About my websites

This page applies to both of my websites: reducing-suffering.org and briantomasik.com

Introduction

"Essays on Reducing Suffering" (reducing-suffering.org) is a collection of thoughts on philosophy and altruism, written from a suffering-focused perspective. Articles, pictures, code, and other materials that are less directly related to reducing suffering are collected on briantomasik.com .

The rest of this current article discusses some frequently asked questions about my websites themselves, rather than about the content of my writings.

Contact me

A contact form can be found here.

Article updates

My views on various topics change regularly, in both large and small ways. I try to update my articles with new information and changed views to the extent I have time, but given how many articles I have and how much my views change, keeping everything up-to-date would be a both Herculean and Sisyphean task. In addition, it's somewhat interesting to have different parts of my website written by different versions of myself, and it's not obvious that my current views are always better than my past ones. (Indeed, sometimes I revert back to views I held previously.)

When I make non-negligible revisions to an article (such as changing a whole paragraph rather than just fixing some typos), I change the "Last nontrivial update" date at the top of the article. This date only means that I've made some edit or other to the article. Sadly, it doesn't mean that I've reread the entire article to make sure the information is all up-to-date as of that date, since that would take way too much time. So recently updated pieces often still contain some outdated information.

Website comments

Perhaps unfortunately, I don't enable comments on my sites. The main reason why might seem a bit silly, but it makes sense to me: I don't have time to reply to all the comments I would get if I enabled commenting, and I would feel bad about that. It feels to me a bit "rude" to invite people to give comments and then fail to reply to them. (I already sometimes fail to reply to private messages that people send me, and I feel bad about that too. :) )

The other benefit of not having comments is that it allows my site to be much simpler from a technical perspective. I can just serve simple HTML pages, with no need for a database, nor integration with a third-party commenting system like Disqus.

If you can't leave comments on the website, what can you do? Some options:

• If you have a lot of points to make, I think the best solution is to write your own blog post replying to mine. If you want, I can probably link to your post from the article of mine that you're critiquing. Writing your own top-level post will arguably get your opinions and your online brand more traffic than if they were buried within a long comment thread.
• Even if you only have one or two critiques to make, if you already have an existing blog post on roughly the same topic, you could add your critiques to that blog post of yours. Then you can point me to your blog post.
• Look for an existing discussion of my article on Reddit, Facebook, or elsewhere, and leave comments there. Or create a new discussion on those platforms.
• Write me a private message. If I have time, I might (with your permission) incorporate your critique into my article, although I may be too busy/lazy to get around to doing that.

Site search

I don't have a box for searching this site because I want to minimize the site's technical complexity and because you can easily do your own site search using a search engine. On Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and perhaps other search engines, you can find results specifically on the domain reducing-suffering.org with a search like this:

cattle grazing site:reducing-suffering.org

Here's a screenshot of this search on Google:

The site: operator is just one of many tools for advanced searches (Linklater 2014-2017). As an example, another operator is intitle: . To find pages on briantomasik.com of which the title contains the word "writing", you could do this search:

intitle:writing site:briantomasik.com

It's possible that a few pages on my sites may not be in Google's index and therefore wouldn't be returned by a search, but I'd guess that something like ~99% of my pages are indexed.

Citation tooltips

Citations on my sites created during or after 2019 show a box of bibliographic information when you hover over them. Because you have to hover over the citation to see the tooltip box, this feature works best on a desktop computer where you can use a mouse, but it may work on mobile too if you tap and hold your finger on the hyperlink rather than just clicking the hyperlink. The tooltip goes away when the mouse isn't on the citation, so if you want to copy information from the tooltip box rather than just reading it, you can view the source HTML of the page, search for the citation, and look at the data-tooltip="" attribute. For more discussion, see the "Citation tooltips" section of Tomasik ("How should I format ...").

RSS

I don't currently have RSS for these websites, mainly so that I have one less thing to think about and keep updated. Even if I did have RSS enabled, I wouldn't put very many pieces into the feed. Most of my work on my websites these days consists in additions and revisions to existing articles, and most of the new pages that I upload are half-baked or niche content that I expect most of my readers wouldn't find very interesting. The few articles that I think are actually high-quality I post to Facebook and Twitter, so if you're on those platforms, you can subscribe to those pages.

Most of my content is relatively timeless, so I imagine that a reasonable way to read my new content is to come back every few years and see if there are articles you don't remember from before. Or if you're reviewing an old page, you might stumble on some new sections in it. This is similar to how I revisit Wikipedia articles: when I'm looking something up, I may notice new information that I didn't see before.

That said, if you really want to try and find new stuff, one way can be to search the site for the current year, or the current year and month. For example, if the current year is 2019 and the current month is July, you could search things like this:

2019 site:briantomasik.com

or

"2019 Jul" site:reducing-suffering.org

Usually this will match words in the date line at the top of the article.

