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A political blogger, here's a taste.
I don't like the idea of being labeled a "political blogger" (I don't think I wrote anything about the election or its run-up), but it's hard to deny that politics is discussed a lot at my blog and I don't really have any other forte I could claim to displace it. I could defend myself by linking to Razib Khan on how many of the "science" blogs on his old blogroll spend most of their time discussing politics (generally, politically inflected atheism), but for one who accepts "politics is the mind-killer" that's just a "but they do it too". The post you link to could be construed as "sociological" rather than "political" and would be relevant in an alternate universe without politics.
In response to
Factions, inequality, and social justice
I appreciate the hat-tip, but you might have wanted to link to the more thorough explication of that chapter from Collins' book, which Hanson discussed here.
EDIT: Some of what you quoted is in my comment you linked originally, and not in my follow-up post. Hope nobody got confused when they weren't able to find those quotes.
In response to
Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity
"In any case, 55% is pretty conservative; it means I consider myself to have almost no information." I'm wondering what evidence there is for a probability above 50. That's what I would consider "conservative". It's not literally "no information", it's "no more information than the median voter". That's what it would mean for your vote to affect the outcome in a positive manner. Conditional on your vote affecting the outcome, there must be as many people (in your area) for one candidate as the other. The more lopsided the outcome, the more plausible it is that a random voter (such as yourself) is making a "correct" decision in light of philosophical majoritarianism. The more divided it is the less it seems likely.
Steve Randy Waldmann has an interesting argument for voting, going from a tribalist to greater-good scenario.
In response to
Causal Diagrams and Causal Models
(summary)
Correlation does not imply causation,
but
causation implies correlation,
and therefore
no correlation implies no causation
...which permits the falsification of some causal theories based on the absence of certain correlations.
What about Milton Friedman's thermostat?
And preventing the creation of a new life prevents the relationships that person would eventually develop.
Really? An appeal to counterfactual consequences? By this line of reasoning, each day you're not having sex with the intent to procreate is tantamount to murder, starting from the moment you hit puberty until you're no longer fertile. There are no remaining schelling points in-between, AFAICT. All that remains is cold hard utilitarian multiplication. Cold hard utilitarian multiplication is, well, hard - and it might not agree with you.
My preferred approach is what you said for eugenics: just admit that I'm alright with murder some of the time, as per the economically efficient amount of crime (such as theft!).
You're hitting Cooperate and telling this the other player (whose game habits you have no information on) on a one-shot P.D. Are you sure you really want to do that?
Here's a fictive example of the "argument":
Blue: X is good!
Green: But X can in theory be defined as an element of Y!
Audience: *gasp!* Ys are bad!
Green: Indeed, Ys are bad!
Blue: Ys are bad because of K, P, Z, C and G. 50% of the badness comes from G, 40% from K, P and Z, and the remaining 10% is C. X only has C. Moreover, X also has B, which is very good, more than twice the amount of C.
Green: But all Y is bad, and X is in Y¹, so X is bad!
Audience: (ignores math) Agreed! *clap for Green*
ETA: ¹. I realized afterwards that this might not be obvious, but it is expected that an informed reader understands that X might not be exclusively part of Y, which Green leaves out (either intentionally, or out of ignorance or concern for efficient communication or whatever other reason). The rest and what follows from this is covered in the main article.
The cold hard utilitarian calculus is hard in many cases because it aims to maximize rather than satisfice. In many ways that seems a feature rather than a bug. Deontological ethics tend to rely heavily on the act-omission distinction, which I must admit I would prefer as the bar I have to pass. But if, as Kant suggested, I ask how I would prefer others to behave, I would want them to act to increase utility. From a contractarian perspective, we can indicate to others that we will increase their utility if they increase ours. It's hard to make contracts with beings that don't exist yet, but there can still exist incentives to create them in the case of farm animals now (which I believe are produced through insemination rather than sex in factory farms) or ems in the future.
My preferred approach also includes not bothering to argue with a great many people. The folk activism* of argument is not going to be very effective at changing anything for most people (I definitely include myself in that set). Like Stirner, I instead converse for my own benefit. This actually makes points in disagreement more valuable because it's more likely to tell me something I don't already know. *Yes, I intentionally linked to a post critiquing the actual argument I am relying on.
In response to
The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world?
I actually thought this argument was quite poor. There are lots of possible features in different cases of a type, and to claim some are vitally important seems to beg the question. Murdering a homeless loner estranged from any family or friends may lack many of the features mentioned, but there's little dispute it would qualify. And preventing the creation of a new life prevents the relationships that person would eventually develop. Pointing out that an example falls into a commonly understood category seems a pretty good starting point before delving into what features of that category are important (which isn't something universally agreed on or even consciously thought about). My preferred approach is what you said for eugenics: just admit that I'm alright with murder some of the time, as per the economically efficient amount of crime (such as theft!).
I also think it is a good thing there is a general norm against breaking laws (even stupid ones) and that it is highly questionable whether George Washington & other "patriot" actions did more good than harm, requiring actual justification in each case against an initial presumption.
In response to
Less Wrong on Twitter
My Twitter handle is conveniently the same as my LW handle. Feel free to list it.
As is mine. Twitter wouldn't allow just TGGP or T.G.G.P
I'm pretty sure that McCarthy is an example of reverse stupidity. The Soviet Union had plenty of spies in America, just like we had spies in the Soviet Union, but my reading has mostly pointed me towards the hypothesis that McCarthy didn't have any special knowledge of who the Soviet spies were.
Why would those correlations invalidate it, assuming we have controlled for origin and education, and are sampling society with low disparity? (e.g. western Europe).
Don't forget we have a direct causal mechanism at work; failure to predict; and we are not concerned with the feelings so much as with the regrettable actions themselves (and thus don't need to care if the intelligent people e.g. regret for longer, or intelligent people notice more often that they could have done better, which can easily result in more intelligent people experiencing feeling of regret more often). Not just that, but ability to predict is part of definition of intelligence.
edit: another direct causal mechanism: more intelligent people tend to have larger set of opportunities (even given same start in life), allowing them to take less risky courses of action, which can be predicted better (e.g. more intelligent people tend to be able to make more money, and consequently have a lower need to commit crime; when committing crime more intelligent people process a larger selection of paths for each goal, and can choose paths with lower risk of getting caught, including subtle unethical high pay off scenarios not classified as crime). The result is that intelligence allows to accommodate for values such as regret better. This is not something that invalidates the effect, but is rather part of effect.
The poor also commit significantly more non-lucrative crime.
I found your top-level post hard to understand at first. You may want to add a clearer introduction. When I saw "The issue in brief", I expected a full sentence/thesis to follow and had to recheck to see if I overlooked a verb.
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Certainly people have challenged that book. But my understanding is that its findings have held up well and that, to the contrary, it is Ryan and Jetha's book that has been variously ignored and discredited, especially for their highly misleading presentation of others' data and the literature generally. See e.g. here.
Robin was one of the people initially impressed with Ryan & Jetha, later persuaded by Saxon in "Dusk".
I personally recommend Azar Gat's "War in Human Civilization" as much more sweeping than Keeley's book. Despite the title, it's range precedes civilization, and even the emergence of humanity (although those are smaller portions of the book near the beginning). My posts about it are here. At any rate, there seems to be substantial evidence for warfare (or at least something analogous to "gang war" given their social scale) among hunter-gatherers, even if not to the extent of primitive agriculturalists like the Yanomamo or New Guineans.