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Here's an interesting application of elementary probability theory.
Syria recently held an election, in the midst of a civil war. Dr. Bashar Hafez al-Assad wins post of President of Syria with sweeping majority of votes at 88.7%.
The elections were a sham. The vote counts are completely fraudulent. And you can learn this just from the results page linked above, without knowing anything about Syria or its internal politics. How?
The results are too accurate.
"11,634,412 valid ballots, Assad wins with 10,319,723 votes at 88.7%". That's not 88.7%, that's 88.699996%. Or in other words, that's 88.7% of 11,634,412, which is 10,319,723.444, rounded to a whole person.
The same is true about all other percentages in this election. In one of the results there's even a bad rounding error: 4.3% cast for Al-Nouri is 11,634,412 * 0.043 = 500,279.716 votes which is rounded down to 500,279 votes in the results instead of the closer 500,280. As a result, the total number of all alternatives (three candidates + incorrect ballots) differs from the total number of valid ballots by 1 (442,108 + 10,319,723 + 500,279 + 372,301 = 11,634,411 and not 11,634,412. If they were rounding correctly, their fake numbers would've looked better. In either case, it's evident that someone took the total vote count, calculated the percentages and rounded.
(why is this an application of elementary probability theory? You can calculate the probability of such an exact percentage of votes occurring by chance).
(to the best of my knowledge, this was first noted in this Russian-language Facebook post. Recently there had been an identical case with a sham referendum in a Ukrainian province controlled by separatists, which is what got people interested in looking at vote counts).
Nice work. I tend to take high-profile election results over 66% or so in favor of one option as prima facie evidence of election fraud (maybe 75 if there's some exceptionally strong reason to vote one way or another, like if one of the candidates is dead), but this is certainly damning.
You'd think that the perpetrators of electoral fraud would realize this sort of thing -- but I suppose the most likely explanation is that (dons Robin Hanson glasses) elections in these cases aren't about legitimacy, but rather about proving that one party has enough power to enforce a clearly illegitimate result.
Referenda on things like secession or constitutional change tend to have extreme landslide victories or defeats, even ones generally agreed to have been fair.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_referendum
Lots of these are in the 80s and 90s.
This is the universe's occasional reminder to you that you should be keeping backups of your files: https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/cpydtJGE5e6
U.S. Marshals are auctioning off 29,656.51306529 bitcoins seized from the Silk Road bust.
I have to say that there is a definite cyberpunk feel in the US government auctioning off purely virtual assets that it obtained cracking down on a marketplace located at a hidden cyberspace address.
I am thinking about forming a non-profit organization called "Thalassocracy Now". The sole purpose of this organization will be to convince the Singaporeans to set up a confederation of coastal charter cities in various impoverished places bordering the Indian and South Pacific oceans (east Africa, India, the Persian Gulf, southeast Asia, etc). The cities will be ruled by the draconian but honest and efficient Singaporean government. They will be linked together by trade routes, naval and air power, and a common legal and administrative framework. The inhabitants of the cities will have some minor influence over their own city's government, but no broader political power; the basic bargain will be: if you don't like it here, leave.
Okay, just kidding, I am not actually planning to do this. But I think someone should.
I remember reading in Lee Kuan Yew's autobiography that China asked him to set up a Singapore in China, but Lee said this wouldn't be possible.
More practically, let's get a copy of Lee's DNA and when the technology becomes available make a few thousand clones of him that in 20 years can be made mayors of major cities.
http://i.imgur.com/xY5UbCh.jpg Whiteboard at Future of Humanity Institute (Oxford University) giving several individuals' estimates for:
P(Disaster kills >50% of humans in next century) P(We're in a computer simulation created by an advanced civilization) P(Humanity goes extinct in next century)
Loving the forename, forename, BOSTROM, forename, forename!
The odd thing about that graph, to me, is the large number of estimates in the middle of the scale for P(simulation). I'd have expected more people to accept the simulation argument (and rate it very high) or reject it outright (and rate it very low).
