Challenge
The ability and tendency to make rational decisions and interpretations is at the root of many problems in the world today. From deciding how to prevent and respond to a pandemic to making fair interpretation of our fellows. From coming up with strategies and technologies to cure cancer to figuring out how our economy can grow inclusively. Most fundamentally, these are all endeavors of the application of rationality. Strategies are designed, options are evaluated, work is performed, data is interpreted, and the cycle repeats - with each cycle getting us closer to the value needed by society. At each step of this cycle we have an opportunity to amplify the overall output substantially by being able to identify and mitigate the biases that otherwise tend to occur, detracting from our otherwise enacting the most excellent strategies and policies.
We have so many cool ideas to share about how to accomplish this. You'll find them each described below.
Teach Rationality
The most general of these is simply to teach rationality by teaching in the following areas of content. We chose these areas because they all represent key dimensions of what we see as necessary for deciding and interpreting rationally:
- Cognitive Bias
- Logical Fallacies
- Eastern Introspection Practices
- Basic Human Physiology
- Key Concepts from Psychology
Continued Certification
The truth about any course, certification, training, and so on is that over time, unless you continue to practice, people tend to forget a lot of what they learned. To solve this, we plan to provide learning exercises that (1) continue to maintain retention over time and (2) provide measures of the extent of this retention. Here's an example of what that might look like:
Figure 1. Curriculum attainment over time. Illustrative/simulated time-series (by day) attainment for the Bias & Logic (BL; blue), Introspection (IN; purple), Physiology (PE; green), and Psychology (PE; orange) curricula are shown each across each of three metric categories: fractional progress, conceptual understanding, and analysis. All measures are normalized to a maximum value of 25 with the maximum attainable combined score across all measures being 300.
This should give you a good intuitive sense of what such a metric would look like as well as of the notion of concept acquisition peaking and then declining. For example here (Figure 1, illustrative and simulated non-user data), while progress through the curriculum is maximal by day 18 for both the Physiology and Psychology curricula, concept understanding measures decline precipitously over the remaining days.
External Certificates
This one isn't that complicated. Coursera and others provide the means to verify the completion of a training via a URL. This is very popular and to a certain extent effective. We plan to similarly provide the means to link to a page that displays the above described continuous notion of certification. Being able to provide this externally has the potential to become a source of extrinsic reward depending on adoption by other parties.
Conceptual Organization
We have sought to organize content into a clear taxonomy and allow each sub-section to be one group of closely-related concepts. Further we have sought to make good use of the presentation of structured information (as opposed to pure prose) to enhance readability.
Case Studies and Memory Effects
Case studies are a great opportunity to simulate the way in which we want people to be able to apply what they learn in the future - primarily by being able to notice bias on-the-fly in real-world situations.
To this end we plan to use case studies both as an opportunity to present detailed expert analysis of realistic situations as well as give learners the opportunity to perform such analysis themselves (and in the process continue to quantify their efficacy).
As of the year 2020, Educational Psychology is a rather deep area of study with a great deal known about how to enhance the retention of taught material. Here are various effects we intend to make use of in the way we write and present these case studies.
| Name | Description | Sources |
|---|---|---|
| von Restorff effect | That an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items. | [1] [2] |
| Bizarreness effect | Bizarre material is better remembered than common material. | [1] |
| Modality effect | That memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received through writing. | [1] |
| Picture superiority effect | The notion that concepts that are learned by viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts. | [1] [2-8] |
| Humor effect | That humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor. | [1] [9] |
We plan to obtiain the benefits of the Modality Effect by allowing learners to hear content read aloud while they read instead of having to only read by themselves.
Motivation
The motivation to learn to become more rational is as essential a consideration as is motivation in regard to eating vegetables. One might say that rationality education may by default approximate the user experience of eating carrots.
We get it. Extrinsic rewards (by way of being able to share a certificate) are one way to do it and pretty important to most people. But on a moment to moment basis, intrinsic rewards work the best.
That's why when it comes to motivation our primary strategy will focus on making learning intrinsically rewarding. Humor, in the context of case studies, as mentioned in the previous section, is one great way to accomplish this. Another is by providing simple technological and meditative techniques to enhace peoples ability to engineer their own intrinsic reward feedback.
Donating
If you liked these ideas we hope you'll consider subscribing and maybe over time increasing your subscription to a supporter or donor level.
References & Acknowledgements
[1] Wikipedia contributors. "List of cognitive biases." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 14 Jul. 2020. Web. 23 Jul. 2020. link
[2] Poppenk, Walia, Joanisse, Danckert, & Köhler, 2006
[3] Slamecka NJ (April 1968). "An examination of trace storage in free recall". Journal of Experimental Psychology. 76 (4): 504–13. doi:10.1037/h0025695. PMID 5650563.
[4] Shepard RN (1967). "Recognition memory for words, sentences, and pictures". Journal of Learning and Verbal Behavior. 6: 156–163. doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(67)80067-7.
[5] McBride DM, Dosher BA (2002). "A comparison of conscious and automatic memory processes for picture and word stimuli: a process dissociation analysis". Consciousness and Cognition. 11 (3): 423–460. doi:10.1016/s1053-8100(02)00007-7. PMID 12435377.
[6] Defetyer MA, Russo R, McPartlin PL (2009). "The picture superiority effect in recognition memory: a developmental study using the response signal procedure". Cognitive Development. 24 (3): 265–273. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2009.05.002.
[7] Whitehouse AJ, Maybery MT, Durkin K (2006). "The development of the picture-superiority effect". British Journal of Developmental Psychology. 24 (4): 767–773. doi:10.1348/026151005X74153.
[8] Ally BA, Gold CA, Budson AE (January 2009). "The picture superiority effect in patients with Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment". Neuropsychologia. 47 (2): 595–8. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2008.10.010. PMC 2763351. PMID 18992266.
[9] Schmidt SR (2003). "Life Is Pleasant—and Memory Helps to Keep It That Way!" (PDF). Review of General Psychology. 7 (2): 203–210. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.7.2.203.
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