Substack banned me for a day a while back (for no reason), and "Deleted - comment deleted" is what all my comments with replies turned into. I'm sure Substack killed the account here.
EDIT: oh wait I'm wrong, looking back mine said "comment removed".
Huh. In the past, I've seen the message "user was banned for this comment", with a link to expand the comment. Maybe there are multiple ways to ban someone, or maybe Substack changed their procedure.
I think I saw this one before it got deleted and it was just some nonsense. It started off sounding like it was addressing one of the points, and then halfway through it turned into a bunch of random crackpot-flavoured words.
> 4: Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that COVID didn’t happen at all, and that both “lab leak” and “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place.
I know you like contrarian takes but really feel like this is a level of conspiracism you shouldn't be signal boosting.
Well, that hasn't happened (AFAIK) to "birds aren't real". Perhaps it needs a base level of credibility to have that effect. (OTOH, people are training AIs on the web.)
But it seems to have happened to "flat earth" and "space is fake". I had a misfortune to click on some eclipse-related thing on FB and now my feed is inundated by space pictures and trolls shouting "fake" at them.
I've been told "birds aren't real" is some specific generational humor of a sort I don't especially understand. It doesn't seem to have the sort of emotional hooks that more pervasive conspiracy theories have.
It has also spawned a conspiracy theory that the powers-that-be are trying to push this dumb "parody" to discredit actual conspiracy theories or hide surveillance or whatever.
I know my son worked at a summer camp one year, and the guy in charge got *really pissed* when one of the camp counselors was telling the kids "birds aren't real" and told him to knock it off. Presumably he figured some parents would object to their kids coming home and telling them birds weren't real....
1) I am not sure the overall solution to this is in the "more restriction/monitoring of disinformation" camp versus the "more free flow of ideas" camp.
2) They are also funny/amusing sometimes. I used to like to read a blog of a guy who thought some images sent back from Mars showed Alien structures. Hilarious thing was he had the scale of the photos off so he would be finding evidence of complex machines and habitats and transportation infrastructure in what were in effects close ups of rocks that were just like a 3'X3' square. So some formation he clearly thought was 50'x50' was actually ~4 inches X 4 inches if you did your math. Nevertheless it was fascinating to see how his mind worked.
1) I don't think we can include individuals personally deciding not to repeat a specific claim as 'restriction/monitoring'.
If bad ideas don't have *some* penalty in the rate at which people repeat them, then the whole 'marketplace of ideas' thing doesn't work at all, and knowledge is impossible to accumulate.
Individuals deciding not to repeat bad ideas is a pretty normal mechanism of the marketplace. I don't think it becomes top-down authoritarianism or anything just because one commenter suggests it to the author.
2) Sure, but that feels like pretty obviously a different category than this? Lolcows are sometimes conspiracy theorists, but not all conspiracy theories are lolcows.
Highlighting wrong ideas while reasserting that they're wrong is still contributing to the marketplace of ideas, so long as the assertions are correct at a rate better than chance.
Satire just happens to be a slightly less conventional method of doing the reassertion.
Sure, but this seems like an argument of the type 'web platforms not hosting your speech isn't violation of the first amendment'. It's kind of missing the forest for the trees. in that we should be interested in the normative principles, not the narrow semantic question of whether it counts as exactly the sort of thing we've decided is bad.
In other words, it may not technically be restriction or monitoring of ideas, but it clearly proceeds on the same principle that we should limit rather than promote the spread of ideas depending on whether we agree with them or not. So I think the broader point that Martin is gesturing towards, that freely spreading ideas is actually better for our societal epistemology and rationality, does apply here even if the specific words he said were against 'more restriction/monitoring of disinformation' and what he's arguing against is not quite technically that.
I don't think this is a good analogy. Scott isn't a web platform. Unlike Twitter, for example, which has more or less infinite capacity to host ideas, and is one of the default networks for putting ideas on, Scott links to a relatively small number of things, presumably carefully selected, and I think it's fair to assume that even if he doesn't endorse everything he has linked to, he's suggesting that these things are worth linking to. (Incidentally, I think he probably *does* think that particular link is worthwhile to link to, and the problem here is mostly that I don't agree with him.)
Yeah, this week's links has me worrying about Scott's current quality filters for linking to stuff. Looking at obviously dumb and wrong stuff on the internet is a guilty pleasure for many of us, it can be fun for a bit but it's not enriching, and has little value beyond making us feel so much smarter, as if our own brains and opinions were not fallible and often half-cooked.
I wonder too about the sudden profusion of religious-apologetics-adjacent content, both in the comments and now from Scott himself. There are good reasons much of the intellectual world got bored with arguments for this or that religion long ago; there is something uniquely stupefying about people trying to extract their favorite idea of God from a few basic facts like their own existence as an individual, and modern takes rooted in "anthropics" and bayesian language are not looking any better. Plus, what's the point? Even if you managed convince someone to squeeze some kind of god principle out of this kind of intellectual wrangling, what spiritual or emotional good could such a poor, dry deity ever do?
OTOH, and for fairness: Yay for geothermal energy, in-ovo sexing, Golden Gate Claude, and Noah Smith. And I hope the Internet Archive manages to survive this one.
> I wonder too about the sudden profusion of religious-apologetics-adjacent content
Seems like a natural thing for engineers and gamers to do? "Here are the system requirements, produce the most elegant solution." "What would it be like to live in a world with class levels and hit points?"
Plus, mystics can get there too. "See the abstraction behind the world, and proceed upwards into higher- and higher-level abstractions."
That would be philosophy in the wider sense I guess, science being the "natural philosophy" that is amenable to repeated measurements.
Seeking abstract truths is not a problem though. The problem with apologists of all kinds is that when you already believe in the thing you want to prove, it's not an intellectual process of open enquiry and the quality of the result suffers accordingly. In maths it doesn't matter because proofs are water tight or they don't count, which is why you don't much hear of "apologists" for e.g the continuum hypothesis. When it comes to slippery metaphysics though...
Seeing a bad idea clearly marked as "bad and false" is still more than not seeing it at all, with enough time, exposure and vulnerability to that you'll create real belief.
It's my belief that exposure matters more than right and wrong, and that being able to be exposed a lot to something but still deny it as false is a rare skill.
It would be really surprising if Substack managed to be the first ever publishing platform on which people writing brain-hurtingly stupid crap never got a wide audience.
Also, once I found something on a 19th-century British conspiracist who thought the whole Bible happened in Britain and the Hebrews were from the Hebrides and "Egypt" was the Faroe Islands, but I didn't bookmark it and I've never been able to find it again.
Seems like a bad idea in game theory terms, since it incentivizes people to make up and spread crazier and crazier takes, which some people inevitably are going to believe. As the way the internet works people directly make money from getting attention, even if its negative. Doesn't that just result in a more and more polluted information ecosystem where people are competing to say the most insane things?
(Linking to a wiki article on an existing theory is a bit different since there's less direct benefit to the theory proposer, as with other ways of talking about stuff indirectly like writing about it but not linking it.
>As the way the internet works people directly make money from getting attention
And this is why avoiding that attention is like promoting pacifism while in a live boxing match. It doesn't work; you lose by default and the audience doesn't even notice you were intentionally not throwing punches. There are thousands if not millions of other sources for crazy takes, they're not going to starve for lack of appearance here. Might as well take some pie in passing.
I wonder if that would be anything to do with the British Israelites? Apparently some of them tried digging up the Hill of Tara in Ireland because they were convinced that was where the Ark of the Covenant was:
"During 1899 and 1902, members of the British-Israel Association of London came to County Meath to dig up the Hill of Tara. These 'British-Israelites' believed they would find buried there the Ark of the Covenant, the chest said to contain the Ten Commandments inscribed on stone tablets."
Seems like a sensible version of looking for your keys underneath a street lamp. Travelling all the way to the Holy Land or North Africa to dig random holes is expensive and inconvenient and not significantly more likely to yield the Ark of the Covenant than digging in your own backyard.
Could it be William Comyns Beaumont (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comyns_Beaumont)? I think his books The Riddle of the Earth and Britain: The Key to World History are closest to what you have in mind.
He sometimes wrote as Appian Way. I wouldn't bother with a pen name if my surname was Beautiful-Mountain and my middle name sounded like a druid, but he was a bit of a nut.
That seems likely to be at least partially inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth's (mostly make-up but purporting to be real) History of the Kings of England, which attributes the founding of Celtic British civilization to exiles survivors from the Fall of Troy, and the first King of the Britons in his account was Brutus of Troy. Brutus was in turn grandson of Virgil's Aeneas and thus a first cousin a many times removed of Romulus and Remus.
The same work by Monmouth also have a central role in codifying and popularizing the King Arthur legend.
This is starting to sound like a really good conspiracy theory, where one group has been controlling the fate of everything for 3000 years! Forget all that "Holy Grail" stuff... Unless Jews are somehow the only non-Trojans in Europe? (Aside from Picts and Basques and Hungarians and Finns and Estonians and Roma ...)
My objection is almost the opposite: reading the position paper, their position seems actually to be the much more boring 'covid wasn't a big deal' than the (I agree) interestingly insane and therefore worth-signal-boosting 'covid literally did not exist'.
They're maybe going slightly further than most in saying that it didn't qualify as a pandemic, because it had no discernible effect on the healthy etc., but at its core it doesn't seem substantially different than the mainstream 'covid was nothing to worry about and we overreacted to it' narrative. And I was so excited as well!
I think I spent a while trying to figure out what that group was on about a few months ago. They were usually pretty vague, so I'm still not really sure. I'm not totally sure if they agree that a virus called SARS-CoV-2 existed or not.
But I think one of their main claims is that the COVID story was used as a cover-up for some other unexplained mass mortality event in specific places like NYC (possibly something related to drugs?), since the early NYC mortality data was drastically different from most other cities.
Well that does sound somewhat more interesting again!
I agree that it's not especially clear what exactly they are saying about the existence and/or nature of the virus itself, from what I've read so far. Which you would think would be a red flag to these supposedly discerning sceptics who see the truth behind the lamestream media's lies...
Is their claim that the increase in deaths (I have some data for California here: http://mistybeach.com/mark/Covid.html) was (a) not that big a deal and/or (b) not technically a pandemic?
Because unless you believe in massive data fraud (including hospitals lying about being overrun) then the increase was quite real.
If the claim is that hospitals across the western world (Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), Japan, Taiwan and other countries AS WELL AS individual mortuary operators as well as regional death reporting from many/all cities was in on the conspiracy ... well, I just don't think there is enough common ground of how the world works to have a conversation with those people :-)
There were a lot of people in the former Soviet Union who would spontaneously talk about how great it was, including most of the media. I wouldn't call that a "conspiracy", as such, but there was definitely a shared interest in not ending up in a gulag, which incentived people to act in similar ways.
Well that WAS fairly true in some places. While we had in my state "lockdowns to prevent hospital overcrowding" that first month or so I needed to go to the emergency room for a couple days (with likely COVID complications) and at least at my big city hospital...it was completely dead. Like 3 emergency room beds out of 50 being used. It is NEVER like that. Always packed to the gills except in APR 2019.
Not that I think those policies were terrible (don't have enough info to judge), but definitely the "hospitals will be overrun" hysteria peak was badly out of tune with what happened her for quite a while. Maybe there was some specific two week period later where it was a problem, but it was well after people were maximally worried about it.
Nah, they were legit overrun in (for example) New York and Italy at the start and India later on. Very real concern among those of us who work in health care. I live and work in Australia, during Delta in 2021 we had pretty serious issues with health care overcrowding causing delays in service provision, and this in a city/country that had some of the toughest lockdowns worldwide.
it’s true for a brief period at the start in 2020 there were actually less hospital presentations - due to people avoiding leaving the house and especially avoiding contact with health care services where they assumed Covid cases were clustering.
The comments on that article are pretty interesting. I even found a link to a substack arguing that the eradication of smallpox was a fake, and it is actually the same thing as monkeypox.
Concerning the epistemic status of conspiracy theories: Sabine Hossenfelder has an old and useful discussion with herself about the empirical validity of claims made by the Flat Earth Society.
Treating their claim as based on a radical version of rational scepticism (akin to pyrrhonian scepticism), Sabine argues that it boils down to whom you trust, or (in the aggregate) on the level of trust within a group. Illustrating "the social thing" in epistemiology.
Addendum: To the extent that social media separates us more effectively into different trust-groups than before, conspiracy theories should have a field day in tomorrow's society (or rather: multitude of virtual societies). Creating the preconditions for ever-more theories to signal boost. From 7:26 but in particular from 11:40 and out:
I think it's a matter of where you draw the line at what you call a conspiracy. Is two kids agreeing to keep a secret from their parents a conspiracy? If not, why not. So I think you're technically correct that there are more conspiracies than conspiracy theories. But I also think most people don't count those when they say "conspiracy".
The distinction I'm most familiar with is between "grand conspiracies" and "petty conspiracies", with the difference being that petty conspiracies have a plausible number of people in on the plot and leave realistic amounts of evidence that can permit reasonable efforts to confirm or falsify them.
A theory can start out as a Petty Conspiracy theory, but gradually evolve into a Grand Conspiracy theory as proponents have more and more contrary evidence to explain away. The Kennedy Assassination is a classic example: it's perfectly possible for a group of people to conspire to assassinate a high-level political leader, e.g. the Booth Conspiracy in 1865 or the Black Hand in 1914. But once there have been multiple official investigations with very long paper trails that consistently conclude that Oswald acted alone on his own initiative, then you need to suppose an implausibly large and cohesive conspiracy to keep the theory alive.
If "some of us have talked together" is a conspiracy, then most intra-party politics (plus quite a lot of inter-party politics) is conspiratorial. But that is stretching the concept beyond the everyday meaning of the word.
In everyday language, a conspiracy is a high-level informal agreement where there would be massive reputation losses, perhaps also criminal charges, if someone should reveal what is going on to the press and the public. Few top-level people will think that the potential benefit of such a conspiracy (remember that forming a conspiracy is no guarantee of its success) outweighs the risk of being found out, including the repercussions if being found out. Therefore conspiracies, in this meaning of the word, are likely to be rare.
I did nor mean to strawman you - only to illustrate the rubber-band characteristics of the concept.
If you say "intrigue", I agree that intrigues is what e.g. diplomacy to a large extent is about. But intrigues are not the same as conspiracies.
Anyway, I sense that much of our disagreement comes from different ways to define words. Which is not particularly interesting for any of us. So let us stop the discussion here.
> where there would be massive reputation losses, perhaps also criminal charges, if someone should reveal what is going on to the press and the public.
Why do you think that this is a required or even central element of a conspiracy? I would argue that a much more important aspect of a conspiracy is that it gives ordinary people a very wrong picture of the world. As in, you think that some things happened by themselves, and happen in different places by a coincidence, etc, but actually there are people tirelessly working to make them happen, that keep it to themselves. When such a conspiracy comes to light, instead of righteous anger people are confused for a bit, then shrug and say that it's not illegal and a good thing actually.
Unfortunately I don't have non-culture-warry examples, but I here I tried to use ones that are at least indisputably true, so anyone upset at me will quickly move to the shrugging stage and stop being very upset.
Would you believe that there's a guy in DC that can get 900 people into a zoom call, tell them that there shouldn't be any BLM/antifa/whatever protests about such and such recent event, and there will be no protests, nationwide?
Would you believe that there's a guy who can get a couple of million extra votes for democrats in swing states simply by mailing convenient preprinted requests for voting by mail to certain demographics, and it's like totally legal and cool?
Would you believe that George Soros decided that justice reform by usual means (changing laws via the Congress) is bothersome, and contributed several billion dollars towards electing prosecutors who simply refuse to prosecute a lot of crimes, all across the country?
Con artists, spin doctors, lobbyists and manipulators of public opinion exist. A fair share of idealistic activists can also be accused of sometimes putting forward a bit too alarmist future scenarios "for the good of the cause".
...But you stretch the concept by calling all behavior aimed at manipulating others "conspiracies". A conspiracy involves at least two persons agreeing to do something, usually something blameworthy, and then pin it on someone else - often involving rather convoluted reasoning. As in "9/11 was really done by the CIA, and then CIA blamed it on Saudi immigrants to start a new war with Iraq".
Conspiracy theory people also sometimes push the idea that something that is caused by god-knows-what-conflation-of-cultural-trends is really the result of a deliberate ploy, as in "the Jews in Hollywood attempt to sap the strength of our youth by feeding them gender-bending movies".
Stuff like that.
Do conspiracies (thus perceived) sometimes really exist? Perhaps. But far less often than conspiracy theory people think. And successful conspiracies even less often. Conspiracies seldom materialize because conspirators who are not idiots, must consider the risk of being found out before they set their evil plans into motion.
Apart from that: Poor old Soros! Vilified by the left and right alike.
The problem is the kind of theory that builds an evidence-proof shell around itself, not the kind that considers the possibility that some group of people is lying in order to do something bad.
I think of a conspiracy theory as being an overarching theory of everything that ends up becoming evidence-proof, as even apparent evidence against it turns out to only be more proof that it is true. But that's distinct from the existence of conspiracies, which absolutely do exist and matter sometimes and occasionally show up in the news or in court.
If I recall correctly from the time I actually read some of it, Fomenko's theory includes at least the conspiracy that the Romanov's were purposefully hiding the past existence of the Russo-Turkish horde that was actually responsible for like half of the global history. I think this is where the "Tartaria" theories originate from.
I vaguely remember some other conspiracy theory that "real" time stopped hundreds of years ago (maybe because the world was cast into hell?) and we've been living in false time ever since. But whenever I search for it, I just find phantom time or one of the variations of it. Do you remember this one?
I read an essay by Philip K. Dick, which I can't find now. He explains that he's a Christian living in the 20th century, but, at the same time, he's also an early Christian being persecuted by the Romans. Kind of like alternate realities, I think, but he experienced both simultaneously.
> Dick supposed time had stopped in 70 A.D., the year the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed by a Roman siege. Everything that happened afterwards was an illusion, and the world was still under Rome’s dominion.
That sounds like the strategy of "to make sure children never get sick, we must sterilize the environment around them and not let them touch anything that could be carrying any infection, since they are kids and weak". Unfortunately, the practice, I think, showed conclusively that following this strategy produces very bad results that the child has to struggle with for the rest of their lives.
Is your concern that he wasn't clear that it was a goofy conspiracy theory?
It's easy to forget that the people reading your words online include precocious 10 year olds and foreigners with only a very loose grasp of English and a notion of America shaped by movies and various kinds of non-neurotypical people out on the edges of various bell curves, and all those people may very well take a sarcastic or snarky comment you make literally. OTOH, it would take all the life out of writing to remove humor, which often comes from absurdity, understatement, hyperbole, sarcasm, etc.
Comment on 5. While £35k is $44k at the market exchange rate (1£=$1.27), the purchasing power parity exchange rate (as of 2022 see here https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm) is (1£=$1.54) means a pound in the UK goes much further than it's value in dollars does in the US. This gives an equivalent household income of $54k in the UK, higher than black American households though still much lower than the average across all USA households.
I would be interested to see the comparison in hours worked, and the related average earnings per hour. In general Europeans seem to work less hours than Americans and take more holidays.
This is mostly caused by part time workers working significantly less hours than in the US.
If you compare only full time employees then it's 40.4 hours a week in Germany vs 42.1 in the US, meaning that the average American actually works only about an extra 100 hours. Which is basically just Germans having slightly more vacation.
That's accounted for in the extra 100 hours. Which amounts to roughly an extra two weeks plus a few more holidays.
The real difference in German working hours is that the average German part timer works about 20 hours while the average American part timer works significantly more than that. So if you take all workers (as opposed to all full time workers) that pulls their average down.
Note this is not wages but all benefits received. So the average American worker, even factoring in European higher benefits, receives about 24% more than the average European and even more than the average British person.
The original question was comparison of hours worked. It was a response to someone pointing out the US was richer than Germany. Then someone said, "Ah, but they work less!" To which the response is: even adjusting hour for hour they earn less. That's not nebulous. It just shows the person was wrong.
The next line of defense is what you're bringing up: Ah, but welfare! To which the response is: GDP per hour worked is also lower and you can't redistribute your way out of that math. And the US also comes out ahead in per capita spending on welfare spending anyway. Europe has spent the last two decades economically stagnant while the US has continued to grow.
The specific answer to your question: It includes public benefits received through work. Which includes healthcare in most of Europe but not in the UK.
yeah I always find these US - other country income comparisons a bit odd, because they will fluctuate a lot based on exchange rates that have a only limited impact on the wealth/feeling of wealth of people within these countries.
I also thought so. But I checked at some point, and the gap has been pretty consistent for decades. Exchange rate matter less than I had previously thought.
That's why it's better to use purchasing power parity (PPP) over just comparing salaries or wealth and seeing what the exchange rate is. PPP gives you a better idea of how much wealthier one country is.
True, but PPP has its drawbacks too, it's based on some arbitrary basket of goods which might resemble someone's purchases but not someone else's. A poor person might spend more on rice than they do on Ferraris, for a rich person it might be the other way around.
For what it's worth, the US also beats all the large European countries on PPP GDP per capita although it varies considerably depending on whose numbers you believe. Switzerland, Norway and Ireland may or may not be better off, while Germany/France/Italy/Spain/UK are all substantially worse off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
This is one of those things that Europeans and Europhiles like to believe but isn't true. If you include all social spending the US is the second largest social spender as a % of GDP in the world, just behind France and significantly ahead of the UK. In absolute terms (just the raw amount of money) it's the largest. But this includes things like refundable tax credits which are not included in government services. The US system is more privatized than the UK, that's the main difference, but it's not smaller.
I sort of agree with you, but a lot of US social welfare spending is unusually inefficient & wasteful compared to other countries. Like, I don't think running programs for the elderly, poor and so on through refundable tax credits is a particularly good way to go about things. So while I guess one could argue that the US is quite generous, a dollar is clearly not going as far as an equal unit of currency in another developed country
Depends on the program. But broadly speaking, top line spending is unusually high but it's not unusually inefficient. The reason we spend more on welfare is down to two things: we provision more welfare and we pay people who work in it better than foreign counterparts.
In order to get British-like numbers you'd need to pay bureaucrats British wages ($38k vs $83k), limit services like the British, and reduce workforces to British levels (about a 25% cut). We could do that. But American voters have generally opposed it.
For instance, if you live in Houston on $150K then you probably own a big house with a yard and a two car garage and a couple of cars and a speedboat or something. If you live in London on $150K then you probably live in a dingy rented apartment and may or may not drive a Vauxhall Corsa. But it's not really fair to compare London to Houston, you should compare it to New York, and in New York people live in crappy apartments too.
But then where *do* you compare Houston to? There's nothing like it in the UK, where everything is either (a) London, (b) some failing former industrial city equivalent to the US rust belt, or (c) the countryside. There is nowhere in the UK that is socially equivalent to the sort of cities that most of the US population lives in.
If you live in London on $150k you can afford to buy a decent house with a garden. Most people on that kind of salary would be looking at houses in places like Guildford or Kingston, which are nice and very green areas. And you can certainly afford a good car and keep a boat if that's what you want. What you describe is more like $60k salary in London, I'd say.
Well, of course you'd take a mortgage, few people are in a place to buy such properties outright. You can usually buy something that's 4-5 times your annual salary, so $150k would mean you can buy in the region of $600k-$750k.
It looks to me like $150k/year before taxes in the UK would be $102k/year after tax. It also looks like a $600K home financed on a thirty-year mortgage at current UK rates would be about $52K/year in mortgage payments. Except that thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages are not really a thing in the UK. So that's 50% of your income at the outset, with the ongoing risk that this could balloon to a much higher value.
In the US, it's generally considered unwise to put more than 30% of one's income into rent/mortgage, and that's with long-term fixed-rate loans that won't be 40% of your income next year. The British version seems uncomfortably close to living on the edge of ruin.
Yeah, I just got back from the UK. 50p for a bag of six pitas > $3 for a bag of six pitas (roughly same number of calories in each pita, so not a difference steeped in the size of the goods).
Since the GBP/USD exchange rate fell to near enough 1 that I've basically been imagining dollars as equivalent to pounds, I have been surprised quite a few times when hearing how expensive basic stuff like food is in the US.
Yeah, it's pretty bad out here... I would also like to add that there are more needs here in the USA (i.e. a car, car insurance, gas for your car, oil for your car, tires for your... you get the point) than in major cities across most of the developed world. These are also ridiculously expensive.
It's pretty frustrating. I know that people in other countries drive, obviously, but it is an absolute necessity in the US and it's just so expensive.
It is not an absolute necessity in all cities. I've been a non-driver for over three decades now. But it sure is a nuisance. We really need decent public transit, but too many people hate the poor, and will act to harm them even at the cost of harming themselves.
One big expense for anyone who's not over 65 or poor enough to be on Medicaid is health insurance. Medical care and insurance is insanely expensive in the US, and the prices are this weird random number generator that nobody can predict ahead of time.
Possibly C. Think Biden looking like a hypocrite by issuing a pardon makes him look worse than a Trump endorsement helps? (Does Trump in this scenario stop running against him? I'm confused).
My meta response would be that the fact that Trump is offering this deal is evidence that he thinks he's going to lose and/or some new stuff is going to come out that he's afraid of being arrested for.
There's also the general game theory arguments against responding to this kind of thing, setting precedent, etc.
EDIT: Looking at the OP it says Trump can lie. Which changes the scenario, given that he's well known for lying constantly. And would happily tell his supporters "I told Biden that if he pardoned me I'd endorse him, and he did! What an idiot! Vote for me tomorrow!" If you can guarantee Trump's compliance, or do it only after he's formally dropped out, that changes things.
If you don't want people to interpret the hypothetical in light of the possibility that a person who's infamous for dishonesty might lie, you should probably specify that he won't as part of the hypothetical.
I would guess that Biden would lose more votes than he would gain from a Trump endorsement. But maybe Trump would lose more votes than Biden would lose on net if he endorsed Biden. Total turnout would suffer dramatically.
It doesn't change the scenario. It's already well-established that Trump lies, and it seems to me that the opinion being canvassed in this survey is not whether justice should be done though the world perish, but whether Trump is lying.
Trump can *already* say "I told Biden that if he pardoned me I'd endorse him, and he did! What an idiot! Vote for me tomorrow!". It wouldn't be true, but in neither the hypothetical nor in real life does that constrain Trump's options. So if the promise is a private deal between Trump and Biden, then it's a no-op unless Biden actually wins and Trump gains nothing by securing the promise and refusing the endorsement.
If Biden has to *publicly* promise the pardon, then yes, that could backfire.
Also, Biden can't pardon Trump of the alleged NY and GA crimes, so this seems like a really bad plan for Trump.
That is supposedly being done by an impartial justice system, so I think it looks quite different from a situation where the current ruler directly and explicitly offers the opposition candidate such a deal in order to circumvent the democratic process.
>That is supposedly being done by an impartial justice system
Does anyone know if there have been polls on what fraction of the public believes that the current charges against Trump have been brought impartially?
Jury of your peers not "fair" enough for you? What's happened to the patriotism that once existed on the Right? It is virtually entirely gone now. They are like hippies spitting in the faces of returning Veterans.
I don't know what "patriotism" has to do with it, but the stated attitudes toward crime and law & order among the right have certainly changed markedly over the last eight years or so.
It seems different to wait until after a court has tried someone and found them guilty and then allow the state to imprison them in keeping with its laws, compared to promising, before an election, to find some way to arrest and try and convict your opponent.
Not that I trust the average person to make very well-considered decisions, but the results don't seem very strange to me when you consider that the scenario doesn't stipulate that Trump can be trusted to keep his word, letter or spirit.
Yes. Too bad there's not a "none of the above" option. (Actually, though, I feel rather neutral towards Biden. But he sure isn't someone to inspire enthusiasm.)
This is not very charitable. What about all of us who want to vote against the status quo and have no choice but to go with Trump, despite our reservations about his character?
Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh
He ran on the platform of "I am going to put conservative jurists on the bench" and he delivered on that promise. Not just at the Supreme Court. The entire Federal bench. I am willing to forgive a lot of foibles for success on what I really care about.
Now you likely disagree that those were positive changes, but you can't argue that Trump didn't do more for the conservative political cause than anyone since Reagan.
During the civil war, Lincoln was asked to get rid of his general, U.S. Grant. I think the issues was he was a drunk and a boor, but I may have the details wrong. In any case, Lincoln's response is how I feel about Trump. “I can't spare this man–he fights."
Putting conservative justices on the Supreme Court isn't "anti-status quo," we do that every time there's an R President and an R Senate. If you mean you hate liberals, say that.
I don't hate liberals, but I do hate the direction they want to push the country. That is called politics. Accusing me (and half of the country) of being in a cult of personality because we have political opinions you don't agree with is neither true, kind, or necessary. It is also not fair or helpful, and I am going to call it out when I see it.
Name a single Republican president (or candidate for) from the last 30 years who would not have put 3 Federalist Society Judges onto SCOTUS. Trump accomplished virtually nothing. Only by his own incompetence did he not manage to dramatically rework Obamacare. Trump is better for Democrats because he does so little in office but worse for the country because he alienates our allies and makes the U.S. seem like an unreliable partner-nation.
No, Biden support is a collective run-out-the-clock strategy. Many people who intend to vote for Biden are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo in this country and few of us view Joe Biden as any sort of solution to that. In fact to be honest I don't know of any such voter who does and I know a _lot_ of deeply-dissatisfied voters.
But: putting Trumpism generally and Trump individually back in charge would be just telling our children and/or grandchildren, "fuck you and fuck your future". So we're going to vote for four more years of keeping the chaos muppet out of the White House; then based on current indications by 2028 Trump's physical and mental health will preclude his running again.
[To be clear I'm not personally advancing the above line of thinking, rather am summarizing the comments of a dozen different friends/colleagues during the past six months. Including a couple of lifelong Republicans.]
Since Biden has no pardon power related to Trump's state trials in New York and Georgia, nor will he if Trump in the Arizona or Michigan cases is shifted from unindicted co-conspirator to indicted defendant [due to some of those already charged flipping on him], but Trump under this scenario is apparently unaware of that fact....maybe the "Dark Brandon" move would be to say yes to the deal and then let the fact of it leak as more evidence that Trump is too dumb to be entrusted with the nuclear codes, negotiating treaties, etc.
Or: when Trump approaches with the proposition, Biden calls in the Secret Service and Attorney General to listen in on and record the call on which Trump offers the corrupt bargain. Biden being a cooperating witness he just makes some noncommittal response ("Well I'll think about it Donald"), and then the next day Trump is indicted for some version of the felony that got Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich convicted and sent to prison. And the White House releases the recording of the phone call.
It seems fairly natural to assume Trump is bound to fulfil his promise, or that Biden's commitment only becomes binding if Trump follows through (because otherwise it's a pointless hypothetical; obviously you would not trust Trump's promise), but presumably not everyone did.
Even if we do make that assumption, there are probably lots of ways Trump could technically 'endorse Biden' without shifting a non-trivial number of votes. Again, different people will make different assumptions here -- but I suspect plenty of 'no' voters chose 'no' at least partly because they doubted that taking the deal would actually result in a Biden win.
The question the Saducees asked Jesus was actually the other way round. If a man dies and his wife remarries who will she be married to after the ressurection? After all polygamy was a thing at the time so it wouldn't have been unthinkable for a man to have two wives. But a woman having more than one husband would be unheard of.
A widow would most probably have come under the protection of her sons so would not have needed to remarry. If the sons are too young she may have married one of her late husband’s brothers.
I think it's the specific legal thing where if a man marries and dies without children his brother must marry the wife and bear children to carry on his name - the general pattern where across a number of cultures a man dying childless (or without a son) is a major tragedy, with the solution of ancient Jewish law being that his brother marries his widow and their son will be that heir. The Sadducees ask Jesus the question modified to the point of ridiculousness - "there were seven brothers and they each married the same woman and then died in turn, with not a one of them getting a kid along the way" - but as I understand the situation actually does come up in that society, and it's specifically because the widow has no sons that it does so.
(I've equivocated between sons and children above - the Bible version I'm reading says children, I'm really dubious a daughter would count, but I'm not a scholar of Jewish law and possibly she would through her eventual husband/son. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levirate_marriage and compare to the story of Tamar.)
Daughters absolutely do count for the purposes of levirate marriage in Jewish law. If a man dies leaving only daughters, the widow does not perform levirate marriage.
It's also worth noting that in such a case the daughter(s) are the heirs of their father and inherit all of his property. Their husbands (if and when they marry) are never viewed as heirs of their father-in-law, although in general they would have use of their wives' property for the duration of the marriage.
As has been pointed out daughters do actually count in this case. However, in this case they must marry within their tribe. The case is actually described in some detail in Numbers. Ihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Zelophehad
'I think you’d have to claim that God will only violate the laws of Nature in cases that will bring a tiny number of people to the faith but leave the vast majority unmoved, which is such a weird preference that I think you can no longer call it a “prediction” of the “God exists” hypothesis.'
This seems related to the hypothesis that Bigfoot doesn't merely exist, but also has a field about him that causes any photos of him to become blurred.
You do need to consider things like the Backfire Effect, where presenting more evidence contrary to people's beliefs causes them to dig in their heels. Also, if the goal is to get people to be more loving, one must be wary of creating a system that encourages showing the appearance of faithfulness rather than actually seeking inner conversion.
> it’s basically “bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can’t hide there, and maybe at some point we’ll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave”. I am not sure what this strategy offers which is worth 50,000 deaths and counting
This one's just blatantly wrong to the point of feeling explicitly dishonest- there's specific military targets (known Hamas commanders and operatives, munitions factories, etc). There's no widespread destruction of buildings in order to remove cover. The number of casualties you quote is also about 30% higher than even the Hamas -run Gaza health ministry's own estimates (not a particularly conservative group on estimating casualty numbers).
My understanding is that this can happen with apparently reasonable rules on targeting if you're trying to hold down casualties while clearing an area. There's a building with people in it shooting at your troops, so you drop a bomb on it. That gets 50% of them, but the other 50% retreat to the next building over, so you drop a bomb on that one. Repeat until you're out of bombs or they are out of people. The result is a string of precision strikes, each individually justified, that leave the area looking like that. This is what Israel appears to be doing, and is quite similar to what we did in Mosul when we retook it from ISIS.
That sounds like... pretty much exactly what Scott said?
> bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can't hide there, and maybe at some point we'll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave?
Take away the facetious tone, and I'd say this is a pretty reasonable characterisation of what you've just described.
I suppose it depends on how you analyze this. If the only metric you care about is "how many buildings are destroyed", then yes, it's basically the same. But that's not how military law has traditionally worked, and for good reason. The alternative involves telling soldiers "yes, I know it would be convenient to blow up that building full of people shooting at you, but you've used up your quota of destroyed buildings, so sucks to be you, hope that none of you die while clearing it the hard way". Or in other words, at some point buildings in Gaza become more important than the lives of Israeli soldiers, based solely on how many buildings have been destroyed. That seems rather nonsensical, and avoiding things like that is why the laws of war care a lot about motives and circumstances rather than being purely based on outcomes.
In a situation like the 1992 LA Riots, where the "enemy" is mobs of angry civilians and the occasional street gang, you can and should operate under that kind of restrictive rules of engagement and then some (e.g. the declassified "Operation Garden Plot" documents make a big deal about not returning fire on snipers firing from residential buildings). But that doesn't work as well against tens of thousands of Hamas fighters.
I don't have a good sense for how much resistance justifies varying levels of destruction, but it makes sense that how much force you should be using varies wildly depending on how strong and organized the opposing force is relative to your infantry.
Fully granted. There's obviously a big difference between how you'd respond to urban unrest in your own city (where the resistance is rather squishy and going in hard is likely to make more enemies and cause problems for years down the line) and how to deal with a city full of entrenched and very hostile enemies.
But while there are times when you absolutely should be willing to take casualties to hold down destruction, and that includes pretty much all civil unrest cases, this is not civil unrest, this is straight-up urban warfare. And to put it politely, Israel basically wasn't bombing buildings before 10/7, and 10/7 still happened, so it's not clear what benefits restraint would bring.
I lived in Berkeley during the 1992 LA riots (they reached Oakland too, and we were bracing ourselves for impact even up in Cragmont Avenue).
I remember the riots stopped from one day to the next when Rodney King (whose beatings by the police started the whole thing) went public and held a short speech, including the immortal sentence: "We are stuck here for a while. Can we get along?"
Maybe he meant it in an everyday fashion, but it struck me - and many others - as a deeply existential and emotional statement. I still believe that sentence was the main factor that stopped the riots.
Pity it is unlikely to work between Israel and Gaza. So far, they miss a street-level philosopher, like Rodney King turned out to be.
"That sounds like... pretty much exactly what Scott said?
> bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can't hide there, and maybe at some point we'll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave?"
Wouldn't bean's description be: "Bomb every building that Hamas IS hiding in"? Rather than "bomb every building that Hamas MIGHT hide in"?
The two seem different because one grants agency to Hamas such that by not hiding in specific buildings those building would be safe(r).
The area in question in the second link was being used heavily to concentrate troops.
Overall an estimated 45-50% of buildings are "damaged or destroyed", but that's mostly more reactive than proactive - a hit is called on a building after enemy combatants are seen using it (I think we have some people here who have been directly involved in the fighting and would know more than me).
Two things worth noting here - first, a building can easily be damaged enough to fall into this category even if not directly struck (as many people in central Israel who've had rockets land down the street from them can attest). Second, most buildings damaged are only damaged after the civilian population was evacuated - this is technically consistent with the idea that they're destroying buildings to prevent Hamas having hiding places, but importantly differs in that it implies both a lot of care to avoid collateral damage, and that Palestinians themselves would not see their buildings destroyed if they didn't choose to use them for military purposes, which is an important distinction.
With no offense intended, this seems like a clear case of mood affiliation. Extrapolating 50% destruction from an aerial photo of a few square miles? The rationalist bar is somehow lowered to the floor in this instance?
It's ironic that Israel, due to forever opprobrium from the weird coalition of European Socialists and the UN* is currently fighting the "most clean" urban-warfare battle of the 20th century, with even the UN admitting to only 25k casualties, meaning a 1:1 ratio of civilian to enemy combatant death (the US would've killed [gulp] for that in Mosul). And yes, a clean combat zone means getting the civilians out first. And yes, as battle rages on, more building are destroyed in the battle zone - I've yet to meet someone who prefers to die form sniper fire rather than call in an airstrike on the building where the sniper is.
But I am left with total disdain for those (not suggesting you are one) whose mood affiliation allows them to just inhale Al Jazeera News (Pravda of the Emirate who funds Hamas) hook line an sinker, because it fits what they want to think of the world. That's just a very skewed way to understand the world.
* with its over-representation of Muslim interests, even considering the fact that 1 out of 4 people in the world are Muslim - I'm guessing because no other major group of nations has any real cause in common.
People support a "ceasefire" until it's specified that "ceasefire" means hamas keeps their hostages and keeps bombing Israel, at which point most people change their minds. It's just like how everyone supports more social programs and lower taxes.
I'm curious why anyone is putting any stock in any casualty numbers coming out of Gaza. Reports I'm seeing are that civilian infrastructure across the region is effectively non-functional. If normally you count the number of bodies going through the morgue to account for deaths, and certain hospital admissions to count for wounded, it seems to me that there's no way to produce a credible number for Gaza. Where's the network of morgues and who are they dutifully reporting to? Are all bodies going to them, given that nearly everyone in the region is a refugee without steady access to food/water, let alone cell phone service and a directory to look up directions to the morgue. Nearly every hospital has been bombed/raided at least once, with reports that they're mostly non-functional, so where are the casualty numbers coming from?
It sounds like the Gaza health ministry is trying to put out some kind of official numbers, but IDK what's behind that. Are the numbers legitimate enough for them to really be able to say, "We've identified >50% of the bodies and are credibly working through the backlog. We'll get back to you with the rest." Are they just putting on a front to look like they're still competent/capable, counting what they can and pretending they aren't missing large numbers of people stuck under the rubble? Are they inflating the numbers to drive recruitment? Or are they depressing the numbers to make it look like Hamas is putting up a good fight?
I think the answer to all these questions is "this information is not currently knowable". I'm happy to hear those answers, but with evidence not pontification. I think most of this discussion of casualties is the illusion of knowledge trying to fill the gap in information everyone wishes to know but can't.
There's a difference between saying, "Don't trust the numbers because they come from an agent of Hamas," versus saying, "don't trust numbers coming from a chaotic war zone with no functional civilian government to deal with this kind of situation."
Do you really think that implies that ALL the number from every source aren't faked. I think the argument that you shouldn't believe any of them is quite convincing.
My sense is that everyone is making up numbers here. This doesn't even require anyone to be doing anything maliciously (though it doesn't preclude that), just that the fog of war is real, and there's a concurrent strong desire for knowledge despite the fog of war.
Since I made the case for the Gaza numbers being necessarily unreliable, I'd like to make the case the the IDF numbers are also not reliable. Kind of like in Vietnam when they asked soldiers on the ground to estimate how many Vietcong they killed, collated those numbers, and reported what the top brass wanted to hear, which is that the US was really sticking it to the enemy. Soldiers on the ground didn't know, they could only guess. I knew a guy who served in Vietnam and he talked about spraying bullets in the jungle at targets he couldn't see, then being haunted at night not knowing whether he'd killed someone, or if so how many.
When I hear IDF reports of X# Hamas fighters killed I don't take those numbers any more seriously than I take those from Hamas. How do they know they killed X# Hamas fighters? They don't wear uniforms. Various government officials have said things implying they think all military-age males in Gaza are Hamas, etc. So maybe they're over counting any male Arab-looking body as a Hamas militant. How would they know the difference? Maybe they're under-counting. How do they know whether there's a dozen Hamas buried in the rubble of a building they bombed? Nobody is going in and clearing out the rubble of an active combat zone just to count bodies of militants killed.
These are all guesses. What people think of those guesses, or which direction they think the real value lies, is more a reflection of ideological predisposition than anything else.
My my, I sure do love to be lectured in the subjects of Statistics and Why Palestinian Lives Don't Matter, Fuckers by a bunch of nobodies literally named after Tabloids, and whose frontpage articles include not one but 2 different defenses of Israeli settlements by different writers.
From an earlier discussion, here's a link to a PDF that has a good look at the first few months of casualty figures, and a link to what the author has been up to more recently.
With all due respect, my source for the 50% number is the BBC, analyzing satellite data for all territory in Gaza, see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68006607 , and you are making a bunch of completely false assumptions about me and then blaming me and my entire community for them.
It doesn't help that you quoted this along with the "50k dead" number, which is 30% higher than even the most extreme estimates by Hamas (which, as an added bonus, include the thousands of terrorists killed inside Israel in the original invasion).
If someone says "Biden reduced inflation-adjusted GDP 10% and also he's a convinctee pedophile", I'd guess the first figure has some source, but quoting it along with the blatantly (easily checked) false and offensive second part makes it clear he's not being honest.
> with the "50k dead" number, which is 30% higher than even the most extreme estimates by Hamas
is it "50k corpses were identified" or "50k people who used be alife before the war, but are currently missing and presumed dead" or "we found body parts of 50k corpses"?
Which one of these are you talking about, and which one is scott talking about?
I am asking, because I remember a couple weeks ago reading news, about how some officials in gaza changed their measurement from one of these counts to another, and "magically" the death count jumped dramatically and people started to blame each other in a very similar manner how you are blaming scott right now.
That jump was between 35k and 25k. So using the 35k is already going with the high end estimates (which, if you don't want to dig into the controversy, is an understandable default number to mention). The 50k number is a further (inexplicable) 30% jump above that.
Note that this claim is often made of Gaza City, not all of Gaza. (I glanced at the article you linked, I think it talks about cities in Northen Gaza in general.)
That said, I think that number is generally considered correct for North Gaza.
The problem as I understand it isn't the known Hamas commanders in those buildings - it's that you need to go through those buildings one by one to look for militants and/or hostages and/or weapons, and many of those buildings are rigged to explode, or e.g. have militants hiding on the top floor waiting to ambush you. Several IDF soldiers have died in exactly that way.
After that happens a few times, it "makes more sense" to just bomb the building rather than risk more soldiers dying, since they are empty of civilians anyway.
> The problem as I understand it isn't the known Hamas commanders in those buildings - it's that you need to go through those buildings one by one to look for militants and/or hostages and/or weapons, and many of those buildings are rigged to explode, or e.g. have militants hiding on the top floor waiting to ambush you. Several IDF soldiers have died in exactly that way.
If the argument is just 'it's difficult and dangerous for our soldiers to prosecute our war without flattening the entire country', my response would be 'tough'- or alternatively 'well have you considered not doing that?'
'But it's much easier for us just to bomb the place' is not an acceptable justification.
This isn't carpet bombing - carpet bombing deliberately targets civilians, while this is pretty careful about not doing that.
"If you can't win a war without killing enemy civilians you should just lie down and die" is also not real advice anyone would follow. If you think you can prosecute this war better you are welcome to come and try. I assume you won't, because you don't particularly feel like risking your life for other people's struggles that aren't your fault - but that's exactly how these soldiers feel.
I actually didn't realise carpet bombing had that precise a meaning; I simply meant 'do lots of bombing of a given area'. The point I was *trying* to make is unaffected, but I realise that I unintentionally made a much stronger point so I've edited the comment to reflect that. Please feel free to respond to the amended point, or not.
> "If you can't win a war without killing enemy civilians you should just lie down and die" is also not real advice anyone would follow. If you think you can prosecute this war better you are welcome to come and try. I assume you won't, because you don't particularly feel like risking your life for other people's struggles that aren't your fault - but that's exactly how these soldiers feel.
This, on the other hand, is just a straw man I'm afraid. Nobody suggested they need to 'lie down and die'; Israel is one of the safest and most affluent countries on earth, and they would have been absolutely fine if they had done exactly nothing in response to October 7.
