stupid (paraphrase: ‘Why did you get in a fight’ ‘I was being bullied’ ‘Did fighting stop the bullying?’ ‘No’ ‘Ok, what are you going to try next?’).
[This isn’t a direct response to Mark, but a reply to encourage more responses]
To add another helpful framing, if you don’t have children, but think as an adult part of your attraction to LessWrong was based on how your parents raised you with an appreciation with rationality, how did that go? Obvious caveats about how memories of childhood are unreliable and fuzzy, and personal perspectives on how your parents raised you will be biased.
I was raised by secular parents, who didn’t in particular put a special emphasis on rationality when raising me, compared to other parents. However, for example, Julia and Jesse Galef have written on their blog of how their father raised them with rationality in mind.
Thanks for the call to action. In my own case I became a rationalist in spite of my upbringing. So people like me who don’t have that background could really use advice from those who do :)
They left Scientific American lying around a lot. The column that had the fewest prerequisites was Michael Shermer’s skepticism column. Also, people around me kept trying to fix my brain, and when I ran into cognitive bias and other rationality topics, they were about fixing your own brain, so then I assumed that I needed to fix it.
In terms of religion stuff: My parents raised me with something between Conservative and Reform Judaism, but they talked about other religions in a way that implied Judaism was not particularly special, and mentioned internal religious differences, and I got just bored enough in religious services to read other parts of the book, which had some of the less appealing if more interesting content. (It wasn’t the greatest comparative religious education: I thought that the way Islam worked was that they had the Torah, the New Testament, and the Qur’an as a third book, sort of the way the Christians had our religious text as well as the New Testament as a second book.)
Thank for putting up this branch Evan, I don’t have children. I think my raising helped my rationality, but the lens of time is known to distort, so take it with a grain of salt.
Most of my rationality influence was a lead by example case. Accountability and agency were encouraged too, they may have made fertile soil for rational thought.
Ethics conversations were had and taken seriously (paraphrase: ‘Why does everyone like you?’ ‘Cause I always cooperate’ ‘Don’t people defect against you?’ ‘Yes, but defectors are rare and I more than cover my losses when dealing with other cooperators’).
Thinking outside the box was encouraged (paraphrase: ‘interfering the receiver is a 10 yard penalty, I can’t do that.’ ‘What’s worse, 10 yards or a touchdown?’ ‘But it is against the rules.’ ‘Why do you think the rule is for only 10 yards, and not kicked from the game? Do you think the rule, and penalty, are part of the game mechanics?’).
Goal based action was encouraged, acting on impulse was treated as being stupid (paraphrase: ‘Why did you get in a fight’ ‘I was being bullied’ ‘Did fighting stop the bullying?’ ‘No’ ‘Ok, what are you going to try next?’).