The Learning in Depth summer intensive
Announcing our first-ever summer cohort
A normal human mind, equipped with the right tools, can achieve a profound understanding of the world.
The trick, of course, is to get the right tools. And there are so many methods that promise to revolutionize learning — flipped classrooms, project-based learning, mindfulness, grit, STEM, STEAM, gamification, etc., etc., etc.
The revolution, meanwhile, has stubbornly refused to occur.1
Why? The answer (from an Egan perspective) is obvious — these methods don’t use the tools, the ones that people have honed over hundreds and thousands of years, the ones that tie together emotion and cognition and memory and mattering.
Later this summer, Alessandro Gelmi and I are leading a 32-person group on a hard-core intellectual adventure. It’s an experiment to see if we can spark the beginning of the education revolution so many people have longed for.
Interested? Read on.
Bore through boredom
If you join us, on the very first day — July 15, 2024 — you’ll be matched with a perfectly dull topic.
Q: Like what?
Like these:
These come from Kieran Egan’s “Learning in Depth”.2 It might be his greatest-ever idea: a twelve-year plunge into a single topic, using the lost tools of learning to transform how students understand everything. At last count, it was in use by 100,000+ students around the world.
We’re squeezing this into just six weeks.
Q: How will the topic be chosen?
Entirely randomly!
Q: What? Why?
One purpose of this experiment is to bore through boredom, and find that the whole world is fascinating. If you chose the topic, you wouldn’t be able to do that.
Anyway, by the end, you’ll have created a masterpiece — an “interactive TED talk” on your topic that spreads your newfound love of your topic to others, and flips upside-down how they understood some piece of the world.
How will we do it? Through daily pokes.
Daily pokes
This isn’t a live class with lessons to attend. Rather, each morning you’ll get a “daily poke” — an email from me with a short, strange assignment. For example, say you got “coffee”:
What’s the OPPOSITE of coffee, and why?
If someone wrote an entire Guinness Book of Coffee World Records, what would it list for the EXTREMES? (What’s the biggest coffee ever? The smallest? The oldest? The newest? The most dangerous?)
Say you travelled back in time and witnessed coffee’s ORIGIN STORY. Spin a quick story about what you might see.
What JOKES can you find about coffee — and can you make your own?
And so on.
These are goofy, they don’t take too much work — and they use the tools to turn knowledge into understanding.
Weekly sources
Knowledge, however, requires a lot of information… which is the other thread of this cohort. Each week you’ll get detailed direction on how to master some of the modern sources:
Week 1: ChatGPT
not just “how to use” it, but how to use prompt engineering to get answers that stick in your head
Week 2: Wikipedia & YouTube
not just “use them”, but how to become a power user of them
Week 3: Books, books, books
not just “read books”, but how to exploit your local library for all its worth to find the very best book for you right now, and break through its crust
Week 4: The arts
not just “read poems and look at paintings”, but how to use art to bring you into more complex feelings for your topic than you thought possible
Week 5: Journal articles
not just “how to access them”, but how to read them quickly to find the edge of what scholars currently understand — and how to write emails to academics that get responses
Week 6 will be set aside for you to craft your masterpiece.
Q: Why start with ChatGPT?
Because a mid-20th-century scholar would have torn the elbow patches off his tweed jacket for just five minutes with ChatGPT. Artificial intelligence (and specifically, LLMs — large language models like ChatGPT) allows computers to speak human. It radically increases the ease of accessing all sorts of information, and making sense of it.
The tragedy, of course, is that most people use it for very limited tasks.
We’re putting it at the beginning because we’re going to build everything on top of it. (This is, by the way, why we suggest you get the $20 monthly upgrade to ChatGPT+ while you’re doing the cohort.)
Q: Why not just stick to ChatGPT, then? Why add on the other stuff?
Because, for all their benefits, AI’s are currently shallow. A great book (and even a great YouTube channel) can go into much more depth than an AI. In this cohort, you’ll learn to use these different sources together.
Constant guidance
Each day you’ll post your responses to the pokes to your small group — a subset of the 32 participants. Together you’ll play games and inspire each other. Alessandro (and occasionally me, too) will be giving advice in the groups; he’ll also run a live “office hours” Zoom session on Mondays to give perspective and extra help.
Questions, answered
Q: Who’s this for?
We’re intending this for a broad swath of people — PhD’s and college students, teachers and homeschoolers and autodidacts.
Q: Is this for me, or for my kids?
Yes it is! We’re accepting both adults and any kids who can keep up with the work — 13 years old might be a good guess for a floor, provided the kid is knowledgable and motivated.
Q: Can I use these tools with my kids?
Yes! Each seat belongs to just one person, but if you’d like to sign up for this yourself, and then do a version of this for your kids, go for it.
Q: Who’s leading this?
I’m Brandon Hendrickson, and I’m the founder of Science is WEIRD (and, um, the writer of this substack). For years I’ve been using this approach to dive deep into topics I previously knew almost nothing about, and teach them to very smart kids at a very high level.
