I have been writing for a long time now. Before I moved to substack I wrote at www.deponysum.com, and I still mirror all my new work there. In total, I’ve written about 270,000 words since I made my blog, that’s approximately 4 PhD theses (in my country) or 4 novels worth of content. I wanted to make an index of what is, in my opinion, the best stuff I’ve written for readers who may interested.
As always, it’s free. However, if I may be an imposition, please share my substack if you enjoy anything here. 🥺🥺🥺
OCD & mental illness
In “What I learnt from being severely mentally ill” I outline life lessons I took from my struggle with OCD and depression.
In “OCD- What I learned fighting mind cancer” I engage in some philosophical and psychological theorising about OCD.
In “OCD and the origins of religion” I put forward a tentative case that the thought processes which define OCD may have played a special role in the origin of religion.
General
In “Reflections occasioned by reading Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit part 1” I outline some thoughts on this book.
In “Twitter is a reverse panopticon” I reflect on the ways in which our behaviours and feelings on social media reflect a desperate need to be seen.
In “The Ballad of Reading Gaol as a rejection of all law and punishment” I reflect on Oscar Wilde and the tension between punishment and humanism.
In “Always be kind because you never know when you’re incompetent” I lay out what I take to be one of the strongest arguments for kindness- you never know when you don’t really know what’s going on.
In “Oh death where is the antidote to thy sting” I reflect on some philosophical questions stirred up by the idea of raising the dead through technological means.
In “Gilbert Gottfried reads part of Futile Devices” I paid Gilbert Gottfried to read… part of Futile Devices! It’s a lot of fun.
In “Perspectival fever” I… well it’s sort of hard to explain tbh.
You don’t have a first amendment right not to be censored on Facebook, but maybe you should. Self explanatory.
In “Existential tragedies” I list what I take to be the great sadnesses inherent to the human condition.
In “The conscientious conservatives” I explain why I don’t take the idea that conscientiousness is a driver of conservatism especially seriously.
In “A consent theodicy” I give one way that it might be possible that there is an all-knowing, all good, all-powerful God in a universe filled with evil.
In “The paradox of the crowd” I deal with a subtle problem in social epistemology that I’ve not previously heard discussed.
In “Weak correlations don’t necessarily mean weak underlying relationships” I describe a remarkable case study of two variables that should be conceptually very tightly related, but which appear only to correlate 0.36.
In “Recent advances in natural language processing, some woolly speculations” I draw out some philosophical implications from the rapid progress of natural language understanding using machine learning.
In “Four parts of belief” I subdivide what we call “belief” into four different potentially separable parts.
In “The culture novels and the deaestheticisation of politics” I argue that the culture novels avoid a reactionary trap that even many leftwing speculative fiction authors fall into.
In “By my scoring over half of the items in the generic conspiracist scale are literally true” I challenge the face/construct validity of a popular test of conspiratorial thinking. The scale doesn’t properly discriminate between irrational conspiracy theories and rational awareness of actual historically documented conspiracies.
In “Economic freedom indexes are bad actually” I methodologically obliterate the Economic Freedom Index, particularly as a metric designed to show that rightwing policies are good for the economy.
Recent
This is the stuff that came out after I moved to Substack.
In “Movements are always a distorted lens on the ideas they embody” I argue that social movements attract a very particular kind of person, and we shouldn’t let this distort our understanding of them.
In “The questions that haunt me at 3 in the morning” I outline some of my favourite unsolved questions. The ones I keep coming back to again and again.
Explicitly leftwing work
In “Yvne, the forgotten opposite of envy” I outline a kind of conceptual opposite of envy. Whereas envy involves upset at another’s better fortune- especially a better social position, Yvne is a pleasure at another’s inferior fortune, especially inferior social position.
In “The Egalitarian Past and Future of Politics” I argue that since available evidence suggests politics began its evolutionary existence as a levelling mechanism, our great task is to understand how it came to be used in the service of inequality.
In “Money and the sceptic” I argue that imperfectly informed agents should assume the evidence for left-wing ideas, particularly about economics, are stronger than they have come across organically.
In “Seeing like a communist” I try to distil what I take to be the essential claims and insights of the broad Marxist/communist worldview into a single article.
In “On Critical Social-technological points” I theorise about some worrying developments in the near future.
In “Thinking about persuasion from a left-wing point of view” I outline a leftwing approach to thinking about persuasion, and to persuading people.
In “Against Libertarian criticisms of redistribution” I attack arguments against redistribution conceived in terms of a deontological “right to property”.
In “Mistaken identity and misunderstood interests” I review Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identity a critique of racial identity politics from the left.
In On Klutzes I outline a theory of the klutz, what they are, and what we owe them.
Poems
“Deadwater” is a long autobiographical poem I wrote about OCD.
“The Arcadian Cantos” is a poem I didn’t write. Instead, I stitched it together with the output of GPT-3, the words of famous (and not so famous) poets and writers and a little of my own content.