Radical Republic

In any deliberation, there are participants — people involved in the arguments, ideation, demonstrations, etc. — and entities who are represented by the participants — not only people but also things whose reactions to the deliberation are anticipated by the participants based on the participants understandings — who I will call “anticipants”.

To invite more of these anticipants to the table as participants (by including more human voices in the deliberation, and more non-human voices, speaking in the transontic lingua franca of experimental data) is to radicalize our republic by making it as universally democratic as practically possible.

Of course, all participants represent anticipants, but the more anticipants are empowered to elect their own representative participants, and the more anticipants are able to reject inadequate representation (especially important for non-humans: help them water the tree of liberty with the blood of bad science. ), the more perfect the republic.

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People who will not respect science are scary, not because they are wrong about truth or resistant to yielding to reality — but because they are literally sociopaths: violent toward social truth-finding, and disrespectful to the existence of others.

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