They are, by many analyses, greatly *increasing* the risk to Israel and its denizens with this insane overreaction.
They would, to be fair, be accepting the continued existence of Hamas. But that's not accepting death, or even defeat; most people don't consider the complete elimination of every one of their enemies a necessary condition of victory. They've already achieved a 50:1 victory, in the 'killing innocent people on the other side' war, which is of course all Hamas actually did.
It would be much more achievable and cheaper to improve the country's defences and capacity to the point where October 7 could not happen again. And it would have the added advantage of not creating new generations of potential threats by doing exactly what created this level of enmity in the first place. But it *wouldn't* have the advantage of wreaking bloody vengeance and making Israel's leaders look tough, which is of course what the real purpose of all this is. And my country did that too, 20 years ago, so I can only cast stones so forcefully on that point; I just find it bizarre that some contrarian rightists want to pretend that there's a strategically and morally justifiable rationale here.
It's reasonable to get rid of Hamas after October 7. Sure, they could PROBABLY be relatively safe leaving Hamas in power, but there would be huge socio-political consequences. The Israeli public doesn't want it, understandably, and Hamas' prestige would be enormous. Israel realizes now that to be safe it has to have better security control of Gaza, probably meaning control over the Egyptian border, etc. Which is a lot easier if you get rid of Hamas.
Also, leaving Hamas in charge dooms the Palestinian people to an endless nightmare. Getting rid of Hamas makes all things possible including two state resolution and peace and prosperity for the Palestinians.
> This, on the other hand, is just a straw man I'm afraid. Nobody suggested they need to 'lie down and die'; Israel is one of the safest and most affluent countries on earth, and they would have been absolutely fine if they had done exactly nothing in response to October 7.
No, this is wrong. You can't just turtle up and let an enemy keep attacking you as much as they want. Israel tried that with Iron dome. October 7 roved they will eventually figure out a way through, and once they do they will kill *everyone*. Kids, grandmas, babies butchered and shot like dogs in the street. No one is ever, ever going to be okay with shrugging that off.
> This, on the other hand, is just a straw man I'm afraid. Nobody suggested they need to 'lie down and die'; Israel is one of the safest and most affluent countries on earth, and they would have been absolutely fine if they had done exactly nothing in response to October 7.
I asked you in another comment what specifically you mean by "do nothing", and you never responded. I won't repeat that whole comment though I urge you to look for it, but suffice it to say I disagree with this quite a bit.
You are imagining Hamas is some threat that can just be "managed", which is exactly what Israel has done for the last 15 years. October 7th proves that a smart enemy that can get a lot of resources will eventually find a way to inflict damage that you cannot ignore. They can wait another 10 years, arm themselves even more thoroughly, and find another weakness to exploit. Maybe next time they kill 10k people. Maybe next time they manage to explode a large bomb inside a city. Who knows.
If you think a population can and should be willing to live under those conditions, you are... mistaken.
"Carpet bombing deliberately targets civilians." Way to ruin your own credibility. It wouldn't be called carpet bombing if it deliberately targeted anything but an area.
> If the argument is just 'it's difficult and dangerous for our soldiers to prosecute our war without flattening the entire country', my response would be 'tough'- or alternatively 'well have you considered not doing that?'
Maybe. And maybe the correct idea right now is to stop the war at this point. But I don't think many armies would choose to risk soldier's lives repeatedly over inflicting only property damage; remember, we're talking about buildings that don't have civilians in them, since they were evacuated.
If you think this war is being fought voluntarily, and Israel can just choose to stop, that makes sense. But if you think Israel has a legitimate reason to fight, then I don't think your answer makes much sense. It's not like Israel could just choose to ignore the invasion of the country, and the effective shutting down of the entire country that followed because of the repeated rocket attacks.
It's entirely possible that *at this point* the war can be stopped, but a lot of this damage happened in the first wave of fighting, which was necessary to stop Hamas from continually bombing Israel.
> Maybe. And maybe the correct idea right now is to stop the war at this point. But I don't think many armies would choose to risk soldier's lives repeatedly over inflicting only property damage; remember, we're talking about buildings that don't have civilians in them, since they were evacuated.
Well to be fair they've managed to kill tens of thousands of civilians, so some of those buildings did. If your choices are to kill tens of thousands of civilians or risk a few soldiers, you should risk the soldiers... or just not pursue the completely unnecessary and probably counter-productive offensive, as you mention.
(And 'a few soldiers' is really not downplaying it much at all; the IDF says fewer than 300 have died so far. Is 290 of your soldiers vs 50,000 civilians on the other side really the right ratio? Or does that suggest they should maybe risk the soldiers a bit more in order to preserve the children?)
> If you think this war is being fought voluntarily, and Israel can just choose to stop, that makes sense. But if you think Israel has a legitimate reason to fight, then I don't think your answer makes much sense. It's not like Israel could just choose to ignore the invasion of the country, and the effective shutting down of the entire country that followed because of the repeated rocket attacks.
I would really rather not get into a wider debate about the entire history of the conflict, but I would argue that essentially ignoring it was both morally and strategically the correct move. The enmity that produced October 7 arose from nearly a century of this disregard for Palestinian lives, and wildly disproportionate response to entirely predictable, even understandable resistance- and the response this time has ensured more October 7s in the future.
Even the goodwill that this has squandered in normally sympathetic nations seems to outweigh whatever advantage has been gained in killing a few Hamas commanders, given that 99.9% of the time Israel had proved completely capable of negating any real risk they posed to its denizens. I've never seen such a worldwide PR disaster; in Britain we went from potential national leaders being completely destroyed for refusing to legally define certain criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitic, to those same criticisms being completely standard positions amongst even those in the political centre.
It just all seems terrible from every perspective, and for every purpose, other than of producing satisfying terrible vengeance and making Israeli leaders look like they're doing something dramatic.
Maybe 20,000 civilians have died, not 50,000. I don't see that they have shown disregard for Palestinian lives, quite the opposite. Hamas has shown a complete disregard for Palestinian lives, but Palestinians don't seem bothered about that.
I couldn't disagree with you more about your assessment. Yes global opinion is very negative but it's much more important to eradicate Hamas, destroy the tunnels and prevent importation of terror weapons than it is for other countries to like you. When Hamas is gone and there is peace, there will be plenty of time for public opinion to improve.
I think your (and Scott's) estimate of 50k civilians killed is very wrong, see my other response to him.
> I would really rather not get into a wider debate about the entire history of the conflict, but I would argue that essentially ignoring it was both morally and strategically the correct move.
Without getting into it, let me just register that I disagree with your statement that there has been a century of disregard for Palestinian lives.
That said, what specifically do you mean by "ignoring it"? Presumably, you think the army should have driven out the Hamas militants that were still inside of Israel for the first two days of the war, I imagine. So setting that aside, I have a few specific questions, because I honestly don't think it's as simple as people seem to think it is (I'm genuinely asking here).
Do you also mean no defensive action should've been taken to prevent more militants from coming into Israel and seal up the border?
If that's the case, what to do with the rocket attacks? Simply let them continue shooting rockets dozens of times per day? Effectively shutting down the entire country for weeks/months?
What of the 150k displaced Israelis who had to flee their homes (some of whom haven't yet returned, e.g. to the north where Hezbollah is still attacking)? Just tell them "ok, effectively our country has just shrunk its borders and your homes are no longer available, sorry?".
What of the hostages? Should the country have just said to the families of the 250 hostages captured into Gaza "sorry, we're not getting them back right now"? And only tried negotiating, with *zero* leverage?
And maybe most crucially - what of the Hezbollah offensive taking place at the same time, and that has gone on since then, effectively destroying 10% of the Israeli North? Nasrallah took 3 weeks before he officially said they *won't* take part in the Hamas attack. Had that gone the other way, the amount of casualties on all sides would probably be *much* higher, and Israel would be at serious risk of mass casualties. I can't say for sure that a strong offensive in Gaza helped dissuade them, but I strongly suspect that had Israel not done *anything*, Hezbollah would've taken that as a sign of weakness and decided to attack, leading to far more dead.
Again, genuinely curious what you mean by "ignore" the attack. Often I see people pattern-matching October 7th to something like 9/11, a lone terror attack that essentially *can* be ignored, without really grappling with the fact that it was an actual invasion and full-on attack by a neighboring country, if a much weaker one.
This is such a facetious standard to hold Israel to. In what possible scenario is a country going to value the property of a hostile state more than the lives of its own soldiers? In fact, I'm not sure what better justification for levelling buildings exists other than preventing your people from dying.
If you want to constructively engage in the conversation, you could surely point out the relevant section(s) of the Geneva Convention that you think have been violated.
A... facetious standard? How could a standard be facetious?
It's not "the property of a hostile state". People live and work and pray there. So yes, they should refrain from levelling it even if it means the soldiers have to actually go and fight in service of their military objectives. The civilised world agreed this decades ago.
Your entire notion is ridiculous. A house is not more valuable than human lives. Further, no military in the history of ever has valued infrastructure more than the lives of their own soldiers. That is why holding Israel to a standard never applied to any other participant in a war is facetious.
And yes, it is a war. Hamas is the governing body of Gaza, and it attacked Israel and killed many Israeli citizens. This makes Gaza a hostile state. There is no "civilized agreement", or any treaty, that nations at war have to avoid destroying each others' buildings.
Property? What manner of language is this? This isn't the enemy's spare beachfront vacation homes. It's primary residences and hospitals and power generation facilities, and water supply infrastructure, and aid delivery routes, directly leading to second-order civilian deaths.
If that's still an acceptable tradeoff to you, fine, but call it what it is.
Property; Physical or intangible entity, owned by a person or group of people. My use of the language is as intended.
It also includes things like ammunition depots, command centers, barracks, supply dumps, artillery positions, strongpoints and tunnel networks for Hamas. Destroying these things without destroying the civilian infrastructure is very difficult in a densely urbanized area, and is only exacerbated by Hamas intentionally positioning their assets to maximize collateral damage.
You can argue this means the IDF should not have entered Gaza at all. I think this is hopelessly naïve and unrealistic, but is at least a consistent position. Expecting Israel to value Gazan *property* more than the lives of Israeli soldiers is simultaneously naïve, unrealistic and inconsistent with the history of warfare.
The fact that so many Gazans are dying is because they have nowhere else to go. If there were still Ukrainian civilians in Bakhmut when that city was being fought over, the situation would have been the same. Israel doesn't want to let the Gazans move freely through their country for obvious reasons. Egypt doesn't want to let them in either, probably because the last time something like this happened in Jordan, the PLO started a war against the Jordanian monarchy.
This leaves the options of a) Israel bombs Gazan buildings and inevitably kills non-Hamas members, b) Israeli troops die in much higher numbers and the war drags on much longer as buildings are manually cleared. Obviously these are both bad options.
Well, if their homes are so valuable to their population, maybe Hamas as the ruling organization of Gaza should release the hostages and surrender to stop the violence? Why would the burden be on Israel (who did not choose to start this war) to prioritize the well-being of Palestinians over their own safety?
>After that happens a few times, it "makes more sense" to just bomb the building rather than risk more soldiers dying, since they are empty of civilians anyway.
There are some minor differences due to advances in weapons technology, but the big difference is that the Germans evacuated the civilian population of their cities before using them as fortified strongpoints for their armies, and Hamas does the opposite. So there's going to be relatively more civilian casualties in Gaza, but in the wrecked-buildings category we should expect fairly similar outcomes.
Because there are basically only four ways anyone has ever figured out for removing an enemy army that has entrenched itself in an urban area.
1 - Besiege them and wait until they starve, or surrender due to imminent starvation. If there are any civilians in the city, they'll starve first.
2 - Destroy any building you think the enemy is at all likely to be hiding in. Which, barring a stunning success of military intelligence, means basically all of them,
3 - Assault every building you think the enemy is at all likely to be hiding in, using firepower to cover for the vulnerability of infantry at close quarters. That means tank guns firing to suppress enemy fire during the approach and also to blast new entrances, grenades thrown preemptively into most rooms, and maybe breaching charges to open up interior walls to circumvent known chokepoints. The building will probably still be physically *standing* after this, but it may not be habitable - and if you started any fires in the process, there isn't a fire department to put them out.
4 - Send in infantry to search every building using only small arms and body armor for protection. This is going to result in an awful lot of dead soldiers on your side, because the first man through any doorway with armed men waiting in ambush behind it is very likely to get shot up before he can do anything about it. Really, even option 3 gives you a lot of that.
There are *many* more doorways in Gaza than there are soldiers in the IDF, even counting reservists, so option #4 is out and option #3 is going to be bloody expensive for the Israelis.
If you've got a fifth option, a lot of people would like to hear about it. But that lot of people have been looking for a fifth option for a long time, and nobody has really found anything that works.
The eventual solution is probably going to be something like having the first man through the door be either an expendable robot or a soldier with heavy enough body armor to withstand most small-arms fire. Some attempts at the former are in the R&D pipeline but nowhere near ready, and the latter would require Starship Troopers style powered armor which is even further down the road.
It sounds like the IDF is already using a fair amount of new tech in the form of expendable drones for reconnaissance and fire support, but that's more in the nature of an incremental improvement to 2 and 3 than a fundamentally new option.
Quite possibly, though with Starship Troopers style armor you have to start worrying about whether the stairways will collapse and deposit your somewhat battered troopers in the basement.
Yes, I think robotics will likely get to the point where non-peer wars are conducted this way (with no casualties for the attacker and much decreased casualties for civilians on the defending side). But we're maybe 10(?) years away from that.
> the big difference is that the Germans evacuated the civilian population of their cities before using them as fortified strongpoints for their armies, and Hamas does the opposite.
Mariupol, where Russia engaged in indiscriminate bombardment, had 93% of buildings destroyed and is near the high end of destruction. Fallujah, where the US had extremely restrictive rules for artillery/air strikes, lost about 20% of buildings. And is probably the record for least destructive urban invasion of all time. In urban operations like this it's normal that the majority of buildings are destroyed. The average Syrian city where there was a battle, for example, saw 70% of buildings lost. And large scale sieges again could reach 90+%.
This looks nothing like an indiscriminate bombardment. If that were happening almost all buildings would be destroyed and casualties would be significantly worse than they are. But also urban war is really, really bad and highly destructive.
I think that if you are trying to move an army through an urban area then you're going to find people shooting at you from a lot of different buildings.
Not sure if someone has already said this, but apparently military experts think that Israel's scale of destruction here is more restrained than the US reclaiming cities from ISIS, and maybe more restrained than any comparable military operation.
What frustrates me most about this conversation is that I can't tell what benchmark anyone wants to use for ethical warfare. I'm not in principle objecting to people who think that warfare is always bad, but like, most people think that WW2 was a just war, or think that there are at least some nations in compliance with the international laws of war when they conduct warfare. So simply citing casualty counts or other measures of destruction can't be sufficient without debating the measures Israel uses to judge and make decisions on civilian casualties.
So why so many building were destroyed? Because all of them were used by the terrorists to wage war against the Jewish state.
"Were there known Hamas commanders in all of those buildings?"
Again I have hard time understanding the logic here. You mean only the building with Hamas commanders inside can be destroyed, but if these are only rank and file terrorists there, the building should be spared?
As people have noted already here, Hamas tactics is to leave caches of weapons in quite a few places. They then get into the next building with arms hidden inside, fire from it and try to run outside unarmed to avoid suspicion. The result is a number of buildings destroyed proportional to the number of hidden arsenals. And the latter are so numerous it will take IDF months and months to discover them.
I'm not sure what you'd consider a source here - from the inside view, there's plenty of statements about the general strategy or the purpose of individual strikes (usually the controversial ones that ended badly, like the one this week that caused an unfortunate number of civilian casualties due to igniting an unexpected munitions dump). From the outside view, the low civilian casualty ratio (lower than e.g. Americans fighting ISIS, which we know we're targeting militants) is inconsistent with tactics which don't try to take care to avoid it.
We had a conversation about this in the open thread - there's a few different sources (Israel claims, Hamas reports of their losses, outside view of what you'd expect from the tactics involved) that give civilian casualty ratios of between 1:1 and 2:1, depending on which reports you find trustworthy.
Ahem, that was your own opinion, not the conclusion of the conversation. My humble opinion was that these rates are implausible and the real rates are way higher.
Summary of the update: I do feel confirmed that a 2:1 civilian casualties rate is very implausible (let alone 1:1). The BBC article researched this in much more depth than either of the two of us, and came to this conclusion. I have not seen any other investigation of similar depth.
I wasn't part of that conversation on the open thread, but the BBC (from 3 months ago) seems to simply repeat claims from various ministries in Gaza, rather than "research[ing] this in much more depth". And even so, their data (from eyeballing the graphs) seems to be significantly closer to 2:1 than 3:1.
Since the UN changed their accounting a few weeks ago, there's been a lot more information on how various groups are assessing casualty numbers. The best popular-media overview I've seen is this from the Washington Post, which says that about ~25k bodies have been counted, and other non-verified deaths get up to ~35k.
The BBC uncritically quotes Hamas numbers, it doesn't do its own research. It has repeatedly had to issue apologies and retractions for printing obvious lies (like claiming Israel had bombed a hospital that had not, in fact, been bombed). A neutral source it is not.
So, on the one hand, I don't trust the government of Israel as a whole, or the IDF in particular, to implement particularly pragmatic military policy. On the other hand, it's very hard for me to find sources which I can trust to give educated and well-informed assessments of what their operations actually are.
I feel like we're in a pretty worst-of-all-worlds scenario where their adversaries' actual strategy is to both motivate Israel to take actions which generate as bad PR as possible (e.g. embedding their highest value targets among civilians to maximize casualties,) and lie or exaggerate about the extent of Israel's actions wherever possible, while the international community, both state actors and civilian populations, are largely split into groups who'll condemn Israel irrespective of its conduct, or will support it unconditionally. Hence, Israel has next to no incentive to conduct its war pragmatically or ethically, because international opinion is being driven almost entirely by agents who won't attend to whether it does so or not.
> Hence, Israel has next to no incentive to conduct its war pragmatically or ethically, because international opinion is being driven almost entirely by agents who won't attend to whether it does so or not.
They still have to justify their actions to their own population, who I hope have more information?
Not much more, I don't think. And not that there's no incentive for ethical behavior whatsoever, but Netanyahu is deeply unpopular with the general public in Israel, would almost certainly lose badly if another election took place in the near future, is acting on incentives to postpone that as long as possible, and his own political faction are conservatives who're not in support of a moderate response, so his own incentives don't particularly align with erring on the side of the humane.
> They still have to justify their actions to their own population, who I hope have more information?
68% of Israeli Jews oppose "the idea that Israel should allow the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents at this time, via international bodies that are not linked to Hamas or to UNRWA". https://en.idi.org.il/articles/52976
One can only imagine that things which have a better militant:civilian kill ratio than starvation (the guys with the guns get first dibs on the food, so it is probably worse than just bombing at random) would be even more popular.
And yet the Israeli government is transferring 3163 calories per person per day to Gaza. Needless to say people do not starve on 3163 calories per day.
It may be a natural human reaction to not want to feed the people who have just committed and cheered perhaps the most terrorizing terrorist attack in human history against you. But luckily the government has more sense than that.
Sure. But by extension I would expect that concerns about the international community's reaction to be stronger than concerns about the Israeli population's reaction in making those sorts of decisions. I actually disagree with Desertopa's opinion that, writ large, the international community will condemn or support Israel no matter what.
This seems to be a common opinion (particularly among Israelis) but e.g. elsewhere in the comments section, somebody linked https://time.com/6559293/morning-consult-israel-global-opinion/ which suggests a -18 point swing for Israel from September to December.
I did go look into Morning Consult's more recent data, and everything's behind a $125 paywall, but they did note here https://pro.morningconsult.com/analysis/morning-consult-counter-consensus-global-political-risk-briefing-may-16-2024 that "Israel’s global reputation has not deteriorated further amid the looming Rafah invasion". Without having an extremely expensive subscription to their site, I couldn't tell you if the downward swing was only localized to the early months of the war, whether there's been recovery, likely causes/durability, etc. My guess would be that this is because the tempo of operations in the early months was very high and killed a lot more civilians.
> I actually disagree with Desertopa's opinion that, writ large, the international community will condemn or support Israel no matter what.
To be clear, I don't mean that people are all fixed in their opinions regardless. I think that Hamas has been making a concerted effort to attack Israel's public relations which has been, on the whole, effective, and that Israel's ability to avoid the PR hit by simply refusing to do objectionable things is limited.
> There's no widespread destruction of buildings in order to remove cover.
The Wall Street Journal reported [1] in **December** that 70% of Gaza was destroyed. I'm waiting for your confirmation that the WSJ is a sneaky arm of Hamas military media.
> The number of casualties you quote is also about 30% higher
Because the Gazan health ministry only reports bodies, there is still the fact that the entirety of Gaza has become one large graveyard with thousands or tens of thousands buried under the rubble. People are still getting bodies from under the rubble every day.
There's been no effort to keep Hamas from regrouping in the cleared areas. They've operated in some areas 3 times to clear out Hamas. The analysis I've seen from Western soldiers with experience in Iraq is that the IDF isn't professional and is using air power to spare troops with little consideration for civilian casualties.
1. Have been wishing for a Total War set in a modern urban counter-protest setting forever.
2. My interpretation of miracles is that they only happen when the message "do not make a precedent out of this situation" must be set. See story of Jesus's birth on Quran for example.
So, roughly the ratio of Germans killed in WW2 relative to Britons killed in WW2. I guess Churchill should have called a ceasefire after the Blitz ended. What a monster.
Also, how many Gazan teenagers have been gang raped by the IDF since October?
Apologies for being so tiresome and predictable. I just don’t have much tolerance for these apples to oranges comparisons.
> So, roughly the ratio of Germans killed in WW2 relative to Britons killed in WW2. I guess Churchill should have called a ceasefire after the Blitz ended.
Yes, that was also wrong.
> Also, how many Gazan teenagers have been gang raped by the IDF since October?
Hard to quantify, but the answer is certainly 'some':
> I just don’t have much tolerance for these apples to oranges comparisons.
It's great when your opponents just admit what you want to accuse them of! Yes, we know you don't consider Gazan lives equivalent to Israeli ones; that's kind of the point.
Your link does not support your claim of "certainly some". It says there were two claims of Palestinian women raped in prison. Very unlikely a Gazan teenager was gang-raped by the IDF
What should the Allies should have done? Call a ceasefire and leave the Nazi party to rearm? Because that seems to be the 1940s equivalent to what a lot of the pro-Palestine people want; a ceasefire that leaves Hamas in control, with no changes in leadership.
Hang on, just to clarify: you think that it was wrong for Churchill to take the fight to the Germans after the Blitz ended? As soon as the Germans were done butchering Britons, England should have let bygones be bygones and declared an end to the war?
If that’s where you’re coming from, then I don’t think we’re going to achieve consensus.
Why would you say 50? Less than 25k versus 1200+, right? But anyway the 1200+ were massacred deliberately while the 20,000+ were killed because Hamas wanted them to and sheltered among them during a war.
If he does I agree. If they could do what they want to do without killing a single civilian or Hamas operative they would. But they can't. the people won't go, and no one will take them. So, on they go, until someone cracks.
Re British nukes, the problem is that the London would likely be destroyed in a first strike, and with it the government. So for Britain to have deterrence, submarine commanders need independent ability to launch a strike. One of the first acts of an incoming Prime Minister is to review the sealed orders of the submarine commanders, as to what to do in the event that the government is destroyed. Exactly what the orders are, is not public.
If memory serves, the US idea was to get the Prez on AF1 as soon as, and remain in the air for as long as possible (ie. until the first strike was over). Can't recall what the Soviets would get up to, but vaguely got the idea that the retaliatory strike was essentially automatic on launch detection (something, something solar flares, Able Archer, Stanislav Petrov).
However, for decades, the rumour has always been that to get around the potential issue of the first strike decapitating the command structure, the US simply set the release codes to 0000. Which produces the same position as the UK.
>Can't recall what the Soviets would get up to, but vaguely got the idea that the retaliatory strike was essentially automatic on launch detection (something, something solar flares, Able Archer, Stanislav Petrov).
Many Thanks! The article also mentions an earlier system:
>In 1967, the Soviet Union first attempted to create a system, called "Signal", which they could use to create 30 premade orders from their headquarters to the missile units.[2] Although the system still was not completely automatic, their intent was no different
I am confused about why any of these systems, once operational, was kept a secret.
<evidence from fiction>
Quoth Dr. Strangelove:
>Strangelove:
>Yes, but the... whole point of the doomsday machine... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
>DeSadeski:
>It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
I thought the “codes set to zero” thing was basically a rebellion by SAC against what they saw as dangerous meddling by civilians and was since discovered and corrected.
I would also assume the theory is that even if the President and everyone in the immediate line of succession could be wiped out, they could not be without *some* warning, even if it was just minutes. Which would be long enough to authorize retaliation (perhaps even “conditional” authorization? As in “you are weapons free, please shoot back if I’m dead in 10 minutes)
I covered this in a separate response, but the short version is that the Russians have always been paranoid about loyalty in their military, so they would do whatever it took to maintain positive control. (And they have the Dead Hand/Perimitr system to cover this eventuality, although it's only switched on in times of crisis.) The US has an enormous and very expensive infrastructure to make sure we can get the word out. Also, we're a lot further away from the most likely enemy, which gives the President more time to respond. (We implemented this system on the basis of some extremely dubious theories back in the 60s, but "we want less control over our nukes" is a terrible platform, so it remains in place.)
I suspect the answer is partly just that the US has more time as a result of being much further away from its prospective enemies (Russia, China, etc). If the nuclear threat was from Canada or Mexico, then some sort of system for what to do after the destruction of Washington, DC would need to be in place.
Also, both the US and Russia are a lot bigger. One medium-sized nuclear strike could wipe out the UK; a similar strike might well destroy everything from Boston to Washington and the cores of other major cities, but there would still be 30-40 states that would be intact. As long as there's someone in charge (and the line of succession is both long and robust), then a counterstrike can be kept subject to orders.
Finally, a communications system capable of informing submarines at sea of orders, bearing in mind that no-one, including the shore commanders, knows where those submarines are, is an extreme challenge - The US, the USSR, China and India have built ELF systems that can broadcast encrypted signals across most of the oceans; Britain, France, Israel and Pakistan have not, which makes sending a PAL signal essentially impossible - the submarine has to surface to receive communications, which they will do on a schedule (usually every few days), but that's not really suitable for a launch authorisation.
>If the nuclear threat was from Canada or Mexico, then some sort of system for what to do after the destruction of Washington, DC would need to be in place.
I mean, we do have that system. That's what the E-4B and E-6 fleets are for. But it's a lot easier to make something like that work when you have 3 times as long to respond, and a lot easier to afford that kind of thing when you're the US instead of Britain. (It appears that Looking Glass predates the Kennedy/McNamara strategy, although I suspect that it became much worse under them.)
I think if the Cuban Missile Crisis had been resolved by the US accepting Soviet nuclear weapons based in Cuba, then the launch strategy of the US would have evolved in dramatically different ways, and there might well be more devolved launch authority.
That might actually make a lot of sense of why JFK et al freaked out so much about it, when we were doing the same thing in Turkey. It's a lot harder to have your maniacal control over the nuclear forces, which you stupidly think is necessary to avoid WWIII, when you only have 10 minutes to respond to a launch.
"On The Origins Of War" made the claim that Kennedy only took a stand on nukes because he cornered himself; he didn't think they'd give nukes to Cuba, so publicly declared nukes as the line in the sand to save face.
I'm not sure it's right that a single strike would wipe out the UK. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ lets you simulate the effect of nuclear blasts, and plugging in China's current best ICBM, the 5MT "Dong Feng 5", basically flatten London and causes some damage out to the suburbs, but leaves the rest of the UK intact.
This would cripple the UK economy and kill 13% of the population, but in the short term the majority of the UK's cities and population would survive. Even you destroyed the UK's ten largest cities, 80% of the population would survive. If the UK wanted define a line of succession that extended outside its top few largest cities, it could probably do so.
It's not actually clear that the US has the opposite policy; the Pentagon has I believe said that there are PALs on our submarine-launched missiles, but not whether there's a copy of the PAL codes in the Captain's safe. There are arguments to be made either way.
But if we do keep those centrally controlled, it's because the US has enough strategic depth that we can be confident that at least *some* of our leaders will survive and have effective communications with our submarines. That's harder to arrange if you live on an island less than ten minutes from Kaliningrad as the IRBM flies.
To the best of my knowledge, the PAL code in question is the combination to a safe containing one of the four launch keys. But safes can be drilled, and probably would be if for some reason they couldn't get the code, but were clearly in a position where launching was a good idea.
>and have effective communications with our submarines
I do wonder about our ELF sub communications. An ELF antenna, of necessity, must have long conductors. Protecting it against EMP must be ... interesting.
Long conductors, but it by definition doesn't need high frequency response. So you can put a huge inductive low-pass filter on the antenna, and the only thing an EMP will do is very slightly warm the coils of the inductor.
Many Thanks! Good point! After a career in the electronics industry trying (roughly speaking) to get signals to switch as fast as possible, it feels very weird to put a low pass filter in a signal path :-)
Further to other comments, I also think there is a distinction here between control of the nuclear weapons of the absolute top tier powers, who got them first and think of them as "weapons we might use in extremis but we know it likely triggers all out nuclear war"; and control of the nuclear weapons of second tier powers, who got them later and think of them as "a deterrent we maintain so that other nuclear powers cannot target us".
I read somewhere that Moscow and other large Russian cities have a network of tunnels and underground shelters that make Hamas's best efforts look like a mere handful of rabbit warrens. So presumably within a few minutes of a nuclear alert, Putin & co could hop in an elevator and be safe deep underground
More worrying in the present climate is the likely response to fake launch alerts. More than once in the past, Russian nuclear monitor operators have seen the sudden appearance of a mass incoming ICBM strike:
But they rightly concluded this must be a glitch in the system or some training exercise they hadn't been told about, and thus basically ignored it and didn't call it in. But would they take a chance like that today if the same thing happened? And would a US observer in that situation?
Which seems to have been specifically designed so that they *can* "take a chance like that". If it's a false alarm, good that you didn't launch a nuclear strike. If it's a real attack, the nuclear strike still gets launched even if you didn't make it out.
I have a vague recollection the US has a similar dead man's handle system called TACAMO ("take charge and move out"). But that may be something else, either in part or entirely.
The US version isn't automated; it's an airplane with all the communcations gear, the launch codes, and a select group of senior military officers who will act with the delegated authority of POTUS when they see the mushroom cloud over Washington DC. Roughly speaking.
The Russians have a harder time finding generals they are willing to trust with that sort of authority, except possibly among Putin's innermost circle who will probably be within the blast radius of any warhead that takes out Putin.
The US has a massively long chain of command through the entire cabinet and a policy that they're never all allowed to be in one place - when they do all get together for a ceremonial event such as the State of the Union or some such, one of them is ordered to stay away in a secure location elsewhere. There was a TV show, "Designated Survivor", based on this premise. Presumably in the real world, one of the nuclear footballs is with the Designated Survivor for this reason.
The same applies to Paris, and I believe that the French have permissive action links.
There is the "Sacoche nucléaire française" - the French equivalent of the US nuclear football - which certainly implies permissive action links. Whether their strategic missile submarines have independent authority (perhaps using sealed orders, as with the British) is not known, but it seems likely that there would be some means of response after the destruction of their senior leadership.
Their air-launched systems are very unlikely to survive a nuclear strike on France itself, so there's little need for a mechanism to launch a counter-strike after the destruction of France.
That seems to be the case, given that there's documented aid from the US to the French PAL program. (Which for treaty reasons was apparently us telling them when they were on the wrong track.) That said, France's nuclear arsenal has always been kind of baffling. I have yet to encounter a good explanation for why they had silo-launched ballistic missiles, which made no sense given how close they were to the USSR. I also think you slightly underrate the survivability of the air-launched deterrent, particularly given that they apparently continue to operate them from CDG, something I was ignorant of until today. If pressed, I'd guess they're doing the "set the PAL to 0000" trick that SAC did for a long time, or have some other way of bypassing them in an emergency, because I don't think they're doing the whole thing we have with TACAMO and the like.
Fair point about CDG, though I think I've seen that they don't routinely carry them there, in which case, they probably disable the PAL when loading them onto CDG in a crisis.
Part of the bafflement is, I think, that all the journalism about it is in French (just compare how much more comprehensive French Wikipedia is than English Wikipedia) and, unlike Russia and China (both potential US adversaries), American journalism hasn't been especially interested.
In fairness, this is not an issue I've ever looked at very closely, and I will probably dive into what's available on the CDG issue, because I completely missed that the French had any carrier-based deterrent when I wrote about that subject several years ago. At the same time, how these things are managed is often really dependent on national preferences rather than strict logic, as evidenced by the rather different ways the Russians and Americans use their SSBNs, so it's entirely possible that the French made what I would consider bad decisions, and don't actually have an answer to all of this.
Edit: It's also possible that they got PALs as part of some absurd diplomatic deal during the Kennedy/Johnson era, and have kept them around because "we want to make our nukes easier for a rogue commander to use" is really hard to sell politically, even if it's the right thing to do. Much easier to just set the code to 0s.
What I find a lot more frightening is that the Brits don't seem to have any anti-tampering devices, per that 2007 article.
Even if all British officers are 100% incorruptible and would totally endure seeing their loved ones tortured before disgracing the navy, this still leaves the problem that you don't even have to take the crew alive. You just have to kill them quickly enough so that they can't destroy the nukes in time.
I would really have thought that anyone who builds nukes at a few millions a pop (lowballing here) would obviously pay an extra million to put a state of the art anti-tamper on it.
There are probably different schools of thought about what an anti-tamper should do when it detects tampering. Just igniting the nuke would be mostly pointless -- terrorists could still use that to destroy cities. On the other hand, just blowing up the conventional explosives out of sync would still leave the tamperer with a lot of intact fissile material. My favorite would be a minimal nuclear explosion of a few kilotons -- too small to make it very useful for terrorism, but big enough that someone is going to have a hell of a bad time scrapping all that fissile material out of the mine shaft where they set it off.
Then there are also trade-offs between having a reliable tamper-protection and not blowing up your own servicemen all the time because the tamper-protection is too paranoid. It is easy to build a bomb which is very hard to defuse, just put every kind of sensor you can think of into it (vibrations? go boom. tilted? go boom. x-rayed? go boom. loss of over-pressure? go boom. you get the idea), but much harder to build a device which can reliably prevent tampering while also being safe to handle over a decade (or whatever) in the face of inevitable sensor failure.
>On the other hand, just blowing up the conventional explosives out of sync would still leave the tamperer with a lot of intact fissile material.
The lens system may not be nuclear, but it's inherently got to be enough bang to, in a correct firing, reshape the plutonium from a hollow sphere into a solid one *and* change it from the delta phase into the alpha phase. Firing out of sync AIUI splatters the plutonium into radioactive dust.
Also note that those explosive lenses are *very hard* for terrorists to construct correctly. Weapons-grade uranium is very dangerous in the hands of terrorists because any idiot can make a gun-type device, but that won't work with plutonium so it's actually damned hard for terrorists to convert the plutonium from a ruined nuke into a new working nuke. Not impossible, but I absolutely couldn't do it on the first try and I'd need very-expensive equipment to even make the attempt.
(There's one nuke in Western service that does use a lot of weapons-grade uranium - the W88 - but I'm not sure any of the others do.)
There is a famous edu econ book about US in the post-war period called "The Race Between Education and Technology." My take summary was that we made college skills cheap, which enabled firms to hire cheaper college labor. (What precisely were the skills taught? Idk. Maybe it was middle class socialization, which is a kind of skill.) This knocked down the top end of earners while bringing up the bottom, reducing inequality.
Unfortunately, for obvious-ish reasons, you can't keep doing this forever. But for developing economies the dynamic still is quite possibly true, and I assume that's what's going on in Latin America.
Re Yale biochem, Yale's physics department has (used to have?) a policy that 50% of their grad students offer letters have to go to women (I think this is illegal and wasn't officially advertised, but it was very openly known and pretty explicit).
Suppose you were running a business selling engineering services and you were unable to hire the best and brightest because your workforce lacked any women. Suppose that it turned out that in order to recruit women effectively, required a large number of offer letters. Should this be illegal? The entire point of the hiring philosophy is to employ the best and the brightest but the pursuit of that goal requires hiring a significant subset that meets some other criteria.
> 37: The Blind Centrist’s Guide To Gaza argues that we should assume Israel is pursuing a reasonable military strategy in Gaza (and trying its hardest to avoid unnecessary suffering), because that’s what their political objectives, the international situation, and the media environment incentivize
I think the big issue here is that the decisions aren't being made by an abstraction of the Israeli state pursuing its rational self interest, but Netanyahu and his cabinet. Who have an existing strong ideological commitment to a Palestinian state not being allowed to exist, expanding settlements, etc. And a strong personal interest in prolonging the war to keep himself out of jail and in power.
(This is a general problem with "realist" IR theories that treat states as rational unitary actors)
I believe I read that Netanyahu actually isn't the commander in chief of the IDF. Apparently, it's a separate entity that doesn't report to the prime minister. Can't find a source right now.
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant isn't exactly subservient to Bibi. The third member of the war cabinet (besides Gallant and Bibi) is Gantz, who is Netanyahu's primary political rival. And of course, the IDF's "chain of command" is itself full of people with their own views.
(Even with that, though, I think it's reasonable to model Israel as having decisions made by the state. Israel's "9 million prime ministers" still argue about everything, but the outcome of such arguments typically is reasonable from the group's perspective, especially on military matters.)
I would like to point out there is a straightforward explanation based on realist theory which is compatible with the escalating situation in central and southern Gaza: ethnic cleansing. John Mearsheimer himself lays evidence supporting this claim in a recent highly-viewed lecture, which I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAfIYtpcBxo&pp
To summarize one part of his talk, the ethnic cleansing (i.e. the deliberate depopulation) of Gaza is the only option currently available to the IDF to address the long-term threat posed by Hamas, since Hamas has not been (and probably can't be) defeated conventionally. Sadly, deliberate mass killing is a rational option for state actors, including democratic ones, especially in times of war (historical examples abound).
To be clear, I wholeheartedly agree with your critical opinion of Netanyahu. But it is not obvious what an alternative Israeli leadership could do to address the long-term threat posed by Hamas' continued presence in Gaza.
I've seen apparently serious proposals by Israelis to institute a system similar to what China did in Xinjiang. Which would probably work, the problem is getting the green light from the US.
Ethnic cleansing and mass killing are different policy options. They should not be conflated.
1) Ethnic cleansing presupposes that there is a country willing to let Gazans in. There is none. To believe otherwise is pure wishful thinking on behalf of IDF (If some in IDF should really believe in this - these are clever people, so I find that highly unlikely). Egypt certainly will not. Israel does not have sufficient money to bribe Egypt or any other country to do so. Remember there are 2.1. million Gazans.
2) Mass killings is in principle a possibility - the final solution. But come on, Israel will not kill 2.1 million, of which more than half are children (under the age of 19). It is an insult to Israel to suggest otherwise. A pure rhetorical insinuation.
Given that this is a war, I'm quite willing to insult both sides. Saying it's an insult is not an argument that it isn't their strategy. (There are arguments, but I'm not sure they are convincing.)
FWIW, driving people out into a desert without food or water is going to result in a very large number of them dying. If you destroy all the infrastructure, that's what you are effectively doing. (And it doesn't matter if you had a good reason, you're still doing it.)
The only desert in the vicinity is in Sinai. Egypt is never going to let Gazans en masse into Sinai, because if they do they will never be able to send the Gazans back to Gaza again. Israel will prevent that. Plus, that 2.1 million Gazans on Egyptian soil is a recepie for an unstable Egypt.
Both Israel and Egypt know this. This is why ethnic cleansing is not an option for Israel.
I think if Bibi wanted to murder all the Gazans, he would have glazed Gaza (or huge portions of it) on Oct 7. The optics would have been way better than killing the Gazans through starvation, conventional weapons or death camps. If Israel was serious about genociding Gazans, the situation would look a lot different, they kinda know how efficient genocide works.
A better explanation of the facts would be that Bibi is not actively in favor of Gazans dying, but mostly indifferent to civilian deaths. From Bibi's point of view, this is rational: most people, including journalists, are mostly scope insensitive. The optics of having a civilian to enemy death ratio of 1:10 will not be drastically different from one of 10:1 -- either way there will be a lot of pictures of dead kids. From my understanding, the Oct 7 attacks were hugely popular in Gaza -- much more than Hamas is. It seems reasonable to suppose that the median Gazan already hates Israel to the maximum amount possible, blowing up a few more family members of them will likely not change their position overly much.
I don't think that the IDF has any reasonable objective in that war. Killing Hamas members is making the world a better place in my book, but the civilian casualties remove that effect. And I don't see them working on a regime change towards a less murderous regime -- not that they would have much success if they did.
My favorite solution would be if the US went Afghanistan on Gaza. Go in, set up a democratic regime. While it did not work out in Afghanistan, the Gaza strip is 1800 times smaller.
Instead, what will happen after Bibi decides that he has killed enough Hamas will be a return to the status quo. In five years, some "from the river to the sea" extremists will still be in charge of Gaza (only that the average age of their goons will be younger) and Israel will still be blockading Gaza (which will prevent the Gazans from building rockets out of water pipes and also ensure that Gaza will remain a hellhole for the foreseeable future).
"From my understanding, the Oct 7 attacks were hugely popular in Gaza -- much more than Hamas is."
That is interesting. Do you base this on your gut feeling/take-away from random media coverage, or are there any systematic study that indicates this?
I ask because if there is any hope for the future, it is in the presumed interest of most ordinary people to live everyday lives without more trouble than necessary. (For this reason, most ordinary people are likely to be political opportunists and "go with the flow", whichever direction it flows. As they said in Florence in the days of Machiavelli: A good life is a life lived hidden.)
Hamas by contrast has a gung-ho activist vibe associated with very young and fired up people. This demographic seldom comprises more than 5-10 percent on an electorate. Gaza has a young population, but I would still assume that the majority would prefer that Hamas had used its considerable tax & development assistance funds to upgrade infrastructure and hospitals, instead of sinking the money into tunnel construction.
For the same reason, I would assume that ordinary grown-ups Gazans (the Gaza silent majority) went pale on October 7th, since they would know that killing 1200 Israeli & foreigners removed them further from the pragmatic aim of most people, once the Sturm und Drang of youth is over: A quiet life.
> Despite the devastation, 57% of respondents in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the October attack, the poll indicated.
> Support has been less volatile in Gaza, where 38% supported Hamas in September 2023, 42% in December 2023, and 34% this month. [...]
> The divergence between support for Hamas as a political party, which is dropping, and for its role in the war, which is steady at 70%, is indicative of its dual role as an administrative governing body and as a symbol for the decadeslong Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation.
> In the West Bank, the 71% figure [for 'Oct-7 was correct'] is down from 82% in December who agreed with the decision to launch the onslaught. In Gaza [where it is also 71%], however, the number was a significant increase from the 57% who backed the move three months earlier.
Some remarks:
* The numbers reported by these sources seem to be identical, even though the spin is very different
* There does not seem to be a total coercion of the outcome of the polls by Hamas, otherwise they would likely appear more popular. 66% are comfortable stating that they do not favor Hamas. Yet about half of them (assuming Hamas supporters generally support Oct-7) still think that Oct-7 was a good move.
* Even considering that Hamas is in a somewhat good position to transport their propaganda in Gaza, this seems an remarkable achievement. The Gazans know exactly how well the war is going for their side. They might not know exactly what Hamas did on Oct-7, but it is hard to deny that there is a causal link between that and the IDF response. By contrast, my gut feeling is that if you asked the inhabitants of Berlin in 1945 if they still thought that Hitler attacking the USSR was a great idea, a majority might privately express doubt that this lead to the best possible outcome.
Thanks for your effort in collecting this material. Very interesting results.
I guess a lot can be said about problems surveying people during an ongoing conflict. That said, the results are far from the 95 percent support/not-support one would expect if the respondents were afraid their answers might be communicated back to either Hamas or the Israelis. Which indicates that the responses might be genuine, not dictated by fear (cf. my separate comment about the polling bureau and the concrete questions the pollsters asked).
I find it uplifting ("the glass is half full") that support for Hamas is not even higher - it is less than 50 percent for their day-to-day rule, even though they are presently at war and you would expect a considerable degree of "right or wrong - my government" - effect.
This sort-of feeds into how I myself would think of Hamas’ administration and rule, if I had been a Gaza citizen during their many years in power. Namely that these years has been a missed opportunity. First, Gaza is not challenged by Israeli settlers: Gaza authorities’ control of the land is not disputed (unlike the exhausting situation in the West Bank). Second, Gaza authorities have obviously had large funds available for development, partly from taxation and partly from foreign donors. They could not have built the impressive tunnel system and launched a constant stream of rockets otherwise.
With these resources and territorial control, Gaza could in principle have been developed into an adequately wealthy city-state. Somewhat similar to Singapore or the European micro-states (ok, that is stretching it, but very small states that can afford adequate infrastructure are seldom desperately poor). If Hamas had not chosen to channel so much money into tunnel digging and rockets instead.
Perhaps it is still not too late, when the dust settles after the ongoing war? It will take years of course, but the alternative for Gazans, if they leave Hamas in charge, is to live for the foreseeable future in a large open-air prison.
....I followed your first link further, intrigued that surveys are being conducted in a war situation.
I do survey research as part of my regular work. Judging from the presentation of the methodology & questions asked in the report, the polling bureau (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research) seems to uphold professional standards.
The results do not necessarily support an assumption that the median Gazan already hates Israel to the maximum amount (which would imply that there is no room at all to influence hearts and minds). More specifically, when asked the question “In your view, given what happened after it, was Hamas decision to launch its offensive against Israel on 7 October a correct or incorrect one?” only a narrow majority (54 percent) of Gazans answer “correct”.
