Democracy isn't supposed to be two wolves and a sheep voting on who to eat for dinner. There are supposed to be checks and balances.
One reason we are in the current situation is because we have discarded these checks and balances, allowing for the president to behave more like an autocratic monarch. If the other branches of government were performing their constitutional function, and if the executive observed the norms it's supposed to that's when you would have a democracy not just in letter but in spirit.
(Ironically I myself am an immigrant and a naturalized citizen, yet I find I know more about American civics than most US-born.)
No, democracy is supposed to be two wolves and a sheep voting on who to eat for dinner. What you’re talking about are the anti-democratic measures the founders put in place because they didn’t trust democracy.
Look, it’s hardly settled that “democracy” is a good thing. The founders didn’t think it was—they restricted the franchise to property owners, and provided for indirect election of the president and appointment of senators by stage legislatures. Just be candid about what you’re arguing, because these distinctions matter. Jacksonian Democracy has a theory of how decisions are legitimized—by the support of the masses. If you believe that the government should sometimes do something different than what the masses want, then you need to articulate a theory for who should make those decisions and what confers legitimacy on those decisions.
Sometimes democracy is the sheep area violently and unconstitutionally seceding from the wolf area and then ethnically cleansing the region of wolves, to make absolutely sure that no wolf will be around who can vote about what to eat (see e.g. the post-1991 history of Yugoslavia). A major reason why people living in immigrant-attracting democratic political entities care about immigration policy is because immigrants eventually change the composition of the voting electorate.
> No, democracy is supposed to be two wolves and a sheep voting on who to eat for dinner.
The senate is exactly the sheep. That the senate is now controlled by the sheep is also wild. The senate is what gives a person in Wyoming has 4x the voting power of someone in California. The senate was designed so that the less populous states (the sheep) don't get rolled. That the senate is majority minority is wild.
The Senate is orthogonal to our discussion. It implements the federalist structure of our government, representing the states themselves. That’s why the state legislatures originally appointed Senators. We have muddled up the system through direct election of senators and should probably repeal the 17th amendment.
You seem to be under the mistaken belief that democracy means deciding policy based on opinion polls. This is not how democracies work in practice, and opinion polls often show that most people don't want policy dictated solely by opinion polls.
Democracy is a governmental system where political power is vested in the people. It is characterized by competitive elections and the safeguarding of human rights[1].
It is by definition undemocratic for two wolves and a sheep to vote for who to eat for dinner. It is undemocratic to have gerrymandering. It is undemocratic to have uncompetitive primary elections. It is undemocratic for the police to quell protests. It is undemocratic to have state-backed propaganda, censorship, and misinformation.
Maintaining a democracy necessitates maintaining its institutions. An authoritarian one-party state does not magically become democratic just because it has an election or manufactures support for its project. Elections are an insufficient condition for democracy.
Which is also why it is a Republic and not a democracy. I wonder why people continue to call it a democracy even when they know that it isn’t. I guess it is just a sticky name
This is a naive take. It’s much more complicated than that. You’re missing the federal and state's. It’s a republic union of republics, so calling it a “Republic” is the most accurate definition
That is exactly what Democracy is. The only difference is people that are now complaining have, up until recently, actually been "the wolves", and now that they're outnumbered on certain topics and country-wide decisions they complain about the concept itself.
How do you think the people on the other side have felt till now?
The checks and balances only acted as a way to hide the true nature of government.
> safely walk around anywhere in my city after dark
For that use case, the crimes to worry about the most would be speeding or distracted driving. But people are usually more focused on e.g. someone doing drugs on the sidewalk than speeding cars; in fact speeding is hardly considered a crime at all despite the danger to pedestrians.
I just don't understand the point of this kind of argument. I suspect you and I would agree on the reason why people focus this way - they see the guy doing drugs on the sidewalk (or the shooting on the news, or their friend who got mugged, or...), think it's spooky, and decide without looking up any numbers that it shouldn't happen again. It's true that a statistical analysis of mortality or injury risk would focus on other things, but they didn't run that analysis and don't agree that it should dictate their focus.
So what is their monetization model? What can one expect from this product or company in the future? Can't find answers on their About page: https://zen-browser.app/about/
If it was any other AI provider like ChatGPT or Gemini, it wouldn't be flagged. Big deal when a major player allows employees to just to change the prompts.
Never assume conspiracy. There's a non-trivial amount of HN isers cheering for Team Musk (because move fast and break everything) and a larger part that's just sick of American news (especially anything Trump/Musk related).
The quoted paper is from 2018. Evolutionary programming is IMO similar to a search algorithm. The biosphere is not. It's not searching; it's removing unfit matches. Which is far less efficient.
I'm a big fan of evolutionary programming; it's just inefficient in the past. I think LLM agents might just be the little advantage they need, like guided missiles with GPS.
Evolutionary programming is hard though. I think it might answer OP's question - it's something that's difficult enough for most people to avoid, but there would be greatly increased interest in it.
One reason we are in the current situation is because we have discarded these checks and balances, allowing for the president to behave more like an autocratic monarch. If the other branches of government were performing their constitutional function, and if the executive observed the norms it's supposed to that's when you would have a democracy not just in letter but in spirit.
(Ironically I myself am an immigrant and a naturalized citizen, yet I find I know more about American civics than most US-born.)