Theory of Knowledge (rationality outreach)

I just sent them an email, volunteering to do a presentation for Richwoods HS, which is the only school close enough to me. Let's see what happens.

See also here.

I feel it would be useful to develop a standard hour long into to LessWrong. People who have done talks could help by providing feedback on what went down well.

ToK was my favorite class in high school, thanks to having an amazing teacher, one of two teachers in the school to complete a Ph. D. I've heard it said that, if you put Michael Vassar in an empt concrete room, he would soon start pontificating on the influence of the Enlightenment on putting people in empty rooms. I think the same is true of this guy.

We read parts of Man is the Measure and a 60s philosophy textbook , discussed the nature of causality, picked apart Max Weber's Verstehen argument, and reflected on the panopticon. We then did segments on each area of knowledge, with lively debates, discussions, and presentations.

It's still the case that ToK was subservient to our other classes. In March, the class turned into time to polish our Extended Essays (the 4000 word paper required of all candidates), some class time was spent starting a yearly tradition of painting the wall with the names of the candidates, and we had a party in place of a winter final.

I wanted to jump in and say that I liked ToK purely for the social bonding rather than the learning, and that the material covered was rather disjoint from LessWrong, but upon reflection, neither is true. My opinion on suburbia has been permanently altered from discussion of a documentary on Levittown, and it was in ToK that "utilon" became a regular part of my vocabulary. I actually became a reader of what was then Overcoming Bias while taking ToK, in part because I saw words like "ontology" and got the warm feelings from its association with ToK. I shared a few OB articles with my ToK teacher; he got a huge kick out of reading about phlogiston theory.

In summary: There are a lot of ways to make ToK good, and some of them don't look like LessWrong.

I participated in the IB diploma program in 1997, in Texas. My experience was better than KPier's in several ways. I think having a skilled and experienced teacher makes all the difference. Mine wasn't a LessWrong style rationalist, but she had experience with teaching philosophy, so we got past initial naive intuitions on most of the class topics relatively soon, and I witnessed basic changes in attitude toward the nature of language and knowledge in both me and several of my classmates.

In retrospect, I think the best thing that could have been added would have been a discussion up front about how not to be confused about words. Some combo of the material in Disputing Definitions and Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory. After that, something to undermine reliance on introspection and intuition more generally, perhaps in the context of presenting basic cognitive biases.

Oooh, pick me!

I do the IB, finishing this November. It's true that ToK is a complete waste of time in general. I didn't learn anything from it. I spent pretty much the whole course thinking "Less Wrong has already thought of this problem, and solved it."

I gave my speech on the morality of abortion, using such concepts as the least convenient possible world, Shut Up and Multiply, playing rationalist taboo, and so on. I got perfect marks, which indicates that even though ToK teaches you nothing, it can grade you usefully.

I'm actually talking to the ToK teacher about giving a seminar to the year 11 students some time. I feel that in an hour or a bit more, you could really usefully go through the fundamentals of rationality.

If you were to go talk to the ToK class, it would be useful to know something of the curriculum. The two basic concepts are Ways of Knowing and Areas of Knowledge. The ways of knowing are intuition, sense perception, reason, and language. You could talk about each of those easily, just quoting from Less Wrong canon. (I quoted LukeProg on intuition in my essay, as it happens.) Areas of knowledge are like english, human sciences, natural sciences, and art. In the IB you have to do one subject from each of the six subject areas, so the students are likely to be well rounded. Also, they're smart kids on average, so you could talk at a fairly high level.

We debated the nature of truth for 4 months; most people do not come up with interesting answers to this on their own initiative, so the conversation went in circles around "There's no such thing as truth!" "Now, that's just stupid." the whole time.

I'm surprised that nobody decided to look up "truth" on Wikipedia. I would have thought that kids growing up today would do that kind of thing reflexively, maybe even on their cell phones during class... Was looking up other people's ideas explicitly discouraged by the teacher?

At my school, we regularly have speakers come in and discuss various topics during ToK, mostly because the regular instructor doesn't have any idea what to say.

This sounds really easy to fix. Most instructors are used to having a curriculum handed to them in textbook form. A list of good articles (whether from Less Wrong or elsewhere) would fill that role. Read a post as homework, discuss in class, repeat. Throw in an occasional writing assignment for writing practice and grading. This would be dramatically more valuable than most high school classes, and easy to run.

I had similar experiences in ToK, and I think your idea of giving rationality talks to ToK students is a great one.

