In addition to Thomas Bayes and Ronald Coase (cf. my previous two posts), another “beautiful mind” that has captured my imagination is the mathematical philosopher Kurt Gödel. (Shout out to my colleague and friend Orlando I. Martinez-Garcia, who pointed me in Gödel’s direction in the early 2000s.) My most cited paper is Gödel’s Loophole, which revisits the story of Gödel’s discovery of a deep logical contradiction in the U.S. Constitution. I wrote that landmark paper in 2012 and published it in 2014, and in the last few years, I have returned to the Austrian logician three more times:

1. The Leibniz Conspiracy (2022). This paper explores a little-known conspiracy theory that Kurt Gödel himself, the greatest logician since Aristotle, believed in!
2. Gödel’s Loophole: A Prequel (2024). This paper surveys three “self-coups” that occurred in Central Europe during the interwar period — Yugoslavia in 1929, Austria in 1933, and Romania in 1938 — that Gödel, who lived in Vienna during this time, may have been familiar with and that may have informed his studies of the U.S. Constitution in the 1940s.
3. Gödel’s Loophole 2.0 (forthcoming). This paper extends the general logic of “Gödel’s loophole” to an otherwise promising new method of AI safety called “Constitutional AI”.