I’ve updated the previous post several times, so if you only read it when I first posted it, you might want to check it again.

Happy New Years to everybody. Around this time many people like creating lists of significant things that happened in the year we wave goodbye too, but the only one of them I find interesting enough to link to is Radley Balko’s Worst Prosecutor of the Year. Though not quite a list, a yearly tradition I enjoy very much is the Edge World Question. The question is “What have you changed your mind about? Why?“. I haven’t gotten very far into it, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t well worth my time and yours (UPDATE: Couldn’t resist linking to Thomas Metzinger’s: There are no moral facts).

Eliezer Yudkowsky, after irritating people in his previous posts with his fondness for Singularity/cryonics and antipathy for religion, decides to take on politics in the Two-Party Swindle, which is great for anybody but especially libertarians and anti-war types. One area I disagree with it is mentioned the topics; basically Caplan’s theory that the voters are getting what they asked for good and hard. Through my nefarious influence I got Jim Henley at Unqualified Offerings to discuss it, and he quibbles with Eliezer over whether the analogy should be to professional athletes or college ones. I have written earlier about my views on the subject in the post Against Politics, which is why I decided to create a mirror of the site by that name (which I might put off fixing up for a while). In a somewhat relevant old post, Hopefully Anonymous (who still hasn’t updated his blog like he said) rails “against the concept of “both sides” as opposed to n-th possible sides“. mtraven is dismissive of that kind of talk, but wanders near that direction in Which side are you on?

In an unexpected event, IOZ sent me an e-mail saying he would add me to his blogroll. Aside from the unusualness of sending a message rather than just gettin’ ‘er done, I was surprised by the move as I am in some respects, and especially from his perspective, a Bad Person and might taint the blog, as I have on occasion his comments section.

I started reading the thing I was being somewhat vague about in the last post but got distracted, though I intend to finish it tonight and then begin writing. Will you readers get to see the results? I don’t know, you’ll just have to stay tuned!