Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
A Twitterer tweets a challenging game-theory question:
The Twitter poll came out 58% blue and right-wing folks are screeching. Here is a bad take. The orange site has a thread where people are rephrasing the prompt in order to make it sound way worse, like giving everybody a gun and then magically making the guns not discharge.
I find it remarkable that not a single dipshit has correctly analyzed the problem. Suppose you are one of Arrow's dictators: your vote tips the scales regardless of which way you go. So, everybody else already voted and they are precisely 50% blue. Either you can vote blue and save everybody or vote red and kill 50% of voters. From that perspective, the pro-red folks are homicidally selfish.
Bonus sneer: since HN couldn't rephrase the problem without magic, let me have a chance. Consider: everybody has some seed food and some rainwater in a barrel. If 50% of people elect to plant their seeds and pool their rainwater in a reservoir then everybody survives; otherwise, only those who selfishly eat their own seed and drink their rainwater will survive. This is a basic referendum on whether we can work together to reduce economic costs and the supposedly-economically-minded conservatives are demonstrating that they would rather be hateful than thrifty.
I don't understand the relevance of Arrow's theorem. Why is your phrasing the correct way of analyzing the situation?
Arrow's dictators are the relevant voters. Suppose polls predict 40% blue, or respectively 60% blue; one should still vote blue as a matter of game theory, but their vote won't decide anything. I'm not going to invoke the Impossibility theorem, merely borrowing the definition of "dictator"; it's quite possible that the actual vote will not have any dictators, but we can force folks to think of the problem as something trolley-problem-shaped by explaining that there are circumstances where their choice will kill people.
If polls predict 40% blue you should not vote blue as a matter of game theory, because that is suicide.
No, and I'm not going to further endorse a myopic framing as "game theory". The analysis which focuses on individual survival is wrong. Kill the Austrian-school economist in your mind.
You're the one who mentioned "game theory" in the first place, I was just directly quoting you. My sentence was of the form "game theory doesn't say X", not "game theory does say Y". I added quotation marks to clarify.
My point here is that you can make whatever philosophical and ethical arguments about the situation you want, but none of game theory, Arrow's theorem, nor the concept of a dictator have any bearing on it. It is an ethics question rather than a mathematical question, and it is an error to claim that your argument is a mathematical one.
Very quotable
as a matter of game theory you should always vote red, as a matter of morality you should always vote blue. also, a part of the "dilemma" is that you don't know how the votes are gonna go.
As I explained elsewhere, my comment was just about the inapplicability of mathematics to this question. But also, is that really what morality always says? What if polls predict 1% will vote blue? What if they predict only one other person will vote blue? Are you always obligated to martyr yourself?