What are you going to work with at IFIKK?
I am part of the interdisciplinary research project Modeling Human Happiness consisting of both philosophers and psychologists. The main aim of this project is to develop new models and measures of well-being on the basis of insights from ancient philosophy, psychology and the philosophy of science. I am very excited about the project because I think that measures of this kind are important for evaluating the impact of philanthropic initiatives and policy interventions. Evaluation helps us prioritise interventions, and motivates action.
The idea behind my doctoral research project is that the subjective impression someone has about their quality of life can be wrong. People do not always want what they need, and don’t always need what they want. In my project, I want to explore the sciences of human nature to find out what humans need, and to develop a rigorous approach to quantify the relative significance of various needs. In order to do this successfully, I think that it is necessary to draw on the full range of life sciences that concern the nature and identity of persons, including biological, cognitive and social sciences.
Can you tell us a bit about your research interests?
My main research interests are in the philosophy and psychology of learning, decision-making and well-being. In my master's thesis I wrote about the meaning, metaphysics and epistemology of practical rationality, where I pursued a robustly naturalistic approach to metaethical questions. Although my present PhD project is about well-being specifically, I take methodological questions very seriously. I am also interested in other cognitive sciences such as linguistics, computer science, and the psychology of learning and decision-making. I recently wrote a text about the relevance of probabilistic methods to individual and group decision-making, which is a topic I would like to pursue in more detail at some point. Last year I wrote a paper on active learning and ways in which advances in natural language processing (AI) can enable deliberate practice with rapid formative assessments in qualitative subjects. The past years I have also been involved in a startup where we are developing educational software for making practice assignments with automatic assessment and feedback.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
Most of my time is devoted to research and work-related projects, but I also enjoy trail running, skiing and other outdoor-activities that lets me explore nature. My longest standing hobby is the curation and maintenance of my library of spotify playlists. The past years I have been active in the Effective Altruism community, and have spent much of my free time working on projects aiming to make it easier for people to find out how to do good, and to actually do some good as well. I also help organise an interdisciplinary reading group on topics in cognitive science.