Moving to Substack

I started this blog 18 years ago, as a second-year undergraduate philosophy major.  The first couple years were... very undergrad-y... but I think by 2006 or so I was doing some pretty interesting philosophy on here, much (but not all) of which I would still stand by.  The next few years (heading into early grad school) were probably the peak years for the blog in terms of audience engagement, commonly getting dozens of comments per post.

After the old blogosphere largely died off, and engagement moved to Facebook and Twitter, I've kept the blog going as a kind of "extended mind" for organizing my thoughts.  Sharing the posts on FB sometimes leads to some good discussion there.  And I get loads of random google hits through all the page-rank built up over the years. I've written over 2000 posts, received over 14K (non-spam) comments, and since 2010 have received over 5 million page views.  Still, the old Blogger software is no longer well-supported, so I'm curious to see if I can do better on a new platform.

I've heard good things about Substack, so have set up a new blog/newsletter there, called Good Thoughts. (The 'goodthoughts' substack url was already taken, alas, so I've gone with rychappell.substack.com instead.)  Existing email subscribers should be carried over automatically.  Others can click through or use the following form to subscribe:

Whereas Philosophy, et cetera was always primarily a self-indulgent project, my aim with Good Thoughts is to be a little more thoughtful about writing for an audience, e.g. writing more self-contained posts, with less reliance on back-linking to previous posts to fill in essential background, etc. We'll see how it goes, but I hope it proves worthwhile.

Hope to see you there!

P.S. For a synoptic view of my past blogging, check out the annual review posts under my 'compendia' category.

New Blogs of Note

Three new-ish blogs (from the past year or so) that I figure are worth highlighting:

(1) Cold Takes - Holden Karnofsky (of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy fame) writing on themes relating to "avant-garde effective altruism".  See especially his "Most Important Century" series, on why humanity needs to prepare for some wild changes.

(2) Hands and Cities - by Oxford philosophy grad (and Open Philanthropy research analyst) Joe Carlsmith. I just discovered this blog a week or so ago, but have been digging through the archives a bit and really enjoying it. I especially recommend 'On future people, looking back at 21st century longtermism', 'On the limits of idealized values' (exploring puzzles for subjectivists about how to select the appropriate idealization procedure), and 'Can you control the past?' (on decision theory).  He's clearly influenced by Eliezer Yudkowsky, but is actually good at philosophy, which makes for an interesting combination.

(3) Astral Codex Ten - Scott Alexander's new blog.  Probably everyone already knows this?  But I mention it here in case there are any deprived souls out there who could still benefit from the pointer.  See, e.g., 'The Moral Costs of Chicken vs Beef', 'The Rise and Fall of Online Culture Wars', stuff on charter cities, schooling, and the FDA.

Are there any other new blogs of note that you've been enjoying recently?  Share a link in the comments, if so...

Aeon article on Procreative Ethics

It's been a year in the making, but my article on procreative ethics is finally up at Aeon Magazine!  Big thanks to Helen Yetter-Chappell, Eden Lin, my parents, and my brother Luke, for helpful feedback on making it accessible to a general audience. (Bonus points to my parents for bringing me and my four brothers into existence -- all net positives for the world, in my opinion!)

Blogs and Articles

There's a cool paper by Thomas Kroedel on 'Dualist Mental Causation and the Exclusion Problem', forthcoming in Nous.  The central idea is very much akin to that discussed in my 2011 blog post 'Epiphenomenal Explanations'.  As with the previously noted case of Kagan on Consequentialism and Individual Impact, I guess it just goes to show that I should hurry up and turn more of my blog posts into journal articles!

It does seem a bit of a shame, though, that that's the only way to get professional credit for one's ideas.  As I've argued before, blogging is an excellent medium for doing philosophy, and while some ideas benefit from the sustained exposition possible in a lengthy journal article, I think it's at least as common to read papers that would benefit from being distilled into blog posts!  So I think it's unfortunate, generally speaking, that our professional incentives are set up the way that they are.  (Not that it's at all clear what feasible alternatives there are...  Any thoughts?)

Top Ten Philosophy Blogs

Brian Leiter compiled this interesting list for blogs.com, which includes a flattering mention of Philosophy, et cetera. Though I probably would've included the Arche Methodology blog as one of the best out there (alongside PEA Soup and Certain Doubts).

