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- Hacker News
- You know there's a relevant XKCD... ... Right? Also this article: https://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising...
I fear you might have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the world is really like, and what people are really like.
After all, the system you describe would not be used for democratic voting, it would be the ultimate playing field in which to weaponize surveillance capitalism and fascist control over societies. If you can't see how that could be true, then you cannot have given much if any serious philosophical thought to technology, because all attempts to fit the messiness of the world into an abstraction and "throw away the trimmings" is a violence you do to the real lives of real people
by conartist6 - Nerd stuff aside, no voting system for socially significant decisions needs to scale to the planet. Democracies don't (or rather, shouldn't) scale. e.g. if the US and China or India formed a democratic superstate, the effect would be that the US would just become a vassal of the much larger entity.
If larger or more powerful groups want to impose their will on smaller ones, they can go ahead and unilaterally do that, and own their behavior. Doing it "democratically" is just victim blaming.
by ndriscoll - I feel bad that it seems like I'm really not in favor of this idea but I'm not entirely saying why. It's difficult to articulate.
Work in tech long enough and you'll encounter the idea of purity.
It is a highly useful concept in technology. It usually means that you've entered the domain of math -- that things have become elegant in their simplicity. Functions without side effects are commonly called "pure functions" for example becuase of the mathematically beautiful ways you can reason about them. A greeat deal of Computer Science in practice depends on the composability that comes from working with pure functions.
But there's a catch!! It's no mistake that "purity", the word used for the math-i-ness of a thing, is the same word used to describe religious extremism. Functionally pure systems only work if every function inside them is pure. One side-effect-having stinker deep, deep down there in the call tree ruins the whole illusion. Purity is necessarily all-encompassing and must seek to eradicate that which is impure so that only that reasoning can be restricted to that which is pure, and clean mathematical axioms can then be developed on which to base the elevated reasoning.
What I'm telling you in no uncertain terms is that Naziism was just such an exercise in the idea of purity as applied to human beings. All of the most horrific crimes against humanity: genocides, mass murders and the like, have been executed by people pursuing purity.
To hate people is, in a way, much kinder than to simply consider them to be completely outside the domain you care about. And because your goal is to reduce all of society and humanity to fit inside a domain with clean, machine-executable roles, you will only be able to fully satisfy your itch for purity once you have destroyed or fully excluded and marginalized all that does not conform.
I'm thankful then that I agree with others that your technical premise is a literal impossibility, a child's fantasy dispelled by first contact with the school of hard knocks.
by conartist6 - BitTorrent mainline DHT does it just fine.by anacrolix
- Great example of a technical solution for a real world problem… which simply won’t work as intended. Aside from the obvious use as a tool of repression, the real problem will be one of adoption: the only way everyone will adopt this is with it being shoved down their throats by their government. At that point, we have circled back to the point that they would only push such a tool if it benefited the status quo.by voakbasda
- Ok, I'm really curious. Is this just a troll? Phishing attempt for information about specific groups? Then again, the requirements would filter out serious responders, so maybe just spam?
The post/project itself is an obvious scam. The first point is already impossible to do. The rest don't make much sense for the use case. And nobody would solve those issues without a serious lit review that doesn't require further asking HN such questions... after you have a solution... after years spent. Or hide their identity if they're doing PhD.
So is this just a funnel to get some people to check their domain? (For some voting system nowhere close to the description) Or is this some more interesting campaign?
Edit: And the repo is gone now. I hope whatever was the goal didn't work.
by viraptor