A workshop to develop curriculum for the 2013 Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition (SPARC).
If you’re reading this and have ideas for how to fund the camp itself, please contact me, Paul Christiano or Jacob Steinhardt!
Update: the SPARC 2013 website and application are now online.
Who’s involved. SPARC is a camp for high school students with top national rankings on mathematics competitions, being organized by International Math Olympiad (IMO) alumni Paul Christiano (EECS PhD student at Berkeley) and Jacob Steinhardt (AI PhD student at Stanford), and the Center for Applied Rationality. Other instructors will include me, Nisan Stiennon (Stanford math PhD student), and Yan Zhang (MIT math PhD student, IMO alumnus).
Teaching objectives. Since SPARC 2012 was the first running of the camp, we learned a lot and will probably revamp the curriculum quite a bit for next year, but I expect we will continue with three main teaching objectives as we did last year, because the students really seemed to like it:
- Mathematical tools to help students parse world-scale decisions (e.g. basic machine learning methods, evaluating the effectiveness or riskiness of public policies, the efficiency of charities…),
- The skill of noticing standard cognitive biases our own decisions and decisions of others (e.g. in choosing a career, in choosing a project…), and
- Productivity and people-skills practice to help students integrate with teams that will work on important problems (e.g. social comfort when talking to strangers, learning from conversations, ways to manage personal and work habits…)