Alan Lockett

The answer is what I call "the rule of algorithm", a new system of governance where representatives vote on a set of utilities or outcomes. An computer system then generates and administers policies towards those outcomes, constrained by a set of values (e.g. Bill of Rights) 3/3

Representative republicanism has failed; the representatives cannot meaningfully constrain the bureaucrats. Democracy, representative or direct, is a recipe for disaster. 2/3

To run a large country, you need a large bureaucracy. But how do you run the bureaucracy? With another bureaucracy? This is the problem of governance in the modern world. 1/3

@BrockSm18075322 @XRPLocal @EatDaBugs @nicksortor @EricLDaugh No, I'm claiming that we can define algorithms that are known, and we can verify that the software is running such algorithms. That part is easy. The voting machines in place are inscrutable today because they were built to be that way, because we let them do that.

@XRPLocal @hypernicon @EatDaBugs @nicksortor @EricLDaugh Is this intellect claiming that computers can program and command themselves WITHOUT human input? With information provided to said computer that has not been touched by humans? So we want computers to cheat and claim, “it wasn’t me”. How about NO!

HOT TAKE nobody on my timeline wants to hear: Watching MAGA influencers like @NickSortor or @EricLDaugh cheer Trump telling Tennessee to redraw for a 9-0 GOP map is embarrassing. Gerrymandering is a DISGRACE when Democrats do it. It is ALSO a disgrace when Republicans do it. Pick a principle and STICK to it. Politicians of BOTH parties carving up districts to pre-select their voters is the political class rigging the game against you. That's the whole scam. Incumbents drawing safe seats so they NEVER face a real challenge. If you cheered when SCOTUS struck down Louisiana's racial gerrymander because "the Constitution is colorblind" and districts shouldn't be drawn to engineer outcomes, then you don't get to turn around 24 hours later and demand your team engineer outcomes harder. Voters should pick politicians. Politicians shouldn't pick voters. End the racket. Independent maps. Compact districts. Stop letting the apparatus pre-cook your elections. Don't tread on me. 🟧

@BrockSm18075322 @XRPLocal @EatDaBugs @nicksortor @EricLDaugh well, aren't you an expert in everybody's motives? FWIW, we shouldn't use computers for things like voting without the source code being public and auditable by anyone.

@XRPLocal @hypernicon @EatDaBugs @nicksortor @EricLDaugh He’s trying to blow smoke up peoples skirts so people can cheat in other ways. Once it goes to computers no one will be able to see what programs they are using, informational source pulls, algorithm data. See supposed “top secret” vote counting machines.

What I was saying is really pretty simple. We want compact, meaningful districts. But the districts are chosen by committees chosen by people with ulterior motives. And so the districts always end up being a mess, and everyone is always pointing fingers at each other. So why not write a computer algorithm that everyone can read, and let it do redistricting for us? Why not design it so that it is based entirely on objective factors that can't be fudged? Then anybody can run redistricting on their home computer and compare it with what the state gets, and it should be the same thing. No politics can influence it, and the results are fair. The rest was just detail to define the nature of the algorithm that would be required (run at the household level, make the diameter of the district as small as possible while trying to match some meaningful boundaries such as zip codes, etc).

@BrockSm18075322 @hypernicon @EatDaBugs @nicksortor @EricLDaugh I dunno...I wasn't being a smart ass...no idea what he was saying. Do computers program themselves now?

@rongdfry @EatDaBugs @nicksortor @EricLDaugh The states do it today, which has resulted in near universal gerrymandering. But if we're going to talk about the Constitution, aren't congressional districts supposed to be about 100,000 people and no more? Meaning Congress should be 9x larger.

@hypernicon @EatDaBugs @nicksortor @EricLDaugh How about just “leave it to each state”, of course following the US Constitution.

Or, we could just be ruled like stupid people like we are today. Guess I know which one most people prefer. For cavemen: ugh, me no want choose congressman by big man draw map, take money. me want computer make fair. make district by man woman live near, not man woman live far. Bad man want kill kid. Me want save kid. Vote me.

@hypernicon @EatDaBugs @nicksortor @EricLDaugh uh, what?

@DirteeeMartini @leap_dog French changed too. French "forêt" < Old French "forest" < Mideval Latin "forestis" = "outside" (adj). French "bois" = woods < Latin "boscus" = pasture

@leap_dog 'nother latinism because the french also call them bois, sorry. gotta be yoonique.

hmmm there's another word.... it's right there... at the tip of my tounge... one that's not french... one that is closely related to this 'wold' word..... one that's still in extremely common use today to mean the exact same thing..... hmmmmmmmm

@leap_dog Except that other word is "wudu" in Old English, not "wald", and it specifically means a single tree, which is why we usually say "the woods" instead of "the wood"

