I wrote these in 2022. The first round in October/November and the second round during December, Christmas break mostly. I am posting these because there aren’t any other recent examples of deep springs applications essays online. I was able to get in during an application cycle with “over 250 applicants”. In bold are the essays I felt I did better/put more time and effort into at the time. My perspectives/stances on many of the issues/subjects raised have changed since.
Round 1:
- In what ways do your behaviors escape the boundaries of your intentions? (650 words)
- Please read the letter to potential applicants. Given the nature of the Deep Springs program: Why does Deep Springs matter to you right now? 300 words
- Do you want kids? Why or why not? 300 words
- Scientific understanding evolves. (Think, for instance, of the shifts in our understanding of matter since Bohr & Rutherford proposed their model of the atom in 1913.) Given such instability, do you think scientific consensus can claim authority? If so, on what basis? 800 words
- L.L. Nunn, the founder of Deep Springs, wrote to the Student Body of 1923, “‘For what came ye into the wilderness?’ Not for conventional scholastic training; not for ranch life; not to become proficient in commercial or professional pursuits for personal gain. You came to prepare for a life of service, with the understanding that superior ability and generous purpose would be expected of you.” This relationship between a life of service and education is not necessarily straightforward. How would you describe the relationship between intellectual inquiry and service to humanity? (450 words)
Round 2:
- Write a tragedy. (100 words)
- What have you been thinking about recently? (300 words)
- How is manual labor relevant to a liberal arts education? (350 words)
- Identify a cliche and explain the terrifying truth it conceals. (500 words)
- Do you hold any moral principle to be absolutely true? Explain. (750 words)
In what ways do your behaviors escape the boundaries of your intentions? (650 words)
I am a mathematician, tech tinkerer, scientist, and a little socially awkward. When I was in lower school, scientific and mathematical excellence correlated with “success” and in these subjects, I found skill and joy. They helped me manifest a story about who I should and could be – an exceptional quantitative thinker. However, the effects of creating and contextualizing my life in this story were not decisively positive, because my story chronically under-valued social and other “soft” skills, this, like my enjoyment of math, also seeped into my identity. Though I have long since abandoned this narrowing story, the behaviors I practiced when I believed it, influence who I am today, for better and worse. When my intentions change because of new beliefs about the world, I intend for my behaviors to follow suit, but because I have previously practiced other behaviors which linger even after my intentions change, the adjustments can take time.
I live and have grown up in a very affluent and educated community of liberals in NYC, and this entails lots of moralizing about political and social issues. The environment has centered social awareness and responsibility as core values of mine. Eventually, however, I sensed hypocrisy between the language and actions of the people who occupy this social bubble with me. There is constant blame of “external” economic and political forces for social ills, either the Trump voters, the oil lobbies, or the lack of social safety net. While there is constant talk about the broken system, there is little recognition that the top one percent control an outsized portion of financial and social resources.
Asking what it would mean to recognize my social position and be more honest to the morality that was constantly invoked in our political and social language, I found effective altruism, a group of philosophers and philanthropists focused on utilizing consequential utilitarianism to guide their action toward social change. This was a more honest, precise, and humanitarian mode of thinking which changed my understanding of contributing to collective good. Like it did in lower school, this fostered a new iteration of my selfhood: I could make good on my education, health, and opportunities by choosing to give back effectively rather than further reinforcing the status quo.
If you believe people have equal value and that we can do things to improve people’s lives, it is hard to deny the strength of this moral prerogative. My story implies that because I have outsized leverage over social systems as a heavily privileged person, I should have equally outsized selfless priorities, something that is incredibly difficult given the sheer scale of inequality. After repeated attempts to adjust my life to this story, I struggled to balance personal, social, and familial wellbeing with my morals. I accepted that it wasn’t viable for me to hold myself or people around me to such a radical and singular set of priorities despite their obvious moral value.