Respecting Pseudonymity

Hear hear:

Many people who first venture out into the blogosphere do so under the cover of pseudonymity, even if they later blog under their own name. There are good pseudonymous bloggers who really are in positions that make it so that they would not blog at all if they had no such protection. If those protections don't exist, if we do not protect the pseudonymity of others, that contributes to an atmosphere of hostility in the blogosphere, many good bloggers will be lost, and we will all be the poorer.

When considering these sorts of cases, people often seem to end up only focusing on the particular case at hand, and so determine whether the 'outing' was justified by assessing whether they dislike the outed blogger enough to trump his putative privacy rights. But it's also important to consider the broader impact, as Brandon highlights in the above quote.

We should want to uphold norms that enable pseudonymous blogging. The most straightforward candidate norm would be to respect a blogger's pseudonymity unless there's some pressing reason why the public needs to know their true identity (e.g. to expose sockpuppetry, undisclosed conflicts of interest, etc.)

One might propose a less accommodating norm, e.g. to respect pseudonymity only insofar as the blogger remains civil and inoffensive, and expose them if they piss you off. This may be motivated by the idea that if people want to engage in verbal attacks, they should have to own their words, rather than hide behind the veil of their virtual persona. Or, if retributivism isn't your thing, perhaps such a rule would have the happy consequence of reducing the amount of vitriol that gets thrown around online. People can still feel safe blogging under a pseudonym; they simply need to take care not to be jerks while they're at it.

The obvious problem with this proposal is that "offensiveness" is rather subjective. Is maintaining a polite tone sufficient to guarantee your pseudonymity, or might an opposing partisan decide that your views are substantively offensive, 'beyond the pale', and that you "deserve" to suffer real-life censure for them? If we grant everyone too much discretion in determining whether or not another's pseudonymity ought to be respected, someone is sure to judge poorly, so we'll end up with much weaker protections than originally intended.

So I think we're probably better off sticking with the straightforward norm to basically always respect pseudonymity (except in the very rare and uncontroversial cases of sockpuppetry and the like).

Academic Blogging: Pros and Cons

I find philosophy blogging so useful, fun, and worthwhile that I'm surprised there aren't more academics (esp. grad students) doing it. Admittedly, I'm an enthusiast. But I take myself to be enthused by reasons that other philosophers could share. For instance:

(1) It helps me do more philosophy -- exploring and writing up ideas that I would otherwise never get around to. (One could use a private journal for this purpose, but I'm sure the public aspect helps boost and maintain my motivation. YMMV.)

(2) It's a great way to get critical feedback on your ideas. (As previously argued, blogging is a medium well-suited to philosophical discussion.) This point will become all the stronger as more and more top young philosophers join in.

(3) It disseminates your insights and ideas to a broader audience. This is worth pondering. If you love philosophy, no doubt you also care about sharing it -- correcting common misconceptions, helping others to come to a clearer understanding of difficult problems, etc. So I cherish the fact that this blog has received over half a million visits, many from undergrads and philosophically interested layfolk, in addition to the fellow grad students and academic philosophers with whom I engage most.

Conversely, I'm very appreciative of other bloggers, from whom I learn a great deal. I only wish there were more! -- sharing ideas and summarizing helpful things they've learnt, so I could learn them too.

---

So, why aren't there more academic bloggers? I expect the main factor is sheer inertia: people don't tend to start doing new things without some reason. (It takes time and effort, after all.) But I hope that drawing attention to the above factors will help instill some readers with the requisite inspiration.

Others, however, may be positively resistant to blogging. Public speaking is of course a very common fear, and I wouldn't be surprised if some (esp. less confident students) have a more generalized fear of (intellectual) 'public exposure', being judged negatively, etc. I don't have much to say about this, except to wish such people luck in overcoming their unfortunate fear, and so dispelling this 'attitude-dependent' reason not to blog.

Are there attitude-independent reasons to fear blogging? I've heard two proposed:

(A) Fear of getting 'scooped', or "giving away ideas without getting much credit". Brian Weatherson had an interesting discussion of this a few years ago. As he points out, there's more to professional reputation than publications alone. (And for many people, at least, blogging will tend to help them produce more publications in any case.)

