Re: [FRIAM] words for Nick

[thompnickson2]

So, we add to Dave's list, as follows.

Liberal; was, "laissez-faire, free market"; is now, "humanist, socialist". 

Conservative: was "royalist, authoritarian;  is now, "fascist, oligarchic."


Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
thompnicks...@gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-Original Message-
From: Friam  On Behalf Of Russell Standish
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2020 8:27 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] words for Nick

On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 11:24:20AM -0400, Eric Charles wrote:
> "Awesome" is one of my favorites. Now used to indicate general 
> goodness.  Not generally used in situations where one say "i was in awe".
> 
> "Liberal" and "conservative" are two of my least favorite.  Liberal 
> was about promoting freedom.  Conservative was about retaining past 
> ways. Note that those are clearly orthogonal issues in their original 
> usage,  and now we act like they are opposites,  which is terrible.

And just as bizarrely, in Australia they are synonyms. The Liberal party is
the conservative party.


-- 


Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
  http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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Re: [FRIAM] words for Nick

[Russell Standish]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 11:24:20AM -0400, Eric Charles wrote:
> "Awesome" is one of my favorites. Now used to indicate general goodness.  Not
> generally used in situations where one say "i was in awe". 
> 
> "Liberal" and "conservative" are two of my least favorite.  Liberal was about
> promoting freedom.  Conservative was about retaining past ways. Note that 
> those
> are clearly orthogonal issues in their original usage,  and now we act like
> they are opposites,  which is terrible.  

And just as bizarrely, in Australia they are synonyms. The Liberal
party is the conservative party.


-- 


Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
  http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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Re: [FRIAM] Myth of the Given

[Eric Charles]

---You can't take "as if P" seriously without taking P seriously.---

It's not what I'm taking seriously, though, right? I don't doubt that the
authors in question take textual interpretation seriously (and come from a
tradition of taking textual interpretation seriously). I also don't doubt
that the methods they developed in that context can provide insights in
other contexts. But that doesn't make those other contexts into texts.

(See also how today's discussion about applying poker to understand
political and business situations doesn't mean those situations *are*
poker.)



On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 12:07 PM glen∉ℂ  wrote:

> That's ridiculous! >8^D You can't take "as if P" seriously without taking
> P seriously. What you'll end up with are spies and moles, bad faith actors,
> pretending to argue but really just building strawmen and hiding in the
> corners of the conversation trying to sabotage any good faith attempts to
> find the truth.
>
>
> On 8/21/20 8:28 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
> > A totally sensible position: "We can treat just about anything /_as if_/
> it is text, and given the sophistication of our ability to deal with text,
> that should lead to some insights."
> >
> > A totally bullshit position that no one should ever have tolerated for a
> minute: "Everything is text."
>
>
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Re: [FRIAM] Unintended effects of intentional systems

[Eric Charles]

Delayed continuing:
The example of the three kids with the magnifying glass demonstrates a
slippage that happens sometimes in "point of view" talk. The reason for
playing with the magnifying glass is different for each child, and what
each child thinks of as "the reason" the other two see as side effects. One
could thus say that what is a reason and what is a side effect depends on
your point of view, and that makes the whole thing seem a bit wishy-washy
and "subjective". But it isn't, because we are not, at any point, trying to
say that anything is inherently "the reason" or inherently "a side effect."
What we are trying to do is point out that each child has an objective,
verifiably reason for picking the magnifying glass; they objectively,
verifiably did not select it for those other reasons. For the sake of
simplifying the example, we assumed they could provide accurate verbal
reports, but the ultimate proof would be found by decoupling the naturally
co-occuring features of the toy.

Per Glen's question: We can provide magnification with a cell phone. We can
use multiple lenses to create a device that focuses rays to heat surfaces
and which magnifies without inverting the image. We can provide
fire-starting devices of all sorts. So, the three functions co-occur in the
particular device we started with, but it is certainly possible to decouple
them.

The magnifying glass example isn't very "FRIAM" though. how about:
We are observing a critter living in the forest. The critter apperars to
looking for things to eat around dawn and dusk. There are leaves and twigs
and berries and rocks and dirt and grass. Even with its dichromatic vision,
there are a lot of colors and smells. The various types of things come in
lots of different sizes. Obviously those variables are correlated to
various extents.

