The famous David D. Friedman writes on his blog about the decision against homeschooling in California:
The term “fascist” has been overused, and in any case I know nothing about Croskey’s views on economics. But I find it extraordinary that he would be willing to explicitly argue that public schools exist largely to indoctrinate children in views the government approves of, with or without the consent of their parents.
Indeed…
A fascinating post just appeared on the Adam Smith Institute blog. It caught my eye due to the title, of course:
These traits [of humans to change their environment] have served them well, but the environment they desire to control includes other people. There is an inbuilt drive to control other people, as there is to tame the natural environment. This is, if you like, original sin, the desire to control others so they will meet our needs. It can be controlled by a moral act, one which recognizes that others are morally equivalent to yourself, and as entitled as you are to shape their own circumstances. A balance is reached in which each of us tries to improve our own circumstance, but trying not to impinge on the right of others to do the same. We restrain our inbuilt drive to control them, and they do the same in return.
- Dr Madsen Pirie, Original Sin
The full post is interesting and not too long at all. Definitely one of those things to think about.
I was just thinking about electronic voting this morning, and I’m curious to know why a particular verification method isn’t used, or even talked about - displaying the total votes for the machine.
Here’s how it would work: At the beginning of election day, for every issue that’s being voted on, the machine assigns and prints a random, fake total number of votes so far to protect the anonymity of the first voter. This total is displayed on screen with that issue for the duration of the election. The number assigned is recorded by an election official, perhaps by securing a printout from the machine itself, and voting begins. When the first person votes, they can see the previous fake vote total, and that their votes incremented their respective totals by one. The voter receives a token indicating that they did, in fact, cast a vote, and the vote itself is stored electronic on multiple commodity storage devices. The voter token is taken to an election official and collected. Votes are tabulated in some sort of WORM system, so that it is possible to add committed votes, but not reduce them (this stops a malicious programmer from altering totals when someone is not looking at the device; the total number of votes must equal the total number of tokens collected). In order to prevent two people from working together to infer someone else’s vote, incoming voters should be randomly assigned to a voting machine. At the end of the day, the election officials subtract the initial random totals from the totals that machines are reporting, verify that the total number of votes equals the total number of tokens collected for each machine,
By no means easy or a complete plan, but it’s not rocket science either. It might be argued that displaying the total like this could cause a information cascade - this can be mitigated by making the initial random value very large within a narrow range, so that the percent of votes that appears to go to any option seems to be close to 1/n, where n is the number of options available to an issue — with an initial value of twice the number of eligible voters +-1% and only one voting machines, the final displayed value for an option would not exceed 68% for a two-option issue (1 part assigned for, 1 part assigned against, 1 real part for, and as much as 2% moved from the assigned against to the assigned for by chance).
As time goes by, I suspect more and more that the Republicans may be in serious trouble for the next Presidential election (in 2008). The Democrats have lined up several interesting personalities, all of whom are more politically savvy and marketable than anyone we’ve seen before in my lifetime. I also suspect that the George Bush Presidency has been an exercise in misapplied logic - it would have been the best damn Presidency ever in a world of Vulcans, and here on earth, it sucked, because it assumed short-term rationality on the part of people who were either completely irrational or willing to forego short-term rationality for some long-term goal.
Just to be clear on my own politics, I generally prefer Republicans to Democrats for office, but have always either considered myself a Libertarian or independent. I’ve found my enthusiasm for the Republican Party to be waning in direct proportion to their increasing abandonment of fiscal issues. I sense that the Republicans are too greatly abusing security theater to the detriment of taxpayers and citizens. True, the Democrats aren’t any better in these respects, but the Republican party has no advantages for me in other respects. It’s become of the party of the bland. All of this has shown up in the party’s real ability to get elected; right now, Hilliary Clinton alone has a 30% chance of being the next President based on the Foresight Exchange claim HRC08. I haven’t looked at claims for the other candidates, but, naively, this seem to indicate to me that the Republicans have only 35% chance of winning the election. With a few percentage points moved around, Clinton could mop the floor with all Republican challengers combined. (Why a prediction market instead of a poll? In short, you get slightly better results asking people what they think will happen rather than what they want to happen; see The Wisdom of Crowds for a good explanation, although I was into prediction markets before prediction markets were [sort-of] cool).