I work on the philosophy of science, with a particular emphasis on the foundations of climate science and complexity theory. I'm interested in the reliability and confirmation of computational climate models, climate engineering/geoengineering, self-organization, emergence, and multi-scale modeling.
I received my PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 2014, and am currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Southern California (USC). I was hired by USC's Sustainability Task Force to engage in interdisciplinary research connecting earth science, philosophy of science, complexity theory, ethics, and policy. My res…
I work on the philosophy of science, with a particular emphasis on the foundations of climate science and complexity theory. I'm interested in the reliability and confirmation of computational climate models, climate engineering/geoengineering, self-organization, emergence, and multi-scale modeling.
I received my PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 2014, and am currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Southern California (USC). I was hired by USC's Sustainability Task Force to engage in interdisciplinary research connecting earth science, philosophy of science, complexity theory, ethics, and policy. My research program involves an attempt to identify and quantify the risks and benefits associated with various multi-faceted climate policies, with a particular emphasis on the dangers and opportunities afforded by large-scale climate engineering proposals. While the risks of implementing specific climate policies are relatively well-explored, such risk analyses are almost always performed in isolation, with the supposition that the climate policy under consideration is likely to be the only significant climate policy being employed. My work focuses on the problems that appear when a more realistic policy scenario is examined--one which blends aspects of climate engineering, alternative energy-based mitigation, and some combination of adaptive policies to produce a heterogeneous “policy portfolio.” I am developing a novel approach to integrated assessment modeling that is better equipped to realistically evaluate these mixed policy portfolios, and less subject to the sort of implicit bias and evaluative baggage associated with traditional attempts at integrated assessment. The approach I have developed--in collaboration Julien Emile-Geay--centers on minimizing the degree to which policy decisions today constrain the range of viable policy options in the future. By optimizing our policy decisions to produce a maximally wide range of future options, we both mitigate the practical impact of structural model uncertainty on our policy decisions and minimize the extent to which individual evaluative choices are irreversibly enshrined in those decisions.
I also have strong interests in the philosophy of technology, information theory, network theory, and the foundations of quantum mechanics.
