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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • Put simply you just give every candidate points out of 10 and then elect the one with the highest average.

    Approval voting (not acceptance, my mistake), simplifies things a bit by only allowing none or all points. Which is the best if you want to vote tactically anyway.

    This method sidesteps a couple of the issues that Arrow’s impossibility theorem raises, and is easy enough to understand. Ranked choice is better than first past the post but still has the issue that adding an additional candidate can affect the end result in complex ways.

    With approval voting most aspects are easy to understand. Adding or removing candidates trivially has no effect on the rest of the result. And while you can still vote tactically the only real tactic is where you put your cutoff, you should still vote for the option(s) you like best.



  • Not sure about the self-driving, but he had a video challenging the idea that electrons in wires that carry electricity. Basically arguing that it was the electric fields themselves that carried the power, which is largely outside of the actual wires.

    Not sure if that’s the same one where he asked what would happen if you used a light switch connected to a lamp by two wires. Apart from some truly egregious mistaken units (1s/c as unit of time), I vaguely recall thinking it was basically a huge clusterfuck of misunderstandings about what an electrical circuit diagram even is (stuff like real vs idealized components, parasitic capacitance / inductance etc.)

    They’re the kind of ‘Well actually’ half true factoids that you never hope to encounter in the wild if you actually understand the stuff. For someone claiming to be enthusiastic about science communication he did one heck of a job poisoning concepts with subtly wrong/misleading explanations that make it a lot harder to explain stuff to anyone with the misfortune to encounter his version first.




  • I think /r/science is misunderstood. The moderators had quite a clear vision on the kind of discussion they wanted and the kind they did not. This caused some friction every time a post reached /r/all but I don’t see that as a bad thing.

    If anything that’s an ideal situation. People encounter a new community they’re interested in, break some rules in ignorance, the mods interfere and the violations are rolled back, the new users then either follow the rules or leave.

    Not sure how they’re doing with the API changes, pretty sure they had some automation going. Don’t think they’re compatible with reddit’s new view on making communities as interchangeable as possible to stop friction from interfering with ad revenue.