That would be an amazing class. Even dropping the “offensiveness” billing and just advertising it as a class that would expose you to as many new and unconventional ideas as possible would be pretty neat.
While we’re asking for the impossible, I’d kind of like to scrap the entire current primary/secondary school curriculum and replace it entirely with rationality. You’d learn math on the way to being able to use Bayes’ Theorem. You’d learn English while writing counter-attitudinal essays. You’d learn history because your assignment is to point out what cognitive biases led Napoleon to make the mistake of invading Russia, and how you would have done better in his shoes. And then you’ll play a game of Diplomacy (or Civilization IV, or whatever) to prove it. All exams are calibration tests.
People will complain that it might not give people the same breadth of knowledge. But our current curriculum is entirely about signaling breadth of knowledge. I learned about Sargon of Akkad in sixth grade and I have >90% confidence I’m the only person in the class who remembers his name, and that entirely because I’m the sort of person who would read about people like Sargon anyway outside of class. Once the primary/secondary school system is producing a generation of scholars of Mesopotamian history—or even people who can still speak Spanish five years after their high school Spanish class is over—then they can complain about breadth of knowledge.
But if you optimized the entire school experience for learning how to evaluate information and make good choices, maybe some of that would stick.
I’m supportive of this idea, but I wonder if people (including me) who make proposals such as “let’s scrap the primary school curriculum and fill it with learning that’s actually useful” underestimate the amount of useful things that they’ve learned in primary school, because they no longer remember the origins of that knowledge and have filed it under “those obvious things that everyone knows”.
In Italy, the ‘official’ syllabuses include topics that few teachers actually get around to doing, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if that was the case elsewhere, so I’d consider those curricula as mere upper bounds.
Personally, watching slideshow clips in the “Strangers Like Me” musical sequence in Disney’s Tarzan always makes me think “Wow… I know a lot of shit.” Because I can give at least a basic description of the things appearing in every single clip, and it gives me a hint of the scope of all the motley stuff I know that would be completely alien to me if I had grown up, say, in an isolated tribal village in Africa.
How much of it is actually useful is another matter, but there are certainly occasions where I find myself drawing on knowledge like, say, which is the country of origin of sumo wrestling, which I wouldn’t predict in advance to be especially useful.
Yesterday I was thinking about how expensive education is, and why human capital seems to be so important, as I knelt down to tie my shoes and I suddenly thought—“I had to be taught how to tie my shoes! In school, for that matter, we had little shoe boards we could practice tying laces on. Wow, how did I forget that?”
You have the Encyclopedic Knowledge merit from World of Darkness.
But, yeah, random knowledge has more uses than merely impressing people. However, please note that your African would have specialized knowledge and skills related to his own environment, not to mention cultural lore. He has probably memorized thousands of verses of poetry, for example.
He has probably memorized thousands of verses of poetry, for example.
Some Africans surely have—a specialist like a griot presumably would. But is that really comparable? Desrtopa presumably isn’t a professional singer, storyteller/raconteur, comedian, or actor. He is, as far as I know, an ordinary person albeit a geeky and intelligent one.
Good point, but I am not sure one way or the other. Compare Sargon of Akkad vs. Julius Caesar. I don’t think we spent more time in school on one than the other. I think people know about Caesar because he has permeated into the culture. I’m not sure how many of the impressive interesting things all of us know are because of school versus because of cultural exposure.
(Napoleon didn’t invade Russia because of cognitive bias. He’d already defeated Russia several times and “invaded” in 1912 with the object of forcing Russia to keep out of Poland and remain in the Continental System. Logistics killed Le Grand Armee.…
Napoleon was actually above average height for his time period… the rumor that Napoleon was short is due to a perhaps-intentional failure to convert French measurement height units into British units of the same name, and so there’s no basis for a “Napoleon Complex”.)
A more interesting question would be “What cognitive biases through history have led us to think of Napoleon as a short person?”
I was thinking more of overconfidence bias and planning fallacy: “I’ll just waltz in here and conquer Moscow in a few months...99% chance it works fine.”
I second the idea of scrapping primary school for rationality training. I catch myself idly contemplating parenthood for the express purpose of trying this. I feel positively betrayed by the system for not being this way already, because now I need to take remedial classes to catch up on what-I-should-have-learned.
Now you’ve got me imagining combining this sort of curriculum with the rigor one reads about in the histories of martial arts masters of yore—being required to do Tai Chi forms in the snow before breakfast until steam rose from their bodies, that sort of thing.
I wonder what sort of homeschool curriculum and training rigor would maximize the chances of raising your own Jeffreyssai vs. getting the kid taken away by social workers or having it grow up into a maladjusted psychopath or something.
