Philosophy blogs

A community blog on rationality, AI risk, and self-improvement, where members post long essays and discussion.

Top post: Generalizing from one example

Maria Popova writes essays and book-based reflections on creativity, thinking, and the lives of notable writers and scientists.

Top post: How to Criticise with Kindness

Econlib is a free-market economics site from the Liberty Fund, hosting essays, a library of classic texts, and a podcast.

Top post: I, Pencil (1958)

The Long Now Foundation, founded by Stewart Brand and others, promotes long-term thinking and builds a 10,000-year clock.

Top post: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine

Current Affairs is a left-leaning magazine publishing essays and criticism on politics, architecture, media, and public intellectuals.

Top post: Why people hate contemporary architecture (2017)

Nassim Taleb, author of the Incerto books, posts essays on risk, probability, intolerance, IQ and the failures of intellectuals.

Top post: The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority (2016)

Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and author, writes and hosts the Making Sense podcast on ethics, politics, religion and health.

Top post: The Fireplace Delusion

GiveWell is a nonprofit that researches charities and recommends the ones it finds save or improve the most lives per dollar.

Top post: Our Top Charities

Nick Bostrom, philosopher at Oxford, publishes papers and essays on existential risk, superintelligence, and the future of humanity.

Top post: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)

Palladium is a magazine of essays on governance, institutions, technology, and society, with a techno-libertarian slant.

Top post: Complex Systems Won't Survive the Competence Crisis

David Chapman writes a book-length online work on meaning, nebulosity, rationality and subculture, drawing on Buddhism and his AI background.

Top post: You Need More Lumens

The main discussion forum for effective altruism, where members post about charity, ethics, long-term risk, and community decisions.

Top post: Why did cea buy wytham abbey

Group blog by academics covering economics, political science, sociology and philosophy.

Top post: In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You (2012)

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute publishes research and essays on AI alignment and the risks of advanced artificial intelligence.

Top post: There's No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence

Maria Popova's literary blog, formerly Brain Pickings, collects essays on books, creativity, science, and ideas.

Top post: Umberto Eco's Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable Than Read Ones

Cato Unbound is a Cato Institute web journal where invited writers debate libertarian ideas, policy, and technology.

Top post: Peter Thiel: The education of a libertarian (2009)

Kevin Simler writes long essays on social behavior, status, belief, and meaning, and co-wrote The Elephant in the Brain.

Top post: Going Critical

Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin) wrote long essays on politics, economics, computer science research and user interfaces.

Top post: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces

Tomas Petricek, a researcher in programming languages, writes about F#, coeffects, and the history and philosophy of programming.

Top post: Histogram: You have to know the past to understand the present

A group blog by mathematicians and physicists, centered on category theory, with posts on logic, set theory, and related math.

Top post: From Set Theory To Type Theory (2013)

Andrew Gelman, a Columbia statistician, shares papers and book materials on Bayesian statistics, replication problems, and the philosophy of statistical practice.

Top post: The Garden of Forking Paths [pdf]

The Unz Review, run by Ron Unz, is a site of articles on politics, geopolitics, education, and race and IQ, from many contributors.

Top post: Great Moments in Google: “American Inventors”

Mind Matters is a site from a think tank that argues AI cannot match human minds, covering chatbots, math, and related news.

Top post: Why I doubt that AI can match the human mind

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, writes about crypto, privacy, governance, zero-knowledge proofs, and wider social and technical questions.

Top post: Why I support privacy

3 Quarks Daily is a group site that collects and links essays on science, philosophy, politics, arts and culture from around the web.

Top post: Birds and Frogs in Physics

David Friedman, an economist and legal scholar, publishes books and papers on anarchism, price theory, and legal systems of other societies.

Top post: The Machinery of Freedom (1989) [pdf]

Site of philosopher John Perry, built around his essay on structured procrastination, a method of getting work done by putting off other tasks.

Top post: Structured Procrastination

Humanity+ publication covering transhumanism, brain-computer interfaces, artificial general intelligence, life extension, and related futurist ideas.

Top post: Is Precognition Real?

Nonprofit of professors and academics promoting viewpoint diversity and open inquiry in higher education, mostly in the US.

Top post: Heterodox Academy

Larry Sanger, a Wikipedia co-founder, writes about Wikipedia's bias, decentralizing social media, philosophy, and education.

Top post: Wikipedia Is More One-Sided Than Ever

Steve Randy Waldman writes essays on economics, finance, and economic philosophy at Interfluidity.

