Category: Politics
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If you wanted to steal an election…
Let us say that you were in charge of the Ministry for Shenanigans, tasked by the Supreme Leader with interfering with the democratic elections in Freedonia, not to ensure the current Prime Minister of Freedonia remains in power, but to sow dissent amongst its people. The current Prime Minister of Freedonia is known for saying…
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Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy confuses me. How can someone someone be angry to be called a “TERF” (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist), how can they denounce it an anti-feminist insult, when in the next breath deny the existence of Trans-* people? That’s what the acronym means. How can someone claim that it’s justified for a police officer to shoot…
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Mistakes
It is important to keep track of one’s mistakes — you can’t learn to be better if you don’t. Here is one of mine from 2016: “Trump and Clinton are both equally awful”. Ye gods, how I wish that was so. I saw each as just two more in the same mould as all other…
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Sufficient technology
Let’s hypothesise sufficient brain scans. As far as I know, we don’t have better than either very low resolution full-brain imaging (millions of synapses per voxel), or very limited high resolution imaging (thousands of synapses total), at least not for living brains. Let’s just pretend for the sake of argument that we have synapse-resolution full-brain…
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The worst form of government except for all the others
(Does this sound fair? I’m not formally qualified in politics). Democracy The only way to get a government which wants to do the sort of things the public are OK with. Technocracy The only way to get a government of people who know what they’re talking about. Industrialism The only way to provide a government…
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Brexit as an example of failure to comprehend conditional probabilities
It’s been 2 years 5 months 12 days 12 hours 25 minutes since my first post about Brexit, and I still don’t really know what will happen. Almost everything is conditional probability: “If there’s a hard (no-deal) Brexit, then the traffic jams from Dover, Harwich/Felixstowe, etc. will be about as long as is physically possible…
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Falsifiability
The 2-4-6 game is there to teach falsifiability. It’s an important skill, because otherwise you just get confirmation biases. For the entirety of my life, never mind the Brexit negotiations, I have assumed “the EU is good” — at least, as far as ‘good’ can be attributed to any government. Nothing the EU have done…
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