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[Egan_BW]

[smjjames]

@pttg: You just said that electronic voting machine companies are incompetent and corrupt to a degree (and then there’s the failure of the state to replace machines that are buggy) and you want to trust companies with counting the votes?

[Rolan7]

I do agree that software is so complicated that there are always vulnerabilities.
But instead, we're trusting humans.

It's like...  We can't trust humans not to hack the software.  So let's have humans run the whole thing??

There's no good solution, I'm just saying that reality sucks.  Had a grandpa who drunkenly bragged about throwing away democrat votes in Virginia, but he was probably just bullshitting.

I mean why would he bother amirite, it's a foregone conclusion anyway

[wierd]

Hmm.. Here were my thoughts on the matter of voluntary opinion polling.

1) The site validates the user. (Telephone, DOB, last 4 of social, an email address, and a PIN.)
2) The site allows ONLY ONE submission per election cycle from that user.  It tells you this-- VERY PROMINENTLY.
3) The site allows a user to notify staff that their one shot has been compromised by an electioneering robot, which gets staff involved.
4) When actually reviewing the submissions, random sampling is used*, along with a real human interpreter**.


* If given a sufficiently large dataset to work with, a randomized sample from that dataset should be roughly approximate of the rest of the dataset. By this, I mean sampling every Nth entry, and evaluating them, would reasonably approximate the results of having every sample evaluated.  The difference is how much confidence you have afterward.

** Because we are dealing with human-produced, natural language submissions, we really need a human interpreter to condense the submission into a form the statisticians can use.  The costs in time and labor to do this are a significant factor in why we do the random sampling.  Human interpreters are given guidelines on how to treat a submission, so that it can be properly tracked for such things as "Degree of partisanship", "Seriousness", "Originality (EG, how likely this submission was actually generated by a real human, and not a robot)", and a generalized assessment of the content of the submission itself. (Support for candidate? Specific grievances? Specific concern? etc)

This, coupled with traditional polling data, would give a deeper picture of the electorate's views and reasoning behind their selections, and their selection process. It would also give insight into the percentage of people responding to the poll that are easily manipulated by memetic PR, and even which kinds.

[smjjames]

Maybe have multiple interpreters per sample? Because no matter how hard you try to train against bias, you can never really fully erase bias, especially when it comes to politics because two people are going to interpret it a bit differently. Ditto if they are a conservative and a liberal.

Actually, I just remembered something, what about so called ‘word clouds’? All that does is track the frequency of words used, no human interpretation needed. Probably less useful statistically though.

[PTTG??]

@pttg: You just said that electronic voting machine companies are incompetent and corrupt to a degree (and then there’s the failure of the state to replace machines that are buggy) and you want to trust companies with counting the votes?

No, I want four separate companies to do it independently and to cross-check each other. They are unlikely to be wrong and or bribed the exact same way all at the same time.

[SalmonGod]

Rep Matt Shae of Washington has written and distributed to a small inner circle a personal manifesto titled "A Biblical Basis for War".  Its content is exactly the sort of stuff the title suggests.  One of the people he gave it to was not comfortable with this, and leaked it to the press.  Shae has since taken credit for writing the thing.  You can find a link to the manifesto itself on his Wikipedia page.

Actually, I just remembered something, what about so called ‘word clouds’? All that does is track the frequency of words used, no human interpretation needed. Probably less useful statistically though.

The last few posts had me thinking about word clouds, too.  Those are being used a lot to study freeform written content on a massive scale these days.

[smjjames]

Not surprised at the manifesto, people have been using religion as a basis for rules of war (among other things) ever since religion became a thing.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalěs]

Why don't we just add the word blockchain to it?  That makes everything technology better, right?

I saw somebody unironically propose a blockchain Dyson sphere. It is terrifying.

Rep Matt Shae of Washington has written and distributed to a small inner circle a personal manifesto titled "A Biblical Basis for War".  Its content is exactly the sort of stuff the title suggests.  One of the people he gave it to was not comfortable with this, and leaked it to the press.  Shae has since taken credit for writing the thing.  You can find a link to the manifesto itself on his Wikipedia page.

That reads more like something you’d see on a ranty website with 90s graphics than being distributed by a US Representative. Rather imperialist if I’m reading it correctly. And countries we don’t like won’t just need to pay tribute - they’ll also need to give up abortion, homosexuality, occultism, and communism or else we kill all of their men.

Just WTF.

[smjjames]

Just saw one of the exemptions from service, being scared. So, does that make desertion legal? Lol

I wouldn’t take it seriously, there’s no way he’d be able to get any of that into law.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalěs]

If you’re scared you might lose your faith. Losing your faith is clearly something the US Government should be working to prevent.

Another thing the US Government should ban is mandolins. Mandolins can cause people to lose their religion.

[wierd]

....

Faith based religions are by necessary exclusion, the domain outside of rational thought. (Rational thought requires data, and evidence; things that are exclusive to "faith")

When the electorate preferentially selects for such religious candidates, the likelihood of getting "deep end" policy documents like this increases, and approaches the asymptote as the percentage of such candidates raised to office increases. 

Or--- Given how heavily the GOP is being tentacle raped by its love affair with the religious community in exchange for those precious votes-- I am not surprised by this at all.  There's a reason for the separation of church and state.  This is a prominent manifestation of that reason.

[smjjames]

Maybe it’s just me, but it did seem to have a touch of Warhammer40K, or maybe DND because warrior-priests* = paladins (or clerics, depending on the build). I suppose it’s just so far out there that to me, it might as well be a fantasy setting. Though it likely wouldn’t be out of place in some historical cultures.

Yes, I know the military has chaplains in units, but the whole thing makes it sound like every soldier would be a warrior priest.

[wierd]

More apt--

Compare Knights Templar, or even "Crusades" crusaders.

Also compare, because I take extreme religious excuses for war in the same bag and dont hold punches--- Fatwas from clerics demanding religiously themed violence, and the exhortation of very religiously motivated, and highly effective killers.


Nope. This is intellectual poison, straight up.


(We have historical data showing that this kind of motivation for war leads to very bad places, and produces very pathological societal trends. The motivations behind it defy rationality, (again, because they are defined by faith as the standard). All signs point to this being a bad thing. Yet, here we are--- with somebody HONESTLY, and EARNESTLY suggesting it.)

[PTTG??]

Of course it's eastern Washington.