Alessandro is a PhD candidate in educational philosophy at the University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy, and is becoming one of the best-connected people in the international community of Egan-heads; when I want to understand something in education more deeply, I go to him. Between the two of us, we’ve used Egan’s tools to teach every age from preschool to college to teachers, and every subject from math to the humanities to foreign languages.
Q: When does this happen, again?
July 15 – August 23, 2024.
Q: How much time will this take per day?
This is the first time that we’re doing this, so we don’t actually know. However, we’re asking everyone to set aside 15 minutes every weekday to work on this. (If we do our job right, your topic will become so interesting that it’ll pop into your brain while you’re trying to work on other things, too.)
Q: What’s the final “masterpiece” project look like?
We’re patterning it off a Science is WEIRD lesson. It’ll be a question that sounds simple, but which has an answer that upends how you see the world. In the middle are hints (metaphors, stories, mental images…) that open people’s minds to new ideas.
Q: I see there are daily “pokes” and one big “masterpiece” project… anything else?
Yes! There are weekly “quests”, but we’ll keep those a surprise. (In any case, the daily pokes will help you do them.)
Q: I’m lonely and isolated. At the end of this, will I be more so, or less?
We’re using the word “cohort” for good reasons. Humans are social learners, and we’ll have you sharing your work daily with a small group, in a comments section.
Q: How much time will I get with Brandon and Alessandro?
This isn’t a live class; most of the work will be done through text. Brandon is spending most of the summer writing a book,3 but you’ll get an email from him each morning. Alessandro, however, will be offering that optional live Zoom session on Mondays.
Q: What’s the cost?
We see this as the equivalent to a college course. In the U.S., those can run anywhere from $200 (at a community college) to $2,000 (at a private college). In the future, we hope to set the price at $500 or more, but since this is our first time (read: we’ll inevitably make some goof-ups), we’ll set it at just $400.
Q: Are there any additional costs?
Not necessarily — though…
you may find you really want to purchase some books that you fall in love with, and
we really recommend adding on a $20/month subscription to ChatGPT+, if you don’t already. (This gives you access to the most advanced model. We suspect you’ll want to keep it after the cohort ends.)
Q: What happens if this doesn’t work for me?
If you “throw yourself into this” (see below for a definition) and it doesn’t “work for you” (ditto), we’ll give you your money back.
Q: Okay, what counts as “throwing myself into it”?
Doing at least 3/4 of the daily challenges and all of the weekly challenges for at least three weeks.
Q: And what counts as “not working for me”?
We’re setting a very high bar for ourselves: we promise that (1) your understanding of the world will be transformed, and (2) you’ll fall in love with your topic. If you’ve done the work, and you don’t think you’ve experience both of those, we’ll give you your money back.
Q: Being matched to a totally random topic scares me. Can I pick the topic? Please???
If you need to, when you sign up, you can go with “Option B”: you’ll get to choose 9 topics that you like, and we’ll pick randomly from those. However, we’ll also add in a tenth topic that seems as unlike the first nine as possible; when we pick, that one will be included.
Q: Where do I sign up?
Right here. (Someday, we might make a whole website for this project; right now, we’re using the Science is WEIRD site.)
Q: What’ll happen right after I sign up?
Basically nothing… until July 15. (We’re on vacation until then.)
Q: Ack, I’ll be on vacation for some of those six weeks!
Good for you! Just let us know ahead of time; we’ll excuse you from the work, and help your small group plan around that.
Q: Will you be doing this again?
Very probably.
Q: Why are you so excited about this?
Because “how do we learn?” is still an unsolved mystery. And ever since I won the book review contest last year, people have been (quite sensibly) telling me that, goshdarnit, we need to make an Egan-related experience that people can participate in, beyond the Science is WEIRD classes.
Well, they’re right, and this is the first one we’re making. We suspect it could be adapted to so many contexts — middle schools, college classes, teaching programs, and homeschooling — and so many subjects. If we fine-tune the topics, there could be even versions of this for different disciplines!
In short, this could be one of the most important things to ever come out of this substack.
Q: And this is built on Egan?
This is Egan education, through and through. The whole experience is a journey through his five kinds of understanding (🤸♀️SOMATIC, 🧙♂️MYTHIC, 🦹♂️ROMANTIC, 👩🔬PHILOSOPHIC, and 😏IRONIC), and utilizes his tools. If you’ve been wanting to use Egan to create a meaningful connection with any topic, this is for you.
Again, you can sign up for it here. Also, here’s a promo that we shot of it:4
Though who knows, maybe AI tutors will do the trick! We’re definitely not falling into the same trap again!
Which he wrote both an essay and a book about, and which I’ve written more about here.
On Egan, for parents! I’ll be writing more about this later.
All its information is correct, except the part about the ages — we’ve decided to go more loosey-goosey since then.
I can't wait for this! I am so excited to meet the other weir... er, enthusiastic people involved.