Konkvistador's excellent List of Blogs by LWers led me to some of my favorite blogs, but is pretty well hidden and gradually becoming obsolete. In order to create an easily-update-able replacement, I have created the wiki page List of Blogs and added most of the blogs from Konkvistador's list. If you have a blog, or you read blogs, please help in the following ways:

-- Add your blog if it's not on there, and if it has updated in the past few months (no dead blogs this time, exceptions for very complete archives of excellent material like Common Sense Atheism in the last section)

-- Add any other blogs you like that are written by LWers or frequently engage with LW ideas

-- Remove your blog if you don't want it on there (I added some prominent critics of LW ideas who might not want to be linked to us)

-- Move your blog to a different category if you don't like the one it's in right now

-- Add a description of your blog, or change the one that already exists

-- Change the name you're listed by (I defaulted to people's LW handles)

-- Bold the name of your blog if it updates near-daily, has a large readership/commentership, and/or gets linked to on LW a lot

-- Improve formatting

Somebody more familiar with the Less Wrong twittersphere might want to do something similar to Grognor's Less Wrong on Twitter

Michael Vassar, former president of the Singularity Institute and current Chief Science Officer of MetaMed, is currently visiting Europe and wants to meet up with Less Wrongers there. His schedule is:

25 April: Berlin

29 April: Estonia

8 May: London

12 May: Oslo

16 May: Nice (but may be able to meet people in Paris?)

26 May: Home to USA

If you have a meetup group in or near one of these cities, or you can put some people together, he's interested in talking about the Singularity, optimal philanthropy, and his work with MetaMed. You can reach him at michael.vassar[at]gmail.com

The first draft of the 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey is complete (see 2011 here). I will link it below if you promise not to try to take the survey because it's not done yet and this is just an example!

2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey Draft

I want three things from you.

First, please critique this draft. Tell me if any questions are unclear, misleading, offensive, confusing, or stupid. Tell me if the survey is so unbearably long that you would never possibly take it. Tell me if anything needs to be rephrased.

Second, I am willing to include any question you want in the Super Extra Bonus Questions section, as long as it is not offensive, super-long-and-involved, or really dumb. Please post any questions you want there. Please be specific - not "Ask something about abortion" but give the exact question you want me to ask as well as all answer choices.

Try not to add more than five or so questions per person, unless you're sure yours are really interesting. Please also don't add any questions that aren't very easily sort-able by a computer program like SPSS unless you can commit to sorting the answers yourself.

Third, please suggest a decent, quick, and at least somewhat accurate Internet IQ test I can stick in a new section, Unreasonably Long Bonus Questions.

I will probably post the survey to Main and officially open it for responses sometime early next week.

There was a lot of controversy over the Worst Argument essay, which surprised me because the basic point seems hard to argue with. I'd like to change it in response to feedback, with the new title "Guilt by Association". Below is the rough draft for the new version, minus a few links and other finishing touches. Please let me know whether you think it is better or worse than the original, and what specific further changes you think that it needs.

David Stove once ran a contest to find the Worst Argument In The World, but he awarded the prize to his own entry, and one that shored up his politics to boot. It hardly seems like an objective process.

If he can unilaterally declare a worst argument, then so can I. I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be Guilt By Association: "If we can apply a word to something, we must judge it the same as we judge more prototypical instances of that word."

Well, it sounds dumb when you put it like that. Who even does that, anyway?

Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin Luther King Jr. for his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of the statue objects: "But Martin Luther King was a criminal!"

Any historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against peaceful anti-segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.

But in this case calling Martin Luther King a criminal is Guilt by Association. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank robber. He is driven only by greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens the fabric of society. We don't like criminals precisely because we don't like greed and preying on innocents and weakening the fabric of society.

The opponent is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King." But King doesn't share any of the features that made us dislike criminals in the first place. Therefore, even though he is a criminal, there is no reason to dislike King. The force of the opponent's argument comes solely from the category "criminal" associating King with people who are bad.  It totally fails to prove King was bad himself.

This all seems so nice and logical when it's presented in this format. Unfortunately, it's also one hundred percent contrary to instinct: the urge is to respond "Martin Luther King? A criminal? No he wasn't! You take that back!" This is why the Worst Argument In The World is so successful. As soon as you do that you've fallen into their trap. Your argument is no longer about whether you should build a statue, it's about whether King was a criminal. Since he was, you have now lost the argument.

Ideally, you should just be able to say "Well, King was the good kind of criminal." But that seems pretty tough as a debating maneuver in real life. Let's look at some political arguments that I think typify Guilt by Association.

