Ethan Kemp

ethankemp[at]nyu[dot]edu

Welcome to my website. I am a philosophy PhD student. My interests are generally motivated by the question: what, ultimately, ought we to believe? Right now I'm exploring the various potential ways—epistemic, practical, and moral—we might go about answering this question.

I am also interested in less ultimate, more practical, questions about what we should actually think about the world. Work on cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychology, and education/learning (among others) are therefore also nearby areas of interest for me.

Here you'll find reading notes, bloglike posts, wip essays, and more. In the Link Heap I share links to articles, videos, blogs, web pages, etc. that I think are worth checking out. I often disagree with content in such links. Feel free to email me for paper drafts (or for anything, really) at the email above.

Find me at: Youtube | Github | Substack | LetterBoxd

Ethan Kemp

Papers

WIP

  • WIP on balanced reasons
  • WIP on LLM judgements

Notes, etc.

Updates

    2/1/26 Updated PhilPapers PDFGrabber, fixed some bugs. Please redownload and reinstall for the fixes.

    6/7/25 Updated website to new styling. Ditched markdeep and am now using water.css with some minor tweaks.

    12/29/23 Updated welcome text.

    11/8/22 Switched over to new domain from the old one (ethanjkemp.com). I waited ~15 years to snag ethankemp.com!

    10/6/22 Updated website styling, now using markdeep to write the html file in markdown.

    3/30/19 Creation of this website (estimated date).

Link Heap

March 2026

A Survival Guide to a PhD - Andrej Karpathy

SEIU Delenda Est - Scott Alexander

The Two Nightmares of Jürgen Habermas - Joseph Heath

Being John Rawls - Scott Alexander

February 2026

Selfish and Stupid - Paul S

A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts On Christoph Shuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy - EJ Spode

The Century of the Maxxer - Sam Kriss

It's Rawls's World and We're Just Living In It - Joseph Heath

January 2026

First, Make Me Care - Gwern

The Monkey's Paw Curls - Scott Alexander

December 2025

How to get hired - Derek Sivers

Seven Thoughts on "AI Scientists" - Corin Wagen

Ars Longa, Vita Brevis - Scott Alexander

November 2025

Postmodernism? - Noam Chomsky

AI Scientists History - Andrew White

Paradoxes of Plenty - Willard Quine

October 2025

A guide to professional philosophy - Neil Mehta

Bloodless Pedantry - Tim Crane

Is Analytic Philosophy a Class Ideology? - Nick French

September 2025

Sources Say Bay Area House Party - Scott Alexander

What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him? - Scott Alexander

The possibility of Kantian metaethics - Florence Bacus

Advice from MIT on Preparing a Philosophy Writing Sample - Anon

August 2025

Penelope Maddy's Workbench - Nathan Ballantyne

My two cents on Abundance - Joseph Heath

Book Review: The Math Academy Way - Isabel

When Should you Peak? - Barry Lam

Face it: you're a crazy person - Adam Mastroianni

How To Write English Prose - David Bentley Hart

July 2025

Cyc: Obituary for the greatest monument to logical AGI - Yuxi Liu

Why is Rear Window so tense? - Henry Oliver

Notes on Spaced Repetition Scheduling - nwm

The Origin of the Research University - Clara Collier

A Mathematician’s Lament - Pual Lockhart

My advice on (internet) writing, for what it's worth - dynomight

June 2025

The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction - Owen Yingling

How I learned to love literary criticism - Henry Oliver

He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal - Jordana Cepelewicz

The Politics of Apoliticism - Kieran Setiya

What I Worked On - Paul Graham

How Intellectuals Found God - Peter Savodnik

Why Do Philosophy PhD Programs Even Exist? - Barry Lam

May 2025

Square Theory - Adam Aaronson

Is Building Good Note-Taking Software an AGI-Complete Problem? - Thane Ruthenis

How to Live on $432 a Month in America - A.M. Hickman

Spaced Repetition Systems Have Gotten Way Better - Domenic Denicola

Curtis Yarvin does not live in reality - Sam Kriss

Two Tendencies - Liam Kofi Bright

My history with philosophy - Tyler Cowen

April 2025

The Colors Of Her Coat - Scott Alexander

The end of my childhood - Vitalik Buterin

March 2025

My 16-month theanine self-experiment - Dynomight

Only About 40% Of The Cruz "Woke Science" Database Is Woke Science - Scott Alexander

