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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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.

• Moral Realism As Moral Motivation: The Impact of Meta-ethics on Everyday Decision Making [PDF]: “People disagree about whether “moral facts” are objective facts like mathematical truths (moral realism) or simply products of the human mind (moral antirealism). What is the impact of different meta-ethical views on actual behavior? In Experiment 1, a street canvasser, soliciting donations for a charitable organization dedicated to helping impoverished children, primed passersby with realism or antirealism. Participants primed with realism were twice as likely to be donors, compared to control participants and participants primed with antirealism. In Experiment 2, online participants primed with realism as opposed to antirealism reported being willing to donate more money to a charity of their choice. Considering the existence of non-negotiable moral facts may have raised the stakes and motivated participants to behave better. These results therefore reveal the impact of meta-ethics on everyday decision-making: priming a belief in moral realism improved moral behavior.”

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I’ve been running this Link Roundup series for a long time, and every time I do ten of them, I like to group them in a summary of the “best of” that I like the most, re-ordered again by my personal preferences so you can see the links I like most.

When I did the best of #1-20, the winner was “The Twelve Virtues of Rationality”. From #21-30, the winner was “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul” [PDF]. Then for #31-40, the winner was “Morality – From Heavens or From Nature?” [YouTube]. #41-50 saw “Fuel Efficiency Standards Have Costs of Their Own” [NYTimes] take the top. For #51-60, it was “The Power of Effective Activism”.

Now that #70 is finished, I’m here to recap the best from roundups #61-70:

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A Weekly Link Roundup contains two things — links to articles on the web that I found worth reading, and a summary of the discussions I have here and other places. Except this time, we’re doing something a little bit different. Given that the Supreme Court is taking on two different cases regarding “same-sex marriage” and that the topic is in the news, I’ve decided to devote today’s weekly link roundup to the analysis of the topic.

As I’m in favor of same-sex marriage, positively framed as “marriage equality”, the first five links will be pieces that outline the case in favor of marriage equality. Then, for fun and so those who agree with me will still have something to read, the last five links will be political science analysis of marriage equality and the Supreme Court.

• Gay Marriage and The Bigot’s Proof: “What is the difference, really, between selling hot dogs at a ball game or drawings of Mohammed on a web site? Both are prohibited by certain religions. Don’t they both call for violence against the infidels that would offend the religion by these practices? Or, perhaps we should form the judgment that neither of them justifies legal entanglements. The same line of reasoning applies to gay marriage. A person’s prohibitions are their own business.”

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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.

• Putting Charities to the Test: “How do you decide where to give? People want to give where their money will be used effectively, of course. For many, that means researching on Charity Navigator or the Better Business Bureau’s Web site to see which charities are well run and take only a small percentage of donations for administration or fund-raising needs. Calculating efficiency is important, but some charities do useful things the numbers can’t capture. Overhead does matter. But it is dwarfed by a different question: Is this group’s work effective? ‘When people think of giving, they look at the issue of whether a charity has a 10 or 20 percent administration cost, and that makes the difference for them [...] But in reality some things they could be funding are hundreds or thousands of times more effective than other things. People never guess there could be such large discrepancies. Instead of a 20 percent difference, there can be a 1,000 percent difference.’”

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