Epistea Epistemics Workshop is a three and a half-day workshop focusing on improving our habits of belief formation. It’s the first out of our series of three workshops.
- When: TBD (depending on the COVID-19 situation, tentative late spring 2021)
- Where: TBD (in proximity to Oxford, UK)
- Price: 400£ (Tentative. In case you would hesitate to apply because of financial issues, let us know.)
- Application deadline: TBD
What is this workshop about? What can you expect?
The workshop’s goal is to improve the participant’s epistemics and enrich their epistemic toolbox. We will cover topics like dealing with uncertainty; empiricism; insights and implications from dual-process theory; building models, their limits and how to effectively share them with others; and more.
This workshop is inspired by the school of experiential education; which means that we will be exploring epistemics through games, simulations, and experiments as opposed to only plane theory and classroom-style classes.
A workshop series? Tell me more!
This workshop is the first out of a series of three workshops organized and run by the Epistea team.
- Workshop 1: Epistemics
- Workshop 2: Internal alignment
- Workshop 3: Group rationality
The workshops are designed to form a meaningful whole. We believe that the workshop series offers significant added value to the sum of its parts. Therefore, we strongly recommend coming to all three of them.
It is of course still possible to apply to any individual workshop of this series independently. Note that, because of limited capacity, our policy is to give priority to those applications who intend to participate in the entirety of the workshop series.
Who is organizing this?
This workshop series is developed by the team at Epistea Lab, in cooperation with few additional external instructors.
Why are we organizing this?
We believe that sound epistemic practices are indispensable for people contributing to EA and longtermist work. Additionally, in order for the EA network as a whole to yield its potential for long-term impact, it is crucial to build and maintain a culture with excellent epistemic standards.
While there exists a lot of written material on epistemology, we believe that there is a lack of application-focused teaching, as well as solid and diverse pedagogical know-how, focused on helping people to improve their epistemics in practice. This is why we think more offers and experiments in this space are valuable.
How is this similar or different from applied rationality workshops by CFAR?
We like CFAR (Center for Applied Rationality), some of us directly collaborate with CFAR and most of us are CFAR alumni – so there is definitely personal overlap and exchange of ideas. Also, a lot of credit for the generative mindset goes to CFAR.
At the same time, we are not CFAR. Using a programming metaphor, you can think about Epistea workshop content as an independent software project which shares some of the use-cases and some contributors, and certain features, but there is almost no overlap in the actual code.
More generally speaking, CFAR workshops are much more mature and well-tuned thanks to their years’ long experience.
What is included in the price?
The price includes the three and a half days of the workshop itself including room and board from Thursday to Monday morning.
We realize that participating in three workshops priced at ~400£ can be a strain on the budget of some of you. We offer financial support for anyone who would like to participate but is prevented from doing so for financial reasons. Please, don’t hesitate to reach out to us about this at rationality@epistea.org.
How to apply?
We will link to a form once the dates are fixed. You should hear back from us within four weeks.
More information
If you have any questions, please send us an email to rationality@epistea.org.