The Five Dogmas of DEI - Joseph Heath

February 2025

Mainstream Media is Worse Than Silence - Bryan Caplan

The Real Analytic/Continental Divide: Fashion - Steven Gimbel

The Outer Limits of Analytic Philosophy - Brian Weatherson

Learning From Four Analytic Philosophy Wins - Liam Kofi Bright

January 2025

John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism - Joseph Heath

On Priesthoods - Scott Alexander

Why Philosophy Matters - Hilarius Bookbinder

Reverie - Kieran Setiya

The Santa Anas - Joan Didion

In the belly of the MrBeast - Kevin Munger

December 2024

The torture of an unphilosophical life - Agnes Callard

Philosophy isn't... - David Chapman

This one internet subculture explains murder suspect Luigi Mangione's odd politics - Emily Shugerman

Nobel Prize Banquet Speech - William Faulkner

November 2024

Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute - Tom Ough

Ozempic For Sleep - Isaak Freeman

Great Books is for Losers - Alex Petkas

Hypercomputation without bothering the cactus people: Software development for the DMT headspace - Cube Flipper

October 2024

Reward is not the optimization target - TurnTrout

Daniel Stoljar's Workbench - Nathan Ballantyne

Some Unattractive Meta-Ethical Positions, Free to a Good Home - Cosma Shalizi

Error is Infinite and Chaotic - Liam Kofi Bright

September 2024

My Dinner with Nozick - David J. Schmidtz

Harder to be fooled, easier to fool yourself - Kasra

The Intelligence Age - Sam Altman

August 2024

Here's Why Automaticity Is Real Actually - Scott Alexander

Against Automaticity - birguslatro

AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities - Eliezer Yudkowsky

July 2024

How I Joined the Resistance - J.D. Vance

The Perceptual Quest for a Truth Machine - Kelly Clancy

Exorcising us of the Primer - Andy Matuschak

Meditation in a Toolshed - C.S. Lewis

On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense - Friedrich Nietzsche

Fast Crimes at Lambda School - Benjamin Sandofsky

The Structure of Academic Writing - John Danaher

Well-functioning democracy for neither me nor for thee? - Tyler Cowen

May 2024

A Dozen Ways to Get More Dakka - David Manheim

Book Review: The Others Within Us - Scott Alexander

Profile: The Far Out Initiative - Scott Alexander

What Is It Like to be a Philosopher? (David Pearce) - Cliff Sosis

April 2024

On starting papers - Helen De Cruz

Every Scholar Should Feel Relatively Underappreciated - Eric Schwitzgebel

March 2024

David Milch's disembodied writing process - Mason Currey

Ideological Bayesians - Kevin Dorst

The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg - Mark Twain

February 2024

Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed - Dan Luu

The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video - Simon Willison

Lableak truther loses $100,000 in his own debate - Philipp Markolin

January 2024

The Serendipity Machine - Nabeel S. Qureshi

Getting In - Malcom Gladwell

From Vexing Uncertainty to Intellectual Humility - Michael Dickson

Principles of Research - Albert Einstein

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years - Peter Norvig

Zen and the art of speedrunning enlightenment - The Irrationalist

December 2023

Studio Trickery - Owen Hatherley

The Great AI Weirding - Delip Rao

The Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War - Ted Gioia

Kelly Bets on Civilization - Scott Alexander

From Scientific Reproducibility to Epistemic Humility - Joseph Wayne Smith

November 2023

Why Not Heterodox Research? - Robin Hanson

The Philosophy of Reading as First Philosophy - Robert Hanna

How to Edit Your Own Lousy Writing - Julian Gough

In Continued Defense of Effective Altruism - Scott Alexander

Is AI alignment on track? Is it progressing... to fast? - Alexey Guzey

October 2023

How I Am A Marxist - Liam Kofi Bright

September 2023

ChatGPT, High-Tech Plagiarism, and The Neoliberal University - Michelle Maiese

Im so sorry for psychologys loss, whatever it is - Adam Mastroianni

August 2023

How Analytic Philosophy Generates Unsolvable Puzzles - Joseph Wayne Smith

How to read the canon - Henry Oliver

Common Knowledge and Aumann's Agreement Theorem - Scott Aaronson

The Happy Sophist - Eric Schliesser

Desperate Honesty - Agnes Callard

July 2023

Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born - Henrik Karlsson

Lifespan extension: separating fact from fiction - milkyeggs

On Not Believing In One's Work - Liam Kofi Bright

Quick thoughts on research - Michael Nielsen

Multi-layered calendars - Julian Lehr

Grading the economic schools of thought - Noah Smith

Instilling Novel Thought Patterns and Making Your Long-Term Memory Accountable with Anki - Alexey Guzey

June 2023

Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness Contest: Psychedelic Cryptography - Andrés Gómez-Emilsson

