Changes

Tomorrow is December, which means today is the last day of NaNoWriMo. Like the last time I tried this (November of 2013), I failed drastically, though this time I managed to get a few thousand words out before defaulting. Nevertheless, I chalk it up as a partial success. My time spent idly scrolling the Internet is down, though not because I particularly built discipline.

(For the most part. Kerbal Space Program takes willpower after the fifth failed attempt to get a payload into stable orbit.)

However, I can say with high confidence that next semester I will not have the free to to consider such a project. I've taken thermodynamics and statics before, and they are not easy classes. My time must be allocated to assignments, not scrolling social media.

Towards that end, I intend to break the habit over winter break. This should not be terribly difficult. I'll have but a few days before Christmas, then I'll be in Minnesota visiting my girlfriend, after which there's a two weeks before the spring semester starts. My manager has also said they'll let me work while I'm in town. So I will not be overwhelmed with free time.

Concretely, my intention is, before Christmas, to check social media in the morning and evening, but not during the bulk of the day. After that Schelling Point, I'll cut back to only evenings. (New Year would be more natural but ineffective for various reasons, not the least because it will not be a natural boundary in my life.) Once I get back to Kansas City, my focus will be on cleaning out my room and catching up on my reading. (I still haven't finished the list I made for the start of the year.)

Not all changes are deferred until after finals. Starting tomorrow, or effectively today since this is being published well before midnight, I'm going to introduce a daily post rule. This can be of any length, of any quality, on any topic. At a bare minimum, a brief recap of what transpired that day. Such a record might even make me more productive, since I'd have to explain why I got nothing done and instead scrolled Tumblr all day to you, hypothetical reader!

Finally, in 2016 I will be migrating to Wordpress. Blogspot seems to have acquired a slightly negative reputation, and sadly puns are perhaps not the best public face to put forward first. Having a a professional Wordpress is better form, and may just hold me to a higher standard for what writings I publish. This blog won't be going away, however, but I'll be converting it into a more general personal blog while intelligent, well-developed thoughts will go over there. In a way, my December post-a-day project is practice for such a functionality.

This blog will soon be about actual gripes. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Comment on Hazlitt

I've been working my way through Henry Hazlitt's The Foundations of Morality, and this section caught my eye:

The real distinction we need to make for ethical clarity is not that between the individual and society, or even between "egoism" and "altruism," but between interests in the short run and those in the long run. This distinction is made constantly in modern economics. It is in large part the basis for the condemnation by economists of such policies as tariffs, subsidies, price-fixing, rent control, crop supports, featherbedding, deficit-financing, and inflation. Those who say mockingly that "in the long run we are all dead" are just as irresponsible as the French aristocrats whose reputed motto was Après nous le déluge. 

I hadn't even reached the latter half of the paragraph before the obvious objection occurred to me. Despite Hazlitt's claim that in the long run our interests align, the fact is that may take longer than our lifetimes to occur.

We don't exist in some sort of spherical cow universe where everyone lives forever. People die. They get old and start to fall apart. Practically speaking, if our interests don't align within the span of a few decades, then acknowledging this doesn't accomplish anything. The allowable period during which our interests must align only shrinks as we get older.

Perhaps this matters less when everyone is having children (assuming the interest of a parent and child align perfectly, which they don't). Long-term problem solving gets a higher priority when you're focused on "leaving a better future for our children" or some such drivel. But we aren't living in such a culture, so that defense is weak at best.

Dismissing those concerned about long-term coordination failures is not a terribly good sign this early in the book. So far it's been thought-provoking, but I'll have to keep reading and see if that persists.

Update 12 Nov 15: Upon finishing the chapter, Hazlitt does briefly address this issue:

In applying the Long-Run Principle, in other words, we must apply it with a certain amount of common sense. We must confine ourselves to consideration of the relevant long run, the finite and reasonably cognizable long run. This is the grain of truth in Keynes's cynical dictum that "In the long run we are all dead." That long run we may no doubt justifiably ignore. We cannot see into eternity.

