úterý 10. února 2009

Danger of positive approach

Few weeks ago, Lubos Motl has won the 2008 Weblog Award price for Best European (Non UK) Blog, which may become a surprise for someone, proponents of dual theories in particular. Whereas AWT is rather invariant/symmetric with respect to string /LQG duality, we can make an attempt for independent analysis of this result. The positive thing may be, Lubos is compatriot of mine, we even both born in the same city - which is not so difficult, after all, as the Czech Republic is really tiny country. Czech Republic is birthplace of many brilliant and intelligent people and beautiful women as well, which is partly due its location in central Europe on the crossroad of many trade routes, along which the mixing of various races can occur.



On the other hand, I'm not very sure, whether Lubos is a typical representative of Czech science, society the less - which is traditionally rather balanced in its opinions, if not opportunistic due it's sensitive geopolitic role of small boundary country between zones of interest of East an West Europe blocks. Buffer countries are often playing a role of branes, which leads to the fragmentation of state boundaries in this area. Aether foam gets more dense at place of density gradient due the potential energy content, where two dual space-time branes/gradients intersects/interfere mutually.



Whereas Weblog Award is rather representative competition, it's still based on results of surprisingly limited number of votes, because the first place in Best European Blog category was a matter of just some 700 voices. Which isn't really too much in the world of anonymous proxies, whereas Goggle is doing a lot more than 1000 queries per second (about 25 queries per second per server). Anyway, Motl's price is well deserved for his frenetic activity and it's even logical in certain extent, because his postings are often quite entertaining and informative and Reference Frame blog is one of few ones, which I'm visiting regularly. Because modern people are basically consumers, Motl's graphomania plays well with their needs, because average visitor can always find something new in his blog everyday.

If so, where's the problem?

Even if we ignore the excentric and subjectively ugly design (typical for Motl's sites) and sometimes unstable behavior of scripts on his site (the purpose of which is to prohibit Motl's opponents in visiting and posting at times), we shouldn't neglect the fact, popularity of this blog is partially based on strongly biased opinions and ad hominem attacks, followed by personally motivated censorship of discussions, which manifest itself by sectarian character of people, which are allowed to post there (simillia simillibus curantur). From these reasons, Motl is often perceived as a controversial person in blogosphere. Personally, I do not believe, most of people, who voted in Weblog Award Poll didn't realize autistic and asocial character of "humble correspondent's" blog - the problem is, the system of voting didn't enable them to express their opinion. Negative voices simply don't count here.

This is a general property of contemporary voting systems, which enable only positive votes, which leads to high degree of populism in side of politicians and ignorance and lack of interests about negative aspects of politics on the side of publicity. Even morally controversial politicians may become successful in this system, if they're is sufficiently active in another areas, in self promotion of personality cult in particular. I believe, this MAY be one of reasons of society problems with its own political representations: voters simply have no veto privilege - they can be only partly responsible. In natural evolution such unbalanced approach to fitness function would suffer consequences, because it violates the equilibrium of supply and demand.

As I'm not expert in social sciences, I'm not informed, whether such approach was proposed or even tested in history and which reasons has lead people to consider only positive voting approach in anonymous elections. Maybe it could have adverse effects and it would lead to undesirable level of opportunism between politicians, I don't know. But as I've met in many cases, most trivial ideas were often ignored for long time just because of their simplicity or generally low asset, which can manifest only under high civilization density. Maybe it could even save Germany from nacism in the mid of 30's of the last century, which was rather inclined to Hitler's populism. If so, maybe the time of more dualistic/symmetric voting system just come up.