I would add that it's not entirely clear to me why blogging should be thought any "riskier" than other ways of doing philosophy in public -- e.g. conference presentations -- that most academics wouldn't give a second thought. But if you're really worried about someone poaching your dissertation topic (say), then I guess you could always just restrict your blogging to side-interests. So this worry is - at most - limited in scope.

(B) Fear of hurting your chances on the job market. I take it the idea here is that your half-baked thoughts aren't as impressive as your finished work, so putting the former on display may create a worse overall impression for Hiring Committees. I guess that's possible, but we need to consider (i) how likely it is that HCs would be irrational in this way, and (ii) how this balances against the likelihood that blogging will help you professionally.

All else equal, I take it, people tend to be more well-disposed towards familiar names and faces, and participating in blog discussions is at least one way to get your name out there. (Compare the professional/networking benefits of attending conferences.) Plus there's always the chance that your thoughts might positively impress.

Notably, even if your blogging alienates more people than it impresses, base rate considerations suggest that it's still overwhelmingly likely to be beneficial on net. Suppose, for example, that a Hiring Committee checking your blog has a massive 10% chance of being discouraged from hiring you, compared to a 2% chance of being encouraged to hire you when they otherwise wouldn't. The crucial observation is that the base rate is overwhelmingly weighted against hiring you to begin with: let's be optimistic and say that as many as 10% of your job applications will be successful by default. How does blogging change the default chances? Well, 1% (10% of the originally-inclined 10%) will be discouraged from hiring you, and 1.8% (i.e. 2% of the originally disinclined 90%) are shifted in your favour, for a net gain of .8%. So your overall success rate increases from 10% to 10.8%, even given the most unfriendly assumptions. It's easy to see that this happy effect is magnified if we are more pessimistic about our default chances, or less pessimistic about the ratio of impressed- to unimpressed blog readers. Plausibly, then, blogging is more professionally prudent than not. (Though anyone motivated by this reason alone would probably not do a very good job of it!)

---

Overall, then, I think there are some pretty compelling considerations that count in favour of academic blogging, and ungrounded fears counting against. Such weak concerns may be enough to maintain inertia, if someone isn't much fussed with the prospect of blogging in the first place. But I think it would be a real pity to let vague professional paranoia prevent you from doing something you consider truly worthwhile.

The Medium of Philosophy

A couple more questions of information architecture: What are blogs good for? And what is the ideal medium for philosophical discussion? Here some form of pluralism seems plausible, since there are many different kinds of valuable philosophical discussion (from brainstorming ideas to the highest levels of rigorous critique), and people differ in whether they prefer, e.g., oral or written communication. But I think some general observations may still be possible. In particular, I want to undermine the common prejudice against taking blogging seriously as an academic medium.

On the traditional picture, philosophers may go through any or all of the following steps: (i) get together at the pub to exchange rough ideas, (ii) go home and write up a paper, (iii) pass it around their friends for comments, (iv) perhaps present it at a colloquium or conference to get a bit more feedback, before (v) submitting the final paper to a journal, where it stands as their "official" contribution to the ongoing discussion in the literature.

Blogging might be understood conservatively as an expansion of the first (brainstorming) step, though I think it also has a fair bit in common with conferencing, and - don't forget - is a form of publication in addition. This combination of features suggests some potentially radical implications. In the long run, I expect that the distinction between 'work in progress' and 'publications' will become increasingly porous, as academia slowly comes to grips with the 'publish then filter' information economy. (Dennett noticed the start of this trend over a decade ago, in employing his famous "multiple drafts" metaphor.) But I also want to say something about our more immediate circumstances.

In particular, I want to suggest that blogging, as a medium, is very well-suited for (much) philosophizing. Indeed, I personally find it to be my favourite philosophical medium, at least for many purposes. I add the proviso because my absolute best philosophical experiences have been in small, well-focused seminar classes, where everyone has done the readings and actively participates in stimulating discussions. That, I grant, is even better than blogging. But in general, I find that blog discussions are often more philosophically valuable than, say, colloquia, conference talks, and similar 'general audience' presentations.

