I'm leaving this up because it's funny, dunk to your hearts content
Oooooh veritasium! Truly a delicious specimen. Between the Waymo shilling, Silicon Valley "philosophy" ideology propaganda disguised as science, and general STEMlord malaise, it's hard to tell which is the juiciest part!
Reminder to everybody that it doesn't take actual knowledge or being right to make a slick explainer video, just some computers and a team of animators.
Mathematically proving that enlightened centrism is the only valid choice
Veritasium is an intellectually impoverished ghoul shilling for neoliberalism; no wonder he doesn't support democracy.
this shit is why I hesitate to recommend any channel unless it is explicitly ML. somebody milkshake ducks and you have to cringe remembering the people you told to check them out
I remember liking kurzgesagt and thinking they were cool, until I saw that they were being funded by the Templeton foundation, and later Bill Gates. They're pre-capitalist reformists who will defend "but reformism and pipedream technology can totally solve inequality and climate change bro".
When I was a liberal, I was very into all the youtube pop science video, kurtzgesagt, rational animation, etc. I was bought on the
space fantasy of terraformation, "grabby aliens", "longtermism" and all that.Becoming a Marxist and being exposed to dialectical materialism made me realize just how much idealism, metaphysics and techno-washing of societal problems there is in science communication and academia itself.
Yeah, it's really annoying sifting through all the techbro space fantasy when you want to learn about why and how we would send humans in space.
Realistically, the only thing an industry in space would have that we couldn't already get on earth for way cheaper is low gravity. So basically, the only industry for which it would make sense to bother putting it in space is the industry to launch stuff in space. This means that there is no profit to be made from asteroid mining, it would be run at a constant loss unless it can somehow be made self sufficient. And of course it's not a solution to mining pollution on earth in and of itself, there are a lot of solutions that could be up and running long before any space mining effort become able to supply earth with even 1% of the metals and rare earths we need.
Not only is mining resources in space far from the solution-to-every-problem that techbros present it as, but a capitalist system is incapable of doing it because there is no profit to be made. Only a system that doesn't need profit to survive could achieve it.
Same.
I hate how modern science fiction and futurism is just "the same capitalist hellhole we live in now but with lasers and stuff". I hate how so many authors imagine that we'll continue to have the same petty wars when the idea of a war in space become more and more absurd the more you think about it, the distances involved alone makes war on an interplanetary scale impossible.
It's all so imprint with this extremely liberal idealism even academia isn't speared. For example, I don't know if you've heard of "grabby aliens". It's a completely serious and unironic proposal for a "solution" to the Fermi paradox, the author is a famous scientist, the same guy who proposed the "great filter" hypothesis. It supposes that alien civilizations start expending in the universe and taking over star systems at a large fraction of the speed of light and because of that if we could see aliens they would be here instead of us and that's why we don't see aliens. Even in this short TL;DR there is glaringly obvious problems. This theory imediately falls apart as soon as you start asking questions about those "grabby aliens", which as you might have guessed are justified ans an assumption by the classic liberal "greed, competition and expansionism is natural
"The average “futurology” devotee handwaves all of that and just says “there are that many resources out there” and then thoughts terminate, leaving only a smug smile and thoughts of passive income from renting out their ZYBERTRUKKKs on Autopilot™ once the kinks are worked out.
Exactly, the capitalism brainrot is deep with those types. The epic space colony must be handled by private companies to them, even the dreams of cool futuristic space habitats must be milked for profit. Even the few ones who have a more grounded view of how we could create industries and permanents outposts don't escape the mind virus. I found a youtube channel all about creating a spaceport and permanent bases on the moon a few days ago, and his plan to develop it is unironically space tourism for assholes billionaires and other private investments.
It is easier to imagine faster than light travel than the end of capitalism.
The take away of this entire thread.
I hope we'll start seeing some based leftist science fiction stories on our creative writing community as the platform grows. See you in space comrade
Democracy is mathematically impossible because the bourgeoisie are compelled by market forces to irreparably destroy all social institutions.
FYI OP was been banned from Lemmygrad 2 hours ago for liberal linkspam (including this same post) and seems to be targeting y'all as a result
They're also spamming radio free Asia and voice of America everywhere.
Both mbfc say are amazing sources even though are propaganda
I'm gonna assume it's about Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which is about social game-theory, sort of. There are some weird paradoxes when you get into the mathematics of voting systems. Arrow's Theorem makes a few reasonable assumptions about a ranked-choice voting system, and shows that a third candidate will always spoil the results between the other two. In other words, adding in Jill Stein would change how Kamala and Trump are ranked in relation to each other (in a ranked-choice voting system).
Probably one of the top ten misused bits of math in the world. It relies on some questionable assumptions about voting behavior, several voting systems do not apply, and even if this was 100% true, getting to 99.99% confidence accuracy in your voting system would still be possible. None of that is mentioned in any of the pop science clickbait videos about it however.
The video mentions this as a solution to the problems presented by Arrow's theorems.
bullshit math wizardry are they pulling out of their ass to argue that the exact ranking of each individual candidate
If you're voting in an election with ten candidates, but you only like two of them and equally despise the other eight, the "maths impossibility" arises because you'll have to put a candidate you hate third
Yes, in Australian Senate elections you only need to rank at least 6 parties above the line or at least 12 individual candidates below the line on the long ballot paper
Show
In practice you might rank all ~100 candidates to try and avoid a couple candidates you hate the most
I usually just go with the party and stop at 6 or the first major party (that kinda acts like a big wall)
I mean, you're making a political argument, and one I don't disagree with. But the point of the theorem is about an idealized voting mechanism, absent ideology. There's absolutely arguments to be made about the usefulness of studying things like pure math, and I'm sympathetic to some of them, but even so, I think it's important to know how the system we use to implement democracy actually functions.
I think also the title is just pure clickbait, never take a youtuber at their word.
-get shit done
-Looks inside
it's just more neoliberalism
Derek needs to stay in his fuckin lane and make cool science nerd videos
You have to subtract the cia but if you do you get valid solutions for for non imaginary sets
I saw this and gave it a watch.
And then I watched him advocate against ranked choice voting... something that would help prevent the shitfest we live in...
Ranked-choice voting probably wouldn't do much. Australia has ranked-choice voting, and their political landscape isn't much different from the UK or Canada, with two status quo parties dominating everything (Labour and Liberal+National), only now you have smaller parties and independents they have to deal with sometimes.
Maybe that's because it still has single-member constituencies, which really hurt electoral diversity. The House uses single-member constituencies, and only 12 percent of seats belong to third parties. Meanwhile the Australian Senate also uses ranked-choice voting, but with the nationwide vote share for seat allocation , and there third parties have 30% of seats, with mainly the Green Party benefitting.
Isn't it because ranked choice is less accurate than individual notation? Like, with ranked you have to pick a first one while if you go even further you can give the possibility to rate everyone 0 and have the election restarted with a new roster if nobody has the average score
Democracy might be mathematically impossible – here’s why. Head to https://brilliant.org/veritasium to start your free 30-day trial and get 20% off an annual premium subscription.
Fuck this.
I don't know how people can unironically use self-congratulatory labels in general. I'd argue that there is a similar case for the word 'progressive' as used by liberals.
Rationalism has a specific meaning, but yeah, I'm not really sure why anybody would consider themselves rationalists in the sense of claiming that there is no way of studying the world other than rationalist ones (as opposed to, for example, empirical studies).
Where can I read it?