Such a short paragraph doesn't do the issue justice, but we're not done with the long run:

We shall reserve until later chapters the detailed illustration and application of the Long-Run Principle. Here we are still concerned with the epistemological or theoretical foundations of ethics rather than with casuistry or detailed practical guidance. But it is now possible to take the next step from the theoretical to the practical. It is one of the most important implications of the Long-Run Principle (and one that Bentham, strangely, failed explicitly to recognize) that we must act, not by attempting separately in every case to weigh and compare the probable specific consequences of one moral decision or course of action as against another, but by acting according to some established general rule or set of rules. This is what is meant by acting according to principle. It is not the consequences (which it is impossible to know in advance) of a specific act that we have to consider, but the probable long-run consequences of following a given rule of action.

Stay tuned.

Available in hardcopy or free pdf through the Mises Institute.

The Text Of Posts Half Written

Following up the previous post, here's the contents of some drafts I'm never going to finish.

A Capitalist Considers Climate Change

As I write this, it's a warm afternoon in late October. Leaves are falling outside, and I'm wondering if I should do any homework before dinner. It seems like an idyllic day during Indian Summer--or is it something more? The scientific evidence would seem to suggest so.

The considerable resistance to this notion is, I believe, a product of how the issue is framed. Generally, those on the left will say you have two options. One the one hand you can be conservative Christian who wants to cut down the rainforest and enslave puppies, damn the consequences! On the other, you can be a progressive environmentalist who loves pansies, rainbows, and Mother Earth.

This post is not going to be a discussion of whether climate change is a real thing. No, today we're talking about how to face it.

Polarization of not-inherently-partisan matters is a feature of our political system, and the climate change debate is just another example. Either you deny global warming, or think anthropogenic climate change is the worst thing since unsliced bread. Saying otherwise invites criticism from both left and right. Being a libertarian, I'm already used to that. What's one more issue?

As with so many things, the climate change debate is a false dichotomy. Leftists believe that Gaia must be obeyed, and the right believes Terra is ours to do with as we will.

But nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Rationality and Leaving People Alone

Libertarians, and Objectivists in particular, have this supposition that if everyone behaved rationally (or their perception of "rationally;" I'm realizing more and more that rationality is a very, very complex mode of thinking) no one would violate one another's person or property. I think this is accurate, but it's not really very intuitive. Some very intelligent people, like Jerry Pournelle, are completely confused by it. Discussing his Political Axes:

On the anti-statist end of the scale we can see the same tendency: extreme anti-rationalism ends with the Bakunin type of anarchist, who blows things up and destroys for the sake of destruction; the utterly rationalist anti-statist, on the other hand, persuades himself that somehow there are natural rights which everyone ought to recognize, and if only the state would get out of the way we'd all live in harmony...

The problem, I think, is a misunderstanding about egoism. I've been meaning to rectify this for some time.

Egoism is a recognition of your nature as a self-interested being. In the context of a rationalist philosophy such as Objectivism, it also implies the fact that other individuals are self-interested, too.

Towards Single Transferable Vote

For those who don't know what Single Transferable Vote is, the YouTuber CGP Grey has an excellent series of videos about voting systems called Politics in the Animal Kingdom. I've included the video on STV at the bottom of this post.

Nearly everyone you meet says they think our elections are unfair and would like to see a third party enter the political arena. Nevertheless, Libertarians and Greens remain by the sidelines for a very simple reason: the spoiler effect. Minor parties usually attract more voters from one of the major parties than the other, leading to a win for the major party they least prefer. Consequently, disaffected citizens continue voting for one of the major parties, simply to prevent the other from gaining a majority.

How can we escape this trap? I'm glad you asked. Enter: the Single Transferable Vote.

I won't attempt explaining STV.

[There was originally a video in here]

Be sure to view the footnotes

Notes On Things Not Written

ICYMI, about a week ago I tweeted the titles of various posts that had been languishing in my drafts, with whatever summary could be crammed into the remaining characters. Surprisingly, it wasn't very hard, which suggests a lot of these ideas didn't need a full-fledged post in the first place. (My thought was to start using my public Tumblr for these, but after that last update....)

However, there's a few that had something approaching an outline, and I'd like to archive those before deleting the posts from my drafts.

Daylight Savings Decentralization

One of my last false starts on a political post before I really began doubting the truth of non-aggression libertarianism. Relevant CGP Grey video.

Twice a year, the inhabitants of a certain nations set their clocks forward or backwards an hour, with the nominal intention of extending the minutes of daylight during the summer months. 