Of course it depends on the participants (so I have in mind a good quality blog like PEA Soup). But it shouldn't be surprising that blogs, as a written medium, may be conducive to higher quality conversation -- at least when all else is equal. After all, asynchronous discussion frees interlocutors to spend as long as they need to reflect carefully and craft their responses. Competitive pressures also help: without a captive audience, "speakers" with nothing particularly worthwhile to say will soon find no-one listening to them. (If only we could leave a boring talk, or skim past an obtuse question, as easily as we can on the Internet!) Thirdly, the space of potential interlocutors is much larger, as overcoming geographic boundaries creates many new opportunities for conversing with wonderful philosophers from all over the globe. [For example, one of my favourite blog discussions (quoted here) was with Jamie Dreier (Brown) when I was at ANU, half the world away.]

So I think blogging is in principle -- and often in practice -- superior to conferencing and colloquia, as a "mid-level" philosophical medium. This claim strikes me as fairly straightforward. More controversially: I'm inclined to think that even "high-level" philosophy, i.e. journal articles, would often be better in (something like) blog format. Granted, some papers really do need all those ten thousand words to make their point. But most often, I think the core insight could be easily captured in an 800 word blog post, and the rest is just tying up loose ends, or repetitive exposition for struggling readers -- stuff that could easily be delegated to separate - hyperlinked - pages, rather than bloating the main work.

Overall, I expect that current academic practices will at least be significantly supplemented (if not supplanted) by new media. Eventually. But I hope to see these improvements implemented sooner rather than later. So helping others to see the opportunities for improvement is perhaps a first step. Your thoughts?

Browsing / Blogging Hacks

I previously wrote a very simple guide to starting a philosophy blog. But I figure it might also be helpful to collate some more advanced tips and tweaks. So, here goes!

Sympoze Button

I mentioned Sympoze ('Digg for philosophers') previously. You can now integrate the Sympoze 'vote button' right into your blog. (I've done this for individual post pages only, since I don't want my main page to load any slower.) Hopefully this will encourage more philosophers to make use of the service, which will in turn make it all the more valuable as a filter for philosophically interesting online content.

So: if you haven't done so already, join Sympoze, vote up blog posts you like, and see what other philosophers have recommended.

Blogging and Protecting the Innocent

I often find that interesting ideas arise in discussion with others. But this suggests a possible tension between three prima facie legitimate interests:
(1) Blogging about interesting ideas,
(2) Giving credit where it's due,
(3) Privacy interests.

I tend to assume that prepared talks (e.g. conference presentations) are considered 'public', so there it's unambiguously appropriate to identify the speaker by (full) name -- much as if I were discussing a published paper.

But I think unprepared or 'off the cuff' remarks (e.g. questions from the audience, informal class discussions, etc.) come with the reasonable expectation that they will not be attached to one's "permanent (Googleable) record". So I tend to balance 'credit' and 'privacy' in such cases by using first names only, or perhaps merely initials. That way anyone who was part of the original discussion can easily follow along (and I suppose an interested reader could probably make an educated guess as to the identities involved), but it's protected from the all-seeing eye of Google, and so from third-party general searches.

Does that seem like a reasonable default practice to follow? (To anyone I've mentioned before: please let me know if you have a different preference, e.g. to be identified in full, or for that matter to be fully anonymized.) I guess to be completely safe I could explicitly ask each such person their personal preference, but that seems kind of a hassle and mildly awkward to boot. It would be worth it nonetheless if anyone's likely to be significantly bothered by my above policy, but I find that hard to imagine. What do you think?

Drive-by Commenting

A great thing about blogging is that you can get instant feedback on your ideas, and engage in interesting conversations and arguments with your readers. Unfortunately, some people seem to interpret comment forms on blogs as a general invitation to spout off their pre-existing opinions on any related topic. (Random Googlers are especially likely to vent once and disappear, hence my reference to 'drive-by commenting'. But there can be repeat offenders too, which are even more annoying -- I had to delete a half dozen irrelevant comments by one guy today.) So let me explicitly reiterate that my policy is to delete comments that don't engage with the specific topic at hand.

If my posting on some issue prompts you to have thoughts of your own, that's great. Go post them to your own blog, citing my post as your proximate inspiration, and I'll be thrilled. But please don't hijack my comment threads to use as your own private soapbox. Get your own -- there are plenty to go around. We're trying to have a conversation here, and while newcomers are always welcome to join in, it's insufferably rude for a stranger to change the topic or otherwise try to take over. The comments here are for responding to the specific issues raised in the post; if you can't pin down a particular quote or section of my post that you're responding to, this may be a sign that your comment doesn't actually engage with what I've written.

