Daniel Issing

experience & education

Researcher

As a researcher at GiveWell, I explore new areas of grantmaking to expand the organization's footprint and enable them to unlock new funding opportunities. GiveWell focuses on identifying the most cost-effective programs to ensure that donations have the highest impact on global well-being. This work often requires me to rapidly pivot from one cause area to another, making decisions even when we're massively uncertain, and above all knowing when we've learned enough to move on.

Data Science Team Lead

Shift Technology

At Shift, I helped develop and customize an AI-powered fraud detection software for insurance companies. I managed a team that worked with major insurers in the UK and Germany, with the goal of allowing them to identify suspicious cases quickly and reliably. You can find a couple of interesting showcases at this link.

Asia Program Manager

Students For Liberty

After volunteering with them for many years (during which I organized numerous conferences, talks and seminars and launched a student magazine), I joined SFL's staff full-time to expand their chapters and activities across Asia. I coordinated with student groups from Afghanistan to Indonesia, helped to establish new chapters, trained local organizers, and adapted programming for diverse cultural contexts. I'm very grateful for the many inspiring individuals I met during that time, who went above and beyond to promote a message of freedom, peaceful coexistence and open dialogue in very challenging environments.

MSc in Theoretical & Mathematical Physics

Ludwig Maximilian University Munich & LAPTh

I studied theoretical and mathematical physics at LMU. My thesis (which you can find here) was written under the supervision of Luc Frappat and Eric Ragoucy at the Laboratoire d'Annecy-le-Vieux de Physique Théorique (LAPTh). This collaboration resulted in a paper in which we showed how to construct the center of an elliptic algebra that's relevant to the study of quantum integrable systems. If all of this sounds like mumbo jumbo to you, here's my attempt to provide a non-technical, high-level overview of that work.

BSc in Physics

Ruprecht Karls University Heidelberg & Carleton University, Ottawa

I went into physics for its promise to offer a glimpse into the fabric of reality at its most fundamental level. My specialization was quantum mechanics, or, more precisely, lattice models for which the Schrödinger equation could be solved analytically. My thesis, written under the supervision of Tilman Enss, dealt with non-equilibrium dynamics (quantum quenches) of precisely such systems. As part of my undergrad degree, I also spent a year in Canada, which was a formative experience for me and something I can't recommend enough.

book recommendations

I love getting book recommendations, so here are a few of mine. Click a cover for a short review!

fiction

The Books of Jacob

Olga Tokarczuk

The novel starts off slow and it takes a while to get into the flow, but the effort is well worth it. An absolute masterwork, for which fortunately an excellent English translation exists. It's no small feat to write 900+ pages about the life of an obscure 18th-century Jewish mystic and have the reader ask for more at the end.

The Feast of the Goat

Mario Vargas Llosa

I've never read a Vargas Llosa novel I didn't like, but his exploration of power and corruption through the lens of Rafa Trujillo's dictatorship may be the best of them all. Vargas Llosa was well-known as one of the powerful critics of left-wing authoritarianism in Latin America, but The Feast of the Goat proves that he was not ignorant of the right's illiberal, repressive tendencies either. A gripping read from start to finish.

Les Bienveillants

Jonathan Littell

This is not the book you pack for a summer vacation on a tropical beach. It is an attempt to pour the "banality of evil" into literary form by revisiting the horrors of the Second World War through the eyes of an SS officer. Dense, full of gratuitous, mind-numbing cruelty, Littell has created a tome that is designed to make your stomach churn.

Der Zauberberg

Thomas Mann

I read "The Magic Mountain" way back in high school, and the novel has had a special place in my heart ever since. It is a nostalgic work, portraying the sanatorium as a microcosm of European culture and thought before the continent descended into the madness of two world wars. And, of course, it's the paradigmatic TB novel, a disease that has faded from collective memory in the West but continues to claim the lives of more than a million people each year.

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

I like to think of Franzen as the 21st century reincarnation of John Updike, and both have certainly contributed much to the tradition of the suburban novel. The conflicts that form the backbone of The Corrections will hit close to home for many readers, and their very futility makes the book so gripping. Read it for glimmers of hope amidst much self-imposed misery, inexplicable behaviors that only gradually begin to make sense, and astute psychological observations of emotional turmoil.

