Comments | andrewducker: Interesting Links for 20-07-2016

andrewducker

Interesting Links for 20-07-2016

Jul 20, 2016 12:00

Government lawyer tells court UK will not trigger Article 50 this year (tags: uk europe ) David Cameron built fewest houses of any Prime Minister since 1923 (Frankly, Labour's record not much better) (tags: housing uk epicfail ) People with low cognitive needs don't care about spoilers (and they don't bother people with low need for affect) ( ( Read more... )

philosophy, music, work, uk, voting, europe, starwars, death, rights, diet, law, spoilers, epicfail, video, intelligence, movies, crows, sex, psychology, housing, food, viaswampers, polls, cooking, politics, democracy, links

Comments 16

supergee July 20 2016, 11:18:18 UTC

Oh, the meltdown in your political system, not ours. I guessed wrong until I saw the "uk" Tag.

andrewducker July 20 2016, 11:38:08 UTC

Yours could also do with some work...

supergee July 20 2016, 14:27:51 UTC

Admirable understatement

The Current Meltdown in Our Political System Is a Sym.. drdoug July 20 2016, 11:39:32 UTC

I'm strongly in favour of electoral reform, but find this argument for it a little unconvincing. We have had FPTP for considerably longer than the current meltdown. Universal suffrage and no extra votes for graduates are newer electoral innovation than FPTP but I wouldn't blame them. Before the current meltdown in the UK, Belgium was the poster child for a dysfunctional political system in Europe (they went more than 500 days without a proper Government), and they use proportional representation.

Re: The Current Meltdown in Our Political System Is a Sym.. andrewducker July 20 2016, 11:43:22 UTC

Nobody is blaming *all* political dysfunction on voting systems.

But the Labour problem clearly is, and I'd definitely argue that Brexit is strongly connected.

RE: Re: The Current Meltdown in Our Political System Is a Sym.. drdoug July 20 2016, 13:50:56 UTC

I'm hesitant to make your arguments for you here, so do please do correct me if I have the wrong end of your stick ( ... )

RE: Re: The Current Meltdown in Our Political System Is a Sym.. andrewducker July 20 2016, 14:00:14 UTC

Oh, I'm not saying there would be no disagreements between different left-wing parties. There clearly would be. But Labour.Right and Labour.Left could go off and both get on with being political parties rather than spending their time fighting over who should get to lead Labour.United. And then the public would have a choice over which party to vote for, rather than the interminable arguments over what, exactly, Labour should be doing to pull in the voters ( ... )

Thread 7

bart_calendar July 20 2016, 13:33:45 UTC

Crows are really, really smart. They have all sorts of weird proven problem solving skills generally not found in other birds (and generally only otherwise found in octopus and higher mammals.) It's really easy to imagine with just slightly different weather they could have evolved into the sentient species on the planet.

kalimac July 20 2016, 16:13:51 UTC

Errors in telephone polling! Were you aware of the utter disaster in pioneer polling that was the 1936 US presidential election? They phoned people up and a vast majority were voting for Landon. People voting for Roosevelt didn't have phones. The pollsters didn't take income-class differentials into account.

I will not resist pointing out that the article on the broken voting system says "A snap general election may be called at any moment."

andrewducker July 20 2016, 16:17:43 UTC

Indeed you won't :-)

And it's accurate. One may be called. At any moment! And I may be attacked by a polar bear at any moment too.

I look forward to observing them tying themselves in knots as they work out the best way of doing it. If they decide.

I had heard of that one. I was curious at the time why people thought that "Tell people verbally that I'm doing something I feel slightly ashamed of." was likely to be more accurate than "Tell a computer that I'm doing something I feel slightly ashamed of." - but I suspect that there are biases in every method which need to be accounted for.

fub July 20 2016, 18:50:24 UTC

The "Chinese Room Experiment" is a thought experiment on cognitive science by Searle. It is interesting, but the claims that Searle draws from the narrative are complete bullshit, and everybody knows it.

In the case of the described experiment, I would argue that the gamer would not have had sex with the pornstar, because they did not have direct 'agency': it was all mediated through the system.
If you have a robotic masturbation aid, did you have sex with the microcontroller driving it, or with the system-as-a-whole, or not at all?