Thiel Fellowship application essays
Drafted in late December 2010 for Peter Thiel’s newly announced “20 Under 20” Fellowship — $100,000 to drop out of college and build something. Alyssa was 19, a Yale undergraduate, and Program Coordinator of Humanity+. The five essays below answer the application’s prompts in order: a contrarian belief, a plan to change the world, current activities, achievements, and a previous startup.
Essay 1. Tell us one thing about the world that you strongly believe is true, but that most people think is not true.
Limit: 1,000 words.
In short, I believe that all large Western institutions have become sclerotic, dysfunctional, corrupt and generally broken, and that we must create new institutions adapted for the environment of the 21st century for our civilization to continue to prosper.
Every civilization rests on the strength of its major institutions. For us in America, these include such groups as the federal and state governments, the universities and educational system, the healthcare system, the major corporations, and the financial system. However, as institutions grow older, the historical track record shows that they tend to stop fulfilling their original purpose, and become focused merely on protecting and enriching themselves. For example, the imperial Chinese examination system was originally designed to select the best qualified for public office. But, by the 18th century, it became a structure merely designed to exclude those who did not obey its mandate to spend lots of time memorizing literature, and imperial China fell into decline.
America has now fairly clearly reached that point. There are infinitely many examples, but they all tend to show the same pattern: increasing expenditure, an increasing level of technological capability, and a constant or even declining output by the institution in question. For instance, from 1900 to 1950, life expectancy in America rose rapidly, though our understanding of biology and how to find cures for diseases was still quite primitive, and expenditures were (by modern standards) low. Nowadays, healthcare spending per capita is increasing much more rapidly, around 7% annually since 1980. Yet, increases in life expectancy have actually slowed down.
Another example is our transportation infrastructure, maintained by the government. All major forms of transportation (cars, trains, buses, planes) existed in roughly their present form in 1970; nothing truly new has come into mass consumer use since then. We do not lack for ideas or technology, such as maglev and cheap supersonic aircraft. What we lack is government institutions capable of developing them. It is virtually inconceivable that the government now would implement, for instance, a national high-speed rail system on the same scale as the 1950s Eisenhower interstate system.
The educational system is particularly prone to these problems. Expenditure per student per capita has grown at an incredible rate since 1975. Yet, not only are we not becoming more knowledgeable in the usual sense (of literacy rates etc.), but the dysfunction in the labor market is confirmation of the intuitive perception that the standard educational track is also failing to teach employment skills. With every subsequent recession since 1981, instead of quick bursts of unemployment followed by recovery, what we see is successively ever-larger numbers of jobs lost, and ever-longer timescales to regain equilibrium (1982 was two years, while 2001 was four years, and 2008 is likely to be even longer).
And, to name a problem which has been fairly well-recognized already, our major investment and commercial banks are not run for the benefit of the customers or even the shareholders, but for the benefit of upper management — who often not only provide little value, but actively stymie the process of obtaining necessary capital. Investment banking, one of the biggest financial services, has shifted away from helping companies float bond issues to mergers and acquisitions. A recent survey showed that, though 80% of M&A deals were rated afterwards by management as successful, more than 75% created no value or destroyed value for stockholders, showing that top i-bankers are very skilled at convincing corporate management to undertake deals which are beneficial to them, but destructive to the overall economy.
What has been causing these problems? This is more speculative than the above, but I currently think the primary cause is a massive explosion in rent-seeking behavior. As a group becomes more prosperous, it becomes more worthwhile for people to seek to exploit them, by forcing the group to either pay them off or have their work disrupted. Such groups are ubiquitous in today’s society, such as public-sector unions that won’t let government operate without paying workers well above-market wages, government bureaucrats who will block new projects unless their demands are satisfied, and universities that will deny diplomas if the student has not been present and paying tuition for four years (regardless of their academic accomplishments), to name but a small sampling.
