- Add notes on The Rise of the Nazis, American Civil War, Civil War
For all of their positives, representative democracies also tend to amplify some of the worst parts of tribalism and “human nature” (traits selected for by evolution). To make democracies better, it’s incredibly important to have clear-thinking and resilient citizenries resistant to populism and civil war. There’s a clear and important role here that schools need to fully embrace.
Things to learn:
- Deeply internalizing epistemic humility
- Beliefs, morality, and values are all incredibly subjective, and your beliefs are mostly the product of your circumstances. Because of WYSIATI, you will tend to reinforce your beliefs until they become trapped.
- You could have had the exact same beliefs/values as the person whose beliefs/values you hate the most if you’d had different life circumstances.
- A special part of the curriculum should be just going through Thinking, Fast and Slow. Getting up close and personal with the overwhelming evidence about your cognitive flaws is one of the best ways to internalize humility.
- Learning how to update your beliefs.
- Understanding when to update your beliefs and when to hold your ground
- Learning to debate while still being able to change your beliefs
- Understanding when to update your beliefs and when to hold your ground
- Beliefs, morality, and values are all incredibly subjective, and your beliefs are mostly the product of your circumstances. Because of WYSIATI, you will tend to reinforce your beliefs until they become trapped.
- Being comfortable with uncertainty
- Learning how to make decisions under uncertainty
- Superforecasting-adjacent skills
- Learning how to make decisions under uncertainty
- Think for yourself.
- Most education systems are terrible about this. It’s just “I teach, you memorize and regurgitate”. Most schools need to be better about encourage more critical thinking and intellectual engagement with material.
- Maybe teachers should intentionally slip up at times while explaining abstract topics (not simple errors on math answers) and encourage students to catch them
- Basic critical thinking skills around statistics, ads, media, propaganda
- Understanding Memetics
- Most education systems are terrible about this. It’s just “I teach, you memorize and regurgitate”. Most schools need to be better about encourage more critical thinking and intellectual engagement with material.
- Other basic skills
- Memetics (I’ll repeat it again)
- Recognizing and avoiding groupthink, mob behavior, extremist ideology
- Understanding the importance of engaging with people who disagree with you despite Cognitive Ease
- Understanding that Correlation != Causation
- Keeping your identity small
- ”But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.”
A lot of these things are taught but only as one-off workshops/lessons instead of getting the focus they deserve.
This should be present overtly (maybe via a reformed English class) and should also be present in the backdrop of everything.