[I should note that this warning is just for newcomers. Friends and trusted (regular) commenters are of course welcome to suggest fruitful tangents for further discussion (perhaps in a new post) -- I don't mean to deter that. You guys rock.]

As a general rule, I abide by the principle that dialectical progress is only possible in small steps. So my posts (and subsequent discussion threads) tend to be quite focused, ideally addressing one particular question or argument each. Such focus may be unfamiliar to non-philosophers (cf. problem #2), but if you would like to make some broader, more sweeping criticism of my posts, please do so in my open thread on fundamental disagreements instead. Thanks.

Suspecting Wishful Thinking

It's curious how often people accuse each other of rationalizing, or holding a position "because they want to believe it" rather than because they have genuine reasons for thinking it true. Sometimes people do engage in wishful thinking, of course. (Sometimes they even admit as much -- e.g. some theists explicitly cite pragmatic reasons, such as 'comfort', for believing in God.) So sometimes such accusations may be warranted. But often they're simply a result of ignorance of the other person's reasons -- if you don't really understand why they hold the position they do, it's all too easy to imagine that they do so for no good reason at all, in which case less charitable explanations will suggest themselves. Such dismissal carries an obvious epistemic risk, however, since you lose the opportunity to learn about their reasons if you assume from the start that they don't have any. I can think of two such misaccusations from my own experience:

(1) Consciousness. It's a common trope that "people" reject physicalism in favour of some form of dualism simply because they want to believe that humans are "special". No doubt this is true of some people. But it certainly isn't true of every critic of physicalism (much though some might like to pretend otherwise -- using a straw-man foil for rhetorical effect). If anything, I would prefer that physicalism be true (as you can see from my 'Wishful Thinking Alert' a few years ago). I've just come to the honest conclusion that the weight of arguments is against it. You can accuse me of bad judgment in this respect, but you can't accuse me of wishful thinking.

(2) Disputing alleged 'obligations'. Eric Schwitzgebel recently wrote:

I suspect that if, indeed, ethicists don't tend to consider voting a duty that may be post-hoc rationalization rather than genuine moral insight.

But, again, I personally enjoy voting and similar political acts (serving on a jury, etc.), so my belief that it is not morally obligatory certainly isn't a rationalization of personal preference.

I find the above quote particularly strange, because you would think the reasonable prior assumption would be to favour the experts over folk opinion in case of disagreement. (Several commenters raised similar concerns about Eric's project, here.) Surely if anyone has reasons worth considering on a controversial moral question, it's going to be moral philosophers! So that strikes me as an especially inadvisable case of alleging rationalization.

Are there any general rules on offer here? Wishful thinking is an epistemic vice -- a form of irrationality -- so I guess one's readiness to make such an accusation should reflect one's prior judgment of how unreasonable (how poor an epistemic agent) one's interlocutor is.

Quick Poll

Commenting on Richard Brown's post, GNZ writes:

I honestly am curious if anyone else besides Richard C could actually read all exchanges between the two of you and leave with the impression that Richard C seems to have of what happened.

I guess there's one way to find out.* What do y'all think?

[See also: Zombie Review, Assessing Arguments and Begging Questions.]

* = Then I promise to waste no further time or blogspace on this silly dispute. It just annoys me to be subjected to unjustified insults. Confirmation from impartial spectators might lead the misguided accuser to reconsider. And I know I would want to be corrected if I were ever in the situation of making unjust claims myself.

The End(s) of Discussion

Life (especially for bloggers) affords limitless opportunities to engage in disputes. Far, far too many to be able to pursue them all. So I guess we just pursue those few discussions which strike us as particularly interesting and enjoyable. Can we say any more than this? Are there distinctive features of a good or worthwhile discussion? Can you identify any rules of thumb you follow in deciding (i) whether to leave a comment, and (ii) whether to continue or quit an ongoing exchange?

No doubt there are many possible ends an online conversation might serve. For example:
(1) Collaborative inquiry, in pursuit of knowledge and understanding.
(2) Asymmetric teaching, or the imparting of knowledge and understanding to others.
(3) Non-epistemic goals, e.g. creating/reinforcing social ties, "winning" an intellectual competition, etc.

