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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Characterising utopia

When we consider how good the best possible future might be, it's tempting to focus on only a handful of dimensions of change. In transhumanist thinking, these dimensions tend to be characteristics of individuals: their happiness, longevity, intelligence, and so on. [1] This reflects the deeply individualistic nature of our modern societies overall, and transhumanists in particular. Yet when asked what makes their lives meaningful, most people prioritise their relationships with others. In contrast, there are strands of utopian literature which focus on social reorganisation (such as Huxley’s Island or Skinner’s Walden Two ), but usually without acknowledging the potential of technology to radically improve the human condition. [2] Meanwhile, utilitarians conceive of the best future as whichever one maximises a given metric of individual welfare - but those metrics are often criticised for oversimplifying the range of goods that people actually care about. [3] In this essay I
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