All Thoughts Being Equal

Something I thought up the other day. Heading in a weird noirish direction with pulp-fantasy trappings. Any feedback is, of course, appreciated. --- This world was not made for us. Well, not specifically for us. I'm sure there was a line item or two in the Grand Design, earmarked for "humankind," some tiny fraction of the cosmic budget allotted on our behalf. Sure, we've done alright for ourselves in those intervening millennia. But every day―every fucking day―we're reminded that there are more philosophies in heaven than ever dreamed of us. Because the gods are real. Some of them are even ours. But most aren't. And all of them don't seem to give two divine shits about us. "Shit." Definitely one drink too many. No other explanation for my black anti-theistic mood. Well, last call was I-don't-know-how-many minutes ago anyway. Three fingers waggled to the bartender and I sent him back to the cashbox with exact change, as usual. ...

I've informally decided to allocate roughly ten percent of my gross annual earnings to donations, in the spirit of Effective Altruism and the "Giving What We Can" pledge. As public reporting of contributions is rather in line with the EA philosophy, I'm keeping a record of what I've done. Maybe it will inspire people to imitate or critique my donation choices! I donated a total of $500 in December 2015. This year, since I didn't earn a lot of money, was mostly about starting to give , and establishing a baseline from which I can iterate and move towards a more satisfactory and effective contribution portfolio. So in future, I suspect that my contributions to, say the "De Facto Subscription" category will stay flat while donations to actual charities will increase. You might ask: why are you publishing this? The answer is: Other people have. Also, why should charity be secret ? Humanities Donations: 5% In 2015, I donated $25 to...

Now that we've seen why Western Washington University decided (and was justified, in my view) to cancel classes for Tuesday, 24 November 2015, in response to racist and threatening comments on the anonymous social media shithole application Yik Yak, let's look at the reaction from the students and the community. Was their response justified? I don't think so. This post is a partial follow-up to: On the rigged-world fallacy and pullback error , Rhetorical imperialism I. Let's get this out of the way first: of the two "camps," so to speak, of students who disagreed with President Bruce Shepard's decision to suspend classes, the ones who thought classes shouldn't have been suspended have a very weak position. Now, there wasn't a lot of publicity of the various posts made, so I can understand why—at the time—some people might have thought the class cancellation was the wrong call. I hope that since those posts have come to light, those peop...

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...