In the Opinions part of the blog I want to lay out some of the political, social and ethical opinions that I hold in an understandable but detailed manner. The journalistic standards that I hold myself to are not scientific standards, i.e. I will not claim to have investigated all of the evidence for multiple years - Instead, I claim to report my best understanding of a topic and back it up by the evidence that lead me to hold that believe or give reasons for it. If somebody points out that I have missunderstood some part of the explanation, the scientific perspective has changed or I have left out an important detail, I will edit the article to show my missunderstanding and the corrected perspective in a transparent way. If you wonder why somebody would post their opinions on a blog even though nobody asked for it, here are my reasons:

  1. It forces me to base my opinion on evidence: As human beings we unfortunately hold many biases. As a consequence of this we often think we base our opinions on science and facts while mostly basing it on our intiution and experiences without actually ever looking at the numbers and stats. Writing a blog post forces me to actually look at the scientific evidence closely and double check whether my current view on things is aligned with the science behind it.

  2. You might actually learn something: Maybe some of the arguments I make or the evidence I present was previously unknown to you and changes your opinion on a given subject.

  3. A way people can learn about my opinions: At socials, especially in the Debating or Effective Altruism community, other people often ask me for my specific opinion on a given subject. Instead of giving them a lengthy talk about all the opinions I hold I can refer them to this blog. This does not mean that I want to automate all my conversations but sometimes I can’t be bothered to present my exact views on effective altruism and answer every question for the rest of the night. Also for people who just want to know me better as a person, reading about my opinions in detail can be useful.

  4. It is a way to track my moral positions over time: In retrospect we often assume that our moral opinions are static over time and we rarely change them, i.e. we often think we have held a position for ever even though it changed over time. Looking back at my history of moral positions that is actually not true at all but I find it hard to quantify how often and to what degree I changed the position in retrospect. This blog is also thought of as a public record of my moral positions so I can check when and why I changed them. Because of this I also mostly write about issues that are not very time specific and ignore topics like the US primaries or elections even though I could talk a lot about them.

One last note:

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