Premise: DST not worth it
States control time zones
No state has incentive to switch stronger than incentive to stay
Failure of decentralization

Unbundling Higher Education

This post was heavily influenced by my experience at Purdue University, where "research" and "undergraduate" were rarely heard in the same sentence. Everything in undergrad was geared towards training, not stretching the frontiers of what's possible--and the occasional grad student or post-doc had been there so long that it made me want to cry.

At the same time, I was learning a great deal about entrepreneurship, thanks to my attempt to earn their certificate in that field. In fact, one of our assignments was to devise a business model for the university.

What struck me was how much interest there was in money for research despite the fact I was already paying more than I could afford, and getting nothing out of research dollars. My thought was "how can we focus on making college cheaper," not "how can we milk the government research grant machine for all it's worth."

This gave me the idea to unbundle higher education. If college is about getting a degree, it should be about getting a degree. And if it's about discovering new things, it should be about discovering new things. And since those two field didn't overlap for the student, it made no sense for then to overlap for faculty (especially in the midst of a PhD glut).

Turns out Purdue is just crap--though they might be the first school to adopt equity student finance--and most colleges do mix training with research, which can help undergrads get jobs after leaving. I'd already realized this by the time I write the actually text below, but was still hedging. I'm archiving this, in part as a reminded that colleges don't have their business model figured out at all.

In the course of my college education, I've often wondered just why people spent so much time talking about research. As far as I could see, it was a distraction from the real purpose: learning a trade. In retrospect, this is a simplistic view, particularly in my chosen field of engineering. Research, design, and development have a mutualistic symbiotic relationship. Nevertheless, I think there is a case to be made for unbundling higher education.
Our institutions of higher learning do not focus on a single core competency. That our colleges support athletic teams and offer academic degrees should be clear evidence of this. Just as no college devotes its entire athletic budget to a single sport, so too does the academic sphere split it's attentions. Though the variations are countless, the general divide (that we will consider, at least) is between research and training.
The "research university" was invented to meet two conflicting needs: to impart existing information, and to obtain new knowledge.
Introduction: where did the research university come from?

• Two conflicting needs: impart and obtain knowledge

• Manpower problem--insufficient number of people trained in technical fields

• "Solution": have researchers teach basic concepts

Why this model failed

• Research has become increasingly divorced from implementation

• Undergrads like me don't benefit from PhDs teaching introductory courses

• Students going into industry aren't properly prepared for company life

21st Century Solution: separate training and research

• Private research firms have existed for a long time: it's time for a renaissance

• Graduate schools + research institutes should be more separated from ugrad education

• We have the manpower, let's focus on core competencies

Conclusion: the future of higher education

• More technical world blurring boundaries between amateurs and professionals

• Training is more important than research for many careers

• Stop depriving both groups of their maximum capacity

Notes

• Pre-research ugrad vs training ugrad

• Professional glut

• Internet education options

• Model allows for specialization

• For-profit institutions (advantageous for researchers, who aren't relying on gov't $$$)

Frontiers and the nature of Morality

Consisted entirely of this quite by Rose Wilder Lane

“Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.”

Typical-Minding and School Reform

[Epistemic Status: Derived from thoughts I had just after waking up. Probably incomplete and definitely lacking rigor.]

In fourth grade, after a considerable struggle, my parents managed to get me admitted to the district's gifted program. This program, like most others of its sort, was a bit of a joke. "Gifted" education consisted of taking us out of class for one day a week (they're smart, surely they can afford to miss a day of class and still do their homework!) to pursue topics of our own interest--not that we got a whole lot of flexibility in the matter. To be fair, most of the ideas I floated were terrible and demonstrated a real lack of grounding in the world, but what do you expect from the son of two Mensans dropped into the slag heap of public education? Anyway, we got most of a day off each week for "gifted" education...then half a day...than an hour each day...then an hour each day if we could find time in our schedule.

I haven't seen what special needs education looks like, but I imagine they have much the same problem. Maybe they get more attention--my impression is that most attention directed at both ends of the bell curve is focused on making sure we look and act normal, and special needs tend to be more visible than gifted. But in either case, the central notion is people should behave like everyone else, you shouldn't be different, egalitarianism.

