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Random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions

Campbell's Law (a variant of Goodhart's Law) states that the more a metric is used for social decision-making, the more it will be subject to corruption which distorts and corrupts not only the metric itself, but the very social processes it was meant to measure. Selection criteria for a position of authority are one example of such a metric. When selection criteria are opaque, it is difficult for them to become a target, preserving their utility as measures. For governance positions however, it

Why random selection is necessary to create stable meritocratic institutions

Campbell's Law (a variant of Goodhart's Law) states that the more a metric is used for social decision-making, the more it will be subject to corruption which distorts and corrupts not only the metric itself, but the very social processes it was meant to measure. Selection criteria for a position of authority are one example of such a metric. When selection criteria are opaque, it is difficult for them to become a target, preserving their utility as measures. For governance positions however, it

Faking a JPEG

25th March 2025: Faking a JPEG Click to expand I've been wittering on about Spigot for a while. It's small web application which generates a fake hierarchy of web pages, on the fly, using a Markov Chain to make gibberish content for aggressive web crawlers to ingest. Spigot has been sitting there, doing its thing, for a few months now, serving over a million pages per day. I've not really been keeping track of what it's up to, but every now and then I look at its logs to see what crawlers are

Quantum upgrade makes random number generation fully traceable

Trust, but verify: Random number generation is a serious matter in modern computing. Most systems rely on a purely hardware-based approach to RNG, but the process is essentially impossible to verify or trace. Now, a new quantum-based method developed by US researchers could offer a potential solution to this RNG puzzle. Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, have upgraded their previously developed quantum-based method for true random number gener

Quantum mechanics provide truly random numbers on demand

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Instrumentation for the quantum random number generator in the NIST Boulder laboratories. Credit: NIST Randomness is incredibly useful. People often draw straws, throw dice or flip coins to make fair choices. Random numbers can enable auditors to make completely unbiased selections. Randomness is also key in securit

When random people give money to random other people (2017)

A post on Decision Science about a problem of Uri Wilensky‘s has been making the rounds: Imagine a room full of 100 people with 100 dollars each. With every tick of the clock, every person with money gives a dollar to one randomly chosen other person. After some time progresses, how will the money be distributed? People often expect the distribution to be close to uniform. But this isn’t right; the simulations in the post show clearly that inequality of wealth rapidly appears and then persists