TED Fellowship application essays
Drafted in February 2011 for the TED Fellows program, which sent winners to TED Global in Edinburgh fully funded, with reasonable odds at the main TED in Long Beach and a small chance at a speaking slot. Alyssa was 20, a Yale undergraduate, Executive Director of Humanity+, and consulting part-time for Ray Kurzweil. The application asked the usual questions about current activity and accomplishments, plus a couple of less standard ones — what to be passionate about outside one’s work, an example of something one has been part of that one considers unique, a question the application should have asked, and a memorable anecdote.
What is your current primary activity?
Limit: 1,500 characters.
My current primary activity is studying economics at Yale. Although economics is what I’m listed as studying, I take advantage of my student status in order to explore a wide variety of fields, such as mathematics, history, physics, and astronomy. As part of attending Yale, I am also involved with student discussion groups, two of which I administer the website for. I am currently organizing and promoting the latest talk I arranged at the university, where my friend Michael Vassar will come up from New York City and speak to the students about artificial intelligence, rationality, the scientific method, and the future of the human species.
What are you best known for?
Limit: 1,500 characters.
I am probably best known for my activities as the youngest-ever board member and Executive Director of Humanity+, such as organizing and promoting our conference at Caltech last December, which got a decent amount of media attention and had about 150 attendees. Humanity+, founded in 1998 by Oxford philosophers Nick Bostrom and David Pearce, is the world’s leading nonprofit for the ethical use of technology to extend human capabilities. We have about seven thousand members and forty chapters worldwide, and we hold conferences, run H+ Magazine , publish books, and administer the Gada Prizes. As Executive Director, I am responsible for overall management and administration: talking to the media, writing the newsletter, recruiting members, organizing chapters, and planning events. In five months, I have so far succeeded in getting several thousand new members, four new major donors, hundreds of thousands of website pageviews, and lots of new projects started.
What other achievements (not only academic) would you like to share?
Limit: 1,500 characters.
I have been fairly successful at writing, and my writings have been featured on the front pages of Slashdot, Reddit, and Hacker News. I occasionally present at conferences, often as the youngest presenter out of several hundred attendees. I also administered the website for the 2009 and 2010 Singularity Summits, international conferences with about 800 attendees, and got many additional registrations through market research, analytics, and discount programs.
In terms of prizes, I won first place with a perfect score in the NES/MAA 2009 Collegiate Mathematics Competition, won Yale’s Barge Mathematics Prize, and was named Meritorious Winner in the national Mathematical Contest in Modeling. Before college, I did the research for the Singularity Institute’s Uncertain Future project, which was the first-ever mathematically self-consistent future-technology modeling web app; came in 17th in the 2007 National Science Bowl; got into the top 100 at the 2006 National Chemistry Olympiad; and got the highest SAT scores among seventh-graders in New York state.
Beyond your work and studies, what are you passionate about?
Hobbies, causes, activities, issues — please do not talk about your work in this section.
I try to run my life like a startup, and so there isn’t really a clear division between “work” and “not work.” For example, I am currently editing a book for my friend James Miller, an economics professor at Smith. Even though he is paying me, I see this as much less of a serious “job” and more of a hobby than my work with Humanity+, because I have less responsibility. This month I will be attending SXSW, which is a fun conference — but I will also be doing promotion for several nonprofit orgs there.
My ultimate passion is not any one activity or project, but the end goal of solving most of the world’s problems and making the Earth a really nice place to live for everyone. Because so few people are pursuing that as their main overall goal, I believe I can personally have an important impact on the world by using science to get the largest possible return in terms of amount of good done per hour of time invested. I want to move forward anything that will have a large positive impact, whether it be research on anti-aging technology, building the next generation of 3D printers, artificial intelligence, or community organizing. That’s why I try to focus on early-stage technologies: it’s easy to do something small now that will have a big impact down the line, after the technology has matured.
Share an example of something you have been part of (created, led, or joined) that you consider unique, even if no one else does. Why do you think it is mould-breaking?
Limit: 2,250 characters.
The Singularity Institute’s Uncertain Future project, which I was lead researcher for, definitely strikes me as something unique. A large number of people try to predict the future; however, these predictions are often vague, so that any outcome can be claimed as accurate, and contradictory, in that experts will often give probabilities that are mathematically inconsistent. The Uncertain Future was a future-prediction web application with two major unique features: it used precise mathematical models, which were formally proven to be consistent; and it allowed anyone to make predictions, by giving them a range of expert opinions about the model’s parameters and then allowing them to select what they felt were the best values.
What questions should we have asked, but didn’t?
Tell us something about yourself we don’t know yet. Limit: 2,250 characters.
I think the biggest question that applications don’t usually ask is: what projects have you done outside of your work or school life? A large percentage of the students at Yale do things like volunteer, travel overseas, and work on research projects — but these are almost always done through some sort of official Yale program. History, meanwhile, shows that the biggest wins, those that really improve life as we know it, are almost always done outside of any overarching institution. Google, the Wright airplanes, the first PCs, and even chocolate chip cookies were all done by individuals who saw an opportunity and took the initiative to act on it themselves.
I think my earlier attempt at starting a Web 2.0 company is a good example of something that falls into this category. During the summer of 2009, I worked with two recent Harvard alums named Rich and Graham on a web startup called EpicNight, roughly patterned after the Paul Graham / Y Combinator / Web 2.0 model. The business plan was to set up a website where people would post stories about interesting things that they did last night. Users rated the submissions based on their quality, and the submissions could also be filtered by geographical area, type of story, and type of location. Every venue where these stories took place — restaurants, bars, clubs — was also listed on the site. Once we got a large amount of traffic, the plan was to charge venues for customizing their pages and adding advertising, since these forms of ads would get the venues more business.
I succeeded in building a decent-quality and well-functioning, if not exceptional, website with most of the features I wanted: dynamic page-refreshing menus, interfaces with Yelp and Google Maps, and a bunch of different content filters. However, by the time school resumed in September, we had not gotten a large user base (we showed the site to friends and family, but didn’t get viral takeoff) or real interest from investment groups, so we decided to drop the project.
Can you share a memorable anecdote from your life that will give us a further sense of what makes you tick?
When I was in high school, I met a friend of mine named Michael Anissimov, who ran a popular technology blog. He thought I was a good writer, and I needed money, so he offered me a part-time job writing science articles for a website called WiseGeek. I had fun writing the articles, and after I had written about a dozen of them, he offered to send me my pay, which came to about $100. This created the interesting problem of how to actually send me the money. Since I was under 18, I couldn’t get a bank account, and since I didn’t have a bank account or credit card, I couldn’t make withdrawals from my PayPal account.
The solution we came up with was that I would walk down to the local post office, about five miles away, and open up a PO Box for myself. The Post Office allowed minors to open boxes, so I printed out the necessary forms and tried to walk down there. The first time I had to turn back, because I left a little before rush hour and couldn’t find a way to cross a freeway interchange without getting run over. The second time I left on Saturday, made it through, and opened the box; the third time I found an envelope with the $100 in it waiting for me. It took about ten hours altogether, but I managed to find a way to do it.