Review of 2014: Favourite and Most Viewed Posts

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As the year now winds to close I thought it might be appropriate to briefly review what has happened on this blog in the past 12 months. Not that I want this to be deeply introspective or anything like that. I just want to give you a bunch of lists, reviewing my favourite posts, some readers' picks, and the most popular posts by page views. Obviously there is some overlap between the lists -- it would be disappointing if my favourite posts never overlapped with the most viewed -- but there are plenty of differences too.

Let's start with favourites. I've tried to pick one "favourite" from each month, substituting some readers' picks in November and December. It was pretty difficult to do this since some months were clearly better than others, and there were several that I wanted to include but didn't. But I published over 110 posts this year so something had to be left on the cutting room floor. If you're curious about all those others, why don't you check them out for yourself. They are available in the archives in the right hand column of this page. And if you have alternative recommendations, feel free to add them in the comments.



Favourite Posts

• Rule by Algorithm? Big Data and the Threat of Algocracy (Jan 2014)

• Advanced Trolleyology and the Doctrine of Double Effect (Feb 2014)

• Plantinga versus Peels on Naturalism and Moral Realism (Part One, Part Two) (Mar 2014)

• Should we bet on radical enhancement? (Apr 2014)

• The Ethics of Suicide: A Framework (May 2014)

• The Ethics of Benign Carnivorism (Part One, Part Two) (June 2014)

• Bostrom on Superintelligence (3): Doom and the Treacherous Turn (Jul 2014)

• Are we heading for technological unemployment? An Argument (Aug 2014)

• Chalmers v Pigliucci on the Philosophy of Mind-uploading (Part One, Part Two) (Sep 2014)

• Should we abolish work? (Oct 2014)

• The Legal Challenges of Robotics (2): Are Robots Exceptional? (Nov 2014)

• Are we innate retributivists? A Review of the Psychological Evidence (Dec 2014)

Moving on then to page views. I know some people like to think of Bitcoin as the currency of the internet, but as we all know the real currency of the internet is page views. How did the blog do on that front? Pretty well, all things considered. I crossed the one million page view mark back in October (according to Google stats anyway) and I ended the year averaging about 40,000 hits per month. That's not amazing, but it is up about 15,000 per month on last year. I also had far more posts this year that scored over 1,000 hits, which is nice. Anyway, here are the top ten posts by number of views (how many actually read them is another matter entirely):

Top Ten posts on Philosophical Disquisitions by page views

• The Ethics of Virtual Rape (6090 hits)

• Do Cognitive Enhancing Drugs Actually Work? (5444 hits)

• Can blogging be academically valuable? Seven reasons for thinking it might be (4025 hits)

• The Ethics of Suicide: A Framework (3420 hits)

• Is Modern Technology Creating a Borg-Like Society? (3400 hits)

• Should we have a right not to work? (3071 hits)

• Enforcing Morality through Criminal Law (Part One) (2853 hits)

• Rule by Algorithm? Big Data and the Threat of Algocracy (2061 hits)

• How can you make your writing more coherent? Four Tips (2012 hits)

• An Ethical Framework for the use of Enhancement Drugs (1690 hits)

Finally, over the past two years my work has been republished several times on various other popular weblogs. Just this past year, I've had posts published on Humanity Plus, Disinfo and Practical Ethics. But my main other outlet is the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) blog. They republish nearly everything I publish on here (a big thank you to Kris Notaro for supporting my work). Here are the top ten posts (by page views) over on IEET.

Top Ten Posts on IEET by page views

• Will sex workers be replaced by robots? A Precis (14645 hits)

• Rule by Algorithm? Big Data and the threat of Algocracy (14262 hits)

• Are we heading for technological unemployment? An Argument (8601 hits)

• Should we have a right not to work? (7843 hits)

• Dawkins and the "We are going to die" Argument (6603 hits)

• Should we abolish work? (6458 hits)

• Big Data, Predictive Algorithms and the Virtues of Transparency (5478 hits)

• Steven Pinker's Guide to Classic Style (5238 hits)

• Is Modern Technology Creating a Borg-like Society? (5118 hits)

• Algocracy and other Problems with Big Data (4775 hits)

So that's it for 2014. Let's see what happens next year.