{"id":7170,"date":"2023-03-28T15:27:28","date_gmt":"2023-03-28T20:27:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=7170"},"modified":"2023-03-28T15:30:29","modified_gmt":"2023-03-28T20:30:29","slug":"an-unexpected-democracy-slogan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=7170","title":{"rendered":"An unexpected democracy slogan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

At least six readers have by now sent me the following photo, which was taken in Israel a couple nights ago during the historic street protests against Netanyahu’s attempted putsch<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

(Update:<\/mark><\/strong> The photo was also featured on Gil Kalai’s blog<\/a>, and was credited there to Alon Rosen.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is surely the first time that “P=NP” has emerged as a viral rallying cry for the preservation of liberal democracy, even to whatever limited extent it has.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what was the graffiti artist’s intended meaning? A few possibilities:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. The government has flouted so many rules of Israel’s social compact that our side needs to flout the rules too: shut down the universities, shut down the airport, block the roads, even assert that P=NP (!)<\/em>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. As a protest movement up against overwhelming odds, we need to shoot for the possibly-impossible, like solving 3SAT in polynomial time.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. A shibboleth for scientific literate people following the news: “Israel is full of sane people who know what ‘P=NP’ means as you know what it means, are amused by its use as political graffiti as you’d be amused by it, and oppose Netanyahu’s putsch<\/em> for the same reasons you’d oppose it.”<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. No meaning, the artist was just amusing himself or herself.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. The artist reads Shtetl-Optimized<\/em> and wanted effectively to force me to feature his or her work here.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Anyway, if the artist becomes aware of this post, he or she is warmly welcomed to clear things up for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    And when this fight resumes after Passover, may those standing up for the checks and balances of a liberal-democratic society achieve … err … satisfaction, however exponentially unlikely it seems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    At least six readers have by now sent me the following photo, which was taken in Israel a couple nights ago during the historic street protests against Netanyahu’s attempted putsch: (Update: The photo was also featured on Gil Kalai’s blog, and was credited there to Alon Rosen.) This is surely the first time that “P=NP” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[5,11,3,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-complexity","category-nerd-interest","category-procrastination","category-the-fate-of-humanity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7170"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7173,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7170\/revisions\/7173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}