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1. In defense of Huxley

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpj.2024.09.005  

   Walcott, Sam; Sun, Sean; Debold, Edward P; Herzog, Walter (October 2024, Biophysical Journal)
2. In Defense of Liquid Democracy

   Daniel Halpern, Joseph Y. (January 2023, EC)
3. In defense of liquid democracy

   Daniel Halpern; Joseph Y. Halpern, Ali Jadbabaie; Elchanan Mossel; Ariel Procaccia; Manon Revel (July 2023, Twenty-fourth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce)

   \ (Ed.)

   Fluid (or liquid) democracy is a voting paradigm that allows voters to choose between directly voting and transitively delegating their votes to other voters. While fluid democracy has been viewed as a system that can combine the best aspects of direct and representative democracy, it can also result in situations where few voters amass a large amount of influence. To analyze the impact of this shortcoming, we consider what has been called an epistemic setting, where voters decide on a binary issue for which there is a ground truth. Previous work has shown that under certain assumptions on the delegation mechanism, the concentration of power is so severe that fluid democracy is less likely to identify the ground truth than direct voting. We examine different, arguably more realistic, classes of mechanisms, and prove they behave well by ensuring that (with high probability) there is a limit on concentration of power. Our proofs demonstrate that delegations can be treated as stochastic processes and that they can be compared to well-known processes from the literature — such as preferential attachment and multi-types branching process—that are sufficiently bounded for our purposes. Our results suggest that the concerns raised about fluid democracy can be overcome, thereby bolstering the case for this emerging paradigm. 

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4. In Defense of Merit in Science

   https://doi.org/10.35995/jci03010001  

   Abbot, D.; Bikfalvi, A.; Bleske-Rechek, A.L.; Bodmer, W.; Boghossian, P.; Carvalho, C.M.; Ciccolini, J.; Coyne, J.A.; Gauss, J.; Gill, P.M.W.; et al (April 2023, Journal of Controversial Ideas)

   Merit is a central pillar of liberal epistemology, humanism, and democracy. The scientific enterprise, built on merit, has proven effective in generating scientific and technological advances, reducing suffering, narrowing social gaps, and improving the quality of life globally. This perspective documents the ongoing attempts to undermine the core principles of liberal epistemology and to replace merit with non-scientific, politically motivated criteria. We explain the philosophical origins of this conflict, document the intrusion of ideology into our scientific institutions, discuss the perils of abandoning merit, and offer an alternative, human-centered approach to address existing social inequalities. 

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5. In defense of the black box

   https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax0162  

   Holm, Elizabeth A. (April 2019, Science)