ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
3d ago
Sorry if I wasn't entirely clear; I'm concerned about the nomination part of the contingent election, which is pre-veto and pre-Condorcet. For nomination, you only need 1/10th support. So, what I'm thinking is that one party controls >= 50% of the state Senate, so they pick >= 5 names (from their general party pool), all of which are ideologically approximately the median of their own party's position. Yes, the minority can come together and pick some of their own, too. So you'll have five or more essentially identical majority party candidates and four or fewer minority party candidates (ideologically arranged however they so please).
Then comes veto, and the minority party can't pick off any more of the majority's nominees as the majority can pick off of the minority's nominees.
Then comes the counting of the votes via Condorcet (yes, this is on the same ballot as the vetos, but I'm not sure it matters if we assume sufficient party solidarity). I think that the majority can ensure that at least one of their (slightly longer than the minority's) list of essentially identical party candidates gets through.
The vetos/Condorcet can definitely moderate if the party actually has to choose five individuals that are from a small, finite set that still possesses a significant spectrum of ideologies. If you've only got thirty folks in your party in the Senate, it may be difficult to cluster them all right at your party's median, especially if there are other reasons (ineligibility, perceived lack of being 'ready', etc.) that might prevent tight bunching.
The vetos/Condorcet can be very effective if you actually think you can get defection in any of the three stages from any of the more moderate members of the majority party. But if they can clearly tell their moderates, "You're getting someone who's not too bad, doesn't really matter who, just the median of our own party's ideology (which is kind of what we, as a public, are already getting), and if you defect, we're probably getting one of their guys (oh, and we'll probably be able to figure out that it was one of you 3-5 who defected)," then I'm not sure we're likely to get that moderate defection at any point.
I'll note that his footnote 33, going through example contingent elections treats every example as though the nominations are still coming directly from the state Senate, itself, in this version, too. This small set and assuming factions rather than party discipline results in examples like:
The majority naturally prefers #12, the center of the party, but #9 won their party primary and is officially their candidate. The minority prefers #34, which, lol, isn’t going to happen. The majority’s different factions nominate #2, #9, #12, and #19. The minority puts forward #21, #33, and #34.
I agree that it may have just been an oversight, but the reason why I think it's actually important to correct that oversight is that I think the majority essentially nominates #12, #12, #12, and #12, just with four different names coming from their more general party pool (ok, in his exact example, they pick #9 by name, then three nameless #12's). Even here, picking only within the state Senate, with strict party discipline (and sufficient eligibility, both legally and for other party sensibilities), they could manage something like #9, #11, #12, and #13, and we probably don't get nearly the same moderating effect.
Mayyyyybe you'll actually get more defections than I think, and there would be at least a different space of maneuvering involved, but this version lacks the sort of serious punishment that the first version had of, "If you go to the contingent election, #12 is sooooo far off the table, because the very punishing algo (if you can keep it) is only giving you #18-22 as options. As an aside, if anything, that algo may be too punishing to the majority party; if the minority knows that #18 is their worst option in the contingent election (and they're able to prevent a 2/3rds in the main one), then they may plausibly choose to just force a contingent election every time. It would definitely give more moderate US Senators, but there may be knock-on effects, even more incentive to figure out how to game the algo, etc.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
In a similar vein, Orin Kerr pointed to an old study that presented folks with two videos of protesters that were actually the same video, and I guess altered to the extent possible at that time to just change the political valence of what they were protesting for.
Many of the most accurate accusations I've seen in these lengthy discussions are accusations of hypocrisy. And yeah, there probably are a lot of hypocrites when it comes to these scissor situations. It's genuinely difficult to come up with a coherent set of neutral rules for these types of extreme situations, and frankly, there's probably variations in state laws for some of the details. It's also extremely difficult to not let your political leanings bleed into a neutral assessment of neutral rules even just a teeny little bit. I'm generally fine with letting the courts handle it and don't care all that much for the water cooler talk (though I can see how it can be of some value). I do see that some folks will even explicitly bracket out 'there's a legal standard, which someone else will figure out, but let's talk on the moral level', which, uh, I guess is a fun thing to try so long as everyone is distracted from trying to claim that Morality Don't Real.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
Yeah, I read that version of it, and I sort of didn't like it quite as much. He didn't talk much about the feature that I didn't like; he just slipped it in there. That is, that they can nominate anyone in the state who meets the qualifications of being a US Senator. I think this plausibly makes it more vulnerable to party discipline concerns. Part of what made the first proposal interesting was that they were limited to nominating from their own body, and he went to great lengths to note how small these bodies are. Moreover, the punishing algo prevented them from even being able to try to game the nomination phase; you were just 'stuck' with the center (excepting the major concern about algo manipulation that maybe I still hold the faintest of hope of fixing in another way).