Today I would describe my intentions as compartmentalized: I still place significant value on understanding how to better society effectively, but my ability to do so no longer dominates my self-worth. Consequently, I have begun to ground myself more by spending time with friends, school work, bicycle maintenance, and maybe even putting my clothes from the laundry basket in the drawer. Practicing these balancing activities at times feels unnatural because they are new, but I am getting better at it. When my intentions change quickly my behaviors often don’t reflect them until my actions, habits, and routines catch up.
Please read the letter to potential applicants. Given the nature of the Deep Springs program: Why does Deep Springs matter to you right now? 300 words
Deep Springs’ values reflect mine more than other college programs. I want to be in an intellectually rich environment with people who are excited about rigorous learning and interrogating ideas for the sake of curiosity and service to society, not personal gain. Lots of places attempt to foster this environment but are beholden to existing ideas about what to teach, how to teach it, and what success looks like. This narrowness and lack of flexibility is in part due to size, but also comes from institutions’ well-established place in the educational status quo and white collar economy.
Deep Springs, as a smaller, more adaptable, geographically isolated, and human-centric institution operates without many of the socioeconomic boundaries and creates a more ideal environment to foster pluralistic growth in ways that other higher education institutions cannot. At Deep Springs, intellectual inquiry is coupled with a commitment to learning, thinking, and working collaboratively with deep social awareness. I believe in Deep Springs’ educational model because it allows for complex individuals, with unique ideas, shortcomings, and strengths to learn, and thrive.
I feel strongly that a more pluralistic understanding of education matters because I have not gelled well with traditional American education infrastructure, but have been fortunate enough to have the resources to discover and pursue ways of learning I excel in. It has become clear to me how rare, economically inaccessible, and academically limited most of these alternative forms of education are. Deep Springs matters to me right now because it uniquely provides a flexible and more holistic education, aligned with values and priorities I share, while achieving ideals like economic accessibility, social awareness, and intellectual rigor across disciplines.
Do you want kids? Why or why not? 300 words
I haven’t thought much about this before, but I think so. Committing a significant portion of energy to someone or something separate from one’s self despite constant fluctuations in life and emotions is grounding and important for me. This motivation for grounding commitments is clearly an important part of human life as evidenced by the prevalence of socially contrived institutions for practicing it like religion, sports, and even the labor pillar at Deep Springs. I would think this variety of commitment is also characteristic of raising a child. I also imagine that watching someone who is partially you walk around, grow, and make decisions, is viscerally fascinating.
There is also some moral component that makes things confusing and complicated as morality often does. Is it ethical to have kids naturally when there are already many, born less geographically fortunate, who will probably prematurely die unless someone helps them? Does the act of raising a child and contributing to the population of a wealthy society indirectly maintain a world order of geographic wealth inequality? Is it ethical to have kids in a generally unpredictable or dangerous world? To what extent does one family choosing to adopt or not have kids make a systemic difference in these situations? As a idealistic person, I’d hope that the answer is somewhere in personal and collective (with the individual who I would likely be collaborating with) meditations on these questions, but as a person with cognitive pattern recognition it seems like most people end up submitting to the basic evolutionary and social interest in having kids regardless of the fascinating moral philosophy.
Scientific understanding evolves. (Think, for instance, of the shifts in our understanding of matter since Bohr & Rutherford proposed their model of the atom in 1913.) Given such instability, do you think scientific consensus can claim authority? If so, on what basis? 800 words
Scientific authority comes from social investment in and respect for its findings, which vary from person to person and culture to culture. Here, I define authority as the importance of a given entity/idea/institution in someone’s explanation of the world. For example, a conspiracy theory can have authority over a believer’s actions even if it is not real, and my understanding of general reliance on my parents is what gives them authority in my life. I think science can and regularly does claim authority when people recognise that science enables the use of commercial and industrial technology in their lives.
