These 11 days can change the trajectory of your life.
At the summer program, you will gain tools to make sense of the future, discuss global issues, and develop a framework that helps you reach your own conclusions about which areas to work on. And you’ll meet like-minded participants who are interested in these questions too.
Dates & Logistics
Fellows can choose from the following sessions:
- June 12 - June 23, 2022
- July 3 - July 14, 2022
- July 17 - July 28, 2022
- August 14 - August 25, 2022
In the San Francisco Bay Area, a five-minute walk from University of California, Berkeley.
To make sure it's accessible to everyone, the summer program is completely free (including travel, housing, food, and all other related expenses).
All Fellows will be invited to the summer program, but don’t need to attend. We trust Fellows to make informed choices about how to use their time.
We've thoughtfully developed the content of our summer program and think it is a great use of time, but it is only a strongly recommended option for winners, not a requirement.
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.
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.
Curious about what the Atlas Fellowship summer program looks like?
We have 4–7 hours of workshops and activities each day. None of the content is mandatory; we trust students to identify whether attending a session will be more useful for them than their counterfactual (what they could’ve been doing otherwise, such as a 1-on-1 chat with a fellow participant).
As a result, Fellows co-create a learning experience tailored to their unique interests. During time outside of structured workshops, students generally relax, talk with each other and the instructors, or organize their own optional activities like board games and hikes.
Morning
Afternoon
Evening
Curriculum Pillars
How should the US tackle climate change? A plastic bag ban may actually increase emissions, though it would decrease litter.
What career will make you happiest and have the best impact on the world? A doctor typically saves far fewer lives than a quantitative trader donating 1% of their income, and a talented researcher or entrepreneur might save more lives still.
Too often, these decisions are automatic, influenced by our cognitive biases or dictated by social norms. We want to help students actually think through questions like these and reach their own conclusions.
Some experts saw COVID coming. Do you have a guess at what the next disaster could be? Are you prepared for it? Being able to model the future is about being less confused. We are pretty good at modeling objects and humans; for example, we have a good idea of what happens if we blindly try to cross a busy road.
The future is a bit fuzzier often due to a lack of knowledge about how things work. We want to demystify the future and help students predict what actually happens, so they can better orient their plans and decisions.
Yeah, someone should do that.
Why not you?
What are your goals?
Do your current most-costly actions help you achieve those goals? What unconventional actions can you take to get there faster?
People often have great ideas that they never take action on. We want to help students become more agentic by teaching things like basic startup skills, resolve cycles and goal factoring, and embedding themselves into communities of people who consistently take initiative to turn their ideas into reality. By practicing agency and planning, students have a shot at creating massive impact.
.png){kind=small}