Welcome!
My name is Oak.1 I do math and philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Here, you can find copies of my philosophy essays (for undergraduate classes) and notes (for graduate seminars). For more public-facing work, see my Substack; for more personal stuff, see my Instagram.
I grew up reading LessWrong fairly uncritically, so I found modal and teleological notions a bit spooky when I first got to Oxford; but now, I think that the most promising research programs in metaphysics and epistemology take such notions as primitive.2
I’m still sympathetic to the Rationalist and Effective Altruist movements. I’ve pledged to donate 10% of my income—or 1% of spending money, while studying—to wherever it can do the most good. I think you should too!
Some beautiful non-Oxford places (with fantastic greenery, lighting, & food):
- Longwood Gardens (Chester County, Pennsylvania)
- Tunxi Old Street & Waterfront (Huangshan, China)
- Lighthaven (Berkeley, California)
This site is under (sporadic) construction!
Footnotes
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Well, technically, my name is ‘Oak Hu’ (a five-letter string), while I am Oak Hu (the person to whom ‘Oak Hu’ refers); but it’s fine to be sloppy in almost all contexts. My parents named me ‘Oak’ after Oklahoma State University, where they went for graduate school. My last name, ‘Hu’, is from the Chinese 胡; appending 说 (‘speak’) yields 胡说 (‘nonsense’)—naturally, someone named ‘Oak Hu’ does philosophy. ↩
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There are two senses of ‘primitive’ here, which we can gloss as ‘all-explaining’ versus ‘unexplainable’. The intensionalist and knowledge-first research programs attempt to explain things like counterfactuals or credences in terms of necessity and knowledge, so they take these notions as primitive in the first sense. But they need not take them as primitive in the second sense! For instance (helping ourselves to technical terms), we may characterize metaphysical necessity as the broadest objective modality, and knowledge as the broadest factive mental state. ↩