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’m a student at Harvard College in a self-designed concentration called Rationality and Decision Theory. I enjoy thinking about hard questions across philosophy, cognitive science, mathematics, and economics in order to understand how minds make judgements under uncertainty

This site is a home for thoughts and stories from my life. You’ll find essays on decision-making, literature, beauty, and time intertwined with reflections from travel, notes on my research, and fragments of a naive life spent trying to understand the world and the mind that perceives it.

I’ve always been drawn to questions that seem to never have clear answers. What does it mean to reason well, why do people believe what they do, what kind of life is worth living, and how we navigate its seasons. I try to collect my ideas on these topics, examine them, and preserve them before they disappear.

Some pieces here are polished. Most aren’t. Some are essays and others are word vomits. I enjoy reading my older works and seeing how I’ve changed since. I think my writing forms a traceable map of my personal growth across continents, comprising the ideas, experiences, and questions that have shaped me. I believe in writing more than ever now and think that personal websites will be the last bastion of pure human expression.

I speak English, Mandarin, and a bit of Italian. I also read Classical Latin. 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. “Or eating” - my roommate.

I have two younger brothers. Perhaps one day they’ll stumble across this site, a microcosm of their older brother’s mind, even from halfway across the world.