After studying the Great Books at St. John's College (Santa Fe), I spent a couple years in risk management consulting for private equity clients, on a human capital risk team, before leaving to teach myself computer programming.

The through-line of my work is a stubbornness about difficulty and a commitment to rigor: a hard passage in a text is supposed to be hard. Making it easier through pre-digestion or summary is a way of circumventing it and missing what it teaches. Something important is lost this way.

This stubbornness shows up in a curriculum that insists on reading primary sources; it shows up in an OCR pipeline which separates a transcription's fidelity from its correctness; and it shows up in my writing which tries to stage viewpoints at their full strength before responding to them.

Currently living in Seattle, and serving in the US Army Reserve. Will be away for training from late September until February.

Interested in developmental interpretability, AI-assisted learning, EdTech and curriculum design, and dev tooling for language models. Roughly in that order.