Haha that's so incredible! I've been seeing talk of this episode and your connection to it all over the place but I didn't know the degree to which you were responsible for it. That's so nuts. Really cool for you and for Dustin too, who spoke his stuff into an even more voidy-void: an academic philosophy conference. If an idea can make it into the wild from there then anything can happen.
I'll comment just to be another normally silent voice that is mulling over a lot of your ideas over months and years. Found you through the Ross Douthat article on believing in God. I grew up in a religious family but became more science/logic oriented in my 20's in college and in my professional training. I still attend church, but mainly for a social reasons and to give my kids a moral framework and community. Internally I'm mostly agnostic/unconvinced. So your summary of LOGIC based arguments (or 10 or 20, all pointing at the same conclusion) hit me super hard and have caused me to re-examine my devotion.
Also the shrimp thing IS a bit crazy, but I can't really dismiss it either. But I LIKE having a kind of wild idea rattle around in my head and trying to figure out how I feel about it. I do sometimes wonder if your arguments about loss of diversity and suffering of animals in the wild doesn't logically extend to argue for nuking the planet, though. (Life is just a suffering generator, so shouldn't we stop it?!?! :)
I'm sure I'm not alone in being affected by this and many of your other missives. And I like THIS one too and hope it will convince other people to voice their own good ideas. Onward and upward!!
As a new Substacker myself, this is very encouraging. Glad to see that you've been able to do so much good. I also was surprised to see that such a high percentage of your audience is Jewish and male. Keep up the great work!
You do a good job of selling animal rights/welfare and veganism to autist men lol! No but seriously the way you frame animal rights (like the whole bug obsession and bestiality compirasons) is probably one of the few ways of framing it that, I’m pretty sure if it was polled, would appeal to more men than women
Not much to say, except I was convinced of veganism from the very same cosmic skeptic video, and it took me over three years to actually bite the bullet and go vegan.
Don't forget the disagreement thing + our respect for you can combine in productive ways! You've been a huge inspiration for me to start sharing my work, and some of my perspectives disagree with yours—so I'm pushed to try even harder with writing to try to live up to your standard, and that improves the quality of dialogue for everyone. (If you ever want to do a collab on Mary's room, I would be honored!)
I don't disagree with you on shrimp stuff, though, and you've persuaded me to seriously think about starting an animal welfare group here at Princeton! It's crazy that we have Peter Singer here and we're the *only* ivy without a student org for animal welfare. You're doing good work, and the impact that you've had makes me feel better about writing as a way to do real good.
I’ve been involved in EA for a long while (Brian Tomasik’s writing may have even got me into EA!), even spent a summer at Rethink, have advocated for the Shrimp Welfare Project before, and don’t eat animal products. But even so, your newsletter has been very influential in the past year in helping me find the moral motivation to spend more of my intellectual effort and money on factory farming, and it has certainly caused me to donate a lot more than I would have otherwise. Thank you for the incredible work you do! :))
>People are a lot more likely to leave blog comments if they disagree with an article than if they agree with it. Few people rush to the comments to say “yes, totally agree 100% with this article—I have nothing to add.” This can lead to a sense that basically all of your readers disagree with you.
Check out the concept of "participation inequality". Basically early internet research shows the vast majority of people are lurkers, but for some reason we've stopped talking about this fact.
I'm confused by people who claim things like "the internet is showing us what other people are really like". Everyone nowadays seems super aware of problems of self-selection and getting a good random sample. So why do they keep implicitly treating internet commenters as a representative sample? planememe.jpg but for the entire internet
"I learned that 28% of my readers studied philosophy in University. Only 7.6% of my blog readers are female while 12.6% have autism and 18.3% are ethnically Jewish. More of my readers had 1600 SAT scores than the property of being female."
I was discussing with some Spanish atheists in the comment section of a YouTube livestream a few weeks ago, and a few people there were asking the host to talk about your anthropic argument for God. We didn’t end up getting to that topic, but I’m glad to see your influence growing. Keep up the great work.
“Whatever task is before you, do it with all your strength. No more waste or luxury or envy. Use whatever God has loaned to you to do good to your fellow Christians and to all people. Give all that you have, as well as all that you are, to him who did not even withhold his own Son for your sake.” John Wesley
BTW, perhaps worth noting that it wasn't *just* blasting into the ether. You asked us all to share your post! I submitted it to reddit and Hacker News and it did well on both. I don't know the stats for HN, but on reddit my submission got over 20K views.
In general I think causal chains of altruism are long and complex, and as individuals we are always predisposed to overrate our role, and it's worth making an effort to acknowledge everyone you can think of in the causal chain. Going back even further, consider the people who originally popularized ideas around animal welfare (e.g. Peter Singer), people who engaged in the invertebrate welfare research which identified shrimp welfare as a cost-effective cause area, and of course the founders and employees of the Shrimp Welfare Project! And thanks to the Daily Show for doing such a hilarious and informative segment, and everyone who was inspired to donate!
Impressive work, Bentham. I'm all for meme-ing substantial ideas into the world. It's lightweight and highly asymmetric. This is what we do at The Boyd Institute, and there's more opportunity to do this on policy ideas and issues.
yes, totally agree 100% with this article—I have nothing to add.
Haha!
Damn you beat me to it
You wrote that article on McPhersons’s argument, right? I loved that article!
YOOO!!! Thanks man
Haha that's so incredible! I've been seeing talk of this episode and your connection to it all over the place but I didn't know the degree to which you were responsible for it. That's so nuts. Really cool for you and for Dustin too, who spoke his stuff into an even more voidy-void: an academic philosophy conference. If an idea can make it into the wild from there then anything can happen.
