#796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More

What It Covers

L.A. Paul, Yale philosophy professor, explains transformative experiences where decisions fundamentally change who you become, making rational choice impossible. She uses vampire thought experiments and parenting decisions to illustrate how you cannot evaluate choices when your future self will have completely different preferences and values.

Key Questions Answered

• •Transformative Experience Framework: Decisions like having children, moving countries, or undergoing radical medical treatments violate act-state independence because the act of choosing changes your state of being. You cannot rationally evaluate options when your future self will have alien preferences you cannot currently understand or value from your present perspective.
• •Vampire Decision Model: Paul uses becoming a vampire as a thought experiment to illustrate transformative choice. Even if vampire friends testify they love it, their testimony is unreliable because becoming a vampire biologically rewires you to prefer vampire existence. This mirrors parenting where biological attachment makes you love your specific child regardless of prior preferences.
• •Philosophical Mentorship Strategy: Paul paid three philosophers $250 each to correspond by mail, sending 20 typewritten pages every two weeks analyzing their published work chapter by chapter. Only one accepted payment, but all provided extensive 10-plus page responses. This self-directed approach secured graduate school admission without formal philosophy training.
• •Counterfactual Self Analysis: When facing transformative decisions, recognize you are choosing which possible future self to discover rather than maximizing expected utility. The person you become after having children exists in a different possible world with values your current self cannot access or properly evaluate through standard rational choice frameworks.
• •Philosophy Application Method: Start with accessible fiction like Ted Chiang's stories or films like Primer and La Jetee that explore philosophical concepts intuitively. If you find yourself asking how things work mechanically, invest in technical philosophy training. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides free expert-written entries translatable through AI for accessibility.