I have been wanting to blog for a long time! I’ve probably been saying that I’ll start a blog for over a year now. Posting things that aren’t perfect (by my arbitrary metrics) felt weirdly difficult and so, I thought in order to force myself to start, I’d just write a bit about myself. (I have a more succinct “about me” page so I’ll try to avoid repetition.)

So, here is my attempt to convey some of who I am and what I care about:

  • I’d label myself :sparkles: EA adjacent :sparkles: (I know this label means almost nothing now). What this means for me is I’ve taken the Giving What We Can Pledge and believe that donating to effective charities is a really good thing for the world (obviously, what effective actually means can be debated!).1
  • I wonder about finding meaning in a world without many of the struggles we have today (such as full-time employment).
  • I love computer science and math. I started coding at ~13 because I wanted to make Minecraft minigames. I wouldn’t generally recommend learning Java via Minecraft plugin Github repos but it was a pretty decent incentive!
  • I am vegetarian (have been for a decade now!). I had an animal rights activist arc as a teenager2 and, although less militant now, am still very concerned with animal welfare.
    • I’ve always really loved animals and wanted to make them suffer less. Growing up I wanted to be a vet and when I was 8, I wrote a letter to the Australian Prime Minister requesting more funding for the RSPCA.
  • I was raised Catholic and schooled in various Catholic/Christian environments. Although not religious now, I believe that my experience was largely positive and helped me understand the extent of global poverty very early in life and be empowered to actually do something about it.
    • I could honestly write a whole post on my relationship to religion.
  • I’m probably pronatalist-adjacent. Population decline seems bad, making it easy to have kids seems good, and the pronatalist movement often seems right-wing coded in a way I don’t endorse. In general, the hyper-rationality of it all doesn’t capture what feels meaningful to me.
  • I love what I do and love AI safety and it’s also taken me some time (probably from ~13 until ~22) to accept that I can’t possibly have all the careers and live all the lives I’d want to (being a physician, tutoring/teaching full-time, doing every kind of research, doing charity work overseas, home-schooling my kids, etc etc). Making my peace with that was probably one of the main things that improved my happiness as an adult.
    • I can maybe do some of these things still but they all capture something that is very fundamental about what I value and I can find other ways to fulfil those things.
  • For more low-key fun, I
    • Read a lot. I have a particular love for works of the Victorian period (e.g. Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre) and the Romantic era (Frankenstein, the poetry of Wordsworth, Colleridge, and Shelley, etc).
    • Do various outdoor activities. Hiking, camping, skiing, etc.
    • Explore whatever my hyperfocus hobby is at the moment. This has recently included crotchet, making terrariums, aviation, and mountaineering.
    • Go to the gym (weightlifting and running!).

  1. The reason I use the adjacent label is that I’m just not really associated with the community or institutions. ↩

  2. It was an arc rather than a thing that stuck for a few reasons. Primarily, I have a lot of uncertainty around the “right” or most effective way to increase compassion towards animals and am probably more convinced that other things like ability to access lab grown will be more effective. ↩