Let's just consider epistemic goals. Discussions between epistemic peers (i.e. #1) tend to be the most interesting and rewarding. It's really wonderful to have the opportunity to improve one's understanding, as when others discern potential flaws in one's initial views. But what about the other case? There are plenty of people out there who are not epistemic peers. Arrogant though this may sound, sometimes you can tell that your disputant is in the grip of a certain confusion, or that they don't really understand the issue, so that there's little you can learn from them.*

The main motivation for continuing, then, will be that niggling itch we feel when "someone is wrong on the internet". They're in a bad state, and so we feel some pull to help make this clear to them, to set them right. Moreover, the act of teaching always has some benefit to the teacher's own understanding, as per my footnote below. So it's not a total waste of time. But if this is time that could have been spent engaging with more insightful interlocutors, this opportunity cost may still be sufficient to deter one whose primary goal is to improve their (own) understanding (or even that of the broader community, if the mistake in question is not widespread).

This relates to my old post, 'engaging persons or ideas?' If we're just interested in ideas for their own sake, then many discussions (i.e. with people who lack sufficient understanding of the relevant ideas) will probably not be worth having. If we think the discussions are worthwhile nonetheless, it must be because we value engaging with the other person.

* = But compare R. Porter:

Almost every new way I have to devise to explain a concept (and sometimes these are pretty simple concepts and thick-headed pupils) makes that concept clearer to me. It's not that the students know something useful that I don't; it's that I need to learn a new facet or explore an uncharted avenue in order to teach them.

Comments and Quality Control

I've written before about the value of filtering out abusive or otherwise unconstructive comments for the sake of promoting reasoned discussion. It's an easy decision to delete comments that don't contribute to the conversation at all. I'm less sure what to do about relevant but low-quality comments. At present I tend to just leave them there but ignore them. (Of course, sometimes I fail to respond to good comments for other reasons, e.g. lack of time.)

But this liberal policy has some unfortunate consequences. The inclusion of low-quality comments may bring down the quality of discussion overall. As Tyler Cowen observes, "the best comments come in the first fifteen or so, after which quality declines precipitously and often exponentially." Short comments are no problem, I think, but long rambling ones are a disincentive for later readers. (One may feel obligated to read the earlier comments before responding, or even feel less comfortable responding to the original post after the conversation has apparently "moved on" to the rambler's choice of tangent.)

The ideal solution would be to have graded levels of comment prominence. I like blog templates which highlight the blogger's own comments relative to the norm. It would also be helpful to be able to make some particular comments less prominent than the norm. The text might be 'greyed out', for example, paled or even completely hidden by default unless readers select to 'click here to display this comment', or some such. Most readers could thus easily ignore the comment, reducing the risk that it will derail the thread, without resorting to heavy-handed deletion (which risks provoking [misguided] complaints of "censorship").

[I've posted this feature suggestion to the Blogger help group, and anyone who likes it is also encouraged to tell Blogger, since they will be more likely to implement a feature for which there is more demand.]

In the meantime, I'm tempted by the following policy: if a comment is both lengthy (i.e. more than a couple of sentences) and unproductive (by my lights), I may delete it and invite the commenter to instead repost the comment on their own blog -- they are then welcome to post the link in my comment thread, since that is far less obtrusive and distracting. (I'm happy to email the person their deleted comment, of course, so they needn't worry about having to rewrite it from scratch.)

Feedback welcome: Is this a good policy -- would it serve to increase the quality of discussions on this blog (which I think is generally quite high to begin with)? Does it seem reasonable? All things considered, do you think I should implement it?

How to start a philosophy blog

I've already had a couple of classmates ask about starting their own blog, which is an encouraging sign. (More philosophy blogs = more interesting conversations, more helpful summaries of interesting books or lectures that I didn't have time to read/attend myself, etc. Every grad student should have one!) In hopes of encouraging yet more people to join in, I thought I'd offer this 'Getting Started' guide.

(Step 1) Create a blog. Go to www.blogger.com and follow their instructions. It really couldn't be easier: select a pre-made template and you'll be up and running within five minutes.

(Step 2) Start writing posts. If you're unsure where to start, see whether any of the following three post types appeals to you:

I think there are three kinds of philosophical activity to which blogs are especially well suited. First is the exploration of half-baked ideas, to get some early feedback and test their potential for further development. Secondly, blogs are a great study and teaching tool, as students can attempt to summarize an issue, and their readers may respond to help correct any misunderstandings. (A good summary may also benefit the readers' knowledge, of course.) Finally, a tightly focused blog post can make technical contributions in response to other work, perhaps critiquing a particular step in an argument, or offering an alleged counterexample.

