Is School of Thought related to the Rationality Community?
9Viliam
4Jesse Richardson
1PaulBecon
4Shoshannah Tekofsky
4Viliam
1Jesse Richardson
2Shoshannah Tekofsky
4Jesse Richardson
2Shoshannah Tekofsky
3Jesse Richardson
4Screwtape
2Shoshannah Tekofsky
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90
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 ...
1
So glad you've come over to share your updated experience.
And I was one of the 30MM who shared the huge chart of biases way back.
I was a student in the tradition of Heuristics & Biases when I studied at Stanford, so long ago that Amos Tversky was still alive. Both Kahneman & Tversky explicitly doubted that knowing about biases could enable us to overcome the 'fast thoughts' that generate an immediate interpretation. I've heard both of them compare biases to optical illusions, which don't go away when you realize they are illusions.
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.
4
That's a complicated topic -- how useful are positive associations of "rationality" (the word) if they do not come with the right content?
On one hand, it seems like not really; we are promoting the word, but not the thing that the word represents. We might even be teaching people to associate the word with a wrong thing.
On the other hand, it's not like negative associations would be better, so...
I don't know.
(Someone should review that Amazon book, but I am not going to buy it.)
1
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).
2
Thanks for the explanation! Are you familiar with the community here and around Astral Codex Ten (ACX)? There are meetups and events (and a lot of writers) who focus on the art and skill of rationality. That was what led to my question originally.
4
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!
30
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!
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