Please don't post unsubstantive dismissals. If an article isn't good enough for HN you can always flag it, but contentless snark just lowers the signal/noise ratio for everyone.

Hmm. Suppose you personally don't think an article is very well written but don't want to deprive other people of the opportunity to read it; surely a single inoffensive post critical of it is better than losing the whole article? Posters on this site seem pretty mature and level headed so it's not like one person is going to start a riot.

> Suppose you personally don't think an article is very well written but don't want to deprive other people of the opportunity to read it;

jqm's post is not constructive. Even a less snarky "I found this article badly written" probably doesn't help other people decide whether or not to read it. You can flag it or not as you see fit, but there's no value in posting a comment like that.

> Posters on this site seem pretty mature and level headed so it's not like one person is going to start a riot.

Only constant enforcement keeps the site that way. http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/

These comments of yours also lower the S/N ratio. Go get some sleep.

I tried, indeed I did try, trice upon a time I didst, sorry, I just can't, I just can't get to the end of the article; reminds me of trying to tackle a Henry James novel in school, one knows one is not going to succeed but regardless one forges ahead in the vain glorious hope that there is light at the end of the tunnel, or at least an end to the paragraph, only to flounder, in a miasmic fugue of cognitive disphoria .. :)

ps: It's a fiction that LSD helped certain people in their creativity. These so-called psychonaut are selling a dangerous form of snakeoil. Terence Mckenna and the rest, after decades communicating with DMT machine elves etc, what have they brought back from the 'other side', absolutely nothing of value. Going on the blurb on Amazon 'Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America' reminds me of 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'. A very interesting section in there on 'Ken Kesey'. He of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ' fame. I don't think Tom Wolfe could have wrote 'Acid Test' if he actually was on LSD.

Who wants to drink a beer that had a ball in it that had been rolling around on the floor?

Beer pong is just dumb all the way around even as a freshman in college.

Every single time I've played we filled the pong cups with water and have whatever you're drinking (beer, soda, cranberry juice) on the side. Whenever they sink a ball, just drink your own drink. I was under the impression most people played like this?

I did notice the org has raised $650K from a variety of sources.

It might be interesting to see the ideological bent of the source of that funding. But I'm guessing it probably isn't oil drillers and Jesus in public school promoters.

i would say that our funding tends to come from more progressive donors. that being said, we are ready, willing and able to take funding from say the Koch brothers should they ever offer to financially support our efforts to increase voter turnout.

Each potential voter decides if they are informed enough. Or at least interested enough. And the two probably go together.

I find more informed people are often less motivated to vote.

According to the sidebar in the Wikipedia article on voter turnout[1], increasing education leads to increasing likelihood to vote.

38% - No high school 43% - Some high school 57% - High school graduate 66% - Some college 79% - College grad 84% - Post-graduate

Though, possibly, being educated isn't the same thing as being informed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout#Socio-economic_f...

There are barriers to voting that tend to crop up the less white collar your job. One sad issue is lines tend to be vastly longer in poor areas.

Much of the time the smartest people don't actually do the best. High IQ isn't a guarantee of high achievement.

And _that_ is the real value of media. Advertising always was a side business.

If you trace the root cause of why people are in prison I bet in most cases poverty is a large part.

When will we stop and realize keeping people indefinitely in poverty only makes life worse for everyone? The people behind these kind of schemes are morally more criminal than many of those who are incarcerated. Preying on defenseless or down and out members of society for financial gain is about as low as you can go.

If indeed it's gone one year to the day later.

That probably depends on who you ask.

Maybe incendiary, but very little charisma . More than all the other candidates, incl. hillary , but still vanishingly little of it. But we dont live in a world of charismatic leaders. Obama is probably the most charismatic of all, and that's telling.

Good point: if charisma won elections, our actors would be our politicians.

Maybe not all governance is possible by algorithm but much of it is.

For instance, where do we widen a road? Absolutely an algorithmic problem. But I suspect sometimes these types of decisions have more to do with contributions, political favors, relations, etc.

Solving even part of this type of friction in society would go a long way toward improving life for the general population.

Bring on the A.I. I'd rather be governed by a machine than a party boss and a lobbyist any day.

>For instance, where do we widen a road? Absolutely an algorithmic problem.

Not to the people living on either side of it who stand to lose their homes. "Computer says yes" would be a political nightmare.

As long as you have people making the decisions you can have the comforting illusion that it may be possible to make them change their minds.

Replace the people with an AI and the comforting illusion disappears.

You'll have people taking to the streets with pitchforks to protest against tyranny in no time - even if the AI is much better at making intelligent decisions.

So if we don't widen roads because people might have to move then we get more accidents. Or the city can't grow. Or people sit in traffic for extra hours a day.

People's needs need to be taken into account, yes, that is what it is all about in the end.

But a few people's inconvenience or greed outweighing the general progress is not a long term formula for successful society.

That sounds like an awesome premise to a dystopian science fiction novel.

The point is we already live in that dystopian future. But it isn't machines running things. It's people fighting over scraps. I firmly believe the machines will do better.

So you understand what is coming, on some level. The question for us is how to best handle the transition.

Where to widen a road ceases to be an algorithmic problem when the algorithm decides to widen it into a neighborhood's front yards, and the homeowners take issue with that. It then becomes a political problem which AI is no better at solving than humans.

There are often hidden agendas in politics. The inscrutability of neural networks and these hidden agendas will make for interesting interactions.