Upon (brief) reflection I agree that relying on the epistemic savviness of the mentors might be too much and the best version of the training program will train a sort of keen internal sense of scientific skepticism that’s not particularly reliant on social approval.
If we have enough time I would float a version of a course that slowly goes from very obvious crap (marketing tripe, bad graphs) into things that are subtler crap (Why We Sleep, Bem ESP stuff) into weasely/motivated stuff (Hickel? Pinker? Sunstein? popular nonfiction in general?) into things that are genuinely hard judgment calls (papers/blog posts/claims accepted by current elite EA consensus).
But maybe I’m just remaking the Calling Bullshit course but with a higher endpoint.
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(I also think it’s plausible/likely that my original program of just giving somebody an EA-approved paper + say 2 weeks to try their best to Red Team it will produce interesting results, even without all these training wheels).
Upon (brief) reflection I agree that relying on the epistemic savviness of the mentors might be too much and the best version of the training program will train a sort of keen internal sense of scientific skepticism that’s not particularly reliant on social approval.
If we have enough time I would float a version of a course that slowly goes from very obvious crap (marketing tripe, bad graphs) into things that are subtler crap (Why We Sleep, Bem ESP stuff) into weasely/motivated stuff (Hickel? Pinker? Sunstein? popular nonfiction in general?) into things that are genuinely hard judgment calls (papers/blog posts/claims accepted by current elite EA consensus).
But maybe I’m just remaking the Calling Bullshit course but with a higher endpoint.
___
(I also think it’s plausible/likely that my original program of just giving somebody an EA-approved paper + say 2 weeks to try their best to Red Team it will produce interesting results, even without all these training wheels).