All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren

To understand what it means to seek power for power's sake, look no further than Warren's fictionalized account of Louisiana's governor Huey Lewis. There are things a novel manages to capture that no study of populism, however comprehensive, could convey.

The Cider House Rules

John Irving

Irving is an excellent storyteller - not because he's groundbreaking or innovative (David Copperfield is an obvious influence, as is Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre), but simply because he's perfected the craft of telling a great story. It's probably the best and most nuanced literary treatment of abortion, neither shying away from judgment nor suppressing its complexities.

East of Eden

John Steinbeck

A multigenerational saga of two families in California's Salinas Valley, centered on the Trasks and their recurring struggle with jealousy, rejection, and the question of how our parents' deeds shape our own lives. It's one of the few books I just couldn't put down - the prose is so, so good.

Faust I

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Faust I represents for German culture what Hamlet is to British, Don Quixote is to Spanish and The Divine Comedy is to Italian literature. Of course you should read it in the original, if you can. Unlike some of the other classics, it's fairly short and actually quite accessible.

La Peste

Albert Camus

Camus' most famous work chronicles a plague outbreak in Algeria with the detached precision of a medical report. The flatness of the prose is the point: no heroics, no melodrama, just people struggling with an invisible enemy. Written in the shadow of the Nazi occupation, it can either be read as an allegory, or - as many have done during the Covid-19 pandemic - in a very literal way. Either way, it's wonderfully somber and haunting.

La Carte et le Territoire

Michel Houelllebecq

Is this the only one of Houellebecq's novel in which he makes a cameo appearance (mostly just to get murdered - a deed he's not nearly as bothered by than the fact that it was unrelated to anything he'd written)?. Anyway, the real subject is France itself: a country transformed from industrial powerhouse to glorified tourist destination, populated by people who've achieved comfort but lost any larger sense of purpose. In other words, it's quintessential Houellebecq — mordant, detached, and funnier than you'd expect it to be.

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos Oz

Oz' magnum opus paints a tragical yet hopeful picture of the early days of Isreal. It's the story of his high bourgeois, Eastern European ancestors who move to Mandatory Palestine in the wake of the Holocaust, and tried to build a new existence in a country that had little in common with the place the grew up in. The book's themes are as relevant as ever, especially Oz' wonderful portrait of the shared humanity of all the different people inhabiting the region.

When We Cease To Understand The World

Benjamin Labatut

The first chapter is some of the best fiction I've ever read - a sprawling, fantastical, mind-boggling stream of associations that is delivered with such force it makes you wonder what substances Labatut must have meditated on. The rest of the book is not quite as strong as the opening, but it's still a marvelous achievement.

The Road

Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy is something like the Impossible Burger of fiction writers - even people who claim to hate literature love his prose. Of all his books, I liked The Road best - it's mesmerizing, almost hypnotic, barren, totally non-condescending, and hard to put down once you get going.

American Pastoral

Philip Roth

A harrowing read. There sure are books that portray greater evil and tragedy than this Newark family drama, but for reasons I can't quite articulate, watching the life of a successful businessman and father unravel through no fault of his own (or so it appears). Roth's best novel, in my mind (and he wrote many excellent ones) - he was truly at his zenith in the late 90s.

non-fiction

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber

This wonderful little book sets out to answer two questions: Why did reason evolve in the first place? And why does it so often lead us astray? Their approach is an engaging and sometimes controversial defense of the claims that reason can only be understood in a social context.

The Secret of Our Success

Joseph Henrich

Henrich's core claim is that much of what makes humans successful isn't individual intelligence but our ability to copy others and accumulate cultural knowledge we don't fully understand. The discussion of how people "figured out" how to detoxify poisonous cassava alone makes this worth reading. The uncomfortable (for some people, anyway) implication is that traditions often encode solutions to problems we can't consciously articulate, and "rational" attempts to optimize them can backfire.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Douglas Hofstadter

Take it from Martin Gardner: "Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event." The field of AI has changed tremendously since GEB was first published, but the book has aged surprisingly well. A must-read for anyone who is fascinated by how mind emerges from matter.

