Hmm, so improving the ‘brand’ of rationality isn’t really the aim of our organization, but rather to help make critical thinking, scientific literacy, and rationality itself more popular and instantiated in minds / culture / politics etc. Having said that, I think the ways that both myself and other rational skeptics have gone about promoting this cause in the past has been counter-productive. In the oughts when I called myself a militant atheist, I naively flattered myself that my hitch-slap smackdowns of what I deemed to be irrational nonsense were serving the noble cause of promoting rationality. Oh the irony. It is, imo, deeply irrational to think that attacking people and using a tone of contempt will result in anything other than profoundly negative outcomes in most situations.
Just for the record, the book we link to is titled ‘How Minds Change’ and is written by one of our directors David McRaney – we don’t benefit from it as an organization, but its contents are highly relevant to this discussion. Also, we’re a registered 501c3 non profit, and currently we are 100% volunteer based i.e. no one is paid a salary (though I have previously paid myself, years ago, on a contract basis for design work, though even then at about 10% of my usual rates).
Jesse Richardson
Hey Viliam, founder here – thanks for the feedback and I think your criticisms are quite valid. When we started this non-profit about 10 years ago my hypothesis was that making critical thinking more engaging through the use of design methodologies i.e. making critical thinking more accessible, could help to popularize it and promulgate a more rational mindset en masse.
I don’t think that hypothesis is exactly wrong, but I’ve quite substantially changed my thinking in the intervening time. Specifically with regard to the fallacies and biases materials that we were quite successful in popularizing (around 30m people reached worldwide under creative commons licenses). I share your skepticism about the efficacy of learning fallacies and biases – much of the time doing so can help us to be more introspective and metacognitive, but I’ve also seen citing fallacies as a means to shut conversations and curiosity down rather than open it up, and simply being aware of biases seems to have minimal effect upon their influence.
The more important thing to focus on, I strongly suspect, is how to change our motivations and mindsets. Where my thinking has shifted is that I no longer believe that cognitive tools are where we ought to begin. They’re important and useful, but humans are emotional and social creatures first, and cognitive creatures after. Any strategy that fails to incorporate this understanding will be suboptimal at best (and counter-productive at worst).
Consequently our more recent project at https://therulesofcivilconversation.org/ and https://theconspiracytest.org/ are focused more on shifting mindsets to a more introspective and metacognitive frame.
We are also working on a bigger project that aims to leverage our worst natures against themselves. Rather than sit in haughty contempt of irrationality, I think it would serve us all well to understand that we can’t shame or debate people into understanding. Rather, we ought to find ways to make people want to understand.
Hello there, founder of The School of Thought here. There’s a more expansive answer to your question at our main website https://schoolofthought.org but in a nutshell: we are a non-profit that seeks to popularize critical thinking, reason, and understanding by using the power of design and creativity to amplify academic, scientific, and rational ways of understanding the universe and ourselves.
Yes, absolutely – I’ve always been a rationalist (or at least attempted to be). I read a lot of the new atheists’ work early on, and have been involved in various rationalist-type communities on the internets. I really ought to be more involved in the community and seek to make the School of Thought more involved too. Thanks for making this post!