This is why the JVP was able to win - they consolidated the working class Sinhala vote, while not threatening Tamils and Muslims.

With Sri Lanka’s ranked ballots, they didn’t need consolidation. Working-class voters could have had this, at any time, with no risk. And if voters keep wasting their second and third votes, then this new plurality-winning party is going to trounce the split alternatives, until one of them disappears, or both of them disappear.

I appreciate the background - but it doesn’t change the math. When voters only get (or only use) one choice, and there’s two parties on the same side of a divide, one of them has to utterly dominate the other, to stand any chance against a popular third party. If you think these two parties have irreconcilable differences then they’re probably both fucked.

Either these voters start using their ranked ballots properly - or they’re going to keep getting a two-party system. Changing which two parties matter doesn’t change that system.

If most voters keep picking one guy, these three parties will become two parties, or the two more-similar parties are fucked. That is what Duverger’s law is about. It doesn’t mean third parties can never win - it means a three-party system cannot last.

If Sri Lankan voters remember how their own goddamn electoral system works, they can have a four-party system, no problem. But as you point out, they’re acting like they have America’s elections, where this schmuck who got 17% is now a massive liability to the runner-up who got 33%. If those two presumably-liberal blocs got together, they could handily oppose the leftist bloc. But if they’re competing for the same exclusive votes then they’ll both become irrelevant.

Sri Lanka already fixed the thing that breaks Plurality. Their voters just aren’t using it, for some goddamn reason.

Or they were the people who made this year’s result possible.

Objectively not. Every single person who wanted him, last time, could have listed him… also. They sure didn’t. His support was three percent. That’s not a viable path to power, that’s a punchline.

He’s done stuff since then. Right? Campaigned, presumably? Been in the news? Built up the expectation that a meaningful number of people would prefer him over other major candidates? That is what made this result possible. Losing a prior election is not a prerequisite.

Dude had 3% support despite everyone being able to toss him a vote just-in-case. Anyone who voted for only him, “last election,” was a fool. That negligible support is not what made him a viable candidate in the separate election they “just did.”

No kidding your choices depend on how other people vote, that’s what democracy is. If you can’t rally a shitload of people behind your guy… you lose. That part is not the failure of Plurality. Plurality blows because two similar groups can be wildly popular and still get destroyed by a minority of schmucks.

The winner of this election was not decided by everyone seeing through The Matrix or whatever and deciding to defeat a broken electoral system. It sounds like 95% of them are functionally unaware of which electoral system they have.

It causes massive damage with ramming attacks.

Did it, though? The iceberg kept floating.

What you want is Blizzaga, but wetter.

I had hopes for recurrent systems becoming kinda… Dixie Flatline. Maybe not general enough to learn, but spooky enough to evaluate claims.

Well thank god that’s not what I wrote. What does run on corn flakes is natural GI… in several senses.

You do all this on three pounds of wet meat powered by cornflakes.

The idea we’ll never recreate it through deliberate effort is absurd.

What you mean is, LLMs probably aren’t how we get there. Which is fair. “Spicy autocorrect” is a limited approach with occasionally spooky results. It does a bunch of stuff people insisted would never happen without AGI - but that’s how this always goes. The products of human intelligence have always shown some hard-to-define qualities which humans can eventually distinguish from our efforts to make a machine produce anything similar.

Just remember the distinction got narrower.

People acting in their best interests is how it happens. It’s an electorate avoiding splits. Given the system you’re voting under - you should vote for someone who has a chance of winning. Otherwise you might write-in some special favorite candidate that no other human being cares about, and accomplish literally nothing. Voting for a third party with single-digit support is not much better.

People voting against their own interests would be… not bothering to write in a second preference. It is the same fuckup: someone who cannot imagine their very favorite guy losing.

