EA Blog Recommendation: Thing of Things, by Ozy Brennan

[Evan_Gaensbauer]

Ozy Brennan is a long-time participant in effective altruism who has a blog called Thing of Things. (It was formerly a WordPress blog but Ozy began blogging on Substack in 2021.) I’ve always appreciated posts about effective altruism from Things of Things because of Ozy’s relatively unique perspective having:

• lived in conservative areas in the United States but also more liberal places like the San Francisco Bay Area.

• been someone in the rationality community and social justice movements in addition to effective altruism.

• worked professionally as a researcher on wild animal welfare for 6 years but has also followed literature in development economics and long-termism as well.

This understanding of different worldviews both within and outside of EA has lent itself to Ozy presenting different parts of EA to a broad cross-section of readers, and to present the priorities of other worldviews to the EA community in more legible ways. Here is a sample of some of Ozy’s posts about EA on Thing of Things:

• The Best Product of the EA Movement Is the EA Movement:
  Cause X, the hinge of history , and empiricism

• Five Books Influential On How I Think About Global Poverty:
  Creating Capabilities, Seeing Like a State, The White Man’s Burden, Poor Economics, and Why Nations Fail

• Career Advice for the Everyday Effective Altruist:
  Some ideas for normal people

• EA Dedicates:
  A relevant distinction for effective altruists

• What Is It Like For Animals To Suffer
  Like us, probably
  
  Be sure to check it out!
  

[Devin Kalish]

Seconded, I’m also very fond of Brennan’s writing on animal welfare. This quick, simple piece in particular:

https://​​thingofthings.substack.com/​​p/​​what-is-it-like-for-animals-to-suffer

[Evan_Gaensbauer]

Oh, thanks, I’ve added it to the post as another recommended blog post. I just did a keyword search for ‘effective altruism’ on Thing of Things and linked to a few of the posts that looked the most approachable for a new reader. There could be a lot of EA-related content on there that doesn’t have the phrase ‘EA’ in it.

[Rasool]

I think your EA dedicates link should point to: https://​​thingofthings.substack.com/​​p/​​ea-dedicates

[Evan_Gaensbauer]

Thanks for catching that! I’ve fixed it.