Wisdom for Smart Teens - my talk at SPARC 2014

Welcome to Less Wrong.

You've given me quite a responsibility here and I'm not sure if I'm qualified as the Less Wrong Ambassador for Smart Teens. This probably deserves a thread of its own.

Anyway, I'll give it my best shot.

The Sequences are often considered the main point of entrance for Less Wrong. I don't quite agree (I wouldn't have read all of that when I was 16, I'm sure), but if you can stomach it: best start reading now. Another point of entry is [Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality], which is more accessible but the style isn't for everyone. If you read very quickly, you might be able to catch up before the finale.

Here are a couple of Less Wrong posts I'd wish I read when I was about your age:

• Tsuyoku Naritai! (I Want To Become Stronger)
• Scope Insensitivity
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/i2/two_more_things_to_unlearn_from_school/
• Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences)
• Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence
• Planning Fallacy
• Something to Protect
• If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help

Alright. That should be enough to get your started for now. I'll think it over more and maybe (but know that I'm extremely prone to procrastination) I'll start a Discussion thread on this sort of introductory material.

The main thing I want you to learn from Less Wrong, to start with, is that you should do more than what is required of you. If you're even slightly intelligent or clever, school will not push you. Your friends will not push you. Your parents will not push you. People will be content with only a bare minimum of your actual capabilities. It's up to you to reach your full potential. Don't count on external sources to do this for you.

The core ideas in LW come from the Major Sequences. You can start there, reading posts in each sequence sequentially.

For the God part, I just wish I was more tactful just because I know some people find it highly offensive. So at the least I could have been empathic to it by saying "I know this feels terrible to hear".

Mmm. I don't think that would have made much of a difference, and the generalization I make of 'avoid highly offensive examples' is "make one point at a time." If you want to teach people about original sight, you probably want to just teach them about original sight, and not original sight and atheism together. This comes up in lots of places, like trying to simultaneously explain causality and human weight. Is it possible to just teach them about original sight without meaty examples? Maybe not, because of the specific topic, but it seems worth trying.

But of the meaty examples, it does seem like the best one (and I suspect that's why you put it first). Part of the Less Wrong project as I see it is the idea that you too can make terrible mistakes. Probably my favorite short concept from LW to push is the "listen to the quiet voice that whispers when you're confused or making a mistake. No, really, you only have a few seconds: take it seriously." that you brought up briefly, because it turns out it's way better to not make mistakes than make mistakes.

So I wouldn't have prefaced it with a "this feels terrible to hear" but more along the lines of "with your original sight, you can see through the Emperor's New Clothes, but you should also expect that there are some parts of your life where you are the ones wearing the clothes, and a huge part of growing is figuring that out." The point isn't that "atheism might suck for you now, and I'm sorry about that" but "models being wrong, instead of just incomplete, is a thing that can happen to you too."

The part about God was high impact, so it might have been worth it. Especially since you moved on rather quickly to less controversial examples. I don't think your explanation on bread would have the same impact without dropping god in there. I'm not a public speaker, so I might be very wrong here, but maybe it's a trade-off.

For the God part, I just wish I was more tactful just because I know some people find it highly offensive. So at the least I could have been empathic to it by saying "I know this feels terrible to hear".

I like to go with the Gelfand principle: when introducing a new concept, give the simplest nontrivial example. Bringing up religion has the risk of offending people, sure, but it seems to me that the deeper issue is that the existence of God is a thorny metaphysical problem and it didn't appear clear to the audience how to apply the methods. It's got one hell of an impact though.

I don't know Latin so I'm guessing "lecture" is Latin for "lost purpose"? That's great, thanks for educating me.

It's "reading."

It's Latin for "reading".

Thanks.