Email (let's drop the hyphen) - Don Knuth

Maker's Schedule - Paul Graham

The Canal Papers - Scott Alexander

Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots - Maggie Appleton

May 2023

Vitalik Buterin Exclusive Interview - Arkadi Mazin

Do the weirdest thing that feels right. - Charlie Becker

Don't get a job - Brian Eno

Instead of your Life's Purpose - existentialpervert69

Two ways of evaluating rationality - Alexander Pruss

My Lifetime Reading Plan - Ted Gioia

Raise Your Threshold For Accusing People Of Faking Bisexuality - Scott Alexander

April 2023

Brain training begins in the hips - Adam Mastroianni

Effective Spaced Repetition - Fernando Borretti

The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise - Marc Brooker

How I use social media mindfully - Kasra

The Solution to Information Overload - Andrew Connor

Hanti's Notes on Doing a PhD and Getting a Job in Philosophy - Hanti Lin

Beware boasting about non-existent forecasting track records - Jotto999

March 2023

ChatGPT + Code Interpreter = Magic - Andrew Mayne

Repair and Remain - Kurt Armstrong

Unbundling Tools for Thought - Fernando Borretti

The end of the system of the world - Noah Smith

Fuzzy API composition - Geoffrey Litt

Advice to young critics - Matt Seitz

lifehacks - Alexey Guzey

February 2023

How to Live Near Your Friends - Priya

January 2023

You Don't Want a Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy of Mental Disorders - Scott Alexander

The Permaweird - Venkatesh Rao

Sorting Pebbles Into Correct Heaps - A Short Story By Eliezer Yudkowsky

Are you serious? - Visakan Veerasamy

The internet is already over - Sam Kriss

How to keep cakes moist and cause the greatest tragedies of the 20th century - Adam Mastroianni

December 2022

Can This AI Save Teenage Spy Alex Rider From A Terrible Fate? - Scott Alexander

November 2022

Is Wine Fake? - Scott Alexander

Don't Surround Yourself With Smarter People - Venkatesh Rao

Umberto Eco's Guide to Writing a Thesis - Umberto Eco

Orexin and the quest for more waking hours - Jordan Arel

Nick Cammarata on Jhana - Scott Alexander

Singer and the Noble Lie - Bryan Caplan

What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture - Derek Thompson

October 2022

Semaglitude has changed the world - Andre Popovitch

A Columbian Exchange - Scott Alexander

Scraping training data for your mind - Henrik Karlsson

Becoming a magician - Autotranslucence

How fateful? - Channon Perry

September 2022

Breaking Points - Agnes Callard

Unpredictable Reward, Predictable Happiness - Scott Alexander

August 2022

Making Normal Conversations Better - Sasha Chapin

Why aren't smarter people happier? - Adam Mastroianni

A Cyclic Theory of Subcultures - Scott Alexander

How a Public School in Florida Built America's Greatest Math Team - Ben Cohen

July 2022

Our Problems Aren't Procedural - Adam Klein

Impact Markets: The Annoying Details - Scott Alexander

Immortality Begins at Forty - Venkatesh Rao

So You Want to Live in a Cabin in the Mountains - Kelton Wright

What do I think about Network States? - Vitalik Buterin

Cartographic Questions - Ben Reinhardt

Art is for Seeing Evil - Agnes Callard

June 2022

My 40-liter backpack travel guide - Vitalik Buterin

Aspartame: Once more unto the breach - Dynomight

Quit Your Job - Wolf Tivy

May 2022

Every sound is SINE - Posy

The Vandal - Kasra Lang

Every Bay Area House Party - Scott Alexander

April 2022

If my library burned tonight - Aldous Huxley

What Is It About Peter Thiel? - Anna Wiener

Fake artists are what happens when fandom dies - Mark Mulligan

Who Gets Self-Determination? - Scott Alexander

Learning from Lucas - Thomas J. Sargent

Why Isn't There a Replication Crisis in Math? - Jay Diagle

March 2022

Do a cost-benefit analysis of your technology usage - TurnTrout

What Are We Arguing About When We Argue About Rationality? - Scott Alexander

Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People - DinoInNameOnly

The Eros Monster - Agnes Callard

Examples of barbell strategies - Dwarkesh Patel

Why we stopped making Einsteins - Erik Hoel

A Meta-Layer for Notes - Julian Digital

February 2022

Misidentifying talent - Dan Luu

Shifting guilt - Nate Soares

What Is The Morning Writing Effect? - Gwern

Theses on Sleep - Alexey Guzey

Motivated Reasoning As Mis-applied Reinforcement Learning - Scott Alexander

January 2022

An Intellectual Entente

The Charisma of Leaders - Metaismurder

Reality is Very Weird and You Need to be Prepared for That - slimemoldtimemold

My first impressions of web3 - Moxie Marlinspike

If Marx or Freud had never lived? - Jon Elster

December 2021

Utopian for Beginners - Joshua Foer

On the Origin of Everything - David Albert

On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished papers, 1960-2000 by Richard Rorty - Daniel C. Dennett

