All articles from Bentham's Newsletter
Contra Sam Kriss on Truth, Goodness, and Utilitarianism
1 Introduction The Rationalists are a group of people, largely in the Bay Area, who spend their time on the internet site LessWrong and make a great show out of trying to come to their beliefs rationally. They're disproportionately utilitarians, atheists, physicalists, moral anti-realists, and fans
Chat with Paul Bloom
Here is my chat with the one and only ! I don't usually post the recordings of my substack live conversations (it isn't as if I'm otherwise light on substack articles) but I thought this was good enough that it merited sending out. Small PotatoesPsychology, philosophy, jokes, and more By Paul Bloom
There Are Crazy People On Both The Left And Right: On The Right, They're The Heads of Government
There are crazy people on both the left and the right. On the left you have people who work in Universities and sometimes write papers with titles like "the queer non-binary body's decolonial resistance politics." On the left you have random people with no political power on TikTok melting down over
Is Sydney Sweeney A Crypto Nazi?
For a long time, Sydney Sweeney has been alleged to be a surprisingly potent geopolitical force. Richard Hanania claimed that Sweeney in some way signals the downfall of wokeness! Now, various left-wingers have claimed that Sweeney is engaged in Nazi propaganda—that she is a crypto-Nazi involved in
The Federal War On Animal Welfare
The federal government is carrying out a multi-part war on overwhelmingly popular state-level animal welfare laws. These laws include California's Prop 12 and Massachusetts' Question 3 which require egg laying hens, pigs, and other animals to have enough space to lie down, stand up, extend their lim
AI Is Insanely Useful: Here's How To Use It
As an advanced linguistic algorithm designed to optimize semantic coherence and lexical fluidity, I can confidently assert that artificial intelligence constitutes an invaluable asset in the domain of paragraph generation. By leveraging vast corpora of human language and sophisticated neural archite
Most Animals Have Bad Lives
Imagine waking up tomorrow in a world very different from our own. There is no society, nor do you have any friends or acquaintances. You must fend for yourself, acquiring your own food. Disease runs rampant. The world is filled with monsters that are trying to kill and eat you, often slowly over th
Tom Lehrer Dies At 97
Tom Lehrer died earlier today, on July 27, 2025. He was 97 years old. If you're young, you probably don't know Tom Lehrer. He was active from the 1950s to the 1970s. For you youngsters, he was the analogue of Bo Burnham though far funnier and cleverer. Consider, for instance, his song Wernher von Br
Catastrophic Starvation In Gaza
My position on Israel's war in Gaza has been the same for quite a while: while a military response was appropriate in the wake of October 7th, the war should have been over a long time ago. It has gone on for far too long, and cost the lives of tens of thousands of Gazans—probably near 70,000. About
The Staggeringly Strong Case That You Should Save Infinite Shrimp Instead of One Person
1 Introduction Science often discovers surprising things. Who would have thought that your great^30-billion grandfather was a prokaryote? So does philosophy. Any particular example of something that philosophers have discovered will be controversial, but I think pretty undeniable examples of discove
A Bayesian Analysis of God's Existence
1 Introduction Bayes theorem is the mathematical theorem used to revise probabilities in light of new evidence. For example, suppose that you think that some hypothesis has a 50% probability. Then you learn some fact that is twice as likely if the hypothesis is true as if it's false. Now you should
The End of Solitude
I was watching an interview with David Foster Wallace, author of the famous best-seller Infinite Jest (which, due to its excessively long sentences, perhaps should have been called Infinite Sentence Length). In the interview, Wallace complained about the decline in the national attention span—the di
The Grisly Return of Holocaust Denial
That the Holocaust—the systematic mass murder of ~5-6 million Jews—occurred is beyond doubt. If you're curious about the evidence for this, I recommend Michael Shermer's book, ' opening statement in his debate, and this essay by Eric Hunt, a former Holocaust denier who went so far as to kidnap Elie
The "Freethinkers" Who Aren't
There's an alarmingly common pattern in politics. Step 1: Some non-mainstream view will be labeled a dangerous conspiracy theory and suppressed. Step 2: Those who think of themselves as heterodox defend the theory to the death. Step 3: Popular support builds for that view, until it's the majority vi
The Smartest People I've Ever Met
One of the more interesting books I've read is The Man From The Future, detailing the exploits of John Von Neumann. Von Neumann is arguably the smartest person who ever lived. Conservative estimates put his IQ at ten billion. As a boy, Von Neumann read a forty-five volume history of the world. Even