Believe it (or Not)

What’s real?

Increasingly, kids are surrounded by nonsense.

TV, YouTube, the news — even some library books! — are peppered with fake reports invented to get clicks. And AI video threatens to make lies more convincing.

And yet the world really is filled with wonder. Bizarre phenomena abound! How can you tell what’s real?

In this series of week-long classes stretching across five summers, kids dive into claims of the strange. We take them on a brains-on adventure, teaching the thinking tools that will help them think more rationally for the rest of their lives.

Each summer, we tackle a new topic:

June 2024: Bigfoot
June 2025: Sea monsters
June 2026: UFOs
June 2027: Psychic powers
June 2028: Ghosts

In each, kids learn a lot of fascinating lore about the topic, but we also use each topic to learn more about the subtle art of thinking rationally.

Each summer camp is online, and lasts 90 minutes for five days, Monday to Friday. They’re for students 8 and up. And they build — the tools we learn in one topic continue through to the next.

People have reported seeing sea monsters for centuries — should we believe them?

We’ll explore famous examples like Loch Ness’s “Nessie”, Lake Champlain’s “Champ”, and the ocean-going “Cadborosaurus”.

We’ll investigate the paleontology of ancient marine reptiles, early whales, and bizarre sharks.

Finally, using what we learned in “Bigfoot”, we’ll update our assumptions (“priors”) and compute our personal probabilities about sea monsters.

Dates:

5 days in a row
Monday June 23 – Friday June 27, 2025

Class times:

You have a choice of two live sessions:

Morning class: 12pm Eastern / 9am Pacific
Afternoon class: 4pm Eastern / 1pm Pacific

They’re about 90 minutes each.

Recordings:

If you can’t join live, you can sign up for the recordings. We’ll upload these each evening. (If you purchase them after they’re done, you’ll get all the links at once.)

You can purchase last year’s five lessons from our first topic (“Bigfoot”) right now.

Q: Isn’t this just a bunch of pseudoscience?

This course doesn’t tell kids what to think — it teaches them how to think critically about extraordinary claims, just like real scientists do.

Q: Will my kid be told what to believe?

No. We take every idea seriously — examining the best arguments for and against, and putting them to the test with real scientific methods. We leave the conclusions up to the kids.

Q: Is this a serious educational experience?

These are applied math courses. They’re our most intense courses on scientific reasoning.

Q: What if my kid already believes in one of these things?

Wonderful! Fervent believers, hardened skeptics, and total noobs are all welcome here. These courses are about testing ideas, not shutting them down.

Q: How interactive is this? Will my kid actually engage?

This isn’t a sit-and-listen class. Like all of our small-group seminars, it’s a brains-on, hyper-interactive experience where kids engage, debate, and challenge their own reasoning in real time.

Q: Do they have to take them in order?

We strongly recommend they do — we teach a new skill in every lesson, so they’ll be lost if they start in the middle.

These aren’t “debunking” courses, and they’re not about “blind belief” either. It’s about thinking like a scientist, which means using Bayes’ theorem. It’s not much to look at…

…but, to many scientists, it’s the secret path to rationality.

Bayesian reasoning is the thread running through the topics. We introduce it in “Bigfoot”, and use it to show something truly surprising. We help you get fluent with it in “Bigfoot”. In “UFOs” and “Psychic powers”, it’ll become second nature. And by “Ghosts”, you’ll marvel that you haven’t always thought like a Bayesian.

It’s hard to overstate its power: it helps us escape black-and-white thinking, and spurs us to challenge our own assumptions. It does, however, have limitations… which we’ll call attention to throughout (and examine especially carefully in the final topics).

In short: they’ll learn how to reason wisely about things experts disagree on.

Year 1: Bigfoot

In “Bigfoot”, we learn to deal with uncertainty. It’s not 100% likely that Bigfoot exists… but it’s not 0%, either. How can we think clearly about this? What even counts as good evidence? We build basic Bayesian reasoning, estimate priors, and practice updating.

By the end, kids have calculated their own subjective odds of Bigfoot’s existence by using a visual version Bayes’ theorem:

(Of course, we also learn about the history of Bigfoot sightings, the paleontology of extinct apes, and a lot more!)

Year 2: Sea monsters

Here, we learn to make intuitive sense of probabilities. Most people would call “1%” and “0.00000001%” “unlikely”, but there’s a universe of difference between the two. How can we feel the difference between the two? When are we allowed to say we’re confident about something?

(We also learn a lot about the history of the Loch Ness Monster, the paleontology of ocean giants, surprising facts about photo editing, and more!)

Year 3: UFOs

Here, we zoom out and learn the moves of “scout mindset” — like seeking opposing views, noticing your own bias, staying curious about things you disagree with, and detaching your self-worth from being right.

(We also learn a lot about the history of UFO sightings, and go into the nitty-gritty details of the U.S. Navy’s recent “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” [UAP] videos.)

Note: we taught a version of this course before; when we teach it this time, it’ll be quite updated. If you’ve taken it, feel free to ask us any questions.

Year 4: Psychic powers

Here, we learn how to really engage academic research.

Lots of people think that the gold standard of truth is peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals. Fun fact: there are lots of studies, done by professors working at impressive universities, that report evidence of psychic powers. There have been many papers in peer-reviewed journals showing evidence for things like psychokinesis (moving objects with your mind), telepathy (communicating with someone else, through thoughts), and remote viewing (seeing something far away).

To put it flatly: should you trust “the science”? How can you tell good peer-reviewed research from bad? How confident can you be either way?

Year 5: Ghosts

Finally, we examine the biggest frame of them all: worldviews. Are there ghosts? What’s the best evidence for life after death? Near-death experiences (NDEs) are fairly common — how do we make sense of them? Can science even talk about the supernatural?

As usual for Science is WEIRD classes, we don’t ever take a position on topics like worldview or religion. Rather, we help you think through the evidence for your beliefs and against them. Expect this course to be challenging to everyone!