In the scale free government post, one of the completely unresolved issues was what to do about the federalism axis. There are two scale free extremes to choose from: completely uniform democracy and pure libertarianism (i.e., anarchy). This post will ramble about the anarchy option without getting anywhere very useful.
Anarchy would only work if the universe is such that the middle ground can be efficiently simulated by ad-hoc coordinated groups. Recall that the goal isn’t actual anarchy, which is absurd, but a system with as few foundational rules as possible.
A past girlfriend and I would occasionally (cheerfully) quibble over the optimal strategy for extracting toothpaste. It occurred to me recently that the disagreement was fundamentally about amortized vs. worst case complexity.
Being lazy, I tend to squeeze the toothpaste out of the front of the tube, optimizing the time spent in the moment and reducing the degree of control required since pressure is exerted near the toothbrush. She would carefully squeeze the tube from the back, maintaining a flat region that would slowly grow as the toothpaste emptied. The main advantage of her strategy is that toothpaste is always at hand, and every iteration is fast. In contrast, squeezing from the front pushes toothpaste both out of the tube and backwards towards the other end. Occasionally, this must be fixed by rolling the back of the tube forwards. Each fix up step takes much longer than a normal toothpaste extraction, but the average time spent might be lower since a normal squeeze is faster. We never did the experiment, so I’m not sure which strategy actually wins on average.
The phrase “everything happens for a reason” came up in a couple contexts recently (conversation with a friend, Radiolab, etc.). It’s a good example of an obviously false statement that contains plenty of useful insight, and is interesting to think about in that context.
We’ll get the pedantic out of the way first: “everything happens for a reason” is literally true in the sense that the future happens for the reason that is the past. What people are usually implying is “everything happens because of a simple event in the future”. It isn’t worth wasting time tearing apart that absurdity.
In well designed cryptographic security systems, the attacker needs to do exponentially more work than the defender in order to read a secret, forge a message, etc., subject to appropriate hardness assumptions. Maybe this is true for many non-computer security-ish systems as well, like choosing good representatives in a voting system or avoiding overpaying for advertised merchandise, and we simply haven’t reached the level of intelligence as defenders for the exponential effort of attackers to be prohibitive. Extra intelligence is a ways off, but faster and simpler access to information is closer, and may have similar effects. In any case, a hopeful thought.
I’ve used Thomas Wang’s integer hash functions for years for various purposes. Using techniques invented by Bob Jenkins for general hashing (e.g., hashes of strings), Wang derived several hash specialized for fixed size integer input. His 64-bit version is
uint64_t hash(uint64_t key) {
key = (~key) + (key << 21); // key = (key << 21) - key - 1;
key = key ^ (key >> 24);
key = (key + (key << 3)) + (key << 8); // key * 265
key = key ^ (key >> 14);
key = (key + (key << 2)) + (key << 4); // key * 21
key = key ^ (key >> 28);
key = key + (key << 31);
return key;
}
Key properties include avalanche (changing any input bit changes about half of the output bits) and invertibility. Recently I wanted to make explicit use of the inverse, in order to verify that zero would never arise as the hash of a given set of inputs. This property would allow me to initialize the hash table in question (which takes up several gigabytes) with zeros and avoid an explicit occupied bit on each entry. Thus, I needed inverse_hash(0).
The previous post described possible ways of removing artificial scale parameters from a political system, the most important being a way to remove the representational scale dependency via “direct democracy plus scripting” (for which I still need a better name). This post will describe how one might try to achieve such a system. Besides the obvious reason for such a discussion, the transition from one system to another provides an excellent thought experiment to evaluate the merits of both current and future systems. Here are two proposed principles which encapsulate why:
I read The Dispossessed again recently, which is a wonderful book by Ursula K. Le Guin about a society of anarchist/revolutionaries where ideally everyone shares everything and is never compelled to do anything by anyone else. In practice all sorts of societal and structural compulsions arise, and half the book is about struggling with these internal contradictions (the other half argues how much better it is, contradictions and all, than the alternative).
From CBS News:
On the one hand, [Obama’s] administration has defended a free, open Internet as it watched repressive regimes fall in the Middle East with help from social media such as Twitter. It has also been a proponent of the concept of “net neutrality,” which prevents Internet service providers from slowing online traffic that comes from file-sharing sites known to trade in pirated content.
On the other hand, Obama and other Democrats have gone to Hollywood dozens of times to raise campaign funds over the years.
Here’s a wonderful article by Lawrence Lessig from a while back on the Citizens United Supreme Court case, which prohibited congress from regulating independent campaign expenditures by corporations:
This is linked off of rootstrikers.org, but I hadn’t read it in detail before. His core argument is great: in key places in their decisions, the justices made statements such as
The appearance of influence or access . . . will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.
I sent this message to Representative Nancy Pelosi, Senator Barbara Boxer, and Senator Diane Feinstein:
Representative Pelosi / Senator Boxer / Senator Feinstein:
I am writing to express my opposition to the anti-piracy legislation SOPA and PIPA. As a member of a private industrial research lab, my life and work depend critically on a free environment of information on the internet, and I believe this environment would be dangerously infringed by either of these bills.