Democracy might be mathematically impossible – here’s why. Head to https://brilliant.org/veritasium to start your free 30-day trial and get 20% off an annual premium subscription.
      • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        13·
        3 months ago

        Oooooh veritasium! Truly a delicious specimen. Between the Waymo shilling, Silicon Valley “philosophy” ideology propaganda disguised as science, and general STEMlord malaise, it’s hard to tell which is the juiciest part!

        Reminder to everybody that it doesn’t take actual knowledge or being right to make a slick explainer video, just some computers and a team of animators.

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          11·
          3 months ago

          Having a slick visual presentation, the illusion of expertise, and speaking in a soothingly condescending tone is enough for Redditors and Reddit-adjecent credulous rubes.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        23·
        3 months ago

        Similarly, I never liked Kurtzgesagt videos, largely because of the smug Reddity vibe and the corporate-art aesthetic, but they got even worse when the videos started bootlicking for billionaires more directly, especially techno hopium shit.

        “Sure, maybe late stage capitalism will wipe out 99% of the global population, but if even 1% survives, that is a win for team humanity!” so-true elmofire said without the slightest acknowledgement that whatever planetary condition wiped out the other 99% wouldn’t suddenly disappear in a puff of hopium.

          • miz [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
            11·
            3 months ago

            this shit is why I hesitate to recommend any channel unless it is explicitly ML. somebody milkshake ducks and you have to cringe remembering the people you told to check them out

        • vovchik_ilich [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          4·
          3 months ago

          I remember liking kurzgesagt and thinking they were cool, until I saw that they were being funded by the Templeton foundation, and later Bill Gates. They’re pre-capitalist reformists who will defend “but reformism and pipedream technology can totally solve inequality and climate change bro”.

        • ExotiqueMatter@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
          4·
          3 months ago

          When I was a liberal, I was very into all the youtube pop science video, kurtzgesagt, rational animation, etc. I was bought on the space fantasy of terraformation, “grabby aliens”, “longtermism” and all that.

          Becoming a Marxist and being exposed to dialectical materialism made me realize just how much idealism, metaphysics and techno-washing of societal problems there is in science communication and academia itself.

          • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            4·
            3 months ago

            When I was a liberal, I was very into all the youtube pop science video, kurtzgesagt, rational animation, etc. I was bought on the space fantasy of terraformation, “grabby aliens”, “longtermism” and all that.

            Oh, how I hated arguing with people like that in the larger internet wild, especially when they thought saying “did you ever consider… asteroid mining?” as some sort of argument destroying silver bullet. Even if I said “fine, even more pollution and industrial waste from that too,” I’d get back “did you ever consider… that asteroid mining would also solve its own problems because that many resources and hockey stick shaped curves?” smuglord

            • ExotiqueMatter@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
              3·
              3 months ago

              Yeah, it’s really annoying sifting through all the techbro space fantasy when you want to learn about why and how we would send humans in space.

              Realistically, the only thing an industry in space would have that we couldn’t already get on earth for way cheaper is low gravity. So basically, the only industry for which it would make sense to bother putting it in space is the industry to launch stuff in space. This means that there is no profit to be made from asteroid mining, it would be run at a constant loss unless it can somehow be made self sufficient. And of course it’s not a solution to mining pollution on earth in and of itself, there are a lot of solutions that could be up and running long before any space mining effort become able to supply earth with even 1% of the metals and rare earths we need.

              Not only is mining resources in space far from the solution-to-every-problem that techbros present it as, but a capitalist system is incapable of doing it because there is no profit to be made. Only a system that doesn’t need profit to survive could achieve it.

              • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                3·
                3 months ago

                From as far back as I can remember, I wanted to know what was out there. The impossibly vast distances of space and the elusiveness of the stars was almost maddening to me even as a child. I wanted to explore them or at least know that someone could reach them and tell me what there is to see.

                When “humanity fuck yeah” and space Manifest Destiny brainworms ideology took over most contemporary future speculation in the western world, I checked out. It’s kind of telling that the only versions of aliens that the average techbro chuds can imagine are “bugs” or some sort of godlike terror entities, because the scariest thing imaginable is sharing space with another sapient life form, or worse, showing respect to one.

                it would be run at a constant loss unless it can somehow be made self sufficient

                The average “futurology” devotee handwaves all of that and just says “there are that many resources out there” and then thoughts terminate, leaving only a smug smile and thoughts of passive income from renting out their ZYBERTRUKKKs on Autopilot™ once the kinks are worked out.

                • ExotiqueMatter@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
                  3·
                  3 months ago

                  Same.

                  I hate how modern science fiction and futurism is just “the same capitalist hellhole we live in now but with lasers and stuff”. I hate how so many authors imagine that we’ll continue to have the same petty wars when the idea of a war in space become more and more absurd the more you think about it, the distances involved alone makes war on an interplanetary scale impossible.

