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 but have broad philosophical interests. My dissertation was about decision theory for non-ideal agents. I also like to think about grue (explained in very short words).
Currently thinking about why optimization is bad. 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.
Variance Normalization and Disagreement, Erkenntnis, forthcoming. [preprint]
Random Emeralds, Philosophical Quarterly, forthcoming. [preprint] [journal]
Rational Aversion to Information, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, forthcoming. [preprint] [journal]
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. [preprint] [journal]
Better Foundations for Subjective Probability, Australasian Journal for Philosophy, 2024. [preprint] [journal]
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 music.