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If dolphins were discovered to be able to understand democracy and you were tasked to train/teach dolphins how it works, what method of voting would you designate for them?
  • Either ranked-choice voting or majority judgement.

    Here's why

    Majority Judgment:

    1. Voters grade each candidate on a scale (e.g. Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, Reject)
    2. The winner is determined by the highest median grade
    3. Ties are broken by measuring how many voters gave grades above and below the median

    Ranked Choice Voting:

    1. Voters rank candidates in order of preference
    2. If no candidate has >50%, the lowest-ranked candidate is eliminated
    3. Their votes transfer to those voters' next choices
    4. Process repeats until someone has majority

    Majority Judgment optimizes for:

    1. Consensus/Compromise.

    By using median grades, it finds candidates who are "acceptable" to a broad swath of voters. A candidate strongly loved by 40% but strongly disliked by 60% will typically lose to someone viewed as "good enough" by most. This pushes politics toward centrist candidates who may not be anyone's perfect choice but whom most find acceptable. The grading system lets voters express "this candidate meets/doesn't meet my minimum standards" rather than just relative preferences

    2. Merit-based evaluation

    Voters judge each candidate against an absolute standard rather than just comparing them. This can help identify when all candidates are weak (if they all get low grades) or when multiple candidates are strong. It moves away from pure competition between candidates toward evaluation against civic ideals

    Ranked Choice Voting optimizes for:

    1. Coalition building

    By eliminating lowest-ranked candidates and redistributing votes, it rewards candidates who can be many voters' second or third choice. This encourages candidates to appeal beyond their base and build broader coalitions. Unlike MJ, it's more focused on relative preferences than absolute standards

    2. Elimination of "spoiler effects"

    Voters can support their true first choice without fear of helping their least favorite candidate win. This allows multiple similar candidates to run without splitting their shared base. The system is built around the idea that votes should transfer to ideologically similar alternatives


    Both systems optimize for honest voting more than plurality voting, but in different ways:

    MJ encourages honest evaluation because exaggerating grades can backfire if too many others don't follow suit RCV encourages honest ranking because putting your true preference first doesn't hurt your later choices

    The key philosophical difference is that:

    • MJ asks "What level of support does each candidate have across the whole electorate?"
    • RCV asks "Which candidate has the strongest coalition of support when similar preferences are consolidated?"

    This means MJ tends to favor broad acceptability while RCV tends to favor strong but potentially narrower bases of support that can build winning coalitions. Neither approach is inherently more democratic - they just emphasize different aspects of democratic decision-making. </details>

  • Do you consistently use Anki? Why?
  • Thanks for sharing your method.

    As to your take on Anki, I think it's fair and accurate. I agree with you in that the learning curve is not in the features or the interface, but as you said: in the pacing. I really hope I can try to space the cards as much as possible, so that a regular practice doesn't become burdensome.

  • Do you consistently use Anki? Why?

    It seems like it can tick many of the boxes for effective long term learning if used properly (including not just surface learning but also deep conceptual understanding). However, my impression is that there is a learning curve and a cost associated to using it consistently, which leads to it not being used as much. Idk. What’s your experience?

    12
    What is a creepy or weird fact that would scare even the bravest person?
  • and Bostrom's simulation hypothesis and Pascal's wager, all subject to serious validity threats. All of these thought experiments are unfalsifiable. They can all be explained with different theories. They all rely on circular reasoning. They all anthropomorphize entities that maybe don't resemble humans at all. They all fall for the mind projection fallacy. They all are prey to selection bias, because they cherry-pick scenarios among countless alternatives.

  • 23 Nobel Prize-winning economists slam Trump agenda, endorse Harris
  • I agree that economics has serious problems that can leave it looking like a shriveled science not worthy of the title "science". There is a reason for this. Economics has been undermined for more than a hundred years.

    When capitalism was born, classical economics had the goal of describing and understanding these new dynamics. It sought to answer questions such as how prices are determined or how labor dynamics affected profits, to name a few. It came up with answers through observation, statistical modeling, and what we would call today the scientific process.