The school district couldn't afford, politically though possibly financially, to take all the gifted kids and shove them in their own corner. That would imply they're better than everyone else, and deserve more attention. How dare you imply my Johnny isn't as important!

Similarly, there's not many options for dealing with special needs kids. There isn't enough money to give them the attention needed to sort out those with potential from the duds. You've basically got two choices: take all of them and shove them in a corner to be neglected (How dare you imply my Johnny isn't as smart as everyone else!) , or leave them in the general population, slowing everyone down.

It's not popular to say this, but people are different. Some are faster than others. Some learn in one way, some in another. Some top out in third grade and some are graduating from Harvard at the same age.

Most of them are in the middle. Our educational system functions okay for these people. But we should realize that some people are faster than others. I'd argue we should have different school tracts for the various segments of the population--three to five should do. In a sense, we already have this, through Honors/AP classes, "regular", and the more remedial courses.

Why can't we say this publicly? I've been particularly surprised by the resistance I get towards these motions, even among those who would benefit from such an arrangement. I've long wondered why.

Enter typical mind fallacy.

Many smart people naively assume that everyone else is just as smart as they are, provided you can poke and prod them the right way to make their inner intelligence show. There's some validity to this--certain people function terribly in environments that others do fine in--but some are just not as mentally capable.

At the other end of the spectrum, it's common to see assumptions that the gifted students aren't actually that much better, just catered to. I'd be just as good, they say, if only someone gave me a chance.

Typical mind fallacy is at play here. It's uncomfortable to admit that some people are just put together differently than you. It's even more difficult to admit that these people-not-like-you are still people, if history is any guide.

Telling people that they aren't like each other, and that some of them are better than others, is not really viable in a democracy. And thus we get our current school system, where only the very rich have the option of taking their children out of the cesspool of public schools and families are slaving against Moloch to live in better districts.

Maybe we should just admit that people aren't actually equal, and make an effort to live with that uncomfortable reality, instead of fighting it.

Thoughts About Libertarians

Contrary to what some parts of the internet might suggest, libertarians are actually a very diverse bunch. (We're also very good at setting up echo chambers, which is why it can be easy to think your brand of libertarianism is the only one worth mentioning.) Today I'd like to focus on one particular aspect: the epistemic beliefs that lead to their adopting the philosophy.

Before we continue, I would like to be clear that the two belief structures examined below are the not only ways that people become libertarians. I'm not even sure that they're the most common. But they are the most interesting to me right now, so here we are.

First, there are those who become libertarians because they believe it is the right ideology. By right I do not mean morally right, so much as pragmatically best. Morality is often intertwined, though, especially from a rule-utilitarian standpoint. This sort of libertarian believes capitalism is the best economic system, democracy is the best form of government yet devisedimplemented, and the Constitution works pretty well.

Second, there are those who become libertarians because they don't believe they know how to run other people's lives. They see libertarianism as the only option for not forcing a belief system on others. These sorts tend to be divided on capitalism and democracy and definitely biased toward anti-constitution anarchism.

I came to libertarianism from neoconservatism through the first camp. I was very confident in capitalism, but didn't find social conservatism (or religion in general) very appealing. Moral behavior without government enforcement was interesting but didn't seem very viable. It wasn't until discovering Objectivism that the possibility of morality in a godless universe was really presented to me in full, and thus becoming a libertarian became much easier.

Since that time, I've spent some time in that other camp, especially when those ideas are popular (for example, Gary Johnson's campaign in 2012 relied heavily on that rhetoric), though it wasn't a comfortable experience. In part, those arguments lack rigor. It's easy to say "I don't know how to run your life better than you do", but for a significant segment of the population, having someone else take over would be a vast improvement, from reduced responsibility/stress levels if nothing else.

A better argument would be to point out that, in the space of possible policies, most will do more harm than good. However, committing to the position of not-knowing is not a good move in the greater debate. Libertarians have long been able to switch between the two mindsets depending on what the conversation demanded. This is a pretty basic motte-and-bailey strategy, which the more rational subsections of the movement should attempt to avoid.

In all fairness, there's a possible middle ground between these two positions. The argument goes something like this:

The space of possible policies is incredibly huge, and it's very difficult to determine which are superior. This is true whether we're talking about macroeconomics or how to decorate your bedroom. Because this is so, we think people should be left to their own devices so that they can experiment with policies at their own discretion until they feel satisfied. However, I have opinions about what the optimal policies are.

