[ExI] Free will was: Everett worlds

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 9:57 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> > On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Free will was: Everett worlds
> Nobody said that the examples were perfect. …. the difference between a dog and a similar looking wolf..    Democracy = the U. S. is just ludicrous.  bill w
>
> Ja thanks for that BillW.
>
> Far too many Americans don’t understand that the US is not a democracy.  Plenty would have it be one, but there is a reason why we don’t say “…and to the democracy for which it stands…”
>
> The USA is a republic, a constitutional union of democracies, united in common defense and in united in common cause: to whoop ass at the Olympic games.  Otherwise those sneaky commie bahstids will win far too many medals.

That really depends on what you mean by 'democracy' and 'republic.'
Even changing terms in my example, if someone asks you what 'republic'
means and you say, 'The US,' do you think that wouldn't lead to any
confusion? If you then went on and threw out more examples -- Venice
during the Late Middle Ages and England under Cromwell -- would that
even clear matters up? My guess is eventually you'd have to define the
term, even if only loosely, rather than just list a bunch of stuff.

Maybe a better example would've been something like 'prime number' or
'vertebrate.' One could list lots of prime numbers and without a
definition one couldn't be sure one was clear about meaning (within
useful limits). Ditto for 'vertebrate.' You can list all kinds of
vertebrates out, but the definition avoids much grief here.

As for the usual _conservative_ quibble here, often in US politics it
just means a representative _democracy_ as opposed to a direct
democracy -- which just means representatives are democratically
elected and supposedly represent the people (the demos) in their use
of their elected offices.

And the whole notion that it's not an X, it's a Y doesn't settle the
issue of whether it should be an X or a Y. (Yeah, I get it. Some folks
here believe if other folks 200+ years ago decided that's it's a Y,
then one should never ever want it to be other than a Y -- or should
only work within Y to change it. You know, like those folks 200+ years
ago never worked outside the British system to change it. They
completely worked only through the Parliament and never judged it
outside that system.)

Regards,

Dan
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http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/