About

I recently published The Moral Foundations of Progress, and am now pursuing questions raised by this initial investigation.

You can subscribe here for updates. I don’t send emails for every post, only the high-effort ones that contain substantial ideas. The historical average is around two emails per month.

You’re welcome to get in touch: applieddivinitystudies@gmail.com

If you’re new and unsure where to start, the popular posts are:

• Isolated Demands for Rigour in New Optimism
• Where are All the Successful Rationalists?
• How Substack Became Milquetoast
• Beware the Casual Polymath
• Bus Factor 1

More abstractly, much of my work consists of:

• Compiling data to tackle a complex question usually thought of as qualitative
• Applying tools from economics and mechanism design to issues outside their domain
• Opinionated claims against over-valued aspects of the zeitgeist

I’m proud to be featured in Scott Alexander’s Blog Roll, Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution, and Byrne Hobart’s The Diff.

I maintain non-exhaustives compilations of my mistakes, and datasets I’ve compiled.

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Recommendations and Awards

• Nadia Eghbal: “one of the few good things to come out of this past year”
• Agnes Callard: “This person cracks me up.”
• Ben Kuhn: “a really good blog post”
• Noah Smith: “the curmudgeonly blogger”
• Jason Crawford: “ADS made some good points”
• Tyler Cowen: “excellent and thought-provoking”
• Alex Berger: “Interesting pseudonymous essay”
• Emergent Ventures: Eleventh Cohort
• Astral Codex Ten: Blogroll

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If you’re interested in meta-posts about the process of writing the blog:

• About Applied Divinity Studies
• Learning in Public in Real Time
• Unemployment Part I – Quitting Won’t Save You
• Unemployment Part 2 - How to Save Yourself
• Why does this blog take so long to write?
• Against and Then for Hyperproductivity

I cite and am inspired by many other writers. The two most underrated are Fantastic Anachronism and For Our Posterity.

One downside of writing anonymously is that I can’t thank by name the many friends who have contributed ideas, comments and encouragement. For now, it will have to suffice to say that they exist, and I’m immensely grateful for their support.

My editor is Alexey Guzey, all errors his.

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Really, I just want an outlet to express the thoughts that are personally meaningful to me.

That might sound odd, but it shouldn’t. There’s no reason to relegate complex questions to a purely intellectual domain. Consider the profile of Liu Cixin:

Liu had an epiphany about the concept of a light-year—the “terrifying distance” and “bone-chilling vastness” it implied. Concepts that seemed abstract to others took on, for him, concrete forms; they were like things he could touch, inducing a “druglike euphoria.” Compared with ordinary literature, he came to feel, “the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional.”