11-13-18 David McClintock presentation - voting methods and game changers

| Return to SciTechNature home page |

11-13-18 David McClintock presentation - voting methods and game changers

Voting Methods and Game changers.

Voting Methods

I tried to teach a bit

- about how our voting methods mean that our politicians choose their voters rather than we voters choosing our leaders

- about how - under our current procedures - voting methods can sliced and diced to create safe districts

- about how safe districts result in the same folks getting reelected again and again without competition

- about how that gives rise to extremes, to elected leaders who do not need to seek any middle grounds, nor need to compromise with others and increasingly don’t get along within their own political party

- about how in safe gerrymandered districts do not reflect our diversity

- about how that unrepresentative leadership makes it safe to be rude, safe to lie, and safe to spread increasingly extreme positions.

- The current Republican president announced just before the midterm elections his intention to overturn article 1 of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution by Executive Order. In his interview with Axios, Trump claimed: “We’re the only country in the world where..." Jus Locis is wherea person is born determines their citizenship. Jus Sanguinis (by blood) is your parentage determines your citizenship. Another Trumpian lie, the US is not “the only country in the world” to have Jus Locis. Canada is the nearest of many examples. Amend the Constitution by Exec order? C’ya in court.

- No surprise that many citizens feel, polarized, artificially separated, and dissatisfied.

It is my contention that division is largely an artifact, something that is not inherent, nor naturally there. It has been taught.The present voting system has become a way to fracture us and now threatens our very democracy. In part, bad voting systems have gotten us “leaders” who do not reflect the good we can be and strive towards. Instead we hear primarily about what we should be “against” using lies to stimulate fears.

It is precisely to limit such extremism and seek a more representative leadership that I suggest a modest step: change Federal elections. Take the matter out of politics. Only 36 states still use political slicing and dicing to keep their pols in power in evil-drawn districts. Others states like conservative Arizona and progressive California have moved on and now use independent external commissions.

In the 2018 midterm elections, on balance the pendulum swung a bit away from extremism.

In 2020, more Republican US Senators will face elections than was the case.

With the 2020 elections there is some probability real authority could return to the Democratic party.

In 2020, there will be the decennial census.

In 2022, there will be a redrawing of the congressional districts.

So before 2022, the Republican party might wish to be open to changing the rules on how those districts are redrawn.

I am a fan of the Australian Electoral Commission.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Electoral_Commission

On voting, I downloaded many hours of videos and edited bits down to fit into half an hour.

Some bits like the one on cracking, packing, kidnapping, and hijacking became less than two minutes out of a 20 minute video. Still, some of the best source material I used on voting is at:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2C_jShtL725hvbm1arSV9w

As the presentation ran to 745MB, several folks asked and I’m happy to copy it onto the USB stick or SD card of their choice.

* * * * *

In “Game changers” we moved beyond the horse.

Folks everywhere always wish things would just stay the same goddamned way it was.

Of course. We all do. But it never does. Here we would be speaking Nahuatl instead of Spanish. But the world changes anyway. I hope someone noticed I used horses as a metaphor. Horses really were a game changer for humanity. Like us, they are herd and tribal. We don’t ride horses much anymore. We adapted. Horses did not have that choice. We remain herd and tribal, however. So we need to re-learn how to be nicer than Zebras. A game changer is that the Machines are coming. There is a lot we must adapt to.

“Humans Need Not Apply”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

* * * * *

AI-composed music

Training a software construct called a neural net, a computer can learn.

Point 1. We understand poorly how exactly they develop good results. But they do pretty well.

Hear a neural network evolves its experience to generate baroque music, Here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SacogDL_4JU

To paraphrase Dr. Johnson watching as dog walk upright on its hind legs: it is not that it does it well, it is remarkable is that it does it at all.

ALB composed a tune with the AI tool Flow Composer by feeding in 16 of his own original compositions. What came out was a new work Didadooda in the style of the music previously put in. ALB then wrote the words with a joke that refer to the Turing Test: if you communicate with a machine over say a telephone line and you cannot tell from the communication that the “person” on the end of a phone call is not a person, then machines will have arrived as thinking beings.

So Didadooda song ends with the machine singing “I don’t even understand the captcha...”

CAPTCHA is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" Is this thinking? … not yet

Point 2. Thinking machines are evolving much much faster than biology.

Clément Daquin also used the AI tool Flow Composer and fed into it many Beatles tunes. Flow Composer came up with this tune for which Clément Daquin wrote the lyrics "Daddy's Car."

Flow Composer is a product of the Flow Machines Corporation, very well funded by SONY.

I used the logo of Flow Machines corporation as a motif for the closing apocalyptic video.

| Return to SciTechNature home page |