Thiago V. S. Coelho

My name is Thiago V. S. Coelho, and I live in Brazil. I was born in 1999-04-19, so I’m currently 26.

This blog post is my personal page, which is kept up-to-date as information about me develops. A more personal description of me, only up-to-date as of 2025-08-03, is here.

Facts about me:

• An opinion piece I wrote, titled “A Rothbardian Critique of Effective Altruism”, was published by the Mises Wire.
• I have an X (formerly Twitter) profile, and a Facebook profile. You can send me anonymous mail here.
• I am the creator and author of this blog. For a while, I had no personal page about myself besides the page I wrote about this blog.
• My blog includes a fan page for academic philosopher Agnes Callard, which she herself appreciated. My blog also includes a summary of her main book. Agnes has confirmed that I’m her biggest fan.
• Besides this blog, I have two other blogs, namely a blog of translations called Thiago’s Translations Blog, and a blog for sharing other interesting LLM-generated content, called Thiago’s ChatGPT Blog.
• I have made translations of key works by Olavo de Carvalho and Severinus Boethius.
• I have been deeply involved with Internet memes. At this post, my various Facebook meme pages and groups, and blog posts on meme research, are listed. My main meme page, then called Aesthetic Intellectual Meme Stash (now called Scholarly Scholastic Memes), was correctly cited by KnowYourMeme as the origin of the English version of the “Divorce Leads Children to the Worst Places” meme template.
• I have made various contributions to Wikipedia, outlined in my user page at the site. I consider myself the main author of the articles Absence of good, Best of all possible worlds, Egregore, A Preface to Paradise Lost, and Propositional logic.
• I have a GitHub profile, with very few open-source contributions to my name. One of my projects was a browser game, Color Golf; another was The Dots–Brackets Converter, a webapp for converting logical formulas into and out of the Principia Mathematica dotted notation.
• I generally take thiagovscoelho as a username, which corresponds to my full name. It is my username in all the previously mentioned platforms, but also various other platforms, such as Discord.

Facts for English speakers about my name

First name origin. My first name, “Thiago”, is a variant of “Tiago”, which is the Portuguese version of the name of St James, from the Bible – specifically, St James the Great. In some contexts, I’d be fine with people calling me James if they find “Thiago” unwieldy, it would just be confusing on a public site where Thiago is my display name.

James the Great is the more likely historical origin of Tiago (see below about the spelling) as a common name, although the other traditional biblical James, called James the Less, may be thought to be more notable since he is traditionally thought to be the James who was a brother of Jesus, and the author of the biblical Book of James. This is because of a tradition that James the Great (most likely “the Great” because he was taller) was the one who spread the Gospel to the Iberian peninsula. See also this text, which traces the name etymologically from Hebrew to Greek and Latin and thence to many other languages. Both saints James were actually named Jacob in the original Hebrew (since they were late antique Jews, after all) but the name distinction developed historically from these etymological accidents, and turns out to be helpful. Aside from how every Bible in Portuguese calls St James “Tiago”, there is also the interesting fact that James Potter, from the Harry Potter series, was localized in Portuguese as Tiago Potter.

First name pronunciation and spelling. In the original Portuguese, I pronounce my first name [t͡ʃiˈa.ɡu], or [ˈt͡ʃja.ɡu] if I say it fast. (That is, tchee-AH-goo, or TCHAH-goo when said fast.)

The H is “decorative”, and does not imply a theta sound, although originally, the variant probably does come from someone incorrectly thinking that there was a theta in the original Greek of St James’s name. (“Tiago” is more common, and more sensibly spelled, but that’s not the version my mom put on my birth certificate.)

In different accents, it might sound more like [tʃiˈa.ɡo], [tiˈa.ɡu], [ˈtja.ɡu], [ti'a.ɡo], [ti'a.ɣu], [ti'a.ɣo], [ˈtja.ɣu], or [ˈtja.ɣo].

But I don’t mind it when English speakers pronounce it [θaɪˈæ.ɡo], as they tend to do. It does puzzle me when they abbreviate it to “Thia” as a nickname – in Brazil, it would be shortened to “Thi”, pronounced [t͡ʃi] (“tchee”).

Middle and last names. My middle names are abbreviated V. S., it does not mean “versus”.

My last name, Coelho, means “rabbit”. (If you were localizing my name to English, the closest rendering might actually be “Coney”.) I am not related to the famous author Paulo Coelho, as far as I know.