I'm a philosopher, sociologist, and game designer. I’ve spent my life working to answer questions like:

• Why do some human needs get sensed and addressed by markets and bureaucracies, but not others?
• Are there any metrics where it’s safe to maximize them?
• When people say an experience was *meaningful* (as opposed to pleasurable, important, etc) or a choice was *wise* (as opposed to effective, clever, etc), what do they mean?
• What’s really driving the trend towards atomization and social isolation?

I've co-founded a research organization which is at the cutting edge of mechanism design, social choice, and AI alignment.

The best way to contact me is  twitter!

What are Human Values, and How Do We Align AI to them? (2024); with Oliver Klingefjord and Ryan Lowe. There is an emerging consensus that we need to align AI systems with human values (Gabriel, 2020; Ji et al., 2024), but it remains unclear how to apply this to language models in practice. We split the problem of "aligning to human values" into three parts: first, eliciting values from people; second, reconciling those values into an alignment target for training ML models; and third, actually training the model. In this paper, we focus on the first two parts, and ask the question: what are "good" ways to synthesize diverse human inputs about values into a target for aligning language models?

Scale, Togetherness, and Meaning (2023) In Chapter 1 of this talk, I cover problems with meaning and the social fabric that emerge at large scales—such as with global social networks, operating systems, app stores, and markets, and give solutions. (transcript)

Values, Preferences, Meaningful Choice (2022) I present a conception of values as attention policies resulting from constitutive judgements, and use it to build an alternative preference relation, Meaningful Choice, which retains many desirable features of revealed preference.

Values-Based Data-Science and Design (2021) A textbook on the design of meaningful social apps, focusing especially on methods for gathering sources of meaning, understanding why it's hard for people to live meaningfully, designing apps that help with these "hard steps", and monitoring the results.

Nothing to be Done (2017) Intellectual history of the west, from a designers' standpoint, as a succession of approaches to human systems.

Is Anything Worth Maximizing (2016) About how metrics affect the structure of organizations and societies, how they change the economy, how we’re doing them wrong, and how we could do them right.

Choicemaking and the Interface (2014) Theories of choice from economics and philosophy suggest information requirements for good choices. In view of these requirements, we can see why current menus lead toward regrettable and isolating choices.

Values Discovery GPT (2023) A GPT which talks to you about what's important to you and makes values cards which capture your sources of meaning.

Moral Graph Elicitation (2023) A democratic process for collecting values from a large, diverse group and building a "moral graph" that shows consensus about which values are wiser than which, and which can be used to create policy, tune LLMs, etc.

Building a Second Heart (2021) A research demo for a writing interface backed by a database of values.

Social Programming Considered as a Habitat for Groups (2019) A new way to code up social apps and information systems emerges from studying how people use ordinary speech to set up social roles and obligations.

Find my games on meaning.supplies

I got started by developing the meaning-based organizational metrics at Couchsurfing.com, then co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan Harris, and coined the term “Time Well Spent” for a family of metrics adopted by teams at Facebook, Google, and Apple.

I then started an online school and wrote a textbook on Values-Based Design, and more recently am starting a nonprofit to bring about a future where wise AIs and humans collaborate to help people live well.

My philosophy work descends pretty clearly from that of Amartya Sen, Charles Taylor, David Velleman, and Ruth Chang.

In tech, I was lucky to learn from people like Alan Kay, Terry Winograd, and Bill Verplank at Interval Research, from Casey Fenton at CouchSurfing (where I developed the metrics which guided the company), from Howie Shrobe and Marvin Minksy at MIT. And more recently through conversations with Bret Victor and Rob Ochshorn.

My tactic of running social experiments through games and performance emerged from study with Christian Wolff (partipatory music) and Peter Parnell (playwriting) at Dartmouth, and then various improvisational scores with Nancy Stark Smith, Mike Vargas, Ruth Zaporah, and others. I had the great fortune to work alongside Albert Kong and Catherine Herdlick on the real world games festival Come Out and Play.

Finally, I've benefited from working alongside Ellie Hain and Tristan Harris, Nathan Vanderpool, and Anne Selke.