The Phrase "No Evidence" Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication - Scott Alexander

November 2021

Jhanas and the Dark Room Problem - Scott Alexander

Futurists have their heads in the clouds - Erik Hoel

Minds Almost Meeting - Robin Hanson

Deliberate Play - J Steinhardt

Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning - Gwern

You and Your Research - Richard Hamming

Read Only - John Holbo

October 2021

Keep Your Identity Small - Paul Graham

A Nobel Prize for the Credibility Revolution - Alex Tabarrok

Yay Argument Orientation - Robin Hanson

Who Is the Bad Art Friend? - Robert Kolker

September 2021

Seneca (Letter 53), Long Haul Covid, and Impiety - Eric Schliesser

Rules for Noobs - Jacob Falkovich

Tyler Cowen on reading fast, reading well, and reading widely - Stuart Patience

Ian and the Limits of Rationality - Simon Dedeo

August 2021

Tyler Cowen is the best curator of talent in the world - Tony Kulesa

How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor - johnswentworth

The Artist - Oscar Wilde

Beware the Casual Polymath - Applied Divinity Studies

June 2021

Reversals in psychology - Gavin Leech

Why People Are Scared of Marie Kondo - Sasha Chapin

BAD Philosophy Videos! - Hans-Georg Moeller

Do we have a duty to read women writers? - Rachel Fraser

What if You Only Invested at Market Peaks? - Ben Carlson

April 2021

Our Improbable Existence Is No Evidence for a Multiverse - Philip Goff

Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality - Scott Alexander

Prospectus On Prospera - Scott Alexander

Against Libertarian Criticisms of Redistribution - DePonySum

Imaginary Numbers May Be Essential for Describing Reality - Charlie Wood

January 2021

The Communist Manifesto: On Bugs vs Features of Capitalism - Eric Schliesser

Write Faster - Sasha Chapin

Bets, Bonds, and Kindergarteners - Jeff Kaufman

Contra Weyl On Technocracy - Scott Alexander

Free Market Vaccines - John Cochrane

November 2020

The "racial wealth gap" is a class gap - Matthew Yglesias

Hayek on the Epistemic Benefits of (Class) Diversity - Eric Schliesser

Social Injustice as Emergent Property - Kevin Vallier

Best 50 Albums of 2020 - Pitchfork

Trumpism expanded the GOP tent - Kevin Williamson

October 2020

New York Times's discredited 1619 Project - Tom Mackaman, David North

The Inner Ring - By C. S. Lewis

Why you are not a conservative - Deirdre McClosky

The Man Who Thought Too Fast - Anthony Gottlieb

Generating Photorealistic Video with AI - Jon Warlick

August 2020

The four-fold imagination - Mark Vernon

God-intoxicated man - Clare Carlisle And Yitzhak Y. Melamed

Heidegger v Carnap: how logic took issue with metaphysics - Sam Dresser

Philosophy without a philosopher in sight - Amit Chaudhuri

CD / Color - Captain Disillusion

Let's avoid talk of 'chemical imbalance': it's people in distress - Joseph Davis

The Subtle Art of Modern Pop Production - David Bruce

Bailout Redux - John Cochrane

March 2020

A Proposal for Social Insurance During the Pandemic - Greg Mankiw

Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now - Tomas Pueyo

Guessing the Teacher's Password - Eliezer Yudkowsky

Socratic Grilling - Scott Alexander

Perennial Philosophy - Jules Evans

February 2020

Introduction to Deleuze on Nietzsche - Bernard Harcourt

Coronavirus: A Note - Norman, Bar-Yam, Taleb

The World of Vaping - Amanda Chicago Lewis

Black People Less Likely - Scott Alexander

Meditations on Moloch - Scott Alexander

The Other Gods - H.P. Lovecraft

Waiting for Godel - Siobhan Roberts

January 2020

Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide - William James

The best of times, or the worst of times? - John Cochrane

Mastering The Core Teachings of the Budapestians - Scott Alexander

If the Only Way You Can Get Your Great Idea Implemented - Bryan Caplan

On Learning and the Learned - Arthur Schopenhauer

The Mystic and the Metaphysician - Miri Albahari

What Intellectual Progress Did I Make in the 2010's? - Scott Alexander

December 2019

Hemingway's Hidden Metafictions - Ian Crouch

Is Eating Meat a Net Harm? - David G and Froolow

Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects - Milton Friedman

Todd Phillips's "Joker" Is No Laughing Matter - Anthony Lane

Against digressions, gurus, and puzzles - Eric Schleisser

November 2019

How to Increase Taxes on the Rich (If You Must) - Gregory Mankiw

The Economic Debate over the Minimum Wage - Dylan Matthews

How to be Rational about Rationality - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Free Market Healthcare - John Cochrane

