---
title: Home
url: https://0ak.hu/
---

# Home

![Oak Hu](/assets/headshot.jpg)

Welcome! My name is Oak.[^1]

I do mathematics and philosophy—the two armchair disciplines—at Magdalen College, Oxford.

I’m also a member of technical staff at Redwood Research, working on big-picture risks related to ASI.

I occasionally get distracted by weekend projects, like:

- this [evolutionary branching](/anisogamy/simulation) simulation;
- this [wavefunction](/schrodinger/spirals) visualisation; or
- this [toy language model](/williamson/loom) trained only on Tim Williamson’s work.

This site also hosts some [personal](/about) and [university](/writing/) writing, but you really should go read my [Substack](https://offhandquibbles.substack.com/) (philosophy) or [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/users/oakhu) (AI) instead.

The wallpaper is a [stylised](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano_Banana) version of a photo taken while visiting Wuzhen (乌镇) in August 2025. More recently, I’ve visited Hostačov (for a rationality camp reunion); New York City (for a higher-order metaphysics conference); San Salvador (for an economics retreat); and Berkeley (for an AI control conference).

You can reach me by email at [oak@rdwrs.com](mailto:oak@rdwrs.com) or on Signal at [oak.76](https://signal.me/#eu/v-1hPsh6eppfzck9xyYmHkUMvEke7Fj8DRbjWo87LhTdNiRkwYBHdrMsBfO8alBI).

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Some philosophical sympathies:

- Our best metaphysical theory is easily the one given by [Logical Foundations](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.11050).
- Our best ethical theory is likely welfare (read ‘flourishing’, not ‘happiness’) consequentialist; but societies and waterfalls might be welfare subjects!
- Our best epistemological theory may be knowledge-first Bayesianism, but self-disagreement is pervasive and handled poorly.[^2]

And some more personal tastes:

- I like Beethoven’s _Pathetique_ Sonata (No. 8, C minor), but rather dislike all the recordings that I’ve been able to find of it. I’d like to hear Dallon Weekes cover Penelope Scott’s ``Cemetery Pigeons’’. I like pretty much any jazz, metal, or EDM. I like Yoasobi’s music in Japanese, but hate it in English. I had 300,744 minutes on Spotify in 2021, but now basically just listen to papers and podcasts (typically around 3x speed, which is a bit lower than it used to be).
- I like 49th State Brewing’s Wild Blueberry Cream Soda, and I really dislike Cherry Coke Zero (weird aftertaste, and I want the calories). I really like fruit: pomelo, jackfruit, mango, melon, crisp watermelon, crisp or frozen grapes, coconut, bramble fruits (especially foraged). However, I generally like savoury food over sweet food, and enjoy cooking with carbon steel.
- I like British pronunciation-guided acronym styling, but with small caps (‘BBC’, ‘Nato’, ‘JPeg’). I like single quotes for quote-names (even nested) and double quotes for scare quoting, but always inside punctuation. I like en dashes for complex modifiers (‘New York–style pizza’), and rewording sentences so as not to end with prepositions. However, I like ‘me’ in compound subjects and ‘I’ in compound objects, although they still must appear first or last respectively.
- I like the fifth generation mainline Pokémon games and also the fifth edition of D&D. More generally for the former, I like the DS / 3DS generations; more specifically for the latter, I like the Druid subclasses from _Tasha’s_ (Spores, Stars, Wildfire), and a house rule letting any attack with a proficient weapon take –5 to hit for +10 damage as a “called shot” (martials need the help).
- I care an outsize amount about Murrysville, Hawk Mountain, Longwood Gardens, and the house in Huangshan (黄山) where my maternal grandmother now lives.
- I’ve been with my girlfriend, [Cadence](https://cadencejames.com/), since November 2024. Aside from being very pretty, she’s better at mental math than I am and lifts more weight than I can.

* * *

_This site was built with the help of Gemini and Claude._

[^1]: Well, [technically](https://offhandquibbles.substack.com/p/quotes-and-quinean-quasi-quotes-quickly), my name is ‘Oak Hu’ (a five-letter string), while _I’m_ Oak Hu (the person to whom ‘Oak Hu’ refers); but it’s almost always fine to be sloppy. My parents named me ‘Oak’ after Oklahoma State University, where they went for graduate school. My last name, ‘Hu’, is from the Chinese 胡; appending 说 (‘speak’) yields 胡说 (‘nonsense’)—naturally, someone named ‘Oak Hu’ does philosophy.
[^2]: Let _A_ be the (rigid) class of propositions comprising all and only the true ones. Now, notice that for any proposition _p_, if _p_ is true then the sentence ⌜_p_ ↔ (_p_ ∈ _A_)⌝ means that _p_, and otherwise the sentence means that ¬_p_. So, if you’re ever wondering whether _p_, the answer is that _p_ ↔ (_p_ ∈ _A_). Congratulations on unlocking omniscience. Unfortunately, knowing something under one guise does not help you decide on it under another guise.