Observing over an extended period, we see that the creature eat mostly
long, thin, light green leaves, that (to us) have a mildly sweet fragrance.
We become interested in why the organism does that, and start introducing
all sorts of new leaves into the environment:
* We take the current target leaves and coat them in a few different types
of oils to *alter the smell*.
* We find a variety of long, *wide*, light green leaves with the same
fragrance and introduce them to the environment.
* We find a variety of *short*, thin, light green leaves with the same
fragrance and introduce them to the environment.
* We find varieties of long, thin, mildly fragrant leaves of *a few
different colors* (dark green, yellowish, etc.) and introduce them to the
environment.

We find that the critter's eating pattern is not affected by the smell,
eats the wide leaves, but does not eat the short leaves or the differently
colored leaves. (By the way, we can do separate experiments if you want to
verify that the critters can distinguish all the variables in play, that's
pretty easy, it is just an extra step.) So, by altering the environment to
include objects not normally present, we have learned something about what
the organism *wants* to eat, which we could not have learned without such
manipulations. It wants to eat long green leaves, regardless of smell or
width.

We could obviously get more fine grained in our manipulations, and
introduce other variables as appropriate. (There may yet be an extreme at
which the organism does care how long or short the leaves are, but we have
at least confirmed a lack of caring within the range tested.)

One might presume that those preferences arose as the result of natural
selection, because the leaves that meet that criterion in this critter's
ancestral environment provided an advantage if eaten preferentially.  There
are several caveats, however:
1) We cannot rule out that those preferences arose due to genetic drift
(i.e., that it provided no advantage and no disadvantage, but became
fixated due to chance).

2) If it was selected for, we cannot be certain that the selective pressure
is still operating today.

To get at these issues, we could perform a *different* set of experiments,
manipulating the food the animals were eating in various ways and seeing
how that affected their success in life and in reproduction. IF we found
that animals eating other leaves found in their native environment did
worse, THEN we would have evidence for retracting the caveates above.

Continuing the caveats:
3) We would definitely not have evidence that the preference-attunement
system would provide advantage in any other environment that had different
leaves present, because we almost always find that you can develop
"super-stimuli" that the organism prefers over the actually-advantageous
thing. For example, we might find that, given the choice, the organism
would preferentially eat an even thinner variety of leaves, even if those
leaves provided almost no nutritional value, and the critters who ate those
even-thinner leaves never successfully reproduced. (In general terms, we
would expect to be able to 

Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[Steve Smith]