Liberalism, Politics, and the Spirit of Mercantilism - Eric Schliesser

Truth in the Culture War - Liam Bright

Fernando Pessoa's Disappearing Act - Adam Kirsch

How to be an Anti-Intellectual - Coleman Hughes

What is Enlightenment? - Immanuel Kant

Samsara - Scott Alexander

The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Byzantium, and PSR - Eric Schleisser

The Mises - (Karl) Polanyi debate (on Imperialism) reconsidered - Eric Schleisser

A Liberal Decalogue - Bertrand Russell

October 2019

The Effects of Rent Control - Rebecca Diamond

New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed - Scott Alexander

God and SuperGod - Noah Smith

Controversial Push to 'Rehumanize' Math - Catherine Gewertz

Clusters of Individual Experiences form a Continuum of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences in Adults - Jeffery Martin

Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty - Scott Alexander

Book Review: Mastering the Core Teachings of The Buddha - Scott Alexander

The PNSE Paper - Scott Alexander

The Algernon Argument - Gwern Branwen

Democrats, Avoid the Robot Rabbit Hole - Paul Krugman

Reflections on Nickel and Dimed - Bryan Caplan

Does God Exist? I Don't "Know" - Peter Enns

September 2019

Naturalism and property dualism - Alexander Pruss

Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain - Scott Alexander

Ethics and complexity - Alexander Pruss

Review of Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments - Joseph Heath

A measure of sincerity - Alexander Pruss

You Will Forget, You Have Forgotten - Aella

Letter to Menoeceus - Epicurus

August 2019

A Successful Artificial Memory Has Been Created - Robert Martone

Inflation, and history - John Cochrane

Don't Fear the Simulators - Scott Alexander

Misunderstanding Nozick, Again - David Boaz

No Absolute Time - Matias Slavov

What's Going On in Hong Kong? What to Know About the Protests - Victor, Yuhas

'National conservatism' is 'Elizabeth Warren conservatism' - George Will

America Needs an Independent Fed - Volcker, Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellin

Yes, There Is a Trade-Off Between Inflation and Unemployment - Gregory Mankiw

The Fireworks Over Share Buybacks Are Duds - Jason Zweig

July 2019

The Trinity, sexual ethics and liberal Christianity - Alexander Pruss

The Discouraged Suitor - Bryan Caplan

The Right's Identity Politics Is More Dangerous Than the Left's - Shikha Dalmia

Donald Trump was right, and Justin Amash was wrong, about conservatives - Ezra Klein

A Midsummer overview of the Democratic Field - Nate Silver

The State as a Metanarrative - Casey Given

Postmodernism: A Libertarian Introduction - Avika Malamet

June 2019

The Post-Liberals' Incoherence - Charles Cooke

Don't be biased (It won't be Trump's fault) - Scott Sumner

The risks to trump - Scott Sumner

Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad - Scott Alexander

Institutionalized Nonsense - John Cochrane

Why is Immigration a "Contentious Issue in Classical Liberalism?" - Bryan Caplan

Epistemic Learned Helplessness - Scott Alexander

May 2019

America's Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals - Farhad Manjoo

How Liberalism Loses - Ross Douthat

Clemens on minimum wage - John Cochrane

Hate Globalization? Then Embrace Stagnation - Noah Smith

Academe's Extinction Event - Andrew Kay

Down and Out? Try Federalism - Kevin Williamson

The Economics of Donald J. Keynes - Paul Krugman

Buspirone Shortage - Scott Alexander

Dunbar's Function - Eliezer Yudkowsky

April 2019

Counterspells - Virgil Kurkjian

Let's not emphasize behavioral economics - Scott Sumner

The Nordic Approach to Private Roads - Giovanna da Silva

Pain as Active Ingredient in Dating - Scott Alexander

Meer On Minimum Wage - John Cochrane

Paying for the Green New Deal - Scott Sumner

Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist - Bryan Caplan

Are You There God? It's Me, John - John Addington Symonds