Summer 2025

I’m currently back home in London, but I’ll be heading to Oxford at the start of October for my final year of PPE (at this point just economics), and the birth of a new group house called Babel! After 11 weeks working in the US (mostly NYC and the Bay Area, but some Boston and DC too), it’s been nice to spend a bit of time doing nothing in particular – I used to be convinced that the stereotypical retirement spent on craft projects, reading, and card games must be horribly dull, but I now think I might very much enjoy whiling the days away, provided my friends were nearby enough to hang out with semi-spontaneously.

Some highlights from over the summer:

• New York was great. As one friend put it, it’s such a city-like city. I tried out about 20 (mostly vegan) restaurants, which became more fun once I stopped being so offended by the prices of everything ($15 smoothies, etc).
  • Working at Bridgewater was overall roughly in line with my expectations; I might write about my experience there at a later date.
• Visited Mount Tam with Nils, for my first time out in the American countryside (although nobody really uses the word. “Wilderness”? but that overstates things…). Understood a little better the geographical enormity of the US, and how good for conversation long drives can be. I’d love to go on a proper road trip; sunsets and mountains seem to be spared from the joy-thief that is diminishing marginal utility.
• A successful conclusion to OAISI’s hiring round, with a wonderful new Programme Manager joining us!

Media I’ve been consuming recently:

• Lots of the posts from Supernuclear in anticipation of moving into Babel (and I bumped into one of the editors at an NYC meetup!).
• Finished Severance – the episodes were mostly good watches, but the satisfaction from the ending didn’t really feel like it was worth the time investment, especially compared to films or books on my recommendation list.
• Rediscovered the addictiveness of video games (Factorio, specifically), which I hadn’t felt since sneaking onto my grandparents’ computer to play Minecraft when visiting them in primary school.
• The new Lorde album has grown on me, and I continue to enjoy The Japanese House. After previously thinking her songs were very annoying (especially the start of “Messy”), I now quite like Lola Young. Spotify really wants me to listen to sombr and Wolf Alice; I do like them but I’d prefer suggestions of newer artists.

Ideas on my mind:

• I’m slowly figuring out what I’ll do career-wise after I graduate. The amount of path dependency already is crazy, and yet the amount of options to choose from is also absurd. This cartoon from Tim Urban sums things up fairly well, although it elides the fact that there are paths which do close off over time (in the sense of becoming infeasible, not strictly impossible).
• Just started another hiring round for Macroscopic. Bringing in top talent is hugely time-consuming, and screening applicants has made me much more sympathetic to the social value of educational signalling – figuring out people’s suitability for a position is extremely difficult when you can’t set them long-horizon tasks, but a successful degree at least gives some evidence that they’re able to perform well over extended periods.
• Are people who enjoy 4X games on average more YIMBYish than the general population? The aesthetic / spiritual appeal of « progress » resonates pretty strongly with me, but I think a lot of people don’t feel the same way.
• There are so many civilisations & worlds I’ll never inhabit! Although if transformative AI goes well, VR games as immersive as the San-Ti’s in the Three Body Problem might only scratch the surface of what’s possible in our leisure time – and I would love to sample some of these experiences.
  • I recently caught up with a friend who’d been on holiday to China this summer, and it was disorienting getting my head around the differences between my experience of life & society and that of its billion-and-a-half citizens. (Yes, obviously there’s enormous within-group variation too.)
  • This weekend I was on the south coast of England (Lewes & Eastbourne), touristing around medieval castles and Bronze Age museum displays. The comforts of the modern world are wonderful, but trying to puzzle my way through grand challenges in history would be a lot of fun provided the game had a “quit” button. I’d enjoy trying my hand at things like devising better rudimentary tools, or playing court politics, or building up a booming merchant’s business.¹
• The fovea section of your eye, which is full of cone cells allowing you to see in high detail, only covers the central 2° of your visual field. (This is why your eyes need to move across the page so frequently when you’re reading.) What would it be like to have 2-100x larger coverage? Obviously your brain would have lots more information to process (50% of the visual cortex is already dedicated to processing inputs from the fovea), but maybe it could manage?