Welcome to my digital vault!
My name’s Yurui.
I was born in Beijing, raised in Sydney, and now live in Cambridge, MA, where I study at Harvard College in a self-designed concentration, Rationality and Decision Theory. This site is a home for thoughts and stories from my life.
I enjoy thinking about various parts of the human condition:
Decision Theory: Philosophy of mind and language, game theory and poker, epistemology, behavioural economics, and how minds form beliefs given uncertainty and resource constraints. I’m also interested in AI governance, and I believe that understanding artificial intelligence requires first understanding the cognitive foundations of intelligence itself.
Health: Workout planning for hypertrophy, sleep optimisation, diet planning, and the psychology of discipline and habit formation. I train with the Harvard Powerlifting team and believe in health as the foundation for all human conquests.
Literature: Aesthetics, architecture, theory of beauty, human irrationality, intertextuality, and the preservation of stories through great art, music, poetry, and literature. I speak English, Mandarin and a bit of Italian. I also read Classical Latin.
I’m fascinated by the gap between how we ought to reason and how we actually make decisions. Long-term, I’m interested in how these ideas shape institutions and the kinds of lives humans live.
Previously, I had some exposure to startups and venture capital in Sydney. Now, I’m trying to build a more theoretical understanding of the world. I think the humanities are becoming increasingly neglected in our accelerating technological age, and that humans know far less than we think we do. Technology successfully helps us 'optimise’ our time, but just as often distracts from what it means to live fully. We should turn physical pages more, and scroll less.
In my spare time, you'll find me in the gym, at the poker table, on the tennis court, fishing at dusk, chasing a sunset, or reading a book.
I have two younger brothers. Perhaps one day they’ll stumble across this site, a microcosm into their older brother’s mind, despite his living halfway across the world from them.