Here, I think he's implicitly relying on the partisan pull to nominate multiple candidates (in an attempt to get through the veto stage) to enable a subset of moderate partisans to 'defect' from the party and nominate someone more centrist. I think the key maneuver he's relying on here is the secret ballot nomination, but that only enables defection; sufficient party solidarity may prevail. If they're only limited to nominating from the 10-30 sitting state Senators of their party, I could see how they're likely to end up with some amount of more moderate nominees. But in this second case, the party can select from anyone. So they make a list. They pick this list to be all people that they think are as close to exactly at the median position of their party's caucus as possible. They assign which senators are to nominate which nominee, allowing them partial visibility 'through the secret ballot' (if somebody steps out of line, you have it narrowed down to <5 people). Sure, the minority party can veto some subset of these "identical in all but name" nominees, but without completely confirming the math, I think sufficient party discipline should get one of them through the final ballot.
Possibly, yes, the minority party could nominate some folks who are centrist enough to try to break the majority party's discipline, but I see this as a major weakness that was not present in the version where you had an algo that could plausibly identify the punishing middle from within the body, itself. If there's any way to further harden the algo approach, I would significantly prefer it.
Also, yes, I would like to encourage a top-level post. Would love more visibility for this stuff!
ControlsFreak
4d ago
That is quite the incredible read. Thanks!
I actually quite like the concept of the solution, but he also admits in later posts that it's just not going to work. I'd probably agree that the two biggest problems are even explaining it to people and Goodhart's law on the algo. Still, the conceptualization of the problem and the broad principles guiding our search for a solution are more spot on than most treatments I've seen.
Shame that it's buried in a gigantic cluster of a thread on yet another silly, tragic, scissor shooting. I'd almost just collapsed the whole thread a few times, but I'm glad I managed to catch this. I'm sure I'll be toying with it in my mind for quite a while to come.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
If we're talking funniest things, I've always thought that the funniest thing would be if the real deception was that Israel gave up on/got rid of nukes for who knows what reason, deciding that it was actually sufficiently fine, so long as everyone else believes they have them. Stay officially ambiguous, occasionally task someone with "leaking" juicy details about how awesome and secret their nukes are, and free-ride on the reputation.
Saddam went so far as to deceive his own military commanders (beyond some tiny core) into believing that they had some set of chem/bio/whatever (I can't remember the details) weapons, to the point that their battle plans on the eve of the invasion were based around getting and using them. Didn't work out for him, but ya know, high risk plays happen, I guess?
...they probably still have them, tho.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
shitty Chinese drywall that later outgassed sulfur compounds
For the purposes of my comment, it is this temporal relationship that matters. Sure, the other temporal relationship between folks realizing this temporal relationship and choosing to ban it is fine. But this one is the one that holds the conceptual link.
I'm certainly not going to defend the UAS/component ban, either, but that's not the point here. The point is that even if we assume that all of that is dumb and doesn't make sense as a Type I ban, we can still make it illegal to use a UAS to kill someone or even just make it illegal to fly a UAS into a stadium or something, and this type of ban will have particular qualities tied to the specifics.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
when anyone who wants to put together a piddly little indie game that uses player controlled image gen is going to need to spend time implementing some, easily circumvented, controls to prevent some class of images to be generated
Sorry, h-what? This is truly out of left field.
And it's not just the deep fakes, we're going to have to get used to every image or video on the internet that doesn't have verifiable provenance being suspect.
Yeah, sure, agreed. Not sure the relevance.
Do you think a kid should get expelled because he imagined what a classmate looked like nude?
I cannot possibly think of how this is remotely responsive to my comment. The answer is obviously no, but the mind is boggled.
*More than 239. The occupation page gives per-specialty mean (not median) numbers ranging from 222 to 451.
Since there are claims about numbers relative to the federal general schedule, the 2026 general schedule location with the highest locality pay tops out at 197. That is the max, not the mean or median. If all doctors were forced onto the GS, that means everyone not at the max would have to be shoved somewhere below that.
...or they'd have to make a separate "doctors are special" schedule, meaning that they wouldn't have to raise all federal employee wages alongside raising doctor wages.
It's not the kind of thing you can realistically ban.
I think this mistakes different types of bans/controls and their different purposes.
