Things SPARC

[EDIT 2018/03/05: This description seems significantly less accurate to me now than it did a few years ago, both because my views/values have changed substantially, and because SPARC has changed direction substantially since I attended as a junior counselor in 2015. I’ll leave it here as a reference, but should be taken with a grain of salt.]

I often get asked about what I learned from the SPARC summer camp. This is hard to describe and I never manage to give as a good of an answer as I want, so I want to take the time to write down something concrete now. For context: I attended SPARC in 2013 and 2014 and again as a counselor in 2015, so this post is long overdue (but better late than never).

(For those of you still in high school: applications for 2016 are now open, due March 1, 2016. The program is completely free including room/board and you don’t need rec letters, so there is no reason to not apply.)

The short version is that maybe 1/4 of the life skills I use on a regular basis are things I picked up from SPARC. (The rest came from some combination of math contests and living in college dorms.) On paper SPARC seems like a math or CS camp, but there is a strong emphasis on practicality in the sense that the instructors specifically want to teach you things that you can apply in life. So in addition to technical classes on Bayes’ theorem and the like, you’ll have classes on much “softer” topics like

• Posture (literally about having good body posture)
• Aversion factoring (e.g. understanding why I’m not exercising and fixing it)
• Expanding comfort zones (with hands-on practice; my year I learned to climb trees)

and so on. This makes it hard to compare to other math camps like MOP (though if you insist on drawing a comparison, I think many MOP+SPARC students agree they learned more from SPARC).

Some more testimonials:

• What benefits do students get from attending SPARC?
• What is like to attend SPARC?
• The SPARC video gives a good sense of the atmosphere at the program.

Now, here is my own list of concrete things which SPARC has taught me, in no particular order:

• Being significantly more introspective / reflective about life. Example: realizing that some class/activity/etc. are not adding much value to life and dropping them.
• Being interested in optimizing life in general; I now find it fun to think about how to be more productive and live life well the same way I like to think about hard math problems.
• Thinking about thinking: things like mental models, cognitive biases, emotions, aversions, System 1 vs System 2,
• Becoming very aggressive at conserving time. I’m much more willing to trade money for time, and actively asking whether I really need to do something, or if I can just axe it.
• Using game theory concepts to think about the world. College tuition is expensive because this is the Nash equilibrium. Recognizing real-life situations which are well understood as games, like prisoner’s dilemma, chicken, etc.
• Applying Bayes’ theorem and expected value to real life. Trying out X activity has constant cost but potentially large payoffs, hence large positive EV.
• Being able to use probabilities in a meaningful way. Being able to tell the difference between being 90% confident and 70% confident in an event happening.
• Actively buying O(n) returns for O(1) cost.
• Being more willing to take less conventional paths, like essentially dropping out of high school to train for the IMO (I describe this in the first FAQ here). Another good example I haven’t done myself (yet) is taking a gap year.
• Using Workflowy. It’s a big part of why I can think as clearly as I do. In context of SPARC, this is a special case of understanding the idea of working memory, which is also an idea I picked up from camp.
• Writing a lot more. This is probably actually a consequence of the things above rather than something that I directly learned from SPARC; some combination of understanding working memory well, and being much more reflective.
• Peer group and culture. This is a bigger one than people realize. In the same way that math contests establish a group of people where it’s cool to think about hard math problems, the SPARC network establishes a group of people with a culture of encouraging people to think about rationality. It’s very hard to be good at reflection in an isolated environment! SPARC lets you see how other people go about thinking about how to live life well and gives you other people to bounce ideas off of.

I’m sure there’s other things, but it’s hard for me to notice since it’s been so long since I had to live life pre-SPARC. And there’s some things that other people learned from SPARC that never stuck with me (lots of the social skills, for example). Much like your first time attending MOP, there will be more things to learn than you’ll actually be able to absorb. So the list above is only the things that I myself learned, and in fact I think the set of things you acquire from SPARC more or less molds to whichever particular things matter to you most.