Excellent idea. It is now posted there as well to catch the crowd that is into HPMOR but hasn’t yet become involved here at LessWrong.
Weisguy
Karma: 25
Using Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to teach the scientific method to Psychology undergraduates
Hi everyone,
I’m currently caught up on HPMOR, and I’ve read many of the sequences, so I figured it was time to introduce myself here.
I’m a 24 year old Cognitive Psychology graduate student. I was raised as a fairly conservative Christian who attempted to avoid any arguments that would seriously challenge my belief structure. When I was in undergrad, I took an intro to philosophy course which helped me realize that I needed to fully examine all of my beliefs. This helped me to move toward becoming a theistic evolutionist and finally an atheist. Now I strive to use the methods of rationality to continue to question all of my beliefs and improve my life.
As a psychology graduate student I have the opportunity to teach an introductory psychology course. I’m hoping to take what I have learned here and start helping my students improve their rationality. Specifically, I’m planning to have the students read excerpts from Ch 22 & 23 of HPMOR as a fun and interesting way to start learning to think like a scientist. I’m hoping the community can assist me with possibly narrowing down the sections I’m going to have them read and consider possible methods of assessment. As of now, I know that I want to have the students analyze the methodology used by Harry in his two experiments from those chapters, and I probably want to have students come up with their own hypotheses and methods to test them. Any help the community wants to provide is most appreciated.
The hyperlinks were created by a malicious chrome addon that was present on the computer I posted from. They didn’t show up on my end until after I posted it. Hopefully they have been removed.