HeyJaredBentham's Newsletter
Utilitarianism, ethical veganism, culture war stuff, philosophy, morality, and more!
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 29
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Aug 26, 2026
Latest issues
Avoiding Atrocity (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Evil is older than empires. Roughly since the dawn of humanity, we’ve been carrying out horrific injustices. Slavery has been nearly universal throughout history. Conquering other nations, slaughtering their men, and raping their women was seen as not merely acceptable but noble and praiseworthy. The Romans left infants to freeze to die of exposure. In Rwanda, babies were hacked to death with machetes; genocidal ethnic slaughter continues around the world to this very day. This is one of the mor
I Underestimated AI Risk (opens the original)
Read excerpt
A common question from AI skeptics: how and why would it kill us? There is a standard answer from those worried about AI doom. They say that the AI will have some inscrutable goal which will be most efficiently achieved by ending humanity. Most goals are easier to achieve if one has world domination. Thus, being motivated to pursue some open-ended goal, it will kill or permanently disempower humanity. But this risk scenario doesn’t really depend on the AI having open-ended goals. It doesn’t need
Take AI Consciousness Seriously! (opens the original)
Read excerpt
I recently had a back and forth with Quillette founder Claire Lehmann about digital sentience. My position is that sentience in AI is a live possibility worth taking seriously, though I’d guess AI isn’t conscious yet. Her position is that taking AI sentience to be a live possibility is evidence of profound mental dysfunction: Lehmann wasn’t the only one to have a view like this. Nathan Robinson also weighed in: I’m a big fan of Lehmann and find her to be very thoughtful in general, so I found th
Atheists Should Pray (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Suppose that you think there is a 5% chance that you have a powerful benefactor who can move heaven and Earth on your behalf. You can send out letters which he will read if he exists. It seems worth doing this sometimes. Sure, probably nobody is listening, but if someone is, the action has very great value. Likewise, suppose you are an atheist. You think God probably doesn’t exist. Nonetheless, being open-minded, you think there’s some chance God exists—maybe 5%, maybe 1%. On similar grounds, it
Against the Anti-EA Smear Campaign (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Effective altruism has somehow become a kind of boogeyman for the subset of the American right opposed to AI safety legislation. This is a funny change of pace—just a few years ago, leftists were accusing us of being secretly in bed with right-wing powers. A new White House memo dedicated to opposition research against EAs has reportedly been circulating. Data Republican, who worked for the <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/maga-influencer-revealed-working-pentagon-210806429.
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
No verified audience measurement yet.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.