Vitalik's Optimism retro-funding post mentions a few instances where secret ballots are used today, and which could arguably be improved by these cryptographic primitives:
- The Israeli Knesset uses secret votes to elect the president and a few other officials
- The Italian parliament has used secret votes in a variety of contexts. In the 19th century, it was considered an important way to protect parliament votes from interference by a monarchy.
- Discussions in US parliaments were less transparent before 1970, and some researchers argue that the switch to more transparency led to more corruption.
- Voting in juries is often secret. Sometimes, even the identities of jurors are secret.
In general, the conclusion seems to be that secret votes in government bodies have complicated consequences; it's not clear that they should be used everywhere, but it's also not clear that transparency is an absolute good either.
If we cannot prove who anyone actually voted for, we can't prove who actually won at all.
Using zero-knowledge proofs it is possible to prove that votes were counted correctly, without revealing who anyone voted for. See MACI [1], which additionally provides inability to prove your own vote to a third party.
if the two agents are able to accurately predict each others' actions and reason using FDT, then it is possible for the two agents to cooperate
Couldn't you equally require QV participants pre-commit to non-collusion?
In The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Bryan Caplan uses Earth data to make the case that compulsory education does not significantly increase literacy.
My reading is that he claims compulsory education had little effect in Britain and the US, where literacy was already widespread.
When Britain first made education compulsory for 5-to-10-year-olds in 1880, over 95% of 15- year-olds were already literate. [1]
There's an interesting footnote where he references a paper on economic returns of compulsory education, which cites many sources (p14) finding little to no economic return from schooling reform (though limited to Europe).
Follow the white rabbit
The source makes explicit reference to refined starches:
c All foods are assumed to be in nutrient-dense forms; lean or low-fat and prepared with minimal added sugars; refined starches, saturated fat, or sodium
Though to be clear, I do not endorse the 'system' as proposed. I do not believe that it adequately reflects nuance in health effects of food consumption, nor do I believe it accurately represents modern food health science (where are their sources?).
For example, the hard-line stance against saturated fats is questionable [1] [2] [3]. Not explicitly mentioning glycemic index is another obvious failure, for which I assume 'added sugar' is a proxy.
There are gut-microbiome differences across carbohydrates with similar GI [4], but I do not have enough information to recommend one sugar over another.
Yes I count most (by GI) flour as equivalent to sugar [1]. As for keeping high GI carbs under 10%, I have insufficient information. To keep all carbs under 10% would be ketogenic, which while not specifically recommended (unless trying to lose weight), has shown interesting results in the literature [2].
Pancakes contain significant quantities of carbohydrates (sugar), with glycemic index comparable to that of table sugar. Those pancakes look like they're closer to 3 sweets than 1 (sorry kids).
For those looking to learn more, erowid.org is an excellent starting point.
Gwern has a fantastic overview of time-lock encryption methods.
A compute-hard real-time in-browser solution that doesn't rely on exotic encryption appears infeasible. (You'd need a GPU, and hours/days worth of compute for years of locking). For LW, perhaps threshold aggregate time-lock encryption would suffice (though vulnerable to collusion/bribery attacks, as noted by Gwern).
I agree with Quintin Pope, a public hash is simple and effective.