I

On my way to work every day, I used to pass a sign reading "ABORTION IS MURDER" The archetypal murder is Charles Manson breaking into your house and shooting you. This sort of murder is bad for at least four reasons: you prefer not to die, you have various thoughts and hopes and dreams that would be snuffed out, your family and friends would be heartbroken, and the rest of society has to live in fear until Manson gets caught. If you define murder as "killing another human being", then abortion is technically murder. But it has none of the downsides of murder Charles Manson style.

If your objection to murder is predicated entirely upon the four reasons above, then abortion might qualify as "murder", but it doesn't share any of the characteristics that make you object to murder of the usual sort. The argument is entirely associative: "Look over there in, that bin marked 'MURDER'. Charles Manson and an abortion doctor! The one is standing suspiciously close to the other, don't you think?"

(some people have tried to solve this problem by defining "murder" as "the unlawful killing of a human being" and then pointing out that abortion is legal. This is exactly as clever as redefining "criminal" to mean "a person who breaks the law but is not Martin Luther King." Cut out the fallacy at its root, not at its branches!)

This argument is relatively clear-cut, but other real world arguments are more complicated.

II

Whenever the airports consider singling out people of Middle Eastern descent for extra security checks, someone is bound to object that "Racial profiling is racist." This is true if we define racism as "discriminating based on a person's race". But why do we have a negative reaction to racism in the first place? Well, the prototypical example of racism is the KKK burning crosses in front of black people's houses. This kind of racism has many obvious problems. It's usually based on scientifically inaccurate generalizations about the moral or intellectual value of different groups. It often leads to violence, hate crimes, verbal abuse, or other traumatic experiences. It keeps whole groups of people from achieving their full potential. And it can be belittling and offensive to the people involved.

Let's stick with these four reasons for our discussion, although obviously there are more. Racial profiling seems to avoid the first three sins of racism, but it definitely hits the fourth. So to object that racial profiling is racist could be either useful or fallacious depending on the intent. If the intent were to remind people that racial profiling, like KKK cross burning, can be belittling and offensive, then that's a worthy goal. If the intent were to stick racial profiling in a bin with Hitler, David Duke, Francis Galton, and the people who bombed the Baptist Church in Birmingham - and then say "Look what company it keeps!", then it's a fallacy. Racial profiling isn't empirically false, isn't violent, and doesn't keep groups of people down. When we hear it called "racist", most of the revulsion we naturally hear at the word should be dismissed as irrelevant to this particular case.

There are a lot of ways to mention that racial profiling is belittling and offensive without using the r-word; for example, you could say "Racial profiling is belittling and offensive." This conveys the one accurate point of "Racial profiling is racist" without the extra baggage. While using the latter sentence would not be provably wrong, one would have to wonder about the motives.

III

In some situations that are even less clear cut, I still think I can see Guilt by Association peeking through.

Consider the common refrain that "Capital punishment is murder". Here most of our objections to Charles Manson really do hold. Capital punishment kills someone who doesn't want to die. It cuts short their hopes and dreams. It disappoints the victim's family and friends. And maybe it does make other people live in fear, either because they've got a hidden criminal record or because they know it has a gruesome history of occasionally killing the falsely accused.

But I still don't think this is a good argument. Mansonesque murder has few if any benefits. Capital punishment arguably has more - some people think it decreases the crime rate, and at the very least it makes crime victims and their families breath a sigh of relief. Do the benefits outweigh the costs? I don't know. But taking something with both costs and benefits and then placing it next to something that only has costs and saying "Look! It's exactly like this thing here!" misses the entire point of the argument. If you want to argue that the costs are worse than the benefits, argue that - don't say "It looks suspiciously like something else that has no benefits at all!"

IV

In an earlier version of this post, some people mistook Guilt by Association for a blanket condemnation of any argument from category membership. I don't think things are quite that bad. Discussing category memberships sometimes insightfully point out double standards. For example, if a racist said we should kill all the Canadians, one might respond: "Canadians are people too!" This would be a challenge for the racist to point out exactly why they believe Canadians lack the features that usually make us think killing people are bad, or what special quality Canadians have that outweighs those features.

Perhaps the best explanation of the difference is that accusing someone of Guilt by Association is an invitation to play Rationalist Taboo. It may be they can taboo the emotionally charged category names and still make the argument. Or it may be that the argument instantly falls flat.

But overall I would recommend avoiding this entire style of discourse. Anything valuable you can do with category memberships you can do in a less sweeping way by just saying what you mean (see the "Racial profiling is belittling and offensive" example above.) And anything you can't do in a less sweeping way probably shouldn't be said at all, with honorable exceptions for people who are consciously making arguments from Schelling fences.