Thanks Parker! Love the YouTube channel!
🫡🫡 need to get you on sometime
Yeah would love to!
I'll comment just to be another normally silent voice that is mulling over a lot of your ideas over months and years. Found you through the Ross Douthat article on believing in God. I grew up in a religious family but became more science/logic oriented in my 20's in college and in my professional training. I still attend church, but mainly for a social reasons and to give my kids a moral framework and community. Internally I'm mostly agnostic/unconvinced. So your summary of LOGIC based arguments (or 10 or 20, all pointing at the same conclusion) hit me super hard and have caused me to re-examine my devotion.
Also the shrimp thing IS a bit crazy, but I can't really dismiss it either. But I LIKE having a kind of wild idea rattle around in my head and trying to figure out how I feel about it. I do sometimes wonder if your arguments about loss of diversity and suffering of animals in the wild doesn't logically extend to argue for nuking the planet, though. (Life is just a suffering generator, so shouldn't we stop it?!?! :)
I'm sure I'm not alone in being affected by this and many of your other missives. And I like THIS one too and hope it will convince other people to voice their own good ideas. Onward and upward!!
Life also generates beauty, joy, and love.
As a new Substacker myself, this is very encouraging. Glad to see that you've been able to do so much good. I also was surprised to see that such a high percentage of your audience is Jewish and male. Keep up the great work!
You do a good job of selling animal rights/welfare and veganism to autist men lol! No but seriously the way you frame animal rights (like the whole bug obsession and bestiality compirasons) is probably one of the few ways of framing it that, I’m pretty sure if it was polled, would appeal to more men than women
Not much to say, except I was convinced of veganism from the very same cosmic skeptic video, and it took me over three years to actually bite the bullet and go vegan.
Don't forget the disagreement thing + our respect for you can combine in productive ways! You've been a huge inspiration for me to start sharing my work, and some of my perspectives disagree with yours—so I'm pushed to try even harder with writing to try to live up to your standard, and that improves the quality of dialogue for everyone. (If you ever want to do a collab on Mary's room, I would be honored!)
I don't disagree with you on shrimp stuff, though, and you've persuaded me to seriously think about starting an animal welfare group here at Princeton! It's crazy that we have Peter Singer here and we're the *only* ivy without a student org for animal welfare. You're doing good work, and the impact that you've had makes me feel better about writing as a way to do real good.
Awesome! :)
I’ve been involved in EA for a long while (Brian Tomasik’s writing may have even got me into EA!), even spent a summer at Rethink, have advocated for the Shrimp Welfare Project before, and don’t eat animal products. But even so, your newsletter has been very influential in the past year in helping me find the moral motivation to spend more of my intellectual effort and money on factory farming, and it has certainly caused me to donate a lot more than I would have otherwise. Thank you for the incredible work you do! :))
Awesome!
Oh wow. If the shrimp video really was inspired by your blog… then I consider the $10/month subscription some of the most effective giving around!
>People are a lot more likely to leave blog comments if they disagree with an article than if they agree with it. Few people rush to the comments to say “yes, totally agree 100% with this article—I have nothing to add.” This can lead to a sense that basically all of your readers disagree with you.
Check out the concept of "participation inequality". Basically early internet research shows the vast majority of people are lurkers, but for some reason we've stopped talking about this fact.
I'm confused by people who claim things like "the internet is showing us what other people are really like". Everyone nowadays seems super aware of problems of self-selection and getting a good random sample. So why do they keep implicitly treating internet commenters as a representative sample? planememe.jpg but for the entire internet
"I learned that 28% of my readers studied philosophy in University. Only 7.6% of my blog readers are female while 12.6% have autism and 18.3% are ethnically Jewish. More of my readers had 1600 SAT scores than the property of being female."
Did you really need a survey to tell you this? ;)
I love stereotypes.
I was discussing with some Spanish atheists in the comment section of a YouTube livestream a few weeks ago, and a few people there were asking the host to talk about your anthropic argument for God. We didn’t end up getting to that topic, but I’m glad to see your influence growing. Keep up the great work.
“Whatever task is before you, do it with all your strength. No more waste or luxury or envy. Use whatever God has loaned to you to do good to your fellow Christians and to all people. Give all that you have, as well as all that you are, to him who did not even withhold his own Son for your sake.” John Wesley
"stone in my shoe." :c I read his book two times like 8 years ago. :v lol
BTW, perhaps worth noting that it wasn't *just* blasting into the ether. You asked us all to share your post! I submitted it to reddit and Hacker News and it did well on both. I don't know the stats for HN, but on reddit my submission got over 20K views.
In general I think causal chains of altruism are long and complex, and as individuals we are always predisposed to overrate our role, and it's worth making an effort to acknowledge everyone you can think of in the causal chain. Going back even further, consider the people who originally popularized ideas around animal welfare (e.g. Peter Singer), people who engaged in the invertebrate welfare research which identified shrimp welfare as a cost-effective cause area, and of course the founders and employees of the Shrimp Welfare Project! And thanks to the Daily Show for doing such a hilarious and informative segment, and everyone who was inspired to donate!
I didn't plan on reading this article all the way but once I started I couldn't stop. Congrats on all ur success!
P.s. if it's not personal, are u autistic and/or Jewish?
I am Jewish but not autistic.
He’s a Jew I doubt he’s autistic though just a little socially awkward (I don’t mean this in a bad way at all!)
Sounds about right, thanks!
Impressive work, Bentham. I'm all for meme-ing substantial ideas into the world. It's lightweight and highly asymmetric. This is what we do at The Boyd Institute, and there's more opportunity to do this on policy ideas and issues.