ABOUT ME

I like to get myself into unfamiliar situations because that's where you grow the most. I try to think for myself, set my ambitions high, and not be too attached to the received wisdom. I think about happiness and fulfillment, and getting those things means doing the work inside and outside. You gotta always be learning and growing. Relationships are key. Helping others makes you happier than helping yourself. And it's good to take as much time as possible to just kick back and laugh about things.

PHILOSOPHY

Alignment. Try to live at the intersection of what I enjoy, what's good for me, and what's good for the world.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

My CS experience includes:
* Hearing it's cool
* Filling out this profile
* Thinking about the cool CS experiences I will have

Interests

I'm interested in philosophy and technology, oddly enough. I'm now finishing a masters in philosophy at the university of chicago. My work is on the value of truth. I think truth is a good thing and we could use more of it. But there are some situations when the truth is bad for us, or when a false belief would be good for us. Upton Sinclair said "It's hard to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Ideas that have a lousy evidential basis can be pretty popular for this kind of a reason. But two problems: one it's hard to know when a true idea will actually be bad for you, and two what's good for you might be bad for everyone else. I think that some of the biggest problems in the world can be undermined if we can get real clear about why people believe what they believe. So I'm interested in exploring the rationality of so-called 'prudential reasoning' and thinking about how we can use technology to help the world get closer to the truth.

Also people. People are cool.

• ethics
• technology
• traveling
• music
• scuba diving

Music, Movies, and Books

I finished the Mad Men series a few weeks ago. That was pretty awesome.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

The beginning of my love of traveling was studying abroad in college. I went to Florence for six months. You don't know how much you don't know until you travel.

Teach, Learn, Share

Some things you could ask me about which would get me talking:

I've CEO'd a music website that gets 5+ million visitors per month. You've probably been there.

I've thought a fair amount about esoteric philosophical things like truth, value, ethics, and the relations between the three.

Countries I’ve Visited

Costa Rica, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

Italy, Thailand, United States

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