Building Hackathons
Reject Stagnation, Embrace Progress
This is a copy of the letter we sent out to the first batch of our Hackathon participants for the Summer ‘24 batch, which focused on the intersection between AI and longevity.
The original thesis behind this hackathon is simple: can students accelerate progress through competitive hackathons?
Outside of computer science, progress in natural sciences (Physics, Chemistry and Biology) has significantly slowed down since the 1970s. If you’d like to learn more about this stagnation, read: Where is My Flying Car , The Great Stagnation , Scientific Freedom and Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find.
For some, this slow down in natural sciences is due to academia’s broader hijacking by social sciences departments. Others believe it’s due to over-regulation, over-centralisation or poor economic incentives. The Unabomber even took this stagnation to mean we are at the end of history.
Whatever the true source of the problem, it is clear we will need to come up with alternative routes to achieve scientific progress, aided by a largely unregulated, mostly decentralized tool, with uniquely great economic incentives called technology.
Data science competitions and software hackathons offer a format with the largest surface area for potential solutions to be discovered, and are incentivized to have low barriers to entry. Turning these hackathon ideas into startups is the second key insight we look to implement, placing them in a faster moving, less regulated, and better incentivized environment in order to prosper.
Can the challenges scientists face be the subject of tech competitions? Are open competitions an effective way to take on these technical challenges? Can open-source accelerate research, so that no problem has to be solved twice? Are students good enough to be part of the solution?
The first hackathon focuses exclusively on longevity, as the barrier to entry for life sciences and biology seems to be lower than physics and chemistry. If the thesis is proven to be correct, we will continue organizing similar hackathons throughout the world and collaborate with researchers to address the obstacles they face. If the thesis is incorrect, then we will continue to iterate towards a solution for the existential problem of stagnation.
Thank you for being a part of this experiment, and good luck.
- Tom
To see the results of this experiment, follow us on X.