Some Blogs You Should Read

An end of year list of my favorite substacks

I’ve started reading more substacks toward the end of this year. It turns out that there are lots of smart, interesting people on substack with cool ideas. While Scott Alexander has roughly 30% of the interesting ideas on substack, that still leaves a whopping 70% of the interesting ideas open for exploration (and you can find another 30% on good thoughts). So, without further ado, here are my favorite substacks and an explanation of why they’re worthwhile.

Good Thoughts

Richard Chappell is perhaps my favorite living philosopher. The only significant downside to him is that he’s an objective list theorist :). His blog is both exceptionally well written and provides in-depth interesting takes on lots of philosophy topics. I would list some of my favorite articles by him — but he has provided a list of his best articles this year. Definitely worth checking out!

I could spend a lot of time gushing about how awesome and brilliant his blog is, but I’ll just provide one notable example. Theron Pummer has an excellent paper called lopsided lives — one which challenges pluralism about well-being. To understand the challenge, let’s first define pluralism about well-being. It is the idea that there are a variety of things that intrinsically make someone better off — examples include knowledge, friendship, and achievements.

The challenge is this — it seems that lives that are in horrific agony every second can’t be well off. But this is hard to account for on pluralist about well-being. If knowledge is an intrinsic good, then if a person is horrifically tortured all the time but has enough knowledge, they’d be well off. But this is clearly wrong. Same thing for friendships — if you’re never happy and constantly tortured, it doesn’t matter how many friends you have; your life is not good.

Now, there are some simple solutions, but most of them don’t work. For example, one way to try to avoid this is to say that knowledge is good only if your life is hedonically positive, containing more pleasure than pain. But this runs into a problem of implying hypersensitivity. Hypersensitivity occurs whenever an arbitrarily large amount of well-being depends entirely on a tiny change to something.

To see that this implies hypersensitivity, consider two possible people, both named John. They both have an arbitrarily large amount of knowledge. Their lives are otherwise identical except at one point, the second John gets an extra slice of cake. This slice of cake pushes his experience from slightly hedonically negative to slightly hedonically positive. On this account, this slice of cake increases John’s well-being by an arbitrarily large amount, by making the arbitrarily large amount of knowledge valuable. But this is nuts.

This challenge had been around for a while — no-one had come up with a decent solution to it. I email Richard about it. A week or so later, he has a perfectly convincing solution that totally avoids the problem. Of course, his solution still has problems of its own, see both my comment on the article and this article. But it’s still astounding that he was able to, in such a short time, provide an adequate solution to what was, in my mind, up until that point, the biggest problem for objective list theory.

If you like my blog, you will almost certainly like his blog. Definitely worth checking out. (Though most of you know that, because a huge number of my readers have come from Richard’s generous recommendation of my blog). And check out his old block philosophyetc too — I may actually prefer the old one, but they’re both great.

Astral Codex Ten

This one is pretty self explanatory. Scott is one of the best writers on the internet, and also happens to write about interesting and important subjects. I won’t spend too much time here, because everyone knows about Scott. Here are some good Alexander articles.

Samstack

Samstack’s blog has perhaps the highest ratio of new interesting things I learn to words typed. He does deep dives on tons of interesting subjects. His blog is pretty general — a bit like Scott’s blog. Some notable articles are this one which tells about lots of interesting results of recent studies, this one which compellingly argues against the general case against education, this one about how to grow a substack, and this one which informed me of Anki, which I anticipate helping me get through university much more easily. All the articles are rigorous, well-written, and insightful. And best of all, he’s (mostly) a bullet biting utilitarian.

This article, for example, criticizes the notino that to do good, you really must be engaging in personal sacrifice. Sam argues that it’s better to fly more and offset than to fly less — if you’d prefer to fly more. Yet our ordinary morality misfires and tells us that flying less is more noble.

This article also explains just how easy it is to write a compelling sounding article on an empirical topic. You just type into google scholar whatever your position is, and then cite a bunch of studies backing it up. This should teach us to be more wary of persuasive looking articles. This article about decoupling is also excellent.

Fake Nous

Michael Huemer is another of my favorite philosophers. There was a brief moment when I was a bit tired of AstralCodexTen, before I found philosophyetc, when his blog was my favorite blog. I’ve read all articles on his blog — and they’re nearly all interesting and worth reading.

Here, for example, Huemer compellingly argues that equality lacks intrinsic value. Huemer has two papers arguing that equality isn’t intrinsically valuable; they are, in my view, the very two best papers on the subject. This article compellingly argues against moral naturalism.

Huemer’s writing is delightfully clear and direct. He does not waste time going on extended rabbit trails to draw in the reader. He simply states what he plants to argue. And then he does argue it — very persuasively.

Also, his articles were what convinced me to start off this blog. When I read his article Why I am not a utilitarian, I figured it was worth responding to it systematically. That’s what I spent my first ten articles doing.

Richard Hanania’s Newsletter

Hanania is my favorite conservative author. His articles are always quite delightful to read and provide interesting explanations of wide scale phenomena like wokeness as a whole, why academia is so liberal, and more. By far, my favorite ever Hanania articles is this one — which provides a deeply honest look at Hanania’s inner psychology, as well as that of many conservatives.

Future Matters

This one is pretty self explanatory — it’s a general newsletter that provides all of the relevant up to date information about longtermism. Worth checking out if you’re a longtermist.

Parrhesia

Parrhesia is a regular commentator on this blog. His comments, as well as his articles, are interesting and thought-provoking. See this article which is something of a manifesto for his general ideology. He combines generally interesting analysis, good writing, philosophical excellence, and discussion of interesting topics — often controversial ones about gene editing, for example. Definitely worth checking out!

Ideas Sleep Furiously

This one is a lot like Parrhesia’s blog — except it focuses a lot more on empirical topics than on the philosophy. The podcasts are excellent, the people interviewed are fascinating, and the empirical deep dives are amazing. It also has perhaps the best name of any blog. Some fascinating articles include the following.

An interview with Noam Chomsky: IQ, Dysgenics, & Existential Risk

Nobody is clever enough to be wrong all the time

Why Do Migrants Change Culture?

Matter in Motion

My friend Coase’s Ghost, whose blog was formerly known as zombie thoughts, never shies away from extreme positions. He’s an anarchist, vegan, type A physicalist, infinitist, moral realist, particularist. His positions could be the start of a joke if the holder of them walked into a bar. His articles are mostly just defending those positions — a lot of them talk about his philosophy of mind. Despite being wrong about lots of things, those articles are excellent — definitely worth checking out.

Julian Hazell’s blog

Julian Hazell is one of the funniest people on EA twitter. But he also has a really great blog. This is probably my favorite article by him — talking about why immigration restrictions are morally atrocious. And yet his musings on basically all topics are interesting — be it factory farming, effective altruism generally, or longtermism. Definitely worth checking out.

Well, that’s all for now!

Thanks for reading my blog in the year 2022. I began this blog in January and it has really taken off. I now have 320 subscribers — hopefully more are to come. I hope you’ve enjoyed my articles — I’ve certainly enjoyed writing and getting feedback. See you all next year, unless one of us dies before then.