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This will be a collection of hypothetical lectures that I might have delivered over the course of my academic career, but didn’t. The goal of this course of lectures is to introduce a broad array of tools, or ideas, or weapons for attacking reasoning problems, taking advantage of a broad range of disciplines. These are meant to be introductory, readily understood by intelligent laypeople who have never studied those disciplines and representing general-purspose methods that might become available to anyone who does study those disciplines at an undergraduate level. So, this collection is envisioned as a kind of Swiss-army knife for your brain. While that is my intention, I do not pretend to cover all the major disciplines, but emphasize those which have had a substantial impact on my intellectual life.
I have taken inspiration from two prolific and excellent writers of articles for Scientific American, A.K. Dewdney and Martin Gardner. In partial consequence of their inspiration, these lectures are somewhat loosely connected; they are intended to largely be intelligible independently of one another, although cross-references will guide the reader through some kinds of dependencies. While this is not intended to be scholarly in the sense of detailing every historical line of thought behind these lectures, or attributing all details to their originators, I do indicate where readers might turn for additional information on these ideas.
The top-level topics I am covering (in tentative order) include: Philosophy, Bayesian Reasoning, Argumentation, Mathematics and Computer Science, Physical Thinking, Modeling and Simulation, Evolution Theory, Information, Ethics, Politics, Cognition and Inference. Posts will be “collected” using the tag #ReasoningWell.
