Applied Divinity Studies

If someone says “because Jesus is real, we should overthrow the US government”, they would get dismissed as a religious nut.

Antimemetics is the study of ideas that resist spreading [0].

You used to comfort yourself with the knowledge that social media is fake.

There’s a tradition of identifying aberrant behavior, posing a mystery around its existence, and using that as a jumping off point for speculative theories on human nature.

There is nothing bad in each of these lives; but there is little happiness, and little else that is good.

A fun game for avowed non-utilitarians is to invent increasingly exotic thought experiments to demonstrate the sheer absurdity of utilitarianism.

[Contains spoilers for Unsong.]

At the Atlantic, Derek Thompson wants to push back against the anti-work narrative .

Some people argue that shoplifters in San Francisco are running rampant.

You may have heard that there’s a shoplifting surge hitting San Francisco.

The people you see have a reputation.

[TLDR: I paid $95 for a 10 minute video consultation with a doctor, told them I was depressed and wanted fluvoxamine, and got my prescription immediately.]

Since quitting my job to blog full time, I didn’t make a lot of money until recently.

Last century, since the end of the Cold War, economic criteria have come to rule our day-to-day lives, and humanity, ruled by these criteria, has reached great heights.

You are standing at the foot of the mountain.

[Thanks to Charles Dillon (2.5x) and Daniel Frank (2.5x) for taking this bet.

I occasionally get emails from young people asking me what they should do with their lives, and implicitly asking how they can become well-connected.

Early in my blogging career, my favorite growth metric was “number of @openphilanthropy.com addresses in my subscriber list”.

I’m not convinced anyone has actually read Stubborn Attachments.

In No One is Even Trying, I wrote: …take a look at Byrne Hobart.