About
About
Kangyu Wang is a PhD candidate in LSE's Department of Philosophy, Logic & Scientific Method, supervised by Dr Campbell Brown and Dr Kieran Oberman and previously by Prof Johanna Thoma. He received an LL.B. Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Renmin University of China and an MSc Philosophy and Public Policy from LSE.
He was a visiting PhD student at the Australian National University, University of Toronto, and Rutgers-New Brunswick, sponsored respectively by Prof Katie Steele, Prof Sergio Tenenbaum, and Prof Mike Otsuka. He co-organises the LSE Choice Group. He is also a Research Affiliate at The Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory (MINT) Lab, Australian National University.
Research Interests
- Kangyu Wang is a philosopher working mainly on decision theory and practical reason, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of economics and finance, and philosophy of AI/ML. His PhD thesis, titled Hard Choices and Human Agency, has five chapters studying the following five questions:
- Which theory of the nature of practical reason can help us make sense of the presence and resolution of hard choices, that is, decision-making cases in which options are incommensurable?
- How is it possible for human agents to genuinely resolve hard choices through deliberation given that options are incommensurable?
- Why is it that picking arbitrarily when encountering hard choices is fitting in some cases but not in other cases? How should we understand the normative importance of the genuine resolution of hard choices?
- How should we understand the resolution of hard choices with respect to rational requirements on dynamic decision-making and the notion of temporally extended agency.
- Why are machine learning agents unable to identify or resolve hard choices? Why does this matter? What does that say about the distinctiveness of human agency? For a glimpse of my view on hard choices, you can read this book review I coauthored with Campbell Brown.
- He also studies political philosophy, applied ethics, and the meaning in life.
- In the coming years, he plans to pursue two main research projects in the Philosophy of AI/ML and the Philosophy of Finance, including the intersection of these two areas. More information can be found on his personal website.