The capitalist environment, which values and produces these technologies, in its immense growth, has transformed the operation and meaning of science. Science has changed from the marginalized perspective of a few elite intellectuals to a standard by which large swaths of society measure truth. In modern wealthy societies, where applied science is responsible for so much that people consume and that impacts their lives, there are advantages to personally believing in the mind-independant accuracy of scientific observations, a perspective known as scientific realism (SR). In these specific societies, belief in SR gives an individual motivation and comfort in science’s ability to drive true knowledge; enabling them to be personally invested in technological development. Ian Morris, Willard professor of classics at Stanford, outlines a macro-historic thesis that capabilities for technological energy extraction “setup the cost and benefits of any decision you make” and that “history works on broadly similar principles to biological evolution, so history is a kind of cultural evolution.” This reasoning suggests that SR is evolutionarily selected for by social and market pressures, fostering its prevalence amongst technocrats.
However, the power of science is its self-consciousness of error. Claims to absolute truth are restricted because there are always errors and limitations associated with experimental results. Science’s skepticism of entirely true claims is what has allowed it to progressively develop more accurate and precise observations and models. When science suspends skepticism, and presupposes facts, it can no longer claim to converge toward understanding real phenomena.
SR’s presupposition that observations accurately represent the mind-independent world does subvert skepticism, and consequently allows for systematic misunderstanding of mind-independent phenomena because of human’s potentially flawed or limiting senses. Quantum physics, evolutionary psychology, and neurotheology are fields that are in this sense scientifically antirealist, because they recognise and study the limits of observability. Though SR asserts it, scientific authority should not be justified by the methodological removal of error. SR is far from a philosophical consensus and should be understood more in terms of cultural relativism because of the particular pressures making it advantageous in modern wealthy societies.
While technocrats have experienced rapid evolution towards scientific realism, other demographic groups have not. The credence with which individuals view scientific inquiry and evidence is dependent on identity traits like education, economic class, race, religion, nationality, and related histories. The factors of relevance here not only affect acceptance of scientific perspective but extend to worldview development generally. In Morris’s evolutionary model, these are the relevant pre-existing environmental factors that define evolutionary optimization. Not all groups stand to gain as much from the scientific apparatus because of the radically different context of their lives. With socioeconomic and political incentives that are less entwined with scientific capability their pre-existing worldviews are less pressured to change. Identity traits unique to individuals and communities define how they understand scientific authority, making it, like other ideologies, culturally relativist.
Technocrats invested in Scientific Realism often misunderstand the importance of relativism to their perspective, and do so at the peril of the societies they direct. Leaders make assertions, based on scientific consensus, about how to stay safe in pandemics or about politics and economics, but these claims are not always accepted by the population. Demographic groups, such as undereducated Black and White communities, view these claims and their evidence differently because of specific histories that impact their perceptions and trust of technocratic institutions, a particularly potent problem in the context of the pandemic. These institutions, without recognising the forces that make them scientific realists, act on the assumption that they have authority because their ideology is the truth, and other communities who don’t share their worldview are somehow incompetent, or fundamentally wrong. This perspective is analogous to that of religious groups acting on the assumption that their god/moral reasoning is more true than others’. When technocrats deify scientific realism without recognising the equal legitimacy and relativism of other worldviews, they further degrade the already diminishing mutual understanding between identity groups along lines like education, wealth, and geography, limiting science’s ability to become part of a more inclusive understanding of our shared world, and ultimately our ability to collaborate on solutions as a more united society.
L.L. Nunn, the founder of Deep Springs, wrote to the Student Body of 1923, “‘For what came ye into the wilderness?’ Not for conventional scholastic training; not for ranch life; not to become proficient in commercial or professional pursuits for personal gain. You came to prepare for a life of service, with the understanding that superior ability and generous purpose would be expected of you.” This relationship between a life of service and education is not necessarily straightforward. How would you describe the relationship between intellectual inquiry and service to humanity? (450 words)
Knowledge derived from intellectual inquiry, defined as the analysis of a subject, to answer underlying questions about it, establishes the scope of our capabilities as a society. The direction of expansion and operation of these capabilities are defined by political, economic, and social interests. When these interests operate in alignment with humanity/morality, the intellectual inquiry that enables innovation and understanding is consequently also aligned. The converse is also the case.
