Maybe the proper approach to raising the worldwide sanity needs to be multi-layered, simply because different people are at different levels of sanity and education. It makes no sense to debate “frequentism vs Bayes” with someone who cannot solve a quadratic equation, which describes the majority of the population.
This makes sense, and I think it’s possible to boil down some concepts to simpler forms that are nonetheless still useful. In a wide variety of situations, I can help people clear up confusions about their “beliefs” by showing them how to treat all beliefs as different explanations that they are implicitly putting more or less “weight” on. It certainly helps with any confusion of the “I’m not sure what I really believe” variety, to recontextualize the problem such that the person can believe many things with a variety of certainty levels. I never have to resort to probability theory or mention Bayes.
Maybe someone could write a book about a wizard kid who used math to achieve great powers, and suddenly the math skills would skyrocket.
So, basically HPMOR with more mainstream appeal. HPMOR was actually a pretty good stab at drawing the interest of the IQ 110+ crowd, but I’ll bet a similar thing could be done for the other half of the bell curve.
This makes sense, and I think it’s possible to boil down some concepts to simpler forms that are nonetheless still useful. In a wide variety of situations, I can help people clear up confusions about their “beliefs” by showing them how to treat all beliefs as different explanations that they are implicitly putting more or less “weight” on. It certainly helps with any confusion of the “I’m not sure what I really believe” variety, to recontextualize the problem such that the person can believe many things with a variety of certainty levels. I never have to resort to probability theory or mention Bayes.
So, basically HPMOR with more mainstream appeal. HPMOR was actually a pretty good stab at drawing the interest of the IQ 110+ crowd, but I’ll bet a similar thing could be done for the other half of the bell curve.
Got to include porn, then.
Whether or not you’re joking, you’re right.
Ha Ha Only Serious