I spend a lot of time on the internet, and a lot of time working on this blog. The 27th weekly link roundup is out, where I summarize all this browsing, blogging, commenting in one place to keep you up to date on everything cool that I’ve done and/or liked within the past week. Enjoy!

From the department of things I have so many conversations about I want to respond to them in bulk on my blog: social issues. In this essay, I will review what claims social conservatives are making, how these claims should be debated, how wrong these claims are, and how harmful their quest for perceived purity is. And along the way, I’ll go down the social issues rabbit hole and try to point out just how absurd focusing on these social issues are. And no, nothing here is infringing, or even coming close to infringing, religious freedom.

Rationality is essential not only to our personal lives, but to saving the lives of others, and how if we applied the lessons we need to apply to rationality, we would recognize that Joseph Kony is evil, but not the biggest priority for our government or our personal checks. Instead, the real focus should be on malaria, and it is our systematic errors in thinking that prevent this from being crazy obvious.

I spend a lot of time on the internet, and a lot of time working on this blog. The 26th weekly link roundup is out, where I summarize all this browsing, blogging, commenting in one place to keep you up to date on everything cool that I’ve done and/or liked within the past week. Enjoy!

I recently found some arguments for atheism from a series of YouTube videos by user TheraminTrees, that set out to explain what TheraminTrees used to believe about gods, and why he is an atheist now — including which gods he rejects, why, and with how much certainty. I want to single out these arguments here to give them a bit more prominence, but also to discuss them and analyze their success. I also think it’s good just to get them written up in text, since some people (like me) prefer reading a lot more than watching.

People who have read my about page know that I currently have six main academic focuses / intellectual interests. I reviewed where I was planning on going forward on answering them this year in my New Year’s retrospective, but I would like to provide some quick updates in where I am here in terms of morality/rationality, artificial intelligence, and a brand new interest to be added!

While I’m kind of happy to have a shiny “win” based on Cl’s recent concession of the debate given the difficulties encountered, I see it as an entirely phyrric victory that just shows a failure on all our parts. This is not something I wanted to happen. Here, I’m going to take my time to explain my side of the story and try to give the interested parties insight into how this blew up, and then try to explain how to put it back together again for the next debate.

Oughtness is a persistent part of our moral language — that we ought to do this, and not that. In an earlier post I summarized the Is-Ought Problem and showed how Moore and Kant were unable to get out of it. Now I turn the tables on Searle and the Aristotelian Natural Law tradition and show yet more ways the Is-Ought Problem remains unsolved.

One of the best reasons to be an atheist is that there is no reason to think that God exists. I think that every argument that claims to demonstrate the existence of God actually doesn’t, either having a false premise, an invalid conclusion, or both. In this essay I’m going to list every argument I’ve heard of that attempts to demonstrate the existence of a god, give a brief bulleted overview of why the argument doesn’t actually prove what it seems to, and then link to the good work that I think decisively takes down the argument.

I spend a lot of time on the internet, and a lot of time working on this blog. The 25th weekly link roundup is out, where I summarize all this browsing, blogging, commenting in one place to keep you up to date on everything cool that I’ve done and/or liked within the past week. Enjoy!