This is a place where I keep my thoughts.
About me
Some bloke with a keyboard and a microphone. My academic background is in finance and economics. I was a professional musician, recording engineer, and producer. I’ve also done financial systems design and modelling after a couple of years as a statistician for an asset management firm.
Other Media and Locations
Linguistics
Language was my first love. I was an avid reader and have been drawn toward language from linguistics to etymology. My operating thesis, since around 2015, is that language is insufficient to perform at the level expected of it. Language is a product of evolution and has served several purposes, from categorising and cataloguing our thoughts as individuals, articulating rhetoric to formulate societies and prospective futures, and fundamentally describing objects in the material realm. Where it fails—or is otherwise insufficient — is regarding abstract concepts: the concepts that undergird and create metanarratives but are specious verisimilitudes (if that makes sense). In many cases, this poses no minor challenges it gives the impression that two people are in agreement when in fact they’ve got entirely different ideas in mind, at times diametrically opposed.
Economics
I am a trained economist and statistician with an interest in behavioural economics. I taught undergraduate economics for the better part of a decade from 2008 to 2016. In a way, my interests in philosophy cross-pollinate each other, although my interest has been more heavily weighted toward philosophy lately. Political economy is not a primary interest, but it seems to occupy a significant portion of my time.
Music
I earned my living in Entertainment during the early and mid-1980s as an audio recording engineer and producer in Los Angeles, when it was the epicentre of the rock music genre and the hair metal movement. Whilst I enjoyed this, I was more interested in progressive jazz and fusion at the time. I have worked with numerous emerging, current, and fading celebrities throughout my career and have had the pleasure of collaborating with various media outlets, including recording for albums, television, commercials, and film projects. I’ve recorded genres from pop, rock, metal, reggae, country, indie, punk, orchestral, choral, folk, experimental, retro, and more, I’m sure. Although my focus was primarily in the studio, I also recorded location sound, foley, and in live settings.
Philosophy
I’ll condense and outline my perspectives presently. In the meantime, that’s the primary purpose of this blog. I am also working on some non-fiction manuscripts exploring the limitations of language and the shortcomings of democracy as a system of governance.
Author
Since 2024, I’ve been writing literary speculative fiction as my pseudonym and alter ego, Ridley Park. Read more about him on my other blog.
I also have a YouTube channel.
Philosophics 