Here are a list of interesting links that I saw recently. Let me know if people like articles like this, because if so I’ll write more.
Apparently, people can patent colors! This generates lots of bizarre legal conflicts. Various artists have tried patenting very pure colors. T-Mobile, for example, sued some lemonade company for using a particular shade of magenta.
Meta link post, but Ozy has a very interesting link post. Warning, do not click on the itch link if you don’t want to be seriously disturbed for the next many days.
If we borrow money and pay people to have kids, that gets the best of both worlds. The newly created kids will pay taxes to solve the debt crisis, and they’re better off because they wouldn’t have otherwise existed.
Alexander the great had lots of totally crazy stories about him that spread over the course of thousands of years. Scott’s summary is hilarious and informative, as usual.
Daniel Larrison correctly identifies how terrible a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia would be.
Very entertaining podcast about the disaster Jesse Singal call with the majority report. Blocked and reported is my favorite podcast—every episode is hilarious and delightful.
Adam Kinzinger created a Substack and boy he does not hold back. Think what you want about Trump, but Kinzinger was clearly politically courageous—willing to put his career on the line for the sake of principle. Those who think Kinzinger and Cheney aren’t politically courageous are clearly motivated by partisanship.
Boston mayor Michelle Wu has a Substack, and it’s pretty good too—I thought this article was especially convincing.
Aella has a Substack where she writes at great length about correlations between demographic factors and various sexual proclivities. The article about things that correlate with pedophilia was especially interesting.
Chomsky has written roughly 100 books about foreign policy. It’s hard to get into Chomsky’s writings given their incredible breadth. A good friend of mine recently wrote a brief summary of Chomsky’s ideas, providing both his basic theory and a nice summary of the evidence.
Sam Atis is super smart but writes only infrequently. He recently had an article on why the replication crisis shouldn’t totally undermine our trust in experts and more broadly on how to form reliable beliefs.
Philosophy Bear is an academic who writes about philosophy. The author is incredibly smart and worth reading. They’re pretty far left, though EA adjacent and everything they write is very well argued. Here’s a link to some of their best essays.
Jesse Singal has a hilarious takedown of a bizarre hit piece on Nate Silver, Steve Kornacki, and Nate Cohn.
Speaking of Nate Silver, he has a newish Substack. Here’s a good article he wrote.
This paper argues for experientialism—the idea that only things which affect one’s experiences affect how well off they are—on the grounds that it best explains why only sentient beings matter.
No, immigration won’t destroy Europe.
Brian Cutter develops a new inconceivability argument against physicalism.
Very often, theists will defend God’s allowing evil by saying that God is justified in creating worlds that are good overall. But arguably that puts us in a skeptical scenario where we could be massively deceived, as long as the world remains good overall.
Many people hold that the word good is necessarily relative to a standard—when we say a person is good, that is similar to calling a knife good in that you describe them as being good at their function. Mankowitz cites a wealth of linguistic evidence for the claim that ordinary English holds that things can be good simpliciter, distinct from being good relative to an end. For instance, it’s perfectly coherent to say someone is a good chess player without being a good chessplayer, in the sense that they’re morally bad but are skilled at chess. Such would be impossible if good were not ambiguous. Thus, “Good people are not like good knives.”
Jonas Aaron has a nice paper out. Here’s the abstract (gotta love the gusto—philosophers generally say things like “I raise considerations that undercut the case for X” rather than “I dismantle proposed analogs”):
Is there a pro tanto moral reason to create a life merely because it would be good for the person living it? Proponents of the procreation asymmetry claim there is not. Defending this controversial no reason claim, some have suggested that it is well in line with other phenomena in the moral realm: there is no reason to give a promise merely because one would keep it, and there is no reason to procreate merely to increase the extent of justice in the world. Allegedly, some analogs extend so far as to support a unified theory of the no reason claim and the nonidentity thesis, that is, the view that of two persons leading lives of positive wellbeing, there is a reason to create the person with higher wellbeing. I dismantle the proposed analogs and show that they fail to meet various desiderata. Moreover, I refute Johann Frick's argument that the no reason claim follows from the assumption that reasons of beneficence are reasons to act for the sake of people. By criticizing attractive defenses for the no reason claim, I weaken its plausibility.
Excellent link collection.