(I must admit I'd especially appreciate seeing more posts in the second category, e.g. distilling out and sharing the most valuable new insights you've come across in classes or readings, etc.)

(Step 3) Enhance your blog.
- You may wish to add a hit counter so you can see how many visitors you're getting, and where they're coming from. (You can also do a Technorati search for your blog URL, to see if anyone has linked to it.)
- Add a recent comments widget to your sidebar, if you wish. (I recently removed mine due to technical problems. But may reinstate it soon, since they're handy things to have.)
- Sign in to draft.blogger.com and navigate to your blog's 'Layout' page. Here you can add new gadgets to your sidebar, e.g. polls, subscription links, and blog lists. I especially recommend the latter two.

(Step 4) Join the community! So, you have a sparkling new blog, with groundbreaking and insightful posts, but nobody else seems to notice. That's not the end of the world: there's plenty of benefit in simply writing your thoughts down. But there's plenty more benefit to be gained by attracting an intelligent audience with whom to engage in discussion. There are several things you can do here.

The simplest is to submit posts to the Philosophers' Carnival, or even sign up to host a future edition yourself.

But it's probably more effective to interact with other bloggers that you like. (Hopefully there are some!) At the very least, add a 'blog list' to your sidebar, as mentioned above. Most bloggers regularly check who's linking to them, so this is an easy way to attract their attention (at least for a moment) and gratitude. That's a very minimal form of interaction, of course. Better: leave (intelligent) comments on their blog. They'll be more likely to reciprocate. Participate in silly memes and other forms of community-building -- any excuse to link, however trivial, will bring you closer together. Best of all: write a substantive post responding to one of theirs (and link to it, of course). You'll find yourself engaged in a fruitful back-and-forth discussion in no time.

[Any other tips? Add them in the comments below...]

Good political blogs?

There are a number of good, thoughtful liberal blogs out there. I'd say hilzoy's Obsidian Wings is far and away the best.

There are a number of good, thoughtful libertarian blogs out there. Here my top vote goes to Will Wilkinson.

Can anyone recommend some comparably good, thoughtful conservative bloggers? (Jeremy Pierce is decent, but only occasionally writes on politics. Russell Arben Fox is also thoughtful, if idiosyncratic -- he certainly doesn't present a mainstream conservative perspective. So neither is quite what I'm looking for here.) Are there any Burkean traditionalists out there, offering wise counsel on the pressing issues of the day?

Consider this an open thread. If you can't recommend any conservatives, feel free to recommend someone else.

Engaging persons or ideas

[My worries about history requirements reminded me of this old draft from a couple of years ago that I never got around to publishing. Better late than never, I suppose.]

It often happens that a reader "takes away" something quite different from a piece of writing than the original author intended. Does this matter? I think that the answer is "sometimes", but I'd like to get clearer on precisely which times those are.

Let's say a blogger goes away and writes up a response to the idea X they "took home" from another writer W, whom it turns out really meant to say Y instead. I'm wondering: in what circumstances is the latter fact relevant? This seems to turn on the further question: is the blogger engaging with idea X for its own sake, or are they instead trying to respond to whatever person W might be saying? Which should they be doing? Here are a few cases where engaging with the person (and their actual claims) seems important:

1) If you insult or dismiss W on the basis of what they're (allegedly) saying.

2) If W is specifically trying to engage you, say by offering an objection to an earlier argument of yours.

3) If you're in a forum where W gets to choose the topic, e.g. commenting on their blog post.

Are there any others?

Those cases aside, I'm partial to the "disembodied ideas" approach, myself. Of course, it's worth listening to W all the same, because this new idea Y might be more interesting-in-itself and worthy of your attention than X was. But if not, that's fine too. As a general rule, the intellectual interest of an idea shouldn't turn on which particular people believe it. (Though I guess winning the support of a reliably discerning person might constitute 'abstract'- or meta-evidence that an idea is worth a closer look.)

