Writer Spotlight: Ozy Brennan

post by jenn (pixx) · 2025-01-12T17:20:48.709Z · ? · GW · 0 comments

Contents

  Readings
  Potential Discussion Questions
None
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Meet inside The Shops at Waterloo Town Square - we will congregate in the indoor seating area next to the Your Independent Grocer with the trees sticking out in the middle of the benches (pic) at 7:00 pm for 15 minutes, and then head over to my nearby apartment's amenity room. If you've been around a few times, feel free to meet up at the front door of the apartment at 7:30 instead.

Readings

The third meetup of every month is dedicated to EA topics. This is one such meetup.

The one other guy besides Scott who gets their posts beamed directly into our server is Ozy Brennan^[1], who writes variously about effective altruism, rationality, gender, philosophy, and whatever else strikes his fancy. This week, we'll be discussing their posts.

Read The Weekly Anthropocene Interviews: Ozy Brennan (Sam Matey and Ozy Brennan, 2025). This post works as a good starting point that links to many different recent ozyposts, so just click and read through a few articles that you find interesting. Or if you don't want to do that, supplement the interview with some of these:

• Animal welfare
  • The Virtue of Wonder: Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals (2023)
  • The Logic of the Larder (2023)
• Effective altruism and rationality
  • You Can Buy a Malaria Net (2024)
  • Rationalists and the Cultic Millieu (2022)
• Gender and sexuality:
  • Cis by Default (2015)
  • Cons of Polyamory (2022)
• Misc
  • The DBT sequence (2015)
  • Greyed Out Options (2022)
  • Weird People of History: Jenny from the Jane Abortion Collective (2024)

Ozy would probably also like you to know that they wrote Her Voice is a Backwards Record, a novella about lesbians and game theory. (A KWR regular has a review here.)

Other folks familiar with Ozy's work are encouraged to post their favourites in the discord.

Aim to read two or three other posts in addition to the interview.

Potential Discussion Questions

Animal Welfare

• When was the last time you felt genuine wonder watching an animal? What struck you about them?
• How do you weigh the interests of pets vs farm animals vs wild animals in your ethical framework? What makes some animals seem more morally relevant than others to you?
• What do you think of Nussbaum's theory that death is bad because it disrupts life projects? Does it feels true for humans? For animals? Which kinds?

Moral Uncertainty, Weird Beliefs, and Community

• Ozy describes how having a community makes it easier to maintain unusual moral beliefs. What should communities such as KWR do to balance encouraging individual conviction with community norms?
• Ozy notes that people drift between seemingly contradictory belief systems within the cultic milieu. Have you ever noticed anything similar going on in the rationalist or EA communities?
• Jenny maintained control over the Jane Abortion Collective through (among other things) the strategic withholding of information. Do you think this is justified, and what makes it justified? More broadly, when is it justified to withhold information?

A Good Life

• What's something that used to feel impossible but now feels natural to do? What helped make that shift?
• How do your current life goals map onto the spectrum between "dead people goals" and "alive people goals"? What would shifting toward more "alive" goals look like?
• The DBT sequence suggests that emotions serve vital functions, even when painful. How has your relationship with "negative" emotions evolved over time?

 

1. ^{^}

   pronouns: whatever

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