On 8/21/20 9:58 AM, glen∉ℂ wrote:
> Hm. I want to confirm that this post is commentary and you're not
> expecting a response. 
I'm always *hoping for* responses, but don't usually expect that my
style or even content is something others care to or feel able to
respond to.  
> But maybe it's push-back for me to be *more* explicit about the
> problem? Just in case, I'll throw more words/gestures at it.
Yes, I definitely meant to invite that if not *expect* it.   And I
appreciate it.
> The problem is that we expect our representation to be, somehow,
> faithful/accurate. We can see this in microcosm with the false
> equivalence between household budgets and national economies (or in
> comparing the USPS to a corporation, or in approval rates for our
> representative vs Congress as a whole, or in thousands of other
> individual vs collective contexts).
And I take this to be strongly related with your issue with metaphor... 
metaphors can be used thoughtfully to help explain or understand one
system in terms of another, but they can also be used to *generate* or
*exploit* conflations for various purposes misaligned with understanding
or explanation. 
> As I've tried to exhibit re: guns, I am unabashedly two-faced.
> Personally, I think anyone ought to be able to destroy the world.
> Politically, socially, that's madness and we ought to ban handguns
> entirely.
I appreciate this span.   I experience it more *generally* in the sense
that my extreme awareness of Libertarian ideals unto Anarchism is that I
can do anything I *can*.   But as you imply (I think), I *choose* to
live within the context of a culture where I have to constrain many of
the things I *could* do, as a participant in shaping the society/world I
want to live in.   I *want* to live in a world where there are very few
people suffering acutely from any of the implied needs in what I've
referred to as neo-Maslowian...    I don't want to be deluded into
thinking that my simple acts of commission/omission actually directly
*cause* the world to be a better place, but I also think it is a
delusion that I can operate acutely *counter* to the ways of the world I
want to live in and still expect it to manifest in that way.  In your
example, I believe that by owning, carrying, brandishing firearms I help
to create a world where my only sense of security is likely to come from
owning, carrying, and brandishing more and better firearms.  So I don't
and live with the paradox that *others* do choose that path, and thereby
have the opportunity to impress-by-force on me and mine with those in
ways that might be blunted if *I* chose their path as well.   My house
could become the sight of a  national news-headline-worthy firefight
with friends, neighbors, criminals, law enforcement, military, etc...
depending on the scenario.
> As the Carter paper on Collective (Telic) Virtue Epistemology tries to
> tease out, fidelity/accuracy in representation is a huge problem, one
> exhibited across all scales and domains (tech included). Clinton
> famously demonstrated *she* understands the difference when she
> expressed that she has different private vs public positions about
> Wall Street. Of course! We all should have individual vs. social
> distinctions. The problem is the map (or lack thereof) between them.
>
> We can even use the virus and the fact that personal psyches have
> trouble with large numbers, exponential growth and statistics. E.g.
> that everyone was surprised by how "wrong" the polls were about
> Clinton being X% likely to win.
>
> Any tool designed to accurately hone in on that tiny little wiggle in
> the popular vote will continue this false equivalence between
> individual and collective, increasing the us-vs-them tribalism that
> produced Trump's win.
And in some way perhaps magnify it, or make it something the likes of
Parscale/Bannon could exploit into a (slim/faux but qualitatively
signifcant) win.
> Voting and polling are simply symptoms. I'd welcome tools that target
> the disease rather than making it worse. In the meantime, I'm with
> Nick. Transparency means paper ballots and some human connection to
> the tabulation and aggregation process. If Jon thinks that position
> helps him understand how Republicans win elections, then it's useful
> to go into a little more detail about the actual problem like I'm
> trying to do, here.

And so, explicitly, can you elaborate yet more on this abstraction? 
What I think you introduce (well) above is the conflation between the
personal/collective, private/public conceptions.  I could (as I often
do) riff on *my* apprehension of what that looks like or how it goes
wrong, but I would welcome your's and other's thoughts on this.  In
particular I'm interested on "just what is it" we are trying to achieve
with our representative democracy and how well are we and where might
there be room for improvement?

Mary and I have been discussing the details of how (mechanically) we
will participate in this November 

Re: [FRIAM] Myth of the Given

[glen∉ℂ]

That's ridiculous! >8^D You can't take "as if P" seriously without taking P 
seriously. What you'll end up with are spies and moles, bad faith actors, pretending to 
argue but really just building strawmen and hiding in the corners of the conversation trying 
to sabotage any good faith attempts to find the truth.


On 8/21/20 8:28 AM, Eric Charles wrote:

A totally sensible position: "We can treat just about anything /_as if_/ it is text, 
and given the sophistication of our ability to deal with text,  that should lead to some 
insights."

A totally bullshit position that no one should ever have tolerated for a minute: 
"Everything is text."



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Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[glen∉ℂ]

Hm. I want to confirm that this post is commentary and you're not expecting a 
response. But maybe it's push-back for me to be *more* explicit about the 
problem? Just in case, I'll throw more words/gestures at it.

The problem is that we expect our representation to be, somehow, 
faithful/accurate. We can see this in microcosm with the false equivalence 
between household budgets and national economies (or in comparing the USPS to a 
corporation, or in approval rates for our representative vs Congress as a 
whole, or in thousands of other individual vs collective contexts). As I've 
tried to exhibit re: guns, I am unabashedly two-faced. Personally, I think 
anyone ought to be able to destroy the world. Politically, socially, that's 
madness and we ought to ban handguns entirely. As the Carter paper on 
Collective (Telic) Virtue Epistemology tries to tease out, fidelity/accuracy in 
representation is a huge problem, one exhibited across all scales and domains 
(tech included). Clinton famously demonstrated *she* understands the difference 
when she expressed that she has different private vs public positions about 
Wall Street. Of course! We all should have individual vs. social distinctions. 
The problem is the map (or lack thereof) between them.

We can even use the virus and the fact that personal psyches have trouble with large 
numbers, exponential growth and statistics. E.g. that everyone was surprised by how 
"wrong" the polls were about Clinton being X% likely to win.

