Has your personal philosophy (at the root metaphysical level) changed recently?

Yes and no.

Yes to the extent that it rarely stays the same over time. I make adjustments on the margin as I learn more about the world and systems that govern it. 

No to the extent that what you see is just an extension of previous beleifs and intuitions. Also, I'm not public about my religious beliefs but I've been sympathetic to and curious about Catholicism for a few years now.

I will address each of these below.

1. "Libertarian" Sympathies

I am considered libertarian among my conservative friends and conservative among my libertarian friends. This historically appeared as a relative laissez-faire approach to the state but a reliance on culture to work as an enforcement mechanism for communities. I am not opposed to state action qua state action. But that state action has to clear three distinct hurdles.

These hurdles define what looks likea libertarian philosophy. 

1a. Hayekianism - Epistemological limitations of large-scale central planning

Knowledge is complex, complicated, and distributed. Neither a single individual nor a group of individuals could aquire, let alone process, the information necessary to run most political projects. Knowledge doesn't simply take the form of bureaucratic inquiry, reports, and explicit knowledge; it also takes the form of language, tradition, price signals, and cultural norms and mores. It's really, really, really hard to have enough information to run anything larger than a company, let alone a state.

I'm fundamentally Hayekian in this way (see Hayek's essays "The Use of Knowledge in Society" and "Cosmos and Taxis" for a good breakdown of Hayekian knowledge theory). Information is hard to find, process, and use; so in the cases where we do want to use knowledge for political ends, it's best to keep that knowledge as close to decision-makers as possible. The further you get from stakeholders, knowledge, and those affected by decisions, the harder it is to make decisions that won't  create terrible outcomes.

That leads to 1b: localism.

1b. Localism - Political systems don't scale well

The people who are best set up to make  most political  decisions are those closest to them. This can look like libertarianism, because it is laissez-faire at the highest levels of scale.  But it can also look pretty hands-on as you get closer to knowledge and decisions. 

My friend Geoff Graham is quoted in Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game putting this well:

At the family level I am  a communist.

At the neighborhood level I am a socialist.

At the city/county level I am a democrat.

At the state level I am a republican.

At the national level I am a libertarian.

Planning works better the closer you are to knowledge. You wouldn't run a company like a country, and you shouldn't try to run a country like a company. In both cases you will make terrible mistakes; the first by mistakes of inaction and the second by mistakes of action.

Sometimes beind hands-on and planning works a lot better than being hands-off. Those cases happen when you are closest to the knowledge to make that decision.

It's important to note that knowledge doesn't simply cease to exist at large levels. Different knowledge-transfer mechanisms developed over decades and centuries and millennia as  a way to help people make decisions with enough information. Prices, language, tradition,  and norms are all tacit knowledge-transfer mechanisms.

1c. Public Choice Theory & History - Harm reduction and historical skepticism 

Assuming the hurdles of knowledge distribution and action can be addressed, there's a final prong of harm reduction and historical skepticism. This is a combination of general-rule-of-thumb and Public Choice Theory.

The nature of concentrated political institutions is to serve themselves. When you set up a large regulatory state to hold back powerful interests, those powerful interests will try to gain control of the regulatory state to help themselves  and hurt their competitors. Occupational licensure is a great example of this. There is no reason why it takes more hours to learn how to cut hair than it takes to pass the bar exam; unless you understand that the occupational licensure around hair-cutting is something put up by a state that is captured by existing barber shops.

This extends to lots of different parts of the state and to any political organization. Nonprofits are terrible in part because of this. If a nonprofit achieves its mission, it should shut down. But this rarely happens. Bureaucratic creep takes over and the nonprofit extends the reach of its mission to stay alfoat.

The reality is that political institutions do a ton of harm and are the most capable of doing great harm. Coca-Cola hasn't vaporized entire cities full of people or put them in camps or infected its own employees with syphilis in an attempt to test weapons -- but the US government has (and it is one of the better states that has come from the last few centuries!).

That alone doesn't imply any kind of theory that throws the state out entirely (though some Anarcho-Capitalists would say it does) -- but it does pose a high barrier to state power. States are less-accountable and less-controllable than most other institutions. So, whenever possible, we should try to get political means achieved by non-state actors.

So what is this? 

Whatever this political framework is, it is probably better described as "state-skeptical" or "localist" than actually "libertarian." "Libertarianism" implies a rights-theory. I don't currently subscribe to a rights theory and don't really consider myself a liberal, classical or otherwise.

The libertarian thinker to whom I am most sympathetic, besides Hayek, would probably be Robert Nozick -- but Nozick is under-appreciated among today's libertarians, who are more concerned with running an irrelevant third party, making people angry on the Internet, and considering Ron Paul an apostate due to his pro-life views.

As for the "Silicon Valley" element -- yeah, you'd see me among SV twitter given that I work in venture capital and engage with people in that space.

2. "Weird Catholic" Sympathies

I am not (as of right now) a Catholic. I am sympathetic to Catholicism, the Catholic project, and the Catholic Church and have been for a few years now. (I am baptised Episcopalian and confirmed Anglican. Lapsed for a few years and started exploring Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism several years ago. I may have become Catholic by now if it weren't for the infestation of perverts in the priesthood.)

I'm especially sympathetic to the Church as an institution that effectively passes down tacit knowledge through tradition - and does so in a way that is neither too rigid nor too loose. Chesterton points out that the Church throughout history has been a bulwark of both traditionalist conservatism (e.g., modern times since Pope Pius X) and of freer-inquiry (e.g., standing against the Puritans).

I actually view this as an extension of 1a, in a sort of sense. People are bad at planning large-scale social projects and should be skeptical of such attempts. That also means we should be skeptical of social engineering. That means also an understanding that you may not know better than hundreds or thousands of years of tradition and you should pause, think about it, and genuflect upon what came before you.

I also have been pretty heavily influenced by Rene Girard (via Thiel people, as one is) and have found his book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning one of the most influential I've read over the last decade.

The role of this institution makes me admire and appreciate my Catholic friends. I am not even ankle-deep in "Rad Trad / Weird Catholic Twitter" but people like Jordan Bloom and others are probably how you've seen my engagement. Plus recently with Adrian Vermeule, who was recently recommended to me.

So, have I recently had a change in my metaphysical beliefs? Not particularly -- but this also isn't a full explanation of my view of religious institutions and specifically the Catholic Church.