Projects

Here are some projects which go beyond the scope of individual blog posts:

Popular posts from this blog

Book review: Very Important People

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New York’s nightclubs are the particle accelerators of sociology: reliably creating the precise conditions under which exotic extremes of status-seeking behaviour can be observed. Ashley Mears documents it all in her excellent book Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit. A model turned sociology professor, while researching the book she spent hundreds of nights in New York’s most exclusive nightclubs, as well as similar parties across the world. The book abounds with fascinating details; in this post I summarise it and highlight a few aspects which I found most interesting. Here’s the core dynamic. There are some activities which are often fun: dancing, drinking, socialising. But they become much more fun when they’re associated with feelings of high status. So wealthy men want to use their money to buy the feeling of having high-status fun, by doing those activities while associated with (and ideally while popular amongst) other high-status people, parti...
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In Search of All Souls

I recently sat the All Souls Fellowship exam, called by some the " world's hardest exam ". It requires you to write twelve essays for four papers over two days; the breadth and novelty of the questions make it a fascinating experience. Two of the papers were "general papers" and two were in a humanities subject of your choice (in my case, philosophy); most papers had around 25 questions. I've summarised my answers below, as well as noting some of the other particularly interesting questions. General paper I: 1. How should you prepare for the end of the world? I started off with a somewhat emotional argument about the badness of death on an individual level. I referred to Epicurus' argument that we have nothing to fear from death because when we are dead, we will not have any preferences about it at all - but argued, in response, that having preferences about future states of the world is a foundation of our lives. In terms of the end of the ...
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What have been the greatest intellectual achievements?

In yesterday's post I briefly mentioned Claude Shannon, founder of information theory. It occurred to me that even most Oxford students wouldn't know who he was, despite his work being crucial for the subsequent development of the "Information Age". How many other intellectual revolutions in obscure fields haven't become common knowledge yet? Perhaps the best way of finding out is just to start listing the greatest and most influential intellectual achievements ever, and seeing if anyone else has more to add - particularly in the humanities and social sciences, where my knowledge is a little shallower. Also, is there anything you expect to deserve a place on this list in the next few years? I'm focusing on achievements which either founded or greatly influenced an entire field (also, although there are many amazing artistic and engineering achievements, to keep things relatively concise I'm not going to include either here). Of course this will be necessa...
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