What I Do
I’m a senior researcher at Just Horizons Alliance, where I design psychologically grounded simulations that help leaders work through messy, high-stakes problems in public health, policy, and human development. That’s my job. The thread running through that and everything else I do is meaning-making. How do we find and construct meaning, and what happens when the systems that support that process shift.
The Thread
When I say meaning-making, I mean a few interconnected things. I mean knowledge: the kind that guides how we understand the world, which is why I study the differences between intuition and reflective thought and keep tabs on the philosophy of science. I mean norms, conventions, morality, and values: the habits of action, individual and collective, that shape nearly everything we do (with varying fidelity, of course). And I mean meaning-making itself: the evolution of knowledge and values as the world keeps changing under us.
Friends will tell you I have a tendency toward abstraction; one of my coping mechanisms, apparently. But I’ve learned enough from pragmatism to believe that with anything like this, the proof is in the pudding. Meaning shows up in our world through the decisions we make trying to get a grip on complexity, and through the communities we form that then inherit and reshape the norms guiding how we live.
Why I Do It
I want to understand all of this partly because it’s one of the stranger things we do as animals, and I have weird ideas of having fun. But I also think better understanding can help people out. That’s why my research is built around giving people and teams the tools to make better decisions and act more effectively — whether that’s a computational model or just a listening ear.
I’m particularly interested in getting these tools, which are often only available in institutions with deep pockets and plenty of power, into the hands of communities and organizations on the ground trying to make a real difference. These are the groups I came up within and I’d like to help them out.
How I Do It
The work takes a different shape depending on the question. Sometimes it’s empirical: designing studies and testing whether the psychological constructs we use actually behave the way we think they do. Sometimes it’s computational: building simulations that let a team rehearse decisions before they have to make them or creating system diagrams that surface the structure of a problem people have been carrying intuitively. Sometimes it’s synthesis: pulling together what’s scattered across a domain so the next decision doesn’t have to start from scratch. And often it’s writing, which is less a separate activity than a way I try to think things through.
All of this has put me in close contact with the rapid development of modern AI. The same tools that let me code this website also let me prototype models, run synthesis across hundreds of sources, and build simulations that would have taken a team months. I see real potential, and I feel real risk, across nearly every layer of our society. I won’t pretend to know how to navigate between the two. But I think it’s important to watch carefully and document honestly, which is why I write The Wobble: a record of how this new technology is crashing into the old structures we’ve built to make meaning as communities.