Earlier, I discussed changing the name of the blog. Now I’ve made a decision: Greatplay.net is now going to be EveryDayUtilitarian.com:

Therefore, you get Everyday Utilitarian, or my blog dedicated to my quest to become just that… an everyday utilitarian, or someone who seeks to put utilitarianism into their everyday life. This blog will definitely focus on the abstract debates you frequently see on philosophy blogs. But it will be a bit more than that. There will be self-improvement and lifestyle building as I craft my everyday utilitarianism. And there will be some discussion of science as it can help build utilitarian communities and answer deep questions about ethics. And there will be political commentary from my utilitarian perspective.

There are other self-improvement sites out there. But I don’t have all the answers, and I’m not out to give you advice. Instead, this blog is a personal blog about a journey, where I work on my life and give you updates on how things are going. And it’s about a particular kind of life — one that seeks to put utilitarianism into practice and make the world a better place. Hopefully you’ll take something out of it and enjoy it.

Let me know.

Greatplay.net will still exist as an archive and I’ll still respond to comments here. However, Greatplay.net will no longer have any new essays added. Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

It was great writing here, but I look forward to the new era. I don’t think all that much will be different. “New look, same great taste”, as they say.

It’s quite clear to me already that work is piling up, so it must be time for the annual shut down of this blog right before finals. Greatplay.net will resume 3 4 May.

…Or will it? Rest assured, I won’t stop blogging permanently. But on 3 4 May, I’ll make an announcement as to whether this blog will get a new name.

From time to time, I like to upload papers that I write for classes or research. Today, I’m highlighting a paper from my Personality Psychology class, fully entitled “Why Bother Making Friends? The Relationship Between Explanatory Style, Hope, Friendship Quality, Friendship Development, and Social Interaction Anxiety”. Here’s the abstract:

While optimism has received a lot of study, few studies have looked at interpersonal relationships or compared two different measures of optimism. In this study, it is hypothesized that both explanatory style and hope will have positive correlations with friendship quality, friendship development, and social interaction anxiety. Questionnaires were given to college students and it was found that only the agency subscale of hope had any correlation with friendship quality. Furthermore, neither hope nor explanatory style correlated with friendship development and only explanatory style and the pathways subscale of hope correlated with social interaction anxiety. The results of this study lead to speculation that one has less friendship quality not because of any particular behaviors one is or isn’t doing, but because less optimism leads one to just think more negatively about one’s friends. This study then concludes with a call for further research taking into account the findings and the methodological approach of including multiple measures of optimism.

I’ve made it available on Issuu and as a PDF. Let me know if you want it made available through any other methods.

The weekly link roundup is where I list links for the links that I liked for the week. Remember that I don’t necessarily agree with everything stated in every article. Feel free to comment or ask. Lastly, it may be worth noting that I do try to sort these links in the order that I like them, descending. You can see the other roundups via the category page.

• Encourage Discussion, Not Defensiveness: “Getting more people behind a cause you care about can be a great way to really multiply your impact. To do this you need to be able to communicate your ideas in a way that allows people to engage with them fully. But this isn’t always easy. Rather than encouraging constructive discussion, presenting new ideas – especially about moral issues – can often spark confrontation.”

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Follow up to: Does Christianity Contradict the Evidence?
Response to: Cl’s “Countering Drange: Introduction

A blogger by the name “Cl” over at The Warfare is Mental is someone I’ve interacted before. While I still have a backlog of old material I need to respond to, today I instead wanted to respond to one of his newest pieces of material — his essay, “Countering Drange: Introduction”. In his words:

I recently found an old printout of Theodore Drange’s 1996 critique of the so-called “Argument From The Bible.” Drange was an early contributor to Internet Infidels, and to this day I still hear atheists occasionally praise him as some sort of competent critic. When I stumbled across the printout, I asked myself why I’d saved it. After reading a few snippets, it all came back to me: I saved it because it’s another shining example of the illogic that passes for rational criticism in atheist circles. So, from time to time I’ll be addressing certain points in this article. First let’s take a look at Drange’s summation of the Argument From the Bible.

Here, I’d like to talk about Cl’s critique of this critique, and argue that Drange actually does succeed on the particular merit that Cl has attempted a rebuttal on.

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