Why am I doing this?

I am in my 6th and final year of medical school and have taken the decision not to apply to foundation jobs; in other words, I am choosing to step away from a potential career as a doctor. This was not a decision I took lightly, and it certainly wasn’t my intention when I first stepped into medical school years ago. But as I’ve developed over my time at university, I’ve realised that staying in medicine would limit me too much given what I want to achieve long term.

The goal for me isn’t about making more money or giving myself an easier life. I’m fully aware that over the next few years I will probably sit close to the edge of having nothing, spending most of my waking hours trying to achieve an initially speculative kind of stability while also trying to grow personally. I have limited real interest in money. I want enough to live comfortably and to fund the research I care about, but I don’t have any desire for an opulent or luxurious existence.

What I want to achieve is not conceptually complicated, but it is highly factorial. That is part of why I decided to build this website.

My initial plan is to secure my own agency over the topics I want to study by gaining financial independence. The way I’m going about this is by creating an internet-scraping system similar to some tools that already exist, but with important differences. The system will scan a variety of websites and analyse recent posts through measures such as credibility, sentiment, topic and narrative. It will then stratify these according to the stocks or currencies being discussed, and feed all of that into a neural network alongside more stable macroeconomic variables to make medium- to long-term predictions about financial entities and when to invest.

None of this is conceptually novel in itself, but the specific ways I want to measure credibility, sentiment and narrative are more nuanced than most previous attempts, which have tended to be coarse, binary, and generally unsuccessful. The success of this project is far from guaranteed, and the scope is likely to change as I am inevitably humbled by reality, but building something that can support long-term financial independence is a necessary part of the path I want to take.

This isn’t because I want “freedom to learn” in a vague, romantic sense. It comes from a systemic mistrust: I do not believe the projects I want to build would remain aligned with their core aims if they were shaped too heavily by external financial incentives. My focus immediately after achieving financial independence reflects this clearly.

I want to work on a novel system for global governance—one that centres informed public decision-making and probability-based interventions, so that public votes can actually be translated into evidence-based policy. Beyond the obvious difficulty of gaining support for something like this, even if it were proven effective, the moment external funding bodies with their own agendas become involved, any attempt at systemic altruism risks being diluted in the search for profitability. The same logic applies to the projects I hope to pursue in academic architecture and funding, as well as the field of connectomics (the systems and technologies focused on mapping the brain).

That explains the trajectory I hope to follow, but not the reason for this website. I built this site for three main reasons: self-protection, connection, and momentum.

Working in silence on governance, academic reform and other areas that challenge the status quo feels risky. It also increases the likelihood that I miss blind spots that others might see clearly. Being open about what I’m building allows me to engage with people who think seriously and are willing to offer reasoned critique, while also offering a degree of protection from actors who might view my work as a threat to existing systems.

But what I want most is for the momentum behind these ideas to grow. I believe the world can function better than it does, and that challenging the status quo publicly is important. Doing so in a way that is evidence-based rather than driven by pure opinion matters to me.

I’m aware of the irony in creating a website under my own name to promote ideas that are supposed to be much larger than me. But I think the need for openness currently supersedes that discomfort. One day, I hope each of these ideas can exist as their own entities, separate from me entirely, but until I have some assurance that those ideas will be protected, I feel a responsibility to maintain some degree of control over how they are introduced.