thielfellowship.org

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/business/the-thiel-fellows-forgoing-college-to-pursue-dreams.html

http://www.hulu.com/20-under-20-transforming-tomorrow

Our friends over at the Thiel Foundation asked us to help spread the word about their fellowship program, which offers $100,000 grants to innovators age 19 or younger.

If you know of a very bright, energetic, and visionary young person, please bring this opportunity to his or her attention.

Of course, here at Foresight we hope that your protege will work on nanotechnology, and the Thiel Foundation is very interested in this field, but the fellowships are available in a wide range of areas of endeavor.

Below is their message. Think of this as a potentially large holiday gift to the smartest teenager you know!

Another great holiday gift — to yourself and society at large — is your membership in Foresight Institute. Donate by December 31 and your gift will be matched:
http://www.foresight.org/challenge

Best wishes,

Foresight Institute

from the Thiel Foundation:

We’d like to tell you about the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 that lets extraordinary young adults skip college and focus on their work, their research, and their self-education. We are delighted to announce that our friends at the Thiel Foundation are now accepting applications for the 2012 class of Fellows.

The future will not take care of itself. Global prosperity is not inevitable. The world will only get better if visionary people are creative and relentless about solving hard problems.

The 2011 class of Thiel Fellows includes 24 people who are tackling breakthroughs in hardware and robotics, making energy plentiful, making markets more effective, challenging the notion that there is only one way to get an education, and extending the human lifespan. Several of them have already launched companies, secured financing, and won prestigious awards. As they’re demonstrating, you don’t need college to invent the future (you can read about their progress in a recent article in TechCrunch).

If you’re under twenty and love science or technology, we hope you’ll consider joining the 2012 class of fellows. Go to ThielFellowship.org and apply to change the world. There’s no cost to apply, and they’re accepting applications through December 31. Fellows will be appointed this spring and begin two-year fellowships this summer.

If you’re twenty or over, we have a different request. Think of the smartest, most creative person you know who’s 19 or younger. Sit down and talk with that person about her or his goals and interests. For some people, such as future doctors, the time and cost of four years of college may be worth it. But for those who plan to invent things or start companies, starting now may make more sense. If your friend is interested, you might suggest pursuing an innovation or applying to the Thiel Fellowship.

Millions of people enjoy a higher quality of life because smart people like Steve Jobs, Muriel Siebert, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Zuckerberg, and hundreds of others skipped college to start a project that couldn’t wait.

We hope you’ll help me spread the word about the Fellowship. The time for innovation is now.

Please visit ThielFellowship.org to learn more.

Christine Peterson, Foresight Institute — a leading think tank and public interest organization focused on transformative future technologies. Founded in 1986, its mission is to discover and promote the upsides, and help avoid the dangers, of nanotechnology, AI, biotech, and similar life-changing developments. http://foresight.org/

From Breakthrough Philanthropy, an evening catalyzing radical advances in technology to address humanity’s greatest challenges, Dec 7th, 2010, in San Francisco. For more info, see the event Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/breakthroughp…

Last night Silicon Valley icon Peter Thiel, of PayPal fame, gathered eight of his favorite future-oriented organizations and a couple hundred of his wealthiest friends in an auditorium at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts and made a magnanimous offer. For every dollar attendees contribute to the organizations before New Year’s Day, Thiel’s foundation announced, the billionaire investor-philanthropist will contribute another dollar, up to a limit of $1,000 per organization per attendee.

If everyone who attended Thiel’s so-called “Breakthrough Philanthropy” event gives a full $8,000, Thiel could be on the hook for a lot of money. My own rough estimate is that 200 people were on hand—and 200 times $8,000 comes to $1.6 million.

It was a bold, assertive way to promote the fortunes of these unusual groups, which included the Foresight Institute, Humanity Plus, the Santa Fe Institute, the Seasteading Institute, the SENS Foundation, the Singularity Institute, Singularity University, and the X Prize Foundation. But Thiel is known an iconoclast who’s attracted to long bets and radical solutions; he possesses the sort of optimism that often seems to be engendered by (or perhaps engenders) extreme self-made wealth.

In “lightning presentations” of about five minutes each, representatives of Thiel’s chosen groups described their goals. These range from the merely ambitious—harnessing nanotechnology, in the case of the Foresight Institute, or sequencing the human genome more cheaply, in the case of the X Prize Foundation—to the barely conceivable and arguably loony, such as transhumanism (Humanity Plus), reversing aging (the SENS Foundation), and establishing ocean cities that function as independent countries (the Seasteading Institute).

In remarks at the event, Thiel drew a distinction between “extensive” technologies, which “take things that are working and replicate them,” and “intensive” technologies, which try to “take the things that are best in the world and make them qualitatively and dramatically better.” All eight of the groups included in the donor challenge have agendas that, to lay people, may sound “really weird and really strange,” Thiel acknowledged. But he argued that “it may be in the nature of things that are ‘intensive’ that any time you are doing something singular that’s never been done before…it will be seen as weird.”

