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.)
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.)