High School Lectures

Remember to make inferential distance work for you: if you try and cover more than about 5 blogpostsworth of material at once, it'll end poorly because it'll be too much for your audience to take in - that's that bad side of inferential distance. But there's a good side too: if you just do a few things with very high quality, even if it doesn't seem like that much to you, if can be really impressive to your audience because most of it will be new to them.

Also, if you ever do a talk on human biases (as opposed to philosophy / AI design), I recommend that you make sure that your talk teaches the audience the preliminaries of talking about biases, while still seeming to just be about biases. Otherwise...

Don't neglect non-sequence topics. Because they are self contained, I think they'd do better in lecture format without requiring tons of pre-requisite understanding.

Yvain's Diseased Thinking, Discussion on Excuses, Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes are all understandable and cover real world issues. Anna Salamon's Learned Blankness, LukeProg's How to Be Happy, Swimmer963's Action and Habit and Eliezer's non-sequence posts 5 second level and Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting are all great self-contained posts about how to improve your life. (Also plugging my own punctuality post). And PhilGoetz's Reason as Memetic Immune disorder and Things you are Supposed to Like are both posts I wish I'd been able to read back when I was in highschool. I know there's tons of stuff I haven't even broached.

My point is that a lot of the best content exists outside of the sequences. Some of the highest value stuff is there, and they're all topics that can be covered in a 5-20 minute talk.

Some tips for presentations that I try to remember to incorporate (but don't always succeed at):

1. Get the audience's attention.

   If you can involve some kind of emotional aspect, it will be more attention grabbing & memorable. Fear works well. For instance, put the audience in a narrative where some critical decision has to be made or something terrible might happen. Sex appeal also works well, although you might have to be discrete about how you go about utilizing it. Even something like pictures of delicious food might be enough to get people focused.

2. Make your point clear & succinct.

   Some people like to make their point at the beginning; some at the end. The more times something is repeated, the more likely it is to be remembered. Consider putting it in both places.

3. Make your presentations interactive.

   Narrative is one way to get the audience's brain working, but you could also ask questions, for example. Attention spans can be extremely short, even for highly intelligent people. Some sources say you need to re-hook your audience every 10 minutes or so, so you might want to design "hooks" (emotional, interactive, or better yet both) into your presentations.

4. Don't expect your audience to remember everything.

   Human memories are terrible. A week after hearing a lecture, the average person will forget 90% of the material covered. Try to make your main points the 10% that stick. If you are doing a lecture series, you could even reinforce the main points of previous lectures by going over them very quickly as a review before the next lecture begins.

Sounds excellent! I would love to hear a report on how this goes.

Especially if you've been hanging around here, remember that explainers shoot high. Aim low!.

We've been doing similar at our meetups. I just gave a talk on philosophy and decision making (specifically probability and decisions). Maybe you can adapt it.

My notes are dense and possibly suck, but here you go: http://sprunge.us/fiYN

EDIT: The red-pill/blue-pill solution didn't get properly written down, and I screwed up the numbers in the commuting utility function example.

You should also check out the LW HighSchooler's facebook page.

I'm a little late to the party, but I thought I'd mention something that hasn't gotten brought up yet.

I have some experience at leading/organizing groups like this. Something to consider when dealing with sequential learning is how to deal with people who are absent. Ideally, of course, you'll have a core group of people who want to do nothing more than attend every session diligently, take notes, and study the material as soon as they wake up, and before they retire at night. This, however, isn't going to happen. Life intrudes; people will miss some sessions.

Creating a plan to keep people updated and current when they miss things, or how to remind them of what they've already learned (something LW could improve upon, in my opinion) will allow everyone to stay together. Consider creating a summary to give them to take home. Likely, you'll be doing a summary any way at the end of your talk (if you aren't planning this, please do), and that ought to be sufficient. Also, you may want to leave room at the end and beginning of your sessions for questions about the concepts.

Also, make an effort to apply whatever concept you're working on to people's daily lives. One of the reason people find the extra material more useful than a lot of the core sequences as that they're more immediately applicable to what we deal with, while it takes more creativity to figure out why some of the more basic or obscure steps matter right now. You may consider challenging people to look for examples of the current concept in their daily life, papers, or current events and bring it to share next time.

I hope something in here was useful. What you're doing sounds really awesome - let us know how it goes!

I might even start off earlier than either of those two- I might give a lecture on why someone would want to read Less Wrong in the first place (probably without referring to it explicitly). This seems like a good approach to take for that: "hey, we ought to take knowledge from psychology and apply it to ourselves and our lives."

A constraint to some lectures. Try to grasp the average epistemic level and background, after that choose the posts. Expecting to being awesome could end counterproductive if people stop in the inference chain.

Karl Popper in three sentences: we will make mistakes and with effort we can learn from our mistakes. Science is refutation of mistaken conjectures, not uncovering truths. Democracy is voting the wrong guy out, not voting the right guy in.

Popper is my proposed alternative way of doing this. Might I also suggest some level of documentation of what goes on and who is there.