…

“The future is not an abstraction,” Thiel summarized at last night’s event. “It is not something that just happens or that other people do. It is something we all participate in helping to create and forge and shape, and if we do that and set our minds to it, we can do a lot more.”

In the San Francisco Chronicle coverage “Peter Thiel seeks funding for the future” Casey Newton quotes Foresight President Christine Peterson:

Philanthropists should take bigger risks with their giving in hopes of making an investment that changes the world, says Facebook investor and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Thiel is bringing entrepreneurs and philanthropists together in San Francisco tonight (Tuesday) to showcase the work of eight science-driven organizations working on issues with big social consequences.

His nonprofit group, the Thiel Foundation, is encouraging philanthropists to donate more money to scientific pursuits that could lead to big breakthroughs in medicine, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, among other fields.

While some of the research may seem arcane, Thiel said he has found an eager audience in Silicon Valley.

“Within the tech industry, there are a large number of people who are very interested in these sorts of futuristic technologies,” Thiel said in a phone interview Monday. “It’s something that people are quite receptive to. They’ve made money in tech, and on the nonprofit side, it makes sense to re-invest at least part of that into nonprofits and foundations that have a technological orientation.”

The organizations include the Seasteading Institute, which promotes the construction of permanent dwellings at sea; the X Prize Foundation, which has funded innovations in space travel and automobile design; and the Foresight Institute, which promotes nanotechnology research. While much of philanthropy focuses on giving that helps its beneficiaries in the near term, Thiel hopes to persuade donors that they can better serve their legacy by making a few higher-risk, higher-reward investments.

“Some folks who have an unusually long time horizon, like Peter, are able to say look, I’m going to put aside the emotional satisfaction of a near-term payoff to go into this more abstract area and go for a really huge win,” said Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute.

Peterson’s group, which Thiel has donated to, promotes efforts that could ultimately lead to technology that allows tiny devices to repair bodies at the cellular level.

“We are very excited about the potential environmental benefits and the medical benefits,” she said. “We’ll be trying to get those across to the crowd (on Tuesday) and get them excited about taking action.”

More broadly, Thiel said, he hopes the research he’s promoting can inspire the general public.

“I think one of the reasons there’s so much more pessimism in the United States today than there would have been 40 years ago is that not only are we in a recession and financial crisis, but there’s also a sense that things aren’t going to get dramatically better or dramatically different,” he said. “Returning to the technological story and the technological vision of the future is in my view the only way we can really tell a powerful and positive story about creating a better society.”

Update: for an amateur video of Christine’s talk, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQCWtb2YRkU

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/cia-software-developer-goes-open-source-instead/

http://www.competinghypotheses.org

“It’s not *quite* released yet, but in theory it will show up there.

“Here’s how the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses process works:

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/art11.html

Analysis of competing hypotheses, sometimes abbreviated ACH, is a tool to aid judgment on important issues requiring careful weighing of alternative explanations or conclusions. It helps an analyst overcome, or at least minimize, some of the cognitive limitations that make prescient intelligence analysis so difficult to achieve.

ACH is an eight-step procedure grounded in basic insights from cognitive psychology, decision analysis, and the scientific method. It is a surprisingly effective, proven process that helps analysts avoid common analytic pitfalls. Because of its thoroughness, it is particularly appropriate for controversial issues when analysts want to leave an audit trail to show what they considered and how they arrived at their judgment.

“This reminded me of the ‘science court’ process that Eric [Drexler] described decades ago in Engines of Creation.  It sounds like it may have found an institutional home in the CIA and may be able to break out into broader society.”

Thanks for this, John.  We’ll watch it with interest!  —Chris Peterson

Topics include OpenPCR, DIY biology, open source hardware, brain preservation, synthetic biology, gene patents, open data, open access journals, reputation engines, crowd-funding and microfinance for science, citizen science, biohacking, open source biodefense, cure entrepreneurs, open source drug discovery, patent pools, tech transfer, and much more.

Here’s some advance media coverage:

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/07/07/the-open-science-shift/

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/07/diy-biotechnologists-go-looking-for-a-bigger-garage/59701/

If you can’t attend in person, watch the webcast live at:

http://fora.tv/live/open_science/open_science_summit_2010

Put it on your calendar now!  Or we’ll hope to see you in person, especially for the session where I’m speaking: “Safety and Security Concerns, Open Source Biodefense” at 5:15 PM on Friday.  –Chris Peterson

Open Science Summit 2010: Updating the Social Contract for Science 2.0

July 29-31 International House Berkeley
http://opensciencesummit.com

Ready for a rapid, radical reboot of the global innovation system for a truly free and open 21st century knowledge economy? Join us at the first Open Science Summit, an attempt to gather all stakeholders who want to liberate our scientific and technological commons to enable an new era of decentralized, distributed innovation to solve humanity’s greatest challenges.