Top post: Why is finance so complex? (2011)

The Long Now Foundation's blog covers long-term thinking, with posts on civilization, books, astronomy, and projects built to last millennia.

Top post: Manual for Civilization: 3500 essential books to rebuild civilization

Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies publishes essays on AI, surveillance, transhumanism, and the social effects of technology.

Top post: The price of the Internet of Things will be a vague dread of a malicious world

Naval Ravikant writes essays and hosts a podcast on wealth, happiness, startups, and ideas from David Deutsch.

Top post: How to get rich without being lucky (2019)

Kartik Agaram writes about minimalist, understandable software, literate programming, and layered program structure, and builds small apps and the Mu project.

Top post: Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014)

Jai writes essays on ethics, rationality and effective altruism, best known for 'The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics'.

Top post: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics

GiveWell's research blog on evaluating charities, cost-effectiveness of aid programs, and how to give money where it does the most good.

Top post: The worst way to pick a charity

Daily Nous is a news site for the academic philosophy profession, covering announcements, obituaries, debates and philosophers' responses to current events.

Top post: Philosophers on GPT-3

Site preserving the work of systems thinker Donella Meadows, including her essays on leverage points and the Limits to Growth.

Top post: Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) writes about Emacs, free software and philosophy, and makes the Modus themes and Denote note-taking package.

Top post: Modus themes

Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, writes on prediction markets, futarchy, the Great Filter, and ways to reduce bias.

Top post: Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs (2013)

Tanner Greer writes essays on history, geopolitics, Chinese and Asian affairs, culture, and the intellectual world of the American right and tech elite.

Top post: History Is Written by the Losers (2016)

Scott Alexander's earlier LiveJournal, before Slate Star Codex, with essays on rationality, ethics, history, and arguments.

Top post: The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo

Qualia Computing is a blog by Andrés Gómez Emilsson on consciousness, psychedelics, and the mathematics of experience.

Top post: Wireheading done right: stay positive without going insane (2016)

The Scholar's Stage is a blog on history, Chinese and East Asian affairs, strategy, and culture, written by a scholar using a pen name.

Top post: Tradition Is Smarter (2018)

Anders Sandberg, a researcher in futurism and transhumanism, writes about Dyson spheres, megastructures, the far future of the universe, and the Fermi paradox.

Top post: Torus-Earth

Ex Urbe is the blog of historian Ada Palmer, covering Renaissance Italy, Machiavelli, the Middle Ages, and how history is told.

Top post: The Shape of Rome (2013)

Simon Sarris writes essays on tradition, belonging, agency, craft, and the limits of rationalism, and on designing a new old home.

Top post: In Praise of the Gods: What the Rationalistic World Forgot

Luke Smith writes opinionated posts on Linux, minimalist computing, browsers, licensing, language learning, and philosophy, alongside his videos.

Top post: I Use the GPL and Not Cuck Licenses

Status 451 is a group blog, split off from Popehat, with essays on politics, activism, diversity, and cross-cultural communication.

Top post: Splain It to Me

Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist and novelist, writes essays on consciousness, scientific progress, AI, and culture.

Top post: Why We Stopped Making Einsteins

The School of Life's online library of essays on relationships, work, psychology and philosophy, associated with Alain de Botton.

Top post: On Marrying the Wrong Person

Extra News Feed is a Medium-based publication of essays on politics, society and technology, including pieces by Yonatan Zunger.

Top post: Tolerance is not a moral precept

Holden Karnofsky writes long, systematic essays on evidence, forecasting, the long-term future and AI risk, including the Most Important Century series.

Top post: Does X cause Y? An in-depth evidence review (2021)

Michael Sacasas writes this newsletter on technology and society, drawing on Ivan Illich, Marshall McLuhan, and related thinkers.

Top post: Narrative Collapse

Open Philanthropy is a grantmaking organization that publishes research on global health, criminal justice reform, and risks from advanced AI.

Top post: Modeling the Human Trajectory

CrimethInc. is an anarchist collective that publishes essays, books and news on activism, work and politics.

Top post: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives in Ukraine

Larry Wall, creator of Perl, hosts a personal site with essays and talks on Perl, language design and postmodernism.

Top post: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

Joel David Hamkins, a mathematician and logician, writes about set theory, infinite chess, logic puzzles, and teaching math to children.

Top post: Math for eight-year-olds: graph theory for kids

High Existence is a site on self-improvement, consciousness, and philosophy, which also hosts essays, comics, and short fiction.

Top post: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Huxley vs Orwell