Ok, so in the box of gas case, you have individual gas molecules following newtonian physics with no process to give any kind of structure at all. However, a human brain of a voter is more like an optimizing process. Most small perturbances to the “house” example, say you go nudge a 2x4 in the materials pile a tiny amount, which is much larger than quantum randomness, and the workers building the house will still put that piece of wood where it goes in the structure, or select an equivalent piece of wood which ends up forming the structure still.
Inside a human brain of a voter, including the primary voters who will determine the candidates for the 2028 election, there is an overall function the brain circuitry tries to satisfy, and many synaptic weights that encode policies that will attempt to satisfy that function. Small fluctuations from quantum randomness are unlikely to change voter preferences, since these are encoded by many weights that reflect life experiences etc. And you can empirically check this—look at experiments where people are presented with new evidence that challenges their currently held beliefs. Generally this just doesn’t work, people interpret the new evidence to support their beliefs, even if a rational agent would not.
What about bigger trends, such as the price of gasoline, or economic activity and employment rates and relative spending power per voter? Same thing here, small quantum randomness is drowned out by larger macroscale trends and inertia, many of the fluctuations cancel out. As in, if you can “reroll” history, and the fluctuations have the same distribution as before, but a different random seed, many of these larger trends would happen identically to the original run.
What about historical events where critical decisions came down to the whim of one man? One of the famous ones being Hitler’s choice of when to attack, allegedly years before his advisors recommended. Maybe. One theory is that Hitler personally had a terminal illness, and so this man would always order an early attack. You could not convince him not to attack with rational evidence or arguments on the probability of winning, because he would personally be dead and unable to see the outcome if the war were delayed.
The existence of the terminal illness would be known to an omniscient observer, and so this would be a case where a seeming “black swan”—an irrational early attack—would be predictable.
WW2 is a specific case where we know that the material advantages the winning side had were enormous, we know the ultimate winners, but tiny perturbations could have changed the course of entire campaigns.
I wonder what the margin of infection was for patient 0 in Wuhan...
agreed on most points, but 1. we’re asking about 0.1% impact, and 2. optimizing processes can have multiple dynamical sinks, so the question is how often we cross decision boundaries in the aggregate dynamical system due to quantum randomness, and I expect the answer is often enough that it has more than 0.1% impact, because any time a chaotic system has the opportunity to make a difference in a person’s behavior, the chaotic system will depend on a significant portion of the bits of the quantum system, and in particular that means the weather over a long enough timescale is a quantum rng, since the mostly-newtonian dynamics have sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and so the slightest perturbation will accumulate. the question is how long it takes, I imagine folks who do work on weather simulation know that pretty well.
So then who is right would depend on whether 1 in 1000 decisions are close enough to the boundary a small disturbance will change it.
Once we develop neural implants this sounds like a testable hypothesis, you could actually manipulate someones brain, changing single neuron activations, and see how often this matters on some repeated decision task.
I think the main point is there is still a structure here, human agents resist disturbances. Atoms of gas don’t, any change above any granularity limits from physics will change the behavior at a collision.
for it to influence an election, 1 in 1k people need to have their election decision change, which depends on a lot more than one decision being locally influenced by quantum randomness. I still think that, pending whatever oracle resolves this question, the biggest impact path is going to look like weather ⇒ economic fortunes of those who are near their political policy decision boundary. It’s possible there are other ways for their fortunes to change from chaos, and the “maybe candidate death depends on quantum randomness” take might be it. But I still think the main thing that is chaotic enough to have a significant impact is the weather.
Correct. I also had a bit to think and are you aware of ternary logic for radiation resistance? The idea is, every circuit and memory cell in an IC has 3 parallel gates, and 3 parallel memory cells for every binary decision or memory read.
Frequently in the chip there are majority gates, where the majority input determines the output.
What this does is random disturbances from radiation must disturb 2 inputs during the same clock cycle, or the output will be the same.
If “quantum fluctuations” are kind of like radiation, and some human synapses are acting like majority gates, then for most decisions they will have no effect at all. In chip designs with n-way redundancy using the above, choosing n, it is possible to design a chip that will ignore radiation to a target pError that can be much smaller than 1 in 10,000. It can be 1 in billions of bit flip events or more cause an output bit to change.
I do not know if human neurology is this robust. I kinda suspect it might not be, but for a “deep belief” like politics, it could be that quantum fluctuations don’t flip a single vote across the US electorate.
I agree that it would only flip votes if those votes were the person basically not giving a crap. again, I only expect significant impact from upstream effects like a different distribution of extreme weather events resulting in a different economic outcome for enough people to matter.
Wouldn’t this random distribution of quantum events (gaussian?) flip an equal number of marginal voters in each direction? Meaning if it changes 1 in 1000 voters, or 220,000 people, I think the law of large numbers kicks in here. It would cause approximately as many (A->B) transitions as (B->A)
The totals would be within a few votes, but smaller counties might have larger shifts because their set sizes are small.
on average across worlds, yes; or if the distribution in your weather simulator says most expected weather events in that timeframe are small, yes. but for a given timeline, extreme weather events would be expected to be biased in one direction in terms of which areas were impacted by which events. if you change the random seed for the weather 5 times, then based on my current knowledge and in the current time period I expect you’ll get at least 5 different natural disasters, which are each region-correlated in their impact, and so can have a significant bias in which votes they flip on an economic recovery basis. this is faul_sname’s argument for election day weather events, but generalized to any weather event extreme enough to impact economic fortunes. if the weather events are small enough to impact people’s economic fortunes individually, then yeah, the expected impact goes down due to law of large numbers, but I also don’t expect small weather events to significantly impact votes, due to the same argument you made about humans being optimizers. (election day weather also might be enough, but I expect a significant number of natural disasters before 2028.)