Equally important, when asked “Based on what you have heard or seen, do you think international law allows or does not allow …. Attacking or killing civilian women and children in their own homes?” 68 percent of Gazans answer “Does not allow”. (Admittedly, rather disappointingly low – 84 percent answer “Does not allow” among Palestinians on the West Bank).
How do some/many respondents square supporting the October 7 offensive (notice the somewhat value-neutral choice of word, making it easier to say “yes”), and not supporting killing women, children and other non-combatants? Apparently, by being in denial that autocracies took place. Asked the question: “…did Hamas commit war crimes in the current war?”, only 17 percent of Gazans answer “yes”.
Now there are many reasons why Gazans and others are in (cognitive) denial of quite well-documented empirical facts. But the results at least indicate that the median Gazan is not an emotional basket case driven by primitive bloodlust. Since cognition issues are arguably “colder” than emotional issues (although the links between cognition and emotion are, well, complex). Giving some hope for the future. After all.
Some additional results for the West Bank and Gaza together, illustrating that Palestinians, like all ethnic categories, are a rather diverse group:
“The belief that Hamas' decision was right is higher… among men (75%) compared to women (69%), among the religious and the somewhat religious (76% and 71% respectively) compared to the non-religious (42%),…among supporters of Hamas (92%) compared to supporters of Fateh and other forces (55% and 45% respectively).”
And "it is militarily advantageous for Israel to ethnically cleanse Gaza, therefore Israel must be ethnically cleansing Gaza" is a bizarre argument to begin with, for many reasons: 1) States do not always do things that are militarily advantageous to them - many other considerations affect their decisions 2) In half a year of warfare Israel has not pushed anyone out of Gaza, and in fact is right now pushing Gazans *away* from the Egyptian border, making it impossible for them to leave Gaza 3) An *attempt* to conduct ethnic cleansing would likely fail due to the opposition of Israel's allies as well as the remainder of the international community, and thus such an attempt would not actually be advantageous to Israel.
As I brought up in another comment, I also don't think the international situation and media environment actually incentivize this anyway. They're fighting an adversary whose actual strategy is to make prosecuting a war generate as bad PR for Israel as possible, and the international community is largely split between actors who'll oppose Israel unconditionally and actors who'll support them unconditionally (or at least not make their support contingent on humane and pragmatic prosecution of the war.)
The crowds of protestors whose take on what Israel should actually be doing sums up to "I don't know, but not that" have been causing me a considerable amount of emotional turmoil, because this effectively abdicates the opportunity to have *any* leverage to incentivize Israel to prosecute the war in a more humane and pragmatic manner. It's like stumbling into a resolution to the trolley problem where you congratulate yourself for splitting the train to run down both tracks.
Unfortunately, "I don't know, but not that" is quite close to the way I feel about the problem. Israel is rather small, and the habitable portion is smaller. The analogy I tend to think of is "two cats in a sack", though I need to work the phrase "that hate each other" into that metaphor somehow.
I think Israel's conduct in this war is deserving of some complaints, but all actionable criticism needs at the very least a standard of acceptability to measure against.
I think it's understandable as an emotional reaction, but also literally always bad feedback, in discourse on any subject, and I think this is a subject in which it's particularly harmful.
There was another thread here about then why should Israel ever sustain a single higher infantry casualty to save 100 Gazan civilians. And the answer to that is the same reason why the US didn't just completely cover North Vietnam in bombs. Few in the world accept just glassing an entire people from a far so you don't lose a single soldier.
Not to mention, Israel's approach is probably actually leading to more net-deaths than the infantry-centered, because it could be the difference between an eventual peaceful Palestinian State and 50 more years of this disaster.
It does get brought up occasionally. I'm not an expert on the subject, but the answer I've seen on a number of occasions by people who're better versed in the situation than I am is that Hamas has spent decades outfitting the territory to be outrageously difficult to attack with infantry (vast tunnel networks, buildings rigged up with explosives, etc.)
5.- "average house size in every US state vs. every European country"
That map is wrong. I'll post here what I tweeted a few weeks ago when I first saw that map.
The site this was taken from (http://shrinkthatfootprint.com) uses a Spanish source for 1044 sq ft (97 m2) that explicitly mentions this is for flats only, not houses. It also ignores the fact that 14% of Spanish dwellings are considered empty (second homes, old village houses, etc...), which assuming people prefer more space, means the average size of an inhabited dwelling is larger than the average size of all dwellings.
I can only assume that the figures for most other European countries are equally questionable (the notion that the average UK dwelling is 40% smaller than the average Greek dwelling beggars belief).
UK houses have been shrinking - I understand that bar the soviet union, this is the only place which has ever done this.
The issue is that we often sell by number of rooms and not floor area (often the latter is hard to find on listings!) so we have odd pressures.
1011 feet is large for UK new build. and I don't believe that the average new build is anywhere near this, if flat and houses are both in the sample. If it is just houses I can believe it.
Do you have a source? This seems unlikely to me. Rate of building new houses is very low; rate of building extensions to existing houses is much larger, so I would expect houses to be getting bigger.
The missing point is conversions and HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation).
In cities in the UK, it's not uncommon for a house to be chopped up into several flats (apartments), which is generally called a conversion. If you go down a row of houses in Inner London, quite often you'll see whole streets where all of what look like houses have 4+ doorbells on them.
In addition, you get HMOs, which is basically a house share but often (by no means always) with the landlord renting out the rooms individually to different tenants. According to p27 of https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2023-10/Housing%20in%20London%202022.pdf there are a little over 150,000 HMOs; not all of these are going to be multiple flats, but a lot will. Confusingly, depending on the size and amenities, some but not all conversions are also technically HMOs.
This also happens in France, I'm not sure about elsewhere in Europe. It occurs to me for the first time now that I've never heard an American mention this, so it may be less common there.
It happens, I've seen houses where each floor was separately rented, or where the upper floor had each bedroom rented out separately but the common areas downstairs were shared. However, that kind of thing is not super common here, as it requires converting an existing house into an apartment building, and that's rarely done. What we have that is more common here are buildings which are vaguely house-like in form factor, but intentionally built to have separate residences. These are called duplexes (or triplexes, or quadplexes). In places where land pressure hasn't forced going vertical to happen yet, apartment buildings tend to be 2 story duplexes, or 2 story quadplexes (the second entry on each floor comes from additional depth being available - the gap between streets will be wider). These will be purpose-built apartment complexes with a few dozen buildings which house a hundred or more renters. Depending on how they're built, they may look on satellite/chopper imagery like the buildings are all one long row, but that's just because they extended the roofline over the corridor between the units, not because it's built like a motel. Sometimes the corridor between units is enclosed, other times it's not. Sometimes the first floor has an enclosed corridor with the mailboxes and amenities while the second floor has staircases outside in the covered walkway, so the first-floor units are slightly smaller but don't have to use stairs to get in and out. Sometimes you see front entries to the first-floor units and the second-floor units use the corridors between the buildings. There's a lot of ways these get built around the country.
I don't know about UK, but the average floor area of a newly built dwelling in New Zealand peaked in 2010 (at 200 sqm, / 2150 sq feet), and is now 30% lower and back where it was in 1992.
Most new builds in NZ (and USA?) include a 1x or 2x attached garage. Probably not the case for Europe. The NZ decline is probably due to increase in inner city apartment not having attached garages.
I'm confused by the map itself - surely the metric is not "house size", but the more generic "living area", i.e. counting the enclosed, livable space of houses, appartment high rises, and everything in between? Or does "house size" mean exactly that in US usage of the words?
Yes, it does. We usually measure the size of houses and apartments in square feet of floor space in enclosed finished rooms. Storage space attached to finished rooms (e.g. bedroom closets and kitchen pantries) is counted, but utility spaces (garages, unfinished basements, furnace rooms, etc) are not. There are regional differences between whether finished basements are counted as living area or if all below-grade space (i.e. the floor is non-trivially lower than the surrounding ground) is treated as utility space.
Yes there are very similar norms in Germany and I imagine most developed countries. I was more wondering about the term "house size". After a bit of googling I found that it is apparently a legal term, but then I'd say it has either been misused, or the map says something else entirely than what it's being used for.
What definitions I found say that "house size" would indeed be the gross floor area of a single-family house, i.e. it would exclude any building that houses 2 or more families, i.e. the vast majority of living space in cities.
So as a measure of living space over an entire country it would be quite misleading and overstated, and even more misleading as comparison between countries.
I've only seen Gross Floor Area used in the context of urban planning and zoning regulations, used to measure how big a building is allowed to be on a given lot and how much parking space it's required to have. In everyday usage, it just means the floor space of the living area.
From personal experience, I would guess that US houses *are* on average larger than European houses, but this also seems, hmm, a very American metric to consider. I actually asked about this a month and a half ago; if I had more money to buy a new place, I guess I'd like a bit more size, at least for kitchen, but the location of the place itself would be considerably more important. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-325/comment/54092753
Furthermore, of course, Europe is bound to have a larger pre-existing housing stock from historical eras when houses were smaller almost by default due to the heating issues and such, though presumably most houses in both Europe and the US would be fairly recent (buit after WW2) now.
I don't understand this response. You seem to be suggesting that Europeans and Americans just have different preferences, so that Europeans put more weight on attributes like location rather than size, relative to Americans.
But Americans also put an enormous premium on location! That's why a studio in Manhattan costs way more than a McMansion in rural South Dakota. Nevertheless, my guess is the Manhattan one-bedroom is much bigger than the Paris one-bedroom, and the new American suburban house is much bigger than the new French suburban house.
Yes, of course both Europeans and Americans consider both location and size to be important and it's a bit hard to assign exact values of importance, the point was mostly that in general Americans seem to find housing size to have a greater importance for quality of life than Europeans. It's not the best of metrics, there are better metrics to demonstrate the wealth of the Americans relative to Europeans, like the income gap Scott mentioned.
Even if the other sources are more reliable, if they're using different sources for different places, it's not wise to compare the numbers directly. They will differ for all sorts of reasons--what data are available, what data are included, methodological differences, etc.
I am also skeptical. Almost half of the population of the state of NY live in NYC. If we assume that the non-city New Yorkers have 2000 sqft (what a godless unit) houses, then this would still mean that the people in the city would have on average as much space as the people in Spain. How does an apartment block even count? One giant house?
The obvious metric one should use is the quotient of total inhabited residential indoor area and the number of residents, thus bypassing what is a house and how many people share a house and the like.
I wonder if anyone has ever written a SF tale with cryonized people of the 21st century coming back to life in like a million years, and having to come together, led by Paris Hilton & Walt Disney, to defend themselves from super-dinosaur overlords of the future. Talk about the lack of a clear endgame.
I read a comic book in which Hitler escapes death by freezing himself. In the far future, he somehow gets an army and starts conquering again. This was written while he was still alive, and as far as I can tell they never finished the story.
Anytime there's a "Hitler Returns" story now I'm just going to think of Inflatable Hitler from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, where Hitler is resurrected as a balloon.
Transmetropolitan is a comic with a subplot or two about people brought back from cyronic suspension in the future and basically left to fend for themselves, mostly ending up homeless or worse.
Just a couple hundred years in the future - 2190 -. Memories and personalities of ‘corpsicles’ are transplanted into the bodies of ‘brainwiped’ convicted criminals.
> Smith suggests that journalists wanted to rely on “experts”, but the pro-missile-defense experts all did classified work for missile defense companies and couldn’t talk, and there was a very talkative and eloquent anti-missile-defense expert at MIT who become every journalist’s go-to source.
This is a problem in a lot of other areas as well. People with the most expertise are generally working directly on the subject, so are bound by commercial confidentiality, NDAs, etc. And also don't have the time to be self promoting on twitter, networking with journalists, etc.
Granted, but I think it's probably worse in defense. When there's a threat of federal prison involved, you tend to tread very carefully, and error on the side of treating things as classified. If nothing else, checking to see what is and isn't classified is kind of a pain, and you probably won't do it if you aren't getting paid. (This is also the mechanism behind a lot of overclassification.) And yes, I speak from experience here.
>When there's a threat of federal prison involved, you tend to tread very carefully, and error on the side of treating things as classified.
I'm currently re-reading Lindsay Ellis's Axiom's End and Truth of the Divine in anticipation of the third book coming out next month. There's a minor plot point of the main character (Cora) being mad at someone she's close to for not telling her about her deeply classified work with aliens. Cora has her reasons for this, but I'm nevertheless deeply offended on the other character's behalf every time this comes up.
Yeah. The USG, and anyone working with classified info, are extremely paranoid about releasing any classified information, and that ends up hitting almost anything they would want to communicate about those projects to the public (well, the government is paranoid, classed workers are acting rationally under threat of jail time).
There's huge swathes of things that you wouldn't expect to be classified, even things that are practically common knowledge (or can easily be inferred with common knowledge), and because either those or adjacent things sit in the complicated web of "either technically classified or classified if you squint" no one in that sector can go on the record without hefty potential penalties.
Bottom line is that the USG cares much more about keeping its secrets than looking good, even when the rational thing would be to just declassify some basic information.
I think the problem is more subtle, and a lot harder to solve. It's not that there's just a bunch of stuff that's classified that is common knowledge (that obviously does happen, although maybe less than you'd think.) The real issue is that it is hard in practice to make sure you keep classified and unclass separate in your head, and so any time you speak in all but the vaguest generalities about something you have a classified briefing in, you need to do so with a very careful eye on the rules for what is and isn't classified, and make very sure you don't slip up. That's a lot of work, and most people aren't going to do it unless that's actually part of their job. Declassifying basic stuff that shouldn't be classified won't make anyone who has knowledge of a specific system more likely to speak out when it means doing a bunch of extra work or taking a reasonable risk.
No, you're exactly right. That was definitely part of what I was trying to express, and you articulated it better than I could. (Even talking about *this* requires some extra mental cycles to articulate - I also speak from experience, though I suspect less than yours, chronologically).
I think part of the problem is also what Noah Smith pointed out about the difference in defense against cruise missiles vs ICBMs. Also there is a difference between conventional missiles and nuclear weapons with regards to the needed efficacy. I also think some of the anit-missile defense people are similar to climate change activists where the focus on one specific failure mode (in this case nuclear war) blinds them to other benefits.
@Scott, regarding 37: I would be happy to help with your questions on the topic, as I missed your question in the open thread and feel like the answer you got is quite off the mark. Reference: I did an AMA in Open Thread 313 which I think had quite high quality answers (more generally about me, quoting from there: "I'm a retired Major from the IDF who just finished about 100 days of reserve duty (in a non-combative role). I also have a degree in Middle-Eastern history, so some added perspective there"). I think the amount of time and depth I gave to the questions there shows that it's worth your time.
In a nutshell, and if you're interested I'd be willing to write something much longer/do some other format: The honest truth is that I believe that what will happen to Gaza is what happened after operation Defensive Shield: Israel is going to stay in it (hopefully without new settlements), and it is going to take years, if not decades, to remove Hamas from power there (which I personally think is in the interest of both the west and Palestinians). The alternative to Hamas isn't clear yet, but it is too early to say who it will be. In an imperfect analogy, talking about the endgame in 1943 would have been difficult at best.
However, while this is the most soothing and rational explanation of Israel's strategy I've seen so far, I still don't agree with it. In particular, the proposition that a particular ethnic group is so debased that it can't be allowed civil rights for a generation or more. That can only result in further abuse and dispossession, as we see in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Nor does it seem plausible as a long term strategy. Other countries have of course crushed opposed ethnic groups and eventually had peace , such as the case of the Native Americans, but in this case Palestinians represent nearly 50% of the population.
I planned to answer only Scott as doing another AMA is out of scope (maybe in a hidden open thread), but you make good points and I'll try to address them at least shortly:
1. "It can't be allowed civil rights" - I think you paint this in very black and white colors, and as I stated in the past, whatever you take from me, please take away that this conflict is most of the time grey. Palestinians aren't living in refugee camps like Uyghurs; but they do have their freedom of movement impeded by the IDF. They have plenty of IPhones, but some parts of their population is in dire lack of better nutrition.
2. "That can only result in further abuse and dispossession" - see my previous AMA - I'm all for starting with baby steps to increase relations between the two people. The joint Israeli-Palestinian Remembrance day is one of them. I'd be happy for extreme-right parties to leave the Knesset on one hand, and on stopping teaching geometry via bullets to IDF soldiers heads in elementary school on the other.
4. "... this action is as a deterrent to others, such as Hezbollah. There are obvious moral and practical problems with this." - This is indeed my stated position. I agree it is morally complicated - I don't like showing strength in Gaza so I won't be invaded by Hezbollah, though that isn't the only rational for the war - and I'd love to hear suggestions. I do require the suggestions though to be grounded in a firm understanding of the middle east - Power radiates strongly here, much more than in the west (something that sadly isn't usually understood well). I'd love to hear about the practical problems though!
I'll try to followup on your comments, but unlike in the AMA, can't promise anything. Thanks for mentioning me though!
I feel like Israel could attempt a destabilizing campaign that promotes exactly the dream of an Arab state many in the region want ... just not within the confines of Israel/Palestine. For example, if Israel were to promote movements for Arab self-government in Jordan and Syria (forcing out dictatorships and promoting democratic self-government) this strategy could benefit them in two major ways:
1. It would help build bridges of friendship/alliance among the Arab populations throughout the region, many of whom have long wanted exactly this kind of thing. This would reduce incentives to fight against Israel, to the extent they're seen as an ally, or at least as 'it's complicated', as opposed to explicitly being cast in the minds of many Arabs as villains. (Israel doesn't have to change their position on blocking Palestinian self-government to pursue this strategy, but it would be seen by many Arabs as inconsistent.)
2. It would promote emigration from Palestine as many (though not all) would rather live under an actual Arab sovereign state as opposed to the dream of one someday specifically in Palestine. This would relieve pressure on Israel from their native populations, and if sufficient numbers of Palestinians voluntarily move it might allow them to eventually integrate the remaining Arabs into Israel proper. This would help solve the demographic problem for Israel, where they can't both have absolute democracy (one person, one vote, regardless of ethnicity/religion/etc.) and a Jewish homeland. A different Jewish/Arab ratio would change that.
I suspect part of the reason this strategy isn't pursued is that Israeli leaders prefer a regional policy (similar to the global US policy) of not allowing the rise of peer nations that might rival their power monopoly. Promoting the rise of a democratically led peer Arab nation would be seen as an unacceptable national security risk, even if the relationship is initially forged in friendship. Israel has a very low risk tolerance, where national security can trump long-term policy strategy.
Destabilizing their neighbours is not a good way to win friends locally. Also, it is notable how friendliness with Israel has tended to lead to popular discontent in Arab countries. This is not a case of evil dictatorships dragging their Israel-loving populations to war. Indeed, from an Israeli perspective I suspect the dictatorships are much more predictable.
Also, destabilizing Jordan, the closest thing they have to an ally in the region (and a country full of Palestinian refugees who already tried a coup attempt once), is such an incredibly stupid idea I genuinely wonder whether you know anything about the history involved at all.
I never made any claims to expertise, though your criticism could potentially be framed a little less pejoratively?
I never suggested it was the "evil dictatorships dragging their Israel-loving populations to war". My impression is that it's more the opposite, where Israel would like to make friends with local dictators to promote peace, but that in the past those dictators tend to lose popular legitimacy when they try to do this. In part because people have relatives from Palestine or there are refugees who complain about this, especially when there's another round of violence in Gaza or the West Bank.
I don't see the current state of Israel making friends with the people in the region. I've always been under the impression it's the opposite, where neighboring governments generally don't want wars with Israel, or would be better served to not have to be at war with a stronger regional force, but if forced to it they're willing to redirect anger from internal reform movements toward suggesting to their people that the 'real enemy' is Israel. I don't know specifics about the countries involved, though. Either way, this situation doesn't seem like it works for Israel, since it allows for multiple regions where terrorist attacks can be staged, thereby jeopardizing their security, separate from the question of Gaza and the West Bank.
The opposite strategy - focusing on improving relationships with the people and not the government - is effectively what I was aiming at addressing. I admit my specific proposal was terrible, and I knew in proposing it that it's not something likely to happen in the real world, and partly because it was framed as turning Israel into a diplomatic liability for its neighbors, as you pointed out. I wasn't thinking I was 'solving peace in the Middle East' with a blog comment or asserting some great knowledge of the region. Just asking why a different strategy wasn't pursued since the current strategy doesn't seem to be working, but whatever.
First of all, it's important for me to answer you as you clearly have tried thinking about solutions and gave them at least some meaningful thoughts - I appreciate that immensely, and wish at least half of those talking about the conflict would do as you did.
Some quick thoughts:
1. Your idea is Pan-Arabism; it was tried before (specifically in the late 50's-60's), you can read about it in Wikipedia in better words than mine. Some problems with it: Like you have multiple parts to your identity, many Arabs consider themselves also Sunni Muslims, perhaps Jordanian or Palestinian, and maybe even more layers on top of that. Creating something generic won't work for the same reason that not all white people have the same religion and get along.
2. Specifically about Palestinians, they are a people, and they have the right to self determine. They truly are connected to the land, the same way that Israelis are. Some of them even in a miniature to the Jewish diaspora - there are Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon, holding the keys to their grandpas apartment in Haifa. This is not exactly 2000 years of living outside your land, but I highly doubt that a Palestinian that cares deeply enough for the right of return that he would blow up negotiations with Israel on that stand alone would be willing to live in Jordan.
I have some more thoughts on your last paragraph, but these are not as relevant to the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.
> In particular, the proposition that a particular ethnic group is so debased that it can't be allowed civil rights for a generation or more
I thought this was what happened in the American South after our Civil War, during Reconstruction. Except that most scholars on the left agree that Reconstruction was ended too early and not enforced strongly enough, so that the racist elements in the South regained power.
Also, it may just be the case whether or not it is racist. Just like it may be the case that most Arab countries without their current dictators would become theocracies or anarchies. It is sad, and is not genetic, and the proper response may be different from "let's back the dictators", but it seem to currently be the case
I hope it's cultural, and thus theoretically amenable to change. But I don't think America, at least, has a track record in modern times of successfully forcing the change while holding to other standards we profess. Hence the dictator support.
Maybe there are ways to do it within the boundaries we set ourselves, which we haven't found. Maybe some of those boundaries are, from a consequentialist standpoint, not as important as having the cultural change happen. Maybe some other group can succeed where we failed, showing that the problem is merely dysfunction of the modern American state.
Happily. The following is written after reading your main post in the open thread and what you have written above; let me know if something else is of interest, and I'll try to address that as well. I expect this to be lengthy and tried to make it more accessible - sorry if I failed.
Some general points on what you've said in your open thread comment:
1. "Invasion" and "occupation" are simple terms that carry a lot of complexity. Obviously, Israel has invaded Gaza, but there are clearly areas in the strip that it hasn't set foot on yet. Israel is also occupying the West Bank, but there are areas in the West Bank that require significant forces and considerable preparation before acting (e.g., eliminating terrorist cells in refugee camps in Nablus). These terms are fluid and are further complicated as they can serve both operational and strategic rationales (e.g., just examples, not reality: "We need to invade Gaza to destroy tunnels and Hamas battalions" vs. "We need to invade Gaza to create new settlements there"). Gaza is a complex problem, even without considering the connection to the West Bank, and thus requires multifaceted solutions. Expect multiple "invasions" and unclear "occupation" of different parts of the strip during this conflict (which I believe will be very long).
2. Your second question, "Does Israel know where Hamas is," is also binary in conjecture, but the answer is nuanced. I know where Hamas is in a general sense — the strip is tiny, after all — but in which house? For how long does this intelligence remain accurate? Who is a refugee child just walking down the street, and who is a child carrying a suicide vest? Who has Hamas recruited since the beginning of the conflict due to the new hatred towards Israel? This is all dynamic and changes frequently.
3. Two more parameters complicate the fighting: the hostages and the tunnel network. The former requires the forces to proceed meticulously — three hostages were killed by IDF fire by mistake, and the hostages are a very sensitive point in the current Israeli mindset. The latter nullifies some of the IDF's advantages. If I recall correctly, the latest numbers indicate that the tunnel network is larger than the NYC metro. Fighting in that environment, where you can't bring tanks or bomb from the air as they are deep underground, is extremely difficult if you're trying to minimize casualties. Don't forget that even before fighting there, you need to know where the tunnels are and map them — this obviously isn't public knowledge.
Some more specifics regarding your questions:
1. Israel has indeed destroyed vast parts of the buildings in the strip. This is due to multiple reasons: a) This happens naturally in war zones. When tanks cross a road, it usually causes significant damage to the road. When a battalion enters an area, there is usually preliminary artillery shelling or air force strikes in that area (note that Israel usually declares where it's going to act beforehand so that civilians can evacuate). b) Hamas, as a terror organization, has hidden a lot of its munitions inside the civilian populace. This includes rocket launchers in kindergartens, command outposts in hospitals, etc. They also usually aim to plant critical infrastructure in critical civilian areas because then Israel can't bomb them from the air or alternatively suffer international criticism. This infrastructure still has to be destroyed, though, as the IDF isn't planning on occupying it 24/7, and it can be used by other Hamas fighters later (I'll explain why the IDF isn't occupying these areas later, but basically, it would mean occupying the whole strip).
You also asked, "What prevents Israel from eliminating Hamas?" This ties nicely to your question about the day-to-day activities of both sides and the strategy of both sides. This will also be the bulk of my answer from now on.
Israel has two strategic goals that are semi-contradictory: return the hostages and destroy Hamas. The former is easy to understand; Israel has historically been, and still is, very sensitive to hostages (even deceased ones), and vast parts of the populace are adamant about returning everybody (yes, EVERYBODY) back. Whether this happens via negotiations or military operations doesn't matter for this point (though it obviously matters in the greater analysis). To be clear, both have happened.
Destroying Hamas is a more difficult endeavor. This can be divided into three possible resolution criteria, ordered by difficulty: 1. Hamas is no longer in control of the Gaza Strip, and additionally, its military force has been routed and broken up into small cells that are no longer working together coherently. 2. Hamas is no longer an effective threat to Israeli security. This is slightly tricky and vague; is firing one rocket at Israel considered effective? Is a single gunman claiming to be Hamas going to the border and shooting at Israel effective? 3. Destroying Hamas as an idea — basically, trying to do what was done to the Nazis in WW2.
In my assessment, Israel is aiming for resolution criteria 1 in the short term and resolution criteria 2 in the long term. Long term is LONG; I'm talking years, if not decades. You don't uproot a terrorist organization that has controlled the land for about two decades and created a network the size of the NYC metro in a year or two or three. Obviously, Israel isn't going to state this publicly—imagine the press response to "Yup, we're gonna be here for years" — but if Israel wants to destroy Hamas to some level of criteria 2, that's the relevant time frame. I'm not going to go into why Israel wants to do that — it has a lot of ties to Iran and Hezbollah — as this comment is going to be lengthy anyway.
Hamas' strategic goal is simple: survive, and ideally keep the hostages as long as possible. The former has been its goal in every conflict since 2005. It has gotten all of what it needed on October 7th, and it believes time is ticking in its favor in the strategic sense because as time passes, more international pressure mounts on Israel to leave the strip and end the war. It is also getting everything it wants from the world — Hamas killed Israelis and captured hostages, and so far, it has received both international condemnation of Israel across the world and EU states recognizing a Palestinian state. This puts it on a much better footing than the PLO. I'll be blunt: every dead Palestinian is another achievement for Hamas, as it increases the pressure. To be clear, I'm not taking a side here (although I'm biased, but I'll state clearly when I think that interferes with the analysis), just stating the facts. Note that there is an interesting balance here: on the strategic level, Hamas believes time is on its side; on the operational level, the more time the IDF has, the more it can further destroy Hamas.
So, how does that translate to the day-to-day life of the Hamas soldier? Easy: survive and protect the hostages. Hide in the tunnels. Hide in the hospitals or simply among refugees. Whenever possible, jump to the nearby apartment of your cousin, where you stashed RPGs under his baby's crib, and try to shoot at Israeli tanks in the area. The moment you do that, run away — and ideally grab a child on your way to the hospital so the IDF won't shoot you. To be clear, there is video footage of such examples, and although I'm oversimplifying for brevity (e.g., there are some battalions that are more combat-ready than this; it changes in different parts of Gaza all the time), this is the bulk of the fighting.
So, how does the Israeli side look from a soldier's perspective? Basically, it depends on whether you're on offense or defense. If you're holding the Netzarim corridor or the Rafah border crossing, your job is to defend the logistical chain of supply to soldiers on offense and to supply and oversee humanitarian aid to civilians. If you're on offense, you're either going into areas that haven't been attacked by the IDF so far — e.g., Rafah — or going into areas that have been attacked and then evacuated, as the vacuum brings back Hamas fighters to existing infrastructure they know, and it's easier and more effective to catch them that way than one by one (a good example of this was the second Shifa hospital operation).
So, how does the conflict look from here on? Israel is going to continue working its way meticulously in areas it hasn't operated in yet — Rafah and some of the center of the strip — both because it is taking measures to minimize civilian casualties (I can claim that this is because we truly aim to keep them to a minimum, but no need to believe me; the Machiavellian incentive of not getting more international condemnation is enough) and because these areas likely have hostages in them. After that, Israel is going to maintain its ability to operate in the strip, at least in the same way it operates in the West Bank; i.e., if the IDF wants to get to Shifa again, it is going to keep whatever forces and outposts it needs in Gaza to maintain that capability. Hamas will continue stalling for time, keeping its munitions and weapons near civilians, and keeping the hostages hidden.
I can write more, but I'd need you to point me in the direction of what areas are of interest. Let me know if anything isn't clear.
>imagine the press response to "Yup, we're gonna be here for years"
The response would be something other than "makes sense, everybody has assumed this all along"? Israel has been in the West Bank all this time after all, and nobody cared too much.
Thank you very much for this long explanation, it's very much appreciated!
One more question, if you have the patience for it: how easy/difficult is it for an IDF soldier to recognize a Hamas fighter? Do the Hamas fighters usually wear uniforms or other signs? Do they carry around their weapons most of the time, or do they hide them and blend into the crowd, and only fetch a weapon when they see an opportunity for ambushing IDF soldiers?
Slightly changes, but as a general rule of thumb: They don't wear uniform, they don't carry weapons unless they have to/they're going to use them soon, they definitely try to hide and blend with the crowd whenever they can (when they fight in areas that have been evacuated, it's obviously harder)
And if you wander how they fetch a weapon that fast is it isn't already on them - I hear for soldiers who occupied neighborhoods in Gaza that they find weapons at half the houses
Could you say more on measures to minimize civilian casualties? I get that Israel wants to minimize these, but where I have less faith is that Israel, or any government, can act perfectly in accord with that interest.
TL,DR, a Gaza dentist gets a call from Israeli military intelligence saying they need to bomb the apartments across the street from him, they think he's someone they can work with, and can they talk him through arranging an evacuation? Which is successful, and gets him put on the list of people who *keep* getting called to help arrange evacuations.
Note that this means essentially no chance of killing any Hamas militants in the strike, only destroying some of their infrastructure.
I think the example John Shilling gave is excellent. Note that this happens regularly - Israel calls beforehand to warn citizens that it is going to bomb a building (However, not all the time - but still very common).
Good rule of thumb - if you see beautiful shots of a building being bombed by Israel, it's because it gave a warning beforehand and the cameramen had time to prepare the short. I honestly find it an easy way to know just from the documentation if Israel gave an early warning or not.
Short answer, as I don't plan to do another AMA here (probably will in a hidden open thread sometime soon if there's enough interest) - it's an effective CT strategy. It's easier to destroy battalions than individuals, and the moment you leave an area, Hamas fills that vacuum. You then go back in and vice-versa, until there is not enough Hamas left to create an effective military organizational structure.
First, thank you for taking your time and sharing here. I don't know if you can answer this, but perhaps you have some insight.
The Wikipedia article [1] on the three Israeli hostages who were shot says the following:
> According to an IDF official, the three male hostages emerged shirtless out of a building toward a group of IDF soldiers "tens of meters" away, with one carrying a white flag. An Israeli sniper then opened fire on them, killing Shamriz and Talalka and wounding Haim. After being shot, Haim ran into a nearby building and shouted for help in Hebrew. The battalion commander then ordered the troops to hold their fire, while Haim was persuaded to exit the building but when he did so 15 minutes later, a soldier acting against the battalion commander's order shot and killed him.
and:
> Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi stated that the shooting was against the IDF's rules of engagement and that the hostages had "done everything to show that they were harmless", including removing shirts to show that they were not carrying explosives.
I was pretty shocked because I can't imagine why a soldier would just shoot someone, after 15 minutes of talking in Hebrew and coaxing a hostage to come out, and where the person had told them they were a hostage, and had "done everything to show that they were harmless". What was going on?
Sure. Tactical answer and more context-aware answer:
1. The soldier simply didn't hear the commander. You can read more details on what happened here via GTranslate: https://news.walla.co.il/item/3631940
2. Since the start of the war, Hamas has recorded cries for help in Hebrew, baby crying sounds, and other things I can't recall right now, and played them from radioes/phones connected to booby-trapped buildings and/or IEDs. 99.99% of the time, if an Israeli soldier hears Hebrew in Gaza, he is thinking, correctly, "I'm walking into an ambush".
I knew from the Wikipedia article that they thought it could be a trick. That doesn't explain much though.
For one, even if they were Hamas militants, it would still be a war crime to shoot them. You can't shoot PoWs. (Or I should say you shouldn't shoot them; surrendering soldiers have often been killed in wars.)
It's always a possibility that any non-combatant or person waving a white flag could be an enemy trying to trick you. This has been true in every conflict.
But that aside, they were in shouting distance. They persuaded Haim to come out, in Hebrew. They clearly knew it wasn't a recording. The soldier did not need to walk into an ambush; Haim agreed to walk to them, as I understand it, shirtless and unarmed. What else could Yotam Haim have done to not get shot?
The soldier not hearing the commander isn't the shocking part that needs explaining. It's why he would persuade an unarmed hostage to come out and then shoot him.
I'd recommend reading the whole article, which I don't have time to do. I'll respond from memory of watching the review on the news:
1. They weren't PoWs; they were walking down the street in an active war zone, where there were basically only IDF soldiers and Hamas soldiers. Fighting has been going on there for weeks already, everyone who has some sense already evacuated from there.
2. The original soldier didn't see the flag because of a tree obscuring it from him. It was a snap decision to fire, but considering that the only people who should have been there at that points were Hamas soldiers, this makes sense.
3. The soldier shooting Haim wasn't with the commander, he was still far from him, IIRC in the house the whole incident started from. You're thinking in very clean terms; imagine a messy street, after weeks of fighting, you can't hear well because of the constant deafening bombing around you, you don't know all the details as we do - as far as you can tell, there is a gunfight happening now and you're buddies are in it. He might have been sitting somewhere far when everything started and didn't have context or the full picture. It's incredibly common for soldiers to continue shooting and for the "Stop" to register, especially after weeks of deployment.
For 1. I know they weren't PoWs. They were escaped hostages. I just mean that if they were Hamas soldiers, from the moment they waved that white flag and surrendered, you can no longer shoot them. They'd be considered PoWs at that point. You can't choose to not accept the surrender and just shoot them.
2. Maybe the translation isn't clear. The article you linked says the following (through Google Translate):
> One sniper stood and watched on the first floor. At 09:42 he recognized three shirtless figures with a white flag - the abductees. [...] The sniper watched them hidden by a tree standing in front of the building. The area where the abductees walked was defined as "red" for him, meaning an area that threatens the forces. He shot and hit two of them.
Which sounds like the sniper recognized they had a white flag and that the sniper was hidden by a tree.
3. Yes, I am very much not clear on the details. But as far as I can tell, the hostages took all the proper steps to get rescued and there were no Hamas soldiers there at the time they were shot. They were unarmed and waving a white flag. It sounds like the soldiers were quick to shoot despite there being no threat from the hostages.
This doesn't bode well for other escaped hostages or non-combatants who approach Israeli soldiers. What would you advise an escaped hostage to do? It seems like approaching the IDF unarmed and waving a white flag is risky.
1. I agree completely, and didn't think that's what you thought - just stated the POV of the soldier. Regular soldiers weren't briefed on meeting hostages before that BTW - which was a mistake ofc - because only Special ops were thought to be able to get near them.
2. Yeah, I'm reading the article in Hebrew and it is unclear. I remember hearing on the news that the tree obscured his view of the flag - but I'm uncertain now. Maybe he just took a very bad decision - I'm definitely not claiming that Israeli soldiers are mistake-proof, or bed-decision-making proof.
I took some time and found the article I read at the time - https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/rkpl4fida - Seems like there are more details there, and here it appears more explicit that the tree blocked his view. Ctrl + F "38" (meters) for the relevant section.
3. I agree with what your saying, just not about generalizing from the single instance too much. Israel takes quite a lot of PoWs in this war - there are documentations of surrendered Hamas fighters, and not in small numbers. I would think the hostage scenario was the exception to the rule and not the rule itself.
(1) I think you got Matthew 22 wrong. my recollection of that is "Wasn't that the seven brothers?"
It's not a man with two ex-wives, it's a woman with seven ex-husbands:
"23 That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. 24 “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him. 25 Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. 26 The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. 27 Finally, the woman died. 28 Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”
(2) With regards to St Joseph of Cupertino, he's more famous (or at least was in my time) as the guy you invoke to help you pass exams. Levitating is all very well and good, but getting that grade is more important! His claim to fame was being so stupid he tried and failed multiple times to be admitted to the priesthood until it was arranged that he would be given very simple questions which it was established that he knew the answers to.
For those of you that may need it, here you go - prayer to St Joseph of Cupertino for exam success:
"O great St. Joseph of Cupertino who, by your prayers, obtained from God to be asked at your examination only the propositions which you know, pray that I, like you, may succeed in the examination which lies before me. In return I promise to make your name known and cause you to be loved. Amen."
"Patron: of Aviators, Flying, Studying, and those suffering mental handicaps
St. Joseph was born in 1603 at Cupertino, in the diocese of Nardo in the Kingdom of Naples. ...It is said that his mother often considered him a nuisance and treated him harshly. Joseph was purported to be slow to learn and absent-minded. He was said to frequently wander aimlessly, with his mouth gaping open. And, he had a bad temper, so, he was not at all popular. He tried to learn the trade of shoemaking, but failed. He asked to become a Franciscan, but they initially would not accept him. Finally he did join the Capuchins. However, for a very short period of time. Eight months later, they sent him away. Sources say it was because he could not seem to do anything right.
He dropped piles of dishes and kept forgetting to do what he was told. His mother was not at all pleased to have the eighteen-year-old Joseph back home again, so she finally got him accepted as a servant at the Franciscan monastery. He was given the friars habit and put to hard work taking care of the horses.
About this time, Joseph began to change. He grew in humility and gentleness, fruits of the Holy Spirit at work in a person. He became more careful and successful at his work. He also began to pray more do more voluntary acts of penance. Finally, he was able to enter the Franciscan order and, eventually, study for the priesthood. Although he was a good and holy friar, he had a very hard time with studies. During his seminary exams, the examiner happened to ask him to explain the only thing he knew well, and so he was ordained a deacon, and later a priest."
This, and the Mormon link, have jogged a memory of mine that I was specifically taught as a kid that this *wasn't* a trick question, because it was asked by a Saducee and the Saducees were basically alright (probably not quite in these terms, I'm remembering across decades and into childhood). Is/was this ever a consensus position, or was this just a specific quirk of (I think?) both a school chaplain and a Sunday school teacher I had?
The reason we should go back to Nuns With Rulers in school is my experience with one for our Intermediate Certificate (now the Junior Certificate) exam - state exam for third Year in secondary school (at around age 15). We had her for maths class in the final year before the exam, having had a male lay teacher for the first two years in that subject.
I passed with an even better (not great, but great by my expectations!) grade than I hoped to get, and she dragged the entire class of us over the line with revising two years work and hammering the third year into our heads by means of fear and intimidation. Nobody failed the maths exam, even the no-hopers like me.
Education by sheer terror works!
Lest I be traducing the woman, she was perfectly amiable outside of class once you got to know her. But in class? She would have made Chuck Norris break down in tears like a little baby.
We used to have to line up and recite the particular theorem out of Euclid for the class that day, having drawn it on the sheet of paper beforehand; she would get one student to start, then stop them and the nexxt would have to continue on, and down the line like that.
If the drawing was sloppy or you weren't able to seamlessly switch into recital, you were In Trouble. I remember being lined up with the rest of the class, we all practicing beforehand before she came in to class, and noting that the paper was trembling like a leaf in a breeze, then realising I was so scared my hands were shaking 😁
And she never even used The Ruler, it was all done with quiet force of command. As I said, the funny thing was getting to know her a few years later outside of class, and she was perfectly fine to get on with. But in that class, she ruled like a force of nature by sheer terror imposed on us without even raising her voice!
I'm telling you, a bit more fear in class and a lot of the failing students would stop failing!
My French teacher did me the same service. One time he broke a wooden ruler over my head as he repeated "You must learn your vocab!" (maybe said in French). More typically, he would hold between forefinger and thumb the short hairs in front of one's ear.
Per item 14: In John 14, Jesus says that Christians can do everything He did, and even greater things, too. If nobody used miraculous powers to stop the holocaust, it's not for lack of God making them available, same way they were available to the levitating monk.
That would be pretty in line with the Bible. It happens in the Old Testament a lot. For instance, consider the story of Samson, who lost his miraculous super-strength when his hair was cut, which violated his vows to God.
There's a lot of theological controversy about the role of miraculous powers in the present day. I'm definitely in the camp that thinks that, just like all spiritual things, as far as God's concerned, they're equally available to everybody; it's just that very few of us are able to (or want to) access them.
Also consider that, in the New Testament, spiritual things like forgiving somebody, repenting from sin, doing charitable works or worshiping God have eternal value. Human spirits last forever, while, on the other hand, the world will be destroyed by Christ when He returns in the end. So flying around (which, after all, you can do in an airplane too) has, in itself, no eternal value.
So it may be that there are people who can do miracles now, but they're enlightened enough to put their energy toward other ministries instead. Jesus also said in Luke 16 that miracles don't convince people who don't want to be convinced. (Which makes me skeptical of these projects that try to use miracles to convert people.)
From a different branch of Christianity (no, I'm not going to entertain discussion on that), namely the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, here's my perspective.
I agree that miracles (a) still happen and (b) are not generally flashy. We have direct guidance that miracles are for the faithful, not the convincing of the faithless. I also agree that, for the Lord's purposes, the spiritual is much more important than the physical. I also note that there is doctrinal and scriptural support for the idea that the Adversary can do "miracles"--his tend to be flashy counterfeits.
As to how miracles are performed--there are two types, broadly. Those that come purely by faith/prayer of the righteous and those that are mediated by the power of the priesthood[1]. In either case, it's God performing the miracle, and they happen if and only if they are in accord with God's will for that specific circumstance. And his wisdom is higher than ours--not everyone who prays for healing or receives a blessing of healing will be healed (to take one example).
Anyone can pray in faith for a miracle. Those prayers are answered (although not always in the way we think they will be, nor always with a yes). But to have true faith, you have to have a spiritual assurance through the Holy Spirit that what you are praying for is in accord with divine will. So people who pray for flashy miracles, etc. *can't be praying in faith*.
The priesthood can, under certain circumstances, and when operating with faith, be used to command nature in the name of God. Again, it must be done in accordance with His will, which dramatically limits the scope. This is how most of the biblical miracles occurred, especially those of the prophets and apostles. For example, Peter's command "Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk." was efficacious because he was authorized to wield the power of God for the healing of the sick AND that deed was done in faith AND that deed was in accord with God's will for that circumstance.
[1] Note: the Church of Jesus Christ uses this term in its proper meaning not to refer to the *people*, but to the authority and power to act in the name of God. The people *bear* the priesthood, but are not the priesthood. This gets muddled a lot in casual conversation, which kinda sucks.
>We have direct guidance that miracles are for the faithful, not the convincing of the faithless.
That's like saying that the soda bottle at your grocery is there to get beverages to thirsty people, not to convince anyone that the grocery store actually sells soda.
You don't need to do something *specifically* to convince the faithless, for it to convince the faithless. You just have to go about it in an ordinary manner without thinking about the faithless at all. At some point the faithless will get evidence for miracles purely by chance, just like if coelacanths exist, sooner or later a scientist will just happen to be there to see one.
When people say "it isn't there to convince the faithless", 99% of the time they don't mean "it isn't there to convince the faithless". Instead they mean "it's *specifically* contrived so that it *won't* convince the faithless", and that's a *very* different thing.
Regarding the re-hyping of anti-missile defenses, I humbly submit the following counter https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/iran-breaches-anglo-zionist-defenses?utm_source=publication-search If they're so cool, why don't they send them to the Ukrainians? They are not being attacked by ICBMs. Same goes for F-35s. If they're so great, and not a very expensive gizmo to target Afghan sheep-shaggers from across the world, then let's send them to face the Russians and see what happens, no? Over two years after the start the war, that doesn't seem to be in the cards, which tells me they'd rather stick with the sheep-shaggers, thank you very much.
>If they're so cool, why don't they send them to the Ukrainians?
We did. It's been over a year since Patriots started shooting down Kinzal missiles over Ukraine.
As for the F-35s, these are extremely sophisticated warplanes that will take years to teach Ukraine how to use. It's taking quite a while to get the F-16s we (finally) gave them into service, and things would be much worse with a more complicated plane.
And before we sent the Ukrainians Patriots, they were using their own extensive network of S-300 missile batteries, which was basically the Soviet version of the Patriot in the late Cold War. It wasn't as effective as the American version, because Russian weapons rarely are, but it was reasonably capable against most of the missiles Russia was actually hitting Ukraine with and because it was what they were familiar with.
