Introduction
Model Thinking is written by Duncan and Jason.
Duncan McClements is an incoming Economics student at King’s College, Cambridge. He is currently independently researching and modelling topics from migration to military spending. He is an Atlas fellow, Emergent Ventures winner, and published a paper modelling Visa Auctions with the Adam Smith Institute.
Jason Hausenloy is a student and independent researcher based in Singapore. He is currently a visiting fellow at the United Nations University and interning at Conjecture, a UK-based AI alignment lab. He is an Atlas Fellow, Emergent Ventures Winner, and co-authored a UNDRR report on existential risk.
Duncan and Jason met in Oxford where they attended the European Summer Program on Rationality (ESPR) ‘22. There, their many late-night conversations followed roughly the same pattern: Duncan would propose an exciting idea he’d be reading about, Jason would ask him to explain, then explain again. Eventually, they’d both understand and break new ground together – that became how they collaborated.
Inspiration
This used to be Duncan’s personal blog. Nuño Sempere, a super-forecaster who taught us both at ESPR, once commented:
Around that time, we had written our first article together, a policy proposal for Cadaver Markets in the UK. We discovered writing together made us both more productive, engaging and original. The tangential ideas we’d have while drafting one piece would often fill a separate document.
At Model Thinking, we want to provide a quantitative lens for viewing the world and perhaps, also, respond to Nuño’s critique.
