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The Education of Mark Zuckerberg: Lessons Learned from the People of Newark

presented by Dale Russakoff

You might have heard that this week Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced that they’re going to give away 99% of their Facebook stock in hopes of mak­ing the world a much bet­ter place for their new­born daugh­ter and her gen­er­a­tion. Now, I just want to be right up front with you. I have no inside infor­ma­tion about this fas­ci­nat­ing devel­op­ment. But what I do have is inside infor­ma­tion, the inside sto­ry, on a gift that this cou­ple made five years ago in their first act as philanthropists. 

The Conversation #5 — Andrew Keen

presented by Aengus Anderson, Andrew Keen, Micah Saul

We’ve got two para­dox­i­cal trends hap­pen­ing at the same time. The first is what I call in my book ​“the cult of the social,” the idea that on the net­work, every­thing has to be social and that the more you reveal about your­self the bet­ter off you are. So if your friends could know what your musi­cal taste is, where you live, what you’re wear­ing, what you’re think­ing, that’s a good thing, this cult of shar­ing. So that’s one thing that’s going on. And the oth­er thing is an increas­ing­ly rad­i­cal­ized indi­vid­u­al­ism of con­tem­po­rary, par­tic­u­lar­ly dig­i­tal, life. And these things seem to sort of coex­ist, which is para­dox­i­cal and it’s some­thing that I try to make sense of in my book.

Hacking Space Exploration and Science

presented by Ariel Waldman

Hacking sci­ence and space explo­ration isn’t just about get­ting excit­ed and mak­ing things. But it’s about get­ting excit­ed and mak­ing dis­rup­tive­ly acces­si­ble things. Things that real­ly dis­rupt the cur­rent state of sci­ence and a lot of the elit­ism around it, and tru­ly make it acces­si­ble for everyone.

The Conversation #4 — Colin Camerer

presented by Aengus Anderson, Colin Camerer, Micah Saul

We know very lit­tle about com­plex finan­cial sys­tems and how sys­temic risk, as it’s called, is com­put­ed and how you would man­age poli­cies. And if you look back at the finan­cial cri­sis, you can either say, as many econ­o­mists do, ​“It all had to do with badly-designed rules,” which may be part of the sto­ry; it’s cer­tain­ly part of the sto­ry. Or it may have to do with the inter­ac­tion of those rules and human nature, like mort­gage bro­ker greed, opti­mism… And you see it not just in indi­vid­u­als who now have hous­es and fore­clo­sure, but at the high­est levels.

The Conversation #3 — Peter Warren

presented by Aengus Anderson, Micah Saul, Peter Warren

Although our ulti­mate goal is pro­tect­ing bio­log­i­cal diver­si­ty on the land and pro­tect­ing the integri­ty of these nat­ur­al com­mu­ni­ties, the strate­gic way to get there is to pre­vent these ranch­es from being sub-divided. And it turns out the issue that these ranch­es are hav­ing, you know, they get togeth­er and talk and say, ​“Wow our neigh­bor over here sold out and that ranch got sub-divided…” every time that hap­pens, it puts pres­sure on the remain­ing ranch­ers who want to stay in ranching.

Challenging the Audience to Work in Anti-Disciplinary Spaces

presented by James Patten

I came into doing work in an antidis­ci­pli­nary space more or less by acci­dent. Back when I was apply­ing to uni­ver­si­ty, the schools would send out these books talk­ing about the dif­fer­ent pro­grams they offered and what each pro­gram was like. And for some rea­son I nev­er read any of those books. I just applied to engi­neer­ing school because I thought, ​“Oh, you know I like to make things, and engi­neer­ing school’s where you make things.” 

The Art of Discovery, As Seen by a Physicist

presented by Subodh Patil

The sci­en­tif­ic method was per­fect­ed in the cru­cible of nat­ur­al sci­ence, and physics in par­tic­u­lar. And an old pro­fes­sor of mine once told me that a good the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist is intrin­si­cal­ly a lazy per­son. And so these heuris­tics of ignor­ing super­flu­ous detail, sim­pli­fy­ing the prob­lem to its barest essen­tials, maybe even mak­ing a car­i­ca­ture out of it, solv­ing that sim­pler prob­lem. If you can’t solve that sim­pler prob­lem, solve an even sim­pler prob­lem. This actu­al­ly works in physics. Because the uni­verse is intrin­si­cal­ly a lazy place.

Making/Meaning in the Realm of Anti-Disciplinarity

presented by Sarah Brin

What does it mean to be antidis­ci­pli­nary? To me, it means strug­gle. Sometimes, work­ing in inter­dis­ci­pli­nary fields, I felt like I’ve maybe tried real­ly hard work­ing and work­ing and work­ing on a project, and I was­n’t see­ing any dif­fer­ence. Sometimes peo­ple would look at me and be like, ​“What are you even doing?” So, to me antidis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty means not only not work­ing in one spe­cif­ic field, but rather instead draw­ing from else­where to imag­ine some­thing new.

The Conversation #2 — Max More

presented by Aengus Anderson, Max More, Micah Saul

My main goal is not to die in the first place. I hope to keep liv­ing, hope­ful­ly long enough that sci­ence will have solved the aging prob­lem and I won’t have to die. But since I don’t know how long that’s going to take, cry­on­ics is the real back­up pol­i­cy for me.

Towards a Quantum Computer

presented by Jeremy O'Brien

From vast data cen­ters to mobile phones, the pow­er of com­put­ers con­tin­ues to trans­form our lives. But there are some prob­lems across arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, in the design of new mate­ri­als, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, and clean ener­gy devices that they will sim­ply nev­er solve. So even if we turned our entire plan­et into a giant super­com­put­er we would­n’t be able to solve these and many oth­er impor­tant prob­lems. The good news is that if we could build a com­put­ing device based on fun­da­men­tal quan­tum prin­ci­ples, we could.

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