Three questions to Jesse

Before we dive in Jesse, tell us a little bit about you

I’m based in Brisbane. I’ve spent the past 20 years persuading people to buy things they probably didn’t need, and now I’m doing my best to balance out my ethical karma by putting those same skills to better use.

These days, most of my work involves collaborating with academics, researchers, authors, and designers to create critical thinking resources that are published under Creative Commons licences and used in thousands of universities, schools, and organisations around the world.

At heart, I’m interested in how we help people think more clearly, especially in complex or emotionally charged contexts and how those tools can be made genuinely accessible, engaging, and useful at scale.

What’s something you’ve changed your mind about recently?

Well, it's not all that recent – in fact it was a slow shifting of mind over several years, but then I think that's generally how we do change our minds hey? And rather than a 180º shift, it was more like moving to a more synthesised understanding. Essentially I started out thinking that popularising critical thinking tools and concepts would make the world a better place, and while that's not untrue, what I changed my mind about was that I think we ought to focus on helping to change the mindsets and attitudes with which people come into conversations, rather than the tools, concepts, and frameworks they might draw upon when they get there. The insight was that we are social and emotional creatures before we are cognitive and rational creatures, and any strategy that fails to account for this will be suboptimal at best, and counter-productive at worst. The sequence is important: heart first, head second.

Who is someone you admire, and why?

I'm going to cheat and mention a few of my intellectual heroes. Stephen Fry for embodying the values I most admire in a human being – kindness, intelligence, humility, integrity, and humour (avoid humourless people – they're boring and lack empathy) – whilst still retaining a delightful dash of sharp cynicism.

Ezra Klein for being simultaneously deeply nerdy and in the weeds, yet also having the demonstrated capacity for original thinking and zoomed-out synthesised perspectives. This is, I think, an unusual and wonderful intellectual capability.

Carl Sagan for his humanism, reason, and poetry.

An idea that deserves more attention?

I think progress is close to inevitable, save for apocalyptic annihilation. If we can somehow run the gauntlet of the many serious existential threats that exponential technological progress has rendered inevitable for us to deal with in the coming 50 or so years, then I suspect we will thrive for millions of years thereafter. However, I currently think that that apocalyptic annihilation is the more likely scenario (I would like to be convinced otherwise).

What's something exciting you're working on?

I feel like a tosser spruiking my own things, but at the same time I'm genuinely excited to share them. I've been running the non-profit schoolofthought.org for about 13 years and if you're curious you can download all our free creative commons critical thinking resources here, check out the freelearninglist.org we made, therulesofcivilconversation.org which was the first thing we did in response to the question above about what I've changed my mind about, and theconspiracytest.org which was the second thing we did on this front. The success we had with the non-profit led to a commercial iteration providing thinking tools for professionals at kitted.shop, and finally I'm currently working as a contributor to the Forecasting Research Institutes's Longitudinal Expert Artificial Intelligence Panel (LEAP) and as an extension of that I'm developing an interactive tool similar to the conspiracy test that helps people think through AI threats rationally. It's called Game Over and I'm having a lot of fun doing the graphics in retro pixel-art style