Twenty Fun Facts About Me
Both Bryan Caplan and Richard Hanania have recently written articles providing sixteen personal facts. I thought, being a sheeple, I’d join the trend and do the same. However, because I am exactly 20/16ths more fun than the rest, I thought I’d give twenty. Here goes:
I’ve mentioned this before on a few occasions, but I can speak backwards fluently. If you give me a word or sentence, I can say it backwards in full immediately. Two clarifications: 1. I flip around the order of the letters in each word, not the order of the words. So, “my name is Matthew” would be “ym eman si wehttam.” 2. This gets harder with longer words. I start to have trouble with words around fourteen letters (I did once figure out that antidisestablishmentarianism backward is msinairatnemhsilbatsesiditna, which I’m pretty proud of—though that took a few minutes). I’ve always been able to do this, never practiced.
(Demonstration—not sure why my arms are so strangely positioned lol).
I am extremely goofy—probably top 1% goofiness. I really like dumb jokes and probably make too many silly comments. My favorite comedian is Mitch Hedberg—my favorite joke is the following:
On a traffic light, green means go and yellow means yield. But on a banana, it’s just the opposite. Green means “hold on” and yellow means “go ahead.” And red means “where the fuck did you get that banana?”
I also really like the show Impractical Jokers (if you haven’t seen it, you must see Murr’s food tasting). The kinds of conversations I enjoy most are either in-the-weeds discussions of interesting topics or complete silliness—don’t like as much conversations in between.
I have an extremely spiky skill distribution. While I’m naturally pretty good at philosophy, and economics was also always pretty intuitive to me, I’m not great at math, was beyond terrible at learning foreign language, and don’t have much general historical knowledge. I’m pretty sure my middle school Spanish teacher thought I was mentally challenged at the same time my English teacher thought I might become some kind of major public intellectual.
I think babies are very cute! But I don’t like dogs, in general, except my cousin’s dog who is, by all accounts, the best dog on earth.
I have what Clara Collier once called “argument brain.” I find it hard to remember facts about the world unless they are relevant to some ongoing debate. I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve learned in history classes throughout the years, but I will never forget any of the arguments for how we know that humans wiped out the megafauna; this is solely because some people are so silly as to deny this.
I’m generally pretty happy most of the time.
I have a really awesome family! My parents are both very smart and reasonable; I’ve talked them into being vegan and giving some of their money to effective charities (though really before going vegan I was the main meat eater in the family, so they didn’t take that much convincing). My brother is great too—also an EA. I even have amazing grandparents! I also have very epic friends (the world has fewer better things than close friendships with Amos Wollen and Jackademic Philosophy!)
In middle school I was politically libertarian and started a blog where I wrote a few posts. It wasn’t very good though and my thinking was often confused. Still, fun to occasionally look back on.
At every point in my life I’ve had one all-encompassing interest. The order: trains—>superheroes—>Pokémon—>Yugioh—Magic: The Gathering—>high school debate—>philosophy. This has consistently been the thing I’ve spent most of my time on.
I currently live in Oxford but I’m starting a Ph.D in philosophy at Princeton in the fall. Oh, and I recently published, along with Amos Wollen, the first ever paper on the Anthropic argument for theism. Now that the existence of God has been proved, hopefully philosophers can move on to other topics.
Juicier info below the paywall.
