Aug 302010
 

Right now, I’m crazy-busy with the final push to complete Ari Armstrong’s and my major update to our policy paper against the “personhood” movement. We’ve put a ton more work into it than we thought, and we’re really pleased with the results. Still, we have much work to do!

Time is also running short on another project of mine, namely the pledge drive for my next podcast. It closes tomorrow at noon.

You’ll find all the details in this blog post. But in essence, your pledges will determine which of the following three topics that I cover — if I podcast at all. (Right now, I’ve not collected sufficient funds to make the podcast worth my doing.) The three topics are:

  • Irrational Family Members: How can we be consistently rational and selfish in our dealings with irrational, altruistic, and/or religious family members? When should you tolerate people you dislike or that you judge immoral? How can you make those people more tolerable — or even acceptable? What should you do if that’s not possible? When should cut off relations with someone? How can you explain what you’re doing and why to your better family members?
  • Sense of Life: What is “sense of life”? What is its importance to a person’s life? How do you identify your own sense of life? How do you identify that of others? How does sense of life impact our thinking, feelings, and choices? How does it impact our relations with other people, including friendship and romance? How is sense of life revealed in our responses to art? What is the relationship between a person’s sense of life and his explicit philosophy? Can sense of life be changed? If so, how?
  • Value Density: What is value density? How and why do people fail to seek value density in their lives? How can we make our lives more value dense? How does the concept apply to our purchases, what we eat, our relationships, productivity, vacations, education, and social events, for example?

The deadline for pledges is August 31st at noon. If people pledge enough money to make this 30 to 60 minute podcast worth my while, I’ll produce it by September 10th. The topic will be whichever of the three above topics that receives the most money in total pledges. So you can pledge on more than one topic, if you like, knowing that you’ll only owe one pledge in the end. Most importantly, only the people who pledged on that particular topic will receive the podcast.

If you want to pledge, here’s the pledge form:

[Sorry, pledging has closed! The results are here.]

If you have any questions, check out this blog post.

   
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