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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Another dumb take from Yud on twitter (xcancel.com):
How to fix democracy: remove voting. Brilliant!
Self declared expert understander yud misunderstanding something is great. Self declared expert understander yud using known misunderstanding generator chatgpt is the cherry on top.
Sounds like he’s been huffing too much of whatever the neoreactionaries offgas. Seems to be the inevitable end result of a certain kind of techbro refusing to learn from history, and imagining themselves to be some sort of future grand vizier in the new regime…
I’m seriously wondering how much of yud’s most recent crap is an attempt to grift for thiel money and right-wing attention by poorly imitating Yarvin
remember that he was on the Thiel gravy train then they broke over Trump. Now it's Vitalik Buterin and Ben Delo from the crypto contingent.
It makes sense that he would want back on the only grift train that ever treated him so well. Post-Trump/Vance Thielworld is likely to be a particularly sad place, though.
Hey, we now know that you can even become a VP pick if you grift hard enough, there are real prizes to be won now
Serves indefinitely? Not even 8 or 16 year terms but indefinitely?? Surely the US supreme court is proof of why this is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
What does "seizing spoils of the executive branch" even mean here?
fuck, I went into the xcancel link to see if he explains that or any of this other nonsense, and of course yud’s replies only succeeded in making my soul hurt:
and someone else points out that a parliamentary republic isn’t an electoral system and he just flatly doesn’t get it:
Here it sounds like he is criticising the parliamentary system were the legislative elects the executive instead of direct election of the executive. Of course both in parliamentary and presidential (and combined) systems a number of voting systems are used. The US famously does not use FPTP for presidential elections, but instead uses an electoral college.
So to be very charitable, he means a parliamentary system where it's hard to depose the executive. I don't think any parliamentary system uses 60 % (presumably of votes or seats in parliament) to depose a cabinet leader, mostly because once you have 50% aligned the cabinet leader you presumably have an opposition leader with a potential majority. So 60% is stupid.
If you want a combined system where parliament appoints but can't depose, Suriname is the place to be. Though of course they appoint their president for a term, not indefinitely. Because that's stupid.
To sum up: stupid ideas, expressed unclearly. Maybe he should have gone to high school.
Which is objectively worse, but apparently Yud thinks it's better than FPTP? Since FPTP is "the worst".
It means that Yudkowsky remains a terrible writer. He really just wanted to say "seizing [control of] the executive branch", but couldn't resist adding some ornamentation.
less charitably, it seems he might mean to say "their job is to do their job, not to get rewarded because of position", i.e. pushing the view that he thinks parliamentary bodies are just there for the high life and rewards
and while I understand that this is the type of "what did he actually mean?" that you might get from highschool poetry analyses, it is also the kind of thing that eliyuzza NotEvenWrong yud[0] seems to do pretty frequently in his portrayals
[0] - meant to be read in the thickest uk-chav accent of your choice
The UK had a parliamentary election using First-Past-The-Post two months ago. Good grief.
'I'm going to invent a new government system!'
'New system or just monarchy with extra steps?'
E: "I could eat a bowl full of paper and vomit a better electoral system than that." and "If you have an alignment plan I can't shoot down in 120 seconds, let's hear it.", Yudkowsky's overestimation of his own abilities is high this week.
When pressed about the kind of system he could invent, he says STAR voting.
Has anyone asked Mark Frohnmayer if he also used the eating a bowl full of paper and vomiting technique when creating the STAR system?
I could invent a state of the art cryptographic hashing function after half a litre of vodka with my hands tied behind my back. Coincidentally the algorithm I'd independently invent from first principles would happen to be exactly the same as BLAKE3 so instead of me having to explain it, you can just skim the Wikipedia page ~~like I did~~.
Well there is something to be said for just trying to make a new system yourself, as a hobby/thought experiment. So I'm not totally opposed to creating something that already exists. It is just weird he thinks he has something new and shining and good here, and not babbies first attempt at creating a voting system. (insert 'wow things are complicated' xkcd here).
