Just sharing my 2024 Year in Review post from Good Thoughts. It summarizes a couple dozen posts in applied ethics and ethical theory (including issues relating to naive instrumentalism and what I call "non-ideal decision theory") that would likely be of interest to many forum readers. (Plus a few more specialist philosophy posts that may only appeal to a more niche audience.)
Just sharing a quick link in case it's of interest: Many will recall Leif Wenar's WIRED article from last year, which attacked charitable giving from a philosophical perspective of valorizing status quo bias. There was plenty of discussion of his substantive arguments at the time. One thing that people mostly just politely overlooked was his very public attack on Will MacAskill as a philosopher. My latest post revisits the controversy to assess whether his charges against MacAskill were reasonable.
(The bulk of the post is paywalled, but you should be able to activate a 7-day free trial if you aren't otherwise interested in my work.)
I was surprised to find that I felt slightly uncomfortable positioning myself on the 'animal welfare' side of the debate week scale. I guess I generally think of myself as more of a 'global health & development' person, and might have subconscious concerns about this as an implicit affiliational exercise (even though I very much like and respect a lot of AW folks, I guess I probably feel more "at home" with GHD)? Obviously those kinds of personal factors shouldn't influence our judgments about an objective question like the debate week question is asking. But I guess they inevitably do.
I don't know if this observation is even worth sharing, but there it is, fwiw. I guess I'd just like to encourage folks to be aware of their personal biases and try to bracket them as best they can. (I'd like to think of all EAs as ultimately "on the same side" even when we disagree about particular questions of cause prioritization, so I feel kind of bad that I evidently have separate mental categories of "GHD folks" and "AW folks" as though it were some kind of political/coalitional competition.)
I speculate that we may base on self-identification on a more general question like "How important do I think GH is vis-a-vis AW?" It seems clear to me that a voter who takes the specific voting question (SVQ) seriously will almost always vote to the right of their self-identification because the SVQ factors cost-effectiveness in so much more clearly. It seems unremarkable to me that you (and I) may have experienced ~cognitive dissonance because where we publicly stuck our pin doesn't line up that well with our own broader self-identification.