Do take a look at my friends’ websites too!
Giving the first £10,000 | TL;DR: I’ve donated to some high-impact charities in animal welfare, malaria prevention, and poverty reduction, and it’d be amazing if you considered doing the same.
Some tips for making Freedom of Information requests | Learned over the course of writing a think-tank report, and getting frustrated with Oxford several times.
Reflections on running a weekend retreat | At the start of this month I co-organised Saddle Point, a three-night & 30-person retreat.
You can select as well as be selected | Running hiring rounds or other application processes is extremely hard.
LLMs can be tool-finding tools | A lot of tools are what I would call intention multipliers: they help you achieve a particular goal more efficiently or easily.
RSVPs | You’ve probably gone to a few events in your life, and declined or ignored invitations to others.
Critiques of conferences | TL;DR: If you’re going to a conference and don’t have a very clear picture of what it going well looks like, I think you’ll probably be wasting your time.
Polite Notice | By default, I try to be polite: I think generally it’s the right thing to do, plus it’s a helpful way of developing virtue & maximising the good (two of my underlying ethical goals, with the former a heuristic for the latter).
love is embarrassing? | Some people aren’t remotely interested in dating, which makes perfect sense.
Suspending adulthood as a way to have fun | Something I noticed at the OULES New Year’s celebrations was that the people there were very good at having silly, joyous fun.
Thermostats | In machine learning, there’s the concept of “temperature”: a parameter which controls the amount of randomness that’s fed in to the model’s predictions.
Observations about dating apps | I’ve been working on building a dating service for Oxford students (Oxheart) this year, but as a friend pointed out, I’m not creating a product which is precisely tailored to what I’d like to have exist.
Asking questions and drinking games | I like being listened to.
Losing my sense of taste | Sometimes I look back over my journal to see what is repeatedly on my mind.
PMQs | In classic Sixth Form work experience fashion, I spent a week last summer shadowing an MP.
When the front page shouldn’t be the top priority | Lots of things are important, but some are more important than others – often by orders of magnitude (for example, causes of death).
I really hate Facebook | Not as a consumer; I don’t use it much.
Bureaucracy | I have spent much more time tangled in Facebook over the past week than I would like.
Advertising | You can make advertisements for things you’re working on!
PPE | TL;DR: I wouldn’t recommend studying PPE for the content – I think it’s unlikely that I will use any more than 5% of what I’ve learned from it in future – but if you want to spend most of your time on extracurricular activities and don’t mind forgoing learning about technical things, it’s a pretty good choice.
This essay will… | George Orwell has a famous essay “Why I Write”, where he presents four reasons that someone might do so: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose (in his words).
University admissions advice | People often ask me whether I have advice about applying to Oxford for PPE.