Ahoy!

My name is Silvano D’Agostino, and I love exploring life in deep conversations with interesting people, enjoying brilliant culture with people I love, and working on projects that have a meaningful, positive impact on people’s lives.

I want to spend my time working on these Four Things, in no particular order:

1. Academia: I want to further our understanding of how incentive structures explain human behavior, including by using evolutionary and game theory.

1. Business: I want to build organizations that solve problems for the long-term, often by utilizing the knowledge from a.. I want to make fantastic products and run fantastic projects that delight people and improve their lives.

1. Storytelling: I want to tell stories that move and inspire people, both fictional and non-fictional.

1. The Big Picture: I want to play a tiny role in shaping the long-term future of humanity by considering the big-picture problems we will face and setting up the basic foundations for future generations to solve them.

As of 2023, I am most actively pursuing b., with much less bandwidth dedicated to a. and c.. Eventually, all three should transform into a unified attempt at d., but I am young and can wait for more experience, wisdom, and material resources.

Specifically, these four areas translate to the following in terms of my current and near-future plans:

1. My academic background stretches from filmmaking and storytelling to the anthropology of migration to evolutionary and social psychology, especially in organizational contexts. After my B.A. at Harvard, I also received an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics in Organizational and Social Psychology. I may eventually choose to pursue a Ph.D. in organizational/social/evolutionary psychology/behavior (or a closely related field). Fundamentally, I believe ultimate incentives determine human behavior; we can understand these ultimate incentives structures to untangle puzzles of behavior. My specific goal is to apply this perspective to the world of organizations and businesses to understand and improve how humans work together.

1. As one of the Managing Partners at Change Solution, I help organizations achieve their goals and build sustainably profitable businesses. We enable individuals and organizations to raise the bar by developing their Change Makers’ abilities. Beyond consulting projects, my goal is to form a collective of like-minded organizations who share a fundamental understanding of their role in society.

1. Four storytelling mediums currently interest me (more may evolve over time and I ought to keep an open mind about new ways of storytelling): public speaking, podcasting, filmmaking and short videos, and written prose. I occasionally engage in public speaking and would like to do more of it in the future. I want to significantly contribute to at least one nonfiction book. I hope to make significant contributions to the production of films and (co-)lead the creation of at least one feature film at some point in my career. I would love to eventually start podcasting again, both humorously and seriously.

1. The short-term urgent problems the world and our society face are not “my” problems—my position of privilege allows me, perhaps coerces me, to instead take a long-term perspective. Some examples of what I would eventually love to turn some of my attention to include questions around how to shape human life in a world of abundance (and no work?) and resource management (including in a potential interplanetary future).

My ideas, ideals, hopes, and dreams continuously evolve; these relatively abstract Four Things have, however, stuck with me as decade-long constants. I will never turn down a good conversation, so feel free to get in touch!

This text reflects my state of mind as of January 2024.