Political Memes

I don’t want Biden to be president. So I’m not going to vote for him. It really is that simple. If the Democrats want my vote, they need to earn it by running a worthy candidate. My vote shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Refusing to make the optimal play when lives are on the line isn’t brave, good, or noble.

I never claimed to be brave, good or noble. Personally I think we're all pigs in the mud at this point.

But frankly it's irrelevant. I'm not voting for Biden again. Find some other way to elect your geriatric procorporate genocide supporting trash candidate.

Thinking that all information has been revealed, and therefore that anyone who plays a different move must have deliberately avoided the optimal one, is called “totalitarianism”.

One of the important pieces of information that should not be ignored about the universe is that there is more information than can be process by the available information processing mechanisms.

Also, there is no logical way to prioritize information for processing (at least in part because logic requires complete information).

To deal with the fact that life is not even qualitatively like a textbook optimization problem, and cannot ever be due to limitations in how information works, we have developed cultural heuristics that ensure relevant information is not lost.

One of those heuristics is having respect for others’ opinions, even when you think they’re wrong.

The opposite of the totalitarian viewpoint is the humble viewpoint. That’s the one that says “I know I don’t understand this completely” and behaves accordingly.

Tic tac toe is a good scenario to behave in a totalitarian way. It’s damned easy to see if a move is optimal or non-optimal in tic tac toe, because the number of possible permutations is pretty small.

If an ongoing game of Tic Tac Toe were somehow linked to whether people lived or died, and I saw someone was about to make an un-optimal move on behalf of the rest of us, I’d say tie that idiot up and override his rights because he was about to kill us all.

But games more complex than tic tac toe are harder to commit. Tic Tac Toe has nine spaces, so you have like 9! paths the game can take. But reality’s bigger than that. Hundreds of orders of magnitude bigger. I can’t be computed or grokked or boiled down to the point where you know what optimal is.

Even deterministic small game like systems get hard to optimize quickly.

It’s hard to get total knowledge of real life, so behaving in a totalitarian way is wrong, in real life. If real life were just one game of tic tac toe, maybe totalitarian attitude would be correct: “You are making a bad move, it’s going to cost us everything, it’s worth it to violate your rights because your rights are worthless when we’re all dead anyway”.