Program — European Summer Program in Rationality
ESPR is structured around a couple optional classes each day, followed by activities organized by students and staff. Alumni consistently report that the classes aren’t the point of ESPR - interactions with other camp participants and the overall atmosphere are often cited instead - but they set the tone and provide a starting point for conversations.
0930: Bayes - what are you supposed to do with new information? The class briefly goes over some theoretical background for what a perfectly rational agent would do and then introduces various ways to use this in real life, such as how much getting a positive or negative test result for some disease actually tells you about the likelihood of you having the disease.
1045: What’s stopping you - even really talented and well-positioned people rarely set ambitious goals and then execute them; what’s in their way? The class goes over examples of people figuring out what their bottleneck was and gives participants some tools to figure out whether anything of the sort might be happening in their life.
1200: Defense against the dark arts - powerful rhetoric and skilled orators often move people to act in ways they couldn’t be convinced of through reason; how can we notice this happening? The class goes over some fairly mundane circumstances in which so-called dark arts appear, such as interactions with car salespeople claiming that some deal is only valid until the end of the day.
