The Arete Fellowship Syllabus

What this fellowship involves

Each week of the fellowship is made up of Core Materials and an Exercise, which fellows are expected to complete in advance of attending the weekly meeting. Typically, the core materials and the exercise together should take around 1 – 2 hours.

We expect fellows to complete this core reading in advance to help get the most out of the fellowship and to give a better experience to your peers. The exercises are designed to help you put the concepts from the reading into practice and should be helpful for making career and impact decisions. Beyond the required reading, there are more materials each week in Recommended Materials — these are all optional and explore the themes of the week in more depth and breadth. 

Approximate reading times are given for each of the core materials. Generally, we prefer that you to take your time and think through the readings instead of rushing through them.

How we hope you will approach the fellowship

Take ideas seriously. Often, conversations about ideas are like recreational diversions: we enjoy batting around interesting thoughts and saying smart things, and then we go back to doing whatever we were already doing in our lives. This is a fine thing to do — but at least sometimes, we think we should be asking ourselves questions like:

  • “How could I tell if this idea was true?”

  • “If it is true, what does that imply I should be doing differently in my life? What else does it imply I’m wrong about?”

And, zooming out: 

  • “Where are my blind spots?”

  • “Which important questions should I be thinking about that I’m not?”

Taking ideas seriously means wanting to make our worldviews as full and accurate as possible, since we see that having accurate beliefs allows us to make better decisions about things that we care about.

Disagreements are interesting. When thoughtful people with access to the same information reach very different conclusions from each other, we should be curious about why. Often, we tend to be incurious about this simply because it’s so common that we’re used to it. But if, for example, a medical community is divided on whether Treatment A or B does a better job of curing some disease, they should want to get to the bottom of that disagreement, because the right answer matters — lives may be at stake.

Strong opinions, weakly held. Often people abstain from trying to have opinions about things because they think things like “I’m not an expert” or “It’s hard to know for sure.” Instead, during this fellowship, we invite you to be bold enough to venture guesses, expressed clearly enough such that it’s easy for someone else, or evidence about the world, to prove you wrong. In the long run, we hope that you'll become stronger and more engaged thinkers; this seems more important than minimizing your error in the short run.

Reading List