.Richard Chappell has been writing a bunch of good blog posts: rychappell.substack.com/p/2023-in-revi…

In both the US and the UK, there are more children than old people in poverty.

Welfare transfers should be redirected from pensioners to children. And the retirement age should be raised.

Textbook page on why utilitarians reject naive instrumentalism: utilitarianism.net/utilitarianism…

I wish people would start using another term, like 'naive instrumentalism', to refer to this sort of reasoning. No utilitarian theorists endorse it! Like, literally, zero.

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all... openings... through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country...

2023 in Review: an overview of my year's blogging at Good Thoughts
tinyurl.com/mwvejact

There is a fantastic discussion about Longtermism/long-range ethics happening right now between Eric Schwitzgebel and Richard Chappell, both fantastic philosophers with a gift for public communication. Here are some links. Start here with Eric’s opening salvo: latecomermag.com/article/dont-m…

It's Not Wise to be Clueless
tinyurl.com/bdfc8yjr

Lots of snowflakes triggered by this, but it really is true that some people are (markedly!) more intellectually honest than others.

This is quite bad. A group of virologists wanted to do gain-of-function research on COVID viruses in Wuhan in ways that closely matched the SARS-CoV-2 virus that's killed 8+ million, but tried to hide the Wuhan linkages and got a lot of help in doing so from science journalists.