If a project has no political, economic, or social will backing it, it doesn’t receive resources. This is true in both academia and private markets, as endowments and grants are often driven by similar macroscopic financial interest to those driving equity valuations. In fact, overlapping interests often cause markets and academia to work closely in fields like technology and pharmacology to develop novel ideas (with academic research) then deploy related products (in markets). Because major sources of academic funding are tied to market interests, academia often suffers from similar failures to recognise the importance of, or adequately invest in, intellectual inquiry that undermines the interests of the economic status quo in favor of long term humanitarian goals.
Education funding reflects this limitation. Nowhere is this more obvious than American public schools where education’s quality is dependent on the property values of attending families’ homes. Given the current state of deep inequities in housing and wealth distribution, this is a barbaric, practically indefensible mechanism of wealth concentration among the rich; it is certainly not aligned with humanitarian and economic interests of a more fair and meritocratic society. The people with the power in this system (the wealthy) choose not to change it because this entails resource redistribution which reduces the volume of assets they control. Funding disparities at the university level also often reach an order of magnitude in size at elite schools compared to good regional public universities. Education’s investment in wealth inequality is proof that, like markets, intellectual inquiry and education are also subject to incentives that value the consolidation of wealth equally to the creation of it.
Despite pervasive flaws in educational infrastructure, we are better off with our broken system than none at all. Public education assures some kind of access for all people, and academia serves as a mechanism for funding important, but not necessarily market viable, disciplines like philosophy, history, langues, and literature.
The complicated relationship between academic intellectual inquiry and service to humanity is defined by how and when inquiry can act independently of incentives that limit investments in humanitarian projects, when they don’t align with the goals of existing interest groups.
Write a tragedy. (100 words)
Jane works at a mutual fund specializing in European energy; currently, she is researching a hydrogen fuel startup operating in Norway. One month later: On Jane’s recommendation, her manager buys thirty percent of the firm. Four years later: The position is sold, returning 163% of original value. Three years later: Jane wakes up to her 6:45 alarm, jogs, and eats muesli. Opening the Financial Times she reads: “Fraudulent Clean Energy Leaves 15000 Consumer Down Payments Unfilled in Multi-billion Euro Bankruptcy.” Minutes later: Jane has a panic attack. She takes five days of medical leave then returns to the office.
What have you been thinking about recently? (300 words)
Who controls computational resources is critical to questions of social governance as economic production rapidly centralizes around automated innovation. These resources consist of computer chips which manipulate data in the form of electricity by interconnecting billions of electronic switches on the surface of silicon substrates. Today, three hundred million of these switches can be fabricated on a square millimeter of silicon. Designing custom integrated circuits (ICs) requires software, machinery to make nanometer-scale devices, and intellectual property which cost up to hundreds of millions of dollars. These costs and related barriers to entry have: rendered gains in computational efficiency from hardware optimization unattainable, created fragile supply networks dependent on small numbers of personnel, labs, and firms (many in the geopolitically vulnerable country of Taiwan), and led to a substantial computer engineer shortage that academia struggles to adequately address.
However, the past couple of years have seen developments toward opening the industry. Notable, is the invention and standardization of RISC-V, a free, powerful, and simple computer architecture for low power ICs. Its lack of license fee and non-disclosure agreements has enabled cheaper and more industry-relevant training at universities. The U.S. government has identified the need for investment in supply diversification evidenced by DARPA investments in free design software and Congress’s $280B CHIPS act. The changing distribution of knowledge and capabilities for IC development matters not simply because it determines humanity’s capacity to advance scientific research or further develop social fabric altering AI, but because it is poised to change the demography of institutions that harness computational resources. Without greater accessibility in chip fabrication and design, humanity risks forfeiting the control computational systems, and a growing portion of economic output to the few who are capable of creating and owning them.