I guess we might be seeing uncertainty over whether or not to accept the argument, or some kind of computationally bounded simulation argument where the root universe can only handle a relatively small number of simulations. I don't quite think I buy the latter, though.
I sure know that in my brief considerations of the matter, the paths of thought have consisted of a lot of 'Well if this is true, then that is almost certainly true' and lots of meta- and meta-meta-uncertainty. E.g. 'Well, if X and Y (meta)epistemological/(meta)metaphysical propositions hold, then it seems like P(Simulation) is zero/is a half/is one. But I'm not sure if I'm overlooking some class of cases that weaken the implication, so maybe it merely seems like P(Simulation) is that high under those propositions, but actually it's not'.
That immediately leads to lots of cases arising as X, Y, and 'seems like' are variously true or false or not applicable. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if uncertainty over arguments gave rise to the middling estimates.
I also wouldn't buy the latter. It wouldn't have occurred to me as an explanation.
Given he's the expert on the simulation argument, I was pretty disappointed that there wasn't an estimate by BOSTROM for it.
Sometimes I come up with scenarios where nothing seems to be wrong yet something still bugs me.
Say there is an economy of two people, Alice and Bob. Bob has an object, say a monthly newspaper, that he personally values at $5. Alice values the newspaper at $7 and thus they are willing to exchange the object at some price strictly between $5 and $7. Now Charlie, who values the newspaper at $10, comes along and is willing to bid a higher monetary amount than Alice, taking her opportunity to make an economic surplus of less than $2.
Did the mere presence and values of Charlie hurt Alice? In this scenario I'm inclined to say yes. Does this mean Alice has a claim to be compensated by Charlie (and Bob)? I'm inclined to say no.
Did the mere presence and values of Charlie hurt Alice? In this scenario I'm inclined to say yes. Does this mean Alice has a claim to be compensated by Charlie (and Bob)? I'm inclined to say no.
Why is this a problem? The mere presence of a bunch of people who are trying to use the road at the same time as I do hurts me. That doesn't mean I have a claim against them. Or just look at any markets.
The general rule is that for Alice to assert a claim against Charlie, Charlie must have some sort of legally recognized duty towards Alice. Just showing loss is not sufficient.
Hello, emic-and-etic. You've spent nearly five solid hours so far making a post every few minutes consisting primarily of chunks copypasted from elsewhere, mostly Wikipedia, and few expressions of your own thinking. How about introducing yourself and passing the Turing test?
Some inconvenient truths (well, "facts") from the quotes in the latest slatestarcodex post (see the sidebar):
The most reliable way to create a lasting community is basing it on shared religion AND costly personal sacrifices. Secularity doesn't cut it, even if demanding sacrifices.
Being religious signals trustworthiness: "The highest levels of wealth ...[is]... created when religious people get to play a trust game with other religious people."
" religion in the United States nowadays generates such vast surpluses of social capital that much of it spills over and benefits outsiders."
Liberals are the least accurate in modeling the views of other political groups (moderates and conservatives).
Note that this is all based exclusively on the US data.
The most reliable way to create a lasting community is basing it on shared religion AND costly personal sacrifices. Secularity doesn't cut it, even if demanding sacrifices.
What kind of secular communities was used in the research? The "secular community" without further specification feels a bit like a non-apple.
Maybe this is because religious communities try to solve all aspects of their member's lives, while secular communities usually have a single purpose. Single-purpose communities can fall apart when their members focus on some other aspect of their lives. For example, yesterday they wanted to save the whales or start the proletarian revolution, today they want to start a family. A religious community can satisfy a wider range of needs. Also, your relatives are often part of the same religious community.
Being religious signals trustworthiness
I imagine this is because religion has a clearly defined set of rules, and members are punished by other members if they break them. I can imagine that a christian who would steal from many people, would be unpopular within their own community. On the other hand, when a social justice warrior would steal from many people, their victims would be probably told to check their privilege, and called sexist / racist / ...phobic for trying to avoid them. Okay, I exaggerate a bit here to illustrate the point.
Being a member of a group is an evidence of a trait if the group tries to change or avoid people who lack the trait.
