All Thoughts Being Equal

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician and philanthropist Priscilla Chan, pledged to donate 99% of their wealth (over their lifetimes) to a philanthropic LLC they're setting up, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. There was some rather vitriolic criticism of this endeavor, which seems both somewhat predictable-in-hindsight but also rather strange at first blush. Do the criticisms have merit? What about the "debunking"? As you might expect, I think there's something missing here. I. As philosopher and Effective Altruism guru William McAskill (whose book Doing Good Better I read and reviewed ) noted : “Couple decides to give majority of their earnings to charity” is hardly a headline that you’d expect people to take umbrage at. But when you replace “couple” with “Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan,” suddenly everyone goes crazy. Even though the majority of commentators have been positive, a significant proportion of people have reacted with a...

Amazon just built its own physical bookstore in the University Distric of Seattle. What a twist! So why do I think it's pointless for Amazon, and indeed any "corporate" bookseller, to operate a physical storefront? And why do I think that the only worthwhile brick-and-mortar bookstores are the "anything and everything" used bookstores? Simply put: serendipity versus suggestion. You may think that my ideas about the philosophy of bookstores are unorthodox, but if you agree, you might also like... Recently New York Times Magazine ran a story about the fascinating gutter-market for ultra-cheap used books sold on Amazon.com. You know, all those books that are priced at $0.01 (+$3.99 shipping)? Turns out they're often rescued from the landfill—sometimes literally. Sort of like donations to a food bank, libraries and thrift stores often get far more donations than they can properly deal with: [Thriftbooks] , along with several other enormous used-book-sellin...

I. Kayla at Crows Against Murder has a great post up about September—that calendrical signifier of Back To School which, for those of us in the current "quarter-life" cohort, is still about two-thirds of our entire lives, and almost the entirety of our remembered lives—and the prolonged existential crisis that is "adult life": But the milestones from my youth are no longer relevant.  I don’t have a promise of seeing old classmates, or meeting new ones.  I won’t develop new relationships with teachers or mentors.  Nobody will curate information for me to consume.  There will not be a semester, nor will there be the accompanying guaranteed measurable accomplishment that I can feel proud of by the time Winter Break comes around.  There isn’t even such thing as “Winter Break” anymore. Most disorientingly, I’m no longer building towards a discrete point at which I will have “graduated” from my current world to another one that is somehow more rea...

or, Notes towards a new characterization of bumper-sticker politics in the American mainstream I. I've had a reasonably long-running joke that when Subarus accumulate enough bumper stickers, they metamorphose into Volvos. Certainly bumper stickers say something about the person whose vehicle they're on. This blog post (which I mostly chose because it features a liberal-bestickered Subaru and a conservative - bestickered pickup truck) opines:   You can tell a lot about a person by their bumper stickers.  I get a kick out of reading what people have branded on the back of their cars.  Some of the stickers are political some are religious and some tell us about the kids or dogs.  If you see a car with multiple bumper stickers one thing about these people who you can count on is, they are passionate and dedicated to what they believe in. I don't think this is entirely true. Bumper-sticker politics is a derogatory term for a rea...

At this point the furor has mostly died down so I think I should frame this as a reply to Katrina’s earlier blog post on the topic . In a nutshell, Brendan Eich, former CTO and now former CEO of Mozilla Corp. (the for-profit arm of the Mozilla Foundation which produced the Firefox browser among other things), stepped down after it became known that he donated $1000 to California’s Proposition 8. This sent many people, particularly libertarians , into a tizzy of self-reflection, especially coming so hot off the heels of the absolutely ridiculous #CancelColbert campaign . On the one hand, a lot of people are fed up with the knee-jerk, bile-and-brimstone mob mentality of some extreme “social justice warriors”— I’m familiar with the type . On the other hand, this seems to be a case of the system working: consumers and employees in the company voiced their displeasure with the company’s choice of CEO, and he stepped down rather than drag the company through the mud.