The key question is, then: what can we do about this situation? After all, if we are all doomed regardless, there is little point in discussing these issues, because we can’t change anything anyway. Most efforts to date have focused on reforming the old institutions, and their poor track record suggests that this is largely a waste of time. Hence, what we should focus on is building new institutions. Entrepreneurship, building new institutions directly, is a critical step towards this, but generally, companies and non-profits focus only on one specific sector (Google on search and advertising, Microsoft on Windows and Office, etc.), so no one company will solve our society-wide problem. Hence, we also need new meta-entrepreneurship institutions, to accelerate the process of entrepreneurship itself. The Thiel Fellowship is a new institution that I believe may become one of the most important of these, and so while I am delighted to have the opportunity to apply myself, if I were over the age limit, I would still do what I could to encourage such projects.
Essay 2. How do you want to change the world?
Limit: 1,000 words.
Although I have many intermediate goals, my ultimate goal is to solve most of the problems of mankind, by taking problem-solving methods which we have already developed, and applying them to tackle our most pressing difficulties. With these methods, before the end of the 21st century, we should be able to solve poverty, aging, most diseases, most crime, and the crippling lack of freedom that characterizes so much of the world today. Equally important is preventing 21st century technology gone wrong from causing the destruction of the human species, and the consequent loss of the galactic civilization we might later create.
The most powerful of our methods, of course, is science. The scientific method has allowed us to advance from the ancient world, with a tenth of our GDP, half of our life expectancy, and no modern conveniences, to the world we are fortunate enough to inhabit today. Every year, everyone knows that the continued progression of science results in new and better technologies and an improved standard of living. However, this system’s most important flaw is that most of the effort of the best and brightest scientists goes into fields such as superstring theory, loop quantum gravity and astrophysics, which are widely regarded in the intellectual community as being the most prestigious. These fields, although certainly interesting and deserving of funding, should not be the primary focus of our top minds at a time when the very existence of our species is in serious jeopardy. At the very least, one can make the argument that, if our civilization or entire species is annihilated by superweapons, even less work would be done in the less practical fields than if we had chosen to shift our focus away from them in the first place and saved ourselves.
On the flip side, many of the efforts to solve our most serious problems receive little attention from the best scientists, and hardly any funding. For instance, looking at the numbers, it is very clear that humanity’s most pressing disease is aging, as it kills more people than every other disease combined. And every year, in somewhat of an ironic twist, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on efforts to merely look younger. Yet, efforts to end or at least seriously impede the fundamental processes of aging through biotechnology go mostly ignored. Given that we don’t actually know if the problem is even that difficult, because of the paucity of efforts to attack it, every marginal dollar or research-hour directed into ending aging should therefore be expected to have huge benefits.
Another such underfunded approach is molecular nanotechnology. As originally described by Eric Drexler during the 1980s and 90s, a successful molecular manufacturing technology would allow construction of most items one might want to use, from laptops to tractor trailers, with a series of instructions, the necessary raw materials and energy. Such a development would result in a true post-scarcity economy, not in the sense that all scarcity would be eliminated, but in that most consumer goods would be available to the point of satiation at sufficiently little cost to provide them freely to everyone. It would also, as a relatively minor side-effect, solve Third World poverty and hunger (though not issues such as corruption). Again, however, the scientific efforts towards MNT have mostly been hijacked by an assortment of groups seeking funding for fairly ordinary chemistry research and engineering, which got labeled as “nanotechnology” despite bearing little resemblance to MNT. Current consensus estimates are that less than 2% of the NSF’s annual budget would be needed to develop MNT within a decade, an amount that could very reasonably be raised by me working in concert with other Thiel Fellows, and the technoactivist / Silicon Valley community generally.
Even given the many positive benefits of technology, we also cannot ignore the fact that the technologies of the 21st century, such as MNT, biotechnology and strong AI, will likely be powerful enough to cause the annihilation of the human species. At the present time, there exists no mechanism whatever for reliably ensuring that technology capable of destroying civilization does not become widespread. One can argue what the best mechanism would be, but we simply must have such a mechanism in place, and soon, if we wish to avoid annihilation. I personally must develop such a mechanism, if no one else is willing and able to do so. If one is not developed, then our history of fumbling and arms races with the first such technology we created — nuclear weapons — shows that our species will most likely be dead after the third or fourth round of Russian roulette. I hope that all reasonable people can agree with me that this is an unacceptable outcome, which absolutely must be prevented.