Submitting translations

I welcome translations of the articles on my websites. I prefer translations in HTML format if possible, for reasons explained in the "PDF vs. HTML" section of Tomasik ("My Writing Style"). However, I can also take PDFs or other formats. You can download the HTML of the English article and translate that HTML file, preserving all the HTML tags, so that I can copy-paste your translation onto my site. You can alternatively put the translation on your website if you prefer. If one of my articles already has translations that I know about, they'll be listed under the "Summary" paragraph(s), before the table of contents.

A few previous translations of my articles that were hosted on other people's websites have since gone offline. In contrast, I plan to keep my websites online indefinitely. So there may be a longevity argument for putting the translation on my site, depending on how likely you think you are to maintain your own site for the long term. On the other hand, if your entire site is in your language, it may be easier for readers to encounter the article there, rather than looking for it on my mostly-English website. Hosting it on your own site also allows you to edit the translation more easily.

Colored boxes

In 2019 I began using colored boxes to distinguish particular kinds of things in my articles. Readers don't necessarily need to know what a given color means, since the main point is just to distinguish a section of text as different from regular text. However, for the curious, I've listed below the different kinds of colored boxes I have in my CSS:

a blockquote

an informational notice

a box below the "Summary" section, for listing translations or other formats of the article

a box for an example or definition

an interview question

an in-article footnote

No site ads

In 2006, when I first created the site that became "Essays on Reducing Suffering", I contemplated the idea of including ads in order to generate some revenue that I could donate. However, I leaned against it. Looking back, I now think it's obvious that adding ads would have been a bad decision.

The income from ads is generally minuscule, but ads cause a huge reduction in the perceived quality of a website, especially a non-famous one. Readers may associate ad-filled websites with spam and content farms, and ads may make it look like the site's primary aim is to bring in money rather than to provide information.

Plus, insofar as many of my readers are altruistic themselves, I don't want them to waste their money buying products after seeing ads on my site. Increasingly, there's also a risk of malvertising.

What year to use when citing my articles?

Besides bare hyperlinks, the citation method I most often see people use is the name-year format, which looks like this: "Smith (1988) says blah." The year used is the year of publication. However, what should one do for articles like many of mine that are edited over the years? A similar question applies for citing Wikipedia using the name-year format, since Wikipedia articles are also often edited continuously.

My articles have a "First published" date and a "Last nontrivial update" date. When academics cite my articles, I see some of them using the former and some using the latter as the year of publication in citations. If one has to choose between these options, I think the "First published" date makes slightly more sense because

• Often, though not always, most of the material was written around the time of the "First published" date, and later revisions may have been relatively small.
• The "First published" date remains fixed (unless the entire article gets split up or merged or something), while the "Last nontrivial update" date will tend to keep changing. Using the "Last nontrivial update" date, one scholar's "Tomasik (2015)" citation in an article the scholar publishes in, say, 2016 might refer to the same article of mine as another scholar's "Tomasik (2017)" citation in an article that scholar publishes in, say, 2018.

Rather than using only the "First published" or "Last nontrivial update" date, I think it makes more sense to use both, like "Tomasik (2015-2017)". This is what I try to do when citing other people's articles that extend over multiple years. I don't know if this approach is allowed in formal publications.

However, even this method is still vulnerable to the problem that the "Last nontrivial update" year keeps changing over time. For that reason, for my own articles and Wikipedia articles, which may keep updating indefinitely, I dispense with a year altogether and cite them with the article title (possibly abbreviated) in place of the year, like:

Another reason to do this is that across all my web pages, if I cited by year, there would be many different citations that would all look like "Wikipedia (2010)" or "Tomasik (2013)". Using a partial or full title instead of a year makes the citation more unique.

This whole situation feels messy, and there's no perfect solution. I think the name-year method is pretty elegant for regular academic papers, where the year of publication is fixed and a single author is unlikely to have huge numbers of articles all with the same year. When those assumptions don't hold, it stops working very well.

Explaining the username for my YouTube channel

My YouTube channel's url is https://www.youtube.com/user/Prioritarian/ . When I first created a YouTube account, I never expected to upload my own videos, so I didn't put too much thought into the username. While I'm sympathetic to prioritarianism, I don't think I technically subscribe to it based on what little I know about it; I think my view is closer to regular negative utilitarianism. I care much more about extreme suffering than mild suffering, and this concern for the worst off seemed similar enough to prioritarianism that I just decided to go for that name rather than picking a moniker that would be more precise.

I think prioritarianism typically decides who is worst off based on the total of an individual's wellbeing over a whole lifetime. In contrast, my view would be to consider each moment of hedonic experience separately, both within and across lives. For example, a person who lives 80 extremely pleasant years and endures just 5 seconds of torture would be judged as pretty well off when considering the whole lifetime in aggregate. However, I think those 5 seconds of torture should be given very high moral priority, because during those 5 seconds, the person was extremely badly off. My morality may be close to a version of prioritarianism that applies to each person-moment of subjective experience separately, ignoring how those person-moments are distributed across different people.

Also, I don't think worse-off person-moments intrinsically deserve higher priority. It's just that I think extreme suffering is really really bad, such that relieving it weighs very heavily in a utilitarian calculation.