Worldview
Perspective
I know I was born into certain advantages, and into a narrow view of the world that took me years to question. There are many honest ways to think about truth, relativism, and how a single life sits inside a global one. I care about human flourishing everywhere, not only in the USA, and I think looking out for each other, across borders, is a basic part of being human.
Part of that is personal. My family is from southern Minnesota, on the lands of the Dakota, part of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Seven Council Fires); Minnesota is also home to the Ojibwe (Anishinaabe). Both are still here, and both were forced from much of that land by an expansion I was raised to celebrate.* Naming it plainly is the point: history has to be protected and kept open to everyone. Whitewashing does real harm, and it is the racial face of a wider erasure, the habit of smoothing history into something kinder and more pleasant than what happened. An honest history deals with the real record. That is why I push back on nationalism and want information kept as free of bias as we can manage.
The Social Contract
I think perception, like knowledge, accumulates over time, and that a kind of social contract runs implicitly between us. For people to flourish they need safety and their basic needs met, food, water, shelter, and, because we are social creatures, they also need to communicate and to reach information, which today runs through the internet. But the information within reach right now needs better safeguards:
- - knowledge built from evidence (Locke)
- - inquiry that wins over dogma (Voltaire)
- - power that answers to the people (Rousseau)
- - freedom made real because people have the means to use it (Beauvoir)
I hold that debt with its critique attached: Charles W. Mills showed, in The Racial Contract, how much of the social-contract tradition was written while excluding most of humanity, and any use I make of it has to answer that.* I think we owe each other the work of building and sharing what we know, and that is where a chain I keep returning to starts: open information feeds democracy, and democracy is what lets people flourish.
I believe in both a modernist and a postmodernist viewpoint of the truth. So while I believe there is real empirical truth, I also believe that in most human interactions, empirical truth matters less than perspective: the relative truths people actually live in. That is about how people relate to each other, not about how evidence gets judged. Where the work is reporting, analysis, or peer review, the stricter standard I set out on my advocacy page applies instead.
Growth is a lifelong project for me. I try to stay open to feedback, and to own it when I am wrong. I do not expect to ever be done.
Ethics, Morality & Boundaries
For me, ethics are contextually and culturally bound, whereas morality is more of a spiritual or internal clock. I set boundaries for how people interact with me and my family, because a boundary is something I can control.
Spirituality
What follows is my own ongoing personal reflection: personal and individual, a private orientation rather than a settled identity or a finished position, and not something I would ask anyone to take as representative of a tradition. It is not a truth-claim that competes with science or evidence, and it is not the basis for my political commitments; the standard I hold research to lives on my research pages, and my politics are held and disclosed separately, on their own terms. Where I engage a tradition I am not part of, that is reverence, not practice; the Daoist and Buddhist traditions I do belong to are named below with that same care.
I am an animist. At its simplest that means I see spirit in all things, living or not, and all of us as part of a single connected whole. My strongest influences are Zen Buddhism, especially Thich Nhat Hanh, and my closest association is with Daoism, which is why I joined DaoUSA and the Tai He Dao Ministry. Even so, I struggle to call myself simply a Daoist or a Buddhist, because my beliefs do not fully line up with either; animist is the honest word. My primary connecting belief is in the universal flow, what Daoists call the Dao, while my school of thought and the way I reason and practice sit closer to Zen Buddhism.*
Alan Watts is part of my thinking here as well, though as a connector of ideas rather than an authority on any of these traditions: the way he wove Zen, Daoist, and Western thought into one conversation is close to how I hold them together.
I was raised Christian Fundamentalist and Baptist, and I have since left that faith behind, once I could see the dangers in how it was taught. Thich Nhat Hanh's Living Buddha, Living Christ helped me find my way from there to here.
Some traditions I do not practice resonate heavily with me, and I hold them with reverence. The closest is the Ainu, whose sense of kamuy, spirits present throughout the living world as I understand it, comes nearest to my own animism; the Ainu are the Indigenous people of Hokkaidō. I feel a similar resonance in Shintō, in the Dakota and Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) traditions of Minnesota, and in Romani folk traditions. Wider traditions shaped the thinking I draw on as well: the relational ethics of Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism, the Hindu vision of one reality underneath many forms, and the bodhisattva ideal of Tibetan and Mahayana Buddhism.
