Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • @bitofhopeEnglish
    5•12 days ago

    It’s fractally wrong and bonkers even by Yud tweet standards.

    The worst common electoral system after First Past The Post - possibly even a worse one - is the parliamentary republic

    I’ll charitably assume based on this he just means proportional representation in general. Specifically he seems to be thinking of a party list type method, but other proportional electoral systems exist and some of them like D’Hondt and various STV methods do involve voting for individuals and not just parties.

    with its absurd alliances and frequently falling governments

    The alliances are often thought of as a feature, but it’s also a valid, if subjective, criticism. Not sure what he means by “frequently falling governments”, though. The UK uses FPTP and their PMs seem to resign quite regularly.

    A possible amendment is to require 60% approval to replace a Chief Executive; who otherwise serves indefinitely, and appoints their own successor if no 60% majority can be scraped together.

    Why 60%? Why not 50% or 70% or two thirds? Approval of whom, the parliament or the population? Would this be approval in the sense of approval voting where you can express approval for multiple candidates or in the sense of the candidate being the voter’s first choice à la FPTP? What does the role of a dictator Chief Executive involve? Would it be analogous to something like POTUS, or perhaps PM of the UK or maybe some other country?

    The parliament’s main job would be legislation, not seizing the spoils of the executive branch of government on a regular basis.

    Good news! In most parliamentary republics that is already the main job of the parliament, at least on paper. If you want to start nitpicking the “on paper” part, you might want to elaborate on how your system would prevent this kind of abuse.

    Anything like this ever been tried historically?

    Yea there’s a long historical tradition of states led by an indefinitely serving chief executive, who would pass the office to his chosen successor. A different candidate winning the supermajority approval has typically been seen as the exception rather than the rule under such systems, but notable exceptions to this exist. One in 1776 saw a change of Chief Executive in some British overseas colonies, another one in late 18th century France ended the dynasty of their Chief Executive, and a later one in 1917 had the Russian Chief Executive Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov lose the office to a firebrand progressive leader.

    ChatGPT was incapable of understanding the question.

    Now to be fair to ChatGPT, it seems that even the famed genius polymath Eliezer Yudkowsky failed to understand his own question.

    • @bitofhopeEnglish
      8•12 days ago

      I’m almost surprised Yud is so clueless about election systems.

      He’s (lol) supposedly super into math and game theory so the failure mode I expected was for him to come up with some byzantine time-independent voting method that minimizes acausal spoiler effect at the cost of condorcet criterion or whatever. Or rather, I would have expected him to claim he’s working on such a thing and throwing all these buzzwords around. Like in MOR where he knows enough advanced science words to at least sound like he knows physics beyond high school level.

      Now I have to update my priors to take into account that he barely knows what an electoral system is. It’s a bit like if the otherwise dumb guy who still seems a huge military nerd suddenly said “the only assault gun worse than the SA80 is the .223”. For once you’d expect him to know enough to make a dumb hot take instead of just spouting gibberish but no.

      • @swlabrEnglish
        9•12 days ago

        He’s (lol) supposedly super into math and game theory

        It’s kind of the inverse of a sports fan that is into sports because of the stats. He’s into the stats for the magical thinking

    • @V0ldekEnglish
      5•11 days ago

      in late 18th century France ended the dynasty of their Chief Executive

      Famously: below 60% approval!