Why We Get Sick

Randolph Nesse & George Williams

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, and illnesses & diseases are no exception to that rule. Of course the insight that pathogens, too, struggle mightily to increase their fitness, is not novel, but the question why the human body hasn't found its way around non-infectious diseases (especially mental illness) remains a puzzling one. I credit this book with giving me a new and refreshing outlook on medicine.

The Righteous Mind

Jonathan Haidt

Politics and religion are the two topics not to be discussed in polite society. What this piece of advice is based on and how we might be able to do better in an increasingly polarized society is the topic of Haidt's classic book. Not everything in it has stood the test of time (e.g. his "Moral Foundations" theory seems to have major replication issues), but it remains a standout work to help us appreciate our own blind spots a little more.

Seeing Like a State

James C. Scott

Scott frames state formation as a grand exercise in making society legible, by standardizing local customs, measures, and property systems so they can be taxed and conscripted from. My favorite example is the window tax, which attempted to measure house values by counting windows (with predictable architectural consequences). His point isn't that standardization is always bad, but that we're too quick to dismiss local practices as irrational.

The Gene

Siddharta Mukherjee

This is probably the best book for curious laypeople to get a deeper understanding of genetics. Mukherjee is one of the most gifted science writers of our age, and here he does a wonderful job of relying complicated concepts in an accesible (but not simplistic) way.

The Rational Optimist

Matt Ridley

Optimists are often accused of having an irrational, panglossian view way of looking at the world, but Ridley makes the case that it's the pessimists who are mistaken and selective in their assessment. There is now a whole community dedicated to the study of progress, but The Rational Optimist still strikes me as the best exposition of this view.

Bureaucracy

James Q. Wilson

Not a gripping read and no grand theory, but a wonderful exploratory tour of the variety of public agencies and the bureaucrats that staff them. Especially libertarians should give this a read, and ask themselves whether cynicism about the public sector is really all they want to offer. Like it or not, bu the usual market remedies don't translate: we sometimes want bureaucracies to be inefficient!

Honeybee Democracy

Thomas D. Seeley

In most everyday sitations, a honeybee is a nuisance, and few people other than professional melittologists think there's much to be gained from studying them. Seeley's remarkable accomplishment is that he demonstrates how fascinating things get when you look at the decision-making processes of a swarm as a whole, with important implications for neuroscience and collective action theories. If nothing else, knowing how a swarm finds a new home is excellent cocktail party knowledge.

The Machinery Of Freedom

David D. Friedman

David Friedman strikes me as the sharpest thinker among the more radical libertarians. You don't have to buy his arguments in favor of market anarchism to find the book thought-provoking. What I particularly liked about it is that, even though his challenges for political philosophers of all stripes are excellent, he's very open about the shortcomings of his preferred political system.

The Sleepwalkers

Christopher Clark

World War I was arguable the defining moment of the 20th century, putting an end to the old imperial order and laying the groundwork for the emergence of facism, national socialism and communism. How could what started as a small regional conflict spiral into a devastating, all-out global conflict with millions of casualities? Clark's controversial (but well-argued) thesis is that Europe indeed sleepwalked into this war: Trench warfare became reality not so much as a a result of geopolitical ambitions as out of sheer incompetence among Europe's ruling class

The Elephant in the Brain

Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler

Among the myriad books that have been written on hidden motives that guide our thinking and decisions, this one stands out. Once you understand their point about self-deception and how it permeates every aspect of society, you'll never the the world through the same eyes again.

Poor Economics

Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo

Poor Economics is, at its core, a highly empathic attempt to come to grips with the seemingly paradoxical and self-defeating everyday choices of the world’s poor. It’s also a prime example of a work that engages those who disagree with its perspective in good faith. Not to mention that it has also been a major driver of the credibility revolution in development economics. No small feat for such a relatively slim volume!

The Unfolding of Language

Guy Deutscher

Language is often cited as the prime example of a complex emergent system or spontaneous order, but what exactly does this mean, and how did it emerge? Deutscher's book is simply the best introduction to understand how, practically speaking, language was created from a pretty rudimentary system of verbal cues, without anyone intending the final outcome we use today. Needless to say, its lessons are underappreciated by the diverse groups out there that try to shape language in their preferred image.

For the complete list of what I've read and what's on deck, see my Libib collections.

daniel issing

about me