Origin of the Fermi Surface in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (I Don't Know You People, Part III)
It is, of course, altogether too easy to find crazy papers on Arxiv.org, without even going to the string theory
section. Today's listings provide the following, brought to my attention
by Mok in e-mail.
- Diderik Aerts, "Towards a New Democracy: Consensus Through Quantum
Parliament", physics/0503078
- Abstract: We compare different actual forms of democracy and
analyse in which way they are variations of a 'natural consensus decision
process'. We analyse how 'consensus decision followed by majority voting' is
open to 'false play' by the majority, and investigate how other types of false
play appear in alternative types of democratic decision procedures. We
introduce the combined notion of 'quantum parliament' and 'quantum decision
procedure', and prove it to be the only one, when applied after consensus
decision, that is immune to false play.
What really makes me despair for the discipline, however, is when otherwise
respectable journals (i.e., ones where I am myself an author and a referee)
print papers which are just so insane you have to wonder if everyone
involved --- authors, referees, editors, type-setters --- were pawns in a
cruel, implacable plot by which the
editorial collective of
Social Text has sought vengence on the world of physics.
- Alexandr A. Ezhov and Andrei Yu. Khrennikov, "Agents with left and right
dominant hemispheres and quantum statistics", Physical Review
E 71 (2005): 016138 [Journal link]
- Abstract: We present a multiagent model illustrating the emergence
of two different quantum statistics, Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac, in a
friendly population of individuals with the right-brain dominance and in a
competitive population of individuals with the left-brain hemisphere dominance,
correspondingly. Doing so, we adduce the arguments that Lefebvre's "algebra of
conscience" can be used in a natural way to describe decision-making strategies
of agents simulating people with different brain dominance. One can suggest
that the emergence of the two principal statistical distributions is able to
illustrate different types of society organization and also to be used in order
to simulate market phenomena and psychic disorders, when a switching of
hemisphere dominance is involved.
The most distinguished (and funky)
living scholar of parliament has wisely told us to "Free your mind and your
ass will follow". I wish I understood why so many of my fellow physicists
appear to confuse freeing your mind with never taking a moment to ask yourself
"Wait --- is this just batshit insane, or what?"
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Posted at March 22, 2005 16:59 | permanent link