Category: quotes

[A] new study argues that for a democracy to function at all, you need lots of ignorant people blindly siding with the majority.

…

There needs to be just enough people who know anything about the issues to act as leaders for everyone else, but the majority disintegrates if there are too many viewpoints pulling in different directions.

…

[The researchers] looked at golden shiners, a species that is naturally attracted to the color yellow. The researchers took a bunch of these fish and trained most of them to act against instinct and swim towards a blue target, while the rest were trained to follow their natural preference and go for a yellow target.

When the researchers placed just these two groups together, the smaller group of yellow-seeking fish was able to dominate the blue-seeking fish, making them all swim to the yellow target 80% of the time. This is because their natural instinct gave them a stronger desire go after the yellow target than their counterparts. But then, when fish with no prior conditioning were added to the mix, the influence of the yellow-seeking fish quickly dropped away, and the initial, blue-seeking majority regained control.

From Democracy needs ignorant people, says science [io9.com]
 

The article is a summary of a paper in Science [sciencemag.org]… now go read the article about how ignorant fish are required for an enlightened fish democracy to work. Before I plagiarise the whole damn article.

[F]ree web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.

Maciej, from Don’t be a Free User [pinborad.in] blog post at Pinboard.

Neurosis can be the sign of a decent guess

Prof. Tom Murphy, from Wind Fights Solar; Triangle Wins [physics.ucsd.edu] a post on his blog; Do The Math

Bonus points for spotting the reference to They Might Be Giants song Particle Man. Wonder if the author knows it from the album or from the Animaniacs episode?

we’re not taking care of our gerbil, so we have not demonstrated that we deserve a pony

Tom Murphy [physics.ucsd.edu], in his blog post Sustainable Means Bunkty to Me [physics.ucsd.edu]

I’ve been reading Tom Murphy’s blog on “astrophysicist’s-eye view of societal issues relating to energy production, climate change, and economic growth” since I first came across it a few months ago. It’s a wonderful blog for anyone remotely math capable who is interested in the details of what it would take to ‘fix’ the current issues of human impact on the earth. Somehow in the age of social updates via Facebook, Google+, Twitter and the like I have never plug it on this site… Consider that oversight fixed.

The articles are long and a bit math heavy, as might be expected of an astrophysicist, but you don’t need to focus on the math to understand the conclusions. In fact the only reason to focus on the math would be to try and disagree with him or because you could actually do that level of math and enjoy the challenge. As long as you trust his ability to actually setup and solve the equations the math is just a tool to lead to the inevitable and, bleak, conclusions that our gluttony is leading the world to, spelled out in metaphor and examples that a non-astrophysicist can actually understand.