    It was later, in the late eighteenth century, that economics shriveled as a science and bloomed as an ideological and political tool. Many of the classical observations —such as how pricing is set by firms, how costs change through time, or how labor affects the production process— were scrapped. This new perspective didn't see the market as turbulent, war-like, and aggressively cost-cutting. Rather, it portrayed the market as a perfectly lubricated machine that optimally distributes resources, maximizing personal utility as well as social utility.

    This perfect machine was not science, but a political tool so that classical economists wouldn't dare being critical of market economies. Even more so, this perfect machine was built so that politicians would not dare interrupt the motions of the machine.

    If you're interested in learning how this perfect machine was built and how classical economics sees the world, you can check out Anwar Shaikh.

  • Why do people see Adopting a Husky Personality and Culture through life inherently bad
  • You mention not having money for therapy. There is evidence suggesting that therapy like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is effective even if learned through books. What is important is to learn the mental processes that matter.

    Here is an approach to therapy that you could try: https://youtu.be/o79_gmO5ppg

    Sorry if my questions sound harsh. I genuinely want to know if this could help. How do you feel about reading books? Have you done it before? Do you have a place and time to read without distractions? Would reading from a device be feasible for you?

  • TIL the average American is dumber than the average human
  • Totally. The history of intelligence has sadly also been the story of eugenics. Fortunately, there have been process-based theories and contextual theories that have defined intelligence in more humane and useful ways. In this view, IQ tests do not measure an underlying characteristic, but a set of mental skills. Seen this way, intelligence becomes something people can gain with nurturance. If you’re interested, check out Relational Frame Theory.

  • Aristotle with a Bust of Homer - Rembrandt (1653)
  • Huh… maybe my perception of Aristotle is a caricature. I don’t know why I thought of him as living in very rudimentary spaces and wearing basic clothing. This painting suggests otherwise. I wonder to what extent it is historically accurate.

  • My favourite type of self-care
  • Ah, I see how my wording was confusing. I mean planning in the sense of “How will we complete the work that we already committed to?” and “What will we do today to achieve our Sprint goal?”

    I arrived at the word planning because Scrum is sometimes described as a planning-planning-feedback-feedback cycle. You plan the Sprint, you plan daily (Daily Scrums), you get feedback on your work (Sprint Review), and you get feedback on your process (Sprint Retrospective).

  • People with framework laptops on linux (nixos?) what is your experience with them?
  • My brother has a Framework 13 and mainly uses a combination of NixOS and Windows. Most of the time he uses NixOS, but sometimes the software he needs is broken on Nix. When that happens, he reverts to a previous version of Nix or he boots onto Windows. He has Windows installed in one of the external-drive socket thingies that he keeps plugged in at all times in case he needs Windows.

    Apart from the occasional broken Nix package, he has had issues with the hyper-sensitive two-finger scrolling in Gnome (which I would say is not directly a Framework or Nix problem). Also, a while back, when I bought the computer with him, we bought Oloy RAM because it was fast and cheap, but that lead to weird crashes. Framework support helped us test the sticks and eventually we sold those sticks and got the Framework-tested Crucial sticks, which solved the problem. Finally, I remember he had to be careful about not just closing the laptop but actually clicking "sleep" and then closing it, because otherwise it would get super hot and lose a lot of battery.

    Despite these struggles, he recently told my Mac-loving girlfriend that he will not get a "disposable" computer. I take this to mean he will keep using his Framework laptop.

  • Method of loci/memory palaces for memorizing professional knowledge or whole languages
  • Professionals have large networks of neurons. They are sturdy and efficient from repeated use. Memory palaces help to start the construction of these large networks of neurons. Afterwards, as another commenter noted, the knowledge is deeply processed. Mnemonics are replaced by networks of meaning. It is no longer “This algorithm rhymes with tomato”, but “This algorithm is faster if the data is stored in faster hardware, but our equipment is old so we better use this other algorithm for now”.

