This course will teach you three fundamental skills for building better theories: critical reasoning, thinking in systems, and formal modelling. You will work as a team and go step-by-step through building, evaluating, and improving your own explanation.
What you’ll do
- Identify a phenomenon worth explaining (from any area of interest)
- Craft a clear verbal theory: what causes what, and why?
- Make this theory precise with mechanical descriptions and diagrams.
- Formalize your theory as a computational model.
- Design critical tests that could prove your theory wrong (or support it).
- Iterate: revise, compare rival explanations, and communicate clearly.
- Experiment with large language models (LLMs) as thinking partners to sharpen definitions, generate alternative explanations, or stress-test your assumptions. Use of LLMs is optional and fully transparent.
What you’ll gain
- Sharper reasoning and communication skills you can use anywhere.
- A toolkit, useful for every-day life, to cut through hype, pseudoscience, and conspiracy claims.
- Concrete practice in methodological thinking that’s great preparation for research or a future PhD.
Good to know
- No statistics required.
- No programming skills required.
- No advanced math skills required.
- You may (but don’t have to) use AI tools such as large language models.