Any tool designed to accurately hone in on that tiny little wiggle in the 
popular vote will continue this false equivalence between individual and 
collective, increasing the us-vs-them tribalism that produced Trump's win.

Voting and polling are simply symptoms. I'd welcome tools that target the 
disease rather than making it worse. In the meantime, I'm with Nick. 
Transparency means paper ballots and some human connection to the tabulation 
and aggregation process. If Jon thinks that position helps him understand how 
Republicans win elections, then it's useful to go into a little more detail 
about the actual problem like I'm trying to do, here.



On 8/21/20 8:20 AM, Steve Smith wrote:

Glen -

I know you tried to be explicit about what the core problems are, and I
am aligned with what you have gestured at and I don't expect you to have
been complete or detailed in this type of forum on such a huge subject.
Huge in depth, breadth, and perhaps more critical, import.  I am glad
you are carrying that torch to keep the playing/working field
illuminated well.

On the other hand, I *do* think the mechanisms involved in maintaining
coherence, etc.  must be considered and acted upon as possible/necessary
as well.  In the idiom of the moment, it isn't enough to declare that
the Postal Service is sacred and must be allowed/supported to be robust,
etc... but the staffing policies, the maintenance of physical mailboxes
and delivery trucks and sorting machines must also be attended to to
achieve the former.  To the extent that the latter is where the former
are encoded, I am sympathetic with those who are eager to "get to work"
on the specific mechanisms which *can* be worked on while the
abstractions of the moment feel hard/impossible to address.

I think this is an example of one of our ongoing threads of conversation
here... not just about the *spectrum* of concrete<->abstract, but the
need to keep the distinction in our awareness and to evaluate the
tensions between them and work them against (or more to the point, with)
one another.

My experience with systems analysis, engineering, development seem
relevant and mirrors what I suspect many here also use as their lens.
Networked Digital Computing is our hammer, so the aspects of our
Democracy which has purchase for a hammer becomes our nail.

I suspect that your own steeping in working on modeling biological
systems and using bio-inspired idioms for modeling non biological
systems gives you a better perspective on this tension than some of us
might have.   My own limited understanding of such things suggests that
this tension between mechanism/goal and intrinsic/extrinsic is key, and
I am hoping that the tension between Jon's focus (at this moment) on
mechanism/intrinsic (to the voting system) and your more big-picture
awareness of the constraints/goals of human endeavor is precisely the
kind of tension that allows our whole system to pivot from something
that might have worked (barely, sortof, for many/some of us) in the past
to something which can continue to meet the whole level of needs in some
as-yet-unspecified new-Maslowian hierarchy or complex.

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Re: [FRIAM] Myth of the Given

[jon zingale]

I think that it is interesting that the lecturer introduces this position as
an extension of structuralism. Where do you stand with the earlier
assertion: "As analytic philosophers might prefer to put it, thought and
language are capable of determining things only up to isomorphism". Do you
also feel that this position is also totally bullshit?



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Re: [FRIAM] Myth of the Given

[Eric Charles]

A totally sensible position: "We can treat just about anything *as if* it
is text, and given the sophistication of our ability to deal with text,
that should lead to some insights."

A totally bullshit position that no one should ever have tolerated for a
minute: "Everything is text."

On Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 12:01 AM jon zingale  wrote:

> With respect to Foucault, I wish to express gratitude to him for his
> introduction to 'Madness and Civilization'[⛵]. He gives a brief and
> engaging account of how the treatment of madmen in European society
> underwent a notable inversion, and to my unkeen eye, one paralleled in
> both the treatment of garbage and conception of national parks in the
> west. Foucault recounts:
>
> "Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with
> their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners
> because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then "knew," had an affinity
> for each other. Thus, "Ships of Fools" crisscrossed the seas and canals
> of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them
> found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the
> isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse,
> or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which
> had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take
> pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign
> lunatics would dock at their harbors."
>
> In other words, Europe's madmen were relegated to a life of perpetual
> *outside*. But soon for polite Renaissance society, this quickly became
> a nuisance, and leper colonies slowly came to replace their lepers with
> madmen. Inside became the new outside. Similarly, it no longer made sense
> to throw one's slop and filth from the window and into the streets below.
> Comically, Europe took a little longer (the 1800s), than with their
> madmen, to realize that *outside* was just no good[♨]. A paradigm shift
> in the west focused on designating landfills to *contain* and cover
> society's waste. Finally, as the compact manifold, we call Earth bore for
> us no more wilderness to discover, her denizens quickly realized their
> need for it. Special *inside* outsides came to be designated as national
> parks, an outside with an entrance fee, spaces where one pays not to
> re-enter society, but to leave it.
>
> [⛵]
>
> https://monoskop.org/images/1/14/Foucault_Michel_Madness_and_Civilization_A_History_of_Insanity_in_the_Age_of_Reason.pdf
>
> [♨]
> https://www.qmul.ac.uk/geog/research/research-projects/historiclandfill/
>
>
>
> --
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Re: [FRIAM] words for Nick

