Month: April 2016

The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality | Quanta Magazine

Source: The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality | Quanta Magazine

The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman believes that evolution and quantum mechanics conspire to make objective reality an illusion.

it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we also have to take it literally

this is a far more radical claim about the nature of reality

The secret rules of the internet | The Verge

Source: The secret rules of the internet | The Verge

The murky history of moderation, and how it’s shaping the future of free speech.

Their stories reveal how the boundaries of free speech were drawn during a period of explosive growth for a high-stakes public domain, one that did not exist for most of human history. As law professor Jeffrey Rosen first said many years ago of Facebook, these platforms have “more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president.”

However, these debates (unlike say, congressional hearings), are shielded from public view, as both corporate and civil society participants remain nearly silent about the deliberations. Without greater transparency, users, consumers — the public at large — are ill-equipped to understand exactly how platforms work and how their own speech is being regulated and why. This means that the most basic tools of accountability and governance — public and legal pressure — simply don’t exist.

American Voting Is Not Rigged

RE: 2016: The Year Americans Found Out Their Elections Are Rigged | Zero Hedge

“We The People” don’t choose our presidents; they are hand-picked by a powerful group of political party insiders – parties that have long since sold out to the highest bidders.

 

I disagree.

The difference between direct election and indirect election only matters when they differ in the selection.

The essential function of the people working for the parties is to get candidates elected, which includes ensuring that *electable* candidates get nominated to the ticket.

The people whining about the system are almost exclusively those who think the system will go against their preferred candidate. Instead of whining about the whole system, they’d do better to either make a convincing argument that the system is worse for *everyone* (or at least for a majority of the citizenry), or arguing *to* the system that their candidate is in fact the best choice (i.e. “is the most electable”).

— DEMOCRAT SIDE

What the Hell Are Superdelegates? | Full Frontal with Samantha Bee | TBS
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtuWiHYmr4U

This is *great* for Democrats because it lets people with experience correctly determining “who can win an election and how?” add that wisdom to voters’ policy preferences as embodied by their preferred candidates. For now, I trust the superdelegates to eventually back the candidate most likely to win the national election. That is highly correlated with the popular primary voting, but isn’t exactly the same because of the electoral college; the states that will influence the superdelegates’ backing are the swing/purple states:
FL, PA, OH, NC, VA, WI, CO, IA, NV, NH
Clinton handily won over Sanders in FL, OH, NC, VA – the larger swing states with more importance to an eventual electoral victory. Sanders will have to show some promising polling figures between him and the expected Republican nominee in those states if he expects superdelegate support. With Clinton, Trump, and Cruz all with >50% negative favorability ratings, that isn’t unthinkable.
– https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/favorable_unfavorable.html
– https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-really-unpopular-with-general-election-voters/

— REPUBLICAN SIDE

Clearly, the Republican party does not believe that Trump is electable. They probably don’t think Cruz is either. But backing Cruz is a better long-term plan than backing Trump.
– https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/the-gop-should-unite-behind-cruz/478149/

— THE MEDIA

Most media just wants viewership and they’re willing to spin the facts to pitch a better story/narrative. Trump as “the political outsider underdog who is fighting for every win” is a more enticing narrative than Trump as “the billionaire winning easily”. Media coverage of the Democrat side is instead split *by* audience. The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore is clearly pitching pro-Sanders and has had Sanders on a few times. More establishment media with older, whiter audiences (e.g. CNN) are playing up Hilary instead.

This is not a break in some illusion of choice. This is a symptom of the delusion that an individual’s choice matters – the delusion that we should all be able to vote for our most preferred, least compromising candidate *and* that candidate should have the possibility of being elected even if 60% of our fellow citizens disagree.