CURRENT MISSION

To be a part of CS again after many years of not having my own place.

ABOUT ME

I'm mostly a sensitive, neurospicy nerd. My D&D alignment is chaotic wholesome. My life has always been weird, and so am I.

I consider myself very tolerant and open minded, and that's why I'll kick someone out in the middle of the night if they talk about other groups of people as inferior. That goes for elitists too :)

My world is as limited as my knowledge of it, and I'm always willing to expand it. But even if you travel the stars and achieve omniscience, the moment you die everything becomes retroactively pointless. All you brought to the world was more entropy. But if you connect your life to the human network, the superstructure will keep your hopes and dreams alive long after you are gone. This isn't just any platitude for me, this is the way I approach life.

Therefore, come humans! Let's meet, exchange, support each other, with no reward but the promise of existing in each other's minds!

PHILOSOPHY

Whatever you do, do it with love. If love isn't compatible with what you are doing, perhaps you shouldn't be doing it, you asshole.
Learn to distinguish between ethics and aesthetics. I like strong data and dislike strong opinions. I'm all about non-zero sum games, and I'm convinced that game theory and evolutionary psychology offer more accurate and useful insight into human behavior than millennia of cultural tradition. I don't believe in free will and, for me, that makes it much easier to make sense of the observation that we oftentimes act crazy.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

I discovered Couchsurfing thanks to some friends, and immediately fell in love with the idea. It creates net value for mankind, allowing those who couldn't otherwise afford to travel to just go and discover the world. It reduces the friction in the very necessary process of inter-cultural communication, and I want to be part of that. My couch is your couch.

Interests

Economics, politics: what is power, why some people have it, and why you don't.
Science: how do thinks work the way they do, and why? I have a silly teenage crush on Stephen Hawking's writings and would make sweet, passionate love to Richard Dawking's speeches. Not his twitter feed, though.
Engineering: how can we make things work they way they don't?
History: why did things turn out the way they did, and how can we influence how they work out now?
Philosophy: what is truth, and how can we recognize it when we stumble upon it? Consequentialism FTW
Martial arts: not a pacifist. If somebody asks "who's gonna get hurt?", I wanna have a chance to decide the answer.

• arts
• folklore
• dancing
• breakfast
• working out
• politics
• traveling
• music
• sports
• martial arts
• economics
• engineering
• genealogy
• history
• physics
• psychology
• science

Music, Movies, and Books

Does anybody ever read this particular box? I mean, I can't bring myself to read a list of 30 books and 50 songs, so feel free to skip this.

-Parahumans. A masterpiece of a novel (free online!) about a world where traumatized people sometimes develop superpowers. How do you recover from trauma, when your power comes from staying in the same mindset? How does society cope when the most hurt are the powerful? And why are some of them so hell-bent in destroying humanity? If you wished that Marvel Movies were greek epics written by Dostoyevski, this is it.

-Guns, germs and steel: inaccurate at times, yet beautifully argued. Essentially, trying to find the factors that led the western countries to a position where they could bully the entire rest of the world with their left hand, and asking whether it was an accident of history or an unavoidable consequence. Spoiler alert, there's nothing special about western success, it's mostly just a show of horrors.

-Outliers: trigger-happy in it's conclusions, looks at different examples of how extraordinary success comes from the intersection of the right skills, the right resources and the right opportunity and the right idea, and not one factor alone.

-The Clan of the Cave Bear: a cromagnon girl is adopted by a neanderthal tribe and becomes an ice-age badass superwoman. An archaeologist's Mary Sue-ish wet dream.

-The Martian: Robinson Crusoe in Mars. An astronaut stranded in the red planet tries to survive by MacGyvering his way out of a guaranteed death. Written by an engineer, for people who want to read about engineering. I feel the need to say that I read it before it was cool.

-The Moral Landscape: if we are to coexist we have to agree on a common set of moral values, and the one thing we can agree on is that the well-being of others concerns us. We can therefore ask how to maximize human well-being, and that's an empirical question to which there are objectively better and worse answers. And to measure them, the only reliable tool is scientific inquiry. Sam Harris disappoints me greatly nowadays, but his deconstructions of morality and consciousness used to be really interesting.

Movies
-As far as my feet will carry me: World War 2. A german soldier in a soviet prisoner camp in the middle of the frozen siberian desert tries to escape. It makes you feel sympathy for the nazi soldier, which is definitely interesting. And the tension is nerve-wracking.
-Primer: a low-budget sci-fi film about two engineers who accidentally invent a time machine, and how they handle it (hint: poorly). Written by an engineer. Touted as the only consistent time-travel movie.
-Coherence: 8 old friends, a dinner party, and accidental interaction with parallel universes. Sometimes people leave for a minute, and they come back... changed. "Alternative title: Uncanny valley, the movie".
-The Man from Earth: when an archeology professor jokingly argues to his academic colleagues that he is thousands of years old, they set out to find the contradictions in his story to prove him wrong. It proves harder that they believed.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Climbed a mountain carrying two backpacks, does that count? That day I ate a whole lemon and it simply tasted sweet.
On my first time skiing I nailed the highest jump of the course, and it was actually part of my job description.
Got TKO'd by a karate world champion in one brutal punch to the liver.
Spent 4 months without an apartment, carrying all my stuff like a snail from one couch to the next.

Teach, Learn, Share

I'm really into communication and relationships. From romance to workplace politics, to fixing toxic family dynamics. I always love to hear about other people's experiences.

What I Can Share with Hosts

A couch in the middle of the party area.

Countries I’ve Visited

Australia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland

Countries I’ve Lived In

Germany, Spain