V

Are the following examples of Guilt By Association? Are they of the first, second, or third type? Or are they totally legitimate?

1. Efforts to cure hereditary diseases through genetic engineering are eugenics.

2. Evolutionary psychology is sexist.

3. Euthanasia is murder.

4. Marijuana is a drug.

5. Taxation is theft.

6. Prescription medications are poison.

7. Affirmative action is discriminatory.

8. Someone who had sex with a 16 year old when he was 18 is a sex offender.

9. Radical environmentalism is a religion.

10. Mormonism is a cult.

One of the most charming features of game theory is the almost limitless depths of evil to which it can sink.

Your garden-variety evils act against your values. Your better class of evil, like Voldemort and the folk-tale version of Satan, use your greed to trick you into acting against your own values, then grab away the promised reward at the last moment. But even demons and dark wizards can only do this once or twice before most victims wise up and decide that taking their advice is a bad idea. Game theory can force you to betray your deepest principles for no lasting benefit again and again, and still leave you convinced that your behavior was rational.

Some of the examples in this post probably wouldn't work in reality; they're more of a reductio ad absurdum of the so-called homo economicus who acts free from any feelings of altruism or trust. But others are lifted directly from real life where seemingly intelligent people genuinely fall for them. And even the ones that don't work with real people might be valuable in modeling institutions or governments.

Of the following examples, the first three are from The Art of Strategy; the second three are relatively classic problems taken from around the Internet. A few have been mentioned in the comments here already and are reposted for people who didn't catch them the first time.

Stalin once (supposedly) said that “He who casts the votes determines nothing; he who counts the votes determines everything “ But he was being insufficiently cynical. He who chooses the voting system may determine just as much as the other two players.

The Art of Strategy gives some good examples of this principle: here's an adaptation of one of them. Three managers are debating whether to give a Distinguished Employee Award to a certain worker. If the worker gets the award, she must receive one of two prizes: a $50 gift certificate, or a $10,000 bonus.

One manager loves the employee and wants her to get the $10,000; if she can't get the $10,000, she should at least get a gift certificate. A second manager acknowledges her contribution but is mostly driven by cost-cutting; she'd be happiest giving her the gift certificate, but would rather refuse to recognize her entirely than lose $10,000. And the third manager dislikes her and doesn't want to recognize her at all - but she also doesn't want the company to gain a reputation for stinginess, so if she gets recognized she'd rather give her the $10,000 than be so pathetic as to give her the cheap certificate.

The managers arrange a meeting to determine the employee's fate. If the agenda tells them to vote for or against giving her an award, and then proceed to determine the prize afterwards if she wins, then things will not go well for the employee. Why not? Because the managers reason as follows: if she gets the award, Manager 1 and Manager 3 will vote for the $10,000 prize, and Manager 2 will vote for the certificate.  Therefore, voting for her to get the award is practically the same as voting for her to get the $10,000 prize. That means Manager 1, who wants her to get the prize, will vote yes on the award, but Managers 2 and 3, who both prefer no award to the $10,000, will strategically vote not to give her the award. Result: she doesn't get recognized for her distinguished service.

But suppose the employee involved happens to be the secretary arranging the meeting where the vote will take place. She makes a seemingly trivial change to the agenda: the managers will vote for what the prize should be first, and then vote on whether to give it to her.

If the managers decide the appropriate prize is $10,000, then the motion to give the award will fail for exactly the same reasons it did above. But if the managers decide the certificate is appropriate, then Manager 1 and 2, who both prefer the certificate to nothing, will vote in favor of giving the award. So the three managers, thinking strategically, realize that the decision before them, which looks like “$10 grand or certificate”, is really “No award or certificate”. Since 1 and 2 both prefer the certificate to nothing, they vote that the certificate is the appropriate prize (even though Manager 1 doesn't really believe this) and the employee ends out with the gift certificate.

But if the secretary is really smart, she may set the agenda as follows: The managers first vote whether or not to give $10,000, and if that fails, they next vote whether or not to give the certificate; if both votes fail the employee gets nothing. Here the managers realize that if the first vote (for $10,000) fails, the next vote (certificate or nothing) will pass, since two managers prefer certificate to nothing as mentioned before. So the true choice in the first vote is “$10,000 versus certificate”. Since two managers (1 and 3) prefer the $10,000 to the certificate, those two start by voting to give the full $10,000, and this is what the employee gets.

So we see that all three options are possible outcomes, and that the true power rests not in the hands of any individual manager, but in the secretary who determines how the voting takes place.