How is manual labor relevant to a liberal arts education? (350 words)
Capitalist society operates at an intersection of governance and the means of economic production. Today, our political and financial governance is socially and institutionally divorced from production, and especially the realities of manual labor in the process of production. Divisions along these lines have led to diminished collective governance, mutual understanding, and respect between those involved in political-economic governance, who monetize their property ownership, and the general population who have little or no property, and rely on the capitalization of their labor, often in the service sector. American neoliberalism’s simultaneous expansion of property rights and undermining of the welfare state has worsened social and geographic rifts between socioeconomic classes. These policies have left the country with a hyper-financialized private sector, which similarly values the consolidation of national income (NI) to its creation, interest group dominated politics, and near-doubling of the top percent’s share of NI since the 1978 low. These rifts are responsible for significant humanitarian crises like exploitative international labor markets and a divisive political culture where rising populism is fuelled by justified anger at financial bureaucracy. The path to addressing these issues begins with dialogue, education, and breaking down labor-based hierarchical biases within institutions of learning.
When education is divided along vocational and intellectual lines, it enforces the status quo, providing property owning classes a limited education that enables them to further control the creation and distribution of wealth and NI, while incidentally reducing the capability of the labor class to achieve greater agency in their lives. The lack of respect between knowledge and manual workers has resulted in a reductive politicized schism that threatens governance globally, via the international clash between “right wing” populism and “left wing” liberalism. Combined into a unified and accessible education, manual labor and the liberal arts offer a less classist solution to education, which could lead to improved economic mobility, equality, and a mutual appreciation that is necessary for an effective, empathetic, and collaborative social governance.
Identify a cliche and explain the terrifying truth it conceals. (500 words)
Academic literature has significantly converged on logarithmic models for the marginal utility of dollars towards subjective well-being. This evidence suggests that the cliche ‘money can’t buy happiness’ is approximately true for the highest earners. Conversely, towards the bottom of the income distribution, the increase in money’s utility makes the cliche’s generalization of wealth-derived happiness inaccurate. This quantitative evidence is reflected in a commonsense understanding of how we become more happy. Physical and emotional health, interpersonal connections, sex, and physical activity are not always bought, but are far easier to attain for someone with income of $20k compared to $1k. In contrast, the same wealth difference between someone worth $100k and $119k would not have nearly as significant an impact.
Research on the dollar value of statistical life years (VSLYs) exposes the even greater impact of capital on well-being when it is invested directly into health outcomes rather than experienced in dollars. Data on VSLYs in low and middle income countries varies; because of this limitation, the most useful and cited values are statistically extrapolated approximations based on conclusive data measured in the U.S. Using data on willingness to pay (WTP) for the VSLY allows for the dollar quantification of value produced by life saving health interventions, which in turn allows for comparison between a variety of health interventions with the integration of disability adjusted life year (DALY) units. DALYs quantify, with databases from over twenty years of research, the comparative burden of a variety of diseases, sickness, and disabilities. Using these morally awkward acronyms we can now very roughly estimate the dollar value of health interventions. GiveWell, the most reputable effectiveness analyst for philanthropic health interventions, has applied these models and found that Helen Keller International is capable of providing vitamin A supplementation to children in Niger with an equivalent 37.9 times greater impact than cash transfers with GiveDirectly.
All of this to say that ‘money can’t buy happiness’ is meaningfully untrue, and its unironic use is testament to myopic and unproductive spending among elites in personal and geopolitical contexts. Interestingly, the research has also exposed that money itself is a far less effective means, by a factor of up to 37.9, of achieving happiness than the health interventions that can be bought with it, but often aren’t. This suggests that well-being operates more like an externality of our economic system, not its primary interest. Many economists have proposed the idea of baking the value of externalities directly into the market, often in the context of carbon tax. One could imagine a similar internalization of the value of well-being into our economic system in order to better align incentives. There are limited truths and significant flaws in the meaning conveyed in ‘money can’t buy happiness’, but perhaps the phrase’s greatest value is its commentary on the intersection of money and happiness that centers the misalignment between economic incentives and the happiness we seek.
