Share this page!

Eliezer Yudkowsky Profile picture
Twitter logo
5 Feb, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Does a known cryptographic system exist which:
- Enables proving who voted
- Enables proving the result of the vote
- Doesn't prove who voted for what
- Doesn't let anyone prove who they voted for, even voluntarily by revealing a key or a calculation
(I realize this sounds pretty impossible; but, to me, it sounds substantially *less* impossible than zk-SNARKs, so at my level it's a fair question.)
Clarification: By "proving who voted" I mean being able to verify a complete list of all the voters/keys who voted, and that no extra votes outside the list occurred. We'd like it to be publicly verifiable that there were no extra or illegal votes.
This is much closer than I'd expect you to be able to get to that system with only paper ballots! (Though it lacks being able to completely generate the voter list to verify no extras.)

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @ESYudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky Profile picture
24 Jan
Remember: If it had been legal to sell half of the first million doses of vaccine for $10,000 each, BioNTech could've easily gotten a $5 billion loan in April, and used that money to help scale up mRNA vaccine production to billions of doses. This is not the market outcome.
The bottleneck on the mRNA vaccines is the (new) encapsulation. There's a creative will to invest $5B in that exact step in March, that happens when there's a huge payout for getting that part right. "Do your job and get paid by the govt", not so much.
The key phrase isn't "$5 billion", it's "and used the money to...", the incentive structure that would've paid & motivated BioNTech to make a lot of vaccine as early as possible. Govt carelessly set up an incentive structure to deliver X doses eventually.
Read 11 tweets
Eliezer Yudkowsky Profile picture
23 Jan
To make predictions explicit and public: With the huge number of people who've gotten Covid, "long Covid" is going to be a huge deal in reality, adding millions of disabled and chronically fatigued people. Don't know what the news stories will be, but that will be the reality.
To be clear, this is not the word of a medical authority. This is me saying my current guesses out loud so that, if I'm guessing wrong, I'm clearly wrong in public. So far Covid-19 has gone better than I expected in most ways, and maybe that trend can continue.
My even larger-looming worry is that - since we didn't shut down the pandemic around the entire planet fast enough - there may be enough mutations that bypass the vaccines, or even previous infection, that Earth struggles on in lockdown for another year and then gives up.
Read 5 tweets
Eliezer Yudkowsky Profile picture
22 Jan
In which Democratic congressionals try to communicate through subtext that their AGI timelines are less than 4 years - there's no future in which any other party controls the government again, because nothing exists after 2024. Or they're just very short-term thinkers, I guess?
Some people are responding with claims that abolishing the filibuster is a positive-sum move across administrations. If so, shouldn't we occasionally see a member of the party *not* currently in power saying to abolish the filibuster that year?
The way this call is being issued *right after* the change of administration... seems a bit hard to read as anything but, "Sure, it's a great idea now that we've got a Democratic administration!" Which, well, sure, if no human government still exists after 2024, but...
Read 4 tweets
Eliezer Yudkowsky Profile picture
31 Dec 20
_Screwtape Letters_ is close enough to being Good and True that I'm having trouble reading it, on account of it feeling like something *I'd* write but full of errors I need to correct by editing. I may just rewrite the whole thing with Tapescrew and Woodworm.
"Woodworm, I note with displeasure that your latest reports are showing a falloff in the amount of time your patient is spending on social media, and in particular, the extent to which your patient is angrily retweeting and subtweeting positions with which he disagrees..."
"It is a grave mistake to think that our task is to lead our patients into wrong answers. Better is to convince the patient to ask the wrong question, and better still by far is to instill the patient with a brief but powerful flinch of revulsion away from the whole topic."
Read 11 tweets
Eliezer Yudkowsky Profile picture
30 Dec 20
So I'm currently reading _The Screwtape Letters_ for the first time, and WOW it sure used to be a lot more possible for someone to master some basics of the Way without losing their personal version of Abrahamic religion. This is practically an AU Sequence.
"I note what you say about guiding your patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïf? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have...
...been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life...
Read 6 tweets
Eliezer Yudkowsky Profile picture
12 Sep 20
What on Earth is up with the people replying "billionaires don't have real money, just stocks they can't easily sell" to the anti-billionaire stuff? It's an insanely straw reply and there are much much better replies.
A better reply should address the core issue whether there is net social good from saying billionaires can't have or keep wealth: eg demotivating next Steves from creating Apple, no Gates vaccine funding, Musk not doing Tesla after selling Paypal.
Hypothesis: social media has an effect promoting Terrible Straw Arguments to being used by many actual people. One crazy on Side A makes a bad argument. Side B subtweets with a refutation and that gets a million views. So people on Side A hear about it as Side A's argument.
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @ESYudkowsky has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @ESYudkowsky!

Read all threads by @ESYudkowsky