master plan (draft 0)

a golden age begins...

I recently applied to the Future Forum, and thought I’d share my answers publicly. Consider this draft 0 of Priya’s Master Plan, to be iterated on over time.

Note: all answers were limited to 200 words, but I plan to expand on these ideas in future posts. And if you have questions/thoughts, I’d love to chat — DM me.

What are the three most remarkable things you’ve done?

1. I co-founded an organization for abundance-minded women in New York City. We sell out every event. Incidentally, we overlap with Future Forum’s target communities: attendees include EV grant winners, effective altruists, and web2 and web3 founders.

2. I co-founded Fractal, a community focused on“the high-return activity of raising others’ aspirations,” and have continually accelerated people at critical moments. Fractal has helped community members get new jobs, get EV grants, get an O1 visa, become a full-time financially successful poet, and start businesses together.

3. <redacted b/c irrelevant to master plan>

You unexpectedly receive 10 million dollars. What do you do?

Both The Golden Door Society and Fractal are financially constrained at the moment.

I’d put down 1.6MM for a down payment on a 20-unit apartment building in New York City, and set aside 2MM to invest into the project until the building is financially sustainable.

That would ensure Fractal’s longevity and expansion. Fractal could accommodate far more residents, and be able to host more and bigger events (and provide event space for other ambitious, abundance-minded organizations, including The Golden Door Society).

Just as a city’s economic productivity scales superlinearly, I believe that a large co-living building full of ambitious people will see superlinear gains (with positive externalities for New York City and the world).

I’d set aside 1MM to fund people to host weekly dinners for ambitious people in their cities, similar to how OneTable funds Friday night Shabbat dinners.

I’d put the rest of the money into creating an accelerator for ambitious co-living houses. As part of the accelerator, we’d cover a security deposit on a community house, and guarantee rent coverage when the house isn’t at full capacity.

What are you currently doing in life? How important is it, and why is it important for humanity?

I’m building a scenius in New York City. As Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison talked about in “We Need a New Science of Progress,” some periods of history (Athens, from ~440 BCE to 380 BCE, Florence from ~1440 to 1490, Silicon Valley from the 1970s onwards), and thus some ecosystems, are “better at generating progress than others, perhaps by orders of magnitude.”

In the past, those periods of history were hard to conjure because ambitious people were spread throughout the world and communication methods were slow. Blogs and twitter are rapidly networking ambitious people, who are moving to collaborate in the same cities together.

In recent years, we saw co-living explode in Berkeley among rationalists. Although it’s hard to tease out cause and effect, this dense co-located network was responsible for bringing AI Safety into the mainstream (via MIRI and other organizations), and growing the Effective Altruism movement into one of the most effective ideological movements today.

NYC has become the center of a growing scenius of people working on “moonshots” of all kinds, and I help grow and tend to that scenius via my organizing work at Fractal and The Golden Door Society.