When I meditate and reflect outside the Zen mindset, I hold Guan Yin* in mind rather than worship her: a figure claimed across both Buddhism and Daoism and traced to the older Indian figure of Avalokiteśvara, and that no single tradition owns her is part of why she fits how I think.
Lifestyle
I want a life built on connection, honesty, and purpose, and I am building it with my spouse, Genesis Wilde.
For a long time I kept people at a distance. I do not want to be that person, and the pull toward an open, honest life is a big part of why information integrity matters so much to me.
Information Advocacy
I treat reliable information as infrastructure, and infrastructure only works while people maintain it. The pillars, the orgs & projects, the products I pay for, and the why behind each: Information Advocacy.
Goals
Next Stage
- - Establish myself in the mathematics community and as a quantum researcher
- - Do my part to strengthen the social contract that ties open information, democracy, and human flourishing together
- - Build local community connections together with my spouse
- - Advance mathematics, quantum, and scientific study
- - Improve information access and reliability
Notes
- On the removals. The specific record: after the U.S.-Dakota War, about 1,658 Dakota were interned at Fort Snelling beginning in November 1862, and somewhere between about 100 and 300 died there over the winter. An act of February 16, 1863 abrogated the federal treaties with the Dakota, the Dakota Removal Act of March 3, 1863 ordered them out of the state, and in May 1863 roughly 1,300 survivors were shipped by steamboat to the Crow Creek reservation. The Ho-Chunk were removed under their own act, passed February 21, 1863. Earlier, the Sandy Lake tragedy of 1850 killed around 400 Ojibwe after annuity payments were deliberately relocated; the 1889 Nelson Act later pushed Minnesota Ojibwe toward concentration on the White Earth reservation. Both nations are still here, in Minnesota and in diaspora. ↩
- On The Racial Contract. The precise claim: Charles W. Mills argued in The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997) that the racial contract is not a mere addendum to the classic social contract but its foundation, written by and for the benefit of those it counted as full persons. Naming him here is deliberate: using contract theory without its strongest critique would be exactly the smoothing-over this page argues against. ↩
- On my Zen framing. This is my own lay engagement with Zen, filtered through Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching, not a claim about what Zen is. Scholars of Buddhism generally treat Zen as a full religious and institutional tradition, and reducing it to philosophy and a way of life is a simplification I am knowingly making for myself, not a scholarly description. What I personally take from it is a disposition: hold a current understanding loosely, test it against experience, and revise it. That resonates for me with the discipline I bring to research and evidence, but that vocabulary (testing, revision) is mine, borrowed for the analogy, not a claim about how Zen practice is structured or what it is for. (Some Zen lineages, notably Japanese Rinzai kōan training, do have a formal practice of a teacher repeatedly checking a student's response over years; that is real, but it belongs to a different branch and practice culture than Thich Nhat Hanh's own Vietnamese tradition, and I am not presenting it as the source of my framing.) ↩
- On Guan Yin. A bodhisattva is not a creator-god or an object of theistic worship. Doctrinally it is a fellow traveler further along a shared path, not a categorically different kind of being. Scholarly and popular sources do differ on calling Guan Yin a deity in the everyday sense, even while agreeing she is not a theistic god. And one more thing belongs here plainly rather than resolved away: taking a devotional figure as a reflection-orientation is itself a decontextualization, the same structure as the McMindfulness critique (Purser and Loy) that scholars level at Western uses of Zen, and I do not claim my use is exempt. Background: Britannica, "Avalokiteshvara"; Chün-fang Yü, Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteśvara (Columbia University Press, 2001), cited as background reading, not yet read in full; Nan Ma, "The Marian-Guanyin Nexus in China, Japan, and the Philippines," Religions 17(2):250 (2026), open access. ↩