Papers

Desire-as-Belief in Context
Mind, forthcoming
Synopsis: I give a context-sensitive version of the Desire-as-Belief Thesis and prove its tenability.
A Behavioural and Representationl Evaluation of Goal-Directedness in Language Model Agents
Co-authored with Mario Giulianelli and 7 others.
Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
Synopsis: We develop a novel framework for interpreting what goals an AI system is pursuing.
Dutch Books, Indicative Conditionals, and Rational Updating
Co-authored with Snow Zhang
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Amsterdam Colloquium, 2025
Synopsis: We discuss how you should update your credence in an indicative conditional, when you learn a piece of factual information.
Causal Decision Theory, Context, and Determinism
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2024
Synopsis: I respond to "deterministic" counterexamples to causal decision theory (CDT), by drawing attention to the fact that counterfactuals are context-sensitive.
The Punctuated Equilibrium of Scientific Change: a Bayesian Network Model
Co-authored with Patrick Grim and 3 others.
Synthese, 2022
Synopsis: We use Bayesian networks to understand how evidence flows through scientific communities.
Scientific Theories as Bayesian Nets: Structure and Evidence Sensitivity
Co-authored with Patrick Grim and 5 others.
Philosophy of Science, 2022
Synopsis: We show how scientific theories can be modeled as Bayesian networks.

Work in Progress

A paper on deference and decision theory
R&R (email me for a draft)
Synopsis: I give some new results concerning causal decision theory and expert deference.
A paper on decision theory and utilitarianism
R&R (email me for a draft)
Synopsis: I prove a version of Harsanyi's impartial observer theorem, in the suppositional decision theory setting.
A paper on indicative conditionals and Dutch books
Co-authored with Snow Zhang
under review (email me for a draft)
Synopsis: We discuss how you should update your credence in an indicative conditional, when you learn a piece of factual information. (This is the full version of our paper in the Amsterdam proceedings.)
A paper on self-recommending decision theories
under review (email me for a draft)
Synopsis: I prove that no suppositional decision theory is self-recommending.
A paper on updating on conditionals
under review (email me for a draft)
Synopsis: I draw out a relationship between van Fraassen's Judy Benjamin Problem and Stalnaker's Thesis.
A paper on the Off-switch Game
under review (email me for a draft)
Synopsis: I prove a generalization of Hadfield-Menell et al.'s (2017) Off-switch Game result about AI alignment.
Emergent Alignment and the Projectability of Ethical Personas
Co-authored with Guillermo Del Pinal , Youngchan Lee , and Alejandro Pérez Carballo
arXiv preprint
Synopsis: We give empirical results demonstrating "emergent alignment" in Large Language Models.
A paper on accuracy and epistemic modality
Co-authored with Mikayla Kelley , Richard Roth , and Snow Zhang (a.k.a. the accu-vengers)
in progress (draft soon!)
Synopsis: We investigate what happens to epistemic utility theory when we introduce epistemic modals and indicative conditionals.
A paper on the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics
Co-authored with Alexander Meehan
in progress (draft soon!)
Synopsis: We prove a new "quantum representation theorem" for the Born rule in Everettian quantum mechanics.
A paper on dynamic deliberation and game-theoretic solution concepts
Co-authored with Clara Bradley
in progress (draft soon!)
Synopsis: We show that different game-theoretic solution concepts can derived from different assumptions about rational deliberation in games.