I’m a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at Berkeley. My advisors are Lara Buchak, John MacFarlane and Wesley Holliday.
I work on decision theory and formal epistemology. My dissertation is on decision theory for non-ideal agents. I have also written about the idea that we should assign higher probability to simpler hypotheses and about reasoning with probability in natural language.
In addition, I’m interested ethics and social choice theory and like to think about Goodman’s ‘New Riddle of Induction' (which I like to explain in very short words).
In this academic year, I’m supported by a Josephine De Karman Fellowship. Before that, I was a Global Priorities Fellow at the Forethought Foundation.
Send me an e-mail at nethsven [at] berkeley [dot] edu.
You can also find me here: PhilPeople, department website (including teaching), arXiv, orcid, ResearchGate.
A Dilemma for Solomonoff Prediction
forthcoming in Philosophy of Science.
[journal] [philpapers] [PhilSci] [arXiv]
Accuracy and Infinity: A Dilemma for Subjective Bayesians
with Mikayla Kelley, Synthese 201 (12): 1-14, 2023.
[journal] [philpapers]
Social Choice with Changing Preferences: Representation Theorems and Long-Run Policies
with Kshitij Kulkarni
Presented at Workshop on Consequential Decision Making in Dynamic Environments, NeurIPS 2020.
[arXiv]
Measuring Belief and Risk Attitude
Proceedings of TARK 2019, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 297: 354-364, 2019.
[journal] [philpapers] [arXiv]
Chancy Modus Ponens
Analysis 79 (4): 632-638, 2019.
[journal] [philpapers] [semantics archive]
Random Emeralds. PSA 2022, November 2022.
Rational Aversion to Information. Bayesian Learning and Reasoning Workshop, July 2022. [video]
(Almost) Certain Modus Ponens. Paris-Berkeley Workshop on Probability and Meaning, Institut Jean Nicod, June 2022. [slides]
Rational Aversion to Information. Berkeley-London Conference, May 2022.
Rational Aversion to Information. Central APA, February 2022.
Rational Aversion to Information. Formal Ethics 2022, January 2022.
A Dilemma for Solomonoff Prediction. The 27th Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, November 2021.
Rational Aversion to Information. Bayesian Epistemology: Perspectives and Challenges, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, August 2020.
Goodman and Bayes. Central APA, February 2020.
Conditionals and Closure. 12th California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics Conference (CUSP), University of Southern California, October 2019.
Measuring Belief and Risk Attitude. Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK) XVII, University of Toulouse, July 2019.
Decision Theory for Bounded Agents. 2nd Oxford Workshop on Global Priorities Research, University of Oxford, July 2019.
Measuring Belief and Risk Attitude. Formal Epistemology Workshop 2019, June 2019.
Bayesian Naturalness. 47th Annual Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy, May 2019.
Chancy Modus Ponens. 11th California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics Conference (CUSP), UC Berkeley, October 2018.
Bayesian Naturalness. Normative Notions Formalized, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, August 2018.
Measuring Belief and Risk Attitude. 7th CSLI Workshop on Logic, Rationality & Intelligent Interaction, Stanford University, June 2018.
Is Accuracy Dominance a Good Argument for Probabilism? CUNY-Milan-Workshop on Belief, City University of New York, February 2018.