Essay 3. Please describe your activities and clubs.
Limit: 200 words.
Very briefly, I am Director and Program Coordinator of Humanity+, the world’s leading transhumanist nonprofit, and one of the orgs at the Thiel Breakthrough Philanthropy event. As Program Coordinator, I am the officer with overall responsibility for practical management of Humanity+, defined as “establishing and managing the day-to-day operations and internal processes of Humanity+, including establishing employee requirements and managing employees.” I am also a part-time consultant for Ray Kurzweil, assisting him with research, writing, journalism, web administration, programming, data analysis and a number of other tasks, and more recently for an embryonic-stage biotech hedge fund currently developing its first set of models. I do a large amount of volunteer work and occasional writing for H+ Magazine , am website administrator for the Yale Student Roundtable, writer for the Yale chapter of The Triple Helix , and am a member of many science, technology and futurism-focused societies and informal social networks. In my spare time, I like to ponder and discuss the future of humanity generally and Western civilization specifically, play video games, go hiking with friends, work on Project Euler math / computer science problems, and generally advocate for saner politics.
Essay 4. Please describe any achievements and prizes.
Limit: 200 words.
Most recently, I organized the Humanity+ @ Caltech conference (with Ben Goertzel and Amy Li), a 150-person gathering with several dozen moderately-famous speakers on topics such as AI, biotech, life extension, brain emulation, art and business. Other accomplishments with Humanity+ include working with David Orban and editor RU Sirius to re-launch H+ Magazine after funding was cut by the previous owner, re-starting the Humanity+ Affiliate program, revamping our website, raising $4,000 a year in new membership dues and creating a better membership structure. I also created better registration tracking and analytics spreadsheets for the 2009 and 2010 Singularity Summits, and generally managed the website for both events. 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 I entered college, I did the research for the 08–09 Uncertain Future world-modeling project, competed in the 2007 National Science Bowl, was a finalist at the 2006 National Chemistry Olympiad, and got the highest overall SAT scores among seventh-graders in New York state.
Essay 5. Have you ever started a business or other organization? If yes, in 500 words or fewer, please describe the organization you started and your role.
Limit: 500 words.
During the summer of 2009, me and two recent Harvard alums named Rich and Graham worked on a web startup, roughly patterned after the Paul Graham / Y Combinator / Web 2.0 model. The basic premise of the company 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 they could also be filtered by geographical area, type of story, type of location, etc. We reasoned that this type of filtering would provide a large volume of interesting content to many users with different locations and interests. Every venue where these stories took place, such as restaurants, bars and clubs, was also listed on the site. Once we got a large amount of traffic, our plan was to charge venues for customizing their pages and adding advertising, since these forms of ads would get the venues more business.
The division of labor we came to was that I would handle the programming and overall management for the website, Rich (who was in software product management) would handle sales, advertising and acquiring users, and Graham (who was in private equity) would find investment. Although I hesitate to over-inflate my own accomplishments, I believe I did succeed in building a decent-quality and well-functioning, if not exceptional, website with most of the features I wanted. However, by the time school resumed in September, we had not gotten a large userbase (we showed friends and family the site, but we didn’t get viral takeoff) or real interest from investment groups. After a month or two of negotiating, we agreed that I would retain rights to the code and web design that I had created, but that Rich and Graham would no longer continue working with me on the project. I tried working with the code, and actually re-tooled it to provide a better place for people to post fan-fiction, but dropped the project after some additional analysis showed that the Y Combinator / Web 2.0 startup model overall appeared to have lost its high risk-adjusted returns.
Although the company was nominally a failure, I did gain a lot of valuable experience from it, most importantly on web-based programming (it was my first commercial-scale web programming project) and how to deal with business partners. I also realized that, in the modern business environment, it was essential to solve what I now call the zero-marginal-cost problem: since information has essentially zero marginal cost, competition will tend to push the amount that a website can charge the user to zero, and indeed, virtually all popular websites are free. Any Internet-based company, I now firmly believe, should be able to provide a clear explanation of how they will overcome this and still generate large amounts of revenue.