Existential Hope Drop #23: Danielle Strachman, 1517 Fund
Education, Agency, and the Ability to Experiment
This month, we chat with Danielle Strachman, who is passionate about disrupting education. She cofounded Innovations Academy, was on the founding team of the Thiel Fellowship, and is a co-founder and partner at the 1517 fund.
We discuss the importance of education, community, straying out of the mainstream, emotional intelligence, and trying the "weird".
Explore her vision of the future in this podcast episode and through an AI artwork inspired by her vision.
Danielle's Mentioned Resources
Heightened Learning – Danielle's initial tutoring website
Innovations Academy Charter School – Danielle's running charter school
Homeschool with Moonrise – a homeschooling collective
Acceleration Studies Foundation [Public archive] – John Smart
Education, Agency, and the Ability to Experiment
Danielle envisions a world where fostering personal agency and curiosity is the key to progress. She believes that technology, particularly AI, can catalyze human potential and societal transformation, and she emphasizes the importance of environments that champion experimentation and a fail-forward mentality.
Specifically, she advocates for special economic zones as laboratories for innovation, suggesting governance that adapts to technological advancements. She dreams of a solarpunk future, where sustainability is achieved through technological and natural harmony.
Acknowledging the complexities ahead, she views the journey to this future as requiring a balance between innovation and ethics. Her vision is grounded in the belief in the human capacity to navigate the unknown and transform existential risks into opportunities for growth.
About the art
This art piece was created with the help of Dall–E 3.
Related Xhope Library Recommendations:
External Tools: Confronting Stagnation: What's Going Wrong?
An Era of Stagnation and Universal Institutional Failure - Peter Thiel, Eric Weinstein. On why and how innovation and scientific progress are declining.
Growth, Progress, Culture - Patrick Collison. Asks if growth, progress, and culture are declining and what we can do about it.
The Case Against Education - Bryan Caplan. Discusses the problems with today’s educational system and gives a few suggestions for alternatives.
Breakthrough Science Roadmap, Life in 2050 – Prime Movers Lab. This blog envisions a roadmap of technological and scientific breakthroughs aimed at addressing global challenges like climate change and poverty, aiming to enhance human wellbeing and create a world of abundance.
NEWS FROM THE XHOPE ECOSYSTEM
2024 Hackathon: Prototyping Institutions for Transformative AI Scenarios – Existential Hope
Congratulations to our winning team, the Conscious Tech Collective. They shared their vision for the Flourishing Foundation, designed to direct AI towards what really matters: our well-being & connection with ourselves, others, and the planet. Given that our existing incentive landscape is awful for our well-being, deploying AI into this landscape seems dire – AI is going to be really great at optimizing for our revealed preference without supporting our deep fulfilment.
They argue that we need to shift the incentives towards models & deployments that support our well-being and help us cultivate meaning. They're excited about being able to measure the effects of products on wellbeing, as well as supporting those products which direct AI towards improving wellbeing.
2024 Vision Weekends: Paths to Progress
Early bird tickets are open for Vision Weekend 2024!
Instead of holding both Vision Weekends back to back like every year, this year, the Europe edition of Vision Weekend will be held in summer in Germany, while the US edition of Vision Weekend will be held in the Bay Area in winter. This means you can easily join the growing pool of attendees joining both events.
Vision Weekend Europe: 12th - 14th July, Bückeburg Castle, Lower Saxony, Germany
Vision Weekend USA: 6th - 8th December, San Francisco, USA
This year’s main conference track is dedicated to “Paths to Progress”; meaning you will hear 10+ invited presentations from Foresight’s core community highlighting paths to progress across our different focus areas.
Purchase your early bird tickets!
Realizing Aspirational Futures – New FLI Grants Opportunities
The Future of Life Institute has launched two new grant opportunities under its Futures Program to promote the beneficial use of AI:
Research evaluating AI's impact on achieving United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to poverty, healthcare, energy, and climate change
Innovative designs for global governance mechanisms to oversee advanced AI systems.
Winners will receive a one-time grant of $15,000 for research advancement. These initiatives aim to foster an evidence-based understanding of AI's benefits and develop frameworks for its safe and equitable governance.
Applications are open until the 1st of April. Apply.
Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet – Dr Hannah Ritchie, Our World in Data
Dr Hannah Ritchie is a Senior Researcher in the Programme for Global Development at the University of Oxford. She is also Deputy Editor and Lead Researcher at the highly influential online publication Our World in Data.
"It’s become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change. We are constantly bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won’t be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, and that we should reconsider having children. In this radically hopeful book, Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. In fact, the data shows we’ve made so much progress on these problems that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in human history.
These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone."
Learn more about our work at existentialhope.com.