What kinds of people sign up for the IB Diploma? It is considered more rigorous than A-levels in Britain, and dramatically more rigorous than standard classes in the United States (I would consider it approximately equal to taking 5 or 6 AP classes a year). Most kids engaged in this program are intelligent, motivated and interested in the world around them. They seem, (through my informal survey method of talking to lots of them) to have a higher click factor than average.

Your description of the types of students who sign up for the IB Diploma Programme (IBDP) is probably accurate for schools where the IBDP is not compulsory or expected, but I think it is too favorable for non-selective schools where most students do the IBDP.

For instance, at my former secondary school, 152 out of 154 seniors did the IBDP, with 150 students receiving an IB Diploma. This is an international school in Hong Kong, and the students are not especially bright since the school has non-selective admissions. There are of course students who are "intelligent, motivated and interested in the world around them", but I would apply this description to a minority - not a majority - of the IBDP students at the school.

(I would have failed the "motivated" criterion - I had no love for half the subjects I took, and did little homework apart from the required IB coursework in these subjects.)

Pleasant coincidence: I've had exactly the same thoughts and have been communicating them to some heads of education in my old school. I doubt they're going to go for it; also, I'd rather become a stronger rationalist first before I evangelize certain aspects of Less Wrong.

The IB can seem quite bureaucratic at times. At least, they try to be. My understanding is that teachers go through a collective standardization process via IB-led conferences. It's not very effective. At my school, there were four ToK teachers who taught four wildly different curricula, and it reflected in our grades. It helps to have a teacher who really gets what it's all about as they'd be more open to getting material from Less Wrong.

Contacting the IB themselves can feel like a pipdream; but, since they really have no way of enforcing curricula content on the teacher level (at least in my school) then it's the teachers that may need convincing more than their superiors.

Element of note: ToK did suck. The class I was in contained more opinion voicing rather than analyzing, and a majority found it painful, or didn't say anything at all.

This seems like a great idea. My partner was an IB student, and had a good relationship with her teacher. I'll talk to her about this today and if she's down with it, we'll do this this fall.

I'd like to see some more discussion from people familiar with IB about which specific LessWrong topics/posts would be most appropriate, engaging, and helpful to the type of people attending the ToK class. I'm more likely to actually contact a school about doing a presentation if I had an idea about what information to present. I often find that I'm interested in things that others don't care about (or vice versa), or I find things obvious that others don't (or vice versa).

I'm actually a good public speaker and really enjoy teaching people who are interested in learning...

Move to main?

Edit: Moved.

Tangentially, "Theory of Knowledge" (and not "Overcoming Bias" or "Less Wrong") is now the first phrase I try when I want to convey to an uninitiated person the general nature of the meeting I am going to. One of its advantages is that it conveys the braininess of the topic matter.

.

I did the IB diploma program too. Except I live in Spain, so I had to follow both the Spanish education system and the IB diploma at the same time. We actually had three different philosophy subjects in two years: Philosophy, History of Philosophy and TOK. All three were absolute shit. Well, we did actually learn about the history of philosophy: we had to memorize every detail about ancient philosophers' thoughts, from the presocratics (Thales, Pythagoras...) to Nietzsche (nothing beyond 1900 though). We didn't actually learn much about actual philosophy (i.e. the basics of how the universe works, the principles of observation, deduction, induction, logic, reductionism, what words mean, etc.). So we could spend months talking about how Plato's intelligible world, but we didn't hear once about reductionism or cognitive science. I guess it really depends on what teacher you get.

Anyway, this has motivated me and I've thinking of writing a book in Spanish covering some of LessWrong's basic topics to see if I can reduce the cultural gap a bit. Or at least starting a blog.

Also it's worth mentioning that an IB diploma is virtually useless to access Spanish universities. I could literally have left my final exams blank if I had felt like doing so, with no practical consequences.

I was part of an IB program in a rural Indiana high school. Our ToK course was primarily a sounding board for Christian fundamentalism. We learned "about" other philosophical theories of knowledge, but all under the obvious-but-not-overtly-stated pretense that the Bible dictates truth and anyone who doesn't have faith that Bible is true will necessarily develop an evil/harmful, incorrect theory or worldview. The same general pattern dominated our sociology and history classes (all taught by the same person, who despite having more advanced degrees than many high school teachers and having been in the school system for something like 20 years as a teacher, basically treated public high school as if it was a religious school).

