Bayes For Everyone

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

A guest post by Brandon Hendrickson

[Editor’s note: I accept guest posts from certain people, especially past Book Review Contest winners. Brandon Hendrickson, whose review of The Educated Mind won the 2023 contest, has taken me up on this and submitted this essay. He writes at The Lost Tools of Learning and will be at LessOnline this weekend, where he and Jack Despain Zhou aka TracingWoodgrains will be doing a live conversation about education.]

I began my book review of a couple years back with a rather simple question:

Could a new kind of school make the world rational?

What followed, however, was a sprawling distillation of one scholar’s answer that I believe still qualifies as “the longest thing anyone has submitted for an ACX contest”. Since then I’ve been diving into particulars, exploring how we use the insights I learned while writing it to start re-enchanting all the academic subjects from kindergarten to high school. But in the fun of all that, I fear I’ve lost touch with that original question. How, even in theory, could a method of education help all students become rational?

It probably won’t surprise you that I think part of the answer is Bayes’ theorem. But the equation is famously prickly and off-putting:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bayes-for-everyone