The Ethical Werewolf ‡ by Neil Sinhababu : December 2012

My other blogs

I've blogged in many different places. Here are some of them:

I'm very proud of War or Car, where I posted a new thing you could buy for the price of the Iraq War everyday, for 121 days. This was during the 2008 elections, and I was glad that the antiwar candidate won. The site got its name because you could buy every American household a Toyota Prius for the $3 trillion price of the war. Or you could buy the Irish their annual beer intake, in Guinness, for a millennium. Or you could buy all the world's pandas their own personal stealth bombers!

Probably my greatest era of internet awesomeness was guestblogging for Ezra Klein long before he achieved his current superstardom at Vox. My posts there are pretty scattered, so they'll be hard to find. My work for Ezra catapulted me into other opportunities like filling in for Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly. After that from 2008 to 2015, my friend Nick Beaudrot and I wrote a blog called Donkeylicious. As the name suggests, it was largely about Democratic politics.

During the 2012 elections, I created a little blog called VoteSeeing that tabulated election predictions and graded predictors on how well they did. The folks at Daily Kos Elections won the prediction contest, with Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight a close second. Shortly afterward, a group of philosophers at a blog called NewAPPS got me to put up a few posts for them.

This post at the Philosophers' Cocoon has more about my job at the National University of Singapore, where I'm a philosophy professor.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

And if you're too chill about everything, you might have nonpolar disorder

Giving people bear hugs and yelling at them that they're doing everything in a way that's totally fine is a classic example of aggressive-passive behavior.

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Merry Christmas!

If the Ghost of Christmas Past had let Scrooge convince his younger self to be more generous, and the ghosts hadn't bothered to visit the newly generous older Scrooge as a result, it'd be a paradox of Christmastime travel.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

A volume of sausage

I believe the German term for a collection of papers written by men to honor an old famous man is "Wurstfestschrift".

Monday, December 17, 2012

Promising Researcher

I just won a Promising Researcher award from my university, and it comes with $5000 SGD which I'll be spending on the upcoming trip. I'm not a Kantian, so I would've considered making false promises to get the money, but my department head helpfully explained to me that the award didn't work that way.

Thursday, December 06, 2012

The problem of other minds is that they get there first

I was excited when I thought up this refutation of external-world skepticism: if there's no external world, there's not enough stuff to realize belief, so there's no danger of false belief. So skepticism doesn't save you from error in any world.

Wrote it up, sent it out, discovered that Daniel Greco had made the same argument way more thoroughly in the July issue of Philosophical Review, canned the paper. It's given me more of an appreciation of skepticism about other minds -- it allows you to have beliefs, and as far as you know, they're all original.

The Ethical Werewolf ‡ by Neil Sinhababu