CeffTheCeph

On both your and daychilde’s comments here…

The system gets rigged when there are fewer people invested in the democratic process, when there are fewer people actually pursuing and participating in a democratic system. The more we outsource our democratic agency to others, the more likely those others are going to be corrupt. One of the main points of the article is that democratic backsliding is a global trend. This doesn’t mean that particular countries are democratically electing dictators, democratic backsliding means that across the world, incrementally, small policy changes are adding up to a less democratic world. These policies may have nothing to do with democracy in their discourse, but act to weaken the democratic process.

As an example, where I am from every school district has a set of trustees who are democratically elected in municipal elections and are tasked with ensuring that the local school board is following the Ministry of Education guidelines as they relate to the needs of the local community. Currently the state government is in the process of eliminating all trustees and appointing a single state ‘administrator’ to take on the role of the trustees for all districts in the state. Literally dozens of locally elected representatives are being replaced with a single state appointed administrator.

The discourse around this issue is troubling, essentially revolving around the notion that trustees are inefficient, don’t know how to properly use public education dollars and are costing taxpayers more while adding no value to the education system itself. While there most certainly is an argument to be made about efficient use of tax dollars with respect to trustees, the point that a functioning democratic institution is being replaced with a centralized authoritarian ruler is completely ignored.

The point of this story is that it is significantly easier to corrupt the democratic process, whether through a rigged election, or through manipulation, or gerrymandering, or whatever, when there are fewer people engaged in the voting process. In my state the average voter turnout for municipal elections is well below 40%. The reason people aren’t interested in the democratic backsliding that is caused by getting rid of trustees is because it is only a minority of people in the state who even bother to elect trustees in the first place.

Another important point that is being made in the article is that one way to effectively fight against threats to democracy is to call out those threats as they are. Getting rid of trustees may actually produce better outcomes in terms of efficiency, but we all have to acknowledge that getting rid of trustees is a direct threat to our democracy. An autocratic state is always going to be way worse for everyone than having some inefficiencies in the school board trustee system.

If there are more people engaged in the democratic process than there are more people who are able to critically scrutinize the democratic process. It is only when we are engaged in the democratic process that we can actually hold it accountable to us. The more people who believe in democracy, the deeper and stronger that democracy becomes.

The voting system may very well be rigged, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up on democracy entirely. In reality, it is only when a majority of people give up on democracy that any voting system can be rigged. When the majority of people believe centralized efficiency is better than local representation, for example, democracy dies. In any case, the more people participate in the democratic process the stronger that process becomes. Just always vote. That is by far the most important and effective action you can take to prevent democratic elections from becoming rigged.

How this can be achieved is the question

Just fucking vote. Engage in all local, state, and federal elections. Be invested in the results. Everyone, all the time, vote on everything. Believe in democracy.

However, their argument rely on that ”quantum gravity” is what makes the universe uncomputable. I’m not sure how valid this statement is.

Here is the assumption the authors use that brings quantum gravity into the proof:

As we do not have a fully consistent theory of quantum gravity, several different axiomatic systems have been proposed to model quantum gravity [26–32]. In all these programs, it is assumed a candidate theory of quantum gravity is encoded as a computational formal system F_QG = {L_QG, ΣQG, R_alg} .

I interpret their assumption to mean that describing quantum gravity in this way is how it would be defined as a formal computational system. This is the approach that all of the other leading theories (String Theory, Loop Quantum Gravity) have taken, which have failed to provide a fully consistent and complete description of gravity. I think the proof is saying that non-computational components can be incorporated into a fully consistent and complete formal system and so taking a non-computational approach to quantum gravity would then incorporate gravity into the formal system thereby completing the theory of everything.

Does that make sense? I am not a logician by any extent and I have no idea how robust this proof really is. I do think the bold claims the authors are making deserve heavy scrutiny, but I am not the one to provide that scrutiny.

Disproving the ‘matrix theory’ is just the catchy headline to garner clicks. The results of the research are beyond just the matrix. For example, this proof means that non-algorithmic determinism isn’t something that represents a lack of deeper theoretical understanding. There are theories that consciousness is non-algorithmic. In that case, this proof means that AGI is also impossible.