One way a ban/control may operate is to try to pre-emptively prevent certain events from occurring. When folks try to control, say, ammonium nitrate following the Oklahoma City bombing, they're often trying to prevent someone from acquiring some of the tools used to create a large bomb, ultimately in the hopes of preventing said hypothetical bomb from being used to kill people and destroy stuff. Whether or not this is practical is not the point here; the point is that this is the point of the effort. Similarly for controls on nuclear material.
Importation controls are somewhat similar in that they may be trying to prevent an event from occurring at all. The funny example I go to sometimes is the ban on Chinese drywall. The intent was to prevent it from even getting into the country, pre-emptively preventing whatever harms it may (or may not) later produce. Or see, for example, the discussion below about possible controls on UAS; I read that conversation to be primarily pondering whether controls can be put in place which pre-emptively prevent a significant number of events, to what extent such controls will be effective or not effective (how hard is it for folks to still "roll their own"?), etc.
Many other bans/controls are post-hoc controls, assigning liability/culpability after a sufficient number of steps have been taken toward an event or after the event has occurred. These are different in type. Probably the majority of controls are like this. I might even say that part of the reason why so many controls are like this is because it is not reasonable to control the inputs that are used to lead up to an event. This may be in part due to "dual use" considerations or other factors.
For a silly example, rope can be used to tie someone up when kidnapping them. Well, basically no one thinks it's reasonable to put heavy controls on possessing rope. But basically no one thinks that kidnapping is "not the kind of thing you can realistically ban", either. That people have widespread access to the tool used is sort of neither here nor there when considering post-hoc controls on the use of those tools for specific events.
What I find strange is that I've really only seen this come up for digital tools. There's this weird perspective that if someone uses specifically a digital tool that is "out there" and accessible, that the "genie is out of the bottle", then it's simply unrealistic to use any sort of law to restrict any type of use of these digital tools that one might perform. That still seems wild to me. Rope is a technology that is "out there". "The genie is out of the bottle." Even the Primitive Technology guy makes his own! ...sorrrrta think that we can still ban kidnapping.
[EDIT: I forgot to add what I had wanted to say about the UAS conversation. Suppose, after consideration, it seems infeasible to use a Type I control to prevent things like killing people with UAS. Can't even manage to stop someone from flying into, say, a crowd at an open sports stadium. I don't see any reason why someone couldn't want a Type II control, still making it illegal to fly a UAS into a stadium or to kill people with a UAS. Sure, maybe you can't prevent it, but to the extent that you have the investigative tools to prove in a court of law who is culpable for doing it, you can still prosecute them.]
Of course, once we're in a Type II ban world instead of a Type I ban world, then there is some amount of "we have to get used to the fact that this type of event will actually happen significantly more often than events that we can control with Type I bans". Frequencies and percentages will depend heavily on specifics. And maybe that's the sentiment you're going for. Sure, we're not going to be able to meaningfully pre-emptively prevent fake AI nudes from being generated, just like we can't really pre-emptively prevent rope-enabled kidnappings. But folks may still want to try a Type II control. The extent to which even a Type II control can be considered effective certainly depends extremely heavily on specifics, including an analysis of post-hoc investigation techniques, surrounding legal frameworks, resource considerations, and even the oft-debated deterrence theory of government sanctions.
ControlsFreak
10d ago
The politicians in single payer systems often stand up against paying doctors more because they know that if they do they have to pay all public sector workers more
The AMA would probably fight against most versions of single payer, and pretty heavily. If the proposal was "single payer and doctors are now going to be subject to the standard federal pay schedule", I don't think anything could prepare you for the fury that would be unleashed to prevent it from passing. Mayyyybe they could accept "...and we'll make a new, separate, special pay schedule (which can be changed separately from the standard schedule) for doctors, who are special," but there's just absolutely no way that the US government will actually have the political will to bulk force doctors to take a 3-8x pay cut.
ControlsFreak
11d ago
proximity
And all this time, I've been told that poor people are stuck living in cramped, high-density areas. Now I don't know what to believe!
ControlsFreak
11d ago
I guess most of this comes down to what one categorizes as "elite", as that was the specific category mentioned.
In any event, yes, love and such. Great things. Though I have heard it flippantly put, "You should marry for love and not for money... but it's just as easy to love a rich man." But that's neither here nor there. I do believe that many folks marry for love, but then the challenge returns to your court. Is the driver of whether or not people fall in love their position on the socioeconomic ladder? I doubt so. When it comes to discussing differentials, or particular categories like "elite", there may be other factors concerning what modern marriage has become which may be relevant.
ControlsFreak
11d ago
For a lot of people, when you have an utterly destroyed shell of an institution, it doesn't make much sense to even bother with it. It's pointless paperwork that can be undone on a whim, but at the pain of much more paperwork and likely legal wrangling.