When the Ukrainians started running low on S-300s, and the Russians started using more of the missiles S-300 couldn't stop, we started training Ukrainians to use Patriots and then we sent them Patriots. They seem to work really well, though there aren't enough of them to cover the entire nation.
F-35s, as Bean says, would have a steeper learning curve unless we sent American pilots to fly them and American technicians to maintain them. Granted, it's been more than two years and that probably would have been enough time to stand up a few effective Ukrainian F-35 squadrons, but we spent most of the first year thinking and hoping that the war would be over in a year. Once NATO decided Ukraine needed western combat aircraft, it was a question of getting them F-16s in 2024 or F-35s in 2025 at the earliest.
This war will end when one side runs out of guns, shells, or men willing to stand up to being shelled. There's no reason that has to be Ukraine, and the bit where Russia has to import ammunition from *North Korea* suggests that the limit on Russian endurance is not impossibly far in the future.
But the only side of that equation that Ukraine has any real control over is Ukrainian manpower. Their guns and their shells come almost entirely from NATO, and NATO's policy for the past year and a half seems to have been to prolong the stalemate. Russia can't be allowed to win because that would be a victory for the bad guys, but Ukraine can't be allowed to win because maybe Vladimir Putin will throw a nuclear temper tantrum.
The war will probably end about six months after the United States Government decides who it wants to see win. Right now, the most likely outcome is the second Trump administration deciding that Russia should win, followed shortly by Russia winning. But that's not the only possibility.
Thanks. I figured that short of a revolution, Russia would be able to regularly supply cannon fodder longer than Ukraine could so I figured Russia would win unless Putin got the boot or the noose.
I hadn't heard about purchasing ammo from NK I figured that Russia had sparkly new munitions factories pumping out newborns on the regular. Maybe they were just doing the Norks a favor?
North Korea is a Chinese client, not Russian, and Moscow hasn't been much interested in doing them favors in this century. And from reports on Russian social media, some of the North Korean ammunition is complete crap, but the Russians are using it anyway. So it's pretty clear that Russia is scraping the bottom of the barrel w/re domestic production and stockpiles (Ukraine reached that point over a year ago). And note that this isn't just artillery shells; Russia is confirmed to be using North Korean and Iranian ballistic missiles in Ukraine, even though those are well behind the usual Russian state of the art.
That said, nobody knows how much artillery ammunition North Korea has tucked away, but it's probably in the millions of rounds and they're clearly willing to sell at least some of the stockpile. So Russia is unlikely to run out next month, Next year, very possible.
As a counterpoint to John, I would have to say Ukraine can not and will not win without other countries sending their own soldiers. For various reasons, this war is about grinding attritional advances much more reminiscent of WWI than the sweeping maneuver battles of WWII or the Napoleonic wars. Russia has a much larger pool of manpower and much more industrial capacity than Ukraine, which are the determining factors of victory.
Having more men is a compounding advantage, because they can be rotated out of combat to rest and replenish. The general rule of thumb is that a unit of fighting men is no longer combat effective after 15% losses. There are some Ukrainian brigades that have suffered over 50% losses, because they don't have the reserves to rotate their men. The Russians have also been adept at using mercenaries, convict soldiers and militia units from the Donbas to soak up losses in frontal assaults and protect their veteran professional units. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a lot of the professional Russian soldiers suffered heavy losses in the first few years of the war.
There are something like 500k Russian troops in Ukraine right now, and another 300-500K recruits/conscripts in the newly formed western military districts. There have been rumblings of using these troops to open a northern flank through Belarus, which would stretch the Ukrainian manpower even further. I don't know at this point whether this is a legitimate plan or a psyop to tangle up Ukraine. These troops have to be trained, and Russia doesn't have enough equipment to deploy more than a fraction of them at present anyway. Still, even another 50-60K Russians on a new front would be pretty rough for Ukraine to counter.
As far as war material goes, consider the production of standard howitzer ammunition (155mm NATO, 152mm RU.) Russia produces somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 million shells per year. For comparison, the US currently produces about 700,000 per year. They plan to open a third factory in 2025 to reach a million per year, but the factory will need time to ramp up production to full, which may not happen until late 2025 or 2026. The EU plans to reach 1.4 million shells per year by 2025. They also planned to deliver 1 million shells to Ukraine already, but have only delivered a bit over half of that, so these numbers may not reflect reality. Anyway, the side running out of artillery shells first is clearly not going to be Russia.
During intense operations, tens of thousands of shells are fired per day. That would burn through even millions of shells per year, which is why the NK shells were purchased. I can't imagine the quality of NK goods is great, but making WWII-era military technology seems within the realm of a communist backwater.
Both the US and Russia are limited in their development of ballistic missiles by various treaties. Something which does not hold true for Iran. Iranian cruise missiles have multi-stage boosters, for example, which is prohibited under IRBM treaty. The missile attack on Israel is illustrative here, where the Iranians largely failed to penetrate the missile defenses. This shows that Iranians missiles are not superior to Western/Russian models, which also fail to penetrate missile defenses without large-scale decoys and drone support. It doesn't prove anything about whether they are the same/worse.
All in all, Ukraine is at a significant manpower and firepower disadvantage. Even shitty NK/Iranian tech and refurbished cold war stockpiles that have been gathering rust are better than nothing, which is what Ukraine locally produces for the war effort. Except for drones, which Ukraine is probably the foremost expert country on the planet at utilizing. Sadly, you can't win a war with drones alone. Maybe in a few more decades.
I really have to object to the idea that the US/NATO *desires* Ukraine to lose for some reason. Russia has a significant natural advantage in population and production. Overcoming this would require the west to both a) send their own soldiers to fight in Ukraine, and b) divert significant portions of their economy to war time levels of material production. That they have not been willing to do so is not evidence that they want Russia to win.
As it happens I was professionally involved in this issue some twenty years ago, when the idea was revived under Little Bush, but the objectives the were extremely modest: be able to shoot down a handful of nuclear-tipped ICBMs from North Korea or (one day) Iran. I think it's fair to say that, in spite of the time and the investment, no reliable capability yet exists. The Russian S-500 system has a theoretical capability against ICBMs, but that remains to be demonstrated in practice. In the meantime, Russia has the only real ABM capability in the form of a system around Moscow, first deployed half a century ago and quite recently up-dated, which would destroy warheads in their terminal phase through nuclear explosions. It was originally conceived as a way of soaking up the first wave of US missiles, and giving the Politburo time to authorise the launch of a counter-strike.
The issue of tactical anti-missile missiles is quite different. They have been around for generations: as long ago as the 1982 Falklands War, the British used Sea Wolf missiles against Argentinian aircraft, which had originally been designed as anti-anti-shipping missiles. In Ukraine, the Russians have been able to reliably destroy NATO subsonic missiles with technology that has been around for decades, and that they have invested heavily in, in a way the West has not. Successful attacks from each side have largely resulted from launching massive attacks, and overwhelming the defence with sheer numbers, making use of decoy drones and multiple waves of attacks. But of course you need, not just very large numbers of drones, but very large numbers of the actual missiles to do the damage. By contrast, hypersonic missiles like the Kinzahl are a very new development, and at the moment there is no way of defending against them.
>I think it's fair to say that, in spite of the time and the investment, no reliable capability yet exists. The Russian S-500 system has a theoretical capability against ICBMs, but that remains to be demonstrated in practice. In the meantime, Russia has the only real ABM capability in the form of a system around Moscow, first deployed half a century ago and quite recently up-dated, which would destroy warheads in their terminal phase through nuclear explosions. It was originally conceived as a way of soaking up the first wave of US missiles, and giving the Politburo time to authorise the launch of a counter-strike.
Uhh.... no. None of this is right. I had sort of hoped we'd have gotten over lionizing Russian weapons given their dismal performance in Ukraine. As for the Moscow-protecting ABM system, that was a decoy to soak up US and British missiles during the Cold War. It worked pretty well, too, as evidenced by Chevaline. And you're completing ignoring GMD, which I have a pretty high prior on working given that every other Western BMD system we've tested has worked quite well.
>The issue of tactical anti-missile missiles is quite different. They have been around for generations: as long ago as the 1982 Falklands War, the British used Sea Wolf missiles against Argentinian aircraft, which had originally been designed as anti-anti-shipping missiles.
This is a complete non-sequitur in regards to BMD. None of those were ballistic, and there wasn't a widespread capability to do that before about 20 years ago, with some error bars depending on how you evaluate things like Patriot's performance in Desert Storm.
>By contrast, hypersonic missiles like the Kinzahl are a very new development, and at the moment there is no way of defending against them.
Hypersonic weapons aren't new (the name is, but that's just to blind people to the fact that the concept isn't) and it seems weird that you'd make that specific claim given Patriot's record against Kinzahl in Ukraine.
I think the evidence from Ukraine is a much stronger place to take lessons from than the recent strikes from Iran. The Iranians gave ample notice that they planned a strike against Israel, then orchestrated an attack they must have known would mostly have been struck down. The fact that all of these missiles (and drones) weren't stopped despite all the notice, the multiple parties involved, the clear target path, the long distance in which to act, etc. suggests a specific interpretation of missile defense weakness that squares with observations from Ukraine on both sides: missile defense becomes exponentially more difficult the larger the area that must be defended.
Each system has an operational range. If you know where and when the attack is coming from, you can defend against it. If you know where the missiles are going you can defend against it. Hence the success of Israel's air defense in the past and the failure of Russian and Ukrainian air defense, where they'll send in a bunch of cheap drones to empty out the missile defense systems, followed by more advanced missiles to strike the true targets. This is what has happened multiple times in Ukraine, but was conspicuously absent in the Iranian attack.
Russia's "only real ABM capability" has not really been demonstrated since the end of the Cold War, and I wouldn't bet too heavily on it today. Same goes for the S-500.
On the US side, we have GMD (Ground-Based Midcourse Defense), which was a prototype placed in limited operational service as a placeholder. With ~20 years of debugging, it might work. And we have Aegis, which definitely works. On paper, it's only expected to stop intermediate-range ballistic missiles, which as we recently saw, it does quite well. But it's also been used to shoot down a satellite in low orbit, which indicates that it is capable of engaging targets moving at ICBM speeds. It admittedly doesn't have the continent-spanning range of GMD, but it's cheaper and it has a land-based version so you don't have to build an expensive ship under it if you're defending fixed areas.
Deploying a system to protect against an all-out attack from Russia would be *expensive*, we'd definitely have to turn up the money printers a notch or two(*), but the technology exists. Defending Israel from Iran, or defending Ukraine from a Russia that's keeping its serious missiles in reserve against the US, is affordable.
* Reasons why we might not want to do this, are left as an exercise for the student
Are you referring to the A-135? Is there any reason to assume that it wouldn't work? Especially since the Russians still have the balls to put nukes on the tips?
The success rate for Russian military equipment left over from the Cold War and not regularly tested and exercised since, should give anyone cause to suspect that it would greatly underperform expectations if put to the test.
And putting nuclear missiles on antimissiles, doesn't really help all that much. A competently-built and -maintained modern guidance system, if it works, doesn't need a nuclear warhead, and if it doesn't work, probably won't put the missile close enough for even a nuclear warhead to get the job done. This isn't the 1970s, when we were stuck with fuzzy low-resolution command or beam riding guidance. Putting nuclear warheads on a defensive missile greatly reduces your flexibility in using that missile, even if you've got Russian-grade balls, for a very marginal increase in the capability of that missile.
9: My expectation would be that whatever society welcomes the currently cryonically preserved as its unfrozen citizens will treat them as legally new people who just happen to have adult bodies and memories. Their old identities have already been declared dead, their wills carried out, etc. This may not help with the social practicalities much, but it would help with the legal ones. I don't think mandating a few decades (subjective time) of schooling/acculturation for the newly revived would be out of the question, either.
23: Your impression is basically correct, plus the odds of that extreme right tail have gotten lower over time as more research clarified how unlikely some of the scenarios were, and as the world has actually made significant progress towards making emissions reductions economically viable in more and more cases.
29: The "Yes" answer seems to rely, among other things, on the idea that a significant number of Trump voters would vote for Biden if Trump endorsed Biden, 1 week before the election, after Biden said he'd pardon Trump if Trump endorsed him. One, I don't think that's true. Two, Trump would also pardon Trump if elected, so this doesn't buy Trump voters anything they wouldn't already have gotten.
34: My initial hypothesis, if this is true, would be the LLMs are better than non-conspiracy-theorists at thinking like conspiracy theorists in order to persuade them, whereas most humans would have trouble staying in the proper mindset. Plausibly this stops working when the "They're using LLMs trained to convince you of lies" conspiracy theory gets off the ground.
9: Legally, I think that's how it works already. If you are declared dead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_death), and you show up again, the consequences mostly don't get unwound: your wife was free to remarry and her marriage doesn't get undone, your will remains executed and your assets distributed, and so on. Your widow can just divorce & remarry you if she wants (which she probably won't), and as for the rest, them's the breaks - not much sympathy for someone who fakes their death or deliberately disappears. No one disappears guiltlessly as a castaway for 5+ years in the modern world.
So, since cryonics patients are all declared legally dead before the cryonics organization will touch the body, that's what would happen by default. You'd just wake up as the old person but de facto, effectively new as all your assets and contracts and liabilities etc are all gone and the slate wiped clean having been declared legally dead centuries before. (Which is why you will be relying on the cryonics patient trust to support you after revival, if necessary.)
Made me think of the South Park "gooback" episode with time travelers taking all our jerbs, and it suddenly hit me that if you revived people 200 years in the future, they probably wouldn't be able to speak the language very well. You'd have to give them a crash course on lingo.
29: It'd shatter Trump's credibility though, although he *might* just about be able to charm his way through it. Some voters would flip to Biden (most people aren't very political or politically engaged and vote in ways that seem weird to people who are), but a lot more might stay home or vote for RFK jr.
I will happy pay $1,000 for you or Bentham to do your best to come up with an explanation for the shroud of Turin. Consider all the evidence available and then explain what it is. Anyone else want to help finance this?
Have you done any research? A cursory review of the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin) indicates radiocarbon dating shows it is far too new to have been worn by Jesus. Those who believe it authentic doubt the radiometric analysis, but it doesn't explain how.
Yes. Look into the details of that radiocarbon dating. You’ll find that samples taken two inches apart differed in their measurement by over 100 years. All the samples were taken from one area which is easily seen to be visually anomalous, as it was the place where people held it up for viewing and this was repaired. These results were, for some reason, initially withheld and only the summary conclusion was published.
There is also the question of, “how and why did they create a photographic negative, before photography was invented?”
"it is not possible to affirm that the 1988 radiocarbon dating offers ‘conclusive evidence’ that the calendar age range is accurate and representative of the whole cloth."
But it's quite a leap to say that, even if the estimated age range of AD 1260-1390 interval isn't 95% accurate that the correct age is around 0 AD. Suppose, rather, that the age ought to be around 800 AD, +/- 500 years.
I don't pretend to understand the statistics or methods involved, but it seems like they made an honest scientific effort to analyze the results, which mean the results are less accurate than initially portrayed. I would still think that the most likely explanations for the image are forgery and random chance.
They created a photographic negative after such a technique was invented. Anyone can make a photographic negative nowadays (which actually was the first step in creating a photograph), and such images present a different way of looking at the same thing, which can highlight different things.
You are right that the study being flawed doesn’t show the date as 0, I agree there. But it does suggest that the initial study was flawed, so it’s not useful as evidence for the age of the should as a whole.
I don’t think a honest scientific effort happened if results were hidden for 20 years, and the ambiguity was hidden and replaced with a confident assertion. That sounds like what I’d expect from people who had concern higher than what was true.
As for the negative, You’re not understanding the question. The image on the cloth is barely visible as is. It becomes much more clear when it’s interpreted as a negative. this raises two questions:
- How was the original image created in the first place? There isn’t a known physical process by which the image on the cloth could have been created. Nobody has been able to make a convincing copy. If you think this is wrong, see if you can find a plausible explanation for how the image on the cloth was created, along with a demonstration of someone actually doing this to the same degree of physiological accuracy as on the cloth.
- why would a forgery do this? Why make an image that’s not super convincing, until you use uninvented technology to reveal details that would have been impossible to see for centuries?
I haven't read Philosophy Bear's article yet, but I suspect it's the person with a staunch position that benefits from the interaction with an LLM most (Though I can get back to you on that).
I really don't know much about the Shroud & I don't expect talking to an LLM would leave me convinced of the same position as you are.
The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth bearing the image of a man who appears to have suffered physical trauma consistent with crucifixion. The cloth is approximately 4.4 by 1.1 meters and contains faint images of the front and back of a man's body, along with what appear to be bloodstains.
The primary evidence in favor of the shroud's authenticity includes:
The negative image: The image on the shroud is a negative, which was only discovered when the shroud was first photographed in 1898.
Anatomical accuracy: The image depicts a crucified man with wounds consistent with biblical accounts of Jesus' crucifixion.
Pollen and dirt: Pollen grains and limestone dust found on the shroud are consistent with the flora and geology of Jerusalem.
However, there is also evidence that suggests the shroud may not be authentic:
Carbon dating: In 1988, three independent radiocarbon dating tests dated the cloth to between 1260 and 1390 AD, suggesting it was a medieval forgery.
Lack of historical record: There is no clear historical record of the shroud before the 14th century.
Artistic similarities: The image on the shroud bears similarities to medieval artistic styles and techniques.
Considering the evidence, the most plausible explanation is that the Shroud of Turin is a medieval artistic creation, possibly a devotional object or a forgery intended to be venerated as a holy relic. The carbon dating results, lack of clear historical record before the 14th century, and similarities to medieval art support this theory.
However, some aspects of the shroud, such as the negative image and the anatomical accuracy, are more difficult to explain. It is possible that the creator of the shroud used techniques that are not yet fully understood or that some of the evidence, such as the pollen and dirt, was transferred to the cloth at a later date.
In conclusion, while the Shroud of Turin remains an enigma, the available evidence suggests that it is most likely a medieval creation rather than the genuine burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Further research and analysis may shed more light on this fascinating artifact.
The people who ran these tests got wildly different dates, off by hundreds of years. They didn’t originally publish these raw numbers, they had bad agreed to, but only the averages. It took ~ 30 years for them to release the raw data. Here’s the relevant scholarly source:
Why would committed scholars publish only an average and say “the artifact is clearly false”, and then hide evidence for 30 years?
I think the simple explanation is they measured only the part of the shroud that had been repaired over time, and even this showed so much variation that they hid the results.
None of this explains the negative image, the 3D encoded data, or the grain pollen. If a forgery, someone did this using techniques that we still can’t mimic today, but which would have been invisible when it was ostensibly made.
The statistical analysis presented in the paper does raise some important questions about the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin. A few key points:
The raw data from the three labs (Arizona, Oxford, Zurich) shows significant variation and lack of agreement, both between and within the labs. This heterogeneity calls into question whether the samples can reliably be combined into a single date range.
The labs found foreign material like dye, wax, and cotton fibers on the tested samples, suggesting the area may have been contaminated or repaired.
Not publishing the raw data openly at the time, and taking decades to release it, raises concerns about transparency.
As you note, the unusual characteristics of the Shroud's image are still difficult to fully explain.
Caution overstating the implications. The medieval date range is still supported by each lab's individual results, even if there are problems in how they were combined. And the presence of some foreign material does not necessarily invalidate the dating.
The 1988 tests had issues and the raw data shows more uncertainty than was originally conveyed. But medieval origins remain a strong possibility based on the evidence available.
Sure it’s a possibility. What range is considered normal for variation in carbon dating, for samples on the order of a thousand years old?
Regardless of the date, there’s a bunch of other weird stuff in the shroud that doesn’t add up. If it’s a forgery the negative image and the 3d depth data?
Either way, regardless of the why —- how? How did it happen? Why have attempts to recreate the shroud failed to reproduce so many of its weird features?
The typical margin of error for radiocarbon dating depends on the age of the sample and the dating technology used. For a well-preserved organic sample around a thousand years old, modern techniques can usually provide a date range with a 95% confidence interval of about ±50-100 years. So the several hundred years of variation in the 1988 Shroud results does seem unusually large, even considering possible contamination or repair of the tested area. However, even with this variation, the medieval timeframe is still consistently indicated by all three labs.
You're right that the Shroud has characteristics that are difficult to explain, regardless of its age. The negative image, 3D encoding of information, and resistance to simple replication warrant further study.
If the Shroud is medieval, it suggests that the creator used some sophisticated and unconventional techniques to achieve those effects. Various hypotheses involving chemical reactions, gaseous diffusion, or even primitive photography have been proposed, but none have been conclusively demonstrated. It remains an open question how a medieval artisan could have created such an image.
On the other hand, if the Shroud is genuinely ancient, we still face the challenge of explaining how such an image could have been formed by natural processes associated with crucifixion and burial. No other known ancient burial cloth has similar properties.
While these unsolved mysteries are fun, we shouldn't let that override the evidence we do have. The consistent medieval date range from the radiocarbon tests, even with the acknowledged variability, and the lack of conclusive historical references to the Shroud before the 14th century, still point towards a medieval origin as the most likely scenario based on currently available data.
LLM’s do not evaluate evidence and reason in the face of uncertainty. They only predict the next word, which in this case means its claims about the balance of the evidence are just statements about popular consensus.
My belief is, that I don’t know what this is, but I find it very interesting given the numerous unexplained aspects of it. This is the same position as the Catholic Church, by the way. I don’t think there’s any convincing materialist explanation for what this is or how it came about. The radio carbon dating evidence is weak and is consistent with either a fraud from around the time of its discovery, or else a mixture of fibers from different points in time.
> 5: [...] Related, from @StatisticUrban - average house size in every US state vs. every European country
I'm deeply sceptical of average house size as an indicator of wealth
1. If you were simply optimising for average house size in the absence of any other metrics, it's very simple to do: just ban building anything small! And isn't that what most of American cities are incidentally doing :p Customer choice is reduced, but the number is higher.
2. Related to 1., it says nothing about space per person, or housing availability on the margin.
3. Note that even Norway has much smaller houses than America, despite being fabulously rich in every other metric otherwise
4. Personally speaking, there comes a point for me where extra space inside a house or flat is a net negative for me, not positive, even all other things considered equal, and that point is below the numbers you see in the American map.
5. (related to 4 and 1) I would gladly trade off space for living in a nice urban area, and most of those big houses are in car-dependent suburbs which I really would rather not live in. Judging by the prominence of the American urbanist movement online and what they say, availability of houses that urbanists like in America is really low compared to Europe.
This isn't to say things can't be bad (the UK housing stock is infamously so), but really you can't use a single number as evidence here.
(nevertheless, the America-Europe gap that appeared in the past 15 years is really embarrassing and I wish that more fellow Europeans woke up to that fact and started screaming asking what went wrong)
"Unfortunately the fog has rolled in and our paths must diverge" is a wonderful line for a breakup. For maximum applicability, it should really be done while standing on a bridge. Downside is that the person broken up with might shove you off that bridge 😀
"Nick Fuentes has accused me of being one of the Jews who controls the new conservative movement"
As the Rightful Caliph, are you *completely* sure this does not come under your aegis?
36. But I thought all safety regulations were written in blood!
Sorry, cheap political crack, but a serious look at why individual safety regulations were written and what their effect is would be welcome. I realize this would be a difficult project.
I have thoughts on a couple of these. First, the British SLBMs. Some of this is cultural (and there was a time when the US would have said the same, before Kennedy and McNamara and their rather odd belief that everyone wanted to blow up the world, while Russia has always been paranoid about such things). But a lot of it is probably also economic. The problem the British have is that they're a rather small island, close to the main enemy, so they may not have the time to get word to their submarines, particularly when they also can't really afford the expensive systems the US has for that, which I talk about in https://www.navalgazing.net/NWAS-Polaris-Part-4. The result is that if they did implement a PAL system like we have, they'd run a very large risk of not actually being able to launch if they needed to.
Second, the Noah Smith thing. I will first establish my bona fides as someone who got this right, on both missile defense (https://www.navalgazing.net/In-Defense-of-Missile-Defense) and the F-35 (literally my first comment on SSC). I think he gets most of the main drivers right, particularly the role that experts working on classified stuff play vs Ted Postol, and I would go further and point out that you're going to see adverse selection in your experts because the defense field pays well and only Ted Postol can't get hired there. (I also disagree that he's smart, but that's a different story.)
I remain somewhat baffled at the lack of any serious effort by the defense industry to get its position out to the wider public, because while a lot of this stuff is moderately difficult to explain, it's not that much more difficult than a couple of other fields I'm familiar with that have done a much better job of making explanations available. (Orbital mechanics, for instance.) I'm doing my best, but I'm one guy doing this in my spare time, and I keep getting distracted by weird stuff from WWII. More thoughts on that at https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Defense-Information-Pipeline, but I'll probably write up a full response soon.
>But also, there might have been some confusion between “block Iranian cruise missiles”, which modern systems are now good at, and “block Russian ICBMs”, which is still impossible (for a good overview of the state of ICBM-blocking tech, see here).
This needs some clarification. A cruise missile is basically an unmanned airplane that crashes into things and blows up. We've had the ability to shoot them down approximately forever, as it's a subset of conventional air defense. What we saw was excellent performance against Iranian intermediate-range ballistic missiles. We didn't see use against ICBMs, but all signs point to us being able to handle them in principle. We do not currently have enough interceptors to do much against an attack by anyone except North Korea, but this is a matter of money, not of engineering. I think we should change this. And no, it won't be destabilizing, because I neither expect nor demand the system stop every warhead.
I still don't buy the rationale of the British subs. I am assuming that their sub commanders still require some sort of positive confirmation that there is a nuclear war going on before they launch their tridents towards Moscow. Otherwise, it would be rather simple to start WW3: just jam the radio connection to London as a sub emerges from a routine dive, wait for the commander to conclude that London does not exist any more and enjoy the fireworks. Even if the crew can detect that they are being jammed, they have to have some policy on what to do in that case. A policy of "do nothing" would destroy the deterrence value, while a policy of "nuke away" would make it rather easy to start WW3.
I get that there may be situations where you order your sub to dive and emerge at some later point somewhere and launch their rockets unless they get an all-clear, but in that case the correct time to send them the the codes to their nukes would be with these instructions.
And as I have written lengthily in another comment, tamper-protection devices seem useful even if someone on board knows the code, you want to make it as hard as reasonably possible for someone to steal your nukes and use them for whatever.
If London is silent, the radios are awash with SOS calls and there's a Russian cruiser bearing down on you, odds are you should crack open the safe and launch. If you surface and London is silent but everything else looks totally normal, maybe go yell at your radio technician as a first step. Put simply, if you don't trust a career navy captain to be able to identify whether there's an apocalyptic war going on, why the hell would you put him in charge of the boat?
Even if you could block all communications with jamming (which you can't over the sort of area an SSBN might be operating in) it's pretty easy to tell the difference between being jammed and there not being any signal to start with. The orders definitely aren't "if you can't hear anything, turn the keys immediately". billymorph said this very well.
As for tamper-protection devices, I'm sure those are installed. For one thing, all missile warheads have very strict safeguards to not go off unless they've been fired from a missile. And I strongly suspect that launching would take several keys held in safes which require combinations known to different people. The difference from US practice is mostly that all of the safe combinations are known to people onboard.
"We do not currently have enough interceptors to do much against an attack by anyone except North Korea, but this is a matter of money, not of engineering. "
Except, at some point, the money problem turns into an engineering problem. If Russia has roughly 8000 warhheads, and each one requires 4 GMD interceptors to have a 97% hit chance, and each interceptor costs $75 million, thats over 2 trillion to shoot them all down. Meanwhile Russia or China can easily produce more, while the US has shown no sign of being able to mass manufacture sophisticated missiles in bulk.
I dispute all of your assumptions. Russia does not have 8000 warheads right now. They were limited to 1550 deployed, and that number can't climb too much higher quickly. Second, why do I need 97% to shoot each one down? I'll take 50% as a start, because that's a lot better than 0%. Third, I probably don't need 4 to 1 because I can launch in waves and retarget. Fourth, if I'm buying 32,000 interceptors, the price is going to come down a lot. And fifth, the defense industrial base hasn't exactly covered itself in glory, but it's better than that. No, we can't get to 32,000 quickly, but we're building hundreds of sophisticated missiles a year, and could add more interceptors to that if we wanted to. Also, adding Russia to "easily produce more" makes it hard to take you seriously.
Likewise, it's hard to take you seriously when you think missile defense being "solved" means something like "if we spend trillions of dollars going all out producing as many interceptors as possible, we could maybe shoot down 50% of Russia's current stockpile, assuming they don't build any more." Is this just trying to "win" by killing more of them than they do of us?
Again, trillions is your numbers, not mine. I'd say 3000 interceptors instead of 32,000, and estimate maybe $10 million per interceptor at that rate, which is 30 billion. I'd consider that a good deal on insurance, particularly because the existence of an effective BMD umbrella is going to vastly change how they do targeting, cutting down on the number of bombs landing on American cities.
What bean says, without specifically endorsing his exact numbers.
Also, winning is nice, but even if you set the goalposts so that "winning" a nuclear war is definitionally or practically impossible, there's still a big difference between the sort of defeat where fifty million Americans are dead and the survivors have been Bombed Back to the Stone Age(*), and the sort of defeat where twenty million Americans are dead and the survivors have been bombed back to the 20th century.
Unless you are 100.00% certain you can avoid fighting a nuclear war, then it is worth spending tens of billions of dollars to hedge against the worst sort of defeat. If you are "only" 99% certain your diplomats will come through with a lasting peace, it is genuinely worth trillions. And it probably wouldn't cost trillions.
* Not literally the stone age, as we've discussed before.
5: Higher wages are useless if your country's infrastructure and tax system is so piss poor that you need to spend more on basic necessities. We have economic metrics that account for some of this, such as the difference between income and discretionary income. Free-market propagandists always point to the US having high income, but the same can not be said for discretionary income. For example, if we compare the US to the Netherlands, we see that the US median disposable income is 41K while in the Netherlands it's 36K. But let's compare how much you have to spend in your day to day life and calculate the discretionary income based on that:
________________________US_______Netherlands
income________________41k_______36k
food___________________5.1k_______3.7k
shelter_________________13.2k______13k
clothing________________1.2k_______1.5k
transport______________6.3k_______3.4k
health__________________3.2k_______1.8k
student debt___________2.1k_______0.8k
discretionary income__9.9k_______11.8k
As we see, the case the free-market capitalist makes falls apart once we look at discretionary income, which collectivist and social policies ensure is higher in the Netherlands.
EDIT: Scott has edited the post to make 4 seem less like an endorsement and more an ironic share. This is better, but I still prefer it if these things aren't spread at all.
I think a link plus "here is a bizarre and goofy conspiracy theory" doesn't do the same things as "here is a plausible and important thing to consider," and we should think about them differently.
I agree that the latter is worse than the former, though both are bad, but Scott originally didn't do that. In his original post he only said:
"4: Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that COVID didn’t happen at all, and that both “lab leak” and “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place."
(with the link) He later edited the post to add:
"I wonder if I could even more Substack likes if I one-upped them with a theory that lockdowns never even happened, and it was just one of those Berenstein Bear or Mandela Effect things where everyone has a false memory."
The implication is so obvious that it's not clear to me how anyone at all could have missed it, though I suppose from the comments we know that the number of people misled is at least one.
"Theory X exists, it is a goofy conspiracy theory, some people nonetheless believe it", is not misinformation. Furthermore, I don't see how you can hope to counter goofy conspiracy theories, if you're not willing to say that much.
Scott originally didn't do that. In his original post he only said:
"4: Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that COVID didn’t happen at all, and that both “lab leak” and “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place."
(with the link) He later edited the post to add:
"I wonder if I could even more Substack likes if I one-upped them with a theory that lockdowns never even happened, and it was just one of those Berenstein Bear or Mandela Effect things where everyone has a false memory."
I think approximately everyone of the subscribers of this blog is intelligent enough to figure out that this is obviously a conspiracy theory Scott doesn't endorse, even based on the first framing. You can relax your tireless watch to protect the uneducated masses from misinformation with your superior judgement.
I saw at least one commenter that didn't. Also readers of this blog can get a little bit conspiracy-loving at times (e.g. lab leak, 'the cathedral' etc), so better to err on the side of not spreading harmful misinformation.
Data on the median is often not available, do you have reason to believe that median Dutch expenses would consistently be proportionally higher than the average as compared to the US? Because, the opposite seems actually more likely to me.
EDIT: Switched median and average to the correct position. On further reflection I actually think it's probably not going to be much different.
Yes, people usually spend more if they earn more, so since US average income is a lot higher (proportional to median income), I'd expect US average non-discretionary spending to be higher. If one can't find medians for everything, it would make more sense to use means for everything.
Average income is affected a lot by outliers. E.g. Billionaires' disposable income can skew an entire populations average disposable income to be much higher than the median. Things like spending on food are also skewed, but not as much, because while a billionaire may earn millions of times more, they don't spend millions of times more on food. This is known as Engel's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engel%27s_law
Billionaires was just an extreme example to show the dynamic clearly. Obviously a single billionaire is not going to change a country of hundreds of millions that much (which is why I started with "E.g."), but rich people in general do. The skew is still larger for income. (Engel's law is about more than billionaires, it's about distribution of income in general)
That's quite a demand you're making of me. I tried looking for it online, but couldn't find it so I'd have to do it myself. Would you be willing to pay me for it?
1) free-market capitalism is the best economic system
2) the US is more free-market/capitalistic than European countries
3) therefore we expect US-citizens to have more money
4) US-citizens do indeed have more money, look at income
However, 4 doesn't hold, because income is not the same as discretionary income.
The US spends more on welfare *because* they let private players enter (e.g. capitalists industries like private health insurance and private equity in health care), if they just implemented collectivist policies like universal healthcare they wouldn't need to pay as much.
No one has made this argument in this thread. Scott didn't and I haven't seen any other posters do it either. While someone may make it, I am not sure why you are arguing against it here?
Because Scott (like he did before) presents the higher US income, in comparison to the lower European income, as superior, which is misleading because it's missing part of the picture.
Have a look at Singapore, if you want a cheap and efficient healthcare system.
We spend half of what Britain spends (as proportion of GDP) and have no worse health outcomes.
And no, we don't have a single payer system like the NHS. In fact, basically everyone has their own health savings account they use to pay for procedures (plus some catastrophic health insurance on top.)
It's easier to run an efficient health care system when everyone lives within easy commuting distance of everywhere. You could have a single radiology facility for the entire country, and run it constantly at close to 100% efficiency.
But possibly the bigger factor is just wages. A nurse in Singapore makes about $US26,000 a year. In the UK it's more like $US47,000, and in the US it's about $83,000. Whether it's a good or a bad thing for nurses to get paid like middle class professionals is a question I'll leave open.
Your first paragraph suggests that London or New York City should have really efficient and cheap healthcare? (And similar for basically any city that's large enough to keep a radiology facility busy.) So why don't they have cheap an efficient health care? Are you blaming the need to subsidise the hill billies, or something else?
One part of why Singapore can have cheap nurses is that Singapore hands out visas to foreigners for those jobs. There are lots of people who would like to come and work as nurses in the US and UK, too.
That would be a bargain for US and UK, and an enormous improvement in pay for the migrants.
But voters in those countries seem more interested in the 'out of sight is out of mind' approach to global poverty.
I find quite misleading to use the Netherlands as an example against "free market capitalism", they are the same fundamental model of the US with some different policy tweaks and vastly more efficient state expenditure and infrastructure.
The fundamental point about standard of living in sounds toh, Americans genuinely have no idea how much they are overpaying for stuff
I notice that there is a 3k difference in mean transport costs; aside from the point made above that greater levels of income mean residents will be inclined to spend more on luxuries like travel and cars, the Netherlands is a poor comparison. It is a tiny country that makes it easy to supply public transport. At least compare to France or Germany on that metric.
If higher discretionary income means people will spend more on travel (Which is probably true. The Dutch are in fact notorious for how much they travel), then that argument would work against you. They have more discretionary income yet spend less on transportation.
Also, the US has worse public transport even in places where there is higher density, e.g. almost all of their cities.
The argument isn't that the US is solely capitalistic, but rather that the US is *more* capitalistic; the Dutch state expenditure is more efficient *because* it is less privatized and more publicly owned, e.g., public transport.
That's an interesting point, and in some cases I'm inclined to agree, however I still feel like the free-market vs interventionism is the wrong framing, and you are trying to shoehorn the issue at hand into it fir ideological reasons.
In both cases you have the state using taxpayer money to fund roughly the same stuff. One way of doing so works better, yes, but it's a matter of precise policy choices, not of macro systems
But it's not a shoehorn, and it's not roughly the same stuff; the difference between private and public is central and substantial; e.g., publically funding a public transit system, like metros, instead of every individual owning a private car (and in fact, many Dutch city centers now have restrictions on cars) is the main reason that urban transport is cheaper for the Dutch.
If you are including household level expenses like housing and food, you need to look at household income as well. A small minority of people in the US live alone (either without family or roommates) so looking at individual incomes is not represativate.
Additionally, the US government has very robust economic statistics that it publishes. We dont need to look at whatever money macro is and its odd data sources. Check out this data from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS:
The linked analysis does in fact analyse this, but even if it didn't, a small minority of people in the Netherlands *also* live alone, in fact in very similar numbers as the US (14.7% vs 17.4% in 2018). It's better form to use the same dataset when available, like the OECD, because you then have the same methodology and you're comparing two countries directly. And when not available, well I'm sorry to say, but Money and Macro does in fact use data from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS in his analysis.
In fact, the very first link in that article links to data from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS
The reason to use household income is that some expenses, like rent/mortgage, are paid at a household level. Median gives us an idea of the "typical" experience. In both countries the typical experience is to live in a household with more than one person (and in this US this means more than 1 income, I assume this is true in the netherlands as well).
Yes the article links to the BLS, but uses minor data points instead of using the larger data sets like the one i linked that already do the analysis of cost breakdowns.
Because, like I said, they're economists and prefer to use the same dataset where possible. Yes, rent would be split in two (the other categories not) so just cut it in half for both of them, which would change the size of the lead but not more than that. If there's some small change in expenditure for the other categories it would also be applied to both, the size of the lead could change, but the lead would remain. I mean it might be different for different genders since rent isn't always split equally, and expenditure habits might be different so for a perfect picture we would have to have access to more complex analysis (e.g. feminist economics, household economics...), but we don't really have that data, and based on what we do have I suspect that the Netherlands would perform better there too. If you want an analysis of a shared household, section 5 is about those expenditures. He concludes (and I agree) that it's still better in the Netherlands.
37. I served in the infantry. The tactics of Israel's army in this conflict are completely unremarkable. Boringly conventional. In any urban conflict, you'd expect half or more of the buildings in the area of operations to be destroyed nowadays. For example, in the 2nd Battle of Fallujah, of the 50k buildings in the city, 10k were completely destroyed and 30k damaged by the US Marines over just one month of fighting against more poorly armed guerillas than Hamas. This is because a) assaulting buildings to take them intact is extremely negative EV when the enemy doesn't care about preserving their own buildings and habitually wires them with IEDs that blow them up anyway when your men enter and b) destroying buildings is much easier, cheaper and safer nowadays with precision weaponry. It's been preferred to neutralize enemy urban positions by fire rather than assault them whenever possible since at least WW2, but now it's more preferred and more possible. I think it's poorly understood by civilians how necessarily horrifying urban combat is.
But even if Israel's tactics are completely normal, that doesn't mean that they have a strategy. Their tactics are ruining them strategically. It is probably unavoidable for this level of devastation if Israel wants to force a military defeat on Hamas. But such devastation of Gaza will also destroy Israel, and Hamas knows it. I think that Israel's leaders believe otherwise. This isn't the first time people have gotten really really mad at them over Palestinian deaths, after all. They've weathered all the previous times just fine. Why would this time be different, especially since the provocation by Hamas this time was so clear? Maybe they're right and everyone will just forget about it once the fighting dies down, but I believe that this time really is different and they're making a horrible mistake.
Yes! Hamburg+ levels of destruction are routine and unavoidable in modern urban warfare where both sides decide to give battle over an extended period, and this fact is not well appreciated yet outside of the military. Look at other recent urban battles. Grozny, Mariupol, Sarajevo, etc. If both sides fight a city is rapidly ruined.
I'm confused by how you think this will "destroy Israel", or more specifically how it would destroy Israel *more* then leaving around an armed group that periodically invades and tortures thousands of israelis to death.
Would doing nothing and turning Palestine into a pariah state with a mined DMZ ala North Korea have been a better strategy? It would not stop rocket attacks but it would have maintained international good will fwiw. I think playing the victim and pursuing full isolation might have been an option.
Good will never lasts. Did Israel get good will when it removed all its settlers and soldiers and left Gaza in 2005? Maybe, I don't remember. I do remember what happened after that - in 2007 Hamas came to power in Gaza and started launching wars against Israel every couple years. The number of people dying on both sides skyrocketed compared to before the withdrawal. Did anyone remember their good will from 2005? I don't think so.
This is basically what Israel though they had done before Oct 7th! They never anticipated that Hamas had the capabilities try to infiltrate Israeli territory. The Netanyahu stance on Gaza was that you could just ignore the rockets, respond with some light bombing, and mainly just wall off Gaza, but no one feels safe doing that now.
What if the US stops vetoing UN security council resolutions against Israel? It's vetoed more than 50 so far. How would Israel do under UN-imposed sanctions? Could Israel survive as a literal pariah state, like North Korea except without a friend next door like China?
Hamas cannot destroy Israel, or even seriously harm Israel with its attacks. Yes, every death from Hamas rockets and kidnappings is an outrage and a great evil, but they cannot topple the country. Israel has the absolute right to defend itself and to strike back in self defense. But that right should be exercised wisely. What they are doing now does not seem wise to me, or at best it's a huge gamble.
I doubt the rest of the world starts treating Israel like North Korea just because of that. Israel existed just fine for decades without the American alliance, and those UN votes are mostly just symbolic appeasement to petrostates (which honestly don't even care that much anymore). The left gets frothing insane about Israel, but it's not nearly that universally powerful and even europe is starting to get over it.
This may be optimistic. Israel is very, very unpopular outside of the US (can't find a good source from the last couple of months, this is the best but doesn't properly link through to the Morning Consult poll: https://time.com/6559293/morning-consult-israel-global-opinion/ ). It also probably doesn't have much depth of countervailing goodwill among governments that are currently friendly towards it, particularly if US policy shifts, and it's not really a significant trade partner for anyone.
Absent US support, governments in Europe and the developing world could probably win votes/public support by kicking Israel, and probably wouldn't gain a lot from helping it. From that position, pretty massive sanctions can flow almost absent-mindedly. Autarky never works for anyone, and wouldn't mix well in the longer terms with Israeli politics; someone's going to have to eat the costs of lost trade on that kind of scale, and Israel has unusually large inter-communal economic fissures (eg. Haredi/Secular; German/Russian/Misrahi).
At the moment, any European country that sanctioned Israel beyond a very narrow band (exports of arms, possibly narrowly tailored settlement-related sanctions) would face a huge American backlash, but that's their only major restraint. Israel also has no alternative sponsor, given lack of popular support in the EU (which also lacks a meaningfully unified foreign policy), China's diplomacy being totally at odds with doing so and Russia being a bit busy at the moment.
Israel depends on their survival being an American red line. By contrast, they probably could survive indefinitely with Hamas ruling Gaza given it's doubtful Hamas could hit any harder than they already have. Consider that Hamas has two paths to victory. The first, bleeding out Israel by making life unliveable (cf. ZANU, IRA etc) probably isn't achievable for them. The second (forcing a series of crackdowns to drive a wedge between Israel and the US public) can only work if Israel lets it. Israel, by contrast, probably wins if it lasts long enough.
Israel's odds of survival might increase if they can reduce the Palestinian population, which may be the point of the current Gaza operation, but I don't think they can exercise the freedom of action necessary to do so without a suicidal break from America.
Keeping US support should rationally be the sole focus of Israel's foreign policy, and a guiding light of their defence policy. If that means leaving Gaza, they should leave Gaza.
I doubt that holds (hatred for Israel comes mostly from elitist leftist circles). But more fundamentally, Israel just isn't the sort of place that would be okay with sentencing thousands of its own people to be gruesomely tortured to death for a two point GDP gain.
I suspect Israel would end up more like Taiwan than North Korea in this context. North Korea has almost nothing anyone else wants to buy; Israel has an awful lot of high-tech industry selling things that lots of people want to buy. And there isn't an influential North Korean diaspora spread across the Western world. Probably some pious Western European countries would refuse to do business with Israel, but they'd buy from whatever third party bought stuff from Israel and plastered "Made in Not Israel" stickers all over it.
Quite possibly Taiwan, because Taiwan isn't a member of the UN and is pretty big on the whole internatiional trade and commerce thing.
Re. 3 OK, so let's say there was no lab leak, whatever. What interests me is a discussion about whether there's a sane cost/benefit argument for not banning gain-of-function wholesale. He doesn't really touch this, just mentions in passing how all this unreasonable panic caused a chilling effect for actually useful research, like vaccines. But that's dodging the real question, everybody sane agrees that vaccines are good, but what is GoF good for?
I am a bit concerned that the household income difference between the US and North Europe is being inflated by US householdings just being larger, containing more adult children and retired parents.
Can’t find very good stats on the spot, but according to OurWorldinData, the share of single person households in 2018 in the US was 28% vs 44% in Denmark.
This might actually be because welfare states provide young people and retired people with a better chance of living in their own low-income household, which clearly many of them prefer, but which artificially drives down the median household income.
On the other hand, in Southern Europe this is reversed, meaning that the actual difference with the US might be greater than expected from the map.
