We’re already drowning in inert content, I don’t see how adding more would help. We’ve had a way to get something like the martial art of rationality since ancient Athens, which is structured interaction with an actual human mentor who knows how to engage with the surrounding world and can teach and train other people with face-to-face interaction. This thing isn’t mechanizable, like arithmetic or algebra is, so simple interactive programs are not going to be much better than just a regular book. This also isn’t a not mechanizable but still clearly delimited topic like wood-carving or playing tennis, so you can’t even say you’re unquestionably doing the thing when going it alone, even though you might do better with some professional training. What you’re trying to teach is the human ability to observe an unexpected situation, make sense of it and respond sensibly to it at a level above baseline adult competency, and the one way we know how to teach that is to have someone competent in the thing you’re trying to learn you can interact with.
Like, yeah, maybe this will help, but I can’t help but feel that people are compulsively eating ice and this is planning an ice shavings machine for your kitchen instead of getting an appointment for for having your blood work done.
While I agree with you that face to face interaction with a skilled mentor is the most effective way to learn complex skills such as rationality, that will fundamentally always be limited by the supply of humans who are both sufficiently skilled in the art, and are sufficiently good teachers, and who also have nothing better to do with their time.
So we really shouldn’t look at this as either/or—we should, on the one hand, make sure there’s good availability and supply of the best opportunity possible (face-to-face with skilled mentors), but also for the vast majority of learners for whom it isn’t feasible to provide skilled human guidance, we need to provide the highest-quality content that can easily be scaled. There are flaws I see in the current best scalable solution (primarily stemming from a lack of interactivity), and I’m currently in a better position to attempt to address that issue than to improve the availability of human mentors
We’re already drowning in inert content, I don’t see how adding more would help. We’ve had a way to get something like the martial art of rationality since ancient Athens, which is structured interaction with an actual human mentor who knows how to engage with the surrounding world and can teach and train other people with face-to-face interaction. This thing isn’t mechanizable, like arithmetic or algebra is, so simple interactive programs are not going to be much better than just a regular book. This also isn’t a not mechanizable but still clearly delimited topic like wood-carving or playing tennis, so you can’t even say you’re unquestionably doing the thing when going it alone, even though you might do better with some professional training. What you’re trying to teach is the human ability to observe an unexpected situation, make sense of it and respond sensibly to it at a level above baseline adult competency, and the one way we know how to teach that is to have someone competent in the thing you’re trying to learn you can interact with.
Like, yeah, maybe this will help, but I can’t help but feel that people are compulsively eating ice and this is planning an ice shavings machine for your kitchen instead of getting an appointment for for having your blood work done.
While I agree with you that face to face interaction with a skilled mentor is the most effective way to learn complex skills such as rationality, that will fundamentally always be limited by the supply of humans who are both sufficiently skilled in the art, and are sufficiently good teachers, and who also have nothing better to do with their time.
So we really shouldn’t look at this as either/or—we should, on the one hand, make sure there’s good availability and supply of the best opportunity possible (face-to-face with skilled mentors), but also for the vast majority of learners for whom it isn’t feasible to provide skilled human guidance, we need to provide the highest-quality content that can easily be scaled. There are flaws I see in the current best scalable solution (primarily stemming from a lack of interactivity), and I’m currently in a better position to attempt to address that issue than to improve the availability of human mentors