About Us
The School of Thought International is a non profit organization dedicated to promoting critical thinking, reason, and understanding. Our free resources, published under Creative Commons licenses, have reached over 30 million people in seven languages. We believe that in order to rise to the challenges of the 21st century, we need to teach the next generation how to think, rather than what to think; and that we can do so by using world-class design, code and creative, making it freely available for everyone.
join our mission on
Patreon
We’re attempting something quite ambitious: to save the world from itself by popularizing critical thinking, reason, and understanding. Please consider joining us in counteracting the descent into an aggressively irrational idiocracy that will result in the downfall of civilization at https://www.patreon.com/theschoolofthought – all backers will get immediate access to all of our downloadable resources as well as some exclusive content. With enormous thanks to Stephen Fry for providing the voiceover for the below video.
website project
theconspiracytest.org
The Conspiracy Test is a gamified interactive platform to help increase healthy skepticism for conspiracy theories.
You can select a theory you think might be true, set a baseline of skepticism, and challenge yourself through a series of self-directed steps to increase your Critical Thinking Score. Rather than an adversarial process, the format of The Conspiracy Test provides us with the agency to conduct our own critical thinking investigation, and utilises probabilistic thinking, metacognition, and collaborative reasoning to improve rationality.
website project
yourfallacy.is
This was our ‘proof of concept’ to demonstrate that combining design with critical thinking would prove effective. We created a microsite that took the heady subject of logical fallacies – which are flaws in reasoning often used by politicians, the media and advertisers to manipulate – and condensed each fallacy into a single, simple sentence that anyone could understand.
The proof came in the form of over 11 million unique visitors, more than 6 million downloads of the Creative Commons poster, reaching over 30 million people in seven languages, and being used in thousands of schools and universities around the world including Oxford and Harvard.
website project
yourbias.is
After the success of the fallacies project, we created a sister site on cognitive biases. This also went immediately viral, hitting the front page of reddit.com, and was featured in Forbes, The World Economic Forum website, Visual Capitalist, Buzzfeed USA and many more.
our supporters
Advisors & Supporters
From intellectual luminaries through to everyday people who have donated or bought some of our products, we are deeply grateful to our supporters and partners who have helped us get this far, and are inspiring us to go much further yet.
gabriel weinberg
ceo and founder of duckduckgo.com
advisory board member
Gabriel is a successful serial entrepreneur with a wealth of experience in business, digital product development, partnerships and tech operations.
He is also the co-author of the books ‘Superthinking - the big book of mental models’
steven pinker
professor of psychology at harvard
supporter
Professor Pinker cited the yourfallacy.is project in his NY Times Bestselling book Enlightenment Now saying it was “An excellent summary of common fallacies”. Bill Gates called Enlightenment Now his favorite book of all time, so we’ve very happy to be among these pages.
Sander van der linden
professor of social psychology at cambridge
advisory board member
Sander is the director of the Cambridge Decision-making Lab and is widely regarded as the world’s foremost expert on misinformation and conspiracy thinking, and is the author of the excellent book ‘Foolproof - why we fall for misinformation and how to build immunity'.
Deborah Brown
professor of philosophy at the university of Queensland
advisory board member
Deb is a Professor of Philosophy and specializes in logic and critical thinking. She is the Director of the University of Queensland’s Critical Thinking Project and a public advocate of rationality.
our MEMBERS
Executive Board
Jesse richardson
president & founder
Jesse is an internationally award-winning creative director and founded the School of Thought in order to popularize critical thinking by combining design with philosophy.
He is also the CEO of soon-to-be-launched startup Kitted Thinking Tools.
david lenowitz
executive director
After studying at Wharton and working as a Chief Information Officer at Susquehanna International Group, Dave was the founding Executive Director of the Alliance for Decision Education, and has over 30 years experience inthe technology and research sector.
david mcraney
vice president & director
David is a science journalist, author of several best-selling books including ‘How Minds Change’, and is the host of the popular blog and podcast at youarenotsosmart.com which explores the many ways in which we suffer cognitive biases.
barry silverberg
secretary and director
Barry has over 45 years of nonprofit professional and volunteer leadership, management, resource development, and communications experience focusing on nonprofit governance, strategic thinking, board engagement, professional and organizational development, and public policy awareness and advocacy.
website project
thethinkingshop.org
Our evidently incorrect hypothesis was that if we proved that combining rationality and design to create world-changing free assets worked, then we wouldn't have too much trouble finding philanthropists to fund our ambitions to create a full critical thinking curriculum and other projects.
Rather than be discouraged that no philanthropists appeared, we created our own Kickstarter for a deck of Critical Thinking Cards which raised over $78,000, and then started our own Shopify store which is currently funding three new projects (including a particularly badly needed project to help deprogram conspiracy thinking through gamification). We still need to find sponsors and philanthropists though, so if you are one or know any, please get in touch via admin@schoolofthought.org
website project
therulesofcivilconversation.org
We believe that ultimately the only way out of this mess is through love and understanding. Not as some kind of vague hippy platitude, but as a practical strategy and response to polarization and hate.
therulesofcivilconversation.org provides a way for us to reframe our conversations to work toward a shared understanding.
website project
freelearninglist.org
Many parents were looking for high quality free educational resources during the pandemic (ourselves included) and so we took a spreadsheet we’d been sharing and turned it into an interactive website that ranked the best free edu-things on the internet in 11 different categories including YouTube, Podcasts and Effective Thinking.
The freelearninglist.org website hit the front page of reddit and continues to get many thousands of visitors.
PRESENTATION
TEDx Talk
Our founder Jesse Richardson gave a talk on ‘How to think, not what to think’ at TEDx Brisbane. The talk has so far had over 700,000 views.
Jesse is an internationally award-winning creative director with over 20 years experience in design – you can find out more about him at jesserichardson.com.au