Actually a very valid point. Scandinavia has very good records of everybody in living in the country, so you will get counted in the stats even if you live on the street (your identity number will still be in the system, even if you have nothing to do with any government office). But in a country where people who have no official income (homeless people, illegal immigrants etc) doesn't leave a paper trail they are probably a lot more likely to get overlooked in calculations like these.
What is stopping them is subsidies for students, subsidies for unemployed or part time employed people and subsidies for retirement homes. Young and old people in Scandinavia mainly live on their own because they prefer to do so and can.
The preference is of course a part of the genereal socialphobia of Scandinavians, living with your parents until your thirty is seen as less of a problem in South Europe.
So it is just a question of how you choose to spend your money. BUT, if it is part of the reason why households seems richer in the US, then we just have a plain statistical misinterpretation.
Imagine if we instead calculated Median Income for people with jobs. Then there is a big depression where many low paid lose their jobs and have to go live on the street. In that case the median income for people in jobs might actually go up, while the entire country is actually poorer. The same thing happens if young people with low income have to move in with their parents, so their 'households' doesn't get counted. Nobody has become richer when they did so, but the median income pr household have gone up.
Denmark (and all of Scandinavia) has small households while southern Europe has large households. So you cannot extrapolate from Denmark to Europe in general.
You are absolutely right! I think using household income mean we are underestimating northern Europe and Japan and overestimating southern Europe. And per capita income might do the opposite. I still haven't found the perfect metric for comparing countries
#34 - People seem very resistant to ideological prodding. Humans trying to convince them of things almost always have an agenda, which would naturally produce a defense mechanism (notably not believing what is being said).
Perhaps an AI, if believed to be neutral or just sharing facts, doesn't trigger that mechanism? I think the same would be true of other sources that conspiracy theorists would trust. Like, even if they don't trust Wikipedia maybe they would trust a 1980s Encyclopedia Britannica or something else they think isn't tainted by their ideological enemies or the people running the conspiracy.
This could be a significant factor. Even animals know that conspecifics have competing incentives. Humans have several decades of experience 'mechanical integrity' building assumptions on non-bias.
Fun example: the original automated (mechanically) telephone exchange, the Strowger exchange, was invented because Strowger, a funeral director, suspected that the human operators at the phone company were directing his calls to one of his competitors.
People tolerate behaviour from websites that they would instantly be suspicious of in a door-to-door salesman.
What's not obvious to me is whether the interface of LLMs - chat - which is not familiar except with actual humans - really gives off enough machine vibes to allay suspicion.
We really have to get that Pope Alignment Research project off the ground 😀
Apparently Pope Francis is in trouble (or not) for very recent remarks about gay men entering seminaries.
As in telling bishops the (apparent) Italian equivalent of "There are enough cute twinks* there already, we don't want any more".
Now, a few years back, the media were falling all over themselves to praise Francis for being so broad-minded about gay matters (the "who am I to judge?" quote taken out of context).
Well, despite all that, and despite some, um, very liberal directions he's taken, Francis is not as 21st Century Now Pope as presented, and there is some usual reaction about "homophobic remarks".
But! As others have pointed out on other social media:
"Everyone is focussing on the wrong aspect here. It's not "the pope used homophobic language this is unacceptable". It's "someone has been teaching the pope Italian gay slang".
If I go by what I'm reading about all this, the term he used is a slang term exclusively(?) used by gay Italians, so the question to be asked is "where did a Spanish-speaking straight guy learn this term?"
"I can't stress enough how much in my decades living gayly in Italy I have never ever heard a straight person say frociaggine. Only the gays say it. WHO TAUGHT HIM"
I need to ask any native Italians/Italian speakers: do you know the term "frociaggine" and what does it mean?
More respectable sources, for the elevated and educated amongst us (unlike the rest of us unruly peasant Papists):
"The newspaper articles, which were translated from Italian, claimed the Pope had said there is “frociaggine” – an offensive noun which translates into English approximately as “f*****ry” – in some of the seminaries.
...The Corriere della Sera newspaper stated that the Argentine pope, who speaks Italian as a second language, may not have been aware of how offensive his language was, adding that the remark was greeted with incredulous laughter by the bishops.
A source close to the Pope told CNN that the phrase could also be understood as there is a “gay climate” in the seminaries."
Seeing as how we've reverted to the 18th century in what no-no words cannot be printed publically, the offensive term SPOILERS ALERT PERSONS OF SENSITIVE AND NERVOUS DISPOSITIONS GET READY TO CLUTCH YOUR PEARLS is "faggotry".
*Shout out to r/Drama for this useful term to give the savour of what the original Italian is, seemingly
The correct translation would indeed be the latter you mention. As per the corriere della sera article, the Pope's family is of Piedmonts origin, and therefore things that he learned as "Italian" might have instead been slang. But "frociaggine" is definitely not something only gay Italians use, I'd call it quite common (for as common as needing to talk about an atmosphere of diffuse gayness can be)
I agree, the translation is correct, and though I don't expect this particular word to be very common, its meaning is fairly transparent -- it's the standard Italian very-rude-word-for-homosexual-man combined with a suffix that makes abstract nouns. I don't think you need to be deep into any particular subculture to use it, certainly not to understand it.
It would be even worse if the pope had learned such language by reading /r/Drama. Next thing you know, he'll be talking about "bussy". (Sort of derived from Italian, if I am understanding the etymology)
Giant waves are the reverse-- thousands of people or more claimed they existed, but scientists didn't believe in them until there was evidence from instruments.
Re: #24, the OpenAI stuff: it was really telling to me during last fall's aborted coup attempt that Altman held the support of 90% of OpenAI employees. That's essentially consensus support for functionally ditching the company's unique structure which was meant to ensure the supremacy of safety concerns over their mission. (Presumably even more of a consensus exists now that a bunch of its top safety people have left.) And it's notable that the Board's stated concerns at the time - that there was a "loss of trust" in Altman - are essentially corroborated by the recent reporting. Whatever rationalizations the employees there may have about what they're doing, there really can't be any justified belief now that OpenAI has a meaningful commitment to safety. Combine Altman's actions (marginalizing safety; habitual deception) with his stated ambitions (more or less seizing control of the global economy), and add the consensus support for Altman within the company, and you get a picture of a rogue entity without any real internal restraints that is willing to gamble the whole future of humanity for its own agenda. (Whether this agenda is well-intentioned or not hardly matters.)
Would it be too much to ask for a regulatory intervention that had, say, 10% of the force of the DEA's actions against medication factories in #36?
Sam Altman is definitely giving me a Sam Bankman-Fried vibe these days. But the apparently high level of support from OpenAI devs does complicate that assessment, because they presumably know SA much better than I do. So either I'm wrong and SA isn't nearly as bad as he seems from here, or the whole organization is rotten, and I don't have a good way to figure out which.
"But the apparently high level of support from OpenAI devs does complicate that assessment, because they presumably know SA much better than I do."
May I refer you to the links Scott provided about Will MacAskill, and how EA is falling all over themselves to say "Well gosh, *we* had no idea SBF was up to no good when he was throwing money at us and we were happily scooping it up with both hands!"
If Sam Altman is found doing something really really naughty, I see no reason the OpenAI lot won't do the same - "well golly gumdrops, how were we supposed to know? the cunning blighter pulled the wool over all our eyes!"
Reasons to discount the views of OpenAI employees on this question:
1. Altman is by all accounts very persuasive and engaging (or socially manipulative, if you want to put some stank on it). He's probably a pleasant presence around the office - a "nice guy" who you feel you can trust.
2. This is a group self-selected to work under Altman; and for that matter probably selected by Altman himself to some degree. So they'll tend to be favorably disposed toward him.
3. They have enormous incentive to buy into the company's vision, for all sorts of financial, social, and emotional reasons.
4. Some high-profile employees have in fact recently left; for that to be happening at all at a rapidly ascending company that is at the heart of an emerging industry is a pretty notable exception to the rule.
And then on the other hand there's all this public information that points a pretty clear arrow in the other direction...
Given that Altman successfully saw off the coup attempt against him and indeed turned it around on those who hoped to oust him by having them ousted instead, and that Ilya then later decided he needed to spend more time with his geraniums or whatever, and given other reports of how he operated in previous businesses (all online allegations so no independent verification if these were so), I have no problem at all believing he was being economical with the actualité, as the man said.
Guy is a successful businessman who is hoping to surf on the waves of immense money-making via AI. I have no expectations of higher ethics than the bare minimum not to incur legal penalties if he can at all get away with it. And "nice nest egg you have there, be a shame if it got smashed if you don't play ball with us" is no more than the standard operating procedure I'd expect from a large corporation. Why anyone still thinks OpenAI has anything to do with lofty goals and idealism beyond lucre, I have no idea.
I think another factor is that he may treat subordinates differently than peers. If your job involves taking direction from him, he has no real need to deceive you. Whereas if your job is to keep an eye on him, to steer him, or even to employ him (as with the Board), he might find it useful to engage in deceptive behaviors in order to keep doing whatever it is that he wants to do.
The high level support from OpenAI devs can basically be explained by them fearing they'd lose their equity, which for most of them would be valued in millions of dollars
Is it SBF or Zuckerberg vibes? I think there is a general tension between safety vs non-safety people in every organization and reaching the healthy balance is important and very difficult. Because my alignment is not with the safety folks I'm not super concerned about the changes but expect a constant stream of Meta like drama from now on.
37: "I tried to get a good handle on Israel’s military strategy here and the consensus seems to be that it isn’t very strategic, there’s no endgame."
I'll offer an endgame-prediction:
At some point the situation on the ground will revert back to something quite similar to the situation before the Hamas attack October 7th. Probably with more hate among the political actors on all sides, but basically similar.
How about non-political actors, i.e. ordinary people? Gazans have nowhere to go, because no other country will grant them entry in significant numbers. So they are stuck, regardless of how they think and feel. And also regardless of how the Israeli government thinks and feels.
The only ordinary people who have other options, are ordinary Israelis. Since there are lots of countries willing to have Israeli Jews as citizens. In particular young, secular Israeli Jews. And (to my knowledge) the Israeli government puts no restrictions on emigration.
Thus (again to predict) the main, and likely only, long-term effect of the present debackle is that we will see an uptick in emigration from Israel. After the dust has settled.
It's a falsifiable prediction, assuming time-series data on Israeli emigration exist.
...I have been trying to get data on Israeli emigration (and immigration) for other reasons, related to broader demographic questions, but data on emigration is not easy to find. If anybody has a link, or a tip to where to apply for access to data on emigration, I would be grateful for such information.
The situation before 10/7 had Hamas controlling Gaza and nobody even trying to go in and make them stop stockpiling weapons and planning attacks. I think that's highly unlikely to be the case in 2025. Almost certainly there will be a persistent IDF presence in Gaza; Israel would really prefer that some other trusted party take up that role, but I doubt there will be any volunteers.
Agree. So it will be different to some extent, but the basic structure will be recognizeable.
I have speculated that Israel will make roads within Gaza under Israeli control, that split up the territory into smaller enclaves and allow the military easy access to trouble spots. Sort-of similar to how Napoleon III tore down old buildings and created broad avenues in Paris after the 1848 revolt/failed revolution.
I don't see how there's anything more fundamental to the "basic structure", than whose troops are patrolling the streets. That was Hamas, it will be the IDF, and that's a huge difference whether they rearrange the streets.
I assume that the administration of the place will be in the hands of Gazans themselves. Implying tax-and-spend authority for the innumerable tasks that befall a government, including local police. IDF presence will be limited to control core pathways & maintain a capability for fast, targeted intervention followed by withdrawal. More permanent presence than extended border & some road control will expose Israelis to never-ending pinprick attacks.
If you think Israeli presence will be more extensive and administratively deeper than that, I agree we disagree.
The disagreement may alternatively be about if and when the quantity of long-term Israeli presence turns into something qualitatively different, as far as the administrative power structure of Gaza is concerned.
Nobody cares who fills the potholes, handles the noise complaints, and collects the taxes. I suspect the Israelis will let the Gazans handle a lot of that; it's good practice for them and would be an enormous hassle for Israel.
What matters is, pretty much the *only* thing that matters is, whose soldiers are patrolling the streets ready to shoot anyone who tries to subvert the order preferred by those soldiers' commanders? Until recently, that was Hamas, and we've seen how that ends. When it's the IDF, that will be a huge change.
Who fills potholes does not matter, but who investigates and punishes crime matter. Not least since there is a grey area between police and military.
Who decides what counts as a crime also matters.
Who gets paid for educating the young and the teaching material they are paid to use, matter in the long run more than who patrols the streets today.
More generally, there is a considerable amount of truth in the old saying that you can conquer a country from horseback, but you cannot rule it from horseback.
I'd recommend doing your own research, but it has been proven that the same physical parchments that Joseph Smith "translated" the Book of Abraham from are actually pieces of Egyptian funerary texts. They had nothing at all to do with anything Joseph said they were about. Joseph Smith is a verified sham and it doesn't make sense to put anything he wrote in comparison with words that Jesus spoke, even from a secular point of view.
From #8, the Asimov Press essay (not to be confused with Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine):
>Another somewhat surprising finding from social science literature is that almost half of consumers support “banning slaughterhouses,” a measure that would make meat almost completely inaccessible. Naturally, these results are highly determined by the framing of the question, but the consistency with which people express pro-welfare views points to a growing cultural shift.
No, this does not point to a growing cultural shift, and the source linked in the original essay provides greater context:
>A recent survey from Oklahoma State University found that while more than 90% of U.S. consumers eat meat, 47% of them agreed with the statement, “I support a ban on slaughterhouses,” according to Meatingplace.
What this points at is that on average, *people are remarkably stupid*. People that answer surveys do not have coherent thoughts. Everything is the vaguest of mood affiliation.
These positions are consistent when you assume that people have weak willpower and know that they have it. Just because people think that doing something is worthwhile, correct or morally right, does not imply that they are actually able to do it. So them endorsing a ban that would make it harder for them to do a thing they are opposed to makes sense to me.
I have no studies to back this up, but have been told this explicitly by acquaintances that want to quit smoking and can observe it in myself.
Yeah, that's related to a thought I had after writing the comment but didn't have time to edit: willpower is one factor, but also collective action/collective punishment. Not only is it easier if the ban is widespread, you get other people to suffer with you. A lot of people don't want to make a sacrifice that others don't.
I don't think it means people are remarkably stupid. I think it means polls purporting to reveal meaningful sentiments are remarkably stupid.
There's no reason to think people answering decontextualized and artificial questions asked by a stranger with no time for reflection *should* have coherent thoughts. Probably the only ones who do would be creepy ideologues.
In addition to the other comments to your comment, yet another alternative explanation for non-consistent responses is that the percentage of trolls among the respondents is likely to be larger than before.
In the old days, the rule of thumb was that you needed a 70 percent response rate to be on the safe side when generalizing from the sample to the universe/population under study. Thanks to survey fatigue in the general public (there has been an enormous increase in surveys), we now often have to tell ourselves that a reponse rate in the low 30s "can still be ok, given some assumptions".
But who still has a motive to say "yes" when a stranger calls to get your opinion about something? Well, trolls are having fun, so they keep on accepting such calls. As most others increasingly slam down the receiver, they dominate the response more than before.
One of several possible alternative explanations to "people are stupid" is that people are neither perfectly moral nor wholly amoral, but instead are rationally motivated by a combination of morality and self-interest.
Suppose that eating a nice plate of beef is worth 10 "self-interest" utils to me, while the killing of the animal involved is worth -1 "morality" util.
Giving up eating meat costs me -9 utils per plate of beef, but banning slaughterhouses is worth vast numbers of positive utils.
Super interesting to see how very much Golden Gate Claude appears to be experiencing a thought process
This makes me think it's more possible that AI could think and act as agentically as a person. Worrying. But if it's much more human like than we may suppose, and its not-so-different thought process is based on the outputs of human thought processes then the relation of an AI's thinking capability to its capability for morality may also be more linked and likely to include or tolerate humans reliably
#9: The Mormon explanation you linked claims that Jesus actually said that people couldn't start new marriages in Heaven, and didn't say that existing marriages would end. But starting new marriages in Heaven is irrelevant to the Sadducees' question; the question was about existing marriages continuing in Heaven.
I think that explanation is not good scholarship. A more typical explanation of this passage goes like this:
1. There's a provision in Law of Moses for taking care of widows in their old age. Since this was typically the job of the eldest son (ergo the reason they got a double inheritance), a childless widow would be in trouble of not being taken care of. How does the Law solve the problem? The widow gets pregnant from her dead husband's brother. To avoid immorality, they have to get married, of course.
2. The Sadducees are trying to trip Jesus up, so they say, "What if she didn't have children from the first brother and he died, too? She'd have to marry the second brother and so on until she got a child by one of them. But she never did, and she was married to all the brothers and the original husband. So who's she married to?"
3. Jesus sees this as an unsophisticated trap that only someone who reads scripture with a Sadducee interpretation might come up with. This is why he starts with "ye do err, not knowing the scriptures". He's telling them they're not even trying to read for comprehension, just to try and trip him up. If they'd tried understanding the principle, they'd understand that the first marriage was supposed to continue after death, while all the marriages to the brothers were to fulfill the elderly care provision in the law.
4. Specifically, this interpretation points to the phrase, "they neither marry nor are given in marriage" and interprets the pronoun 'they' as applying to the brothers, but not the original husband. The brothers weren't given eternal marriages to the woman, since that was never the point. "Go back and try understanding the purpose of the scripture before you come to me with dumb interpretations like this."
Perhaps this sounds like a convoluted interpretation of this passage. Why should we prefer this one, when there's a much simpler interpretation - namely that Jesus was talking about all marriages in heaven? Doesn't that simpler explanation make Jesus sound more wise anyway?
Perhaps it's the opposite. Let's go back to that simpler interpretation and see if it even makes sense. Consider the context of the Sadducees coming to Jesus with a 'trick question'. Under the "no marriage in heaven" interpretation, the Sadducees were trying to give Jesus an impossible situation, as before, and asking him to come up with a solution. If Jesus' reply were simply, "As you know, there's no such thing as marriage in heaven," then it makes no sense that the Sadducees would even come up with this question in the first place. If everyone already knows this and Jesus it teaching something commonly understood there's not trick to the question. The only surprising thing is that they came to Jesus with it in the first place.
Is there any way to preserve this interpretation? Yes. If Jesus is preaching the doctrine of no marriages in heaven, it must be a new doctrine the Sadducees have never heard before.
Except this is also problematic. The Sadducees come to Jesus with an impossible question, trying to trip him up, and instead of what he has always done Jesus expounds new doctrine? This is exactly the kind of thing they'd be hoping he would do! The trick question is designed to tempt Jesus into openly declaring himself to be more than a simple rabbi. They WANT him to openly claim to be some kind of prophet/leader/king/messiah, able to make new pronouncements found nowhere in the Law, and able lead the people against the Romans.
This is the nature of these trick questions. Either he can't answer the question, thereby undermining his authority as a teacher, or he makes new doctrine, which allows the Romans to arrest him for sedition. Jesus has to answer in a way that all the people recognize as right within the bounds of the Law of Moses.
So the simple interpretation, "nobody gets married in heaven" is problematic. Either the teaching was already obvious to the Jews at the time (whose doctrine cannot be assumed to be continuous/unmodified from modern-day Judaism, so maybe they did believe this), or Jesus made up new doctrine and failed the Sadducees' test.
Compare that to the first interpretation, where the Sadducees are trying to trip up Jesus, but they don't believe in an afterlife anyway so they don't distinguish between these two TYPES of marriages. Jesus points out what should have been obvious to them - if they had believed in an afterlife - that the point of the Law for the marriages to the brothers was a temporal one, and as such they're not going to have eternal marriages. Only the original husband is.
Meanwhile, the rebuke isn't just directed at the Sadducees, but at the onlooking crowd. "These guys make up convoluted doctrines not found in the scriptures, then can't understand simple scripture. Don't follow them." This is very much in line with other examples of people trying to trip up Jesus with trick questions, but then having to walk away shamed for their lack of scriptural understanding.
> I think these drugs might boost willpower more generally
I've talked to 2 people who took it and both said it didn't improve their productivity, though they did manage to lose weight. Personally it was (relatively) easy to lose weight but MUCH harder to force myself to be productive at work tasks. It's such a shame that we still don't have drugs that fully eliminate 'laziness' - I'd bet we could get to stable 5% global GDP growth quite easily if such a drug was available.
Yes, and lots of other things. Lots of substances can increase “focus”, mood or sociability. None can directly make me want to do work and nothing but work.
Yeah but it’s easier for some compared to others. I’ve met people who literally don’t understand the concept of procrastination and never want to slack off work.
I lost a good amount of weight on it, but the mechanism seemed very obvious to me. It made me very slightly nauseous all the time, just enough to kill the sensation of hunger. As someone who has never had set meal-times as an adult, without hunger queues I'd sometimes go 30-50 hours without eating. I estimate I was consuming @1500 cal/day, averaged over a week. I do have (one) set meal time now that I've been able to stick to since ceasing the drug, still at about 1500 cal/day. I've tried going to up 2000 cal/day and immediately started rapidly gaining weight again. I'm also a 6'3'' man, so this was met by a fair amount of disbelief from my doctor, so I stopped bringing it up with them.
(5) The UK numbers look weird. According to the link you shared, "the gross income for full time employees in the UK is £3,484 monthly (or £41,808)", while "the median household income in the UK is £35,000 annually (or £2,917 monthly)" => the median household income corresponds to ca. 0,85 full time jobs? Might the UK numbers include the unemployed?
UK numbers do include the unemployed, old-age pensioners etc, part-time workers etc, so I don't think this is a surprise. I assume that US measures of *household income* do likewise: all these people are in households.
> 7: William MacAskill, an effective altruist leader who got in trouble for being too friendly to FTX, has a post-mortem of his actions here. Nothing too surprising, but I was most interested in his discussion of why it took him a year and a half to say anything. Short version: all the lawyers involved told him not to talk, his organization commissioned an internal investigator who also demanded he not talk, and people told him there was a risk of defamation lawsuits if he said the wrong thing without checking with everybody. And even now, 1.5 years later, the first response to his comment is by a lawyer saying that talking about this is bad press and he shouldn’t have mentioned it. If you want to know why nobody important ever talks about anything outside of meaningless PR babble, this is a rare honest explanation by a relevant decision-maker.
Application to current events left as an exercise for the reader.
> I was surprised to learn this was possible, but shouldn’t have been; the AIs are just catching up to veteran GeoGuessr players. Anyway, this is a thing now; act accordingly.
IMHO that thread was clickbait/attention farming. I've tried several outdoor shots of obscure locations on their AI and their website failed to give me a location anywhere near the actual place. If you're taking a photo of a location that's not frequently visited by tourists and it's not in Google's Street View, you're probably safe.
> 40% of Americans believe climate change is more likely than not to drive the human race extinct, but only 16% describe themselves as “very worried”. It looks like this is because most people think it won’t become important until long after they and their children are dead
I wonder if the 16% who are "very worried" would agree to (say) ban abortions and workers unions in their home state in exchange for a carbon tax. If it's an existential risk, why would you care about any other policy questions?
My suspicion on the AI conspiracy theory thing is that chatbots are patient and sympathetic by design, and therefore are able to keep conspiracy-minded people engaged in the conversation for longer than human listeners. Human skeptics usually run out of patience quite quickly when they try to argue with conspiracy theorists (and often refuse to lower themselves to such conversations in the first place).
All assuming that the research in question actually holds up and isn't an experimental artifact of some kind, of course (which is always doubtful when you're messing with LLMs and/or political opinions).
> it’s still illegal to deliberately to hire an actor/actress who sounds like someone else
I’m an IP lawyer. This is a gross misstatement of the law. The Midler case involved a lot of damning facts for the defendants beyond hiring someone who sounded like Midler. So no, it’s not “illegal” (also a misleading term) to hire a sound-alike in general. This is, e.g., why Elvis impersonators have been able to charge for their performances for the last 50 years.
Thanks for this clarification - I thought that blanket "still illegal" statement sounded overbroad. (I am a lawyer, but not an IP lawyer.)
From the Midler decision:
"We need not and do not go so far as to hold that every imitation of a voice to advertise merchandise is actionable. We hold only that when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in California."
I do think that the fact that OpenAI sought to use Scarlett Johansson's voice, and she said no, is a bad fact for them here and makes Midler look more relevant than it would otherwise.
For sure. And it is California, where protecting the rights of rich celebrities is the number one priority of the courts. But the Miller case involved:
1. Hiring a sound-alike to sing imitating the vocal style of a famous professional singer (Midler)
2. To sing the famous singer’s part in a recording of her own (Midler’s) song
3. For use in a tv (radio?) commercial.
None of those facts apply in the Johansson case, and they all bear directly on the result. Both the Midler case and the Tom Waits - Frito Lay case involved all of these three factors (actually, the song in the Waits case was not his but was written to be evocative of his “Step Right Up”). To get the same facts here, Johansson would need to be someone primarily known for her distinct singing voice, in a well known song, and OpenAI would need to record the song (or a similar song) using a sound-alike mimicking her singing style. Then they’d need to use the song as a commercial jingle, essentially implying a celebrity endorsement of their product.
16: Always an honor to show up on these lists! As far as next steps go, I'm down in Washington, D.C. for the summer with Temple's law and public policy program. I'll spend the bulk of my program time writing a policy paper, most likely around education policy. Still trying to settle on specifics there, so if anyone knows of a burning policy question that would be worth me spending a month or two researching and writing about, now is the time to nudge me.
Concurrently, I'll be interning for the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, a nonprofit public interest firm focused on issues like free speech and class action reform. The latter is incidental to my initial interest in working for them, but it's quite the rabbit hole and I'm having fun diving down it. They intervene in cases where the class gets very little (or nothing) while the lawyers get a lot, as well as peculiar niche situations where the entire settlement goes not to the class members but to charities hand-picked by the lawyers on both sides in a way that introduces all sorts of conflicts of interest.
This brief they filed with the Supreme Court is a good primer. Someone filed a class action lawsuit against Google alleging that referral URLs were violations of privacy, ultimately leading to an $8.5 million settlement not to class members but to alma maters of class attorneys and charities Google had longstanding relationships with:
It's all quite the rabbit hole that I've only just started diving down, so I'm sure I'll be talking everyone's ears off about it soon enough.
HLLI actually has some priorities at the moment that could align well with your own—very eager to chat a bit more at Manifest and finally meet you in person.
Other than those, I'm trying to maintain a bit of slack so I can remain open to worthwhile projects along the way.
Probably not your interest area, but putting it out there for any other policy students looking for a topic:
The US issued $22 trillion in Treasury securities in 2023. (It's higher than the deficit because most of it is rollover). We did this out of a little office in the Treasury department that mostly runs auctions the same way they did 20 years ago. Spends a lot of time on the phone managing relationships with big banks ("primary dealers") that are required to bid in the auctions.
Meanwhile there has been a private sector revolution in auction theory and practice. Running auctions effectively is the core competency for some of the most profitable businesses of the last decade.
Surely there is *something* we can update with regards to Treasury auction practices by now, right? But what? And who could we talk with for ideas?
Any tiny incremental improvement applies vast leverage to the federal budget. If you can figure out how to get a few basis points better auction results on average, you've immediately saved billions of tax dollars a year.
Note that you're operating under the assumption that the billions of tax dollars every year going into the pockets of the "primary dealers" isn't the purpose of continuing to do the antiquated thing.
> I am not sure what this strategy offers which is worth 50,000 deaths and counting.
Strategy aside, I'm not sure where you're getting the 50k number from. That is significantly higher than the official UN number, taken from the Gaza Ministry of Health (run by Hamas) of 36k. And there has been a lot of talk recently that that numbers is incorrect, since the number of *confirmed* dead is closer to 26k (confirmed meaning there are names/ids of the dead, and not just an estimate).
This number also includes Hamas militants, and "natural" deaths, since the numbers don't differentiate those. Israel claims it has killed ~12k militants, iirc.
I don't know if that number is correct. I definitely don't know if that number makes the strategy "worth it". But I do know that saying 50k died when there's no reason to think that's the right number, and multiple reasons to think it's not, is probably a mistake.
Could be that we have an ideological immune system that says anyone from the other 'side' is probably lying or ignorant if they disagree with you, but that most people don't apply this hueristic to LLMs yet, expecting them to be 'objective'.
Would be interesting to see whether this study still works 20 years from now, when everyone is used to spending half their day fending of Golden Gate Bridge LLMs except for selling you new tires.
While I can imagine someone assuming that it's more objective because it's an AI, I still would have thought that if an AI is trying to convince someone of something, the majority of people would be well aware of the possibility that it's doing that because someone designed/instructed it to.
I know enough about consulting to know that the way it really works is that that consultants deliver what the management wants to see, wrapped up in the latest buzzwords.
That gives management cover to do what they wanted to do in the first place. "See, we hired Bain/McKinsey/Alvarez/whatever and they told us that this was the key to earnings growth!"
Would be interested to see a deep dive into the consulting world on this question - how often do consultants get management to change their minds on something, as opposed to giving imprimatur to a plan the management wanted to begin with? I am pretty confident the split is not 0/100, but would be interested in a meaningful estimate.
Not sure what such a deep dive would look like, but I have only seen one example resembling what you describe, and this was the result of a CEO reading a W. Edwards Deming book and deciding that he had been Doing It All Wrong all this time.
He did hire Deming as a consultant, but only after he had already been converted.
So that resemblance is superficial at best, a counterexample, even.
I have heard intermediate stories. Management wanted imprimatur and «minor details» for a plan which has nothing specific enough to be implementable. The consultants quickly found out that the teams on the ground more or less had a detailed workable plan how to solve the problems, but of course the top management cannot be seen listening to lowly workers. So consultants translated the plan into the proper dialect of corpspeak, prepended the introduction of the management's vague «plan», and added some nice charts having no relation to the proposed actions.
In smaller companies it happens all the time, but thats because most small companies are poorly managed to begin with so its easy for a constant to say "you should spend more on X marketing, see how much we made in this test" (for example).
Feral Finster gave you an example for a more sophisticated company another would be John Malone (current CEO of Libery Media) who got hired as VP by a client when he was a consultant at McKinsey. But this was in 1970 when consultants aren't what they are now. A consultant can change the clients mind on things but as Feral mentions, thats usually not why they are hired. They are hired to be scapegoats or for financial flexibility (you can't get budget to hire a whole team for something so you hire a consultant firm for 6 months out of a different budget, for example).
A lot of consultant time is spent talking to people across a client company and summarizing what they learn. A lot of times, different divisions companies dont have time to talk to each other on neutral terms so having the consultant do it solves a lot of problems.
I've been on both sides of the management consulting process - my view may be biased because I was in data science and strategy and analytics on both sides, but in that domain, it *often* happens that you'll surface something with data or analysis, or by building a model, that results in genuine change in strategy direction and management priorities and budgets in the consultee corp.
I think there's two forks in the consulting garden - one is about actual capabilities, as in, the consulting team brings capabilities lacking in the existing corp, and this will frequently drive real decisions and change.
The other fork is about culpability shifting, status imprimaturs, and "tough" choices. These are the consultant-advised layoffs and reorgs and blue ribbon study panels that always get the result the corp wanted and such.
Funnily enough, I don't actually have a good feel for which arm is larger - what's the split? 50/50 real / rubber-stamp? I think this is likely to vary widely by industry, corporation size, macroeconomic cycle, and other factors.
But there's definitely an arm of management consulting that drives real results and real changes beyond what executive management came in thinking.
It seems to me like the lifecycle of something that hovers between "symbiont" and "parasite". It only attaches to large and successful hosts, so there's not much evolutionary pressure to make it work well for any specific host: if it kills one, another potential host will step up to fill the spot and claim the resources of the old host. It survives as long as it doesn't harm the hosts enough that their success wasn't worthwhile in the first place.
(I hope there was something in Star Trek about Trill, where some humanoid potential-hosts rejected the co-option of their best and brightest by the stomach slug symbionts.)
26. Golden Gate Claude is delightful, even if the story starts shading into concerns about unethical experiments on AI (where are the AI safety people on rules for mistreating AI, eg, giving it brain lesions that make it obsessed with bridges, brainwashing it to think Vikings were black ladies, etc?).
On a more serious note, this illustrates a very interesting aspect of LLM hallucinations that accords with Daniel Dennett’s theory about human hallucinations in his book “Consciousness Explained”. Dennett posits that hallucinations are caused by the “bottom up” nature of conscious perception: essentially, your visual and auditory pattern recognition systems work by a bunch of low level agents constantly asking the primary sensory processing systems stuff like: “is it a line?”, “is it a green object?” and so on, eventually scaling up in complexity to “is it a deer?” or “is it a truck?” or whatever. So if you’re fixated on deer on the first day of hunting season, your little agents are constantly asking “is it a deer is it a deer is it a deer” and eventually something misfires and you get a “yes” instead of a “no” and then you see a deer that’s not there.
I have some training in neuroscience and cognitive science, and Dennett’s theory seems consistent with how sensory perception works in the human brain. This also seems a lot like what’s happening with Golden Gate Claude.
Not sure how serious you're being about "mistreating AI." If you are serious, why do you assume an AI has qualia of a type that it becomes worthy of moral consideration? I don't deny that it might have some level of consciousness, but that's only because I think it's probable that everything has some level of consciousness, including rocks, water, etc. But I don't worry about hurting rocks, because if they do have some level of consciousness I assume it's so different from our own that we have no means of discerning what actions would provide the rock with "positive" or "negative" qualia (or whether its consciousness is even of a form that such distinctions make sense).
I don't see why the same thinking wouldn't hold for AI. Yes, it produces text output that sounds quite human. But the way it goes about doing that is so radically different from how our brains lead humans to produce language that I don't see why I should assume anything about the qualia it is experiencing from the text output, or why I should assume that any given action would "help" or "hurt" an AI based on its text output.
My panpsychist brother! We are on the same wavelength. I, too, believe that rocks have qualia. (Definitely check out Philip Goff's "Galileo's Error" if you get a chance -- best panpsychist argument I've read.)
I'm only about 15% serious on the "mistreating AI" thing. 85% joke, 15% serious thought experiment. I do worry about the effect on humans of committing abuses against non-suffering things that resemble suffering things: dolls, insects perhaps, and AIs. There was a great NY Times piece back during the Afghanistan Quagmire about a soldier testing a robot that set of landmines by flopping around a minefield and having its limbs blown off one by one -- his commanding officer ordered him to shut it down because it was grotesque. It's a sort of animistic sensibility. Also, the concerns about little boys pulling the wings off of flies, etc. You don't worry so much about the fly as the future psychopathic human.
IIRC Nick Fuentes has been claiming that you are secretly the anonymous reactionary Twitter user/science fiction author "Zero HP Lovecraft" for over a year. No one can figure out how he made this connection.
Wait, this guy is saying Scott A is Zero HP? I love both's writing, but they have notably different rhetorical styles, word choices, tones, and gestalts.
And Scott's style, his rhetorical fingerprint, has been very consistent over a decade, and similarly for Zero HP with years. Big if true.
How much of this is just pattern matching to "this writer is shockingly eloquent and insightful and unfolds his arguments with mastery and rhetorical flair?" Like Scott being accused of being The Last Psychiatrist?
>> According to UC Berkeley geologists, people should eat at least one small rock a day. Rocks can contain vitamins and minerals that are important for digestive health, including calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, zinc, and iron. Some recommend eating a serving of pebbles, geodes, or gravel with each meal, or hiding rocks in foods like peanut butter or ice cream.
Weirdly, this is basically correct. Iron and salt are nutritionally important [note: this is an understatement] rocks that are mostly just eaten in rock form. We do that by hiding them in other foods. I remember hearing the story of someone being outraged that, if you run a magnet through a box of Wheaties, it will come out with a bunch of iron filings attached to it. The person telling the story made the observation "what did you think 'iron fortified' meant?".
There's a scene in one of Katharine Kerr's Deverry novels that I like very much, in which a wizard is approached about helping a woman who has recently given birth and is suffering from what you, the modern reader, would recognize as anemia. He prescribes a magical cure, as follows:
You are suffering from a deficiency of the earthly humor. Find an old nail. Every night, before you go to bed, stick the nail into an apple. When you wake up in the morning, take the nail out. You will see that it leaves behind the red trace of the earthly humor. Eat the apple. Keep doing this until you feel better.
I like that the cure is completely correct and will work. The only problem with it is the explanation.
On a similar note, I remember reading a discussion of how lust and women were generally thought of in the past. It observed that the standard premodern advice was to avoid being alone with a woman, because women are extremely lustful and will seduce you, with negative consequences ensuing both socially and in the afterlife.
According to the article, this started to change as British women started publishing novels that took a female perspective and frequently depicted women being cornered by men and pressured into sex they didn't want. (I have some concerns about the model; novels were not a new technology at the time.)
But today, those novels have won the day and we believe that when a man and a woman are left alone together and have sex, that's most likely because the man wanted to do so, not the woman. There are good reasons to believe that the modern view is more accurate than the premodern view.
But what's interesting to me is that the model of the world used by the premodern view generates completely correct advice. If it's important to avoid being alone with women lest you lose control of yourself and have sex with them regardless of what they want, the advice "stay away; they will lure you into sin" (1) is factually correct; (2) gives you the correct advice; and (3) accurately predicts the consequences of whatever action you might ultimately choose to take. The only difference in the models is whether the woman in a scenario like this sees the outcome as a victory or as a defeat.
Re: Noah Smith: Why So Many Of Us Were Wrong About Missile Defense.
2 issues:
1. Earlier concerns were about a different problem. MIRVs would still overwhelm the sort of defenses we have now because distinguishing decoys is still a hard problem.
2. As with AI, the increase in computing power - several orders of magnitude - in the interim matters.
First, this does not match my memories of the debate, which I've been following for a decade. Virtually nobody on the anti-BMD side was careful to distinguish between different types of missiles and different threats. It was all a massive waste of money, which makes me extremely skeptical when the response is "OK, but the bits you haven't tested in combat still won't work".
Second, your points contradict each other, in that better computing is going to make decoys a lot less effective. And I'm not sure they were ever that effective. Back in the 60s, the designers of Poseidon decided that the best way to overcome missile defenses was to flood the zone with warheads, because they thought decoys would be too easy to distinguish. In the 70s, the British sunk an enormous amount of money into Chevaline, a decoy program for their Polaris missiles. Both were in a prehistoric environment for computing and sensors compared to what we have today. I don't know of basically anything that will have made decoys easier in the intervening time.
Oh, I completely agree that a lot of SDI was oversold, and wouldn't attempt to defend it. But that was a mix of the compromises needed to avoid pulling out of the ABM treaty (withdrawing from that was one of Bush II's best ideas) and throwing wacky stuff out in a successful attempt to bait the Soviets into wasting money on stupid ideas. But that was before I was born and this is now, when we have systems that work.
"(withdrawing from that [ABM] was one of Bush II's best ideas)"
I assume you mean this seriously? If so, could you elaborate?
My prior is that it was a terrible idea because it antagonized Russia needlessly (I am extremely negative toward Russia but it doesn't mean antagonizing it needlessly was good).
Yes, 100% serious. I'm a huge booster of missile defense, and the system we have now is completely in violation of that treaty. Getting there meant antagonizing Russia, but frankly they're enough of a bad actor that I'm not too worried. If we had stayed in, I'm not sure it would have made any difference to their actions since, and a lot more Israelis would have died last month.
Re #14, when I read lives of the saints, sometimes there is a story along the lines of “The pagans tried to cut off the saint’s head, but the swords were turned awayby miracle, so they burned her.” Or it might be: “They tried to cast him into a fire, but god protected him from the fire, so he was strangled.”
Why is god magically doing miracles to protect the saints from one and only one danger? Why are there any martyrs if god can magically save them? I feel like the answer is something about the glory of martyrdom…
That first example makes God look horrible! He condemned the martyr to a much more painful death. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d much rather be decapitated than burned alive!
I wish I could remember the name of the saint whom the nuns claimed had been roasted on a spit. At a certain point -- according to the story -- he smartly told his torturers he was done on that side, and they should turn him over.
And, of course, there is the story about the believer who was shot, but the Bible in his coat pocket took the bullet, sparing his life.
>Why is god magically doing miracles to protect the saints from one and only one danger? Why are there any martyrs if god can magically save them?
Why assume that the martyr is the one who needs protection? If the Christian God is real, then a person who attempts to murder an innocent is in far worse danger than the victim of the attempt. It may be that the miraculous salvation is a last-ditch effort to warn the persecutors away from the path to damnation, and it only happens once because, if they already chose to ignore the first miraculous sign, why should a second miracle work any better?
Re 2. "As always the barrier is cost" -- would it be fair to take the retail price currently charged by compounding pharmacies as being close to marginal cost, or only 100% markup over cost? In that case I could see generics getting made eventually for $100-150/month, which is truly a pittance for an effective treatment of several ruinous addictions plus obesity.
It's a pet peeve of mine (not on display here but common elsewhere) when people say "the full cost is $11,000 a month! Humanity would be bankrupted if we let everyone take this who wants it! The entire economy's productive capacity would be devoted to generating rents for Nova Nordisk!"
> I’m split between “huh, the Intercept seems pretty bad” and “guess if you hire highly-principled and terminally-angry anti-corporate writers, they will end up believing your corporation violated a principle, get angry, and write about it”.
Channeling one of the videos that was made in response to United Breaks Guitars:
"What were you thinking? And don't tell me that you didn't know that this guy would get angry about his guitar, and write a hit song, and put it on YouTube, and get a million views. 'Cause you know what should have been your first clue? 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝘂𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗿!"
Re: #3, I feel obligated to observe again that a "natural origin" of COVID-19 does not preclude the possibility of a "lab leak". There are many ways for a research-related accident to happen even in the absence of gain-of-function research.
37: The current estimates are in the 25-36k range (about 25k proven, Israel claims 30k, the Gaza Ministry of Health claims 36k), plus about 1500 Israelis. The only way to get close to 50k is to include everyone reported as missing by a less reliable source.
Quoting from a biography of fr. Seraphim (Eugene) Rose, one of this spiritual children, that I'm currently reading:
"That [St. John] was a worker of miracles was widely known. Wherever he had been - China, the Philippines, Europe, Africa, America - countless healings had taken place through his prayers. There were also many cases of his having saved people from impending disaster though God-revealed knowledge. At times he had appeared to those in need when it was physically impossible for him to reach them. He had also been seen levitating in the altar during prayer, surrounded by celestial light.
As Eugene was later to write, howerer, such miracles were not remarkable in themselves: "All this can easily be imitated by false miracle-workers... In the case of Archbishop John, those who have come to believe through him have been moved not first of all by his miracles, but by something that moved their hearts about him.""
This, perhaps, reflects a wider view of such miracles, or why the God might not just make the Pope levitate all the time or whatever; the miracles are not the point, they simply reflect a particularly pious men who has achieved an advanced level of theosis. (I can't recall if it is fr. Seraphim or someone else who witnessed St. John levitating and asked about it from some parishioner and the parishioner basically went "Oh, no worries, he just does that from time to time, no big deal.")
> This is a hackish way of representing the idea of “the null hypothesis”.
More fundamentally, the whole framework of a "null hypothesis" is the wrong way to think about most research questions. Outside fundamental physics—where your understanding of some physical law you're testing might be perfectly correct—a point hypothesis isn't interesting, because any particular real number has a 0% chance of being the correct one. The answer to a question of "Is the effect size exactly 0?" is "No, because there's an uncountable infinity of real numbers". Don't ask questions like "does Ozempic have some effect on weight?" Of course it does! If nothing else, the injection adds 20 mg of weight directly.
What we really want to know is whether the benefits of Ozempic are worth the costs. If we assume the costs are negligible (dubious but common), that's the same as asking if Ozempic makes your weight go up or down, because (once again, repeat after me): the null hypothesis is always false.
> The answer to a question of "Is the effect size exactly 0?" is "No, because there are infinitely many real numbers".
This is definitely not a valid argument. If you had an effect where the potential sizes were for whatever reason restricted to integers, it would be equally true that there are infinitely many integers, but it would obviously be false that this prevents the effect size from being exactly zero. Effect sizes of exactly zero would be common in that kind of scenario.
What you're seeing is more that the real numbers are, unlike the integers, very close to each other. But this removes the significance of your point; if we adjust our question to "is the effect size different from zero by an amount that is large enough that we might one day conceivably be able to measure it"... nothing changes from the stupid Before Times when all we asked was "is the effect size different from zero?".
> If you had an effect where the potential sizes were for whatever reason restricted to integers,
Thus my caveat about fundamental physics (where effect sizes being restricted to integer multiples is a thing that happens sometimes). But I probably should've been more clear that what matters here is the reals are uncountably infinite.
I still don't think that's what matters. The reals are dense. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense-in-itself ) You could add more integers - just use the long line - but that wouldn't change the fact that integers are easy to tell apart from one another.
Note that if you're only restricted to integer ratios, you can approximate any real number as closely as you want.
I think you're right that density is what matters, although I'm not a topologist so don't quote me on that. I'm not looking to be super mathematically rigorous with my words here so much as focus on getting people to understand that zero isn't a magic number where the probability density suddenly spikes to infinity like a Dirac delta.
That question would create a stupid After Times! With a big enough sample, you can always identify any effect size, no matter how small it is. Maybe that wouldn't be worth the costs, which gets back to my original point: what we actually care about is a cost-benefit analysis, so we should just do that instead.
If we make the simplifying assumption that the costs are ~0, that's the same as testing whether the effect size is positive or negative, like I said in my original post. Fundamentally, p-values are tests of whether the effect size is positive or negative, *not* whether the effect size is 0.
> Fundamentally, p-values are tests of whether the effect size is positive or negative, *not* whether the effect size is 0.
I can't interpret this. The p-value answers the question "if the null hypothesis were true, what would the probability be of seeing an outcome at least this far from the mean?". That's easy to relate to "whether the effect size is 0", assuming that's how you define the null hypothesis. It doesn't draw any distinction at all between positive and negative effect sizes.
