Someday I'm going to write a paper that achieves SOTA results with a nigh-incomprehensible mishmash of diverse techniques and title it "All You Need Considered Harmful".
The most promising work along these lines centers around augmenting LLMs with an external data store ("retrieval-augmented LLM"s). I think this started with Facebook's KNN-LLM ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.00172.pdf ). Legal conflict may force the industry to move towards vector DBs as the predominant method by which facts are "stored" rather than model parameters ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.04430.pdf ) , with the happy side effect of update-ability over time.
These are good examples of mass casualty events that didn't motivate effective responses. For both climate change and guns, there are people that want to keep the status quo as it is. I believe that popular arguments against gun control will be able to stay effective in ways that arguments against climate action will fail.
First, one of the most popular arguments against action addressing climate change has been that climate change is simply fake. A mass-casualty event would make that argument less effective.
The gun control debate in the United States is linked with people's perceptions of personal agency. Often, a mass casualty event perpetrated with a gun is ended by a gun being used on the perpetrator (sometimes, it's the perpetrator killing themselves, and sometimes it's police killing them). Many people imagine it would be possible to end those events as a bystander with a gun. But I think that it would be much harder to get people to fantasize about being a hero that stops a mass casualty event resulting from extreme heat. Such an event starts and ends when Mother Nature says it does, and it seems like it should be pretty clear to people that the only way personal agency is relevant is in the act of preparing the environment.
> A mass-casualty event would make that argument less effective
I would have bought this 10 years ago. But following the recent rise of conspricism, especially far out things like Qanon and Pizza Gate, I've come to realize that it's possible for vast numbers of people to just decide to believe something is/isn't true because it suits them.
Or Sandy Hook for that matter. Also, elsewhere in the thread people have mentioned comment sections on major news sites coverage of the Maui fires, and apparently droves of people are more interested in blaming clean energy installations, imaginary energy weapons, and Obama, Zuckerberg, and Oprah (of all people) than anything else.
News media like to have stories they can focus popular attention on, and no one car accident (unless it kills someone famous) will matter to enough people to warrant broader coverage than one's local paper. Despite this lack of media visibility, there actually is some movement at the city level to change the design of roads to reduce the lethality of accidents. This isn't very publicly visible yet, I don't think, and there's certainly very little in the way of public desire to drive less lethal vehicles.
I haven't read the book, but if the event the book describes kills hundreds of people or more, it seems like a plausible seed that news coverage can accrete around.
The idea in the book was this was a new event that never occurred previously that finally did and was able to demonstrate that climate change is doing some new and not survivable.
In the book, people galvanized around it kind of like 9/11 as it was clearly climate change, as opposed to other things that already existed and may or may not be due to climate change (more hurricanes, etc).
Be careful what you wish for. 9/11 galvanized Americans to start two disastrous wars. The effect of a mass fatality event like in MFTF could easily be a bunch of pointless, ineffective wars. There's precedent for that, but not for anything like a Ministry for the Future
Last year there was a local heat bubble that killed 69 people in my city. There was a bit of news coverage, but it hardly moved the needle in terms of local politics. Hell, the city can't even bother keep alive the trees it's recently planted nor stop pulling out more canopy to expand arterial roads in areas of the city that are heat islands due to lower than average tree coverage.
I think it's going to take more than hundreds of deaths to go beyond a few news stories that get lots of clicks for a week or two and talking points for politicians to bring up when it's convenient and forget when it is not.
I'm curious about whether anyone has studied using the harmonic mean (or at least, the reciprocal of the sum of reciprocals) as a way of aggregating utilities. I haven't had time to research this, but the thought repeatedly occurs to me as I have kids that are gifted in a school district that is especially concerned with the gap in achievement between the highest and lowest performers. I can't shake the feeling that what they really should want is a measure that prioritizes helping the lowest performers but does not consider the performance of the highest performers to have literally negative value, and the harmonic mean fits that bill.
A group being "above the rules" is, I think, a statement about what the rules are and how they are enforced. It doesn't really hinge on whether any members of that group have, up to this point, violated the rules.
As others have said, if they're limiting the number of approvals you can make on your ballot, then that's not how approval voting is supposed to be administered.
