For quite some time I've considered creating a Youtube channel devoted to rationality.
I live in Italy, and the political situation here bears some similarities with the US': we've seen the rise of populist figures accompanied by the debate around fake news and post-truth, usually created with the purpose of bringing more votes to those politicians.
When a fake news is exposed, the standard answer is deploring the lack of critical thinking, and blaming school for failing to teach it. But, as far as I know, schools can only teach programs that are approved by the Department of Education, which 'institutionalize' living intellectual efforts like science and history. So far, no one has institutionalized critical thinking. In a sense, you could say that it cannot be completely institutionalized.
Sometimes, it's expected that philosophy classes teaches rationality, or at least thatteaches the pupils how to think. I know that LW users will appreciate the irony.
Anyway, philosophy is taught only in high school, and especially in poorer area not enough people reach that level of education, and is only taught within some 'orientation' (here in high school you cannot compose your courses as you wish, you have 'pre-packaged' sets of courses with a scientific or humanistic or artistic orientations).
In the end, the situation is that everybody is complaining about the lack of rationality teaching, but so far no-one has put himslef at creating such content.
Cue me.
I've been a member of LW since 2010, and I've always been interested in rationality, philosophy and AI. I'm not the smartest guy, so it's quite useless for me to be in academia or other research institution, but I've been told repeatedly that I'm good at explaining complicated things in lay terms. This seems a perfect combination of features for me to create content, aimed at the Italian situation and the Italian speaking audience, that tries to popularize rationality, Bayesianism and critical thinking.
With this post I would like to call for topics. What topic could I treat and how?
I already thought about something: locating rationality in the midst of and in contrast with other approaches; a non-technical survey of Bayesian probability; excercise in critical thinking (discussing a hot topic and trying to keep your identity small); atheism; the principle and crisis of science.
I really like your idea because I have a very similar idea (though the focus isn't just rationality). I've been planning to make youtube videos for a while, but have had difficulty getting myself to implement. I have outlines on topics I want to talk about already like you have here! The difference would be that I'm doing it more for myself than for those out there, because I don't expect my youtube video to get out much. My biggest hurdle currently is video editing.
When I read your content, it felt like I was reading a news article. The only thing that might be an issue with that, is that you may want to have a bigger impact on your video. I felt like if you talked about something that made me critically think more, then it would be more engaging (and hence more appealing). Like, maybe explain Bayesian thinking and how it works since your target audience probably doesn't know anything about Bayesian?
I also don't know if I'll get some attention, I'm doing that entirely for myself: to leave a legacy, to look back and say that I too did something to raise the sanity waterline.
[...]
My motto: "think big, act small, move quickly". I know that my first videos will suck, I've prepared to embrace suckiness and plunge forward anyway.
That was one of the reasons I wanted to make the youtube videos as well, to leave a legacy. Hopefully I can motivate myself to keep working on it. Let me know if you're interested in sharing ideas or something. I don't think we will conflict too much since my channel will idealy be all over the place with talk about relationships and whatever other random things that interest me.
For quite some time I've considered creating a Youtube channel devoted to rationality.
I live in Italy, and the political situation here bears some similarities with the US': we've seen the rise of populist figures accompanied by the debate around fake news and post-truth, usually created with the purpose of bringing more votes to those politicians.
When a fake news is exposed, the standard answer is deploring the lack of critical thinking, and blaming school for failing to teach it. But, as far as I know, schools can only teach programs that are approved by the Department of Education, which 'institutionalize' living intellectual efforts like science and history. So far, no one has institutionalized critical thinking. In a sense, you could say that it cannot be completely institutionalized.
Sometimes, it's expected that philosophy classes teaches rationality, or at least thatteaches the pupils how to think. I know that LW users will appreciate the irony.
Anyway, philosophy is taught only in high school, and especially in poorer area not enough people reach that level of education, and is only taught within some 'orientation' (here in high school you cannot compose your courses as you wish, you have 'pre-packaged' sets of courses with a scientific or humanistic or artistic orientations).
In the end, the situation is that everybody is complaining about the lack of rationality teaching, but so far no-one has put himslef at creating such content.
Cue me.
I've been a member of LW since 2010, and I've always been interested in rationality, philosophy and AI. I'm not the smartest guy, so it's quite useless for me to be in academia or other research institution, but I've been told repeatedly that I'm good at explaining complicated things in lay terms. This seems a perfect combination of features for me to create content, aimed at the Italian situation and the Italian speaking audience, that tries to popularize rationality, Bayesianism and critical thinking.
With this post I would like to call for topics. What topic could I treat and how?
I already thought about something: locating rationality in the midst of and in contrast with other approaches; a non-technical survey of Bayesian probability; excercise in critical thinking (discussing a hot topic and trying to keep your identity small); atheism; the principle and crisis of science.
What do you think?