Can you honestly look at the Catholic popes from, say, the 700s to the 1500s and say, "these are great, holy men who deserve respect and veneration"? You had popes marching at the head of armies. Popes with known mistresses and boyfriends. Popes whose parents bought them the seat. You had the Great Schism, over what? and then the splinter papacy in Avignon. Why should Protestants respect the historical popes? Yes, there were a lot of renewal and restoration movements, especially in the century or so around 1000 AD, and it wasn't all bad. There were always good priests, monks, and even bishops. But in 1517 when Martin Luther pinned his theses to the church door, it was in part because Tetzel was indeed claiming to sell forgiveness for sin and access to heaven in order to fund the construction of St Peter's Basilica. And literally half the money was being embezzled by the Archbishop of Mainz, which he used in part to pay off the loan he had taken out to pay a confirmation fee for his seat to Rome. And let's not forget about the holy mother church's tendency to cruelly murder its own for preaching against corruption (like buying bishoprics and papacies), as when John Huss was burnt at the stake in 1415. Or how the Catholic church hated the idea of people reading the Bible in their own language, so much so that they burned William Tyndale alive in 1536 for translating the Bible into English. Then there was the whole Spanish Inquisition, which everyone is familiar with. And yes, it started to go bad pretty quickly. Look at how Augustine of Hippo dealt with heretics (Donatists) late in his life in the early 400s, and you'll see from which of its teachers the Catholic church learned cruelty. The contrast with the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth was stark, even then. Most people are ignorant and uneducated. That includes most Protestants. Of course they know nothing about church history, especially early church history. But it's not like the Reformation came out of thin air with no cause or justification. The Catholic Church was more often than not run by immoral, worldly, and unholy people for most of a millenium. They had one private standard for themselves, focused around increasing their wealth and power, and another standard for the lower classes. That's pretty hard to dispute.

Protestantism's deepest assumption is that Christianity went wrong almost immediately and stayed wrong for 1,500 years. That's not a small claim. It's the entire premise of the movement.

@mehdirhasan Do that, and you will likely get civil war. Can you win?

If the Democrats don't make rebalancing and expanding the Supreme Court a top priority for whenever (if?) they next get into power, then I don't know what to say anymore. The GOP-packed court is the biggest block on progress in this country and has been for a while.

@BarackObama Pray tell, who is protecting the people of Virginia from the recent gerrymandering in that state that created districts snaking out from Arlington? Is it that you don't recognize rural whites for the minorities that they are, and hence think they don't deserve representation?

Today’s Supreme Court decision effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, freeing state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities - so long as they do it under the guise of “partisanship” rather than explicit “racial bias.” And it serves as just one more example of how a majority of the current Court seems intent on abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal participation in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach. The good news is that such setbacks can be overcome. But that will only happen if citizens across the country who cherish our democratic ideals continue to mobilize and vote in record numbers - not just in the upcoming midterms or in high profile races, but in every election and every level.

This pessimistic take is somewhat unfair. The field of physics has clearly ossified, but it is not necessarily because there is no work to be done. It is more likely because our sclerotic bureaucracy has prioritized the same dead-ends for decades now. The question of whether spacetime is emergent from a more fundamental set of operations is an area receiving a lot of exploration now, including from popular extramural researchers Wolfram, Weinstein, and probably many others that are less well-known. It's kind of silly to declare it all a failure just because it's hit a multi-decade plateau. Even a multi-century plateau would be par for the course in science history.

There are quite a few scholarly fields these days that have basically been shut down because there’s no more original work to be done. The closing of physics has got to be particularly upsetting to true believers in Tomorrowland, too, because that means most of their wet dreams — superluminal space travel, notably — have just had the door shut on them forever.

@spencer_askew What's happening is that you went to Waco.

It would have helped if the teachers had asked questions that weren't so dreadfully obvious. My 6th grade teacher called my parents in to accuse me of cheating at math because I would give the correct answer to word problems immediately without thinking. What I could not (and still do not) understand is why everyone could not solve the problems in their heads like that. It was so easy. Schools are built for morons.

Must have had bad teachers; I did those things and don't remember any "massive conflict" over it. Although not show your work is a big problem in math; when learning math in school, believe it or not, the point is not to get the right answer but to learn the process; don't show your work and you have not demonstrated that you understand the material.

@8teAPi I call the system where AI makes the legal decisions "the rule of algorithm" and I can't decide whether I mean it as a serious political proposal, or as a backdrop for dystopic fiction

the end state is a singleton Supreme Court AI system that adjudicates every case instantly and finally..

@ylecun @Noahpinion Unfortunately, Hinton is on the p(doom) train, and Bengio has ridden at least a few stops. I agree p(doom) is silly, but it's Gary Marcus who gets to testify in Congress as an "AI Expert"...

@Noahpinion Most "leading AI figures" think this p(doom) estimates are complete bullshit and the existential risk is essentially zero. But most of them are silent. The doomers attract a disproportionate amount of attention, of course.

Hmm. But leading AI figures give pretty high p(doom) numbers. Dario says he thinks AI has a 25% chance of causing human extinction or something similar.

Most Westerners don't really believe in assigned roles or fate anymore, so that explains part of the disconnect. In the West these days it all seems to be about mechanism: the hero must figure out _how_ to defeat the villain, and this _figuring out how_ is central to the plot. Westerners also struggle deeply with the existence of suffering and loss, which are treated as background and motivational rather than as the central foreground study, but I don't think this is in contrast to the Eastern stories, I don't know. Then there is the issue of value structures, which seem paper-thin in both east and west.

@eigenrobot Im eastern storytelling the external conflict is just there to prompt the story into action; what matters is the internal conflict. That in turn usually comes ftom characters rebelling against their assigned roll or fate.

is it just me or do many (obviously not all just more than you'd think) contemporary east asian stories make absolutely no sense at all, and what is the problem here examplars include all Final Fantasy plots, Chrono Cross, _Doomed Megalopolis_