Jonathan Herbst
What is your favorite extracurricular activity?
Ethics Bowl! You get to debate philosophy, practice establishing ethical guidelines for your own life, work across teams to build arguments up instead of tearing each other down, and spend your time chatting with friends. Really, what could be better?
What was your favorite Stanford OHS course and why?DFRL is one of my favorite courses, combining all the best problems of democracy and political theory with economics and pragmatism. Not only is it an intriguing source of topics to heat up any dinnertime conversation, but it’s fundamentally valuable in a world where political literacy is so important. Knowing not only the what of our political system but how and why -- that’s powerful.
What is your career goal?
Hopefully, I’ll be working in the intersection between our biology and our technology, whether analyzing psychological effects of virtual reality, increasing the capabilities of human-computer interaction, or identifying the extent of privacy and autonomy in future artificial intelligence and machine learning settings. Whether that will be through research, law, medicine, or writing, I like to leave as an exercise to the reader.