My friend Brian Tomasik recently made available a table summarizing his beliefs on various issues. I thought this would be a fun and potentially instructive exercise, so I decided to do the same. To prevent myself from being influenced by Brian’s responses, I copied the original table onto an Excel spreadsheet, deleted the column with his answers and randomized the rows (by sorting them in alphabetical order). Only after recording all my responses did I allow myself to look at Brian’s, and I managed to resist the temptation to make any changes ex post facto. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at the degree to which we agree, and not very surprised at the areas where we don’t agree. I also suspect that a few of our disagreements (e.g. on compatibilism about free will) are merely verbal. Below, I comment on the propositions on which we disagree the most.
If you think you might want to participate in this exercise, you can make a duplicate of this spreadsheet and record your answers there before reading any further.