This Blog Has Moved

I switched to livejournal from blogger because I wanted a place where obscurity is the default and bad posts are not just tolerated, but expected.

But livejournal lost one of my drafts, which made me very upset. and blogger provides many tools that livejournal does not.

This blog is now at: http://grognor.blogspot.com/

I've replicated all the posts there, and will be removing them from here shortly. Please update your RSS feeds, and if you've linked to posts on this blog before, I ask that you change the link to the new location.

"Writing Is Bullshit" Is Bullshit

Resonse to: Writing Is Bullshit

The author of that post writes about how the marginal utility of a blog post or comment is negative because crummy dialogue wastes people's scarce time and attention. In that post he doesn't mention other harmful consequences, such as providing directly misleading information about the content of ideologies or theories, or partaking of a runaway information cascade about how dangerous some actually-harmless new development. I'm sure he would agree that these are also harms of mediocre dialogue.

However, something he omits in that post, which I'm sure he will rectify some day, is that writing also has benefits. In particular, it's the best way to think. At least for me it is. I do a lot of inchoate mind-wandering, but what's the use of that, if it never gets written down anywhere at all?

I hope the author thinks about this more often.

And so begins an attempt to write something, anything, in this space, every single time I have wifi.

My Morality

My one firm conviction is that suffering is bad. I call it a conviction not because I feel justified in feeling certainty but because I can't imagine that my mind can actually change about this. I will refrain from hedging, so note well that the following is provisional.

With that in mind, let's explore a stream-of-consciousness account of my object-level morality. Warning: this will not be a good introduction to anything. Try to already understand all the concepts before reading. This is an experiment. I am just going to brain dump until I can't anymore. I won't go back and edit later, and I won't reread anything here, lest it crystallize and prevent me from changing my mind or thinking wordless thoughts later.
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