Point against: Professor Whatsisname, the presumably quite-powerful dueling legend, learned/developed “Stuporfy”, which is intentionally meant to sound almost exactly like “Stupify”. If powerful wizards get a pass on their pronunciation, how is it that a powerful wizard can effectively differentiate those two similar spells when casting?
Eugene
Karma: 61
That’s just the problem. It does happen now, in a system where everyone is throttled at only one vote to spend per election. In a system where you can withhold that vote till another election, increasing the power of your vote over time, it only exacerbates this behavior.
Is the better fairness on a micro level worth the trade-off of lesser fairness on a macro level?
One problem with this system is that it can violate the “non-dictatorship” criteria for fairness, since a single voter (or small group of allied voters) could strategically withhold votes during potential landslide elections and spend them during close elections. With the right maneuvering among a well-organized block of voters, I could imagine a situation where the system becomes a perpetual minority rule.
That was lazy of me, in retrospect. I find that often I’m poorer at communicating my intent than I assume I am.
It’s relevant insofar as we shouldn’t make assumptions on what is and is not preset simply based on observations that take place in a “typical” environment.
This is probably the wrong place to talk about language, but I encourage you to look up how language actually works in the wild, both among small cultures and large populations. You may find that your phrase: “words mean what me and my friends want them to mean,” is a surprisingly accurate description of language.
Conversely, studies with newborn mammals have shown that if you deprive them of something as simple as horizontal lines, they will grow up unable to distinguish lines that approach ‘horizontalness’. So even separating the most basic evolved behavior from the most basic learned behavior is not intuitive.
There’s little indication of how the utopia actually operates at a higher level, only how the artificially and consensually non-uplifted humans experience it. So there’s no way to be certain, from this small snapshot, whether it is inefficient or not.
I would instead say that it’s main flaw is that the machines allow too much of the “fun” decision to be customized by the humans. We already know, with the help of cognitive psychology, that humans (which I assume by their behavior to have intelligence comparable to ours) aren’t very good at making assessments about what they really want. This could lead to a false dystopia if a significant proportion of humans choose their wants poorly, become miserable, then make even worse decisions in their misery.
The only way—at least within the strangely convenient convergence happening in the story—to remove the Babyeater compromise from the bargain is for the humans to outwit the Superhappies such that they convince the Superhappies to be official go-betweens amongst all three species. This eliminates the necessity for humans to adopt even superficial Babyeater behavior, since the two incompatible species could simply interact exclusively through the Superhappies, who would be obligated by their moral nature to keep each side in a state of peace with the other. It should be taken as a given, after all, that the Superhappies will impose the full extent of their proposed compromises on themselves. They’d theoretically be the perfect inter-species ambassadors.
That said—given the Superhappies’ thinking speed, alien comprehension (plus their selfishness and unreasonable impatience, either of which could be a narrative accident) and higher technological advancement—I’m fairly confident that it would be impossible for this story’s humans to outwit them.
A late response, but for what it’s worth, it could be said that part of the point of the climax and “true” conclusion of this story was to demonstrate how rational actors, using human logic, can be given the same information and yet come up with diametrically opposing solutions.
There’s a problem with that. The Hat expressly forbade Harry to ever wear it again, since that leads to troubling Sentience issues. While that might potentially make it vastly more powerful in his hands than in others, I have serious doubts that it would actually come if called that particular way.