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Internet forums are disappearing because now everything is Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying.
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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You make great points, and I will not necessarily refute any of them. This is why I said prior that I wanted a bunch of mathematicians to work towards a solution to this. There are many small and careful considerations that have to be made.
I think a heuristic (simplified model) may work better than trying to flat out solve it. As I said, this is not to refute, just a thought.
First, the problem is fundamentally chaotic (as you've said) there is no point in trying to accurately predict (solve) the outcome. Choosing "properties" that tend to be consistent, and then basing "success" off of those may be the more practical option. What these "properties" are would depend on consensus - models have elements you deem important, which may not actually be (as you've said). This is just something that needs RFC - hence needing a group of mathies.
Secondly, whatever the solution turns out to be needs to actually be do-able for the average joe. If there is a straight up solution, and it turns out to complex, I think it would be less valuable than a simple-to-do heuristic. If people don't follow up it's just worthless - and seeing how long it takes people to do very simple things, we'll be waiting hundreds of years.
I'll read the two articles you linked (I've read the abstracts) but it'll be a slow burn.
Awesome! Ping me when you're done, if you like. Happy to chat more.
I agree heuristics are a good approach, but I'm not conviced maths people are the ones to do it - at least not alone. There is too much messy sociology at the edges of the problem to ensure good problem specification. Some interdisciplinary approach could kill it though. If you get through that intro article, there's a short article in the same journal that gives a neat intro the Critical Systems Heuristics, which seems like an excellent wrapper around this kind of approach.