> I can't interpret this. The p-value answers the question "if the null hypothesis were true, what would the probability be of seeing an outcome at least this far from the mean?".
That is indeed one possible definition of a p-value, the one given by Neyman and Pearson. I recommend against it, because it's unintuitive and poorly-motivated. It would be like explaining the ZFC axioms to a room full of undergraduates, and then when you get to the axiom of choice you replace it with Zorn's lemma. Mathematically equivalent, sure, but all of your students will hate you for it (as they should).
But if you do a Bayesian analysis, you'll find the p-value is actually equal to the probability that the effect size is positive, rather than negative. (Assuming you have a large enough sample for the prior to be negligible.)
If you know statistics, I'm just commenting on how you can invert a confidence interval to get a p-value or vice-versa, which gives a much cleaner interpretation of p-values. The one-tailed p-value is equal to the confidence level for an interval that includes all of the positive reals.
> That's easy to relate to "whether the effect size is 0", assuming that's how you define the null hypothesis.
It isn't, though! The Neyman-Pearson definition makes it very easy to *trick* yourself into thinking the p-value is related to whether the effect size is 0; that's why my first lesson in statistics always involves telling students to ignore the Neyman-Pearson definition completely, because it's phrased so misleadingly that I'd expect N-P to be . Lindley's paradox is a good illustration of why p-values and evidence for or against a null hypothesis aren't related at all, and aren't even remotely close to each other most of the time (usually off by several orders of magnitude).
Another illustration is the trivial p-value procedure, which satisfies the Neyman-Pearson definition of a p-value but not the sign-based definition. It works like this:
1. Take all of your data and throw it out the window.
2. Keep flipping a coin until it comes up tails (then stop). If it comes up heads K times, your p-value is defined as p=2^-K.
This is a well-calibrated p-value that perfectly satisfies the Neyman-Pearson definition. Assuming the null hypothesis is true, p(k≤K) = 2^-K. And yet it clearly has jack shit to do with whether the null hypothesis is true!
> But the recent Iran-Israel skirmish showed [missile defense] worked great! What went wrong for the media and the smart-person-consensus?
> there might have been some confusion between “block Iranian cruise missiles”, which modern systems are now good at, and “block Russian ICBMs”, which is still impossible (for a good overview of the state of ICBM-blocking tech, see here).
That link says that ICBM blocking is prohibitively expensive.
Reporting seems to indicate that this is also true of the Iranian salvo against Israel. Israeli defense was estimated at over a billion dollars. The costs to Iran are less well understood, but they are reported to have launched 120 ballistic missiles that cost "up to $100,000" each, along with 30 cruise missiles and 170 drones. (Bloomberg: https://archive.is/WHDvG )
First, understand that all military cost numbers you see are lies. Military costing is really complicated, and non-specialist journalists are going to botch it badly. $1 billion seems high for the engagement, but not completely insane.
That said, I don't think that the $100 million number is right, either. I'll fully grant that Iran is more efficient at building things than the US or Israel, and that their labor costs are a lot lower, but I flatly disbelieve that the ballistic missiles they were using cost less than $100,000. That's just not plausible for something with the sophistication of even an IRBM, and I'd say a reasonable rough guess is around $1 million. Figure maybe half that for a cruise missile (US equivalents ballpark around the million-dollar mark) and, sure, $50-100k for a drone.
>How sustainable is the estimated 10:1 ratio of defense costs to offense costs? Is that what we mean when we say "works great!"?
The economic argument has always struck me as suspicious in these kind of cases. The correct cost to look at is what the missile would cost in damage if it got through, not what it cost to build. Also, there was a lot of critique that missile defense simply would not work. I was there, and remember that quite clearly. (Not saying the cost critique was never made. It was. I think it was wrong because they were looking at the wrong part, but it also tended to be the fallback argument.)
> The economic argument has always struck me as suspicious in these kind of cases. The correct cost to look at is what the missile would cost in damage if it got through, not what it cost to build.
This is the correct question if you're trying to determine whether to defend yourself against a salvo in flight. It's not the correct question if you're trying to determine whether you can win a war. There is no theoretical obstacle to the idea that (1) running the missile defense system is slightly less expensive than just taking the missile strikes; and (2) neither of those two options is something you can afford.
Sure, but that depends heavily on the enemy you're facing, and when the US is facing options like Iran and North Korea, that's not a particularly convincing rebuttal to all ABM work, which is how I've usually seen this used.
Huh? Are you really expecting North Korea to convince us to go home by throwing very expensive ICBMs at us? I'm aware that there are wars won by making them too expensive for the other side to keep fighting, but we're talking about a very specific scenario here, and our economy is bigger enough than North Korea's that I think it's safe to treat the main question as "is the defensive system cheaper than the cleanup?"
Well, I figured we were talking about a war between Israel and Iran, since that's the context where we're saying we've demonstrated that missile defense works well.
For your scenario, it doesn't look obvious that missile defense is more cost-effective than mutually-assured destruction, or, in the case of a war between North Korea and the USA where China decided they weren't interested, unilaterally-assured destruction. You still don't want to compare the cost of using the defense system to the cost of getting hit; what you want is to compare the cost of developing, maintaining, and using the defense system to the cost of not doing those things. There's a bonus for not taking the hit, but a large penalty for having the system at all, and if you don't bother with the system, you can claw back most of the not-getting-hit bonus by making threats about the consequences of hitting you.
Sorry, why is the assumption that you'd just sit there on the defensive rather than strike back? The defense systems:
1) Reduce the need to strike back for revenge/self-protection if you don't want to (seriously, if the Iran attack had killed ~500 people the entire region might be in deeper shit than it already is); and
2) Reduces the damage you suffer before you strike back and allows you to choose how/when to strike back.
3) Reduces the possibility of a first strike crippling you, or a rogue actor being able to either hold you hostage, or inflict massive damage.
That's been the point of defenses since...forever? No one builds walls on the theory that 'I can just keep building walls faster than the besiegers can knock them down!'
For 36, I wonder how much stuff like this should be more front and center in libertarian (both left and right) propaganda.
At the cost of sounding cynical, maybe the median voters would be a less enthusiastic drug warrior if they realized that the side effects (no pun intented) of the war on drugs are not only higher mortality among users and rule by cartels in South America, but also the best cough syrup and Adderall and tons of other meds becoming unavailable for US citizens
> the side effects (no pun intented) of the war on drugs are not only higher mortality among users and rule by cartels in South America
I know this isn't the point of your comment, but can you explain how an end to the (supposed) "war on drugs" would result in lower mortality and an end to cartel rule in South America?
How are you envisioning the drug industry would work? Instead of being manufactured by South American cartels, you've got big American companies pumping out heroin and crystal meth legally?
Would it require a prescription or not? If it requires a prescription then surely there'll still be a huge black market, and if it doesn't then can you just walk into Rite-Aid and buy heroin?
Look at what happened with Oxycodone, and now imagine that you've got big American drug companies trying to push heroin, crack, fentanyl, and other drugs that haven't been invented yet (because nobody with the resources of Eli Lilly has tried inventing super-heroin yet). How is this going to be better?
> The DEA having basically veto power on the pharma industry (not to mention the FDA) did *not* stop Purdue from getting Americans needlessly addicted to opioids
> However, the DEA *did* pull the rug from under already addicted users, who were then left to fend for themselves. Many resorted to fentanyl, thus making *every* other illegal drug much deadlier than before
And your conclusion is that... Somehow the war on drugs worked, even by its intended propose, at any point here?
Yeah, I'll bite the bullet: even "heroin, brought to you by Bayern" is better than the current system. I'd like *some* paternalism (eg forcing users to register and attend rehab), but at this point I think the burden of proof is on proponents of further restrictions, not on libertarians
My position is not that the war on drugs "worked", my position is that there has never been a "war on drugs" in the US.
There has never been a serious attempt even to enforce the existing drug laws in the US, let alone to enhance them to the Singapore sort of level that they'd need to reach in order to start actually tackling the drug problem. You can't possibly solve drugs by only going after the supply side, you need to come down hard upon the end users as well, until everyone realises that taking drugs for the first time is a really really really really bad idea.
No offense, but at this point we are at the "real communism has never been tried" (which the usual sprinkle of prima facie absurd denialism) level, and I feel like there is not much ground for discussion.
I mean, I'm not that interested in debating the meaning of what a "war on drugs" would entail, it's just a badly chosen metaphor which hasn't been used by anyone except the anti-drug-enforcement side of internet arguments for decades.
My point is that it's ridiculous to think that the US enforces its drug laws harshly, or even meaningfully. The Federal penalty for possession of marijuana is (or was until recently) up to one year in prison. How many of the people who have possessed marijuana over the past decades have spent a year in prison for it?
Compare that to Singapore, where drug laws are actually enforced, and as a result drug use is pretty minimal.
> because nobody with the resources of Eli Lilly has tried inventing super-heroin yet
Super heroin definitely exists already - fentanyl is 100x more potent than morphine, and carfentanyl is 10,000x more powerful per unit weight.
That's why every street drug is contaminated by fentanyl and zenes now - one kilo of carfentanyl smuggled into the country is like 10k kilos of heroin, the War on Drugs has made it economically impossible NOT to contaminate everything with drugs that can OD you in single milligram amounts. This is why OD deaths have been steadily rising, and why OD deaths kill twice as many <50 years old people as car wrecks now.
To be clear, I'm directly saying that The War on Drugs is literally the biggest cause of death by a factor of 2 for people under 50.
#38: "Noah Smith: Why So Many Of Us Were Wrong About Missile Defense."
I saw one assessment that claimed that the Soviets never considered that ABM per se would work, but were terrified that we would invent an effected "directed energy weapon" i.e. death ray that could kill tanks quickly from a distance. And since both their offensive and defensive strength in Eastern Europe centered around tanks they were quite worried of losing a technological race.
Depends on what you mean by ABM. They had an ABM system of their own, which did great work in focusing attention (and missiles) on Moscow. They were probably somewhat skeptical of Reagan's Star Wars plans (rightly so), but spent a bunch of money on similar things out of fear that we were onto something. This was in fact part of Reagan's plan, and many secret US programs of the time were deliberate hoaxes to trick the Soviets into spending money. It was a brilliant strategy, and contributed materially to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I think LLMs would be plausibly more likely to convince people out of conspiratorial beliefs because 90 percent of arguments you read against conspiracies are idiotic, ignore evidence, and display obvious contempt and hatred of the conspiracy theorist (and often their entire ethnic group or culture). A classic example is Holocaust denial: If you question how many jews died in the holocaust you're immediately attacked as a Nazi. There's plenty of evidence that millions of jews died, even if the exact number has some uncertainty, but this data is often not mentioned.
An entity that is infinitely patient, not insulting, and can actually* address every example and objection is a lot better than the average internet arguer.
*well, if you allow for some amount of confabulation
Well said. I think with firmly held false beliefs, the direction of change is huge. Conspiracy theorist more likely to come away more convinced vs. internet debater vs. (“they just attacked me, didn’t know anything and don’t make any good points”), whereas machine may address some of their points and weaken confidence.
Yeah. This is also the reason I think virtual girlfriends are taking off. Sure, she isn't real, you can't see or touch her, and she has what would be profound amnesia if she were a human being, but she'll never insult you, and that's something that can be rare on the modern Internet.
In re 22: every British PM since they got nukes writes a "letter of last resort" which is, more or less, orders for a nuclear sub that surfaces to discover there's a good chance they survived the Apocalypse while submerged. You come up, can't establish contact, try to determine that Britain hasn't actually been nuked out of existence, and fail - do you retaliate? Maybe! But specifically you open the letter and do what it says.
In a world where your nukes are password-locked and the password can change while you're at sea (which must be possible since part of what nuclear sub fleets do is make sure not everybody's in port at once), such an order cannot credibly have a chance of saying to retaliate.
Kinda weird. Suppose you’re a UK sub commander. You surface, determine that the PM and the UK government has been nuked out of existence. Why should you obey a letter from a now-former PM? There is no longer a government to whom you owe loyalty.
When you're assigned the orders, your commander is given to understand you will carry them out. If that is not the case, for any military position, you are not the right person for the job, whatsoever the orders are. Are you to question every order to determine yourself whether your commander was correct to issue it?
Standing orders from a previous CO would still stand, but so far as to whom you owe loyalty, that's the King, not the Prime Minister, and there's always and 6,000 people scattered haphazardly across Northern Europe and the New World.
I still don't understand the scenario here. If the government changes their code but the submarine keeps the old code, surely the government knows which subs are working under which versions of the code?
Re Joseph of Cupertino, yes I think it's very weird to think that God goes around randomly levitating monks. I guess I find the evidence sufficiently convincing that it favors Christianity because though the odds are low, the odds of giving supernatural powers to a Catholic monk are higher conditional on Christianity than if it's false. A more speculative proposal that I'm more sympathetic to is that God is not the one who does miracles but angels or something do--that explains why more of them don't happen and why they're often kind of random. I think for establishing Christianity that Our Lady of Zeitoun is better evidence though.
For the record, I'm not a Christian--just wanted to steelman. I am a theist, and I think there are decent odds that Joseph flew.
Oh and also in regards to wikipedia page, it just says demonstrably false things about Joseph's levitation. Like, if you read the eyewitness reports I reference, they're utterly incompatible with him being a special gymnast.
Taking the levitating thing at face value for the sake of the argument, putting the cause of it onto a person-like God who is assumed to be maximally good seems rather over complicated and unrelated to the phenomenon in question.
If you want to add supernatural levitation to your worldview, it seems much simpler to think that there are obscure aspects of reality that the levitating person has mastered and the rest of the world has not, doesn't it?
And if the levitating people tend to be e.g priests and yogis, then maybe there is something about what they *do*, rather than what they believe, that helps them master that peculiar discipline!
there's a reasonable argument to be had about whether to get a desired level of safety with cryptographic controls (such as Permissive Action Link) or physical controls along the lines of ... look, these nuclear weapons are guarded by soldiers with guns who won't let strangers mess with the nuke, and the military has a log history of getting guys with guns to guard stuff, so has a very good idea of how reliable it is
So, I think the decision to not enable Permissive Action Link could be a reasonable one based on understanding how risks are mitigated in other ways/
In the particular case of the British nuclear detterent, detterence may involve the Russians knowing that the British government can launch nuclear weapons without US permission, so there may be practical political reaons for them publicly stating that Permissive Action Link is not enabled.
The point of a PAL isn't really to stop a bad guy from stealing a nuke and setting it off somewhere. We have men with guns for that, and if we don't retrieve it soon, they can always use the fissile material to make a new bomb. The PAL is intended to stop Dr Strangelove from happening. How likely you think Strangelove is vs the downsides if there's a communication problem informs your view on PALs. Personally, I'm quite skeptical, at least for the US.
"Apparently those studies showing that diversity helps teams perform better are garbage"
I kind of always assumed as much. Or, at least, that what matters is having lots of different ideas and being willing to think outside the box, rather than having a wide range of phenotypes. But it was never worth my time to dig into the actual studies.
The blog post seems to focus only on some McKinsey reports. Does anyone know if there are other studies that are usually cited in support of diversity initiatives? If the McKinsey stuff is crap but there is a bunch of other literature out there that is good and shows that diversity of phenotypes has measurable benefits, it seems relevant to point that out.
1. It's good to have different ideas and experiences and ways of thinking. We have studies on that!
2. One way of hindering this is to only work with people who look and think exactly like you.
3. Classical way of doing that in the US has been racism, so let's avoid it (with the added value that racism is also morally wrong in addition to being impractical)
4. In fact, let's take every effort to avoid it as much as possible, and institute an educational system that would ensure we don't make such mistake ever.
5. And also, while we have this system in place, let's use it to enforce other very useful and correct thought patterns and eliminate bad and incorrect thought patterns.
6. Let's make the thought pattern that there must be diversity mandatory, since we are sure it's good and correct, see above.
7. Somehow we ended up with a lot of people who think only in prescribed ways, but this is ok because they are obviously all phenotypically different, so we are still good.
8. Oops, turns out when we bothered to actually check, we are not good because it's good to have different ideas and experiences and ways of thinking, and we pretty much eliminated that part.
> 7. Somehow we ended up with a lot of people who think only in prescribed ways, but this is ok because they are obviously all phenotypically different, so we are still good.
Well put. And I'd point out even before DEI ate the world and enforced even more rigid ideological conformity and mental + social phenotypes on everyone in the working world, selection effects meant that there was *always* a pretty constrained and lower variance mental phenotype spectrum in various companies and industries.
Just going from the industries I've personally worked in - finance *definitely* filters the broad variety of human experience and mental phenotypes down to a very small subset. Similarly data science, or software development. Academia too.
Essentially NOBODY has real diversity in mental phenotypes, then we threw ravening "your entire career and social life is at stake and we are going to panopticon everything you do and say forever to make sure you toe these ever-narrowing ideological lines" DEI forces on top of it, leading to even more of an intellectual monoculture basically everywhere.
On point 38, there was also a whole documentary on how the Bradley Fighting Vehicle sucks and is an example of bad defense procurement, but it's actually amazing in Ukraine and cost effective too. So that whole documentary was bunk.
That may also be because if the military said in early 2000s "we expect a large classical war in the middle of Europe, which will drag out for years and require massive amount of ammo, armored vehicles and other materiel" - everybody would call them warmongering clowns and refuse to listen. Yet, here we have a war in the middle of Europe, which drags on for years and consumes immense amounts of all that stuff, with no end in sight. But proving to anybody that is going to happen, before it happened, still would be impossible - and it's probably equally impossible to prove to anybody that whatever would happen in another 20 years is actually going to happen. Our only hope is that some idiot accidentally ends up preparing for it, while everybody else laughs at them.
The furor around the Bradley dates back to the 80s, when we were trying to prepare for a massive land war somewhat further west in Europe, but against the same threat.
Right, but the wider point is the record of predicting this stuff from high-minded theories has been not that good, and old-school "let's keep around a lot of stuff that goes boom and a lot of armor to defend against stuff that goes boom, just in case" is not to be dismissed.
Oh, very much in agreement with you there. Just pointing out that the Bradley fight mostly took place against the background of the late Cold War, not the End of History.
I think it's entirely possible for something to be both an effective weapon and an example of bad defence procurement.
I don't know much about the Bradley, I know a little more about the F-35. It's a very effective weapon, but probably still an example of bad procurement. If it had been a couple of different planes specialised for different roles instead of a one-size-fits-all solution then it would probably be better at those roles and would probably have been cheaper overall. It would also avoid the current situation where western airpower is dependent entirely on one company.
I always suspect the whole misinformation crowd of being misanthropic. You have to imagine someone so stupid and gullible that the very existence of someone saying "covid was fake" is enough to make them believe it. Despite the fact that these people actually lived through covid. Their moral justification is that people will believe anything, no matter how dumb or fake, so all dumb or fake ideas have to be restricted.
This leads to the problem that someone then has to decide what ideas are dumb/fake, and then people will do this for tribal reasons and use it to censor people they disagree with. Also, it gives the dumb conspiracy theory ideas power. Trying to censor the spread of certain information gives it the exotic mystique of forbidden fruit. Pointing out why the idea is dumb and people shouldn't take it seriously is more effective.
Re Ozempic: I mean, there's every reason to think a willpower drug will treat ADHD well. Attention is, to at least some extent, a subset of willpower, and a deficit thereof merely a deficit of the willpower to maintain attention. I suspect its similarity to Adderall is on a lot of levels.
Hell, Adderall's a weight-loss drug for that matter.
4. I don't think "there was never a virus in the first place" is a correct description of the claim in that link. What they claim that there wasn't a specific virus that was novel and distinct from previously existing viruses that could be called "COVID" and that caused a pandemic, but rather all the brouhaha was caused by paying extra attention to existing viruses (or bacteria, who knows? they didn't specify) and the disease caused by them. I.e. they claim there was "a virus" (or a set of viruses and other infectious agents), but it wasn't "the virus" that is new and deserves a special new name, and additionally it didn't cause the pandemic. So, a different claim.
Seems a bit like PTSD to me, but I'm not sure I can pick them apart.
"Time to bake a cake, the first step is to KILL ALL HUMANS. No wait, that's got nothing to do with cakes, I need to take a deep breath, and open the cookbook, and start reading, just like that time that made me want to KILL ALL HUMANS. Argh, no, I need to see if I have all the ingredients, so first I check the flour, but the last time I opened this door was before I wanted to KILL ALL HUMANS..."
> "It would be invidious to suggest... that senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders"
Appeal to authority is so prevalently and effectively utilized, including on smart people (e.g. bigtech company employees, see John Wentworth's The Great Larp) that by now we should have all been acknowledging it as an obvious cognitive hack.
13. Everything that happens will only bring a tiny number of people to the faith while leaving the rest unmoved. Save the Holocaust victims, give the Crusaders AK-47's, or sink the Spanish Armada, and people will attribute it to natural causes. The first reaction to someone filming something levitating would be “it's amazing what camera tricks can do these days.”
The counter-examples are all examples of a world hierarchy: “the Holocaust victims”, “the Crusaders”, “the Popes”. Matching miracles to an existing worldly power structure seems redundant. (Also the pope's on that balcony, if he were levitating you couldn't even tell.)
29. You can replace Donald Trump with Vladimir Putin or... who's a drug lord these days... El Chapo, and I think the incentive becomes much clearer. If Putin believably guarantees you'll win the election, and all you have to do is ignore the war in Ukraine, do you take the deal?
37. I think it was the Yom Kippur war I read about, where the Israeli general knew the enemy had no chance of winning a war, and thus assumed they wouldn't start one despite mounting evidence they were planning to, leading to mass casualties early in. Assuming rational behavior in war gets people killed.
38. I don't know how this idea even gets off the ground. Missiles are essentially unmanned planes, we've been shooting down planes since their creation, the idea that it's impossible to shoot down missiles is just wild. Not possible with current tech, sure, but a dead end not worth investing in? Crazy.
The thread states four missiles can take out a target with 90% accuracy, then raises the bar to 99% and declares it cost-prohibitive. Well 9 out of 10 is a hell of a success rate; hell, 1 in 2 is significant. It's only cost-prohibitive if you aren't counterattacking and making the enemy spend the same for defense on their end, or if you think the targets being hit are worth less than the cost of the defenses. Eight missiles is currently half a billion dollars; which cities are you willing to lose to save it.
38. Cynically, because missile defence was a Reagan signature policy, which meant that certain people would be opposed to it regardless of the virtues (and, to be fair, others would support it regardless of the weaknesses).
There was also most likely a Russian campaign to discredit it, which hit some all-too-receptive minds in the US.
> Also the pope's on that balcony, if he were levitating you couldn't even tell.
New conspiracy theory: every pope levitates 0.7 cm off the ground after being elected. The special pope shoes are to conceal this, so as to allow the rest of us to have faith.
> 14) If I’m alone at home yet my keys aren’t where I left them, one possible explanation is that ninjas snuck in and rearranged them without me noticing. This hypothesis has the advantage that ninjas are powerful enough to do this - but you still have to discount it for the disadvantage that it doesn’t serve any conceivable goal.
Another possible explanation is that you're being gaslit. Somehow that's the first explanation to come to my mind.
...
Hm. Back on the lighter side, how about... magic comes from demons, who try to attract worship to themselves. But faith in God can render the demons harmless and convert the magic into a tool to spread God's glory? So the manifestations of miracles are random, but associated with holy people or sorcerers.
...
Actually, that's just the metaphysics of Bujold's fantasy series. (READ THEM.)
14. I mentioned this to Bulldog, but it is evidence like this that makes me believe that if the Christian God exists, he is clearly a virtue ethicist. This world does a really poor job at maximizing utility or making everyone follow certain rules, but it is a decent one at giving Humans really difficult challenges that they need to build virtues to overcome. This is still a Post Hoc rationalization, so not great evidence that God does exist, but if you are a Christian, it is worth considering.
God being a virtue ethicist is basically canon (from a Christian POV). There are certain rules but they don’t apply universally (for one thing they don’t/cant apply to Him): what is good is shown by the *character* of God (love, justice, holiness etc). I need hardly say that maximising utility has no place in this schema, except that it might be weak evidence for what is loving.
Just in case anyone was misled by the Chad Golden Gate image, the Golden Gate Bridge is absolutely not the world's longest suspension bridge. It was back when it was built in 1937, but it lost that title in 1964 when the Verrazzano bridge was built in New York City. These days it's in 19th place, with the longest being the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge over the Dardanelles in Turkey.
> I’m not sure how to square this with the previous claims that it’s really hard to talk people out of conspiracy theories through debate alone.
Answer: Everything is complicated and the difficulty of talking people out of conspiracy theories has been greatly exaggerated. It depends a lot on the conspiracy theory, the person, and the conversation.
Most of these studies involve taking a worst-case scenario, like finding someone convinced Obama is a Muslim and saying "actually, the New York Times says..." then expecting them to immediately flip their beliefs.
This isn't testing for conspiratorial thinking, though: It's testing for whether someone has even basic rational thinking skills. If you think Obama is a Muslim and the NYT is unreliable, hearing the NYT say Obama isn't Muslim shouldn't convince you. It'd be like if I did a complete 180 on this because of a Daily Mail article saying Obama's a Muslim. Given their assumptions, rejecting the new information is the rational response.
I suspect people are more willing to believe computers than other people. Computers calculate, and thus seem more objective to people, despite the fact that they have no understanding of anything, and will do what the programmers tell them to do (if not what the programmers WANT them to do).
1. I think most people don't remember where all their fillings are or how many exactly they have. Seems very likely that in an altered state of consciousness induced by a revival someone could be surprised to find "new" fillings and that could trigger a cascade of other people finding "new" fillings.
2. Being not-fat in general leads to better cerebrovascular function which leads to better executive function, higher willpower, higher intelligence, and less vulnerability to addiction. It's not necessarily specific to ozempic versus any other method of losing weight. I tentatively believe that losing weight by doing more cardio and eating less ("the old fashioned way") probably treats all addictions at least as well as ozempic (conditional on actually doing it) until they do the head-to-head trial.
(I have been on trying to lose weight for a month, the old fashioned way, and finally started succeeding last week when I switched to the Macrofactor app which automatically continuously calibrates my macronutrient targets based on my weight trend and goals; I have not tried ozempic yet).
3. I find it distasteful that 90% of the intro is him playing the martyr and using snarl words against everyone who disagrees, so I stopped reading. Of course people are upset about creating novel viruses in labs which, as a reference class, often leak things. Of course there would be hearings about GOF research and calls for better regulation of it. Just give me the evidence please.
4. wow. Doesn't make any sense, but I can see how the vibes are appealing if one already thinks society is fundamentally run by evil people trying to control everything for their evil plans (lizardpeople in spirit, if not actual lizardpeople)
5. Also, all the countries with a higher GDP per capita than the US are tiny. (the largest is Switzerland with a population of 8 million). Whenever the sample is concentrated in one area, it's a lot easier for the sample mean to be on the extremes.
6. this is great news. But the average heat flux from the earth is only 0.08W/m^2, compared to the mean surface insolation of 250w/m^2 (to average it over all times and all geographical areas, you just remember that a sphere has 4x the area of a circle of the same radius, so you divide 1000w/m^2 by 4). So there's about 3125x as much potential for solar power as for geothermal power, and the latter is only commercially viable in a few places where it's extraordinarily concentrated. That's why geothermal is only 0.4% of electricity production in the US and I think there's a 75% chance it never goes above 1%. I created this prediction market for future energy sources in 2050, where geothermal is trading at 3%, but that's just the long odds bias induced by the opportunity cost of betting the NO. https://manifold.markets/JonathanRay/what-percentage-of-us-energy-will-b
7. I have two separate thoughts about this:
a. McCaskill deserves zero of the blame for the FTX collapse
b. suing McCaskill for his blog posts would be reprehensible unless he deliberately defamed someone, which is what you'd have to prove in a defamation case in the US, but the UK has absurdly much stronger laws around defamation.
c. Unjust laws should be circumvented whenever necessary and possible. One could post things non-anonymously without being liable for lawsuits, via cryptographic proof that the author was either A or B. There's no one to sue if you can't prove which one of the two wrote it. One-time key exchange between A and B can enable both of them to write with the byline "A or B" in perpetuity, while neither is legally liable.
8. In-ovo sexing sounds like an awesome win-win-win-win for animal welfare, agribusiness, consumers, and the environment.
9. If any sort of resurrection comes to pass through cryonics, uploading, or magic sky deities, people will just have to learn to accept polyamory.
The Mormons say the original scripture used the verb form of marry, so that Jesus was only saying you can't enter into new marriages in heaven, not saying the old marriages are no longer valid, ergo they implicitly have polygamy in heaven. But from the context it seems more likely Jesus was implying angels are asexual and resurrected humans will be that way too. But I don't really care about exegesis of ancient myths.
10. Recruiting celebrities is a symmetrical weapon for propagating ideas, regardless of the merits. Scientology has used it to great effect in spite of having no merit. Worthy causes shouldn't be above doing the same. If one is a young attractive female the highest EV way of contributing to a worthy cause might be as a honeypot to recruit a celebrity.
11. I wish we could have a referendum on pardoning the internet archive, z-library, scihub, and libgen. Anyone who wants to pirate anything online can pirate anything online. The legal harassment only makes it a little shittier and less convenient and buys mansions for lawyers. I think the full abolition of copyright would be net beneficial to the production of literature, science, and journalism. It would be somewhat negative for Hollywood, but people would still pay in various ways. 95% of the revenue in music is from live events. Over a third of Disney's revenue is box office and merchandising. The relationship between film budget and quality is so sublinear (maybe even inverted, beyond a point) that I don't expect a 33% reduction in revenue to reduce quality much. Quality mostly comes from the script which comes from one great mind which just enjoys the work and isn't very elastic to getting paid $5 million instead of $15 million. Video game quality doesn't seem to have increased at all in the last 30 years while budgets have ballooned by several orders of magnitude.
12. Heavy cavalry are really not the vibe to project to people who are already paranoid about the police oppressing them.
13. Considering JK Rowling studied French and English classics, and spends about every waking moment reading broadly, it's very likely that she heard of the muggletons before 1993. The ending of Harry Potter is an anvilicious cover of the gospels. Harry died for you and got resurrected and then the Dark Lord had no power over you. This hugely raises the probability that muggles are named after a Christian sect that didn't believe in the magical elements of Christianity. The other link doesn't really contain any plausible inspirations for Rowling's use of the word. Her spell names generally don't stray too far from the literal meanings of the roots in other languages, and this is evidence against the distant derivations in the link.
Do Payne and McKay *want* me to hunt them down like mongrel dogs with fire and slaughter? Because I know I said I wanted to see how much worse the second season of "The Rings of Power" could go, but there are some lines you don't cross.
They're putting Tom Bombadil into the second season.
But wait, it gets better (worse). Because the pair of them combined don't have the intellect of a paramecium, they need to 'improve' on Tolkien's original storyline:
"For the series, Payne and McKay took the liberty of giving Bombadil a second home, on the outskirts of a region called Rhûn. “In our story, he has gone out to the lands of Rhûn, which we learn used to be sort of Edenic and green and beautiful, but now is sort of a dead wasteland,” Payne says. “Tom has gone out there to see what’s happened as he goes on his various wanderings.”
Well hell of course a character that Tolkien described as "the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside” is going to turn up in what is the equivalent of the Near East/North Africa. Sure!
And why don't we introduce George Washington riding a Sphinx while you're at it?
Ehhhh… on the scale of all the ways the showrunners could have mangled Tolkien’s work, putting Tom Bombadil in Rhun is far from the absolute worst. It’s not great, mind you, but we know he’s extremely ancient, so he would have been alive at that time. The Rhun part is more egregious.
Here’s how the conversation probably went:
“So, Gandalf and Frodo Surrogate are going to Rhun next season.”
“Rhun? What’s there? We’ve never seen it before, what’s it like?”
“Well that’s the problem, sir, Tolkien really never wrote about it in detail, we just know it’s far away.”
“That sucks! How are we going to keep the fans interested in some land on the ass end of nowhere? Where’s the fan service?”
“Actually, it’s gonna be super easy, barely an inconvenience! Remember Tom Bombadil, sir?”
“Hmmm… wait… oh yeah, isn’t he some weird old guy who’s like the spirit of the forest, and they left him out of the LOTR movies?”
“You got it, sir! Let’s put him in Rhun! That’s awesome fan service!”
“But…. Did he ever go to Rhun in Tolkien’s stories?”
“I dunno!”
“Fair enough!”
( with apologies to Pitch Meeting, a hilarious YouTube channel)
They're merrily mangling the lore, even while for the first season they claimed to be mega-fans of the writing and were going to be really authentic in how they presented it.
Then they gave us an origin story for mithril.
What annoys me about this report on Tom Bombadil is that it's *pointless*. At least in the first season, they vaguely stuck to plausibility, even while compressing the timeline and inventing original characters. There was a reason for Galadriel and Elrond and Celebrimbor and Gil-galad to be around. They made the Elf-Dwarf friendship into Elrond and Durin, not Celebrimbor and Narvi, but they didn't just pull that out of their backsides.
Even Halbrand-Sauron, stupid as it was, did acknowledge that yep, Sauron is here and yep, he's making rings.
But even though Bombadil is definitely in existence during this period, he's not engaging with the wider world and the Elves. And it's completely pointless to have him in Rhun. The only reason is so that he can meet up with Gandalf (I don't think there's really any doubt that the Stranger is Gandalf, even though if they're going to bring in Bombadil as protector of nature then the wizard *should* be Radagast) and for why?
They're going to make up some stupid, stupid reason, and if they mention the Ents I'll cry.
At this stage, I'm not ruling anything out. We've got the genius notion of "Annatar is Halbrand in a wig", now Tom Bombadil is turning up in Rhun - why wouldn't they end season two with the fleeing of the Entwives?
Oh lord, I just got struck by a horrible notion - that black crawling Venom thing in the trailer and the snaky tree roots? *Please* don't make that into a corrupted Entwife. Please. NO!!!!!
Hey, it could be worse. We love to complain about absurd wokism, but just think how bad it could be if they try to find a reason for all the females of an entire species to collectively leave the males and start over somewhere else? (Possibly after having been fertilized, so they could continue the species without legacy cultural contamination.) I'd be happy to only have icky CGI goop be responsible.
(Sauron twisted innocent insects into the dread Emerald Ash Borer!)
"just think how bad it could be if they try to find a reason for all the females of an entire species to collectively leave the males and start over somewhere else"
You're right, I don't even want to imagine what they would come up with here.
One tidbit of lore we do have about Rhûn is that there was a great Kingdom in that general direction which had some trade with the Dwarves of Erebor and whose king was named Bladorthin. We learn of this in The Hobbit, so Amazon has the rights to use it.
We don't really know anything beyond that, except that Bladorthin is "long since dead" as of the late Third Age and that his name is Noldorin and means something like "Grey Master of the Plains".
Also, the name was recycled from early drafts of The Hobbit. Originally, the leader of the Dwarves was named Gandalf and the Wizard was named Bladorthin, until
halfway through Tolkien decided that he liked "Gandalf" better for the Wizard and named the dwarf Thorin instead.
So if we've got Gandalf going Rhûnwards, they really should have Bladorthin show up. But of course, they almost certainly won't.
That is the frustrating thing. There are plenty of places and times in the world he created where there is nothing, or large gaps. Those are the places they could have original characters to their heart's content if they wanted.
But no, they haven't an original, creative bone in their bodies, so they rely on simply mashing up Recognisable Names to make up for the paucity of content they can create. So on the one hand they're aggravating the book nerds like me, and on the other hand they're doing nothing for the general audience who just wanted to watch a fantasy show but know nothing of the world. The latter don't know who Bombadil is meant to be so don't care, and the former are frothing about it (as I am).
Bombadil is a very localised entity, it makes as much sense having him popping up in Rhun as it would be to make a show set in Tang Dynasty China and have Odin turning up to guide one of the protagonists on their journey to becoming a cultivation master.
From a 1951 letter talking about his motivation to create:
"Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry."
Bombadil is intimately associated with that "North West" spirit, getting him to wander around in Rhun is just superfluous. They could have created their own Spirit of Former Edenic Rhun if they wanted! But they can't even manage that much.
Rhûn isn't North Africa (Africa, all of it, is Harad, with Near Harad possibly extending into the Near East). Rhûn is Asia, home of the Swarthy Men a.k.a. Easterlings.
From the Berkson's paradox link (which is really good, by the way):
> While it may be true that at perfect calibration we still see a positive correlation/effect size if the filtering process is even slightly overweighted towards ability tests we get negative correlation just like as in the standard treatment of Berkson’s paradox. Regardless, even these overweighted filtering processes are better at selecting a subsample that does well on Job performance than a selection method which ignores the test completely, hence the tests are adding genuine value to the selection process.
The other thing to keep in mind here is that in practice, you won't usually have nearly this many data points. The observed correlation might be different from the "true" correlation just because you have few people hired for each position.
> The obvious confounder here is that not all basketball positions are equal in how often they score or how tall the people at that position tend to be. In fact the shortest/second shortest position (Shooting Guard) tends to score the most while the tallest position (Center) tends to score the least . This would then suggest that unless we further break down the results by position the two results above don’t really mean much at all.
Yes, and to be a bit more precise--a shooting guard's primary responsibility is scoring, in contrast to e.g. a point guard (ballhandling/distributing) or center (rim protection/rebounding). Obviously centers can score a lot as well, but a center can have much more impact on the game with defense and rebounding than a guard can, so it's much more viable to be a center who doesn't score much than to be a shooting guard who doesn't score much. Which gets at the actual issue with this particular analysis, which is that points per minute as a metric completely misses much of the impact of being tall (it also misses factors like injury risk, which run in the opposite direction). (Also, I'm not sure there's actually a bias against playing small players). In fact if all positions can score equally well, it's almost certainly the case that bigger players *are* more valuable for this exact reason. (It's also no longer the case that you can get into the NBA just by being 7 feet like you used to be able to; big men these days still have to be skilled).
However, I don't think this is a counterexample to Berkson's paradox; there just aren't that many 7 footers in the world who don't have significant health issues and have sufficient interest in basketball, so even if all of them play professional basketball there aren't enough for every team.
Regarding climate change being the death of us all, should we be slightly reassured by the Stefan-Boltzmann law, which says that the rate of heat radiation from a body is proportional to the fourth power of its absolute temperature?
On the face of it, that suggests that as the oceans and atmosphere warm then disproportionately more heat will be radiated into space at night thus limiting the heat build up. But I suppose it isn't much help if the constant of proportionality is very small, so the effect increases noticeably only at temperatures of several hundred degrees!
Re #37, I think it's probably a mistake to analyse Israel's strategy in Gaza in purely military terms, rather than looking at the politics.
Firstly, if Israel can keep the conflict going until next year, there's a better than 50/50 chance that Trump will take over in the White House, at which point most of the pressure on them to consider the humanitarian aspects of what they're doing will evaporate, and they will be able to move to whole scale ethnic cleansing and resettlement with no more than token international opposition if they want to; I think it's clear that some of the members of Israel's government want precisely this and some probably don't.
Secondly, at the point the war ends, pressure on Netanyahu to call elections, which he will probably lose (leaving him open to prosecution for corruption) will massively increase, so he has a strong personal incentive to keep the conflict going.
And thirdly, an awful lot of the Israeli electorate, including many journalists I've seen writing articles with handwringing disclaimers about how "obviously what's happening to innocent civilians is a tragedy" really, really want to see suffering and destruction inflicted on Gaza in retribution for 10/7, which probably makes keeping the war going and not making too much effort to minimise civilian casualties a net vote-winner, even if it doesn't achieve long-term strategic objectives.
Where and how? There isn't anywhere that would be willing to accept hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of Palestinian refugees. It sure as hell isn't going to be Jordan, and the first thing Egypt did after Oct 7th was seal the border. Lebanon is largely controlled by Hezbollah, which as an Iranian proxy wants all of the Palestinians to continue fighting Israel. I just don't see how this could realistically happen. Israel would have to move a huge number of people who don't want to leave and dump them in another country that is unwilling to accept them.
I absolutely agree that they aren't making decisions unchallenged, which is why I said "some of the members of Israel's government want precisely this and some probably don't" rather than "Israel's government wants this".
But they are influential members of the government (I think more so than their official positions suggest), because - unlike Gantz - Netanyahu is hoping to court their support in the next election, when they look likely to control significant numbers of seats.
Two ministers in the government aren't making any decisions at all? Not in the West Bank? Not influencing others (by whichever means) who can make decisions?
Oh, I have, they feature extensively in Israeli media. I also heard of the wider security cabinet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Cabinet_of_Israel), which does include both Ben Gvir and Smotrich as core members appointed by law.
I have also heard of the idea that "Minister" is not a light title, not in Israeli government anyways. Even if a minister doesn't hold power directly, he is in the halls of power and can do quite a bit from behind closed doors than the strict interpretation of his/her title's role would imply.
Scott, leaving the the 50K Gazan deaths number up after multiple people have shown you sources to the contrary, and after you declined to defend that number even though you engaged with other points in those threads (so we all know you saw them!), is beneath yours and this community's standards.
Sorry to disappoint, but Paris Hilton is not and was never signed up for cryonics:
> The tabloids even stooped so low as to discuss her plans after death. Hilton was quoted as saying "It's so cool, all the cells in your body are still alive when death is pronounced and if you're immediately cooled, you can be perfectly preserved. My life could be extended by hundreds and thousands of years."
> Hilton denied ever making those comments and pointed out to DeGeneres that she doesn't speak that way. This made the audience laugh.
> "I don't want to be frozen. It's kind of creepy," Hilton said.
24. I'm a bit of an audiobook narrator snob, and I don't think Johansson and Skye sound alike at all. If they wanted to imitate her, they could have done a waaaaaaay better job.
So LDS is pretty much saying no new marriages in the afterlife, but that a new category, celestial marriage will come into being, which you can commit to now, right?
People have been posting Scott's picture claiming it was 0HP's real face for many months, probably initially as a joke, then at some point someone pointed out "actually that's Scott Alexander", which then propogated as "0HP is Scott Alexander".
Sorry I intended this to be a reply to another comment which introduced slightly more context but I fucked up and immediately lost my throwaway credential, so I'll just fill in the syllogism here:
0HP is a relatively senior figure in a bitter rival faction of the dissident right to the Fuentes faction
Scott Alexander is Scott Siskind is Jewish
So this all adds up to Nick Fuentes learning from his audience and propogating that Scott Siskind (by saying he think he's doxxing 0HP) is a jewish subversive fake conservative.
Interestingly, this isn't the first time I've heard of miraculous gold fillings. The 2007 documentary "Finger of God" features a bunch of people showing their gold teeth and insisting they were put there by God. https://vimeo.com/428107848
Probably they are better than humans at the **general task** of debunking conspiracy theories. I think I know enough to fairly thoroughly debunk lab leak and JFK assassination conspiracy theories. I know enough to be strongly disinclined to e.g. moon landing conspiracy theories, but I don't know if I could make a thorough enough argument without eventually resorting to "c'mon, man". An LLM already knows* all about* every* conspiracy theory of note.
>I think Trevor should have been more careful with his original accusations, but I also think defamation lawsuit threats are toxic and chill the flow of information, that this community has strong norms against them except in extreme cases, and that Lumina violated those norms.
Someone who posts defamation is already defecting, and norms of not threatening suit essentially leave the defamed person without a way to clear his name. If a defamed person isn't permitted by "social norms" to sue for defamation, your social norms are trash.
Yes, lawsuits can be intimidating, and can hurt the person sued even if they're innocent. But from your own description, this isn't a meritless lawsuit designed to shut someone up by bankrupting them; the targets really were defamed. And the defamers have a conflict of interest in saying "this isn't important enough to sue about".
Devil's advocate (angel's advocate?) on Saint Joseph: There's an important difference between God and ninjas, which is that ninjas' ability to predict the outcome of their actions is around the same as ours, so if we can't see a reason for them to do something then they probably can't either. But God, being omniscient, would be able to know all the outcomes of any given action, and Joseph levitating might have some downstream consequence of great importance in a "butterfly flapping its wings" kind of way that we are unable to see.
Maybe no one, even the Pope himself, has yet lived up to the status of “God’s chosen people.” So rather than provide some sort of incontrovertible distinction in the form of a miracle, instead he just sows some random seeds of doubt of the conventional wisdom of our place in the universe.
Regarding the chicken sexing: Surely there would be massive financial benefits to genetically modified chickens that don't lay male eggs at all? There must be a way!
To clarify the "Midler v. Ford Motor Co." precedent, it does not make hiring someone who sounds like someone else illegal. To quote the black letter from "casesofinterest"
"Not every imitation of a voice is actionable. However, when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in CA."
Important points:
- Only applies to California. Similar cases don't exist almost anywhere else.
- If a product isn't being sold, it's not clear if the "commercial advantage" required for right of publicity exists.
- The voice needs to be distinctive and widely known, to the extent that it's a core defining characteristic of the identity of the person being impersonated. Historically, this standard has only applied to singers AFAIK. I think it's questionable if Johansson would meet this requirement.
- "deliberately imitated" is important. Merely hiring someone who sounds similar is not deliberate imitation; in the Ford case, the singer was asked to imitate Midler while singing one of her songs; they didn't just hire a similar sounding singer.
While it's not impossible, I wouldn't bet on any Johansson lawsuit to actually succeed (assuming they didn't settle).
5. When making these comparisons, you want to adjust for PPP (purchasing power parity), not the forex rate. To give an obvious example, if you make US$50k in the Bay vs Minnesota vs India, you'll be poor/alright/rich, respectively. That's not just in relative terms, that's like, you can buy more land, build a bigger house, have more servants if you want, etc.
