…by having actual experts feed her sensiblr answers, demonstrating a good politician’s critical judgement of her own limits and trust in the subject matter expertise of others for good decision making

That’s the old TV show host shining through, whose only concern is the size of the audience. His “show” not drawing a huge crowd kicked the attention-addict right in the self-esteem and he’s still pissed enough that even his delusion can’t mask it.

No billionaire wants to lose profits

A specialist in one field isn’t necessarily adept in another, and particularly coming from STEM to humanities seems a particularly treacherous transition because so much about humans is based on premises that cold, logical STEM principles just aren’t aware of. That doesn’t mean we STEMs are stupid, we just don’t know just how much there is that we don’t know and would need to know before we can understand, let alone predict human behaviour.

I know I’ve found myself grossly misjudging human reactions in some case because humans are complex and there are so mamy premises and factors affecting individual behaviour and so many more for collective behaviour that they’re effectively non-deterministic and even predicting the probabilities requires such familiarity with the people or demographics, respectively.

All that is to say: Yes, I think so too. She’s well-educated, but not above tripping over the same, common stone that many smart people have stumbled on.

But we gave him a nice little prison stay to write his manifesto in! Surely he learned his lesson and won’t attempt to overthrow democracy again, right?

…right?

I had to read up on the topic of semantic models for my Bachelor’s thesis - this just might be the first time I’ve actually gotten to talk about it since my thesis defense.

Welcome to the wonderful, confusing world of objects, semantic models and unintuitive terminology.

The “immutable object” is an abstract kernel of your being, to which all other properties are related. It represents, in a way, the coincidence of all those other properties, but it’s not quite so simple.

In semantic modelling, those properties are considered objects too, albeit often dependent ones: “Hair color” in the sense of a person’s hair color is an object type; individual instances cannot exist without a person whose hair they’re describing. “Blonde”, in that sense, is a grouping of instances, but if there were no blonde people, the group would be empty.

Likewise, “Name” is an object type that depends on the thing it’s naming. Sure, you can come up with arbitrary terms that don’t refer to anything, but they’re semantically meaningless. Conversely, a thing can exist without being named, like a newborn. You could identify it as “the newborn baby of <parents>”, but that isn’t a name so much as list of properties (newborn, parents\¹), that coincide for one particular person.

The combination of a simple object (that a stract kernel) and its dependent objects (properties) forms a complex object. You, as a person, probably have a name by now. You also probably have a body, a past², some knowledge and skills like the ability to understand and form words and sentences, which in turn includes a vocabulary…

If you change your name, that is one property that changes; one dependent object that is swapped out for another. The rest of your properties is unaffected by that. Formally, the relation between you and your name is mutable, but your eye color for instance (probably) isn’t dependent on your name.

Now, if you were to somehow swap out all dependent objects at once, changing every property - a different name, different past, different parents, different body - then you would arguably be a different person. Even if you could argue that the core object remains the same, but given that this core object is an abstraction to describe the complex of properties and relations, which no longer has any intersection with the original, that “sameness” is effectively meaningless. The original configuration of properties is no longer tied to anything.

The philosophical difficulty of this concept is the question just what level of change constitutes a different object; which properties are immutably tied to you, so that changing one of them would be a different person? It’s the Ship Of Theseus question: How much about a thing can change before it’s no longer the same?

Do we argue that, as soon as even one property is changed, it no longer is the same object? Then every moment in time, adding to the past of an object, will make it a new object, nothing is permanent and the immutability is worthless.

For a person, most immutable properties of yours would be part of your past - where you were born, when you were born, essentially the continuous sequence of moments in your existence leading up to this one. The name you were assigned after birth would be a part of that history, even if the name you now use is a different one. Yet we do say that someone has become a different person if things like worldview and patterns of behaviour differ strongly enough. Again we encounter the question: What else, besides your past, defines you?

Practically, most contexts use some subset of your properties to define a person. In the example of a user id, that is the one immutable identification for user management purposes. Change the name, age, login, permissions and everything - from the system’s perspective it’s still the same user. Semantically, this might be a different person, but the system doesn’t care.

Practice has to make concessions to the limitations of human abilities. We accept a level of ambiguity by ignoring some properties, because ultimately every model and pattern is supposed to simplify our decision-making. Overcomplicating things doesn’t help us navigate life.

1 Parenthood itself could be modeled a simple, abstract object, dependent on both the parent and the progeny, representing the circumstance that one is the parent of the other. Technically, the Child could then exist independently from having parents; Practically, biology gets in the way of that.

2 Modeling the past of a given object is actually a complex exercise that also runs up against many of the same problems: You could consider it a continuous set of moments, each of which represents a relationship between a point in time and your exact state (coincidence of properties) at that point. But under the assumption of linear time, each moment would describe a different state, at the very least a different set of past moments.

Maybe the journalist wanted to be “neutral” and “unbiased” and thought that meant pulling a bOtH SiDeS

I’d excuse it as part of the joke

“The demented felon rapist backed by christofascist authoritarians seeking to abolish democracy is just as bad as the lawyer that promises tax credits to the lower and middle class, banning price gouging and has sued Big Oil in the past, whose running mate publicly endorses RCV which would make additional parties viable”

💀

You’re repeating yourself.

Supporting third-party candidates isn’t about splitting the vote

…but that’s the practical effect

—it’s about pushing for the reforms necessary to break the two-party monopoly that limits our democracy

…which you expect to happen, if Trump wins?

And no, I’m not a “republican muppet” just because I am not voting for your candidate. If I wanted to vote republican, then I’d vote republican.

I don’t think you want to vote Republican. I don’t think you want a Republican government. I think you consider it an acceptable alternative to sacrificing principles. And therein lies the issue.

The question at the heart of it all - and try to answer just yes or no - is this:

Do you think Trump is preferable to Harris?

That’s a yes then.

The point is that this isn’t just about conscientious voting. There is a strategic element to it. That’s the unfortunate reality, and standing on principles alone won’t change it.

Support efforts to abolish the FPTP system to replace it with something like RCV, where you could then in good conscience vote Green first and Dem second. Support efforts at proportional representation to have Green members in the Houses. Support anything thay breaks up the two-party monopoly so that voting for a candidate who truly represents your values no longer becomes a political gamble.

But if you’re saying “I’d rather split the left-wing votes and risk a Trump victory than vote for Harris”, people will rightly call you a Republican muppet, because you’d essentially prefer Trump over Harris.

So you’d rather have a Republican victory than a mediocre Democrat?

Okay Imma pick a fight here. Your suggestion is the opposite of pedantic. It advocates for a “vulgarisation” of Latin loanwords (in the sense of “making them more like common words”).

I want to go back to pluralising more words in line with their Greek or Latin roots. I want to reverse the perfectly natural and reasonable linguistic shift you’re proposing and instead restore or retain that piece of linguistic anachronism as long as possible.

You were shown a simple demonstration of the Spoiler Effect, which may cause Republicans to win the race if a third party manages to draw votes away from Democrats.

You’re still endorsing voting third party, saying you don’t care.

You’re endorsing helping Republicans.

What the other poster is implying isn’t that Republicans may vote Green. On the contrary, it’s that Democrats may vote Green and split their vote, while Republicans will stand united.

At the end of the day, when the votes are counted, your ideology doesn’t matter. Why you voted the way you did doesn’t matter. What matters is who wins the election, and if you’re consciously proposing an election strategy that may aid the Republicans, you’re contributing to their chances of victory.

And if you’re helping Republicans, don’t be surprised if people call you a Republican.