We help thoughtful students solve hard problems.
Cofounders
Ashley Lin
Ashley Lin founded a nonprofit that brought online cultural exchange to >1,000 students in 35+ countries and wrote a book on community building.
Sydney Von Arx
Sydney Von Arx founded a coding bootcamp for kids and set up a summer program that teaches high school students quantitative reasoning.
Jonas Vollmer
Jonas Vollmer oversaw over $20 million in grants to high-impact projects. He previously co-founded and led an AI risk research non-profit with 20 full-time staff.
Instructors
Instructors will teach at multiple sessions, but not every instructor will attend all sessions.
Eli Tyre
Eli is a former instructor and curriculum developer for the Center For Applied Rationality, a non-profit that develops and teaches epistemic skills for reasoning about the world and improving one’s life.
Chana Messinger
Chana Messinger is a longtime teacher, speaker and writer. She taught math for 9 years, and has been giving workshops and coaching for learning how to think better for the last year.
She has blogged about and helped edit a book about rationality.
John Salvatier
John Salvatier trained as a chemical engineer and worked as a programmer. He built a popular Bayesian stats library, and has written about the surprising detailedness of reality.
Ross Rheingans-Yoo
Ross Rheingans-Yoo works at the FTX Foundation with a focus on ways of preventing catastrophic pandemics. He previously spent 5 years as a trader and educator at Jane Street, and conducts independent economic research on market design, matching, mechanisms, and networks. Ross blogs infrequently about a variety of topics at Icosian Reflections.
Andrew Masley
In addition to being a physics teacher, Andrew is a community builder for the Center for Effective Altruism in Washington, DC.
Thomas Kwa
Thomas Kwa is an undergraduate at Caltech studying computer science. He interned at a quant trading firm in 2021, and is spending this summer 2022 studying AI alignment.
Ricki Heicklen
Ricki Heicklen is a freelance teacher, techie, and data scientist. She previously worked as a quantitative trader at Jane Street Capital, researching US equities markets and auction structures. She enjoys thinking about optimization, ethics, and collaborative board games.
Aaron Scher
Aaron is a recent graduate of Pitzer College where he studied psychology and economics. He enjoys playing tennis and chess despite not being very good! He loves talking about big problems, emotions, and hearing about other people’s passions
Sydney Von Arx
Sydney Von Arx founded a coding bootcamp for kids and set up a summer program that teaches high school students quantitative reasoning.
Jonas Vollmer
Jonas Vollmer oversaw over $20 million in grants to high-impact projects. He previously co-founded and led an AI risk research non-profit with 20 full-time staff.
Ashley Lin
Ashley Lin founded a nonprofit that brought online cultural exchange to >1,000 students in 35+ countries and wrote a book on community building.
Our History
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