Him not realizing (or not caring) about him being completely unoriginal while thinking he is hot shit is funny though. Shit having a certain amount of sycophants must suck so much, as it removes any ability to truly judge if you are being dumb or not, as there will always be a revolving door of those who kiss your ass.
It's not that he invented anything, even something that was already invented. He claimed he could invent a new system if he wanted to and when asked to deliver, just namedropped an existing system.
Also a subjectively bad one at that—given his america-brained position on wanting to maintain a single executive not that suprising but:
I think it's less america-brained and more just straight up cryptomonarchist.
For what it's worth STAR looks like something Yud wishes he would design, or would design if he could. A complicated system that assumes a highly informed electorate and allows for counterintuitive victory conditions sounds exactly like something appealing to him.
lol ow sorry, yeah that is even worse.
Love that even the bullshit word salad machine gets confused by Yud's level of bullshit word salad.
I've been going back and forth whether to dig deeper into this comment (I learned about the STAR system from downcomments, always nice to learn new hipster voting systems I guess). But I wonder if this is a cult leader move - state something obviously dumb, then sort your followers by how loyal they are in endorsing it.
Voting systems and government systems tend to be nerd snipe territory, especially for the kind of person who is obsessed with finding the right technical solution to social problems, so Yud being so obviously, obliviously not even wrong here is a bit puzzling.
AT LEAST IT'S A REPUBLIC NOT A, TFU, DEMOCRACY
sorry I just love how those people cannot understand literal primary school level political science
It's fractally wrong and bonkers even by Yud tweet standards.
I'll charitably assume based on this he just means proportional representation in general. Specifically he seems to be thinking of a party list type method, but other proportional electoral systems exist and some of them like D'Hondt and various STV methods do involve voting for individuals and not just parties.
The alliances are often thought of as a feature, but it's also a valid, if subjective, criticism. Not sure what he means by "frequently falling governments", though. The UK uses FPTP and their PMs seem to resign quite regularly.
Why 60%? Why not 50% or 70% or two thirds? Approval of whom, the parliament or the population? Would this be approval in the sense of approval voting where you can express approval for multiple candidates or in the sense of the candidate being the voter's first choice à la FPTP? What does the role of a ~~dictator~~ Chief Executive involve? Would it be analogous to something like POTUS, or perhaps PM of the UK or maybe some other country?
Good news! In most parliamentary republics that is already the main job of the parliament, at least on paper. If you want to start nitpicking the "on paper" part, you might want to elaborate on how your system would prevent this kind of abuse.
Yea there's a long historical tradition of states led by an indefinitely serving chief executive, who would pass the office to his chosen successor. A different candidate winning the supermajority approval has typically been seen as the exception rather than the rule under such systems, but notable exceptions to this exist. One in 1776 saw a change of Chief Executive in some British overseas colonies, another one in late 18th century France ended the dynasty of their Chief Executive, and a later one in 1917 had the Russian Chief Executive Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov lose the office to a firebrand progressive leader.
Now to be fair to ChatGPT, it seems that even the famed genius polymath Eliezer Yudkowsky failed to understand his own question.
I'm almost surprised Yud is so clueless about election systems.
He's (lol) supposedly super into math and game theory so the failure mode I expected was for him to come up with some byzantine time-independent voting method that minimizes acausal spoiler effect at the cost of condorcet criterion or whatever. Or rather, I would have expected him to claim he's working on such a thing and throwing all these buzzwords around. Like in MOR where he knows enough advanced science words to at least sound like he knows physics beyond high school level.
Now I have to update my priors to take into account that he barely knows what an electoral system is. It's a bit like if the otherwise dumb guy who still seems a huge military nerd suddenly said "the only assault gun worse than the SA80 is the .223". For once you'd expect him to know enough to make a dumb hot take instead of just spouting gibberish but no.
It’s kind of the inverse of a sports fan that is into sports because of the stats. He’s into the stats for the magical thinking
Famously: below 60% approval!
Yud definitely sided with Mr. House