The Ambition Project
The Ambition ProjectA guest post by Jason BrennanBryan CaplanAug 04, 202658115ShareI was fascinated to hear about Jason Brennan’s class assignments for his “Ambition” class. Two of these I got from Jess Flanigan at Richmond.1. The Failure ProjectSelect an activity you find intriguing, but which you are bad at and expect to fail at if you attempt it. (For instance, if you are a bad singer, sing karaoke in public.
- ▪The Ambition ProjectA guest post by Jason BrennanBryan CaplanAug 04, 202658115ShareI was fascinated to hear about Jason Brennan’s class assignments for his “Ambition” class.
- ▪Two of these I got from Jess Flanigan at Richmond.1.
- ▪The Failure ProjectSelect an activity you find intriguing, but which you are bad at and expect to fail at if you attempt it. (For instance, if you are a bad singer, sing karaoke in public.
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| Original publisher | Hacker News (Front Page) |
| Canonical URL | https://www.betonit.ai/p/the-ambition-project |
| Publication time | Sun, 09 Aug 2026 23:36:05 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-10T02:10:41.828Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-10T02:10:41.828Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Ambition ProjectA guest post by Jason BrennanBryan CaplanAug 04, 202658115ShareI was fascinated to hear about Jason Brennan’s class assignments for his “Ambition” class. Reprinted with his kind permission. I doubt that the average U.S. college student would actually follow through with any of these challenges, but they’d be great for a school like UATX!In my first year seminar course Ambition, in addition to their other work, students will need to complete four of the following assignments, including at least one starred project. Two of these I got from Jess Flanigan at Richmond.1. The Failure ProjectSelect an activity you find intriguing, but which you are bad at and expect to fail at if you attempt it. (For instance, if you are a bad singer, sing karaoke in public.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (Front Page).
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