Running "Running a Bootcamp" Bootcamp
A pedagogy incubator leading into Arbor Summer Camp
I’m writing this from my team bunker in building F of Lighthaven Campus, where the LessOnline conference is happening in full force. The rest of the Arbor team is busy running demo sessions across campus for their upcoming bootcamps this week, while I hide in Arbor Headquarters in order to, in classic LessOnline fashion, write a blog post.
It’s the eve of Arbor Summer Camp, a micromester1 of workshops and bootcamps the week between LessOnline and Manifest. The three events are together called Festival Season, and it’s the most glorious time of year to be in Berkeley, California. It’s also the eve of Shavuot, a two-day Jewish holiday that will take me fully offline for this 250-person event we’re running. I’ve spent the past several weeks counting up the days leading to this moment with trepidation, grit, and a ton of infrastructure context downloading to the rest of my team, so it’s nice to sneak away between Electronic Trading Games and MCing a Fooming Shoggoths concert for a little breather.
Arbor Summer Camp (ASC) is a spiritual descendant of last year’s Manifest Summer Camp at Lighthaven, where my trading bootcamp originally got started.
One year ago, the Manifest Summer Camp team reached out to me and said "hey can you run a trading bootcamp at summer camp people might like it" and I said "ok sure whatever." Then @patio11, who happened2 to be at Lighthaven for Festival Season anyway, heard about it and said "wanna talk to me about your trading bootcamp for my new podcast" and I said "ok sure whatever.”
I basically did not think at all about agreeing to do a trading bootcamp or Patrick's podcast because I was trying to run the LessOnline Puzzle Hunt, my magnum opus and spiritual calling, and anyone who had non-puzzle-hunt-related questions for me got one sentence answers at best.
But then trading bootcamp went great (turns out Manifest attendees love getting picked off in pretend markets), patio11’s podcast went semi-viral, and people started writing in with "When is your next bootcamp? I want to give you my money.”
So I said “uh… August!” and now, one year and 6 trading bootcamps later, I run Arbor, a team of people curious about markets, pedagogy, and game design, with our flagship trading bootcamp as the bread-and-butter that helps keep the rest of our zany projects alive.
Over the past year, I learned that I love teaching trading bootcamp. It gets me out of bed in the morning. There's nothing like keeping fake markets liquid to fill one's life with joy and meaning.
But I also realized I... don't actually care that much about quantitative trading, inherently. The reason I love running trading bootcamps isn't because I love trading, but because I love pedagogy—figuring out how to teach concepts so that people understand them in their bones.
I don't know whether or not there should be more quantitative traders in the world. But I do believe that there should be more (and better) teachers in this world. And over the past year, the Arbor team has gotten really good at teaching.
So, for this past week, we have been running “running a bootcamp” bootcamp, a pedagogy incubator where we trained students in how to run a good bootcamp or workshop. We gave students all of the ingredients, templates, and teaching support that I wish I would have had a year ago. (Or at least, all of it that we understand consciously.)
A huge part of my philosophy around trading pedagogy is “the best way to learn how to trade is to trade.” Most of our bootcamp is just giving people reps of playing increasingly complicated trading games, where we start with a very simple scenario, and then add more details, adjust the parameters, toggle different “characters” (like Mark the market maker and Bob the coin-flipping retail trader), and walk people through heuristics they should be building every step along the way.
I am terrible at learning things from textbooks and lectures. In trading bootcamp, I teach to the type of student that I am, someone who needs things to be interactive, immersive, and able to be played with.
“Running a bootcamp” bootcamp was even more like that. I think across four days of work we managed to squeeze in maybe two and a half hours of yapping.
Our most recent trading bootcamp had 37 students, which was twice the size we'd ever run before, and it hit me like a truck how freaking hard it is to teach well and at scale. In particular, it clicked that if I wanted to turn this into a real business, I needed to figure out how to teach how to teach — get other people to have the skills I've exercised over the past year.
This week (June 2-6), our students get to run their bootcamps at Arbor Summer Camp for 6-20 students of their own. I don't expect every single one of the bootcamps to be long-lived and amazing. I think of this more like the YC model, where we invest resources into a handful of promising people with good ideas, & bet that some of them will flourish when given templates, infrastructure, and advising.
But if just one of them gets what I got out of last year's festival season — a framework that provided the space, students, funding, and potential-podcast-appearance lottery ticket3 — and then blooms into a business as a result, that's a huge win in my book
This coming week, we’re going to be running a dozen “branches”—bootcamps, workshops, multi-day quests—across campus in parallel. I am so, so proud of what our students put together:
Tuesday-Thursday, Twig Theis teaches Security Mindset, a workshop that conveys the principles of designing secure systems by teaching you to think like an attacker.
Tuesday-Thursday, Yoav Tzfati is teaching Code Bloom, a vibecoding workshop for the non-coder.
Monday-Thursday, Sophia Wisdom teaches GPU architecture and programming.
Tuesday-Thursday, Niki Dupuis is running AI for Epistemics, a three-day branch about designing AI interfaces that improve human thinking (public talks in Rat Park Monday and Wednesday!).
On Monday, Aella is teaching a class about how to build a good survey.
On Wednesday, Clara Collier and Jake Eaton of Asterisk Magazine teach a class about how to edit your own writing.
And even if every one of the incubated bootcamps is a catastrophic trashfire and the Arbor Summer Camp attendees start rioting with pitchforks... I can just retreat to my happy place, where David Holt, Ross Rheingans-Yoo, and a handful of newly-trained Arbor Apprentices will be running yet another iteration of now-1-year-old Trading Bootcamp.
There are also some workshops/bootcamps/whatever run by people who have done this before! Who are not me!
Monday-Thursday, CFAR is running an experimental mini-workshop with new applied rationality content (and some classics)
Tuesday-Thursday, Sy Etirabys (the artist behind the Manifest art) will teach how to do art without technical skill (which you do not have time to gain in three days)
Tuesday and Thursday, Anthony Neil Tan is running a one-day hands-on plant genetic engineering workshop where you turn a plant red
(By application) Monday, Jonas Vollmer of the AI Futures Project is running a tabletop exercise simulating the development, deployment, and geopolitics of artificial superintelligence
(By application) Wednesday, Austin Chen, Patrick McKenzie, and Ajeya Cotra help you debug your startup/charity/projects's hardest problems
I hope I see you there.
Like a minimester, but even smaller
Okay, "happened to be" is a little disingenuous, I had pitched him pretty hard on attending Festival Season
Oh yeah, that’s another thing we have at Festival Season this year, there’s a kickass podcast room.