Do you hold any moral principle to be absolutely true? Explain. (750 words)
The answer to this question is dependent on what is being referred to with the words ‘absolutely true’. In the most granular sense, ‘absolute truth’ might refer to the epistemically reliable facts about the mind-independent world, because these refer to everything that is actually existent. I don’t see much use in this definition, because I cannot escape the limitations of my imperfect human perspective or consequently comment on, with any authority, this world or its nature. In this sense I rather simply do not hold any moral principle to be absolutely true, because I have no basis for thinking one thing or another.
The version of truth I do have access to is the version mediated by my perception and cognition. In some sense, this is the only practical or applicable version of truth to consider, and generally speaking, I think practicality is an important trait of academic efforts. For this reason, the rest of my words here will center on this pragmatist’s view of mind-dependent truth rather than absolute metaphysical truth because the former is within the extent of my capability for knowledge, and the latter is not.
Our perspectives and thinking are fundamentally entwined with evolution, which selects for sensory-cognitive processes that are advantageous for survival. In this sense the direction of convergence of our conscious and unconscious experiences as humans is dictated by evolution. Some claim that our moral predispositions aren’t reliable on the basis that they are shaped by evolutionary forces which select for ones that assist special survival, but aren’t necessarily determined by mind-independent moral facts. This sort of claim is rebutted by philosophers like Andreas Morgensen, Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University, who claims that those who delegitimize moral intuitions and thought on the basis of evolutionary influence hold a double standard if they simultaneously maintain the reliability of basic senses, like vision, which are subject to natural selection under the same conditions. For instance, humans mostly have a mutual understanding of the color red. Our understanding of redness has been selected for and is considered reliable because it allows us to make evolutionarily favorable judgments based on our perceptions, despite the fact that we do not know if or to what degree the red we see reflects the state of the mind-independent world. The exact same can be said of morality. In this sense perceptions of morality stand on equal epistemic grounds to sensory perception because each was selected for evolutionarily and cannot be verified because of the aforementioned inaccessibility of the mind-independent facts. This logic establishes our perceptual thoughts as personal mind-dependent truths which are, as I have established, the achievable and useful versions of truth. I agree with Morgensen’s rebuttal, but beyond that, I think his argument implies a logical necessity for a relativistic model that considers the differences in the perception of morality throughout humanity.
In establishing the equal epistemic value of both moral and basic sensory-cognition and their truth in mind-dependent contexts, Morgensen’s argument leads us to the socially and politically significant question of what the distribution of individuals’ mind-dependent perspectives looks like. These distributions have different forms and social implications for different concepts. In the case of redness, the distribution of perspectives is more heavily concentrated around the statistical mean than the distribution of moral perspectives. Consequently there is greater interpersonal and intersocietal agreement about what is red than there is about what is ethical. Conversely the higher variability along a much greater number of dimensions, is what makes the distribution of moral perspectives so central to differences in personal and cultural perspectives. The degree of homogeneity in perceptions is important because consensus or disagreement on moral issues lead to different varieties of consequential socio-political-economic interactions within and between societies. The scale of variation in moral mind-dependent perspectives, perhaps implies we should be less egocentric and more humble about the significance of our personal experiences and moral perspectives compared to others. Despite this the consideration of individual persons’ and institutions’ epistemically legitimate moral perspectives are rarely a central consideration made by people or societies. This lack of consideration has frequently resulted in powerful collectives operating on the premise of their moral perspectives’ mind-independent authority which has contributed to events like the Vietnam War, Crusades, and Holocaust among others. Perhaps in a world where moral and perceptual relativity are recognised to a greater degree, religious and political institutions would be less prone to committing acts of physical violence or injustice under the guise of moral absolutism.
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