Blog

I have a blog called The Weird Turn Pro at AndyMasley.Substack.com. I use the blog to share ideas that have been useful or important to me. I try to combine bits of knowledge from different sources together in new ways to show an overall pattern or vibe I think is important or interesting.

I run the effective altruist city group in Washington DC, so I spend a lot of time talking and thinking about EA-related stuff and that will be a big theme of the blog as well.

There are a few specific ideas I’d want to be a part of a much better future that I’m trying to push:

  • Value pluralism: There are multiple ways of achieving the good life, and people have a bad but natural tendency to try to impose a narrow idea of the good life on others.

  • Small-L-liberalism: Finding ways to mediate and prevent violence between people with radically different conceptions of the good life to allow for maximum freedom.

  • Reducing extreme suffering: In some ways this goes against the first two, but a consistent societal focus on reducing extreme suffering much more than we currently do.

  • Valuing extreme well-being: There are a lot of ways our lives could go extremely well that I think we’re just beginning to understand and may still be undervaluing.

  • Valuing non-human animals: Almost all conscious beings in the world are non-human animals. Animal welfare philosophy has been much more marginalized than it ought to be.

I’ve been really excited by utopian ideas and art since I was young. I buy into a cluster of ideas that I’d consider at least partially utopian:

  • The world can be much better in ways we just barely understand. The ways to make the world better are difficult but not impossible to learn.

  • We all have an obligation to live carefully to try to push the world in good directions and to give each other authentic care and company along the way. We should take life and each other extremely seriously.

  • Even in our personal relationships our choices can make things extremely better or worse for the people around us.

  • We are not living in a normal time. We’re living in one of the strangest periods that’s happened on Earth and we should think about what that means.

These sound obvious, but I think they’re a better set of beliefs than some other options, like:

  • The world is unknowable and we can’t do anything to make it better or worse.

  • The future will be bad and there’s nothing we can do about it.

  • Regardless of what the world’s like, we should take it easy and not take life or each other too seriously.

The people I’m most excited to talk to and read have most of the beliefs in the first list, though their specific politics and ideologies are very different from each other.

Things I expect to write about a lot

  • Animal welfare

  • AI

  • Political liberalism and value pluralism

  • Analytic philosophy in general, especially philosophy of mind and ethics

  • Taking religious philosophy and theology seriously

  • Trying to live more authentically and responsibly

  • The idea that we’re just barely scratching the surface of what there is to know

  • Friendship

  • General life improvement stuff

  • General effective altruist stuff

  • Book reviews

Reasons for blogging more

Writing is a useful exercise. This Paul Graham post fits my experience:

If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.

It feels to them as if they do, especially if they're not in the habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel complete. It's only when you try to put them into words that you discover they're not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you'll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.

Writing even one essay makes me permanently better at speaking and thinking about the topic. I think there’s an incredibly high payoff to speaking and thinking well about ideas you’re building your life around and that you think are fundamentally important.

Writing in public has been much more fun than I expected. I’ve met a disproportionate number of really cool people with surprisingly deep similarities to me purely through posting on Twitter and Medium, and some of the best conversations I’ve had in the last few years were started by stuff I or the other person was writing about. I’m still meeting a lot of new people via public writing who I have a sense of as being on the same general team in the world, and I want to see where I can take that.

I often don’t have clear summaries of ideas which are having a big effect on my life available to share with my friends, and I’d like to have those on hand. I also have a lot of conversations with friends that I wish other friends could have been around for and contributed to, so I want to the ideas from those conversations public when I can.

Leaning into goofy and cringe

One aim for this blog is to write posts that my early 20’s self would have benefited from. I could write reserved and technical posts about the specific stuff I actually know a lot about, or I could gesture at the general vibe of stuff and make big pronouncements and use grandiose language about utopia and responsibility and the meaning of life. I know which of these two my early 20’s self would have found more useful.

Some writers I like a lot

  • Joan Didion is still my favorite essayist. Don’t want to compare myself to her but she’s a good north star for how good writing about life and culture can be. A good place to start with her writing is On Self Respect.

  • Reading a lot of Joe Carlsmith convinced me that trying to write about big general stuff is really valuable and something I could do. This piece by him is a good place to start. His style combines efficiency and minimalism with poetic language that tries to point at important hard-to-articulate stuff. He also mainly pulls from a lot of other writers to create good and useful overviews of exciting intellectual spaces, which is what I’m trying to do for the stuff I care about.

  • I think Joseph Heath writes about politics and philosophy better than almost any other contemporary writer, especially in The Machinery of Government and Following the Rules.

  • When I’m writing about philosophy I’m trying my best to mimic the style of either Derek Parfit, Christine Korsgaard, or Martha Nussbaum.

Support

If you’d be excited to support my writing I’d be really excited if you’d considered donating to one of two specific charities that are really important to me and letting me know that you donated. It’s a huge encouragement.

If you’d like to support me directly you can turn on a paid subscription to my Substack or use my donation link here. All posts will stay free unless I have a strong reason to start posting paywalled content.

Any form of support in any of these categories is a huge motivation for me to write more! The fact that people are paying me to write is new and exciting and it helps me justify spending more time on it!

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