Astral Codex Ten

Egan

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Egan

Article

Egan is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 14, 2023 and May 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “I think Egan was an academicist in his heart, too. His book drips with classical references”; “Egan asks? The Hitler Youth!”; “One of the things I love about Egan is that he looks at educational ideas historically”. It most often appears alongside Brandon Hendrickson, Eliezer, Erik Hoel.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: July 14, 2023
  • Last seen: May 30, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: The Educated Mind
July 14, 2023 · Original source
“The promise of a new educational theory”, writes Kieran Egan, “has the magnetism of a newspaper headline like ‘Small Earthquake in Chile: Few Hurt’”.
I discovered the work of Kieran Egan in a dreary academic library. The book I happened to find — Getting it Wrong from the Beginning — was an evisceration of progressive schools. As I worked at one at the time, I got a kick out of this.
Inline links: Getting it Wrong from the Beginning
To be sure, broadsides against progressivist education aren’t exactly hard to come by. But Egan’s account went to the root, deeper than any critique I had found. Better yet, as I read more, I discovered he was against traditionalist education, too — and that he had constructed a new paradigm that incorporated the best of both.
Inline links: aren’t, exactly, hard, to, come, by
Open Thread 295
September 25, 2023 · Original source
2: Brandon Hendrickson, writer of the Educated Mind review that won the recent contest, has a post up responding to comments on his piece. He also asks that people interested in helping with his project of creating Egan-inspired schools contact him; he has a contact form available here.
Inline links: has a post up responding to comments on his piece, here
Bayes For Everyone
May 30, 2025 · Original source
I began my book review of a couple years back with a rather simple question:
Inline links: book review
I’ll be honest: I’ve learned something from each of these, but I think we can do even better. Specifically, I think that by using the paradigm I introduced in that book review — that of the recently-deceased philosopher Kieran Egan — we can make understanding and enjoying Bayes’ theorem a perfectly normal thing not just for quantitative geeks, but for more-or-less everyone. I’ve recently begun to test this out, and thought others might benefit from seeing what I’ve learned.
Your mind, rather, is a Swiss Army knife — an assortment of oddball capacities kludged together over our long evolutionary history. In my book review, I showed how Kieran Egan found it useful to think of those tools being in five boxes: