ASPR is a 10-day program on epistemic and applied rationality: how to believe fewer false things, and better align our actions with our goals. Camps consist of 20-30 students aged 16-19, and about a dozen staff. ASPR 2025 will take about ten days in February in Taiwan.
The programme is structured around a few optional classes each day, followed by activities organized by both students and staff. Alumni consistently report that the classes never felt like the point - interactions with other camp participants and the overall atmosphere are often cited instead - but they tend to provide lots of interesting ideas and shared references for conversations, and ideas for student-led activities.
An example day
0900: Morning meta - Time for comments, requests, logistics updates, and reflection on the previous day.
0930: Bayes’ theorem - How much is new information supposed to change your beliefs? The class briefly goes over some theoretical background for what a “perfectly rational” agent would do given new data, 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 that disease.
1045: What’s stopping you - Even really talented and well-positioned people rarely set ambitious goals, and even fewer end up following through on them. What’s getting 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 lives.
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.
1300: Lunch
1430: Boggle walk - What if we put our attention on what surprises us about our environment? The activity invites participants to notice all the ways they never really thought about what exists and happens around them, such as wondering about what creates a particular discoloration pattern on a wall, why one particular flower seems to have grown much larger than its neighbors or how humans figured out how to mass-produce chairs.
1545: Statistical street fighting - Statistics can be used to portray incredibly diverse narratives without outright telling falsehoods; how can we navigate the academic world in light of this? The class goes over some of the more common tools of misdirection and stat-massaging as well as going over how one can avoid accidentally doing so.
1700: Student-led afternoon activities - Such as Ultimate Frisbee, Löb’s Theorem, Intro to Go, Debate mini-tournament, Discussion about the Fermi paradox, swing dancing and many more.
1800: Time for yourself - Free time in which students can rest, play games, journal, explore the area, or just chat with each other.
1900: Dinner
2000: Fermithon - Competitive estimation, where students split into teams and try to calculate things like approximately how many medical doctors there might be on any given plane, or how many water balloons it would take to fill a pool.
2100: Lightning talks - 3 minute lessons, demonstrations, skits, performances, etc by staff and students on any subject they want!
Special events
A few times each camp, we have activities which don’t quite fall into the same category as the rest. These include guest speakers talking about their area of expertise, city-wide puzzle hunts, and field trips to research institutes. Most notable and surprising is the final day of camp, where students control the agenda.