[Eric Charles]

"Awesome" is one of my favorites. Now used to indicate general goodness.
Not generally used in situations where one say "i was in awe".

"Liberal" and "conservative" are two of my least favorite.  Liberal was
about promoting freedom.  Conservative was about retaining past ways. Note
that those are clearly orthogonal issues in their original usage,  and now
we act like they are opposites,  which is terrible.

On Thu, Aug 20, 2020, 8:38 PM  wrote:

> Dave,
>
> Great list.   Here is my favorite to add:
>
> Incredible: now is "good", "very good"; was: "unsubstantiated",
> "suspect".
> Ditto unbelievable.
>
> See also adverbial forms, incredibly and unbelievably which have come to
> mean "very".
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
> thompnicks...@gmail.com
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam  On Behalf Of Prof David West
> Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2020 5:15 PM
> To: friam@redfish.com
> Subject: [FRIAM] words for Nick
>
> Wit — now: fun, funny, humorous; then: clever, apt humor,
> intelligence, acumen, thinker
>
> Fizzle — now: to fail, failure; then: to fart quietly
>
> Buxom — now: large-breasted; then: compliant or obedient
>
> Fantastic — now: unbelievable, superlative, excellent; then: based on
> fantasy or imagination, of fantasy
>
> Girl — now: young female; then: young person of any gender
>
> Backlog — now: pending work; then: largest log (literally!)
>
> Prestigious — now: honored; then: trickery, illusion, conjuring
>
> Bully — now: to be cruel, insulting, or threatening; then: a
> sweetheart, a fine chap
>
> Cute — now: attractive; then: clever, shrewd
>
> Meat — now: animal flesh for food; then: all foods
>
> Myriad — now: a great number; then: referred to the number 10,000 in
> ancient Greece
>
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Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

I know you tried to be explicit about what the core problems are, and I
am aligned with what you have gestured at and I don't expect you to have
been complete or detailed in this type of forum on such a huge subject. 
Huge in depth, breadth, and perhaps more critical, import.  I am glad
you are carrying that torch to keep the playing/working field
illuminated well.

On the other hand, I *do* think the mechanisms involved in maintaining
coherence, etc.  must be considered and acted upon as possible/necessary
as well.  In the idiom of the moment, it isn't enough to declare that
the Postal Service is sacred and must be allowed/supported to be robust,
etc... but the staffing policies, the maintenance of physical mailboxes
and delivery trucks and sorting machines must also be attended to to
achieve the former.  To the extent that the latter is where the former
are encoded, I am sympathetic with those who are eager to "get to work"
on the specific mechanisms which *can* be worked on while the
abstractions of the moment feel hard/impossible to address.

I think this is an example of one of our ongoing threads of conversation
here... not just about the *spectrum* of concrete<->abstract, but the
need to keep the distinction in our awareness and to evaluate the
tensions between them and work them against (or more to the point, with)
one another.  

My experience with systems analysis, engineering, development seem
relevant and mirrors what I suspect many here also use as their lens. 
Networked Digital Computing is our hammer, so the aspects of our
Democracy which has purchase for a hammer becomes our nail. 