Ok, so in the box of gas case, you have individual gas molecules following newtonian physics with no process to give any kind of structure at all. However, a human brain of a voter is more like an optimizing process. Most small perturbances to the “house” example, say you go nudge a 2x4 in the materials pile a tiny amount, which is much larger than quantum randomness, and the workers building the house will still put that piece of wood where it goes in the structure, or select an equivalent piece of wood which ends up forming the structure still.
Inside a human brain of a voter, including the primary voters who will determine the candidates for the 2028 election, there is an overall function the brain circuitry tries to satisfy, and many synaptic weights that encode policies that will attempt to satisfy that function. Small fluctuations from quantum randomness are unlikely to change voter preferences, since these are encoded by many weights that reflect life experiences etc. And you can empirically check this—look at experiments where people are presented with new evidence that challenges their currently held beliefs. Generally this just doesn’t work, people interpret the new evidence to support their beliefs, even if a rational agent would not.
What about bigger trends, such as the price of gasoline, or economic activity and employment rates and relative spending power per voter? Same thing here, small quantum randomness is drowned out by larger macroscale trends and inertia, many of the fluctuations cancel out. As in, if you can “reroll” history, and the fluctuations have the same distribution as before, but a different random seed, many of these larger trends would happen identically to the original run.
What about historical events where critical decisions came down to the whim of one man? One of the famous ones being Hitler’s choice of when to attack, allegedly years before his advisors recommended. Maybe. One theory is that Hitler personally had a terminal illness, and so this man would always order an early attack. You could not convince him not to attack with rational evidence or arguments on the probability of winning, because he would personally be dead and unable to see the outcome if the war were delayed.
The existence of the terminal illness would be known to an omniscient observer, and so this would be a case where a seeming “black swan”—an irrational early attack—would be predictable.
WW2 is a specific case where we know that the material advantages the winning side had were enormous, we know the ultimate winners, but tiny perturbations could have changed the course of entire campaigns.
I wonder what the margin of infection was for patient 0 in Wuhan...
agreed on most points, but 1. we’re asking about 0.1% impact, and 2. optimizing processes can have multiple dynamical sinks, so the question is how often we cross decision boundaries in the aggregate dynamical system due to quantum randomness, and I expect the answer is often enough that it has more than 0.1% impact, because any time a chaotic system has the opportunity to make a difference in a person’s behavior, the chaotic system will depend on a significant portion of the bits of the quantum system, and in particular that means the weather over a long enough timescale is a quantum rng, since the mostly-newtonian dynamics have sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and so the slightest perturbation will accumulate. the question is how long it takes, I imagine folks who do work on weather simulation know that pretty well.
So then who is right would depend on whether 1 in 1000 decisions are close enough to the boundary a small disturbance will change it.
Once we develop neural implants this sounds like a testable hypothesis, you could actually manipulate someones brain, changing single neuron activations, and see how often this matters on some repeated decision task.
I think the main point is there is still a structure here, human agents resist disturbances. Atoms of gas don’t, any change above any granularity limits from physics will change the behavior at a collision.
for it to influence an election, 1 in 1k people need to have their election decision change, which depends on a lot more than one decision being locally influenced by quantum randomness. I still think that, pending whatever oracle resolves this question, the biggest impact path is going to look like weather ⇒ economic fortunes of those who are near their political policy decision boundary. It’s possible there are other ways for their fortunes to change from chaos, and the “maybe candidate death depends on quantum randomness” take might be it. But I still think the main thing that is chaotic enough to have a significant impact is the weather.
Correct. I also had a bit to think and are you aware of ternary logic for radiation resistance? The idea is, every circuit and memory cell in an IC has 3 parallel gates, and 3 parallel memory cells for every binary decision or memory read.
Frequently in the chip there are majority gates, where the majority input determines the output.
What this does is random disturbances from radiation must disturb 2 inputs during the same clock cycle, or the output will be the same.
If “quantum fluctuations” are kind of like radiation, and some human synapses are acting like majority gates, then for most decisions they will have no effect at all. In chip designs with n-way redundancy using the above, choosing n, it is possible to design a chip that will ignore radiation to a target pError that can be much smaller than 1 in 10,000. It can be 1 in billions of bit flip events or more cause an output bit to change.
I do not know if human neurology is this robust. I kinda suspect it might not be, but for a “deep belief” like politics, it could be that quantum fluctuations don’t flip a single vote across the US electorate.
I agree that it would only flip votes if those votes were the person basically not giving a crap. again, I only expect significant impact from upstream effects like a different distribution of extreme weather events resulting in a different economic outcome for enough people to matter.
Wouldn’t this random distribution of quantum events (gaussian?) flip an equal number of marginal voters in each direction? Meaning if it changes 1 in 1000 voters, or 220,000 people, I think the law of large numbers kicks in here. It would cause approximately as many (A->B) transitions as (B->A)
The totals would be within a few votes, but smaller counties might have larger shifts because their set sizes are small.
on average across worlds, yes; or if the distribution in your weather simulator says most expected weather events in that timeframe are small, yes. but for a given timeline, extreme weather events would be expected to be biased in one direction in terms of which areas were impacted by which events. if you change the random seed for the weather 5 times, then based on my current knowledge and in the current time period I expect you’ll get at least 5 different natural disasters, which are each region-correlated in their impact, and so can have a significant bias in which votes they flip on an economic recovery basis. this is faul_sname’s argument for election day weather events, but generalized to any weather event extreme enough to impact economic fortunes. if the weather events are small enough to impact people’s economic fortunes individually, then yeah, the expected impact goes down due to law of large numbers, but I also don’t expect small weather events to significantly impact votes, due to the same argument you made about humans being optimizers. (election day weather also might be enough, but I expect a significant number of natural disasters before 2028.)