By the sound of things it’s more like nobody wanted anything to do with the major-party incumbent. Duverger’s law is about how there tend to be two parties. Three and one are equally unstable. When a race becomes a total rout, like a 30-point spread, that dominance can be seen as a power vacuum.

… also, Sri Lanka has ranked ballots. It’s not a Plurality voting system. They have an automatic runoff. That’s one of the more obvious fixes that allows people to even consider supporting a third party, without playing Russian roulette against their own foot.

… wait, Sri Lanka has ranked ballots! What the fuck? They’re not even using Plurality, they’re doing RCV!

Ranked Choice is a hot mess on its own, but-- oh for fuck’s sake I’ll just use the example I always use. Say an election goes like this:

40% vote A > B > C.
35% vote C > B > A.
25% vote B > C > A.

Plurality says A wins, because Plurality sucks. You don’t even need a bare majority. You just need everybody else to split up.

RCV says C wins: B has the fewest top votes, so they’re eliminated. The race becomes 40% A > C versus 60% C > A. Better… but still wrong, because 65% of people would prefer B > C.

Condorcet methods like Ranked Pairs get that right. They model every runoff: A vs B is 40-60, A vs C is 40-60, B vs C is 65-35. B wins every 1v1 and is obviously the best candidate according to these voters. The supermajority prefers B.

And of course Approval Voting is just letting people check multiple names, and it somehow matches Condorcet results when enough people vote, because you are unique, just like everybody else. Genuinely there is no good reason we’re not doing Approval by default.

And what do you think happens next?

Those two parties won’t keep slapfighting for an uneven split of 60% of the vote, while this third party takes power with 40% of the vote. They will merge. Or the smaller one will simply vanish, if its voters prefer the bigger loser to the plurality winner.

Even in the US, where plurality has a hideous repeated bottleneck on which two parties can meaningfully exist, we did not always have these two parties.

It is buck wild that these networks can generate shitty English by sight alone. These aren’t the robots that scanned all the books in the library. This is purely visual.

Thumbnail looks like a horny cacodemon.

Gradually gliding into a gaseous cloud that the sun lights up would be genuinely fascinating, but still probably kill everyone. Pros and cons.

… would it affect the northern hemisphere first? I have no idea which direction the solar system actually proceeds.

Does this count?

“Why do you want that?”

Incorrect. Next.

I’d guess that we’d probably wind up turning ourselves into the largest explosion that humanity has ever observed in the universe.

With front-row seats.

perhaps some would be wise enough to realize that the sudden dimming of the sun - eight minutes as it turns to a dull, occluded, sky-colored haze, as if it had just melted away -

Huh. If it all snapped into existence, it’d catch the light traveling through space, at that moment. So Earth might briefly get brighter? The dark side obviously would, as Rayleigh scattering turns our penumbra blue… all the way out to fucking Neptune. On the bright side, at first, it would genuinely be more sky, but-- I don’t-- I just cannot wrap my head around how to even model that. The entire solar system would flash as bright as the daytime sky, give or take a couple AU, for like a billisecond. And then that energy would bounce around until it’s mostly absorbed, surely. The image of the sun might vanish instantly. Even on Earth I expect most photons do not arrive having dodged the entire atmosphere.

Thinking about modeling this ridiculous hypothetical is going to keep me up tonight.

Science values independent discovery of exactly how fucked we are.

I hadn’t considered foreign asteroids. If this ridiculous setup was somehow stable, bits of it would routinely light up from space rocks plunging through at terrifying speed. Hailey’s comet is coming back to stay.

Yeah, this question kinda undersells how it’s sprinkling a couple aspirational rocks into an enormous cosmic gas cloud, rather than providing those rocks with a quaint environment. Even the provolone-slice model that’s 1 AU thick is only lighter by two orders of magnitude. It’s one million times the total mass of everything else in the solar system. Spreading it on as thickly as our soupy atmosphere, where even certain mammals can flap hard enough to hunt in midair, would have an impact on world events the way a period impacts a sentence.