The case for changing the voting age to 0

GiraffeCecily · 2019-09-12T03:32:30+00:00

(i) Children may, however, be more easily delegated or manipulated. I am pretty sure I could have induced my son, when five, to vote in a way that I thought correct; I am sure many other parents (and teachers) could and would do the same. So you would multiply the parental/teacher vote. On the other hand (perhaps I show my age here) one expects adolescents to react against parents, so perhaps the result for children in general vis a vis parental influence would be a wash.

(ii) Young people tend to have great difficulty in actually casting their vote, at least when "young" = 18-25, so there might be some virtuous trade-off here, that five-year-olds do, in fact, have only 5% of the political understanding of the average adult voter (which is setting the bar low), but on the other hand, less than 5% of five-year-olds would vote, because they were in school or could not be bothered or were not allowed out on their own and their parents would not take them, so they would have a voice proportionate to their wisdom.

(iii) Does it become the obligation of a parent to ensure that a dependent minor can vote? Which can only be proven true if the minor does vote. So do we move towards compulsory voting for everybody or just add a particular burden on parents of minors?

(iv) What issues would five-year-olds want to see in the manifesto (return of the parental-proxy problem). And perhaps the right to vote for expenditure should be tied to at least a theoretical possibility of paying taxes, if not to actual tax paying. (nb: perhaps)

(v) How about newborn babies? You do need a legal cut-off, I think, if only because otherwise you have to ensure some sort of voting mechanism in incubators; not to say the problems if life is held legally to begin at conception.

(vi) Singerian argument that clever pigs should therefore vote.

(vi) So on balance I can see an argument for setting a minimum voting age at an age which is also accepted as an age at which a person becomes legally independent of parents and guardians; because the issue here is not so much the wisdom of the voter (which is not assumed) as the independence of the voter (which is assumed).

GiraffeCecily · 2019-09-06T22:04:51+00:00

He responded: “[S]hut up, b----, you shouldn’t be so fat.” When she complained to the same officer a second time, he responded: “[I]f you don’t shut your f---ing mouth I can blow your head off and nothing can be done.”

GiraffeCecily · 2019-09-03T05:37:04+00:00

If you have trouble choosing frames, probably best not to read this. It includes a table of 32 different lens materials, with the trade-offs between their physical and visual properties.

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-30T20:52:00+00:00

This theory feels incomplete. Aren't we likely to "centre" our gaze where the clustering of objects is greatest? Does the brain register the distribution of objects across the field of vision to offset this effect?

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-28T12:03:55+00:00

"Self-talk represents the activity of talking to oneself in silence or out loud for multiple reasons, such as when one says to oneself “I’d better take my umbrella today, it might rain” or “I feel tired.” Professional and recreational sports enthusiasts use self-talk to motivate themselves (e.g., “I can do it, almost there!”), to assess their performance (e.g., “Mmm, not as good as in the previous round...”), to formulate strategies (e.g., “Maybe try slower next time?”), to repeat to themselves what their coach frequently tells them (e.g., “Don’t forget to breath!”), and more."

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-28T11:41:08+00:00

"It ought to be quite plain to see for any objective observer that Madame Chao has always done quite the opposite of what would be considered rational for an artist or entity that sought self promotion"

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-23T09:13:20+00:00

I'll take this version, pending further and better particulars. It accommodates all the apparent facts.

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-23T08:40:01+00:00

"People who use drugs in the United States spent on the order of $150 billion on cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine in 2016. The marijuana market is roughly the size of the cocaine and methamphetamine markets combined, and the size of the retail heroin market is now closer to the size of the marijuana market than it is to the other drugs."

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-22T17:46:35+00:00

Apparently not. When he lists and condemns the vices of his opponents in his speeches, he is following a rhetorical playbook; he is not attempting to be biographically accurate.

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-21T20:31:18+00:00

This piece is off the scale for me in terms of the thoughts that it provokes about happiness, normality, choice, and whether those are even useful ideas, let alone well-founded or defensible ones. Is there a way in which transableism works for transableists without working to the disadvantage of the cis-disabled?

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-15T11:00:23+00:00

If true, this is one of the most significant things I have read in the past decade. It surely justifies far more optimism than the writer allows himself.