I frequently see parents stressing out and forcing their kids (3+) to eat or eat enough, when the kids don't want to eat. So which one is it? Do kids really lack the capacity start eating before it becomes unhealthy and need to be coerced.... or are parents doing something irrational?
That seems... less than obvious to me. One could as easily say that modern food-preservation technology (refrigeration, sealed containers, chemical preservatives) enabled snacking, and that preindustrial people would have had a stronger incentive to eat preplanned meals. That's a just-so story, granted, but most of the preindustrial cooking methods I'm familiar with would have taken hours and produced food for many people: not exactly conducive to eating individually as a response to hunger.
Of course, eating at precisely 7:00 or whatever is enabled by modern timekeeping, but my understanding is that the concept of a noon or an evening meal has been around for a long while. (Breakfast in the modern sense is more recent, though.)
preindustrial people would have had a stronger incentive to eat preplanned meals
I suspect that there was/is a big difference between foragers and farmers in that respect.
Snacking also doesn't require modern food-preservation technology. It's easy to snack on apples, berries, bread, cheese, etc.
I mostly agree with you, but let's not take this "reversing stupidity" too far. Centuries ago, many people died in their child years, so this is not as strong evidence as it would be in a hypothetical universe where people ate when they were hungry and all children survived.
I mean, maybe with 90% of children, letting them wait until they are hungry would be okay, but with 10% it would be harmful. Such hypothesis can only be proved or disproved by someone with detailed knowledge, not by simple comparison with eating habit of our ancestors.
It may also be a matter of convenience for the parents-- if you let the child stop eating when they feel like it, they might be hungry in a half an hour, when you were hoping to do something else.
I'd want to see some cross-cultural work on how much parents control the amount small children eat.
Are there any methods for selecting important public officials from large populations that are arguably much better than the current standards as practiced in various modern democracies?
For instance in actual vote tallying like Condorcet seem to have huge advantages over simple plurality or runoff systems, and yet it is rarely used. Are there similar big gains to be made in the systems that leads up to a vote, or avoids one entirely?
For instance, a couple ideas:
What other fun or crazy systems (that are at least somewhat defensible) are out there?
Request: can someone please reply to this post, and then immediately edit their reply? I'm curious whether the version in my inbox will remain the non-edited version. (I'd give ~80% that it will, 10% that the message doesn't get sent until after a short window, and 10% that the message gets edited after being sent.)
GHash.io reaching 51% is somewhat surprising. It seems that one of three unlikely-sounding situations hold:
Any guesses?
Regular reminder that, yes, there really have been some pretty smart philosophers in previous eras: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%E2%80%93Lewis_method
Frank P. Ramsey seems to be generally regarded as a prodigy. But I have a vague impression that Lewis has a mixed reputation and some even think he's outright crap. But everything of his I've seen mentioned seems at worst merely plausible and important to consider, and at best maybe decades ahead of its time. Does anyone know why he might have a bad reputation with some?
David Lewis is generally regarded as one of the most formidable philosophers of the last century in terms of sheer intellectual firepower. I'm not aware of anyone who thinks he's outright crap. His papers are incredibly well-written - dense, but very well argued and lucid. On topics of interest to LW: he made significant contributions to causal decision theory, the interpretation of probability, the compatibilist account of free will, physicalism about the mind, and the counterfactual analysis of causation.
However, he has been criticized for too often directing his impressive abilities towards an ill-conceived task - the revival of armchair speculative metaphysics. I think this is a fair criticism. Lewis was very adept with logic and mathematics, but he was, as far as I can tell, insufficiently familiar with the sciences, and this shows in his metaphysics.
That said, the idea for which he is most often criticized -- his modal realism -- is now making somewhat of a comeback in the form of Tegmark's Level IV multiverse hypothesis. It's still a fairly fringe and very controversial idea, of course, but its now being taken seriously in at least some non-philosophical circles. It also appears to have some currency among some of the people working on new decision theories here at LW.
I tend to daydream while in this situation but here are some other ideas: meditate, try to train yourself to count seconds accurately (requires a watch or other timepiece to score yourself with), ask yourself the miracle question.