                  It’s all so imprint with this extremely liberal idealism even academia isn’t speared. For example, I don’t know if you’ve heard of “grabby aliens”. It’s a completely serious and unironic proposal for a “solution” to the Fermi paradox, the author is a famous scientist, the same guy who proposed the “great filter” hypothesis. It supposes that alien civilizations start expending in the universe and taking over star systems at a large fraction of the speed of light and because of that if we could see aliens they would be here instead of us and that’s why we don’t see aliens. Even in this short TL;DR there is glaringly obvious problems. This theory imediately falls apart as soon as you start asking questions about those “grabby aliens”, which as you might have guessed are justified ans an assumption by the classic liberal "greed, competition and expansionism is natural "

                  The average “futurology” devotee handwaves all of that and just says “there are that many resources out there” and then thoughts terminate, leaving only a smug smile and thoughts of passive income from renting out their ZYBERTRUKKKs on Autopilot™ once the kinks are worked out.

                  Exactly, the capitalism brainrot is deep with those types. The epic space colony must be handled by private companies to them, even the dreams of cool futuristic space habitats must be milked for profit. Even the few ones who have a more grounded view of how we could create industries and permanents outposts don’t escape the mind virus. I found a youtube channel all about creating a spaceport and permanent bases on the moon a few days ago, and his plan to develop it is unironically space tourism for assholes billionaires and other private investments.

    • tripartitegraph [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      24·
      3 months ago

      I’m gonna assume it’s about Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, which is about social game-theory, sort of. There are some weird paradoxes when you get into the mathematics of voting systems. Arrow’s Theorem makes a few reasonable assumptions about a ranked-choice voting system, and shows that a third candidate will always spoil the results between the other two. In other words, adding in Jill Stein would change how Kamala and Trump are ranked in relation to each other (in a ranked-choice voting system).

      • The_sleepy_woke_dialectic [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        21·
        3 months ago

        Probably one of the top ten misused bits of math in the world. It relies on some questionable assumptions about voting behavior, several voting systems do not apply, and even if this was 100% true, getting to 99.99% confidence accuracy in your voting system would still be possible. None of that is mentioned in any of the pop science clickbait videos about it however.

        • Hexboare [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          3 months ago

          bullshit math wizardry are they pulling out of their ass to argue that the exact ranking of each individual candidate

          If you’re voting in an election with ten candidates, but you only like two of them and equally despise the other eight, the “maths impossibility” arises because you’ll have to put a candidate you hate third

            • Hexboare [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              4·
              3 months ago

              Yes, in Australian Senate elections you only need to rank at least 6 parties above the line or at least 12 individual candidates below the line on the long ballot paper

              In practice you might rank all ~100 candidates to try and avoid a couple candidates you hate the most

        • tripartitegraph [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          4·
          3 months ago

          I mean, you’re making a political argument, and one I don’t disagree with. But the point of the theorem is about an idealized voting mechanism, absent ideology. There’s absolutely arguments to be made about the usefulness of studying things like pure math, and I’m sympathetic to some of them, but even so, I think it’s important to know how the system we use to implement democracy actually functions.
          I think also the title is just pure clickbait, never take a youtuber at their word.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      20·
      3 months ago

      It means the adults in the room are making the hard decisions and get shit done in a way you mere ignorant masses can’t possibly understand. smuglord

    • AstroStelar [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      Ranked-choice voting probably wouldn’t do much. Australia has ranked-choice voting, and their political landscape isn’t much different from the UK or Canada, with two status quo parties dominating everything (Labour and Liberal+National), only now you have smaller parties and independents they have to deal with sometimes.

      Maybe that’s because it still has single-member constituencies, which really hurt electoral diversity. The House uses single-member constituencies, and only 12 percent of seats belong to third parties. Meanwhile the Australian Senate also uses ranked-choice voting, but with the nationwide vote share for seat allocation , and there third parties have 30% of seats, with mainly the Green Party benefitting.

    • lil_tank [any, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Isn’t it because ranked choice is less accurate than individual notation? Like, with ranked you have to pick a first one while if you go even further you can give the possibility to rate everyone 0 and have the election restarted with a new roster if nobody has the average score

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      14·
      3 months ago

      Brilliant dot org? The fuck?

      That the same kind of masturbatory self-labeling that made Reddit New Atheists try to call themselves “brights” until everyone else mocked them for it too much?

          • Tomorrow_Farewell [any, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            5·
            3 months ago

            Rationalism has a specific meaning, but yeah, I’m not really sure why anybody would consider themselves rationalists in the sense of claiming that there is no way of studying the world other than rationalist ones (as opposed to, for example, empirical studies).

            • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
              5·
              3 months ago

              Rationalism has a specific meaning

              If that had an original specific meaning outside of billionaire-financed “LessWrong” jackoffs like Big Yud and his Harry Potter fanfic-based cult, that specific meaning’s been lost for some time now in contemporary use.