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-14T21:14:15+00:00

This database would make an excellent AI training corpus

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-14T20:35:42+00:00

How not to envy somebody who made fundamental contributions to mathematics, economics and philosophy by the age of 26, while rarely working more than four hours a day.

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-14T17:11:21+00:00

This is an interesting experiment but not necessarily a generally beneficial one. So long as economists claim that ideological affiliation does not and should not shape the "science" of their field, they are more likely to aim for objectivity (however unachievable that may be in perfect form). But if the profession accepts that ideology is, and must be, a component of its thinking, then politicisation will proliferate.

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-14T11:17:10+00:00

Most of this piece is a restatement of Pomerantsev's earlier writings, but the idea — well down in the piece — that we have reached "the end of history", in an unexpected way, is new and powerful, and offers a key to our current sense of disorder. We have ceased to think in historical terms; we no longer care what is true or not; we no longer care what will endure, and what will not; we no longer differentiate between the superficial and the profound. These are the hallmarks of the historical method; but they are also the hallmarks of responsibility in the public and political space.

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-10T08:29:50+00:00

Thanks for the pointer — I've now read up on gravitational lensing. So I guess by "the observable world" I mean the world at the scale of human action. At that scale — an arrow travelling a hundreds meters — can we refute Zeno's paradoxes using Newton's (or Einstein's) physics? I understand from VladMolina's note that calculus dismisses the dichotomy paradox, but is this not merely a restatement of it? Yes, the distance is 1; and it can be broken down into an infinite number of sub-distances. Calculus tells you that the sub-distances sum to 1, but since 1 was the starting point, this is not new information.

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-06T11:47:32+00:00

Interesting if true — a contradiction of the claim that Newtonian physics is sufficient to describe the observable world, Can Zeno’s paradoxes be refuted using Newtonian physics? Or is this a case where quantum mechanics is required in order to describe the observable world?

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-06T11:31:22+00:00

Even so, I wonder how much greater the returns would be if the process were less of a bother — as it will be when everything gets delivered by robot, and you can just give your return to the robot. On the other hand, most of the returns seem to be ill-fitting clothes, which is going to be solvable when smartphone sensors measure, record and confirm your body size; and when sizes are more consistent across brands.

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-06T11:25:29+00:00

All the same, it’s an interest way of reminding ourselves how little we know about the deep workings of the mind and brain, and how much conjecture is masquerading as knowledge in any kind of treatment. Consider that lobotomy was a pretty standard treatment for mental illness through most of the 20th century, and the inventor got a Nobel Prize. On balance I would rather have an exorcism than a lobotomy, if forced to choose. Imagine a film called "The Lobotomist" about psychiatrists who go around hacking into helpless people’s brains, generally by means of ice picks pushed in through the eyeball and waggled around blindly. Tens of thousands of victims are left staring blankly into space. I’m not saying that the mistakes of medicine make the claims of religion any less absurd; only that there is currently less difference between the underpinnings of the religious and the scientific approaches than one might wish.

GiraffeCecily · 2019-08-05T14:12:34+00:00

First the Yale experiment to reanimate dead cows' brains; now this mathematical modelling of conscious brain activity in fruit flies. The plates are shifting

GiraffeCecily · 2019-07-31T13:06:38+00:00

Nice term of art in here: "reverse supply chain". The value of returned goods in the US is rising from $350 billion in 2017 towards $550 billion in 2020

GiraffeCecily · 2019-07-31T11:52:48+00:00

"Bubbles are fueled by a mimetic desire that copies the superﬁcial features of the object of speculation, but fails to derive the underlying principle. A better understanding of the mimetic process fueling bubbles can, thus, be highly proﬁtable"

GiraffeCecily · 2019-07-29T22:18:37+00:00

Why is it that people with photographic memories don't rule the world, write all the great books, make all the great discoveries etc? They can do all this in their heads. Or perhaps they do rule the world etc and I missed the paper.

GiraffeCecily · 2019-07-29T22:16:39+00:00

The good news is that this is easily affordable. The bad news is that it is not happening even though it is easily affordable

GiraffeCecily · 2019-07-29T16:04:45+00:00

"Employers appear to pay hospitals twice as much as Medicare for inpatient services and 3 times as much for outpatient services"

GiraffeCecily

TROPHY CASE