Elections of all kinds. I’ve used pen and paper as well as a silly script to choose as a group what to eat, what movie to watch, what book to read, and who to elect as president of a club. The issue is it takes time to do it, and every bit of friction makes it more likely someone will object to a new and different electoral system, even if it is better.

So a good Majority Judgment webapp or something like that would be used for fast elections of all kind.

Bonus points if it’s FLOSS, so that it gets more legitimacy.

Fast and easy Majority Judgment voting (Balinski et all.), where I can choose the judgments, and at any moment add, remove, or disable more voting options or voters.

I wonder if there’s a relevant B Corporation.

In general, I watch the very last couple of games because that’s usually when lots of people around me are excited about it and watching it.

With this year’s one, I’m so grossed out by its ecological and social insanity that I don’t really want to.

The Snowden leaks show that the government programs rely on unencrypted data and data that companies are forced to give. Neither method relies on exploits of memory unsafety.

Memory safety refers to the software that is used internally.

Here’s an analogy. Imagine I sit in a park, and have a squad of friends who go out to listen to other people’s conversations. They may write down and pass me what they hear or they may simply tell me what they remember. That doesn’t matter. What matters is what I do afterwards.

Let’s say I want to write down what they said. I could write it down with a permanent marker on the palm of my hand. If I make a mistake, I’ll have to cross it and waste precious space.

Imagine I learn I could use pencil and paper, or a computer. Mistakes would stop costing me dearly. I would also have more space.

This change from ‘permanent marker on a hand’ to ‘paper and pencil’ or ‘computer’ is the equivalent to the NSA recommending memory safety. This doesn’t change the fact that my squad is out there spying on people. It just changes how I deal with the evidence they hand me over.

Echo chambers are responsible for polarization if we define them broadly as groups that orient themselves towards similar values by listening to each other and not to other groups. This happens with friend groups over dinner, family reunions, and (for those who are religious) at religious events.

However, if we define it as necessarily something that happens in social media, I disagree with the notion that those echo chambers are responsible for radicalization. Notice I said “radicalization” rather than ‘polarization’.

Before, you’d simply gather around with your friends or family and discuss how the world is becoming more progressive. If your family happens to have regressive values, you’d complain about marginalized groups no longer being as marginalized. “Oh, the gays, they want to destroy the country by normalizing homosexuality”. The impulse to retain the values of a marginalized group (such as religious and racist zealots) motivates further cloistering and clustering.

Now, social media amplifies polemical voices that fiddle with your insecurities. If you’re a shy teenage girl, this might mean that you’re exposed to messages about how you’re ugly and poor. But if you’re not, it can be about anything. An effective technique is showing you your political enemy doing something threatening. “Democrats steal the election”, " Republicans burn a library because of LGBT books". This makes you want to engage with the content and watch more ads from the social media platform (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube). As a result, you spend more time reading about or watching videos about this threat (the insecurity-fiddling threat) and radicalize. These are the flat-earth YouTube rabbit holes. Or the toxic-masculinity red pill ideology rabbit holes. Or the fucked up terrorist rabbit holes. Or the hyper-religious and anti-democratic zealot rabbit holes. Or the racist rabbit holes. There are plenty. You can tell me which ones I’m missing. You probably know what I am talking about.

In other words, it’s not echo chambers that worry me. It is algorithmic manipulation to maximize engagement. That is a source of big trouble for the world. That is what we will have to deal with if we, as a world, pretend to live democratically.

If you’re not too anxious, reading Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman and applying it. If you’re too anxious, reading The Happiness Trap and applying it. Those are both books on proven ways to deal with many mental health issues.

Get paid

wut

Interesting question. It both spurs discussion and shows you’ve thought about this topic. What do you think? :)

Interesting question. What do you think, @tomasz@lemmy.ml?

Interesting question. What do you think, @tomasz@lemmy.ml?

As in feeling comfortable with others noticing the parts that you’d like to show of yourself? As in being able to share with the recurrent experience of being heard? What do you mean?

This one

I guess I can feel a bit like this as well. What about yours do you like?

It could be my stupid bath meme, or the times Dessalines asked what I thought about Dune.

The last one is just wholesome: people sharing what they like. I think I’ve built a bit of a mystique around Dessalines as a leftist programmer, and the “How do you find Dune?” question breaks that barrier a bit.

Whoops. I updated the one I made with a link to yours. If I find a /c/BestOfLemmy post I’ll post it in yours. Thanks for the mod offer :)

Done: https://lemmy.ml/c/best_of_lemmy

I wonder if we can have a /c/BestOfLemmy