I had an idea to increase average people’s rationality with 4 qualities:
It doesn’t seem/feel “rationalist” or “nerdy.”
It can work without people understanding why it works
It can be taught without understanding its purpose
It can be perceived as about politeness
A high school class, where people try to pass Intellectual Turing Tests. It’s not POLITE/sophisticated to assert opinions if you can’t show that you understand the people that you’re saying are wrong.
We already have a lot of error-detection abilities when our minds criticize others’ ideas, we just need to access that power for our own ideas.
I’m not sure to what extent you want people to criticize ideas in this thread, and I’m going to test the waters. Give me feedback on how well this matches the norms you envision.
An immediate flaw comes to mind, that any elaboration of this idea should respond to: Changing the high school curriculum is very difficult. If you’ve acquired the social capital to change the curriculum of a high school, you should not spend it by making such a small, marginal contribution, but rather you could probably find something with a larger effect with the same social capital.
You don’t have to understand what it does or why it works (or care about those) to successfully perform it. You can put yourself in the other side’s shoes without understanding the effects of doing so.
I had an idea to increase average people’s rationality with 4 qualities:
It doesn’t seem/feel “rationalist” or “nerdy.”
It can work without people understanding why it works
It can be taught without understanding its purpose
It can be perceived as about politeness
A high school class, where people try to pass Intellectual Turing Tests. It’s not POLITE/sophisticated to assert opinions if you can’t show that you understand the people that you’re saying are wrong.
We already have a lot of error-detection abilities when our minds criticize others’ ideas, we just need to access that power for our own ideas.
[META] General +1 for taking initiative and giving us something to iterate on, wrt to the idea of sourcing insights in short form.
I’m not sure to what extent you want people to criticize ideas in this thread, and I’m going to test the waters. Give me feedback on how well this matches the norms you envision.
An immediate flaw comes to mind, that any elaboration of this idea should respond to: Changing the high school curriculum is very difficult. If you’ve acquired the social capital to change the curriculum of a high school, you should not spend it by making such a small, marginal contribution, but rather you could probably find something with a larger effect with the same social capital.
This is an interesting idea, although I’m not sure what you mean by
Shouldn’t the people learning it understand it? It doesn’t really seem much like learning otherwise.
You don’t have to understand what it does or why it works (or care about those) to successfully perform it. You can put yourself in the other side’s shoes without understanding the effects of doing so.
This is about 100 words, in case you want to get a feel for the length