Site Update 005

What’s New

I removed the people and organizations sections on the about page. I never explained why those sections were there in the first place. I just filled them with links to organizations and people. My linking to them was not an endorsement of everything those people and organizations have ever said or done. For people I was just trying to indicate that each person in the list had some important ideas. For organizations I was trying to indicate that I thought they fought for worthy causes on the whole. But there was no way for readers to know just by looking at the links which words and actions I agreed with and which I disagreed with. I removed those links because, as I’ve written before, I want my blog to be chiefly about ideas, not people or organizations.

With that said, there are so many ideas that I appreciate from others that sound better in their words rather than my own. I was conscious of this when writing about free will. Those posts were inspired by Sam Harris’ book Free Will. It’s not that I can’t make a good case against free will. It’s that I can’t make a better case against free will than Sam does in his book. So it might have been better for me to literally plug his book rather than write my own post on the subject. I feel this way when it comes to lots of topics. Why spend so much time and effort restating something someone else has already expressed in a clearer way than I can?

Therefore I’ve decided to create a new tag called “recommendation”. Posts under the recommendation tag will feature books, articles, academic papers, videos and ideas along with some commentary. The idea is this will give me the flexibility to write a new post when I want to share ideas in my own words and create a “recommendation” post when I want to endorse the ideas of others in their own words. After I’ve created a few recommendation posts and a few regular posts, I’ll reevaluate site organization and decide whether to keep recommendations or come up with something else.