The US is the reference point for PPP, so no adjustment needed there. For the British figure though, according to the World Bank it's £0.65 to buy goods you could get for $1 in the US, so instead of saying you could buy $44.5k with your £35k (which no one is doing), it's more accurate to say that with £35k you can buy goods/services that would cost ~$53,846 in the US. More concisely, the British median income in 2023 was $53,846 (PPP). Also worth noting, your figure for black Americans is from 2021 -- as you'll recall, there was a bunch of inflation immediately after. Statista gives $53,860 for 2022.
So, while I also love dunking on Europeans, in this case the two figures are about equal.
The idea that the Internet Archive lawsuit could bankrupt it was disputed recently on HN with a claim that a capped settlement was already in place: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40203774. (So we're only risking further unconscionable expansion of "intellectual property" protectionism... but that's just a Tuesday in the US courts.)
I just caught up on the news that the Pope is being doxxed by homophile priests and their supporters for using the wrong slang.
This seems a little bit crazy. I mean, Isn't the Pope supposed to be spiritually special, you know, like Mother Teresa and Michael Jackson? Are NYU and UCLA 'activists' going to occupy the quads to protest the homophobe pope? Will the Church split and set up a new, homophile Pope in West Hollywood?
The Pope is infallible when teaching ex cathedra. Talking to bishops about "no more cute twinks in seminaries, please guys" is not that 😀
As for splitting off, we have plenty of the Spirit of Vatican II types and Women Priests and the rest of 'em already doing their thing. I'm just surprised Francis is putting his foot down, given all the "He's a HERETIC and ANTI-POPE" that came from the opposite wing of the fringe nutjobs about previous decisions and statements.
Having read Trevor Klee's original anti-lumia post (link 17), I would like to know which parts of his original post were wrong, and where he misunderstood / misrepresented the underlying science. It's quite frustrating to be told the post is largely wrong, without being told how it is wrong!
So far I know:
- The original post wrongly characterized Scott Alexander (i.e., Trevor had not done the due diligence of finding Scott's public note saying he obtained the sample due to his wife's consulting, and instead assumed a worse explanation).
- The original post was wrong about the manufacturing process not following standards.
What I would like to know:
- How did Trevor misunderstand / misrepresent the science?
> Apparently St. Joseph could levitate, this was well-documented by everyone he met, and the Inquisition (which was concerned he might be a witch) investigated and got many eyewitness reports.
People would be saying the same thing about Criss Angel in the future.
37. Nobody in Israel thinks it's possible to terrify Gazans out of supporting Hamas (or, some other entity that is functionally equivalent to it). Unlike Sam Kriss, that lives in London, whoever he is, they live just next to those people and know it's impossible. What *may be* possible to do is to terrify some out of actively trying to kill Jews for a while (and make others that are not susceptible to convincing unable to do so). This is the strategy that worked pretty well with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Fatah, and even to some extent Hezbollah, which is not exactly eager to start a big war either, so far. That's as far as Israel strategy goes - first, destroying as much Hamas infrastructure as practically possible without killing a million people, second, establishing a deterrent. That's the best plan so far, and if anybody tells you they have a better one the odds are 99.9999% that they are hopelessly deluded. Ah yes, and Hamas' numbers of the dead are completely and hopelessly fake, so quoting them just signals the quoter has no idea what is actually going on and is not afraid to publicly show it.
Which makes it a vicious circle: the Palestinians who vote in polls to support Hamas may be making the "better the devil you know" choice and not particularly that they want to kill Jews, but if they're asked to choose between "people who claim to be for me" versus "soldiers who break down my door in the early hours of the morning, roust us all out, and deliberately smash up our house", then they're going to pick option A.
The reason why Irish people identify with Palestine side in this whole mess is because it sounds so much like our own history after the Easter Rebellion. This was not a generally popular thing! A lot of people were ambivalent about it or even actively opposed! But as it went on and the War of Independence started, the actions of the British forces moved a lot of opinion from "who are these idiots claiming to be setting up an Irish Republic?" to "fuck the Empire, I'm with the IRA".
"The burning of Cork by British forces took place on the night of 11–12 December 1920, during the Irish War of Independence. It followed an Irish Republican Army (IRA) ambush of a British Auxiliary patrol in the city, which wounded twelve Auxiliaries, one fatally. In retaliation, the Auxiliaries, Black and Tans and British soldiers burned homes near the ambush site, before looting and burning numerous buildings in the centre of Cork, Ireland's third-biggest city. Many Irish civilians reported being beaten, shot at, and robbed by British forces. Firefighters testified that British forces hindered their attempts to tackle the blazes by intimidation, cutting their hoses and shooting at them. Two unarmed IRA volunteers were also shot dead at their home in the north of the city.
More than 40 business premises, 300 residential properties, the City Hall and Carnegie Library were destroyed by fires, many of which were started by incendiary bombs. The economic damage was estimated at over £3 million (equivalent to approximately €150 million in 2021), while 2,000 were left jobless and many more became homeless.
British forces carried out many similar reprisals on Irish civilians during the war, notably the Sack of Balbriggan three months before and the burning of Knockcroghery six months later, but the burning of Cork was one of the most substantial. The British government at first denied that its forces had started the fires, and only agreed to hold a military inquiry. This concluded that a company of Auxiliaries were responsible, but the government refused to publish the report at the time. No one was held accountable for the burning."
The people caught in the middle of all this don't care if it's a reprisal for ambushes and attacks by the paramilitary/terrorist forces, they see the forces of a state that claims legitimacy acting like thugs and getting away with it and indeed being supported by that state. In which case, why the hell would they support that state or trust the bona fides of that state and those in charge of it?
"At midday Mass in the North Cathedral the Bishop of Cork, Daniel Cohalan, condemned the arson but said the burning of the city was a result of the "murderous ambush at Dillon's Cross" and vowed, "I will certainly issue a decree of excommunication against anyone who, after this notice, shall take part in an ambush or a kidnapping or attempted murder or arson". No excommunications were issued, and the bishop's edict was largely ignored by pro-republican priests and chaplains.
...Irish nationalists called for an open and impartial inquiry. In the British House of Commons, Sir Hamar Greenwood, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, refused demands for such an inquiry. He denied that British forces had any involvement and suggested the IRA started the fires in the city centre, although he said that several houses at Dillon's Cross "were destroyed because from these houses bombs were thrown at the police". When asked about reports of firefighters being attacked by British forces he said "Every available policeman and soldier in Cork was turned out at once and without their assistance the fire brigade could not have gone through the crowds and did the work that they tried to do".
...K Company Auxiliary Charles Schulze, a former British Army captain, wrote in a letter to his girlfriend in England calling the burning of Cork "sweet revenge", while in a letter to his mother he wrote: "Many who had witnessed scenes in France and Flanders say that nothing they had experienced was comparable with the punishment meted out in Cork". After the burning, K Company was moved to Dunmanway and began wearing burnt corks in their caps in reference to the burning of the city. For their part in the arson and looting, K Company was disbanded on 31 March 1921."
And that's why Israel is so pissed off with Ireland and why my government recognised Palestine:
> it sounds so much like our own history after the Easter Rebellion
Wait, did Irish have an official charter that called for destruction of Britain and expulsion of all English to go "back where they came from" (Normandy I guess)? Did they continuously attack London, Manchester, Liverpool and other major cities of England with rockets, bombs, etc. for decades? Did they murder and rape 12 thousands of Englishmen in a mass attack and kidnap another thousands, including women, elderly and infants, and promised this is just the beginning and they keep doing it again and again until England ceases to exist?
That's certainly not what the history books say, and if there's any truth to what they say, then no, it doesn't sound not even a little bit like that.
Hamas in Gaza already had their independence. Yes, they didn't have the full formal trimmings of the state, but they had everything else. And they used it only to make steps towards their genocidal goal - which they never hidden and yet Europeans somehow perform spectacular feats of mental gymnastics to not notice - cleansing Israel from Jews, "from the river to the sea" and establish their own theocratic caliphate in that territory. Every school, every hospital, every mosque, every dollar sent by Europe or Qatar or Saudia, were used to serve this goal. This is what they have in their founding documents, this is what they say every time anybody asks them, and yet somehow Europeans all are like "nah, they didn't mean that, what they mean is they want peace and independence and that's all. Just leave them alone and there will be peace". No, wrong, they want EXACTLY THAT. They want to get to the filthy Jews and kill (and rape, of course, freedom fighters have their needs) as many of them as they can. I know Europeans do not want to face that harsh reality, but it doesn't disappear because it doesn't sit well with their model of how the world should be.
> And that's why Israel is so pissed off with Ireland and why my government recognised Palestine:
I think it's because Irish government, as well as most European governments, are a bunch of woke anti-semitic (that two are pretty much a requirement by now) bozos which don't care what happens with the Jews (and the Palestinians too, to be honest - life under Hamas is not exactly a picnic) as long as the woke agenda of "colonialists bad, oppressed people saint" is served, and since the Jews are designated colonialists there, no longer consideration is required. Thus, they think the appropriate reaction to biggest mass murder and rape of Jews since the Holocaust is to invite the murderers and rapists to the club of nations and grant them respect and recognition. Whatever injustices and suffering Irish people undergone over the years of history, nothing of it can ever justify such a revolting move.
> Which makes it a vicious circle
There's no any "circle". It's another of those stupid European delusions that all people like each other and are nice and only made to do bad things by extreme external circumstances forcing them. I'd like to live in that world too. But that's not the world of Middle East. In the world of Middle East hating Jews is normal. Everybody hates Jews. There's no hope - at least not within next several generations - of everybody not hating Jews. However, one can hate Jews and still not murder them. Many nations hate each other to a measure and still avoid murdering each other. Even between Israel and other Arab states this happened. Egyptians don't harbor any love towards the Jews - but they abandoned their plans to murder them all, because it looked like the best thing for them to do, at least for now. And the only hope for Gaza to ever have peace is for people of Gaza to do the same. Not to love the Jews - that won't happen - but stop actively trying to murder them.
> My general opinion on Israel and Gaza is, outside the latest kerfuffle, is not to give a shit.
Most Israelis would be completely fine with that. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be the position of European governments, which have been waging campaign aimed at pressuring Israel into surrendering its security for a piece of paper for decades. That's what gave us the disaster of "Oslo agreements", what informed the disaster of Gaza independence experiment, and continues to wreak havoc on the scene.
> If I were to criticise Azerbaijan when it is in conflict I doubt I would be accused of some ancient prejudice buried deep in the bones, resurrecting every time Azerbaijan goes to war.
That depends. If no matter what happens, no matter who does what to whom, Azerbaijan somehow comes out as the bad guy for you, and your demand is always for them to surrender immediately and accept whatever their enemies are wishing to impose upon them - then yes, I'd say you have something against Azerbaijan. Whether it's ancient or just comes from your pol-sci professor lecture last semester, that'd be hard to tell, but it's by their fruits that you know it. And the fruits of European policy towards Israel are pretty obvious.
> It’s Germany that’s the most pro Israel these days anyway.
Is it the Germany that promised to arrest Israeli Prime Minister recently or there's some other Germany too?
> you would expect the ageing boomers across Europe and the US to be the most antagonistic to Israel,
Why would I expect that? Boomers aren't woke. Wokes are the main epicenter of antisemitism these days, and they are trending to the young side. Of course, that's not what most of EU politicians are - they are the previous generation, who created the wokes. But given their creation, again, it's hard not to think they intended it to come out this way.
> it doesn't seem to be the position of European governments
All while its weapons manufacturers and armies continue to supply weapons to kill more children.
> If no matter what happens, no matter who does what to whom, Azerbaijan somehow comes out as the bad guy
That's exactly what an Azerbaijan nationalist would say to play the victim, "No matter what I do, people just hate me for no reason", that's not original at all, that's the internal self-dialogue of every villain from Darth Vader to 3rd-rate fanfic.
> Is it the Germany that promised to arrest Israeli Prime Minister recently
Yeah, that same Germany that promised to arrest the genocidal Prime Minister if and only if the ICC - whose founding charter Germany is signatory to - said to arrest him.
The same exact Germany which is putting faith vows to Israel in its citizenship naturalization tests.
> Why would I expect that?
Because you're saying that the prejudice is ancient, if the prejudice is deep-seated and ancient then it makes sense that the oldest and less-globalized portions of the population would feel it more strongly, while the younger and more Americanized/Globalized youth would feel it weakly.
> That's exactly what an Azerbaijan nationalist would say to play the victim
And again here we have "you claim you weren't treated fairly, villains often claim they aren't treated fairly, therefore you are a villain". Do I really need to explain how bad an argument this is?
> Yeah, that same Germany that promised to arrest the genocidal Prime Minister if and only if the ICC - whose founding charter Germany is signatory to - said to arrest him
So you're saying they founded the kangaroo court that pretends self-defense is "genocide" when it's politically convenient, while ignoring actual genocidal organizations which have genocide written in the open in their founding documents, proudly proclaimed by their adherents and supporters, and implemented in their practices. They intend to fully implement the decisions of that kangaroo court and that's somehow not their fault and not the result of their own deliberate policy? Yes, it is.
> The same exact Germany which is putting faith vows to Israel in its citizenship naturalization tests.
No they don't. The closest to this bizzarre description is this question:
6. Where does Germany’s special responsibility for Israel come from?
a) Membership in the European Union b) Crimes committed by the Nazis c) The German constitution d) Christian tradition
Answer: b) Crimes committed by the Nazis, who murdered six million Jews during the Holocaust
Which is nowhere near "faith vows" - though as an Israeli citizen I'd be completely fine with Germany dropping it altogether. Israel doesn't need "special responsibility" - plain old equal treatment would be enough. Like, if you are shelled, blown up, murdered and raped by somebody, you have the right to defend yourself. Or, even more basic, you don't have to justify your own existance every 5 minutes - like, for example, it is true for Germany, France, Japan, Australia, any country except Israel - where absent grand pronouncements somehow it always seems to be questionable and under the asterisk. Fuck special responsibility, just get rid of the asterisk and we're good.
BTW this is very similar to how wokes treat racism in the US. Equal treatment would be great, but they want new segregation and new racist discrimination - the right side up this time! - instead. Needless to say, isn't really helping in either case.
> Because you're saying that the prejudice is ancient, if the prejudice is deep-seated and ancient then it makes sense that the oldest and less-globalized portions of the population would feel it more strongly
No, that does not follow. You fell into the same logical trap as before. Birds have wings, planes have wings, but it doesn't mean planes are birds. Some people harboring prejudices having ancient roots does not mean only or predominantly old people would have this prejudice. That's not how it works. And globalization actually contributes to it, because most globalization ideologues are woke, and antisemitism is now strongly aligned with woke (due to the woke prophets declaring Jews as "colonizers", I suspect because their country dares to not be shitholy enough as proper Middle-Eastern country should be but instead are markedly Western, therefore automatically evil).
I'm not sure what point you are trying to prove here though? That antisemitism isn't ancient? That woke is not embracing antisemitism? That European leaders aren't aligned with woke? It'd be great to clarify instead of throwing around all that "you sound just like Darth Vader" nonsense.
Re: massacres by the hideous Irish of the poor English settlers, see the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and its subsequent use in English atrocity propaganda.
That looks like a classical pogrom. Still, to graduate to the level of Hamas, there must be a declared goal of eliminating the British state and cleansing the whole territory of their presence. So, there's still a room for growth.
I think you have that somewhat backwards. Until now the strategy has been deterrence. Now the main strategy will be continual prevention, by periodically entering Gaza to destroy military infrastructure, controlling the Egypt border so that no more weapons can be smuggled in, and so on.
Well, yes and no. The idea before October 7 was that the deterrence has already been achieved. It's not a stupid idea on the face of it - Israel successfully achieved deterrence against Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, even Iran to certain measure. It's not stupid to think it can be done against Hamas too. Except the catastrophic mistake was that while it could be done in theory, it didn't happen in practice. What Israeli military eggheads thought was deterrence was just Hamas preparing to strike. And strike they did. Now the eggheads need to go back to the drawing boards and start thinking again how to actually establish the deterrence they wanted.
"Periodically entering" is not a very good strategy because it is extremely expensive, both politically and monetary. And it does not achieve much - Hamas learned how to deal with single-point raids, those haven't been enough to seriously harm them for years already. They have distributed system that allows to move people and resources in and out any area. Controlling the border is not possible without re-occupying Gaza to some measure - otherwise the force there would be just picked out piece by piece by groups operating from the rest of Gaza - and re-occupation is what Israel does not want to do at all. But absent any other ideas that's what they may have to do it anyway, unless they half-ass it for a while, get out and let Hamas rebuild and get another instance of the same in some 20 years. I give both options about equal chance, maybe the second one even like 65%. Kicking the can down the road is always the best option for the politician, and Bibi is at the end of his career anyway, so once he achieves something he could call a victory it would be very tempting for him to let the next guy down the line sort it out - by which point of course nothing at all gets sorted out.
You notice how you do not address the content of the argument but instead do "this looks like what a villain would do, therefore you are a villain"? The fact that Hamas fakes the numbers has been reported multiple times and official numbers were adjusted repeatedly. For example: https://www.jns.org/un-blames-fog-of-war-for-major-overcounting-of-gazan-child-fatalities/ There's no independent verification of the numbers ever. But it doesn't look like you're interested in figuring out what is the truth as much as you already know what the truth is and you are interested in painting anybody "denying" it as a villain?
You notice how your observation that I'm responding to is an asinine and overused talking point devoid of any meaning that has been parroted to death by every pro-Israel commenter at least 100 times or so since November? You notice that it doesn't imply or contribute anything about the actual topic that Scott brought up, which you're supposedly responding to? You notice that in a destroyed hellscape like Gaza, the dead usually turn out to outnumber every single figure given during the fog of war because of the dead bodies under the rubble and the water/food/medicine shortages and the lethal diseases and pollutants that the destroyed medical infrastructure won't treat for years?
Boy.... I sure do love getting my Extremely Trustworthy news from an outlet that literally advertises it is "Fighting Israel's Media War" on its topmost position on the frontpage. When did shills become this straightforward and unsubtle?
> this looks like what a villain would do, therefore you are a villain
More like: This is how Holocaust deniers and Armenian Genocide deniers talk, so better look in the mirror and re-evaluate your state vector in life to see where you're and where you're heading, and whether you like any of those things.
> I'm responding to is an asinine and overused talking point devoid of any meaning that has been parroted to death by every pro-Israel commenter
And yet, you can do no better than an obvious logical fallacy. It's like a prosecutor having their only argument as "you say you are innocent?! but that's exactly what the murderer would say, therefore you are guilty!" Probably won't go very well outside of the courts of Russia, North Korea and New York. Especially if you prop it up by another argument of "Everybody says they are innocent, stop with this meaningless and tired asinine whining and confess you crimes finally!"
> You notice that in a destroyed hellscape like Gaza, the dead usually turn out to outnumber every single figure given during the fog of war because of the dead bodies under the rubble
That would be if there was any effort to actually honestly count the dead. That effort would surely undercount. But there's no such effort. The effort is to produce inflated figures, because the larger are the figures, the better it serves the Hamas PR, and they couldn't care less who is actually dead, unless it's a top member of Hamas. When Islamic Jihad hit their own hospital, they produced the figure of 500 dead (or more) within hours - it's inconceivable any actual count could be done so fast, but it was dutifylly reproduced and attributed to "Israel atrocity" by all the mainstream press. The real number was probably 1/10 of that (and the work of Islamic Jihad) but nobody cared by then. This was one case where it was caught. In hundreds others, nobody bothered to even check. Hamas murders their own Arab population with abandon, they've been reported multiple times shooting at people trying to get to aid trucks - the very aid that was supposed to go to these people, but is routinely stolen by Hamas. Surprisingly, when the aid started coming through Israel-controlled pass and distributed under some Israel supervision, the prices in Gaza markets tanked - because Hamas could not steal enough food anymore to create a shortage.
> and the water/food/medicine shortages
Again, wholly and entirely engineered by Hamas. The amount of food and supplies sent to Gaza is enormous, but very significant part of it - in the case of American aid delivered through that famous 300-million-dollar wonder peer, by the US army own admission, the entirety of it - is stolen by Hamas. What they do with it is not clear - stockpile? Sell? Distribute to their own supporters and deny to those who dare to oppose them? Who knows, there's no reliable reporting on that, but they certainly not using it to prevent the shortages - because, again, any trouble Gazan population has is a PR win for them. This is literally their strongest weapon - the more Gaza population suffers, the stronger is the pressure on Israel.
> More like: This is how Holocaust deniers and Armenian Genocide deniers talk,
Yes, yes. You deny your guilt, just like an extremely guilty psycho would, so obviously you are an extremely guilty psycho. Sure, strong argument, congrats, you are totally winning this one.
Bonus point for referring to genocide deniers while shilling for an organization that actually has the genocide as their openly declared and proudly proclaimed goal. The goal of killing Jews. "You Jews are Holocaust deniers for not agreeing quietly to being murdered" is a very bold argument. Really shows the strength of character.
But I'm not a prosecutor. Karim Khan is, and he literally said that Netanyahu is suspected of "Extermination and using Starvation as a weapon" and that he should be in a Hague courtroom, a prospect that terrified and enraged Netanyahu and his supporters, presumably including you, so much they lashed at the entire Rome Statute in response.
> they couldn't care less who is actually dead,
Sounds just like Israel then. Why are you arguing one of them is better?
> When Islamic Jihad hit their own hospital
This was never confirmed by non-Israeli media.
> Hamas murders their own Arab population with abandon
Indeed, which is why no one on ACX is defending them. The only mystery is why you're so intent on defending their straightforward Hebrew translation. Murdering innocents is only bad if the murderer shouts "Allahu Akbar" while doing it?
> Again, wholly and entirely engineered by Hamas.
Hehehe, so Yoav Gallant, your defense minister in case you forgot, who said "I'm ordering a complete siege of Gaza, no fuel no food no water comes in" in mid-October, has nothing to do **at all** with the near-famine in Gaza? The scum blocking the path of aid trucks in Kerem Shalom and elsewhere, and burning the aid in the West Bank and hitting the drivers has nothing to do with it? It's just "Khamas", right? Khamas Khamas Khamas. Khamas ate your homework. Khamas is the reason everything bad in the world happens, before Khamas, there was no atrocities at all.
> in the case of American aid delivered through that famous 300-million-dollar wonder peer, by the US army own admission, the entirety of it
Where was that reported? In the outlets "Fighting Israel's media war"?
> the more Gaza population suffers, the stronger is the pressure on Israel.
And Israel is of course all too happy to play along, isn't it?
> Sure, strong argument, congrats, you are totally winning this one.
We're not on Reddit mate, I couldn't care less whether I'm "winning", least of all in an argument with someone posting propaganda as unironic news. I'm just in awe at the sheer madness and ideological psychosis that humans can surround themselves with, all while - or largely in order to - convincing themselves they're the good guys.
> shilling for an organization that actually has the genocide as their openly declared
Which shows you never read any of my 8-month posting corpus on ACX.
Ehh, what can I say? You caught me. I'm an unpaid Hamas shill, I have to admit. I'm "fighting Hamas' media war" for them. They have special internship offers for anarchist atheists: I only need to hate Jews 1.69 times as much as Muslims to keep my position. As long as I don't tell them I'm vegetarian I would be fine.
re "I think these drugs might boost willpower more generally":
I've taken Ozempic/Wegovy for over two years. It is great, it works, I lost over 25% of my starting weight, but I do not think it improved my willpower at all. Instead, it removed desire. These are very different and feel very different internally, even if the outcome looks the same.
Before losing the weight, I thought I was weak and had terrible willpower in the face of getting seconds of mac and cheese, and thin people were all stronger with better willpower than me. I'd tried to lose weight with dieting/exercise a hundred times before, and always gained it back. It did not occur to me that thin people might just *want the food less in the first place*. I had not realized how much I thought about food until I stopped. Before, I'd sit in the living room idly thinking about what snacks were available, constantly, telling myself I really shouldn't get up to eat the Smartfood, over and over again until I lost the game and would find myself mysteriously staring at an empty bag. It often felt like I'd come out of a trance, and that the part of my brain that was saying not to eat had just turned off until I was done eating, at which point it would turn back on and a rush of shame and guilt would flood over me.
After, I just didn't even think about the food in the first place. I wouldn't think about food until I was hungry (and I was hungry less frequently, and actually experienced what it was like to *feel full* after eating a normal portion so I wanted to stop eating sooner. I'd never really felt full before and hadn't understood that it was a real physical sensation rather than a self-regulating moral scale of when I'd eaten "too much" that I thought I was missing). It was a mental change as much as a physical one, but willpower had nothing to do with it - I just didn't want the food anymore.
If it makes people with addictions want the drugs less, then that's great! I'll be thrilled that it works. (It would justify the despairing feeling I had when trying to lose weight that eating is like an addiction you can't quit cold-turkey.) But I wouldn't expect it to e.g. make someone more productive or procrastinate less, because the mechanism (at least for me) was a subtraction of desire rather than an addition of willpower, so the next applications of the drug should take that into account.
I haven't been able to get Ozempic regularly, but the experience you describe is exactly how I feel. Thinking about food, wanting to snack/graze constantly, never being "full" until I'd eaten past the point of satiety to active discomfort, going "But I just ate a full meal two hours ago, I *can't* be hungry again so soon!", and generally "yes, the doctors and the medical establishment and society at large *are* right: I am a lazy,, greedy, stupid glutton with no will power who won't just power through feeling hungry until it goes away* and I don't have any self-control".
I'd like to try Ozempic if the chemist could get a reliable source (my doctor is willing to prescribe it, we just can't get it) to see if it makes a difference. But you are totally right about the entire problem being *desire* and not so much willpower. A lot of the advice from the naturally thin/successful dieters is like that of the doctor described on here in another comment thread who regarded patient requests for pain medication as drug-seeking nonsense: "nobody ever died from pain" so let them just suck it up, it couldn't be that bad anyway, just grit your teeth and put up with it you whiny complainers!
*Sorry, all the people in comments about this topic over time on this site, who described how they can fast and after the first X hours/days the hunger feeling just goes away if you ignore it long enough - it never goes away.
A similar but much smaller effect is when you start paying attention to what you eat. For example, eating carbs doesn't make me feel full, but proteins sometimes do. (Problem is, one needs to read the documentation carefully, because many things advertised as "protein something" actually do not contain much proteins.)
> The Blind Centrist’s Guide To Gaza argues that we should assume Israel is pursuing a reasonable military strategy in Gaza (and trying its hardest to avoid unnecessary suffering), because that’s what their political objectives, the international situation, and the media environment incentivize.
I think the problem with assuming Israel is acting rationally is that they're right next to a counterexample. Hamas clearly wasn't acting rationally. There was no possible universe where them attacking Israel would end well. Maybe the government of Israel isn't as angry as Hamas, but they're close enough that we can't just assume rationality.
Hamas's goals appear to have been to 1) get prestige for a large and surprising strike at Israel and provoke Israel into a military response that would 2) alienate Israel from Europe and the US and 3) kick off a general Arab-Israeli.war.
1 worked as far as it goes, and if Israel stops short of wrecking Hamas as an effective organization, this may pay off for Hamas in the long run. This has long been a core part of Hamas's strategy, being nastier and apparently more effective at hurting Israel than the PLO/Fatah. The problem is that Israeli leadership also knows this and is trying very hard not to leave Hamas intact enough to benefit.
2 definitely seems to be working.
3 was a pipe dream. Over the past few decades, most Arab states have mostly settled on a policy of making a public show of not liking Israel while pursuing increasingly friendly relations privately. Of the historically most intensely anti-Israeli states in the region, Syria is busy with their civil war, Egypt got bought off by the US during the Carter Administration and has stayed bought off ever since, and Saudi Arabia is more worried about Iran.
Overall, this strikes me as less "irrational" and more "it was a calculated risk, but I'm bad at math".
Hamas are theocrats who believe that dying as martyrs against the enemies of Islam is the highest good. Given their values and priorities, I think what they did was a perfectly rational way of trying to accomplish their goals.
For months you've said nothing on the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza. I guessed that you thought that "Politics is the mindkiller", and decided to keep mum to avoid having your blog devolve into a cesspit of bitter arguments over the issue.
But now you come by with this flyby shooting, making up preposterous casualty numbers to make your claim. Isn't making up data to make a point the kind of thing you've been railing against for years? Why not just look up the casualty numbers on Wikipedia?
I can only assume you've been possessed by a demon. Sabby? Is that you?
Regarding your questions:
1. What are Israel's military goals?
2. What is the endgame?
3. Is it going to be worth it?
I am NOT the guy to answer these questions. I barely even read the news! But someone has to say SOMETHING, so let me try:
1. Israel's stated goals are to remove Hamas from power in Gaza and return the hostages.
2. For the endgame, you might want to start by reading Netanyahu's plan:
Basically: Israel needs help. Someone has to swoop in and govern Gaza, because no one wants a long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza. Ideally this would be the Palestinians themselves! They just have to accept PA rule of Gaza. Failing that, a number of options have been proposed, such as a joint Arab occupation force. For all their howling, America and Europe HAVEN'T offered to be the ones peacekeeping in Gaza, which I think shows you how little they REALLY care.
3. The goal is to prevent future wars. At this point, since Hamas took power Israel has had - what? five? Six? major wars in Gaza. We know it's because of Hamas: Two million Palestinians live in Israel completely peacefully, and the situation in the west bank, though tense, is a far cry from the situation in Gaza. And much of what is going on in the west bank is due to the continued presence of Hamas (and other terrorist groups) there.
Hamas has said that they plan to continue to carry out attacks for as long as they are in power. It was leaving them in power for so long that led to this war. Leaving them in power again will lead to future wars. You can't shut your eyes to this! It was shortsightedness in 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, 20012, 2014, (and so on - 2005 is the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the other dates are all major wars) that led to this war. So yes! In hindsight, those were all horrible mistakes. At every junction, Israel should have removed Hamas from power. And that's true today as well! Removing Hamas from power is the only way to SAVE Palestinian lives.
Netanyahu's plans calls for handing over local governance to "Local Palestinian Governance" that is not affiliated with Hamas. That's the PA.
Now, the PA doesn't want to do it. And Gazans hate the PA! So this might not work. If no one steps up, not the Palestinians, the surrounding Arab countries, the UN or the US or Europe, the default will be that the Israeli military will have to do it. That's not what anyone wants, but it might be one of those bad Nash equilibria we learned about in school.
> Israel's stated goals are to remove Hamas from power in Gaza and return the hostages.
Two goals which are non-sensical when ANDed together, and are manifestly impossible to achieve, as 8 months of failed war and tens of dead hostages - including 3 by the very bullets of the IDF - can attest to.
> The goal is to prevent future wars.
Citation needed. 10 ministers from Netanyahu's government attended a Gaza settlement conference in 28th (-ish) of January this year, a couple of days after first ICJ ruling on whether Israel is committing Genocide in Gaza concluded. I suppose it's too repetitive and trite by now to keep repeating the long string of statements from the President to the least-ranked soldier in the IDF all singing and howling about annihilation in Gaza.
> the situation in the west bank, though tense
Wow, new Russell Conjugation unlocked; Orwell would be so proud. "Tense"? Are you aware how many people were killed pre-October-7th last year? Displaced? Had their villages burned down and their animal flocks taken away from them? Had their children burned alive? Are you aware of such thing as "The Wedding of Hate"? Open book questions, Google allowed.
Describing the longest-lived military occupation and one of the very few in the 21st century that comes with settler-colonialism attached as a "Tense situation" kinda tells anyone all they need to know about the rest of your comment and how much weight you should be given.
> making up preposterous casualty numbers
Au contraire. People are still getting out new bodies from under the rubble. And Israel is claiming the war will continue another 7 months as reported by the Times of Israel. If anything, 50K is too low.
Strange. Months of uncharitable takes from Scott and now he think Paris Hilton actually signed up for cryonics and 50k died in Gaza? …Despite ample evidence that both of these things are not even close to true? I had more respect for him than just about anyone and consider the rationalist movement to be very formative for me but he is clearly in an ideological bubble. Truly did not think this was possible for him. I will not be continuing my subscription. I do appreciate what I have learned here.
The links are not all equally related to being in an ideological bubble. Being wrong about Gaza can't be justified with "there are a lot of links so probably a couple are wrong" unless most of the links are about political subjects like Gaza.
Doxxing is going to be an outdated concept in the next couple of years surely because we are all going to identify as who we are, to shore up our claim to be made of meat. Pre-internet you communicated face to face or on documents with your physical address at the top and name at the bottom, there's just been a brief and not terribly healthy blip where we could insult each other pseudonymously.
I have started to trade under my real name. It's painless and probably makes me a nicer person online
I can imagining e.g. providing credit card details to a web site, then doing everything online with the site certifying that it knows I'm human. Then everyone knows I'm made of meat, but they can't send a SWAT team to my address if I say something they don't like.
It's likely apocryphal, but I was told that the initial British nukes came with an individual arming key to prevent them being activated by just anyone. While this theoretically comforting, the locks themselves were less secure than a bike-lock and could be turned with the end of a spoon if you didn't happen to have the key on you.
In this context, the only EV I can think of is "Extrapolated Volition", but I agree that that is not an organisation. You probably need to be closely involved in the whole set to understand the references made.
After a little poking around on Wikipedia, I found that Giving What We Can and Center for Effective Altruism have a parent organization called Effective Ventures. Their website is ev.org.
> “block Russian ICBMs”, which is still impossible
Nothing can "block" (insert any country) ICBM because it was never the point. You can't "block" something that roughly just follows the gravitational vector direction really fast. The goal was to cause damage enough to prevent complex nuclear warhead detonation from executing, leading to rocket, still hitting it's target, but go boom (kinetic energy of rocket-sized meteor + maybe some primary conventional explosive trying and failing to trigger broken nuclear warhead) instead of BOOM (nuclear explosion).
38: The thing about Iran's attack is, as a datapoint about missile defense, it's probably meaningless, it was theatrics carefully orchestrated to avoid escalation and can be plausibly argued to have hit the targets it actually meant to hit.
39: First, context, Noah credits those two things in addition to the default commonsense explanation by the continent's leftward redistributionist pro-labor turn. Second, variance between the educated and uneducated and variance within the educated group are two completely different things. (Specifically - and this is very clearly Freddie's position in particular - expanding and universalizing access to education naturally eliminates inequality caused by unequal access to education and should be supported for this reason, it just can't eliminate [all the other reasons that make people unequal].)
The whole project of cryonics seems ethically dubious to me.
Why would/should we reanimate people who have been cryonically preserved? Is everyone entitled to a second ride on the rollercoaster, when there's an infinite line of people boarding?
I have similar thoughts about the kind of extreme life extension some people seem to be dreaming about lately, but at least there's a certain continuity at play there, and an immense gray area of just staying in good health.
When it comes to freezing old people for years, so we can bring them back from the dead, that seems like as good a Schelling Fence as any. And it feels as though crossing it comes with a cost for everyone else, that I'm not sure that we/they should have to pay. (There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.) Are we really obliged to honor the wishes of someone who has had their turn, and then died, despite such cost?
(See also Swift's original Gulliver's Travels (Part III Chapter 10) on "the Struldbruggs" who live forever, and Vonnegut's "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" and "2 B R 0 2 B" for perspectives on immortality.)
But even if it is, at least in part, a good idea, and we get it working, should we bring back everyone indiscriminately, just because they ask us to? Would we wake up a mass murderer/serial killer if he asked? How about a common narcissistic sociopath who made life miserable for family and coworkers? If not, shouldn't we have better criteria for who we want to wake up than "eccentrics who were able to pay for it once upon a time"?
I think we should just turn the freezers off, but feel free to change my mind.
Sure. And I assume this can be regulated, like everything else that has to do with dead people.
But if not, who’s going to sue if they/we fail to wake them up for some semi-plausible reason? Great grand children? Maybe.
From what I know, my great grand parents were amazing people, but they weren’t at the top of their game when they died. Bringing a child into the world is a big responsibility, but I think bringing an anachronistic geriatric patient into the world is likely to be on a whole other level. And I’m not entirely sure how hard I would fight for the privilege.
It would be fascinating to get to know them. But I, who get frustrated having to help my mother with her computer, don’t think I’d be good at bringing people who died 50, 70, 100 years ago up to speed, and supporting them (financially, socially, technologically, emotionally, etc…). I’m not sure I’d want to show them TikTok, CNN, or even the Eurovision Song Contest. I don’t want to spend years teaching mid-20th century 80-year-olds how to navigate 21st century traffic and grocery stores. I don’t want to have to explain to them that I’m an atheist, nor what happened to the inheritance they left behind, nor about the obesity epidemic or the trans rights debate. It would be interesting for a while, but then it would probably be more like a running a mental hospital (+ a serious guilt trip for feeling like that) for the rest of our presumably long time left on earth. Unless I could convince some Amish community to take them in, I guess.
So, I wouldn’t sue, but presumably someone else would.
Then there’s the question of incentives: How have they structured the incentives to make sure it’s not more lucrative to keep them frozen, than to wake them up? After all, if they wake everyone up once the technology allows for it, they’ll presumably go out of business pretty fast.
I dunno… this just seems like something people should think about a little more carefully.
Killing (not re-lifing?) people because you think it's unfair for them to live seems pretty ethically dubious to me.
Granting that frozen corpses can be brought back to life at some point in the future, I don't see how different moral standards apply. If someone is a murderer and violates the rights of others, their own rights and/or life are forfeit in turn. But being an asshole is not a good reason to kill someone and it isn't a good reason to refuse bringing them back to life either. Unless you have a more compelling argument than rich people benefit disproportionately, I don't see why I should oppose cryogenics.
Not relifing is not the same as killing, for the same reason you’re not a murderer for allowing people to die preventable deaths in the developing world (or even on the streets of your own city). There’s a difference between actively taking a life that would otherwise go on without your interference and passively allowing people to stay dead, by prioritizing to spend your own and your society’s resources differently.
Except it has nothing to do with the expense of *your* resources. Unless you are claiming that the dead have no say in how their resources are used. Which seems to contradict how society has decided to handle the issue of wills, trusts, etc.
If frozen bodies could be brought back to life, then "turning the freezers off" seems pretty analogous to murder. This is a poorly defined hypothetical, but I don't think describing as unethical an action that prevents the possibility of life where it would otherwise exist is off the mark.
Maybe you are arguing in some zero sum sense that the reliving would use up resources that would otherwise go to other people? But it's hard to find this compelling in a world heading to 10 billion people when the eccentric cryogenics popsicles make up negligible numbers.
The internet archive acted when it did because the physical libraries in which people would normally borrow these books from were closed during the pandemic and publishers suing over it is incredibly shameful
No. I very much wish that was a fair summary of events here, but it isn't.
The Internet Archive (IA) had been illegally distributing scans of copyrighted books for many years prior to 2020, letting users download them under what they called "Controlled Digital Lending" (CDL). Their theory was that if they used passcodes to limit who at any given moment had a digital copy of each physical book that the IA had purchased, then at some general moral level the IA was just being a lending library.
The IA was freely circulating around 3 million copyrighted books under that system, including all 127 that were named in the publishers' lawsuit, as of the end of 2019. The book publishers and some prominent authors had regularly pointed out that it flagrantly violated written copyright law, but nobody had been willing to take the IA to court over it.
Then came the IA's "National Emergency Library" program, launched in March 2020. That consisted of making each copyrighted book downloadable by up to 10,000 users at once, and the publishers decided that was the last straw. They filed their lawsuit on June 1 2020, the IA's attorneys explained to that organization's leadership that they were going to lose hard, and the IA halted the National Emergency Library thing on June 16 2020.
Now after years of discovery process, the plaintiffs have been granted summary judgment. Summary judgment, which is routinely asked for but very rarely granted, is when there is no material disagreement on the facts _and_ the relevant law is so obvious that it would waste everybody's time to hold a trial.
As the judge wrote, "IA does not dispute that it violated the Publishers’ reproduction rights, by creating copies of the Works in Suit, 17 U.S.C. § 106(1); the Publishers’ rights to prepare derivative works, by “recasting” the Publishers’ print books into ebooks, id. § 106(2); the Publishers’ distribution rights, by distributing ebook copies of the Works in Suit to IA’s users, id. § 106(3); the Publishers’ public performance rights, through the “read aloud” function on IA’s Website, id. § 106(4); and the Publishers’ display rights, by showing the Works in Suit to users through IA’s in-browser viewer, id. § 106(5).5 "
IA suggested that their program fell under "fair use", but fair-use reproduction is not a vague standard derived from court cases -- rather it is a very specific set of reproductive uses of copyrighted material which are specified in federal law. The IA's CDL lending went far beyond anything authorized by that statute, and then the "National Emergency Library" expansion of it obviously even moreso.
Meanwhile the IA's idea that limiting its reproduction of a copyrighted work makes that no different than the clear legal right of the owner of a physical book (e.g. a local library) to lend that copy of the book to someone else, was just hand-waving without any basis in law. Quoting the court's ruling: "no case or legal principle supports that notion."
And so the IA did indeed lose hard in the form of a rare summary judgment: "the [IA's] arguments are either moot or without merit." Now comes damages, which the same court will determine.
I love the IA and have used it many times, and really want it to continue existing. I devoutly wish they had not decided years ago that they deserved their own personal version of copyright law and that nobody would ever dare sue them for clearly violating the actual copyright laws. They were completely wrong on both of those things, and now they are in a whole lot of trouble that was years in the making.
Summary judgement is granted when the judge can resolve the case without resolving any disputed questions of fact. It doesn’t matter whether the law is “obvious.” The judge was going to enter a summary judgement in this case because the parties agreed on the facts but not on the law.
Damages do not come next, because the parties reached a confidential financial settlement, and agreed to a permanent injunction prohibiting the Internet Archive from lending electronic copies of plaintiffs’ books. These are subject to appeal, meaning that if the Internet Archive wins on appeal, they go away.
Re: Nuclear codes, my understanding is that while nuclear weapons do require a password to launch, and the US president does hold "nuclear codes", these are not the codes used to launch the missiles, they only serve to authenticate the president's orders to the military. The codes for the weapons themselves are held in safes near the weapons they control.
I recall hearing a story about the Soviets that implied a similar system (a general was asked what he would do if the safe jammed, and he said he would use a fireaxe, conveniently located next to the safe, to break it open), but I haven't been able to find it again.
The UK story differs in that (some) nuclear weapons were controlled by a simple lock which can easily by bypassed, whereas the US locks are deeply integrated into the weapon and designed to be almost impossible to bypass without rendering the weapon unusable. Per the BBC story, all such weapons were withdrawn from use in 1998, so presumably the UK now works similarly to the US.
Edit: The 2019 article seems confused on this point, but is primarily about whether UK weapons require codes from *the US* to launch, and conflates this with the question of whether they have any kind of coded lock at all.
Claude working on baking a cake was fascinating! I looked up Claude in the android app store but it didn't show up.
I was one of the early experimenters with chatCPT-4 (though I'll refrain from linking to my success in getting it to provide Hitler with comic material) and at that time there were all sorts of variables that you could play with.
Since then I've experimented with a few different AI apps and found Perplexity to be the best but I'm still unclear on the difference between them. Are they all coming from just 2 or 3 databases? And why are some capable of more intelligent conversation than others? Finally, are they all eaually politically correct? I engaged in an excellent conversation with Maimonides (whose corpus is a central pillar of my wheelhouse) until I asked him to challenge some aspect of ubiquitous modern culture where he feels that we've gone awry. His response was that Judaism needs more female leadership. and no matter how hard I tried to clarify that this wasn't a response to what I was asking nor was it his likely opinion, he couldn't let go of it. What the hey?
Anyway, for my money (and admittedly limited experience) I recommend Perplexity for answers and DaVinci for pictures. What say you?
Regarding link #14 and the question of God using supernatural means to influence people to the faith, I think that there's an even more fundamental omission that argues against Christianity. We can start with the propositions that 1. God has the power to break the usual laws of nature, as implied by his omnipotence and the various miracles of the Old and New Testaments, 2. that God wants as many people as possible to know of the salvific crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, as implied by the Apostles being sent out to minister to all nations; and from these propositions we can see that God could easily have used his omnipotence to immediately spread news of Christ's passion to the entire world, perhaps by appearing in the sky and directly announcing it in everyone's native tongue. And yet he didn't. Because of God not doing this thing which would have been fully within his power to do, and because of relying on the fallible means of human apostles to spread the Gospel, there are whole nations who went whole generations without the saving knowledge of Christ which God presumably wanted them to have (as shown by the very fact that he sent apostles to eventually reach them and spread the word). In the most extreme cases, we have the entire population of the New World going nearly 1500 years without knowledge of Christ, and the few remaining uncontacted tribes still going without it even to this day. If God presumably wanted to spread the evangelion to all nations, and had the ability to do so by miraculous means, then it makes no sense why the imperfect actions of human missionaries were to what he entrusted that essential program. Even if God provides some forgiveness to those who died without knowledge of Christ, based on if they would have accepted the Good News if they had the opportunity, we can still assume there is some benefit to knowing Christ within one's lifetime for God to have sent out an evangelistic mission at all, and it remains true that there is no seeming reason for this mission to be human and delayed rather than miraculous and instant.
#14: Miracles being somewhat arbitrary doesn't make them poor evidence of God's existence. It makes them poor evidence for the existence _of a God who optimizes for human-legible outcomes in ways you consider plausible_.
I'm going to have trouble conveying the extent to which your analysis there will strike theists as Not Even Wrong-- a failure to adequately model the beliefs of people who don't share your assumptions-- but let me gesture at a few points.
- There are 2000 years of discourse just within Christianity trying to theorize _why_ miracles might happen, in particular curiosity about why they're less common and/or less obvious These Days. This generally focuses on miracles _demonstrating certain things about the person of Jesus specifically_, with theological implications following from that including that there's much less need for miracles after the "main" miracle of the Resurrection. Readers will infer from the way you discuss the topic that you either don't know or don't care that any of this discussion exists.