The discerning reader will notice a problem here. Laissez-faire in the realm of personal lives is very different from laissez-faire in the realm of, say, fiscal policy. If you do a terrible job decorating your bedroom, that affects you and maybe your immediate family. If the economy crashes, that affects millions of people, sometimes quite significantly.

Good luck winning debates with that approach. To argue for hands-off economic policies, you should have evidence (or at least theory) that indicates doing so produces better outcomes. That's a bit more difficult and, I believe, the more rational thing to do.

Back to School--ish

It's a new school year! Except, well, I haven't had a term off since 2013. Summer classes have given way to something more closely resembling a proper academic load. Right now I'm signed up for Introduction to Aerospace Engineering, Computing for Engineers, Astrobiology and Russian Culture. Hopefully that'll hold, because I still haven't be formally admitted to the engineering school. I'm not buying textbooks till I find out.

Emotionally, I'm at a dead end. Getting to the fall semester was the extent of my thinking. Get through spring. Get through summer. Visit Mary in Minnesota. Start in the fall.

Now I need "goals" and "plans" again. For the time being, my plan is to go to class and stay on top of my schoolwork. I anticipate success: math and hard science classes were an academic drag, hoovering up far more time than they warranted. Now that I'm done on both counts, we can focus on what matters: spacecraft.

We're not doing that yet, but I've got Kerbal Space Program to sate me during these lower-level classes. We are building a drone this semester, which is more than Purdue can say.

Beyond that...I'm not sure. My professor for Intro to Aerospace was quite clear that he didn't believe engineering students have free time, period. Whether that's accurate is anyone's guess--but it's probably more accurate than not. All too many students come to college expecting it to be all fun and games, when really it's stress and all-nighters.

Was there really a time when I thought getting in would be the most ruthless part?

More Questions Than Answers

"More questions than answers", they say, as if that makes them sound wise. This study, or expedition, or mission raised more questions than it answered. But did it?

Twenty days ago we didn't know what Pluto looked like, let alone anything significant about its atmosphere and surface features. Today we have this:

New Horizons revealed a world we'd never truly seen before—and a world we'll never not know again. Venkatesh Rao has some thoughts on the matter, but I want to address a different problem.

New Horizons did not do a thorough survey. A great deal of Pluto was not imaged in such high resolution, and what was imaged was not truly studied at length. Already we have new questions: why is there haze in the atmosphere? What's causing those ice flows in Sputnik Planum? How about the terrain of Tombaugh Regio?

Some of these will be answered as the rest of New Horizon's flyby data is downlinked over the next several months, but some will persist for decades. It may be that New Horizons raises more questions than answers, but the statement doesn't sit well with me. Information is missing.

When one says "more questions than answers", they don't say anything about the kind of questions. Specifically, the questions that New Horizons raises are questions we never knew to ask before. Our overall picture of the universe has improved, and now we're working on the details.

I'm reminded of Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong, in which he writes:

I RECEIVED a letter the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important. In the first sentence, the writer told me he was majoring in English literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, so I read on.) 

It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the universe straight. 

I didn't go into detail in the matter, but what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships, since these are very neatly described by the quantum theory worked out between 1900 and 1930. What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical universe, as discovered between 1920 and 1930. 

These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see. 

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal. 

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." 

The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.

Asimov is right, of course. Some ideas are less wrong than others. Saying the earth is flat is less wrong than saying it is concave, and saying it is spherical is less wrong still. In truth, we live on oblate spheroid which is biased towards the south, with a considerable number of irregularities.

But we expect short inferential differences. We expect to say either the earth is flat or the earth is round. Explaining what's meant by "oblate spheroid" is too much for Greek commoner who has only the loosest grasp on astronomy and geometry. Similarly, the modern public expects scientific questions to have simple, straightforward answers. Most outstanding questions either have not been investigated or have considerable evidence on both sides. That's a level of nuance even those members of the public interested in serious questions has to muster. When you say "more questions than answers", most listeners aren't envisioning an ever expanding and detailed worldview. They see a list of questions getting longer, faster than we cross them off.

