I’m an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Before that, I did my PhD at Berkeley, advised by Lara Buchak, John MacFarlane and Wesley Holliday. Before that, I was an undergraduate at Freie Universität Berlin.
I work mostly on decision theory and formal epistemology and have broad philosophical interests. My dissertation was about decision theory for non-ideal agents. I like to think about grue (explained in very short words). I’m also thinking about AI safety with CoRe Safe AI at Carnegie Mellon University.
Currently thinking about Carnap. Comments welcome!
Send me an e-mail at sven.neth [at] pitt [dot] edu.
You can also find me here: PhilPeople, dept, arXiv, orcid, PhilSci, GitHub, Scholar.
Against Coherence, The Philosophical Review, forthcoming. [preprint]
Random Emeralds, Philosophical Quarterly, forthcoming. [journal] [preprint]
Rational Aversion to Information, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, forthcoming. [journal] [preprint]
Against Proxy Optimization, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2026. [journal] [preprint]
Gruesome Predictions, Pittsburgh Interdisciplinary Mathematics Review, 2026. [journal]
Variance Normalization and Disagreement, Erkenntnis, 2026. [journal] [preprint]
Longtermist Myopia (with Amanda Askell), Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future, Oxford University Press, 2025. [publisher]
Off-Switching Not Guaranteed, Philosophical Studies, 2025. [journal] [preprint]
Better Foundations for Subjective Probability, Australasian Journal for Philosophy, 2025. [journal] [preprint]
A Dilemma for Solomonoff Prediction, Philosophy of Science, 2023. [journal]
Accuracy and Infinity: A Dilemma for Subjective Bayesians (with Mikayla Kelley), Synthese, 2023. [journal]
Social Choice with Changing Preferences: Representation Theorems and Long-Run Policies (with Kshitij Kulkarni), presented at workshop, NeurIPS 2020. [arXiv]
Measuring Belief and Risk Attitude, Proceedings of TARK, 2019. [journal]
Letter to the London Review of Books discussing Ramsey’s method for measuring beliefs (LRB, April 2021).
My Carnap number is finite.
When not doing philosophy, I like techno. Recent favorites: