Four years ago, I moved my site to what you see here, posting “New Site is Up” with a picture of a cat. I consider that the official “date of birth” of the site. Before then, the original site was just a place for me to store my games and other projects, like my personal haiku collection. The site didn’t even become a blog until late 2007, where I started writing short essays. They were, I think, good for my age at the time (15), but terrible by today’s standards, and they’re all gone now. Nearest as I can tell, the actual site was created 11 May 2003, almost ten years ago…

The biggest pro and biggest con to the name “Greatplay.net” are the same — it doesn’t really mean anything. It was chosen way back in 2003, actually (I was 12 at the time), and it was intentionally designed to be (1) short, (2) pronounceable, (3) communicable without any risk of the other person misspelling it, and (4) not communicate any information about what the site would be about, so I could mold the site as I grew. I think this site has done a good job of just that, documenting my growth as a person over the past four years and the history of my ideas.

My how time has flown but my how much has happened in the last four years. I look forward to seeing where the next four years go. I imagine they’ll be just as formative.

I used to have a section in my about page about why I blog, but that was kind of unnecessary clutter. I’d much rather give the topic an essay of it’s own so I can explore it in depth, and then put it out of harms way where it only need be read by those that are interested. So… why do I blog? Why should anyone blog?

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Executive Summary of: The Normativity Series

This essay is part of my long mission to make sense of normativity, or the idea that we ought to do certain things. Obviously, normativity is a complex topic, so I wanted to distill what I’ve been talking about down to the essentials for reference. This way people can keep track of what is going on from one place, and those who don’t want to read several dozen thousand words will not miss out.

“Don’t Smuggle Your Connotations”

Many words can have hidden connotations that we use as part of the definition of the word without consciously realizing it. This can make us fall easily into fallacies of equivocation which confuse the issue.

“The Folly of Debating Definitions”

Quite often, a philosophical question will hinge on how a word is defined, and different definitions of the word will yield different answers to the question. However, the arguing parties are unaware that the word has multiple definitions, and thus go around in circles forever. (See “Free Will” as a prime example.)

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Companion Reader to: The Normativity Series

This companion reader is a list of links to other essays that also deal with the topic of morality, specifically selected by me to supplement my own ongoing morality series. While I’m aiming to do the best I can at writing my series and as effective as I can be in addressing comments on the series, I thought it would be best to release this reader so you can see what works I draw from for my own work, see where I’m coming from, or just generally get more reading to supplement (or completely replace) what I already say. You could also consider it a works cited to give due credit to the kind shoulders upon which I stand.

Here, I will link only to essays that supplement the essays I have already written, and will add to this reader frequently as my own work expands. It’s intended to be read from top to bottom, in order, but feel free to disregard that suggestion. This reader was last updated February 9, 2013:

• “37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong” by Eliezer Yudkowsky
• “The Wrong Test for Ethical Theories” by Luke Muelhauser (Commonsense Atheism)
• “Heading Toward No-Nonsense Meta-Ethics” by Luke Muelhauser (Less Wrong)
• “What is Meta-Ethics?” by Luke Muelhauser (Less Wrong)
• “Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory” by Luke Muelhauser (Less Wrong)
• “Pluralistic Moral Reductionism” by Luke Muelhauser (Less Wrong)
• “On ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’” by Garren Hochstetler (Words, Ideas, and Things)
• “Hypothetical Imperatives: Acting for Reasons” by Garren Hochstetler (Words, Ideas, and Things)
• “On ‘Oughts and Ends’” by Garren Hochstetler (Words, Ideas, and Things)
• “Judith Jarvis Thomson’s ‘Normativity’” by Gilbert Harman
• “Oughts and Ends” [PDF] by Stephen Finlay
• “On ‘Moral Facts Naturally Exist (And Science Could Find Them)’ (Pt. 2)” by Garren Hochstetler (Words, Ideas, and Things)
• “A Response to Richard Carrier” by Garren Hochstetler (Words, Ideas, and Things)
• “Darla, the She Goat” by Richard Carrier (Richard Carrier Blogs)
• “Moral Ontology” by Richard Carrier (Richard Carrier Blogs)
• “The Triviality of the Debate Over ‘Is-Ought’ and the Definition of ‘Moral’” by Peter Singer
• “Metaethical Pluralism: How Both Moral Naturalism and Moral Skepticism May Be Permissible Positions” [PDF] by Richard Joyce
• “Expressive-Assertivism” [PDF] by Daniel Boisvert
• “Four Faces of Moral Realism” [PDF] by Stephen Finlay
• “The Error in Error Theory” [PDF] by Stephen Finlay
• “The Error in ‘The Error in Error Theory’” [PDF] by Richard Joyce
• “Errors Upon Errors: A Reply to Joyce” [PDF] by Stephen Finlay
• “Enough With The Errors: A Final Reply to Finlay” [PDF] by Richard Joyce

Follow up to: The NaNoWriMo 2011 Experiment

There are two things you need to know about this blog for this post to make sense:

First, I’m participating in NaNoWriMo on my blog, with a self-appointed goal of not just writing 50,000 words on my blog through November, but also writing one post for every day, with a total goal of thirty posts.

Second, I have recently written a series on morality that starts out with what I think is a successful introductory essay “The Meaning of Morality”, but then transitioned into a three-part series about the word “ought” that left some people confused, and despite a two-part clarification essay, still left large parts of my presentation incomplete at best and partially inaccurate at worst.

So this leads me to want to restart the series.

But this is my dilemma: what do I do with the previous essays? Do I edit them and fix them up? Do I rewrite a new series, and then delete the old version? Do I rewrite a new series, but then maintain the old series with a disclaimer? Do I just write a second clarification series with an attempt to fix the damage?

How bad is it to immediately fix up what I just wrote within the past week? And how should this affect my running word count for NaNoWriMo?

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Followed up in: I’m Never As Clear As I Think I Am