Never heard about them.
(Well, it's not like the Less Wrong community has a monopoly on talking about biases. Topics like rationality, critical thinking, intelligence, logic, etc. were popular long before LW existed.)
If you scroll down on their company page, you can find names:
Jesse Richardson - an internationally award-winning creative director and founded the School of Thought in order to popularize critical thinking by combining design with philosophy.
David Lenowitz - after studying at Wharton and working as a Chief Information Officer at Susquehanna International Group, Dave was the founding Executive Director of the Alliance for Decision Education, and has over 30 years experience inthe technology and research sector.
David McRaney- a science journalist, author of several best-selling books including ‘How Minds Change’, and is the host of the popular blog and podcast at youarenotsosmart.com which explores the many ways in which we suffer cognitive biases.
Barry Silverberg - has over 45 years of nonprofit professional and volunteer leadership, management, resource development, and communications experience focusing on nonprofit governance, strategic thinking, board engagement, professional and organizational development, and public policy awareness and advocacy.
...at least, that's what they say about themselves.
I am impressed by their marketing skills, but I doubt the usefulness of the material.
For example, clicking on "the dunning-kruger effect" tells me that experts are often under-confident and idiots are often over-confident. That's true, but... not really useful.
It feels like the only purpose of that section is to make me buy their book on Amazon, and to conveniently share the link on social networks (perhaps when I want to accuse my opponents of being over-confident idiots). It's hard to say whether stuff like this actually helps or hurts people.
(From my perspective, an important part that is missing in that very short description, is that when experts become familiar with the opinions of everyone else including the idiots, their self-confidence usually increases. But when idiots become familiar with the opinions of everyone else including the experts, their self-confidence remains the same.)
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 ...
I didn't look deeply in to the material, but good branding gives people a good feeling about a thing, and I think rationality could use some better branding. In my experience a lot of people bounce off a lot of the material cause they have negative associations with it or it's not packaged in a way that appeals. I think even if (I didn't check) the material is too superficial to be useful as content, it's still useful to increase people's affinity / positive association with rationality.
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.
I have heard of them. The first time was when someone at LessWrong Community Weekend used their cards as part of an exercise, the second time when they came up on Clearer Thinking.
School of Thought is at least adjacent via Clearer Thinking. I think your question is a little under-defined. Are you asking if the people running it identify as rationalists?
Oh cool!
I was asking for any connection of any type. The overlap just seemed so great that I’d expect there to be a connection of some sort. The Clearer Thinking link makes sense and is an example, thank you!
If so, who are they?
Link: https://yourbias.is/
At a gloss the material looks really polished and topical.