Yay false dilemma! I did not realize that talking about teenagers could be mindkilling, so here comes my list of disclaimers...
Of course the “LW articles for teenagers” should be nothing like the typical articles for teenagers. For exactly the same reason that LW articles today are not like the typical articles for N-years-old people for any value of N.
I advocate having some content focused on teenagers, but not a separate website for them. Best solution could be to use tags and/or later collect the teenager-oriented articles into a new sequence. (This is my personal opinion, I don’t speak for other “teenage LW” advocates here.) People who come here to read Eliezer writing about X will continue to come here, because Eliezer will continue to write about X. There will be no filter to remove Eliezer’s articles from the teenage readers’ starting pages.
Even if we assume that (aspiring) rational teenagers have exactly the same minds as (aspiring) rational adults, they still live in different conditions. An article about a job choice is more relevant to a person in a job market, and less relevant for a teenager; not because the teenager wouldn’t understand it, but simply because for a teenager, job choice is not a present-day problem, unlike for an adult. Teenagers have different present-day problems.
How much is it necessary to focus on everyone’s present-day problems? Well, this is a site for both epistemic and instrumental rationality. It’s about winning. And what one does during their average day usually contributes to their winning. Ignoring one’s everyday life and focusing on the meaning of Peano’s Fifth Axiom instead may be high status, but ultimately self-deceiving.
Yes, typical advice for teenagers is a pure far-mode “obey the authorities, don’t ask questions, and everything will magically be fine” crap. I am not suggesting anything like this here. Litany of Tarski etc.
But perhaps the best way to make sure at least some teenagers will want to read those articles, is to ask them.
Yay false dilemma! I did not realize that talking about teenagers could be mindkilling, so here comes my list of disclaimers...
Of course the “LW articles for teenagers” should be nothing like the typical articles for teenagers. For exactly the same reason that LW articles today are not like the typical articles for N-years-old people for any value of N.
I advocate having some content focused on teenagers, but not a separate website for them. Best solution could be to use tags and/or later collect the teenager-oriented articles into a new sequence. (This is my personal opinion, I don’t speak for other “teenage LW” advocates here.) People who come here to read Eliezer writing about X will continue to come here, because Eliezer will continue to write about X. There will be no filter to remove Eliezer’s articles from the teenage readers’ starting pages.
Even if we assume that (aspiring) rational teenagers have exactly the same minds as (aspiring) rational adults, they still live in different conditions. An article about a job choice is more relevant to a person in a job market, and less relevant for a teenager; not because the teenager wouldn’t understand it, but simply because for a teenager, job choice is not a present-day problem, unlike for an adult. Teenagers have different present-day problems.
How much is it necessary to focus on everyone’s present-day problems? Well, this is a site for both epistemic and instrumental rationality. It’s about winning. And what one does during their average day usually contributes to their winning. Ignoring one’s everyday life and focusing on the meaning of Peano’s Fifth Axiom instead may be high status, but ultimately self-deceiving.
Yes, typical advice for teenagers is a pure far-mode “obey the authorities, don’t ask questions, and everything will magically be fine” crap. I am not suggesting anything like this here. Litany of Tarski etc.
But perhaps the best way to make sure at least some teenagers will want to read those articles, is to ask them.