Elite women obviously still want to opt in, because they're likely getting a wealthy man on the hook. If you're both poor? Who cares? Religious people still do it, because their religious communities still enforce some amount of social approval for proper use of it and some amount of social sanctions for improper use. It's still a somewhat stronger social contract for them, if not a legal one.
ControlsFreak
12d ago
As a starter, speak out against the folks who are working to accomplish the opposite. I've covered this before as being a fully-general argument against any sort of minority view. "How do you convince people to sign up for [any view that is a minority view, which by definition is not preferred by most people at the current moment]? Well, you, uh, convince them. Maybe giving reasons, showing them data, making arguments, etc."
ControlsFreak
12d ago
kitten-caboodle
kit and caboodle
ControlsFreak
21d ago
Sure, some people will want to think that it's fake in some way. I mean, I guess something like that could be fake? If you asked me a prior probability for a video coming out of any prominent politician committing a violent rape of a 14-year-old, especially in the AI age, I'd have a pretty non-zero chance of it being fake. And these days, normies have had their probability estimates for foreign government disinformation along lines like these jacked up, too.
...but that's basically the only thing that could plausibly have any play for the example given. People might think it's fake, but if there is enough other evidence to support that it's not a total fabrication, nothing else would save him.
ControlsFreak
22d ago
There's a pretty huge difference between a tape of someone running their mouth and a tape of someone raping a minor. Again, if your model of the world doesn't account for this sort of massive difference, then you might want to reconsider your model. Different models may have different predictions for a tape of someone running their mouth, and one might evaluate said models on what actually happened, but there is obviously no constraint on the set of models forcing them to produce the same output on such extremely different cases.
people would say it's AI
This is plausible today, which is why I mentioned it.
they'd think it was out of context roleplay ... they'd say she lied about her age ... they'd think it was invasion of privacy or propaganda and refuse to watch ... they'd think Trump has let himself down again, but on a national level he's still a force for good etc
None of these are plausible for the example given of a tape of him "violently raping a 14-year-old girl".
Testing one's model as parameters go to infinity is, indeed, a good sanity check. I do this in my daily work. If your model has truly absurd results as the parameters go to infinity, it's more likely that there's a problem with your model than that the world will actually match the model outputs.
ControlsFreak
22d ago
This is one of those moments where you should probably take honest stock in your model of the world, because it's really far out there. I could imagine some defenses these days along the lines of the video not being real; AI gen has gotten good or whatever. But there is not even a single cultural/theoretical/whathaveyou hook that is remotely likely to take hold as a defense in society if it is widely believed that such a video is real. It's not like Clinton, where the left was already trying to lean hard on "consent of adults is the only thing that matters" in order to help the gays.
ControlsFreak
23d ago
I did say that I was sure I would link to SMBC doing the philosophy of mathematics joke many times in the future here.
ControlsFreak
23d ago
If you are definitionally not allowed to observe an empirical difference then the answer to the question is mu, as both answers yield exactly identical predictions about the future and so are the same answer.
This is a fairly common failure in reasoning from STEM people who haven't STEMed enough. You may just be unfamiliar with the concept of observability. That's not even getting into the actual philosophy problem.
The maths fail part of the STEM fail has already been covered decently enough below.
It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning.
This, on the other hand, isn't a STEM fail; it is definitely outside of that. But it does give me yet another chance to share one of my favorite papers on the topic.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Do you have a source for that? I tried a few search terms, and I couldn't find anything.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Marco Rubio, who is not only the Secretary of State but also Trump's National Security Strategy
Somehow still yes.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Okay, show me. Show me where someone else posted something equivalent and wasn't modded.
*Laughs in self-contradiction*
every time I have made this request, what I get is a post that isn't equivalent and a 20-post-deep argument about why it's not.
You have a post that was designed to be as equivalent as possible, specifically for the purposes of this type of request. Yes, we also have a 20-post-deep argument where you persist in claiming that the modding was for other non-specified comments, but the latest is that you've said no, that was all bollocks; the modding was for the completely and totally equivalent post.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Yep, sometimes you really can tell exactly what's going on by reversing the valence. We don't have access to the TA here to ask some clarifying questions, but I have little doubt that they would end up a stammering mess and contradicting themself when trying to explain why they gave the grade they gave.
He goes to pretty significant lengths to come up with a scheme that manages the facts that they each currently have two and that there is a rotating six-year cycle of elections, ultimately for the purpose of being able to say that at one single moment, every State would have their number of Senators cut from two to one at the same time. Will this suffice for preserving "equal Suffrage"? As with many things Constitutional, it might just depend on how people feel about it.
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