That would be an amazing class. Even dropping the “offensiveness” billing and just advertising it as a class that would expose you to as many new and unconventional ideas as possible would be pretty neat.
While we’re asking for the impossible, I’d kind of like to scrap the entire current primary/secondary school curriculum and replace it entirely with rationality. You’d learn math on the way to being able to use Bayes’ Theorem. You’d learn English while writing counter-attitudinal essays. You’d learn history because your assignment is to point out what cognitive biases led Napoleon to make the mistake of invading Russia, and how you would have done better in his shoes. And then you’ll play a game of Diplomacy (or Civilization IV, or whatever) to prove it. All exams are calibration tests.
People will complain that it might not give people the same breadth of knowledge. But our current curriculum is entirely about signaling breadth of knowledge. I learned about Sargon of Akkad in sixth grade and I have >90% confidence I’m the only person in the class who remembers his name, and that entirely because I’m the sort of person who would read about people like Sargon anyway outside of class. Once the primary/secondary school system is producing a generation of scholars of Mesopotamian history—or even people who can still speak Spanish five years after their high school Spanish class is over—then they can complain about breadth of knowledge.
But if you optimized the entire school experience for learning how to evaluate information and make good choices, maybe some of that would stick.
I’m supportive of this idea, but I wonder if people (including me) who make proposals such as “let’s scrap the primary school curriculum and fill it with learning that’s actually useful” underestimate the amount of useful things that they’ve learned in primary school, because they no longer remember the origins of that knowledge and have filed it under “those obvious things that everyone knows”.
Looking at a primary school curriculum could help with this.
In Italy, the ‘official’ syllabuses include topics that few teachers actually get around to doing, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if that was the case elsewhere, so I’d consider those curricula as mere upper bounds.
Personally, watching slideshow clips in the “Strangers Like Me” musical sequence in Disney’s Tarzan always makes me think “Wow… I know a lot of shit.” Because I can give at least a basic description of the things appearing in every single clip, and it gives me a hint of the scope of all the motley stuff I know that would be completely alien to me if I had grown up, say, in an isolated tribal village in Africa.
How much of it is actually useful is another matter, but there are certainly occasions where I find myself drawing on knowledge like, say, which is the country of origin of sumo wrestling, which I wouldn’t predict in advance to be especially useful.
Yesterday I was thinking about how expensive education is, and why human capital seems to be so important, as I knelt down to tie my shoes and I suddenly thought—“I had to be taught how to tie my shoes! In school, for that matter, we had little shoe boards we could practice tying laces on. Wow, how did I forget that?”
You have the Encyclopedic Knowledge merit from World of Darkness.
But, yeah, random knowledge has more uses than merely impressing people. However, please note that your African would have specialized knowledge and skills related to his own environment, not to mention cultural lore. He has probably memorized thousands of verses of poetry, for example.
Some Africans surely have—a specialist like a griot presumably would. But is that really comparable? Desrtopa presumably isn’t a professional singer, storyteller/raconteur, comedian, or actor. He is, as far as I know, an ordinary person albeit a geeky and intelligent one.
Good point, but I am not sure one way or the other. Compare Sargon of Akkad vs. Julius Caesar. I don’t think we spent more time in school on one than the other. I think people know about Caesar because he has permeated into the culture. I’m not sure how many of the impressive interesting things all of us know are because of school versus because of cultural exposure.
(Napoleon didn’t invade Russia because of cognitive bias. He’d already defeated Russia several times and “invaded” in 1912 with the object of forcing Russia to keep out of Poland and remain in the Continental System. Logistics killed Le Grand Armee.… Napoleon was actually above average height for his time period… the rumor that Napoleon was short is due to a perhaps-intentional failure to convert French measurement height units into British units of the same name, and so there’s no basis for a “Napoleon Complex”.)
A more interesting question would be “What cognitive biases through history have led us to think of Napoleon as a short person?”
Illustrated!
I was thinking more of overconfidence bias and planning fallacy: “I’ll just waltz in here and conquer Moscow in a few months...99% chance it works fine.”
I second the idea of scrapping primary school for rationality training. I catch myself idly contemplating parenthood for the express purpose of trying this. I feel positively betrayed by the system for not being this way already, because now I need to take remedial classes to catch up on what-I-should-have-learned.
Now you’ve got me imagining combining this sort of curriculum with the rigor one reads about in the histories of martial arts masters of yore—being required to do Tai Chi forms in the snow before breakfast until steam rose from their bodies, that sort of thing.
I wonder what sort of homeschool curriculum and training rigor would maximize the chances of raising your own Jeffreyssai vs. getting the kid taken away by social workers or having it grow up into a maladjusted psychopath or something.