I’m Anthony and I’m a computer scientist and a Luddite.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • @t3rmit3@beehaw.org That’d be such a great thing to see in data. I was alluding more to the theory of voting systems, like rational choice theory. The setup in those is something like you have a set of people, and there’s a choice they need to make collectively. Each person can have a different preference about what the choice should be. Arrow’s impossibility theorem states, roughly, that in most cases no matter what system you use to take account of the people’s preferences and make the final choice, at least one person’s preferences will be violated (they won’t like the choice).

    What I was imagining was, in the same setup, everybody modifies their preferences based on what they think the other people’s preferences are. So now the choice isn’t being made based on their preferences, it’s being made on the modification of their preferences. Arrow’s impossibility theorem still holds, so no matter how the final choice is made some people will still be unhappy with it. But, I think it’s possible that even more people will be unhappy than if they’d just stuck with their original preferences. Or, maybe the people who’d already have been unhappy are even more unhappy. I’d have to actually sit down and work it out though, which I haven’t.

    The example of your dad talking himself out of voting for Buttigieg because he thinks other people won’t vote for Buttigieg is exactly the kind of case I was thinking of! Except I was thinking more theoretically than data-wise. It’d be great to see data on it too, for sure.





  • Right! And the US Democratic party seems to be obsessed with means testing, so that many times when there is government assistance available people who need it are forced to subject themselves to intrusive surveillance, frequent paperwork and sometimes shifting requirements, etc. It’s rare (in my experience) to hear anyone critique this state of affairs, let alone make substantive moves to change it.





  • @return2ozma@lemmy.world One way to think about “the left” is that it values freedom from domination. Who in the US is fighting to reduce the level of domination we experience in important areas of life (health care, education, food, housing to name a few)? Should we really have to pay and put ourselves into debt–thereby becoming dominated–to go to school, live somewhere, or maintain our health? Even the so-called left in the US supports this arrangement generally; at best they fight over the details, not the structure itself.



  • @RacerX@lemm.ee In 1995 I worked at a company with several active web sites. Early days of the web, very important to the company. I was hired to take care of the hardware and software running the existing web sites and help in developing new ones.

    One day I walked into my office, which had the production web server in it, carrying a Diet Coke (I was young and inexperienced). I opened the Diet Coke and it spewed an epic fountain right onto the production server. It was as if that server had a gravitational pull that drew all liquid towards it. I panicked and started unplugging every cable in sight, thinking this was better than risking a hardware-destroying short.

    Needless to say the web sites were down for awhile. I believe I managed to save the hardware from myself though.