History of This Website

Overview

"Essays on Reducing Suffering" compiles pieces I've written since 2005. Whether or not readers agree with my viewpoints, I hope to spark discussion on important issues. Below I describe the origins, growth, and current state of this site.

Origins

In 2003, my 11th-grade English teacher introduced his students to Western philosophy, which is sadly a topic usually neglected in pre-college education. He assigned his students to write a 500-word journal entry each week on an specified topic, usually of a philosophical nature. This class put me in the habit of writing philosophical essays, and I continued doing so on my own even after the school year was over.

In summer 2005, I compiled a long collection of journal entries I had written and sent them to a few friends. I continued adding to the collection throughout 2005-2006. By June 2006, the collection morphed this document (.tex). Looking back, I can see many subtle points that I missed and many areas in which my views were naive. I don't now agree with some statements in that document. However, I've uploaded it for historical interest as a snapshot of my world view at age 19.

In June 2006, I wrote for the first time to David Pearce with questions after reading his Hedonistic Imperative. David wrote back: "My first (and utilitarian!) response was: how can I encourage you to get a website?" We discussed a bit further, and David soon reserved a domain called utilitarian-essays.com for me. I began learning HTML and converting my then-LaTeX essays to that format.

My turn toward focusing on suffering

Before 2006 I was a very ordinary utilitarian, along the lines of Peter Singer. I thought happiness was pretty important and that creating new happiness even by organisms that didn't exist was a moral priority. During 2006, I began to change my views. I thought about just how awful suffering was. David Pearce's writings on this subject resonated with me. In addition, I met another friend who felt that extreme suffering could not be outweighed by happiness. I began to see that happiness just couldn't compare with the awfulness of experiences like torture.

My essays gradually began to catch up with this shift in perspective. In 2008, at the recommendation of a friend, I changed the title of my site from "A Collection of Essays on Utilitarianism" to "Essays on Reducing Suffering" because

1. I wanted to reflect the modification in my emphasis, since I didn't any longer endorse conventional utilitarianism, and
2. "utilitarianism" is a dirty word in many circles, because of the naive objections levied against it, and in any case, other value systems may legitimately disagree with a utilitarian axiology; in contrast "reducing suffering" is something almost everyone supports.

Growth

As time went on I continued adding to and refining my website. The number of essays steadily grew, as did the number of visitors.

By 2013, there were ~145 unique page views per day. (This number may be slightly inflated because I didn't always filter out traffic from myself, but probably this affects the totals by no more than 5-10%.) When I encountered issues, they were helpfully resolved by either David or the technically talented James Evans.

Many other people have given helpful advice regarding or corrections to my website. Pablo Stafforini and others have pointed out several typos.

Images

The information in this section has moved here.

Move to WordPress

In Sep.-Oct. 2014, I decided to move utilitarian-essays.com to WordPress for several reasons:

• WordPress makes it easy to create sites that look more professional.
• Knowing WordPress is a useful skill and helps me with another WordPress site I maintain.
• Editing WordPress pages can be done in the browser without requiring me to open the HTML file in Notepad++, edit it, and then upload it via FileZilla. This saves a few seconds per edit, but given that I may make many small edits in a day, the time saving adds up.
• WordPress plugins make it easy to add functionality that would otherwise require great effort to set up, including hoverable footnotes, automatic table of contents, etc. Also, RSS comes for free with WordPress.

I use the Spacious theme with some custom variations in a child theme.

I use the plugin AJS Footnotes. By default, this plugin has the problem that paragraphs beyond the first paragraph within footnotes are of a different text size. Andrei Poehlmann heroically fixed this problem by tweaking CSS within the plugin's code.

Migrating was also an opportunity to change the domain, which is now reducing-suffering.org. The new domain name has several advantages:

• "Reducing suffering" has broader appeal than cold, calculating utilitarianism. It's also closer to the suffering-focused message I want to convey. I actually disagree with conventional utilitarianism in many ways, and I also fear that naive utilitarianism can hurt society by making people more Machiavellian.
• I've been told that a .com domain seems weird for my non-commercial work, and .org seems more appropriate and authoritative.
• When I created a few test ads for utilitarian-essays.com on Google AdWords, Google thought the site was designed to sell students essays that they could plagiarize. To create ads, I had to request someone to manually verify that the site fell within the AdWords policies. I'm not actively creating AdWords to my site, so this isn't a big deal, but it's possible that casual observers of the utilitarian-essays.com domain name also made similar assumptions about the purpose of the site.

Losing your changes in the WordPress editor

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Moving away from WordPress

By 2018, I began to grow dissatisfied with the complexity of WordPress, for a number of reasons. Here's just one example of the kinds of things I have in mind.

The last straw that precipitated my migration away from WordPress was the WordPress update that made Gutenberg editor the default in late 2018. I agree with many reviewers in saying that Gutenberg was worse than the previous editor. Worst of all, after this update, WordPress began trying to automatically clean up my HTML in ways that sometimes broke things on my site when I edited a page. I probably could have found a way to disable the automated messing up of my HTML. But since I was planning to move away from WordPress anyway, I took this as the right time to do the migration back to writing my web pages entirely by hand, which I mostly finished in mid-Jan 2019.

One of the many benefits of simplifying my site by not using WordPress was speed: because the new site loaded vastly fewer dependency files, it was much faster. According to "Pingdom Website Speed Test", my post-WordPress page load time was often less than half of the WordPress page load time.

Future

Publishing this website has been the single best investment I've ever made. In terms of altruistic payoff per unit of effort, it has been extraordinarily successful. I'm thankful to my readers for their engagement.

Given that writing about important and neglected topics seems to be a comparative advantage of mine, I intend to continue doing that insofar as I have useful things to say. My impression is that, especially in this age of social networks, good ideas have a way of spreading themselves, and often other people can pick up where my writings leave off. For this reason, I feel less urgency than I used to about concretely translating my proposals into actions. What I've found is that if my ideas are good, others will carry them forward. If not, it's less obvious they should be carried forward.

This website is always a work in progress. I edit my pages constantly as my views change, and this is important for helping me remain flexible with my beliefs. It's a lot of work to change my mind, because not only do I have to mentally re-evaluate my plans, but I also have to reflect those updates in my essays. Often this revision process is incomplete, and I don't necessarily agree with everything I wrote a few years ago, or even sometimes a few months ago. That said, there's no alternative to this revision process, and I think it's important to write down my current thinking both to share with others but also for myself. In many ways, this website is an external storage device for my own brain, because otherwise I would sometimes forget my past reasoning and discoveries.

Site acknowledgments

Many people have helped with this website in various ways. As I mentioned above, David Pearce and James Evans assisted with the first version of the site from 2006 to 2014. Numerous people have given me ideas or pointed out factual errors in my writings. Several friends have given me feedback on the appearance of the site in its various iterations. Some readers have contacted me to point out various kinds of typos. In 2022, Niplav Yushtun sent me a long list of typos to fix on many different pages of my site.