Public interest may be another issue: of all the possible bad arguments out there in logical space, we're usually only interested in refuting the ones that are (or threaten to be) actually taken seriously by a significant section of society. Even so, the Writer's personal beliefs don't seem directly relevant here. But perhaps egregious misreadings are. That is, if nobody else is likely to interpret W the way you did (as arguing for X, say), and no-one else has defended X either, then arguing against it doesn't serve much of a public purpose. But hey, not everything has to: if you found it interesting to clarify the issue in your own mind, or whatever, then that's fine. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that.

To address the flip-side: how should we, as writers, react when others offer false "responses" to our posts, e.g. criticising claims that we're not really committed to? Again, it may depend on the particular situation, but it seems like the ideal would simply be to clarify your position without forcing the other person on to the defensive. (E.g. "Note that my post merely meant to establish Y, which is consistent with your denial of X. So I don't think we really disagree here.") Focusing on the assessment of disembodied ideas seems more likely to lead to a pleasant exchange than some of the more conflict-ridden person-involving alternatives.

(Which is not to say that I always live up to these ideals, of course.)

P.S. A related question for historians of philosophy: is it intrinsically important to discover what old philosophers "really" meant, or should we use them more instrumentally, to garner whatever interesting ideas they might suggest to us? (Or do you think that the historical task is essential to the instrumental one?)

Motivated Incomprehension

Take the following passage, written by a respected academic:

Hillary Clinton suffers from being a Clinton, as well as having one of the most unappealing public personae of a national politician in recent memory. Dick Cheney is creepier and scarier, to be sure, but “fake” is the only word that captures the impression Ms. Clinton makes every time she opens her mouth.

Now, could any competent speaker of the English language reasonably interpret this as RM does?

“unappealing,” meaning–I, Brian Leiter, would not want to sleep with her?

Because that just sounds completely loony to me. When I asked RM to explain how she[?] could possibly interpret the talk of 'appeal', in this context, as referring to sex appeal, RM wrote:

the “context” is the historical characterization of women being evaluated in terms of sexual appeal. This context is always present, regardless if it is explicitly referred to or not.

So apparently it is impossible in our linguistic community to successfully refer to any kind of 'appeal' other than sex appeal, when speaking of a person who is female. That would surprise me. At least, when I read the original quote, the "sex appeal" interpretation did not even occur to me. Yet RM leaped at it as the only possible interpretation. So one of us must be way out of touch with the rest of the speech community. (I assume it's RM who's wrong here, but I'd encourage any readers to report their linguistic intuitions in the comments, just so I can be sure.)

This illustrates one of the things that really bothers me with ideological movements: they seem to impede clear thought (to put it mildly). Paranoia leads ideologues to see threats and insults where none exist. Further, some seem motivated to twist others' statements and read them in the most uncharitable light, willfully misunderstanding them in order to get that dark rush of moralistic pleasure that comes from thinking ill of others. (Cf. Hilzoy's 'Hatred Is A Poison' - possibly the best blog post I've ever read.)

Indeed, RM repeats the debacle later in the very same comments thread. I wrote: "if we are to take sexism seriously, then wrongful accusations of sexism are also pretty serious, to my mind." To which RM responded:

Richlet,

This my last comment. If you feel the need to get the last word in, well, I’ll write that off to your nature.

Have you ever heard of Modus Tollens (it’s related to Transposition)? When we have a conditional statement if A then B, and if not B is shown to be the case, we can conclude not A. This means that B not being the case can, indeed, show that A is false (or as you loosely put it, call A “into doubt”).

In your example, B NOT being the case would be making false accusations of sexism, i.e. if we prove that there are lots of false accusations of sexism then we should not take sexism seriously.

So, my dear boy, given that you think that Leiter has been falsely accused of being sexist, we have at least one instance of not B that could call A (taking sexism seriously) into doubt. Granted, how many more of these “false accusations” are needed before you really begin to question sexism is not clear.

Regardless, I suggest you take a quick look at Modus Tollens. Google it. I teach it in my intro logic class.

Hugs,
RM

Never mind the patronizing false intimacy, or the passive-aggressive posturing re: getting the last word in. Here we have a logic professor suggesting that "if we prove that there are lots of false accusations of sexism then we should not take sexism seriously" is the contrapositive of the previously quoted conditional (apparently misreading the actual consequent, i.e. 'wrongful accusations of sexism are serious', as the very different claim: 'wrongful accusations of sexism don't occur'). The mind boggles.