Interesting Equilibria

Over on TheEdge, they asked 150 people what worries them most.  One of the more interesting responses by Dylan Evans notes that while Democracy is pretty good, there might be something better. Unfortunately, we may never find that better system.

the appendix persists because individuals with a smaller and thinner appendix are more vulnerable to appendicitis. So the normal tendency for useless organs to atrophy away to nothing is blocked, in the case of the appendix, by natural selection itself. Perhaps this idea will turn out not to be correct, but it does illustrate how the persistence of something can conceivably be explained by the very factors that make it disadvantageous. 

Democracy is like the appendix. The very thing that makes majority dissatisfaction inevitable in a democracy—the voting mechanism—also makes it hard for a better political system to develop.

It's a neat analogy and a deep problem.  The thought of the median voter, including the great unwashed one sees at amusement parks, deciding policy forever seems somewhat limiting.  After all, the nautilus's pinhole eye is far inferior to something with a lens, but in the 500 million years since the Cambrian explosion, it's still stuck with the pinhole eye camera even though a nautilus would really benefit, greatly and immediately, from a lens. It is like a hi-fi system with an excellent amplifier fed by a gramophone with a blunt needle.

Another fascinating post was Clifford Pickover:

Zeilberger considers himself to be an ultrafinitist, an adherent of the mathematical philosophy that denies the existence of the infinite set of natural numbers (the ordinary whole numbers used for counting). More startlingly, he suggests that even very large numbers do not exist—say numbers greater than 10 raised to the power of 10 raised to the power of 10 raised to the power of 10. In Zeilberger's universe, when we start counting, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., we can seemingly count forever; however, eventually we will reach the largest number, and when we add 1 to it, we return to zero!

I'm hopped up on pain meds now, and this thought is blowing my mind.

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