Bentham's Bulldog 2025 In Review
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Longtermism
18 min read
Central philosophical shift discussed in the article. The author explicitly states this was a major ideological change, moving from animal welfare donations to longtermist charities. Understanding the philosophical framework, its key arguments, and criticisms would provide essential context for readers.
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Effective altruism
14 min read
The entire article is situated within EA discourse - discussing cause prioritization, charity evaluation, insect welfare, AI risk, and global health interventions. The author references 'Scenes From an Effective Altruist Prayer Breakfast' and discusses donation strategies typical of EA reasoning.
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Bayesian probability
12 min read
The author specifically highlights Daniel Greco's post 'Bayes's Dirty Secret' about conflicts between Bayesianism and avoiding credences of 0 or 1. This is clearly a topic the author finds intellectually significant, and understanding Bayesian epistemology would illuminate the philosophical methodology underlying much of the article's reasoning.
As of this January, Bentham’s Bulldog will be four years old (the publication, not the author). Woo! Happy new year to everyone, even the haters and losers who have grown increasingly desperate as we have saved shrimp at a level that no one has ever seen before.
At the end of year last year, I had around 4,200 blog readers. Now I have 9903. So if doubling trends continue, in 2095, I will have around 1.1805916 x 10^21 blog subscribers. This strikes me as a conservative estimate, because such things tend to speed up.
Speaking of trends continuing or maybe speeding up, one of my major ideological changes this year is I’ve become convinced that AI will be a huge deal. Specifically, I now think it’s reasonably likely that some time in the next decade or two, we’ll see growth rates much faster than any that have previously been seen in human history.
The other related shift is that I’ve become increasingly convinced of Longtermism. I’ll write more about this soon, but for a while I accepted Longtermism intellectually but did not really act on it. For instance, I mostly gave my money to charities that helped animals. I’ve now become convinced that Longtermist charities are better, and I give them a decent slice of my money.
I’ve also gotten more convinced that insect welfare is hugely important. After learning that the average human prevents about 14 million insect life years per year they’re alive, and that you likely affect more animals by giving to charities saving people than the shrimp welfare project, I’ve started thinking that saving human lives is probably the best short-term charitable endeavor. I give a significant chunk of my donations now to charities that raise money for effective global health charities.
I wanted to shout out some blogs that I’ve enjoyed this year (this won’t be anything like exhaustive, and I’ll leave out some ones you probably already know). I loved ’s blog. Andy is just so smart, meticulous, and careful. I also met him in person and he was as nice as you’d expect. One of the things I’ve enjoyed this year has been watching him fight with totally unhinged people about AI water use, and consistently very politely destroy them.
Similarly, my friend started a blog. I particularly enjoyed this post where he discusses the importance of engaging with counterarguments ...
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