I am, among other categories, a cognitive scientistwith primary research interest in judgement and decision-making under unmeasurable uncertainty, a field in the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. I love the scientific method so much that I regularly spread my joy about it in various formats of science communication. In the end I care about ideas being applied in the real world, solving problems, and benefitting humanity. This means I often play the role of being an interface between the two worlds, of ideas and their application by humans. Over the last years I have founded and lead different organizations in the DACH region that work on improving the world. With Effective Altruism Austria we educate students and young professionals on how to think more clearly about (and finally have more) impact and offer a community for people who want to combine applied ethics as well as strategical and scientific thinking. With the Global Shapers Vienna Hub we bursted filter bubbles and constantly design new social projects and businesses.
“If everybody contemplates the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera.” ― John Rich
Research Interests
Cognitive Psychology, Heuristics and biases, individual decision-making
Collective: intelligence, rationality, and decision-making
Complex and dynamical systems, computational social science, science of science
Effective altruism, applied ethics, and impact measurement
General (Theoretical) Interests
(Bayesian) Epistemology
History in general, history of ideas, technology and innovation
Philosophy of Science
Public Health, Mental Health, Positive Psychology, Psychology of virtue
Interdisciplinary thinking and communication, science communication
Holistic and humanistic education
Network science
Behavioural and Neuroendocrinology
Information design, Science Illustrations, Visual Representation and Understanding
Talks I give
Impact Thinking (Effective Altruism): How can we think more clearly about and have more positive impact on the world? How can we overcome typical systematic errors in thinking and doing, when helping others?
Social Cognition: What typical mistakes do we make when we think about other humans? What does psychology tell us, how we can do it better?
Quantified Self: What gets measured gets managed: How can we use (self-)measurement to reach (our) goals? What tools are out there? A critical and practical introduction and overview
Academic talks: everything mentioned in "research -" and "general interests"
I am open to expand the portfolio upon request for topics in my domain of competence
Projects, POSITIONS, ACTIVITIES
Rationality Vienna MeetupCo-Organizer of the monthly meetup (discussing heuristics/biases, science and more)
Regularly I perceive how people have naive impressions of my beliefs. Most of my interests do not represent positions and opinions I identify with, but phenomena I am interested in thinking about. I am agnostic and flexible regarding my stands on them and my opinion is like a flag in the wind of good arguments and evidence. Also many of my blog posts do not reflect my standards of quality. I try to produce minimal viable products that are readable and at least approximate my knowledge and opinion, to get ideas and input "out there".