Welcome! My name is Oak.Well, technically, 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.

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

This summer, I’ll be working at Redwood Research, which I think has the most exciting empirical agendas as well as the best strategic thinking about big-picture risks.

I occasionally get distracted by weekend projects, like:

• this wavefunction visualisation;
• this evolutionary branching simulation; or
• this toy language model trained only on Tim Williamson’s work.

This site hosts some personal and university writing, but you really should go read my Substack instead.

The wallpaper is a stylised 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 [email protected] or on Signal at oak.76.

Some philosophical sympathies:

• Our best metaphysical theory is easily the one given by Logical Foundations.
• 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.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.

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 even ‘twenty year–old’), 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.

This site was built with the help of Gemini and Claude.