Americans have a head start in understanding the pitfalls of voting systems thanks to the so-called two party system. Every four years, they face quandaries like "If leftists like me vote for Nader instead of Gore just because we like him better, are we going to end up electing Bush because we've split the leftist vote?"

Empirically, yes. The 60,000 Florida citizens who voted Green in 2000 didn't elect Nader. However, they did make Gore lose to Bush by a mere 500 votes. The last post discussed a Vickrey auction, a style of auction in which you have have no incentive to bid anything except your true value. Wouldn't it be nice if we had an electoral system with the same property: one where you should always vote for the candidate you actually support? If such a system existed, we would have ample reason to institute it and could rest assured that no modern-day Stalin was manipulating us via the choice of voting system we used.

Some countries do claim to have better systems than the simple winner-takes-all approach of the United States. My own adopted homeland of Ireland uses a system called “single transferable vote” (also called instant-runoff vote), in which voters rank the X candidates from 1 to X. If a candidate has the majority of first preference votes (or a number of first preference votes greater than the number of positions to fill divided by the number of candidates, in elections with multiple potential winners like legislative elections), then that candidate wins and any surplus votes go to their voters' next preference. If no one meets the quota, then the least popular candidate is eliminated and their second preference votes become first preferences. The system continues until all available seats are full.

For example, suppose I voted (1: Nader), (2: Gore), (3: Bush). The election officials tally all the votes and find that Gore has 49 million first preferences, Bush has 50 million, and Nader has 5 million. There's only one presidency, so a candidate would have to have a majority of votes (greater than 52 million out of 104 million) to win. Since no one meets that quota, the lowest ranked candidate gets eliminated - in this case, Nader. My vote now goes to my second preference, Gore. If 4 million Nader voters put Gore second versus 1 million who put Bush second, the tally's now at 53 million Gore, 51 million Bush. Gore has greater than 52 million and wins the election - the opposite result from if we'd elected a president the traditional way.

Another system called Condorcet voting also uses a list of all candidates ranked in order, but uses the information to run mock runoffs between each of them. So a Condorcet system would use the ballots to run a Gore/Nader match (which Gore would win), a Gore/Bush match (which Gore would win), and a Bush/Nader match (which Bush would win). Since Gore won all of his matches, he becomes President. This becomes complicated when no candidate wins all of his matches (imagine Gore beating Nader, Bush beating Gore, but Nader beating Bush in a sort of Presidential rock-paper-scissors.) Condorcet voting has various options to resolve this; some systems give victory to the candidate whose greatest loss was by the smallest margin, and others to candidates who defeated the greatest number of other candidates.

Do these systems avoid the strategic voting that plagues American elections? No. For example, both Single Transferable Vote and Condorcet voting sometimes provide incentives to rank a candidate with a greater chance of winning higher than a candidate you prefer - that is, the same "vote Gore instead of Nader" dilemma you get in traditional first-past-the-post.

There are many other electoral systems in use around the world, including several more with ranking of candidates, a few that do different sorts of runoffs, and even some that ask you to give a numerical rating to each candidate (for example “Nader 10, Gore 6, Bush -100000”). Some of them even manage to eliminate the temptation to rank a non-preferred candidate first. But these work only at the expense of incentivizing other strategic manuevers, like defining “approved candidate” differently or exaggerating the difference between two candidates.

So is there any voting system that automatically reflects the will of the populace in every way without encouraging tactical voting? No. Various proofs, including the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem and the better-known Arrow Impossibility Theorem show that many of the criteria by which we would naturally judge voting systems are mutually incompatible and that all reasonable systems must contain at least some small element of tactics (one example of an unreasonable system that eliminates tactical voting is picking one ballot at random and determining the results based solely on its preferences; the precise text of the theorem rules out “nondeterministic or dictatorial” methods).

This means that each voting system has its own benefits and drawbacks, and that which one people use is largely a matter of preference. Some of these preferences reflect genuine concern about the differences between voting systems: for example, is it better to make sure your system always elects the Condorcet winner, even if that means the system penalizes candidates who are too similar to other candidates? Is it better to have a system where you can guarantee that participating in the election always makes your candidate more likely to win, or one where you can be sure that everyone voting exactly the opposite will never elect the same candidate?

But in practice, these preferences tend to be political and self-interested. This was recently apparent in Britain, which voted last year on a referendum to change the voting system. The Liberal Democrats, who were perpetually stuck in the same third-place situation as Nader in the States, supported a change to a form of instant runoff voting which would have made voting Lib Dem a much more palatable option; the two major parties opposed it probably for exactly that reason.

Although no single voting system is mathematically perfect, several do seem to do better on the criteria that real people care about; look over Wikipedia's section on the strengths and weaknesses of different voting systems to see which one looks best.