I suspect that your own steeping in working on modeling biological
systems and using bio-inspired idioms for modeling non biological
systems gives you a better perspective on this tension than some of us
might have.   My own limited understanding of such things suggests that
this tension between mechanism/goal and intrinsic/extrinsic is key, and
I am hoping that the tension between Jon's focus (at this moment) on
mechanism/intrinsic (to the voting system) and your more big-picture
awareness of the constraints/goals of human endeavor is precisely the
kind of tension that allows our whole system to pivot from something
that might have worked (barely, sortof, for many/some of us) in the past
to something which can continue to meet the whole level of needs in some
as-yet-unspecified new-Maslowian hierarchy or complex.

- Steve

> There are other trials beside absentee voting. It's largely
> irrelevant, though, as is the patent. My point was that this focus on
> "digital" voting will do more harm than good. Of course, everyone is
> free to do harm, accidentally or on purpose. My only objective was to
> point out why these efforts will be harmful if the core problems
> aren't addressed first.
>
> On 8/21/20 7:46 AM, jon zingale wrote:
>> Absentee voting is a technology ushered in during (for military) and
>> after
>> the civil war (for civilians). I would not say that this *Tool
>> doesn't solve
>> problems*. If I were to substitute *absentee voting* in for tools and
>> technology in your post, I am not sure how you distinguish absentee
>> voting
>> generally from a digital application option. If I side-stepped your
>> post, it
>> is mostly so that I could stay with the fire I had started.
>
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Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[glen∉ℂ]

There are other trials beside absentee voting. It's largely irrelevant, though, as is the 
patent. My point was that this focus on "digital" voting will do more harm than 
good. Of course, everyone is free to do harm, accidentally or on purpose. My only 
objective was to point out why these efforts will be harmful if the core problems aren't 
addressed first.

On 8/21/20 7:46 AM, jon zingale wrote:

Absentee voting is a technology ushered in during (for military) and after
the civil war (for civilians). I would not say that this *Tool doesn't solve
problems*. If I were to substitute *absentee voting* in for tools and
technology in your post, I am not sure how you distinguish absentee voting
generally from a digital application option. If I side-stepped your post, it
is mostly so that I could stay with the fire I had started.


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Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[jon zingale]

Absentee voting is a technology ushered in during (for military) and after
the civil war (for civilians). I would not say that this *Tool doesn't solve
problems*. If I were to substitute *absentee voting* in for tools and
technology in your post, I am not sure how you distinguish absentee voting
generally from a digital application option. If I side-stepped your post, it
is mostly so that I could stay with the fire I had started.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting_in_the_United_States



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Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[glen∉ℂ]

Nah. That's simply false and cleverly ignores my post entirely. Tools don't 
solve problems. The typical Republican approach of throwing money at some vague 
problem doesn't work. What does work is to identify the problem and develop 
candidate solutions to it using the extant tools. Resources devoted to your 
nonexistent tool will make the problem worse. And even if your tool did exist 
[⛧], it would make the problem worse.

The problem is our mechanism for representative government. That mechanism lenses in, magnifies, the wiggle 
and defocuses the "bases" to the periphery. You see it every day. Just yesterday, there was a 
segment on some TV show asking the panel about whether or not Harris as VP will help sway the 
"undecided" ... the "independent". Pffft. It's nonsense. Your tool will do that, enable 
that, magnify that, if the actual problem isn't addressed *first*.

And it's a very difficult problem to solve. So the more time we spend on 
distracting nonsense like alternative voting technology, the *less* time we 
spend working on the actual problem(s) -- the electoral college, 
first-past-the-post, informed citizenry, gerrymandering, etc. It's not zero 
sum, of course, but there are opportunity costs. The first thing to do when you 
find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. The USPS, vote fraud nonsense is 
more eshatological Trump disinformation designed to distract us dorks from the 
real problem(s) while the gamers continue their game.


[⛧] There are *many* exploratory alternative voting efforts going on all over 
the country, all of which exhibit a panoply of security flaws.

On 8/20/20 7:53 AM, jon zingale wrote:

To be clear, the challenge set before me was to sketch out an alternative
voting technology option. While liberating elections from a winner-takes-all
modality is also something I want, it relates to a mostly orthogonal
problem. Ranked-choice voting can be implemented for polling stations, phone
apps, and snail-mail alike. Sooner or later the technology I am advocating
for will be here, what it will be when it arrives is what I wish to direct
concern toward. Witnessing an endless procession of squandered opportunity
is what I find so abhorrent. If the first actionable steps are being taken,
great, we now have the opportunity to take others.



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