In the last ten years, a collection of burgeoning movements has begun the herculean task of overhauling the outmoded institutions and worldviews that make up our global scientific governance system. Proponents of the Access to Knowledge movement (A2K) have united around the principle that data and knowledge are “anti-rivalrous,” the value of information increases as it spreads.

Open Access Journals have demonstrated a new path for publishing that utilizes the power of the internet to instantly distribute ideas instead of imposing artificial scarcity to prop up old business models. “Health 2.0” entrepreneurs are seeking to apply the lessons of e-commerce to empower patients.

However, these different efforts are each working on a piece of a problem without a view of the whole. It is not sufficient or realistic to tweak one component of the innovation system (eg, patent policy) and assume the others stay static. Instead, dynamic, interactive, nonlinear change is unfolding.

The Open Science Summit is the first and only event to consider what happens throughout the entire innovation chain as reform in one area influences the prospects in others. In the best case scenario, a virtuous circle of mutually reinforcing shifts toward transparency and collaboration could unleash hitherto untapped reserves of human ingenuity.

Hope to see you there!  —Chris Peterson

Watch it online or download it:

1. Get a vimeo account by registering.
2. Option-click on the download link close to the bottom right on the video’s page
3. Wait an hour It’s a gigabyte, almost.
(This is known to work in FireFox and Safari. Don’t know about other browsers. YMMV.)

Many many thanks to Monica Anderson for doing the video.

Of course, what the GOP apparat does is less important nowadays than it was. As I noted before, there’s a whole lot of disintermediation going on here — Scott Brown got money and volunteers via the Internet and the Tea Party movement, to a much greater degree than he got them from the RNC. Smart candidates will realize that, too.

And lies don’t work as well as they used to. Obama promised transparency and pragmatic good government, but delivered closed-door meetings and outrageous special-interest payoffs. This made people angry. If Republicans promise honesty and less-intrusive government, but go back to their old ways, the likelihood that the Tea Party will become a full-fledged third party is much greater. …

via Instapundit » Blog Archive » SO, BROWN WON. This is big news; while the White House is still in the healthcare bunker, things li….

We don’t deal with politics here but we are concerned with technological developments that improve social decision-making and governance.  The internet has clearly been such a technology.  As one very tiny part of the generation of computer scientists that built it, I will happily accept the plaudits of a grateful world in their behalf …

Of course, the Internet could be improved as a fact-finding device, and ought to, as Eric Drexler notes:

We could benefit immensely from a medium that is as good at representing factual controversies as Wikipedia is at representing factual consensus.

What I mean by this is a social software system and community much like Wikipedia — perhaps an organic offshoot — that would operate to draw forth and present what is, roughly speaking, the best evidence on each side of a factual controversy. To function well would require a core community that shares many of the Wikipedia norms, but would invite advocates to present a far-from-neutral point of view. In an effective system of this sort, competitive pressures would drive competent advocates to participate, and incentives and constraints inherent in the dynamics and structure of the medium would drive advocates to pit their best arguments head-to-head and point-by-point against the other side’s best arguments. Ignoring or caricaturing opposing arguments simply wouldn’t work, and unsupported arguments would become more recognizable.

Success in such an innovation would provide a single place to look for the best arguments that support a point in a debate, and with these, the best counter-arguments — a single place where the absence of a good argument would be good reason to think that none exists.

Turns out my wife’s iPhone had crashed — the software had wedged and there was no way to reboot.  The amusing, if you can call it that, fact was that her (employer-required) Windows PC had done the same thing the same day.  For the PC, which also ignored any attempt to reboot, we took the battery out and back in, forcing a cold start.

We are rapidly turning our civilization into software. As we do that, and as we build smarter and smarter AIs to do more and more important tasks, it will be important simply to be sure the software we write simply works right and is reliable.

A key design feature that makes natural control systems reliable, as well as adaptive and robust and resilient, is the inclusion of lots of feedback.  In the human brain, there is generally more feedback than forward signal along the major data pathways.  By contrast, the standard model of sequential programming has no feedback at all; in the simplest and most common coding styles, all the operations are done by dead reckoning. Consider an html renderer such as is showing you this page. There are plenty of sites whose pages come up with overprinted regions in some browsers — because the renderer doesn’t look where it’s writing.

It’s possible to do better, of course. In control systems, where feedback is essential, you have tight control loops that check and set, check and set, hundreds or thousands of times a second. Porting some knowledge of feedback in control systems back into systems software (and the rest of our software) would make it more reliable, as well as adaptive and robust and resilient. And as we turn our civilization into software, that’ll be a very good thing.