Ever since Eliezer, Yvain, and myself stopped posting regularly, LW's front page has mostly been populated by meta posts. (The Discussion section is still abuzz with interesting content, though, including original research.)
Luckily, many LWers are posting potentially front-page-worthy content to their own blogs.
Below are some recent-ish highlights outside Less Wrong, for your reading enjoyment. I've added an * to my personal favorites.
Overcoming Bias (Robin Hanson, Rob Wiblin, Katja Grace, Carl Shulman)
- Hanson, Beware Far Values
- Wiblin, Is US Gun Control an Important Issue?
- Wiblin, Morality As Though It Really Mattered
- Grace, Can a Tiny Bit of Noise Destroy Communication?
- Shulman, Nuclear winter and human extinction: Q&A with Luke Oman
- Wiblin, Does complexity bias biotechnology towards doing damage?
- Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns *
- The Great Stagnation
- Epistemic Learned Helplessness *
- The Biodeterminist's Guide to Parenting
- Spreading happiness to the stars seems little harder than just spreading
- Rawls' original position, potential people, and Pascal's Mugging
- Philosophers vs economists on discounting
- Utilitarianism, contractualism, and self-sacrifice
- Are pain and pleasure equally energy-efficient? *
Sorry about that, your examples pattern matched to what someone who wanted to question contemporary practices without actually questioning contemporary ethics would write.
Thanks, Eugine. I can see in hindsight why I would look like that to you, but before hand, I didn't expect anyone to jump on examples that weren't elaborated upon to the degree you appear to have been expecting. I'm interested in continuing this discussion for reasons unrelated to the comment that originally spurred this off, as I've been thinking a lot lately about how to measure the ethical behavior of humans. I'm still wondering if you're interested in talking about this. Are you?