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Thinking about gerrymandering, it's not easy to see how you should do a voting district the "correct" way, or why a gerrymandered district would be less correct than one created by a different method.
A related koan:
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
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@kaia This is the high level intellectual content that people come to my stream for
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@lain not many will comprehend this
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@lain abolishing the state solves gerrymandering.
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@lain a feature of gerrymandered districts that people have real fun observing, is the residence of the lord of the district, which is carefully sniped into the district even when it's made up of wholly unrelated areas. "See this odd narrow line right here? At the end of that line is the Count's manor!"
but, districts aren't changed ever two years. The real enabler for this feature is that the aristrocracy of the country feels so secure in their positions that it's not seen as wasted effort to do such a thing.
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@feld I don't think that's true, because the same outcome can occur naturally. If it does, should the district be redrawn?
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> it's not easy to see how you should do a voting district the "correct" way
well, I don't know what answer is for the "correct" way but the "incorrect" way is really, really obvious:
e.g., If the problem affecting the state is lead in the water, but lead in the water is only in the poor black communities and the GOP doesn't want to blow the whole taxpayer budget on fixing the water lines when they can be funneling it to their business friends, it should be pretty obvious that drawing the district with crazy boundaries so the black voters can never achieve more than 45% of the vote in the majority of districts thereby stripping them of their voice when collectively they exceed more than 60% of the total vote is definitely the "incorrect" way to draw districts.
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@feld I think my point is that the main issue is injustice, which obviously occurs in gerrymandering, but less obviously also occurs when districts are put together by other means.
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This is going to happen naturally? I think the odds are not quite as high
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@feld I think the impression that right is unnatural and the middle one natural exists simply because of the way this graphic was made. You could redistribute the red and blue squares into the middle graphic and it would look just as natural, and then you'd get the 'correct' result by doing gerrymandering like in the right picture.
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since we have this broken "2 party" system here the only thing I can think of that would be "fair" is to fucking profile every American on their politics and draw the districts so it's basically 50/50 and let the independents/undecided/easily flipped people decide which way it leans
it sucks all around. there is no sane solution, but we should be able to throw out the obviously rigged district maps
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@feld hey, having two choices is one choice more than tyranny
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districts like these do not make any logical sense, though
sure, states are a big geographical area and only some areas are developed for humans to live in so they don't exist in a nice clean grid with even distribution but they're really stretching to force some communities to be inside the same district on purpose.
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@feld this would also be literal gerrymandering, just for a different reason.
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maybe the entire concept of voting districts needs to be ripped out
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@grillchen @feld the half-mentioned third way is what I would take out of it: The whole idea is unworkable.
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@lain @feld i think there are 2 ways to fix this:
1: randomness and live with any result
2: gerrymander as much as possible but put rules in place to make it more fair
i would argue approach 1 will lead people to go to areas which serves their political agendas long term.
like if an area has high property taxes but good schools, people with kids will go there and people without will leave. over many many generations the outcome might be gerrymandered again, because populations moved
to prevent this maybe areas should be randomized every election, or every tenth or whatever...
that said all election systems are broken in some regard
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@lain @feld i mean every election is hard.
if we have 10 people
6 of them are slightly in favor of A
and 4 are absolutely against A
the majority is for A, if A happens people will be less happy as a result
LS
kaia
ロミンちゃん
of nothing
feld
grillchen
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