    Broadly, the progression of learning is: superficial learning, deep learning, and transfer. Check out Visible Learning: The Sequel by John Hattie for more on this.

    Edit: To directly answer your question, experts have so many sturdy neural hooks on which to hang new knowledge that mnemonics become less and less necessary. Mnemonics may be particularly helpful when first learning something challenging, but are less necessary as people learn.

    You could also check out a paradox called the expert paradox. We used to think memory is boxes that get filled. This idea was directly challenged by Craik and Lockhart’s Levels of Processing. Levels of processing supports the idea that “the more you know, the faster you learn”. Note that this is domain-specific. In other words, an expert in dog training won’t learn quantum mechanics faster than anyone else.

  • What's the closest you've ever come to having a crush on someone on Lemmy?
  • I’d say feeling admiration for others. People who are kind, patient, insightful, and critical thinkers. People who look at how political goods (including wealth) are distributed and can think critically about it. Nutomic and Dessalines for sure.

  • Do we know whether Proton VPN addresses the TunnelVision vulnerability?

    Apparently, the researchers contacted some VPN providers. Perhaps Proton is one of them.

    10
    Experienced meditators probably have less earworms (explanation in the body of the post).

    Thinking a thought is like watering a plant in a garden. Your attention is the sprinkler. The more you water a plant (up to a point, of course), the more the plant grows.

    Similarly, the more you think about a thought, the more that thought network grows. The denser a thought network, the likelier it is that you will end up thinking about/through that thought network. There are more entry points and the paths are better paved.

    In other words, thinking thoughts make it likelier that you will think those thoughts in the future. This can cause psychological rigidity.

    However, psycholofical flexibility can be developed through mindfulness. In particular, I am talking about mindfulness developed through meditations like mindful breathing. In that kind of meditation, you start by noticing your breath. When you're distracted by something, you pay attention to it, but you return to the breathing. The point is to develop flexible attention. You choose what to pay attention to, even when your attention is pulled by something.

    That is why I say that experienced meditators would notice earworms just like anyone else (after listening to the song or remembering it because of another related memory), but because they can choose not to pay attention to it and feed that thought network, there is a lower probability of having those networks reinforced. Their sprinklers can turn off with more ease than non-meditators'.

    Meditators can choose not to feed the cognitive network. Non-meditators could find themselves feeding the network.

    3
    Unpopular Opinion @lemmy.ml snek_boi @lemmy.ml
    News outlets confuse readers by insisting on using "," instead of the word "and". Compare "Drought causes famine, migration" to "Drought cases famine and migration".
    0
    Professors who grade the same exam dozens or hundreds of times probably experience semantic satiation (explained in the body of the post).

    Semantic satiation happens when repeating word or a phrase over and over makes it temporarily lose its meaning. This was first written about in the psychological literature by Titchener, in case you search it online and find that name.

    Because word repetition causes defusion (in the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy way), these professors could actually be more cognitively flexible than other people, at least in terms of whatever it is that they're grading.

    8
    As income or wealth inequality changes, so could the composition of students in elite universities. There could be different proportions of legacy students.

    I also wonder whether there could be factors that determine how many students would be considered wondrous or how many would be considered more extrinsically motivated.

    3
    Evolutionarily, at some point we were similar to rodents, nocturnal so that massive reptiles wouldn't hunt us. It's ironic that millions of years later we had a TV show called The Crocodile Hunter,

    ... a TV show featuring a human 'hunting' big reptiles.

    "From Eucynodontia came the first mammals. Most early mammals were small shrew-like animals that fed on insects and had transitioned to nocturnality to avoid competition with the dominant archosaurs — this led to the loss of the vision of red and ultraviolet light (ancestral tetrachromacy of vertebrates reduced to dichromacy)."

    \- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution

    Image by Nobu Tamura https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Repenomamus_BW.jpg

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)SN
    snek_boi @lemmy.ml
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