We gave an unfair amount of attention to Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis whose works weren't necessarily actually about ToK (the closest that Lewis comes is perhaps his book Miracles in which he tries to argue that irregularities are what allow us to detect regularities). I grew up, moved away from fundamentalist family and community, studied math and biology in college and eventually became a rationalist and an atheist. I think my same story is exceedingly common in the midwestern United States. The only ways to defeat fundamentalism from a young age are (a) having non-fundamentalist parents; in fact, not even religion-sympathizers will do; you probably actually need actively atheist parents to avoid it / possibly including homeschooling; (b) attend a non-religious private school or a magnet school near a large urban area.

If you attend school anywhere in the suburban-to-rural midwest, there is a very high probability that some school official will talk to you about creationism at some point, philosophy/sociology/psychology/evolution will be presented as weakly supported "theories" that are at least as flawed as religious reasoning, and you are generally discouraged from being smart in any dimension or capacity that causes you to disagree with established dogma. Frankly, I'm just so lucky that I went to an elite college that was small enough that I had close contact with the professors. That was the main thing that convinced me to stop being a religion sympathizer (otherwise, I probably would be one of these people who says, "well, you can't disprove God, so anything goes.")

At any rate, I support the aim of a program like IB and teaching ToK is a good idea. But the real problem is that no matter how good the ideas are, there are vast areas of the country in which they simply will not be implemented or will be intentionally misused to reward religious belief. I think that's the part of the problem that is more discouraging. But I don't think a singularity is necessarily required to fix the problem.

I'm a graduate of an IB school, and even took a few IB-level courses, just not the full course.

I also took a ToK class, but our school offered AP and IB varieties, and I went with AP, not having the full-IB prerequisites.

I find that what really matters is the teacher teaching the coursework, not the class itself. OTOH, having a class about ToK in the first place is at least a step in the right direction.

Regardless, as an alumni (and still friends with a few of the teachers there), I may have a bit of an in to do some sort of presentation. Likely based off of Liron's YAAB.

For the record, I'm not convinced the IB Diploma Program is a good thing. It doesn't really solve any of the problems with public schools, it shares the frustrating focus on standardized testing and password-guessing instead of real learning, etc.

I graduated from IB back in 2000 (with 43 out of 45 on my diploma), and I disagree here. The thing about IB's tests (and the Extended Essay) is that they're incredibly comprehensive. There's just no way to do well on them except by actually learning the stuff.

My time was before the current era of standardized testing, but I've taken an AP test (AP Physics C: Mechanics; my IB program didn't do physics), as well as the ACT, SAT (I and several IIs), and GRE. Unlike all of them, IB tests depend very strongly on both general intelligence (mostly the ability to write coherently) and subject-specific knowledge, and (importantly!) they don't saturate at the high end. It's quite difficult to get 7s on the tests, especially HL - I fought for four years for mine (and I still got two 6s in my weaker subjects).

Of course, it's totally possible for an IB program to be implemented badly, and produce students who get really low scores and sometimes miss the diploma entirely. The tests would detect that, though. I was fortunate to have a good program in my public school, plus I had a really strong work ethic back then.

You're right about ToK, though - it was basically useless.

I can't speak for ToK students specifically, since I myself did not take the IB course in high school, but I'll note that the greatest skills I've learned from this community have been a) how to state arguments clearly and effectively, e.g. not getting confused by words, and b) understanding how politics mindkills. I would love to present the Blue/Green sky dilemma, see what came of it... but only after introducing the meaning of truth and perhaps even the Litanies.

Upvote for providing a reasonable and relatively easy step toward solving a once-thought-to-be-intractable problem.

At my school TOK took place before the normal classes for the day did, it was clearly an afterthought. Everyone was half asleep, debates did not happen.

It is a good start, and it's becoming more critical as normal people have to sift through more and more orphaned factoids each day. When I was going through school, the most important question to ask was supposed to be "Why?" It's becoming more apparent to me that a more useful question to teach students is "How do you know?"

That can be covered in some depth in an IB class, but just being in the habit of asking that from the age of 5 is going to do more good than a structured curriculum once you're 16.

It might be of help to include elements of rationality within each course, in addition to a ToK course on it's own. For example, in physics it might be useful to teach theories that turned out to be incorrect, and to analyze how and why it seemed correct at one point of time, and by collecting more evidence etc. it turned out incorrect.

Perhaps this is too difficult to include in current curriculums, so it can be included in the ToK course as additional discussions? Kind of an application or case study of Bayes' theorem (it could be prone to hindsight bias, so this has to be taken into consideration, not to make the errors in the theory seem so obvious)

There are 2 such schools in San Jose. Anyone else in the area interested?

Theory of Knowledge was perhaps the most useful class I ever took.

Oh, what did I do during it? I sat in the back and read the Sequences.