It frustrates me when space advocates say things like this. If we want to get a follow up mission to New Horizons (principal investigator Alan Stern has some ideas), it's going to take a better approach to science communication than that. The public is interested, but that interest could easily wane over the many years before another spacecraft can be designed, approved, constructed, and launched.

I love cool toys as much as the next person, and New Horizons is absolutely delightful in that regard—but that isn't why our governments spend billions of dollars every year to fund their space agencies. We're doing it understand our universe, our world, and ourselves. Space exploration is about exploration. We need enthusiasm for learning about the cosmos as we pursue the future of human spaceflight.

Irresponsible Amateur Punditry: GE 2015 Edition

Wikimedia Commons

For those who haven't been paying attention (in other words, most of North America), the UK had their 2015 general election last night.

A quick summary: The Conservatives, formerly in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, won a full majority. Their erstwhile partners were absolutely destroyed, winning a total of just eight seats. SNP won almost every seat in Scotland, making it the third-largest party by number of MPs.

The leaders of the Liberal Democrats, Labour, and UK Independence all resigned after their parties' poor showings. David Cameron remains Prime Minister.

This isn't at all the result the polls predicted. Pollsters had the Conservatives in the lead, but not winning a majority. No one expected the Liberal Democrats to do just as badly as they did. It seemed very plausible that a progressive coalition between Labour, Lib Dems, and the SNP would form the next government.

Nate Silver and the rest will have very interesting things to say about poll bias and herding over the next few days, but I'd like to discuss something else: Duverger's Law.

The UK has long been treated as a counterexample to the rule that first-past-the-post voting tends to produce two party systems. Despite being underrepresented in MPs per votes received, the Liberal Democrats have held their place as the third-largest party, swinging elections and occasionally a coalition government. But after yesterday, they hold less than 2% of the seats in Parliament.

At first glance, it seems that SNP has just replaced the Liberal Democrats as the nation's centrist party. However, the SNP won all of its seats in Scotland--it's a strictly regional party.

In the rest of Britain, the division between Conservatives and Labour is considerably sharper. The UK is suffering from the same polarization that all first-past-the-post electorates suffer from. Votes are cast tactically, to deny the least-favored viable party the win.

To illustrate this for Americans, let's say you have a simplified ballot with the Greens, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Conservatives, and UKIP. If you lean right, you might favor UKIP over the Conservatives, but fear Labour will squeak out a win if you vote for them. You vote Conservative.

On the other side, you might favor the Greens over Labour, but fear a Conservative win if you do. You vote Labour. Moderates face a similar choice--which of the two major parties seems like the worse choice?

(It's important to remember that in many constituencies, there's really only two serious contenders. The UK is often less a three party systems and more a patchwork of interlocking two-party systems. However, the same principle applies when voters start thinking on the national scale.)

The fate of the smaller parties isn't really clear at this time. Maybe they'll rebound in time for the next general election, and we'll see another coalition government in the 2020s. Maybe they'll reform into protest vote parties, forcing Conservatives and Labour to alter their platforms or lose seats. Maybe they'll attach themselves to major parties, shifting their center of balance.

The best hope for political diversity, however, is to abolish the first-past-the-post voting system. There's a lot of different ways to go about doing this (personally I favor Singe-Transferrable Vote, but the Alternative Vote would probably be easier to implement). Regardless, I encourage you to watch C.G.P. Grey's series on the subject. I've embedded the first video below.

Disdain for Elections, or Why I'm (probably not actually) Moving to Canada

Recent post to the contrary, this is still a political blog.

We're seven months out, and I'm already getting worried about the 2016 Presidential Primaries. Specifically, the seeming inevitability of both parties nominating a terrible candidate. Right now, it looks like we'll be seeing another Bush or Clinton in office, despite the fact nobody actually wants either of them.

Obviously party nominations are Molochian process riddled by lies, misperceptions, and short-term thinking. But this is a uniquely frustrating problem for me, since I've yet to come up with a solution that's politically viable. Neither party will nominate better candidates, no one will vote for third parties, and no one will support actual voting reform. So what do we do?

I have no idea. Maybe I should just move to Canada. They seem to be stable, above us on both conservative and liberal freedom indices, and a fair bit less partisan. The big problem, of course, is that I hate the cold.

New Zealand is always a substitute.