- 2025-06-23
- I wrote this as part of my application to be a part time researcher at FRI and I was pretty proud of it
What about our work makes you most interested in working with us?
I recently completed a project that involved ~50 hours of study of John Boyd, as I had identified him as one of the best strategists to learn from. He put together a compelling argument re: the importance of the OODA loop, of observing new information, orienting skillfully to it, updating your model so that you can more skillfully act, etc. It occurred to me during investigating this role that forecasting is a direct continuation of the work started (or at least, unified) under Boyd, which is very exciting to me.
There are real territories out there - the p(doom) from AI, from nuclear war, from bioweapons (in addition to international relations things like p(America going to war with Iran), p(recession), etc). Our chance of survival as a species in large part will be downstream of being able to accurately diagnose our most pressing problems, discover the key leverage points, the key initiatives/policies/collaborative endeavours that can mitigate the most urgent risks.
The empirical paradigm shift started by Philip Tetlock, going from unvalidated expert intuition and the incentive for hedgehog-style reasoning, to an industry of empirically validated forecasting, is a hugely positive shift for humanity (and it’s still early days, of course!). This is following in Boyd’s footsteps, the Neo-Darwinian idea of “survival of the best informed”. We need to be as well informed as possible to prevent sleepwalking into catastrophe.
As FRI are at the cutting edge of the science (and art) of forecasting, expanding what can be forecasted, developing and refining new methods like adversarial collaboration for finding common cruxes… this truth-seeking endeavour just seems incredibly pressing, urgent, and exciting. It makes me think of Ken Wilbur’s “spiral dynamics” model, where FRI & Tetlock’s work represent a shift from “blue” level thinking (faith, towing the party line, deference to authority) to “orange” reasoning (empiricism, skepticism).
I’ve been interested in all of these things for a while - I’ve been involved in the Effective Altruism space for around 8 years, and the “meta-crisis”/second renaissance/Integral Altruism movement for around 2 years. It seems very true to me that the science of forecasting can be further elucidated, and signal-boosted. Especially in these times of fake news and populism, a counter-culture of empiricism and calibration to counter the vision of “Amusing Ourselves to Death” seems incredibly needed.
In addition to the above lil essay – I really loved doing literature reviews during my undergrad and masters. I love learning new subjects, breaking down complex problems and questions into component parts, “grokking” new fields, getting stuck into the data. I think I’m unusually qualified for the role, having the overlap of a deep love of learning new things, proficiency in data analysis (Python rather than R, but I imagine I could pick up the basics of R very quickly - it’s the learning of the first coding language which is hardest IMO), interest in forecasting (I’ve been doing >1 Fatebook.io prediction per day since March, and am now at 350+ forecasts, and recently made a polymarket account and have bet £100 so far). I have internal operations experience, experience running cohorts, I am part of the Open Research Institute, etc.****