The Summer Program on Applied Rationality and Cognition (SPARC) is a free program that aims at helping high school students develop quantitative thinking skills and improve mental habits by applying techniques from decision theory, behavioral economics and statistics. It takes place at California State University, East Bay, typically for two weeks in late July. Boarding and food are provided free of charge.
Further reading
Open Philanthropy (2016) Center for Applied Rationality — SPARC, Open Philanthropy, July.
External links
SPARC. Official website.
Related entries
building effective altruism | Cambridge Summer Programme in Applied Reasoning | Center for Applied Rationality | effective altruism education | European Summer Program on Rationality | rationality | rationality community | research training programs
I’m not sure whether (1) this tag should also cover ESPR and/or CaSPAR or (2) there should be a separate tag for those. And if we go with (1), I’m not sure whether that should just be reflected in the text of this entry or also in the title (e.g., calling it “SPARC & ESPR” or “SPARC & CaSPAR” or “rationality summer camps”).
Edit: Yeah, now I feel like I really don’t want people to feel that we have to stick with this tag’s current scope just because the tag is now made. Feel just as free to propose a tag that covers multiple programs as you would’ve if I hadn’t yet made this tag. The text can easily be changed. (The reason I made this tag before commenting in the tag proposal thread is just that it was clear there should be some tag with this sort of scope, and I already had some posts open that I wanted to give the tag to.)
Related vague and uninformed thoughts:
Is the AI Safety Camp sufficiently similar to be mentioned in related entries?
Is this cluster of things notable enough that we should have a tag for summer camps, rationality camps, or something like that, even if we also have tags for each individual program/organisation/camp?
I think I really hate the name “rationality camps” for reasons I don’t really understand. (Maybe “rationality” is too close in my cognitive schema to “concentration”? Maybe it just sounds arrogant and cult-like?) But maybe a nearby name could be found.
I think it’s best to have separate entries for each, since these are different organizations (though it seems that both SPARC and ESPR are connected to CFAR). Feel free to create the other articles; otherwise I’ll create them myself tomorrow.
Yeah, I guess I was just unsure whether they were sufficiently notable and sufficiently separate (especially SPARC and ESPR) to warrant 2 or 3 separate entries, rather than just 1. But I was on the fence anyway, so your message tipped me over and I’ve now made the other two entries:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/espr
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/tag/caspar
(I haven’t done any tagging for them yet, though.)
(By the way, I like your habit of proposing an action, leaving time for someone to disagree before the action is taken, but also stating that you’ll do it if nothing is heard back by a certain time. This seems good for avoiding indefinite vague background deliberation, forgetting about the thing, and/or bystander effects. I’ve been doing this lately as well, and I think I picked it up from you, so thanks for that.)
I think I’ve previously been in a comment thread about how acceptable it is to make the first sentence(s) basically just copied (with attribution) from Wikipedia or the thing’s website, but I can’t remember where that thread was or what was said. Someone else can feel free to change these first sentences so they’re not just a quote, if that’s preferred.