Nothing is boring
Nothing is boring
Free livestream events
Everyone knows AIs are educationally dangerous. They enable cheating, they hallucinate facts, they cut creativity and injure imagination, they make things too simple.
Everyone is missing something huge: AIs like ChatGPT and Claude might be the greatest device we have for falling in love with the world. They just need to be combined with one thing: the lost tools of learning.
And, well, that’s the thesis of this substack. But doing this well is a subtle art. How can anyone hope to learn it?
Showing you how to do it is the purpose of our free livestream series, Nothing is Boring.1
Dates & times
Saturday, Oct. 5: 3pm Eastern / 12pm Pacific (life science
Thursday, Oct. 10: 9pm Eastern / 6pm Pacific (history)
Thursday, Oct. 17: 9pm Eastern / 6pm Pacific (math)
Thursday, Oct. 24: 9pm Eastern / 6pm Pacific (physical science)
Thursday, Oct. 31: 9pm Eastern / 6pm Pacific (geography)
They’re all recorded, and viewable on our YouTube channel (and at the bottom of this page).
What can you expect?
Each live streaming event is a challenge for Brandon.
First 5 minutes
The group comes up with the most boring topic they can imagine, liked to the subject (like math or life science or history) of the week. Past topics have included long division, commas, and polygenic inheritance.
Middle 45 minutes
I scramble to research the topic with ChatGPT and the lost tools, answering your questions and showing you how to do it.
Final 5 minutes
The group votes: how close did I come to…
helping you understand the topic
making it grab you by your emotions
connecting it to the big picture of life, the Universe, and everything
Who’s this for?
Everyone who’s tired of learning and teaching things that feel boring. Adults, kids, whatever.
Egan said about schools:
We represent the world to children as mostly known and rather dull.
The opposite is the case: we are surrounded by mystery, and what we know is fascinating.
Because it’s free, it’s designed to be an outreach event. Wanna help move the our education revolution forward? Post this somewhere that people might love being able to make anything interesting.
(And if you do, you’ll probably also be interested in our year-long AI-fueled course, Learning in Depth. It’s life-changing.)
How can I attend?
Get the link by filling out this form on the Science is WEIRD website.
Can I watch the recordings?
They’re all available on our YouTube playlist, but you can also watch some of them here.
We’ve previously billed this as “Egan and ChatGPT Walk Into a Bar”, when it was also focused on crafting a lesson. We’ve tweaked it! Expect this to happen sometimes.