Jon, In my balmy way, I took you entirely seriously. During the whole ACA debacle, when it looked like programming ineptitude was going to bring the whole health system down, You Wizards (and I use the word loosely ... the word "You", that is) declared that you could have designed a better system to allocate people to health insurers in a weekend. So, I thought, the Wizards are getting the jump on it, this time. They are going to get together for a weekend and design a national voting system for 2024. What a wonderful thing! They will make a s-load of a lot of money and the country will be the better for it. Perfect! I did have one worry, of course. My worry was that a voting system should not be mysterious. And since what Wizards do is always mysterious to the rest of us (we "citizens", as Owen used to say), that was definitely going to be a "roll-out" problem.
Nick Nicholas Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University [email protected] https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of jon zingale Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2020 8:54 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite! Sure my tongue-was-in-cheek wrt redirecting 1/9 of the U.S military budget to fund solving this problem, maybe it does detract from my main point. Fixing the problem of wasteful decadence is also not on the docket for me this pass through. I feel a lot can be said about what a culture burns its resources on. Hell, if we must, à la Ghostbusters, choose the form of the destroyer I choose the societal engine described in Borges' "The Lottery in Babylon"[£]. To be clear, the challenge set before me was to sketch out an alternative voting technology option. While liberating elections from a winner-takes-all modality is also something I want, it relates to a mostly orthogonal problem. Ranked-choice voting can be implemented for polling stations, phone apps, and snail-mail alike. Sooner or later the technology I am advocating for will be here, what it will be when it arrives is what I wish to direct concern toward. Witnessing an endless procession of squandered opportunity is what I find so abhorrent. If the first actionable steps are being taken, great, we now have the opportunity to take others. [£] https://web.itu.edu.tr/~inceogl4/modernism/lotteryofbabylon.pdf -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
