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"Instead of validating products, I think about validating problems.”
- Jay Clouse
I’ve said this before, but I am excited for you all to see and hear the next season of the podcast, starting next month. I can’t believe that some of these people take the time to talk to me about their work and some bigger, philosophical questions. If you’re not yet subscribed, hit subscribe here on YouTube to get notified when they’re released, and if you prefer to listen, just search “Selling Plato” on your favorite podcast app, hit subscribe, and you’ll see the episodes in your podcast feed.
Today’s newsletter has a news update: the logic course failed. (And that’s genuinely ok.)
It turns out that a lot of people like the idea of learning logic, but very few people take action steps toward that goal. Learning logic is difficult, and initially not great on the ego, so it’s not surprising that those big barriers keep people away.
A year ago, I released my Introduction to Logic course, after getting some good feedback and listening to a lot of people who expressed a desire to improve their critical thinking.
But I quickly learned that a desire for something is not at all the same as personally investing time and money into that thing. People want to get in good physical shape, but very few do. People want to get in good logical shape, but very few do.
It took a crazy amount of time to produce the course; from finding the right hosting platform (Teachable), to scripting the lessons and modules, to creating the slide presentations, to purchasing the right video and audio equipment, to recording and editing the videos. I had to learn every tech and A/V aspect myself on the job while creating the course. That skill stack is great to have now, but I vastly underestimated its height before I got started.
Live shot of Plato realizing the numbers don't add up
The thought was that I would create a subscription model so that learning logic would not be a financial burden on you, the student, so a subscription would make it more appealing than other multi-hundred dollar full courses out there. Initially, there were a few students interested, which was very cool to see: people were watching the videos and taking the quizzes I created, and really learning!
But it became obvious that the number of students was too low for the time and expense it takes to keep the course going. The hosting platform alone is not cheap, and getting that bill every month in my inbox brought some guilt and, admittedly, frustration that I just couldn’t motivate anyone to get in on the learning process. I have benefitted so much from learning formal logic, but I’ve failed at communicating those benefits in a way that does those benefits justice, and in a way that converts. I would need about 4-5 more students to make the course worth keeping, which doesn't seem likely.
I did learn a ton from the process, though. The logic course was my first attempt at a digital product. Those are not easy, and I have learned since then that digital products typically only work when someone has an unusually large following. I ran sales and promotions, got endorsements from trial students, and tried just about everything I could think of. But I’m hearing from successful creators that the demand for digital courses specifically will probably drastically shrink as AI grows. That’s just how tech goes. But we might see things like community experiences, real world events, and other human-to-human experiences grow as the demand and need for those things generally grow. (That’s one reason I think podcasts aren’t going away any time soon.)
The biggest lesson for me was the necessity of developing the internal, emotional muscles when I attempted to make the course appealing, and the silence would continually shout back to me as, “Yeah, NO ONE CARES. No one cares about actually learning logic, man.” I wish that wasn’t true, but it is. So don’t get too precious about your digital creations. No one is forcing you to do any of this.
I might keep the course up for a few days or so, but the signs are pointing to taking it out to pasture and ending its long, slow death. Quick and painless. I’ll tell future newsletter subscribers who ask where it went that it’s now on a farm in the country where it can play and frolic with other logic courses.
But thanks are due to you, if you spent any time or dollars on the course. Or if you even spent a single brain cell thinking about it. If the numbers work at some point, I’ll think about getting something out there. I was in the beginning stages of doing an Intro to Philosophy course, but there’s no way I can put time and energy into that with what I know now.
How do I end this on a positive note? Well, the semester starts soon, and I’m looking forward to getting back into real world, flesh and bone teaching. That includes teaching a logic course this semester, which will always be one of my favorite things to teach.
This is a full book as part of the Open Logic Project, which has even more advanced material on set theory, modal logic, intermediate logic, etc. All free.
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Selling Plato
by Jared Oliphint (PhD, Philosophy prof.)
Scratch that philosophical itch with Selling Plato's Dialogues weekly. Read what philosophy has to offer you for daily living, and subscribe here so you never miss a post, an episode, or an opportunity to learn even more through a philosophy course 👇🏻
Dialogues #62 Read in browser↗️ "A goal without a strategy is useless.” - Will Guidara The semester has officially started, and my philosophy students are already hard at work on assignments. To jumpstart the faculty and staff, my school invited Will Guidara to come speak to us. Out of all the talks and speeches I've heard through the course of my life, Will's talk has to rank in the top five or so. If you're not familiar with Will Guidara, he's the author of the New York Times bestseller...
Dialogues #60 Read in browser↗️ "“mainstream feminism has morphed from a movement with both communitarian and libertarian strands, to one focused almost entirely on individual freedom, imagined as the property of functionally interchangeable ‘humans'.” - Mary Harrington Last week I introduced the first part of a two-part piece, where I talked about how men are doing generally. (Spoiler: not great.) In this piece, I'll give a few more recommendations for books that evaluate whether some of the...
Dialogues #59 Read in browser↗️ "Increasingly today, young men are the second sex in education...The gender equity movement deploys an unusual logic: gaps favoring men, those are evidence of invidious discrimination. They demand massive attention, including national legislation. Gaps favoring women, no matter how large, no matter how momentous or devastating to men's progress, those go unmentioned, unaddressed." - Christina Hoff Sommers A friend of mine recently told me he is in the early...
