dvorak365

We might lose a few hundred million in the next few decades

And we'll be fine.

Maybe we should then consider how to prevent hundreds of millions of deaths in the meantime? Like, the holocaust didn't lead to the extinction of humans as a whole, but there's a good amount of literature around what should've been done differently to prevent it in the first place, and that's an order of magnitude fewer deaths than what you're forecasting.

The left has no issue with building more supply. The issue they tend to have is when housing is commodified - the new units being built are for maximizing private profit, not number of people housed. (The former tends to lead to the breakup of established communities as they get priced out of their longtime homes). Lefties I know are incredibly excited about the prospect of massive construction projects to build more public and social housing.

Climate engineering to stop global warming seems to me like trying to remove a bullet by shooting it out from the other side

There are other ways to construct a voting system that places power in compromise without incentivizing weak opinions over strong opinions.

I'm not denying that this is a type of voting system that biases towards certain outcomes. I'm saying that the bias it attempts to accomplish is not desirable as it gives more political power to people with weak opinions than people with strong opinions. I think a good voting system would allow people to express the strength of their feelings on the options, but the system shouldn't reward weak opinions over strong opinions and vice versa. Most traditional cardinal systems accomplish this just fine.

But tokens aren't votes. A person whose ideology aligns with 100 options has 10x the ability to influence the outcome of the election towards their preferred outcomes than someone whose ideology aligns with only one option.

What if we took this idea, applied it to wealth instead of votes, and called it something like "progressive marginal tax rates"? Seems like it would be a more effective way to fight zealotry than to attack the democratic principle of all people getting the same amount of votes.

It would be amazing if the US had an equivalent of the CBO for determining the impact of legislation on the annual total of labor-hours. Are there any estimates how many less labor-hours would be necessary if the US handled tax returns more efficiently (eg. sent out prefilled forms)?

That's fair, but still by virtue of being successful (in this particular context of success) you have a lot more money which offers you a lot more freedom to express yourself. Musk is practically free to do most anything he wants to do, but he chooses to stay in a position where he exposes himself to risk by not tempering himself.

Even more concerning is the belief that the ability to speak one's mind should be dependent on some arbitrary metric of "success".

What's the point of freedom if I'm not free to force any random person obey my every word?

It’s free in a similar way to how preventing citizens from owning slaves is free.

“Civil software” is simple, accurate, sounds good, and is relatively unambiguous. It would get my vote

I would blame the person, because the best case scenario of shooting an allegedly harmless gun into a crowd is equivalent in effect to the worst case scenario of doing nothing in the first place.

If you're unfamiliar with "absolute pitch" I suggest you look it up. Some people claim to have AP by way of sound->color synesthesia, but for most people with AP, synesthesia isn't required. AP definitely gives some edge over others in certain aspects of musical abilities.

XCode?

NTS is a form of moving the goalposts.

If you say "No X would do Y", and then after an X does Y move the goalposts to say "No true X would do Y", that's the fallacy.

If you simply stated in the first place that "No true X would do Y", then you're off the hook as long as your definition of "true X" doesn't apply to the particular X that did Y.

When did FB invest in D?

"Based on a true story" is one of those film-marketing buzzphrases that means almost nothing. If the initial inspiration for the story is a true story, even if it bears little resemblance to the final product, it is "based on a true story". See also: Subway's "made with 100% chicken"

That doesn't seem to bear any relevance to what you were replying to.

Score ratings are not as useful when the scales are poorly defined, as many internet scoring systems are. Many internet scoring systems want you to measure quality to some universal standard that should apply to all things past and present in the same way. A range voting election asks you to measure quality relative only to the options you are presented with.

Here's a hypothetical example involving 3 different shampoos. All 3 work. One smells bad. One smells decent. One smells great.

If I were to review these on Amazon, I would likely give them 3, 4, 5 stars respectively. All 3 of them worked, but I have a preference. I could imagine a theoretically worse shampoo that didn't work, or even worse, made all my hair fall out. Such a shampoo would be worth a rating of 0 stars. I don't give my least favorite shampoo I actually used 0 stars because I can imagine that in the future I may come across something worse, and it doesn't seem correct to put a functional product on the same level as a harmful one.

If I were to vote (using a score system) for which one of these 3 shampoos I would like my workplace to stock, then it is much simpler. 0, 2, 5 stars for each option, respectively. I don't have to worry about a hypothetical worse 4th option in the future skewing my results now. If a future election is held with that worse, 4th option, then I can give it a 0 and adjust my previous 0 and 2 star ratings accordingly.

More range -> greater expressivity -> better voting system

There is no reason to give your favorite candidate less than max score, and no reason to give your least favorite candidate more than 0 score, but the middle does serve a purpose. Scoring other candidates in the middle is to boost their chances of winning against your less-favored candidates at the cost of boosting their chances of winning against your more-favored candidates.

There are some variants, such as Range2Runoff, which beats Range often in simulations. I hear that it is much better than pure Range when there are many strategic voters.