scratchee

Inhuman behaviour is a problem that scales with intelligence.

Evil cat? Lock it in a room whenever it does evil things.

Evil human? Call the police

Evil billionaire? Protest/push for law changes whenever his company does evil shit, hope it’s enough to blunt the worst of his behaviour.

Evil superhuman ai? Guess I’ll die.

Edit: to be clear, don’t think billionaires are smarter, but felt wrong to ignore them in the list, consider them the worst case of a single evil human.

A: That’s true until it isn’t. Preparing for/predicting things before they happen is our best hope for not sticking our collective heads into a guillotine any time soon.

B: corporations are only very weak analogues of superhuman intelligence, they’re different from us in “wisdom of crowds” sense (and ofc in the “too many cooks” sense).

But they’re basically just distilled from human intelligence and match our own style of intelligence somewhat closely as a consequence. Also, we’re pretty good at the alignment problem for corporations, they do largely what the combination of their investors, government, society, and workers want because they’re inner workings are fed through human brains at every stage and those humans even if incentivised with money will alter the behaviour of the corporation towards human preferences.

The fact even corporations that have thousands of intelligent human filters (most of whom are presumably in the middle of the human bell curve) monitoring every single mental process still manage to occasionally do terrible things is not a particularly compelling reason to think that a mind that has barely any human understanding or oversight into it’s internal function will be very safe to keep around.

Not OP, but regardless of it being ugly, it is novel and kind of goofy look, which has some appeal. Like buying a car designed by a child it’s sort of “fun”.

Otoh, I don’t have the cash to throw away on “fun”, and regardless, funding a nazi definitely ruins the fun, so even if I won the lottery, I’d have to find my fun elsewhere I suppose.

Also worth noting, ignoring all of that, the fact it was built so poorly and is clearly just flawed in ways that go well beyond the aesthetics also ruins it, even if musk wasn’t a nazi and the car wasn’t ridiculously expensive.

No, but I will acknowledge where some democratic elements exist within even the DPRK, though they’re very thin and weak.

There are other forms of government that are a better match for describing the DPRK. One party dictatorship, for example.

If you want to apply the same logic to the US, calling it simply an oligarchy rings hollow, though there’s a stronger argument than DPRK+democracy I’ll admit. It’s a democracy with flaws, but those flaws are smaller than the democratic elements they weaken, so it still gets to be called a democracy.

Dams are a normally a power supply rather than a battery. I was more thinking pumped storage hydro. Which is usually done where theres 2 lakes next to each other at very different heights, so you can “store” power by pumping water up and release by pumping back down.

Everyone can always call themselves whatever they want. But fear that people might use a kernel of truth to sell a lie isn’t a good reason to throw away even a tiny part of the truth.

I know, I just threw out one of the many contenders for grid power.

Iron water does look promising too.

Weirdly it’s not, except maybe gravity batteries where nice reservoirs happen to exist already. It should be but it’s not right now.

Li-ion has economy of scale right now. I do think molten metal etc will overtake eventually, but they’re currently playing catchup and li-ion has dropped in price so much over time that it’s surprisingly cheap even where it should make no sense.

Because democracy is not the best way to solve every problem.

The messy job of squeezing entire countries into a handful of words is fraught enough without throwing away up to half of the information.

As a more amusing answer: Dictatorships throw away 99.9% of the opinions, so should we let one arsehole decide which countries are called a dictatorship?

We can all agree on that, Clearly li-ion is a bad choice for static use cases.

But right now it’s the cheapest option, and it looks likely that will stay true for quite a while unfortunately.

Yes, great example. That would indeed be stretching the definition to breaking point. The fuzzy logic approach would be that you’ve described a 99% monarchy with 1% democracy.

Personally I’d put the US as a 60% democracy with a 40% oligopoly. The UK is similar since on the one hand we have more than 2 parties and are slightly better at avoiding gerrymandering and voter suppression, but on the other hand we have the silly rules for the House of Lords, and weaker freedom of speech (I don’t mind the theory of banning violent extremist speech, but I don’t like the application we’ve got at the moment, it prevents too much speech that isn’t unreasonable, free speech would be better).

Based on what you’ve said, I’m Sure you’d put it lower, but I don’t think you can justify putting 1% when it’s so easy to find worse countries even in the real world, that are still on the democracy spectrum.

Strongly disagree. Yes, all the problems you listed weaken a democracy. Some by a lot. But that’s “no true Scotsman” logic, and dangerous. Better to apply fuzzy logic than Boolean logic, countries are not perfect democracies or non democracies. They are on a sliding scale, and there’s not much point making a scale that is so idealistic that no existing country can get on the scale (or where only the best few can).

You can claim the US and UK are weak democracies, that’s justifiable if you define why (and you have, I see your point there). But calling them non democracies is just willfully twisting the meaning of words, in fact they’re unusually good democracies by some measures (both have unusually free and trustworthy elections compared to most in the world, and that has to be taken into account).

Or to put it another way, any scale needs space at the bottom.

Imagine an alternative USA where every single state was gerrymandered to hell by whoever won, where electors were routinely bribed by opposition parties to vote against their states results, where people were bullied at the polls or where minorities were entirely disenfranchised. That would be a worse place than our USA, but by your definition both would be the same. Clearly they are not the same, that one is a worse democracy. By my definition that hypothetical and awful democracy is still a democracy, just a very very bad one.