On Camps, Thoughts and Talking
In Person Learning Is Magical
I have spent the past two months surrounded by my favoritest people. Kids.
Better still, this has been at my favoritest place: Genwise.
I’ve taught at Genwise Summer Camps since December 2021, and have been in love with the idea of the camp since then.
The recipe is simple. Every summer, we get the best folks we can find. “Best” is defined as the intersection set of:
Being really good at what you do
Being really good at teaching others what you do
Being really good, specifically, at teaching kids what you do1
Then, we throw these good folks and their students together at the camp in Manipal, and watch the magic unfold. There’s no exams, no syllabus, no ranking at the camp. Every day, for three weeks, the kids and their respective mentors learn the one subject which each kid has chosen. Classes run from 9am to 4pm, Monday to Friday.
The rest of the time they’re at the camp, we spend doing things that should be done at a summer camp. Sports, madcap activities, walks, trips to local museums, and just hanging out with each other. The one rule that needs to be followed religiously: no devices, except for 30 minutes in the evening (and in class while you’re learning, of course).
Students this year could choose any one course from AI/ML, data science using AI, math, a course on building out your own submarine, a course on building out your own speaker, neuroscience, economics, architecture, among others.
And I’m happy to report that we scaled up a bit this year, and ran a second camp in Bangalore.
Eklavya Shetty and I share a strong conviction. In the age of AI, in-person learning over short sharp sprints is only going to go up in value. Community is going to be a valuable resource, and our summer camps provide participants with just that, across mentors, interns and students. Especially for students, because a community of young curious learners who feel a sense of togetherness is the best thing a young person can retain in this day and age.
I’m always happy to talk about learning, but especially the magic that happens at the camp. If you’d like to learn more, drop me a message, anytime.
On Thinking About Writing
I also used these two months to think about the other thing close to my heart when it comes to learning: this blog.
I’ve now been writing on EFE for a decade, and it remains the best thing I’ve ever done. There are many reasons why:
Putting your writing out in public forces you to think more seriously about whatever you’re writing about, and that discipline stood me in good stead for many years as a teacher.
For many years, I wrote on a near daily basis. I was inspired to do this by observing two masters at work: Tyler Cowen and Seth Godin. To write every day is by itself an awesome discipline. But to write every day at a very high quality is even more impressive, and if there is one habit I was hoping to build, it was precisely this one. I never did manage a perfect year, but that was fine by me. Showing up often enough is still better than never showing up!
Writing a post (nearly) a day instills in you the ability to work reasonably efficiently, and to always read with purpose. “Is this good enough to talk about on the blog?” is a wonderful mindset to have when you’re reading, because passive consumption is out of the window. And over time, that mindset becomes an unconscious habit. Being regular at writing makes one a better reader!
Every single professional assignment I’ve worked on over the last six years has been because of the blog. The blog has become my marketing tool and my CV at the same time, and if there is anybody reading this who is wondering about whether to start their own blog/podcast/YouTube video channel, whatever, my advice would be to just effin’ do it. Ship your first work out there, and be reasonably regular at it. Don’t worry about anything: reactions, number of followers, comments — none of it matters. Just show up, and do the work regularly. Only good things happen, I promise you.
But also, it is true that over the last two to three years, my frequency of posting has dropped off that metaphorical cliff. And there is only one reason: AI.
I simply have not been able to understand why anyone would want to read what I write in the age of AI. Much easier, I have always thought, to just go to your LLM of choice, and have it explain to you whatever it is that you want to learn about. Now, dear reader, before you start reacting with righteous indignation and the first of many “No, but”s, let me tell you that plenty of my friends and well-wishers have preceded you on what is now a well-trodden path.
And their points even make sense to me! The obvious one being that each of the points I listed out above still holds, so what am I even talking about? My closest friends have said as much, with many adjectives for company.
For a while, I’ve made peace with writing only occasionally here, but the downside with that approach is that inertia is an extremely convenient mistress. Every day that you don’t write makes it easier to take “just one more day” to get back in the saddle. And pretty soon, you see a couple of weeks have gone by, and then a month. You know how it is, each and every one of you does.
So ok, I thought to myself these past two months, how about trying something different, and seeing if that gets the creative juices flowing? Quite what that “something different” is I’m not entirely sure yet, but here’s a first stab at it.
My writing may have gone down, but my reading hasn’t. It has become more short-form (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing), sure. And it has become much more concentrated on a particular topic: AI.
That page I linked to above (The Economics of AI) is a distillation of how I think about the most important development of these times. And it is a continuing distillation — the page will continue to grow and change shape over time. The page itself has been designed with the help of both Codex and Claude Code. But the usage of both of these harnesses is much more than just saying “Build a pretty HTML page based on this topic.” Using these tools to help me both clarify my thinking about the topic, and create some sort of structure around it, has been revelatory. LLMs aren’t just wizards at coding — they’re also genuinely helpful with you becoming better at reading and learning.
The way I decide what to read about AI, and the extent to which I decide to engage with whatever I read, are both assisted by LLMs. Building out that workflow has been as much fun as has been the learning about the field of AI itself. And both, the learning and the learning how to learn with AI, are co-evolving. In the days to come, I hope to share with you more of both: my learnings about the field, as also how I learn with the help of LLMs.
But the more I read about AI, the more I want to learn about it, and tell others about it. So please, do take a look at The Economics of AI, and let me know what you think about it.
On Conversations About AI
Speaking of wanting to learn more about AI, there’s a third update I wanted to share with you guys. A good friend (and an irritatingly regular blogger in his own right), Navin Kabra, has been as fascinated with AI’s rise as I have been.
And, as he puts it, writing on AI has mostly been either US/globally focused, or has been rather too breathless about what AI can do2. And so we’ve launched a podcast about what folks in India are doing with, about and for AI. That is a deliberately broad and vague sentence, with only one thing being resolutely clear: this is about AI, and this is about India. Within that intersection set, anything goes.
The first episode is about the work that MCCIA is doing with AI and adoption, particularly among the small and medium businesses that make up most of what MCCIA is really about. It also touches upon Prashant Girbane’s role, both at MCCIA, and in helping with the diffusion of AI among Maharashtra’s business community.
I hope you give it a listen, and I hope you choose to subscribe.
It is precisely because of these stringent requirements that I stopped teaching at the camp, and handed over the reins on teaching econ to my good friend Anupam Manur, from Takshashila
I love the summer camp idea - I recall reading about it last year also. I wonder, though, if this is sufficient to move the needle on a more well rounded education. I suppose if the same kids come back for several editions of this camp, they perhaps carry some residue of how much fun in person learning can be and how to see challenge and fun as two sides of the same coin.