Im a sophomore in IB at the moment, and i've heard a lot about ToK. I'm pretty excited about it, many of the older students say it changed the way they view things, and that our school's ToK teacher is exceptional. Apparently at the beginning of the first class of the year, the first thing the student's are asked is 'how do you know 2 plus 2 equals 4?'. And in the IB MYP, not all the kids are that motivated, but they're 'filtered out' before the diploma program. I attend a IB world school here in Canada and i live in an area with relatively high immigration rates, so there's a lot of competition since immigrants (like my parents) are obsessed with education.

I looked at the IB web page and it appears to be "critical thinking" as opposed to direct instruction in logic or other more-practical reasoning skills. The first problem is that there is lack of agreement about what critical thinking is (Lloyd and Bahr, 2010). Another problem is whether critical thinking skills are generalizable. What I know of critical thinking assessment is that there is emphasis on high-level approach to problems and a lack or complete absence of formal logic, math, statistics, or other specific skills that might help people to solve complex problems. There is no way that a class in critical thinking can substitute skills for logic, math, or statistics, but if it introduces topics that help kids advance to the next level, then it might be worth it. If teachers assert that people who complete the course "have good reasoning skills," then the class could be doing more harm than good.

Reference

Lloyd, M. and Bahr, N. (2010). Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking in Higher Education. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Vol. 4, No. 2 (July 2010)
http://academics.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/v4n2/articles/PDFs/_LloydBahr.pdf

I agree that emphasis on critical thinking and analytical skills should be an essential element of any programme but from my admittedly limited experience the IB approach does not go as far in this direction as one might desire. Caveats; 1) the IB ToK element is better than the nothing most curricula I am familiar with have and shows the good intentions of those setting up the course, so this is not a 'it's no good' but a 'could do better' comment and 2) not having gone to a school which taught IB, my experience has been limited to the handful of students I have discussed this programme with or offered ad hoc tutoring to in connection to the ToK element.

From what I can see, though the actual process of what is taught in classrooms and how it is taught may differ, in terms of what students seem to be producing at the end of the course the ToK element amounts to little more than Epistemology 101 where rather than being, as you put it, about 'how to think, not what to think' it is instead about 'what to think', just at a meta- level; 'what to think about thinking'. If you wish to stimulate critical thinking I'm inclined to think intensive classroom based discussion of comparative analysis of arguments and source handling is superior to teaching the difference between the a priori and the a posteriori, or raising the possibility of absolute scepticism. I say this with no prejudice against epistemology, as a philosophy postgraduate student some of my best friends are epistemologists, but if the question is 'what would be the best way to structure a curriculum so as to raise a generation of genuinely critical thinkers' I don't believe the answer is teaching them about Plato's myth of the cave or the disputes between empiricism and rationalism. Perhaps such basic distinctions require some coverage, if only to avoid obvious howlers such as failing to recognise the use/mention distinction or the like, but for real critical thought it would seem better if the curriculum was structured so as to emphasise critical thought in all subjects in the form of subject-specific problem based critical analysis.

My school doesn't offer IB, but there's an ToK equivalent under our CIE (Cambridge International Examinations) course called Thinking Skills. It's a bit more focused than ToK - it doesn't try to teach students how to think, but instead focuses more on specific thinking techniques. For example, there's an emphasis on deconstructing arguments, analysing essays, and identifying logical reasoning. While that's not quite as useful as what well-applied ToK sounds like, it's probably a bit more realistic in terms of ability to convey information to pupils - it's still very much an assessed subject. There's also a multichoice problem-solving section, although I'm not sure to what extent this can be taught - it seems to measure inherent logical skills and IQ as much as anything else.

Timing is a bit off for the U.S., but this is an excellent idea.

Back in high school I was part of an outreach program where we prepared a presentation on science or computers and went out to elementary school classrooms. All the teachers were very cooperative, and they liked having a special event.

Theory of Knowledge can (and should be) great. The fact that many schools force apathetic teachers to "teach" it is where the problem lies. All IB teachers are REQUIRED to integrate ToK into their subjects and almost none do. Most IB teachers do not have the first clue what ToK is and they are not motivated to find out.

I have noticed that few commenters here seem to be aware of the actual aims and objectives of the course (based on their comments here). Perhaps reading page 5 of the ToK guide would be pertinent for those who think ToK is "pointless" or for those who thought that "ToK sucks".

ToK is NOT about "solving problems" - it is to encourage thinking critically about knowledge, expressing ones own views, sharing ideas and developing ideas about "knowledge as a human construction".

That is all.

EDIT: What's the deal with downvotes? As a new member of the community what's the protocol?