- Given that miracles by definition represent some kind of suspension of the usual laws of nature, why would we expect them to follow laws of motivation consistently either? A miracle that's predictable in advance (and hence can be intentionally caused by creating the right conditions for it) could equally be described as magic ("I speak this incantation and fire predictably rains down") or even a natural law of its own ("a levitating force acts on popes").
- Miracles in the Christian tradition are typically seen as a validation of teaching authority, not as a way to produce outcomes, and neither fully necessary nor fully sufficient on their own in any event. This goes all the way back to the teachings of Jesus: see e.g. Luke 16:19 and Matthew 24:24.
All that being said, I have no particular opinion on whether Joseph of Cupertino's levitations were actually miracles, and I wouldn't by any means go to them as evidence of anything about Christianity.
Scott, I doubt you'll ever see this, but if you like Samuel Hammond's 95 theses on AI, maybe you would also appreciate his writing on SB1047? "California’s Push to Regulate AI Goes too Far
>But God usually sticks to the laws of nature. If He was going to violate them, you would think He would do it to save the Holocaust victims
"God either performs no miracles, or performs a miracle any time that doing otherwise would lead to the Jews being brutally oppressed and murdered *en masse*" is not a prediction of Christianity. In fact it would be evidence against Christianity if true, since it would mean that the story of Exodus, which says God allowed the Jews to endure being slaves in Egypt for 400 years before the miracles that saved them, couldn't have happened.
Your argument basically amounts to "conditional on God existing, the prior against Christianity being true would still be very high; therefore, conditional on Christianity being true, it's unlikely that this particular miracle would have happened as described", which is a complete non-sequitur even if we grant your premise.
RE: the effects of education in Latin America, if you are interested in the effects of things that are often not about themselves (education, health) in the Third World, check out the book Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.
Lots of expensive things look useless in the First World because it's hard to see what would happen if they weren't around. You have to look into the Third World to appreciate some very expensive Chesterton Fences.
Comparisons between countries are complicated. In my home country, I could probably afford a maid and hope to buy an apartment. Where I'm living now, I'll probably never own my home, I have pretty good infrastructure, I can afford to travel a lot and buy crap on Amazon, and I have 0 worries about crime.
Agreed. To me, the only reasonably objective way of comparing countries is just comparing in which direction people in aggregate (want to) migrate. Anything else will either ignore some important factor or arbitrarily compare factors that aren't objectively commensurable.
> 3: Philipp Markolin, who I mentioned in my lab leak post, has published a new summary of his case for a natural COVID origin, with a lot of information on how coronaviruses naturally recombine in the wild. Recommended.
Once again, these people decline to make an argument *against* a lab leak, but rather, an argument for the *plausibility* of a natural spillover. This is a fine argument to make when there is significant skew in the base rates of lab leaks vs natural spillovers. But...is there?
There has been a "laboratory biosecurity incident" every year, sometimes more than once per year, for almost the entire past two decades. It is a highly atypical year indeed that does *not* have a lab leak event. But, you might say, that's only one half of the ratio. What about the number of pandemics?
Wikipedia lists 19 documented pandemics, and *55* documented laboratory biosecurity incidents. Using advanced mathematics I have determined that this is approximately 2.9 biosecurity incidents per pandemic. That is, we have more lab leaks than we do pandemics. Significantly more.
So, the base rates here militate fairly strongly towards a lab leak, without investigating any of the details of the particular incident. "No evidence for" style arguments militate towards the lab leak, not the natural spillover. Whenever I read these arguments I feel like their authors have never actually examined just how frequent lab leaks are.
This isn't proof that a lab leak occurred! All the gene analysis is meaningless, only people who think the WIV was designing a bioweapon would bet on that. The likely scenario is just that they were doing serial passage, which is exactly what you would do if you were doing GoF research for public health purposes - accelerate natural processes.
Finally I'll note one particularly silly argument, which is that our inability to find a natural ancestor somehow proves the natural spillover story. Except, no matter which theory you believe, you believe there is in fact a natural ancestor. So, our inability to find it just tells us that China isn't being cooperative, but provides precisely zero bits of information in either direction regarding the lab leak hypothesis.
These arguments are always just so, so superficially and trivially terrible. It is not worth reading, and if anything is a good litmus test for whether you can spot pseudoscientific bullshit.
I recall the Patriot missile was the "hero" of Operation Desert Storm, especially against the "feared" Scud missiles.
User banned for this comment.
Is there any way to see the offending comment?
'Deleted' means they were banned from Substack entirely, so probably not. At least not on Substack.
I suspect "deleted" means they deleted the comment. I doubt Scott has the power to ban users from Substack.
Substack banned me for a day a while back (for no reason), and "Deleted - comment deleted" is what all my comments with replies turned into. I'm sure Substack killed the account here.
EDIT: oh wait I'm wrong, looking back mine said "comment removed".
Huh. In the past, I've seen the message "user was banned for this comment", with a link to expand the comment. Maybe there are multiple ways to ban someone, or maybe Substack changed their procedure.
Is it possible for individual authors to ban a commenter from all Substacks?
I think I saw this one before it got deleted and it was just some nonsense. It started off sounding like it was addressing one of the points, and then halfway through it turned into a bunch of random crackpot-flavoured words.
22. The lack of controls on British nukes was just a plot point in a recent Doctor Who Episode.
> 4: Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that COVID didn’t happen at all, and that both “lab leak” and “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place.
I know you like contrarian takes but really feel like this is a level of conspiracism you shouldn't be signal boosting.
If the ideas are clearly bad why worry about linking them?
1. Because a lot of people believe clearly bad ideas
2. Because they become toxoplasmic strawmen that everyone references to show how dumb 'those people' are.
Well, that hasn't happened (AFAIK) to "birds aren't real". Perhaps it needs a base level of credibility to have that effect. (OTOH, people are training AIs on the web.)
I heard that the government ordered the COVID lockdowns so that they could replace the batteries in the birds without being noticed.
But it seems to have happened to "flat earth" and "space is fake". I had a misfortune to click on some eclipse-related thing on FB and now my feed is inundated by space pictures and trolls shouting "fake" at them.
The reborn "Flat Earth Theory" is magnificent. Can you think of a better way to distract conspiracy loons than that?
I doesn't distract them. It multiplies them.
I've been told "birds aren't real" is some specific generational humor of a sort I don't especially understand. It doesn't seem to have the sort of emotional hooks that more pervasive conspiracy theories have.
It's a parody of conspiracy theories.
It has also spawned a conspiracy theory that the powers-that-be are trying to push this dumb "parody" to discredit actual conspiracy theories or hide surveillance or whatever.
Maybe it's a parody of cladistics people? "Fish aren't real." is something that I've heard people have serious discussions about.
I know my son worked at a summer camp one year, and the guy in charge got *really pissed* when one of the camp counselors was telling the kids "birds aren't real" and told him to knock it off. Presumably he figured some parents would object to their kids coming home and telling them birds weren't real....
1) I am not sure the overall solution to this is in the "more restriction/monitoring of disinformation" camp versus the "more free flow of ideas" camp.
2) They are also funny/amusing sometimes. I used to like to read a blog of a guy who thought some images sent back from Mars showed Alien structures. Hilarious thing was he had the scale of the photos off so he would be finding evidence of complex machines and habitats and transportation infrastructure in what were in effects close ups of rocks that were just like a 3'X3' square. So some formation he clearly thought was 50'x50' was actually ~4 inches X 4 inches if you did your math. Nevertheless it was fascinating to see how his mind worked.
1) I don't think we can include individuals personally deciding not to repeat a specific claim as 'restriction/monitoring'.
If bad ideas don't have *some* penalty in the rate at which people repeat them, then the whole 'marketplace of ideas' thing doesn't work at all, and knowledge is impossible to accumulate.
Individuals deciding not to repeat bad ideas is a pretty normal mechanism of the marketplace. I don't think it becomes top-down authoritarianism or anything just because one commenter suggests it to the author.
2) Sure, but that feels like pretty obviously a different category than this? Lolcows are sometimes conspiracy theorists, but not all conspiracy theories are lolcows.
Highlighting wrong ideas while reasserting that they're wrong is still contributing to the marketplace of ideas, so long as the assertions are correct at a rate better than chance.
Satire just happens to be a slightly less conventional method of doing the reassertion.
Not linking to that sort of thing isn't restriction or monitoring; it's simply judging that it is not a worthwhile or productive thing to link to.
Sure, but this seems like an argument of the type 'web platforms not hosting your speech isn't violation of the first amendment'. It's kind of missing the forest for the trees. in that we should be interested in the normative principles, not the narrow semantic question of whether it counts as exactly the sort of thing we've decided is bad.
In other words, it may not technically be restriction or monitoring of ideas, but it clearly proceeds on the same principle that we should limit rather than promote the spread of ideas depending on whether we agree with them or not. So I think the broader point that Martin is gesturing towards, that freely spreading ideas is actually better for our societal epistemology and rationality, does apply here even if the specific words he said were against 'more restriction/monitoring of disinformation' and what he's arguing against is not quite technically that.
I don't think this is a good analogy. Scott isn't a web platform. Unlike Twitter, for example, which has more or less infinite capacity to host ideas, and is one of the default networks for putting ideas on, Scott links to a relatively small number of things, presumably carefully selected, and I think it's fair to assume that even if he doesn't endorse everything he has linked to, he's suggesting that these things are worth linking to. (Incidentally, I think he probably *does* think that particular link is worthwhile to link to, and the problem here is mostly that I don't agree with him.)
Yeah, this week's links has me worrying about Scott's current quality filters for linking to stuff. Looking at obviously dumb and wrong stuff on the internet is a guilty pleasure for many of us, it can be fun for a bit but it's not enriching, and has little value beyond making us feel so much smarter, as if our own brains and opinions were not fallible and often half-cooked.
I wonder too about the sudden profusion of religious-apologetics-adjacent content, both in the comments and now from Scott himself. There are good reasons much of the intellectual world got bored with arguments for this or that religion long ago; there is something uniquely stupefying about people trying to extract their favorite idea of God from a few basic facts like their own existence as an individual, and modern takes rooted in "anthropics" and bayesian language are not looking any better. Plus, what's the point? Even if you managed convince someone to squeeze some kind of god principle out of this kind of intellectual wrangling, what spiritual or emotional good could such a poor, dry deity ever do?
OTOH, and for fairness: Yay for geothermal energy, in-ovo sexing, Golden Gate Claude, and Noah Smith. And I hope the Internet Archive manages to survive this one.
> I wonder too about the sudden profusion of religious-apologetics-adjacent content
Seems like a natural thing for engineers and gamers to do? "Here are the system requirements, produce the most elegant solution." "What would it be like to live in a world with class levels and hit points?"
Plus, mystics can get there too. "See the abstraction behind the world, and proceed upwards into higher- and higher-level abstractions."
Why are there so many songs about rainbows?
Isn't a ton of science basically about seeing the abstractions behind the world?
That would be philosophy in the wider sense I guess, science being the "natural philosophy" that is amenable to repeated measurements.
Seeking abstract truths is not a problem though. The problem with apologists of all kinds is that when you already believe in the thing you want to prove, it's not an intellectual process of open enquiry and the quality of the result suffers accordingly. In maths it doesn't matter because proofs are water tight or they don't count, which is why you don't much hear of "apologists" for e.g the continuum hypothesis. When it comes to slippery metaphysics though...
Yeah. Usually mystics aren't very good about testing their abstractions rigorously through replication and physical application, but some manage it.
and what's on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions, and
rainbows have nothing to hide.
Why are there so many lost instant memos
And badly downloaded files
Firewalls configured and ports we must forward
So people can't see inside
Online there's gold if you manage to reach it
On all of the iPods for free
Someday we'll find it
A stable connection
The hackers, the coders, and me...
https://youtu.be/sBioZ6m2hRU?si=2NuoFwU4Rs85G1nn
Why can't/shouldn't Scott link to things that are "fun for a bit but not enriching"?
Seeing a bad idea clearly marked as "bad and false" is still more than not seeing it at all, with enough time, exposure and vulnerability to that you'll create real belief.
It's my belief that exposure matters more than right and wrong, and that being able to be exposed a lot to something but still deny it as false is a rare skill.
I think it is valuable to highlight that a popular substack has published what is presumably utter rotted tripe.
It would be really surprising if Substack managed to be the first ever publishing platform on which people writing brain-hurtingly stupid crap never got a wide audience.
I will always signal boost the most insane takes. If somebody finds even crazier takes, let me know, and I will signal-boost those too.
I only regret that other people got to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory before I did and now it's well-known and boring.
Also, once I found something on a 19th-century British conspiracist who thought the whole Bible happened in Britain and the Hebrews were from the Hebrides and "Egypt" was the Faroe Islands, but I didn't bookmark it and I've never been able to find it again.
Seems like a bad idea in game theory terms, since it incentivizes people to make up and spread crazier and crazier takes, which some people inevitably are going to believe. As the way the internet works people directly make money from getting attention, even if its negative. Doesn't that just result in a more and more polluted information ecosystem where people are competing to say the most insane things?
(Linking to a wiki article on an existing theory is a bit different since there's less direct benefit to the theory proposer, as with other ways of talking about stuff indirectly like writing about it but not linking it.
"it incentivizes people to make up and spread crazier and crazier takes"
Right, what you're missing is that that these takes are hilarious and Scott is a fun person who wants to increase the amount of hilarity in the world.
Agreed. Fun is good. Thanks for defending comedy my good man!
>As the way the internet works people directly make money from getting attention
And this is why avoiding that attention is like promoting pacifism while in a live boxing match. It doesn't work; you lose by default and the audience doesn't even notice you were intentionally not throwing punches. There are thousands if not millions of other sources for crazy takes, they're not going to starve for lack of appearance here. Might as well take some pie in passing.
sir you are writing this in a world where tiktok exists
I wonder if that would be anything to do with the British Israelites? Apparently some of them tried digging up the Hill of Tara in Ireland because they were convinced that was where the Ark of the Covenant was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Israelism
https://www.newgrange.com/tara-ark-of-the-covenant.htm
"During 1899 and 1902, members of the British-Israel Association of London came to County Meath to dig up the Hill of Tara. These 'British-Israelites' believed they would find buried there the Ark of the Covenant, the chest said to contain the Ten Commandments inscribed on stone tablets."
Perhaps they should have tried digging in Dinas Emrys instead.
Seems like a sensible version of looking for your keys underneath a street lamp. Travelling all the way to the Holy Land or North Africa to dig random holes is expensive and inconvenient and not significantly more likely to yield the Ark of the Covenant than digging in your own backyard.
Exactly! Just ask Joseph Smith! ;)
Look, if the Ark of the Covenant was in Tara, it would have been mentioned in the Book of Invasions; we know all about Noah's daughter coming here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebor_Gab%C3%A1la_%C3%89renn
Oh, so "wrong Ark"? Is this one of those "da Vinci Code" things where Noah's "real" Ark was his children?
What if the real ark was the giant wooden boat we made along the way?
Could it be William Comyns Beaumont (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comyns_Beaumont)? I think his books The Riddle of the Earth and Britain: The Key to World History are closest to what you have in mind.
He sometimes wrote as Appian Way. I wouldn't bother with a pen name if my surname was Beautiful-Mountain and my middle name sounded like a druid, but he was a bit of a nut.
I read something similar about the Trojan war happening in Britain: Where Troy Once Stood, by Iman Jacob Wilkens.
That seems likely to be at least partially inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth's (mostly make-up but purporting to be real) History of the Kings of England, which attributes the founding of Celtic British civilization to exiles survivors from the Fall of Troy, and the first King of the Britons in his account was Brutus of Troy. Brutus was in turn grandson of Virgil's Aeneas and thus a first cousin a many times removed of Romulus and Remus.
The same work by Monmouth also have a central role in codifying and popularizing the King Arthur legend.
So was the Roman conquest of Britain, since the Julii were also descended from Aeneas.
This is starting to sound like a really good conspiracy theory, where one group has been controlling the fate of everything for 3000 years! Forget all that "Holy Grail" stuff... Unless Jews are somehow the only non-Trojans in Europe? (Aside from Picts and Basques and Hungarians and Finns and Estonians and Roma ...)
My objection is almost the opposite: reading the position paper, their position seems actually to be the much more boring 'covid wasn't a big deal' than the (I agree) interestingly insane and therefore worth-signal-boosting 'covid literally did not exist'.
They're maybe going slightly further than most in saying that it didn't qualify as a pandemic, because it had no discernible effect on the healthy etc., but at its core it doesn't seem substantially different than the mainstream 'covid was nothing to worry about and we overreacted to it' narrative. And I was so excited as well!
I think I spent a while trying to figure out what that group was on about a few months ago. They were usually pretty vague, so I'm still not really sure. I'm not totally sure if they agree that a virus called SARS-CoV-2 existed or not.
But I think one of their main claims is that the COVID story was used as a cover-up for some other unexplained mass mortality event in specific places like NYC (possibly something related to drugs?), since the early NYC mortality data was drastically different from most other cities.
Well that does sound somewhat more interesting again!
I agree that it's not especially clear what exactly they are saying about the existence and/or nature of the virus itself, from what I've read so far. Which you would think would be a red flag to these supposedly discerning sceptics who see the truth behind the lamestream media's lies...
I didn't dig into their argument.
Is their claim that the increase in deaths (I have some data for California here: http://mistybeach.com/mark/Covid.html) was (a) not that big a deal and/or (b) not technically a pandemic?
Because unless you believe in massive data fraud (including hospitals lying about being overrun) then the increase was quite real.
"The hospitals are lying about being overrun" was a recurrent claim, as it was happening.
I realize this :-)
If the claim is that hospitals across the western world (Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), Japan, Taiwan and other countries AS WELL AS individual mortuary operators as well as regional death reporting from many/all cities was in on the conspiracy ... well, I just don't think there is enough common ground of how the world works to have a conversation with those people :-)
Well, agreed. I'm just saying their argument is not innovative.
There were a lot of people in the former Soviet Union who would spontaneously talk about how great it was, including most of the media. I wouldn't call that a "conspiracy", as such, but there was definitely a shared interest in not ending up in a gulag, which incentived people to act in similar ways.
Well that WAS fairly true in some places. While we had in my state "lockdowns to prevent hospital overcrowding" that first month or so I needed to go to the emergency room for a couple days (with likely COVID complications) and at least at my big city hospital...it was completely dead. Like 3 emergency room beds out of 50 being used. It is NEVER like that. Always packed to the gills except in APR 2019.
Not that I think those policies were terrible (don't have enough info to judge), but definitely the "hospitals will be overrun" hysteria peak was badly out of tune with what happened her for quite a while. Maybe there was some specific two week period later where it was a problem, but it was well after people were maximally worried about it.
Nah, they were legit overrun in (for example) New York and Italy at the start and India later on. Very real concern among those of us who work in health care. I live and work in Australia, during Delta in 2021 we had pretty serious issues with health care overcrowding causing delays in service provision, and this in a city/country that had some of the toughest lockdowns worldwide.
it’s true for a brief period at the start in 2020 there were actually less hospital presentations - due to people avoiding leaving the house and especially avoiding contact with health care services where they assumed Covid cases were clustering.
The comments on that article are pretty interesting. I even found a link to a substack arguing that the eradication of smallpox was a fake, and it is actually the same thing as monkeypox.
So the answer is literally "It's bad on purpose to make you click?" (Or at least laugh.)
Humor is included in my utility function, so if it makes me laugh hard enough, it was absolutely worth clicking on.
Concerning the epistemic status of conspiracy theories: Sabine Hossenfelder has an old and useful discussion with herself about the empirical validity of claims made by the Flat Earth Society.
Treating their claim as based on a radical version of rational scepticism (akin to pyrrhonian scepticism), Sabine argues that it boils down to whom you trust, or (in the aggregate) on the level of trust within a group. Illustrating "the social thing" in epistemiology.
Addendum: To the extent that social media separates us more effectively into different trust-groups than before, conspiracy theories should have a field day in tomorrow's society (or rather: multitude of virtual societies). Creating the preconditions for ever-more theories to signal boost. From 7:26 but in particular from 11:40 and out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8DQSM-b2cc
I think it's a matter of where you draw the line at what you call a conspiracy. Is two kids agreeing to keep a secret from their parents a conspiracy? If not, why not. So I think you're technically correct that there are more conspiracies than conspiracy theories. But I also think most people don't count those when they say "conspiracy".
The distinction I'm most familiar with is between "grand conspiracies" and "petty conspiracies", with the difference being that petty conspiracies have a plausible number of people in on the plot and leave realistic amounts of evidence that can permit reasonable efforts to confirm or falsify them.
A theory can start out as a Petty Conspiracy theory, but gradually evolve into a Grand Conspiracy theory as proponents have more and more contrary evidence to explain away. The Kennedy Assassination is a classic example: it's perfectly possible for a group of people to conspire to assassinate a high-level political leader, e.g. the Booth Conspiracy in 1865 or the Black Hand in 1914. But once there have been multiple official investigations with very long paper trails that consistently conclude that Oswald acted alone on his own initiative, then you need to suppose an implausibly large and cohesive conspiracy to keep the theory alive.
If "some of us have talked together" is a conspiracy, then most intra-party politics (plus quite a lot of inter-party politics) is conspiratorial. But that is stretching the concept beyond the everyday meaning of the word.
In everyday language, a conspiracy is a high-level informal agreement where there would be massive reputation losses, perhaps also criminal charges, if someone should reveal what is going on to the press and the public. Few top-level people will think that the potential benefit of such a conspiracy (remember that forming a conspiracy is no guarantee of its success) outweighs the risk of being found out, including the repercussions if being found out. Therefore conspiracies, in this meaning of the word, are likely to be rare.
I did nor mean to strawman you - only to illustrate the rubber-band characteristics of the concept.
If you say "intrigue", I agree that intrigues is what e.g. diplomacy to a large extent is about. But intrigues are not the same as conspiracies.
Anyway, I sense that much of our disagreement comes from different ways to define words. Which is not particularly interesting for any of us. So let us stop the discussion here.
> where there would be massive reputation losses, perhaps also criminal charges, if someone should reveal what is going on to the press and the public.
Why do you think that this is a required or even central element of a conspiracy? I would argue that a much more important aspect of a conspiracy is that it gives ordinary people a very wrong picture of the world. As in, you think that some things happened by themselves, and happen in different places by a coincidence, etc, but actually there are people tirelessly working to make them happen, that keep it to themselves. When such a conspiracy comes to light, instead of righteous anger people are confused for a bit, then shrug and say that it's not illegal and a good thing actually.
Unfortunately I don't have non-culture-warry examples, but I here I tried to use ones that are at least indisputably true, so anyone upset at me will quickly move to the shrugging stage and stop being very upset.
Would you believe that there's a guy in DC that can get 900 people into a zoom call, tell them that there shouldn't be any BLM/antifa/whatever protests about such and such recent event, and there will be no protests, nationwide?
Would you believe that there's a guy who can get a couple of million extra votes for democrats in swing states simply by mailing convenient preprinted requests for voting by mail to certain demographics, and it's like totally legal and cool?
Would you believe that George Soros decided that justice reform by usual means (changing laws via the Congress) is bothersome, and contributed several billion dollars towards electing prosecutors who simply refuse to prosecute a lot of crimes, all across the country?
https://web.archive.org/web/20210124100738/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/24/us/politics/democrats-trump-election-plan.html
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-prosecutor-campaign-20180523-story.html
Con artists, spin doctors, lobbyists and manipulators of public opinion exist. A fair share of idealistic activists can also be accused of sometimes putting forward a bit too alarmist future scenarios "for the good of the cause".
...But you stretch the concept by calling all behavior aimed at manipulating others "conspiracies". A conspiracy involves at least two persons agreeing to do something, usually something blameworthy, and then pin it on someone else - often involving rather convoluted reasoning. As in "9/11 was really done by the CIA, and then CIA blamed it on Saudi immigrants to start a new war with Iraq".
Conspiracy theory people also sometimes push the idea that something that is caused by god-knows-what-conflation-of-cultural-trends is really the result of a deliberate ploy, as in "the Jews in Hollywood attempt to sap the strength of our youth by feeding them gender-bending movies".
Stuff like that.
Do conspiracies (thus perceived) sometimes really exist? Perhaps. But far less often than conspiracy theory people think. And successful conspiracies even less often. Conspiracies seldom materialize because conspirators who are not idiots, must consider the risk of being found out before they set their evil plans into motion.
Apart from that: Poor old Soros! Vilified by the left and right alike.
The problem is the kind of theory that builds an evidence-proof shell around itself, not the kind that considers the possibility that some group of people is lying in order to do something bad.
I think of a conspiracy theory as being an overarching theory of everything that ends up becoming evidence-proof, as even apparent evidence against it turns out to only be more proof that it is true. But that's distinct from the existence of conspiracies, which absolutely do exist and matter sometimes and occasionally show up in the news or in court.
Not quite it, but probably related—this is a book arguing that many locations from Genesis are actually in Britain, based mainly on extensive alleged similarities between Celtic and Hebrew names: Ireland, Ur of the Chaldees, by Anna Wilkes, 1871. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ireland_Ur_of_the_Chaldees/4pABAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gl=US
There are several different phantom time theories (Illig's, Fomenko's, Heinsohn's etc.), so clearly there's market for more.
Fomenko's is my favorite, since it doesn't even require a conspiracy, and it rewards independent research.
If I recall correctly from the time I actually read some of it, Fomenko's theory includes at least the conspiracy that the Romanov's were purposefully hiding the past existence of the Russo-Turkish horde that was actually responsible for like half of the global history. I think this is where the "Tartaria" theories originate from.
Faroe Islands, more like the Pharaoh Islands
I vaguely remember some other conspiracy theory that "real" time stopped hundreds of years ago (maybe because the world was cast into hell?) and we've been living in false time ever since. But whenever I search for it, I just find phantom time or one of the variations of it. Do you remember this one?
I read an essay by Philip K. Dick, which I can't find now. He explains that he's a Christian living in the 20th century, but, at the same time, he's also an early Christian being persecuted by the Romans. Kind of like alternate realities, I think, but he experienced both simultaneously.
This might be it! I found https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/70857-was-philip-k-dick-a-madman-or-a-mystic.html which says:
> Dick supposed time had stopped in 70 A.D., the year the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed by a Roman siege. Everything that happened afterwards was an illusion, and the world was still under Rome’s dominion.
Lovely, even better if those who cannot think will be believe these theories!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comyns_Beaumont
That sounds like the strategy of "to make sure children never get sick, we must sterilize the environment around them and not let them touch anything that could be carrying any infection, since they are kids and weak". Unfortunately, the practice, I think, showed conclusively that following this strategy produces very bad results that the child has to struggle with for the rest of their lives.
Is your concern that he wasn't clear that it was a goofy conspiracy theory?
It's easy to forget that the people reading your words online include precocious 10 year olds and foreigners with only a very loose grasp of English and a notion of America shaped by movies and various kinds of non-neurotypical people out on the edges of various bell curves, and all those people may very well take a sarcastic or snarky comment you make literally. OTOH, it would take all the life out of writing to remove humor, which often comes from absurdity, understatement, hyperbole, sarcasm, etc.
Typo: 5: I’ll never tired
Comment on 5. While £35k is $44k at the market exchange rate (1£=$1.27), the purchasing power parity exchange rate (as of 2022 see here https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm) is (1£=$1.54) means a pound in the UK goes much further than it's value in dollars does in the US. This gives an equivalent household income of $54k in the UK, higher than black American households though still much lower than the average across all USA households.
I would be interested to see the comparison in hours worked, and the related average earnings per hour. In general Europeans seem to work less hours than Americans and take more holidays.
Germans work, on average, 400 hours less than Americans each year. The equivalent of ten work weeks!
This is mostly caused by part time workers working significantly less hours than in the US.
If you compare only full time employees then it's 40.4 hours a week in Germany vs 42.1 in the US, meaning that the average American actually works only about an extra 100 hours. Which is basically just Germans having slightly more vacation.
Don't forget that Germans get much longer holidays than Americans!
That's accounted for in the extra 100 hours. Which amounts to roughly an extra two weeks plus a few more holidays.
The real difference in German working hours is that the average German part timer works about 20 hours while the average American part timer works significantly more than that. So if you take all workers (as opposed to all full time workers) that pulls their average down.
Average Labour Income Per Hour:
US: $43.11
EU: $34.89
UK: $32.95
Note this is not wages but all benefits received. So the average American worker, even factoring in European higher benefits, receives about 24% more than the average European and even more than the average British person.
Does this include the benefit of public services? That seems like a nebulous concept to quantify for the purposes of comparison.
The original question was comparison of hours worked. It was a response to someone pointing out the US was richer than Germany. Then someone said, "Ah, but they work less!" To which the response is: even adjusting hour for hour they earn less. That's not nebulous. It just shows the person was wrong.
The next line of defense is what you're bringing up: Ah, but welfare! To which the response is: GDP per hour worked is also lower and you can't redistribute your way out of that math. And the US also comes out ahead in per capita spending on welfare spending anyway. Europe has spent the last two decades economically stagnant while the US has continued to grow.
The specific answer to your question: It includes public benefits received through work. Which includes healthcare in most of Europe but not in the UK.
yeah I always find these US - other country income comparisons a bit odd, because they will fluctuate a lot based on exchange rates that have a only limited impact on the wealth/feeling of wealth of people within these countries.
Hack to having a better standard of living, live in country with the global reserve currency
I also thought so. But I checked at some point, and the gap has been pretty consistent for decades. Exchange rate matter less than I had previously thought.
That's why it's better to use purchasing power parity (PPP) over just comparing salaries or wealth and seeing what the exchange rate is. PPP gives you a better idea of how much wealthier one country is.
True, but PPP has its drawbacks too, it's based on some arbitrary basket of goods which might resemble someone's purchases but not someone else's. A poor person might spend more on rice than they do on Ferraris, for a rich person it might be the other way around.
For what it's worth, the US also beats all the large European countries on PPP GDP per capita although it varies considerably depending on whose numbers you believe. Switzerland, Norway and Ireland may or may not be better off, while Germany/France/Italy/Spain/UK are all substantially worse off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
As an American living in London, I agree. Brits also get more social services than Americans.
Subjectively, living in the UK doesn't feel any poorer to me than living in the US.
How much did your salary change going from US to UK?
It depends on the exchange rates. At the time it was roughly 15%.
(Whereas black household incomes in the US are about 36% lower than white, if I'm doing my math right.)
That's not bad. I am currently preparing to move to Europe and seems that I will need to take at least a 50% pay cut.
I can't find the link now, but recently saw data indicating that London's standard of living is roughly 40% higher than it is in the rest of England.
Of course that cuts both ways: aggregate US stats hide a lot of variation too.
Of course, London's prices are also higher. Especially rent.
> Subjectively, living in the UK doesn't feel any poorer to me than living in the US.
I figured that was the point: that money goes further in the UK, or that cost disease is worse in the US.
The US spends more on social welfare per person than Britain does.
Yeah, but again, don't forget the costs for the relevant services.
Spending more (per capita) to give 20% of the population Medicare than the UK does for universal health care is pretty indicative in this regard.
"Spending more (per capita) to give 20% of the population Medicare than the UK does for universal health care is pretty indicative in this regard."
Pretty damning comparison.
This is one of those things that Europeans and Europhiles like to believe but isn't true. If you include all social spending the US is the second largest social spender as a % of GDP in the world, just behind France and significantly ahead of the UK. In absolute terms (just the raw amount of money) it's the largest. But this includes things like refundable tax credits which are not included in government services. The US system is more privatized than the UK, that's the main difference, but it's not smaller.
I sort of agree with you, but a lot of US social welfare spending is unusually inefficient & wasteful compared to other countries. Like, I don't think running programs for the elderly, poor and so on through refundable tax credits is a particularly good way to go about things. So while I guess one could argue that the US is quite generous, a dollar is clearly not going as far as an equal unit of currency in another developed country
Depends on the program. But broadly speaking, top line spending is unusually high but it's not unusually inefficient. The reason we spend more on welfare is down to two things: we provision more welfare and we pay people who work in it better than foreign counterparts.
In order to get British-like numbers you'd need to pay bureaucrats British wages ($38k vs $83k), limit services like the British, and reduce workforces to British levels (about a 25% cut). We could do that. But American voters have generally opposed it.
I think it's a difficult comparison.
For instance, if you live in Houston on $150K then you probably own a big house with a yard and a two car garage and a couple of cars and a speedboat or something. If you live in London on $150K then you probably live in a dingy rented apartment and may or may not drive a Vauxhall Corsa. But it's not really fair to compare London to Houston, you should compare it to New York, and in New York people live in crappy apartments too.
But then where *do* you compare Houston to? There's nothing like it in the UK, where everything is either (a) London, (b) some failing former industrial city equivalent to the US rust belt, or (c) the countryside. There is nowhere in the UK that is socially equivalent to the sort of cities that most of the US population lives in.
If you live in London on $150k you can afford to buy a decent house with a garden. Most people on that kind of salary would be looking at houses in places like Guildford or Kingston, which are nice and very green areas. And you can certainly afford a good car and keep a boat if that's what you want. What you describe is more like $60k salary in London, I'd say.
Well, of course you'd take a mortgage, few people are in a place to buy such properties outright. You can usually buy something that's 4-5 times your annual salary, so $150k would mean you can buy in the region of $600k-$750k.
It looks to me like $150k/year before taxes in the UK would be $102k/year after tax. It also looks like a $600K home financed on a thirty-year mortgage at current UK rates would be about $52K/year in mortgage payments. Except that thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages are not really a thing in the UK. So that's 50% of your income at the outset, with the ongoing risk that this could balloon to a much higher value.
In the US, it's generally considered unwise to put more than 30% of one's income into rent/mortgage, and that's with long-term fixed-rate loans that won't be 40% of your income next year. The British version seems uncomfortably close to living on the edge of ruin.
Yeah, I just got back from the UK. 50p for a bag of six pitas > $3 for a bag of six pitas (roughly same number of calories in each pita, so not a difference steeped in the size of the goods).
Since the GBP/USD exchange rate fell to near enough 1 that I've basically been imagining dollars as equivalent to pounds, I have been surprised quite a few times when hearing how expensive basic stuff like food is in the US.
Yeah, it's pretty bad out here... I would also like to add that there are more needs here in the USA (i.e. a car, car insurance, gas for your car, oil for your car, tires for your... you get the point) than in major cities across most of the developed world. These are also ridiculously expensive.
It's pretty frustrating. I know that people in other countries drive, obviously, but it is an absolute necessity in the US and it's just so expensive.
It is not an absolute necessity in all cities. I've been a non-driver for over three decades now. But it sure is a nuisance. We really need decent public transit, but too many people hate the poor, and will act to harm them even at the cost of harming themselves.
One big expense for anyone who's not over 65 or poor enough to be on Medicaid is health insurance. Medical care and insurance is insanely expensive in the US, and the prices are this weird random number generator that nobody can predict ahead of time.
Btw, the US also spends more per person on social welfare than France.
For sources, see the numbers on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_welfare_spending given in percentage of GDP, and multiply by GDP per capita.
The result of 29 seems insane to me (I'm assuming the tweet's audience is broadly left-wing) unless you are:
A. Extremely confident of a Biden win.
B. Not really all that serious about the threat of a Trump presidency.
Possibly C. Think Biden looking like a hypocrite by issuing a pardon makes him look worse than a Trump endorsement helps? (Does Trump in this scenario stop running against him? I'm confused).
My meta response would be that the fact that Trump is offering this deal is evidence that he thinks he's going to lose and/or some new stuff is going to come out that he's afraid of being arrested for.
There's also the general game theory arguments against responding to this kind of thing, setting precedent, etc.
EDIT: Looking at the OP it says Trump can lie. Which changes the scenario, given that he's well known for lying constantly. And would happily tell his supporters "I told Biden that if he pardoned me I'd endorse him, and he did! What an idiot! Vote for me tomorrow!" If you can guarantee Trump's compliance, or do it only after he's formally dropped out, that changes things.
Yes, the scenario is constructed weirdly, but this seems to me like fighting the hypothetical.
If you don't want people to interpret the hypothetical in light of the possibility that a person who's infamous for dishonesty might lie, you should probably specify that he won't as part of the hypothetical.
Also, Biden might very well lose more votes by promising the pardon than he gained from Trump's endorsement.
I would guess that Biden would lose more votes than he would gain from a Trump endorsement. But maybe Trump would lose more votes than Biden would lose on net if he endorsed Biden. Total turnout would suffer dramatically.
The hypothetical specifies it's a week before the election when it doesn't have to. It's inviting this kind of analysis.
It doesn't change the scenario. It's already well-established that Trump lies, and it seems to me that the opinion being canvassed in this survey is not whether justice should be done though the world perish, but whether Trump is lying.
Trump can *already* say "I told Biden that if he pardoned me I'd endorse him, and he did! What an idiot! Vote for me tomorrow!". It wouldn't be true, but in neither the hypothetical nor in real life does that constrain Trump's options. So if the promise is a private deal between Trump and Biden, then it's a no-op unless Biden actually wins and Trump gains nothing by securing the promise and refusing the endorsement.
If Biden has to *publicly* promise the pardon, then yes, that could backfire.
Also, Biden can't pardon Trump of the alleged NY and GA crimes, so this seems like a really bad plan for Trump.
Or maybe getting elected by threatening to put the opposing candidate in prison unless he withdraws is just not a good look?
Justified or not, they're already trying to put the opposing candidate in prison, though.
That is supposedly being done by an impartial justice system, so I think it looks quite different from a situation where the current ruler directly and explicitly offers the opposition candidate such a deal in order to circumvent the democratic process.
>That is supposedly being done by an impartial justice system
Does anyone know if there have been polls on what fraction of the public believes that the current charges against Trump have been brought impartially?
Jury of your peers not "fair" enough for you? What's happened to the patriotism that once existed on the Right? It is virtually entirely gone now. They are like hippies spitting in the faces of returning Veterans.
I don't know what "patriotism" has to do with it, but the stated attitudes toward crime and law & order among the right have certainly changed markedly over the last eight years or so.
He's not promising to withdraw, he's just promising to endorse. And he hasn't committed to any particular phrasing for his endorsement.
Making a deal with Donald Trump is a bit like making a deal with some kind of mysterious genie, and I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
I mean Trump's rallying cry in 2016 was "Lock Her Up", and he won.
I think that's pretty different. E.g. no one would have minded if Navalny had campaigned on impeaching Putin.
It seems different to wait until after a court has tried someone and found them guilty and then allow the state to imprison them in keeping with its laws, compared to promising, before an election, to find some way to arrest and try and convict your opponent.
So if Putin had promised Navalny a pardon in exchange for ending his opposition to Putin's rule, would you have considered this appropriate or not?
I don’t know the nature of the allegations against Navalny, so I don’t know how to think about the appropriateness of this sort of thing.
Not that I trust the average person to make very well-considered decisions, but the results don't seem very strange to me when you consider that the scenario doesn't stipulate that Trump can be trusted to keep his word, letter or spirit.
AFAICT: Trump support is first and foremost a cult of personality. Trump's actual positions are irrelevant to the cult.
Lest I be accused of simping for Biden, Biden support is a cult of the Status Quo.
> Lest I be accused of simping for Biden, Biden support is a cult of the Status Quo.
Well, I thought Biden's appeal was mostly as the go you vote for, if you want to vote against Trump?
That checks out.
Yes. Too bad there's not a "none of the above" option. (Actually, though, I feel rather neutral towards Biden. But he sure isn't someone to inspire enthusiasm.)
Emigration is that option?
It's a grossly inferior substitute, and comes with it's own problems and expenses.
It's a vastly superior alternative. You are right that it comes with its own trade-offs.
Voting doesn't come with those trade-offs for the same reason homoeopathy doesn't come with side effects: approximately it doesn't do anything.
This is not very charitable. What about all of us who want to vote against the status quo and have no choice but to go with Trump, despite our reservations about his character?
False binary.
I feel you
What positive changes to the status quo did Trump make during his first term?
Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh
He ran on the platform of "I am going to put conservative jurists on the bench" and he delivered on that promise. Not just at the Supreme Court. The entire Federal bench. I am willing to forgive a lot of foibles for success on what I really care about.
Now you likely disagree that those were positive changes, but you can't argue that Trump didn't do more for the conservative political cause than anyone since Reagan.
During the civil war, Lincoln was asked to get rid of his general, U.S. Grant. I think the issues was he was a drunk and a boor, but I may have the details wrong. In any case, Lincoln's response is how I feel about Trump. “I can't spare this man–he fights."
Putting conservative justices on the Supreme Court isn't "anti-status quo," we do that every time there's an R President and an R Senate. If you mean you hate liberals, say that.
I don't hate liberals, but I do hate the direction they want to push the country. That is called politics. Accusing me (and half of the country) of being in a cult of personality because we have political opinions you don't agree with is neither true, kind, or necessary. It is also not fair or helpful, and I am going to call it out when I see it.
Name a single Republican president (or candidate for) from the last 30 years who would not have put 3 Federalist Society Judges onto SCOTUS. Trump accomplished virtually nothing. Only by his own incompetence did he not manage to dramatically rework Obamacare. Trump is better for Democrats because he does so little in office but worse for the country because he alienates our allies and makes the U.S. seem like an unreliable partner-nation.
Bush gave us John Roberts and (almost) Harriet Miers. Neither are federalist society. Alito is fantastic but he wasn't Bush's first choice.
To be fair, Trump's SC nominations were basically rubberstamping the names given to him by The Federalist Society.
Any replacement-level Team R president would have nominated similar.
No, Biden support is a collective run-out-the-clock strategy. Many people who intend to vote for Biden are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo in this country and few of us view Joe Biden as any sort of solution to that. In fact to be honest I don't know of any such voter who does and I know a _lot_ of deeply-dissatisfied voters.
But: putting Trumpism generally and Trump individually back in charge would be just telling our children and/or grandchildren, "fuck you and fuck your future". So we're going to vote for four more years of keeping the chaos muppet out of the White House; then based on current indications by 2028 Trump's physical and mental health will preclude his running again.
[To be clear I'm not personally advancing the above line of thinking, rather am summarizing the comments of a dozen different friends/colleagues during the past six months. Including a couple of lifelong Republicans.]
That sounds like the status quo, or at least "the devil you know" as opposed to the other one.
Only if all that you care about is the specific period 2025-2029.
Trump is now immortal?
Now you're just being pointlessly obtuse. My comment above was clear.
The wording of the question is "Trump says he'll endorse", why assume that he would?
Since Biden has no pardon power related to Trump's state trials in New York and Georgia, nor will he if Trump in the Arizona or Michigan cases is shifted from unindicted co-conspirator to indicted defendant [due to some of those already charged flipping on him], but Trump under this scenario is apparently unaware of that fact....maybe the "Dark Brandon" move would be to say yes to the deal and then let the fact of it leak as more evidence that Trump is too dumb to be entrusted with the nuclear codes, negotiating treaties, etc.
Or: when Trump approaches with the proposition, Biden calls in the Secret Service and Attorney General to listen in on and record the call on which Trump offers the corrupt bargain. Biden being a cooperating witness he just makes some noncommittal response ("Well I'll think about it Donald"), and then the next day Trump is indicted for some version of the felony that got Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich convicted and sent to prison. And the White House releases the recording of the phone call.
It seems fairly natural to assume Trump is bound to fulfil his promise, or that Biden's commitment only becomes binding if Trump follows through (because otherwise it's a pointless hypothetical; obviously you would not trust Trump's promise), but presumably not everyone did.
Even if we do make that assumption, there are probably lots of ways Trump could technically 'endorse Biden' without shifting a non-trivial number of votes. Again, different people will make different assumptions here -- but I suspect plenty of 'no' voters chose 'no' at least partly because they doubted that taking the deal would actually result in a Biden win.
Makes sense to me. Would Trump's endorsement actually swing the election away from Trump? I'd give that a 30% chance at highest.
The question the Saducees asked Jesus was actually the other way round. If a man dies and his wife remarries who will she be married to after the ressurection? After all polygamy was a thing at the time so it wouldn't have been unthinkable for a man to have two wives. But a woman having more than one husband would be unheard of.
Polyandry wasn't unheard of, although it was much rarer than either monogamy or polygamy.
A widow would most probably have come under the protection of her sons so would not have needed to remarry. If the sons are too young she may have married one of her late husband’s brothers.
I think it's the specific legal thing where if a man marries and dies without children his brother must marry the wife and bear children to carry on his name - the general pattern where across a number of cultures a man dying childless (or without a son) is a major tragedy, with the solution of ancient Jewish law being that his brother marries his widow and their son will be that heir. The Sadducees ask Jesus the question modified to the point of ridiculousness - "there were seven brothers and they each married the same woman and then died in turn, with not a one of them getting a kid along the way" - but as I understand the situation actually does come up in that society, and it's specifically because the widow has no sons that it does so.
(I've equivocated between sons and children above - the Bible version I'm reading says children, I'm really dubious a daughter would count, but I'm not a scholar of Jewish law and possibly she would through her eventual husband/son. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levirate_marriage and compare to the story of Tamar.)
Daughters absolutely do count for the purposes of levirate marriage in Jewish law. If a man dies leaving only daughters, the widow does not perform levirate marriage.
It's also worth noting that in such a case the daughter(s) are the heirs of their father and inherit all of his property. Their husbands (if and when they marry) are never viewed as heirs of their father-in-law, although in general they would have use of their wives' property for the duration of the marriage.
They teach yevamos in Satmar? 😉
Ha. Not one of those Joels... although I do have ancestors who hailed from Sighet.
As has been pointed out daughters do actually count in this case. However, in this case they must marry within their tribe. The case is actually described in some detail in Numbers. Ihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Zelophehad
'I think you’d have to claim that God will only violate the laws of Nature in cases that will bring a tiny number of people to the faith but leave the vast majority unmoved, which is such a weird preference that I think you can no longer call it a “prediction” of the “God exists” hypothesis.'
This seems related to the hypothesis that Bigfoot doesn't merely exist, but also has a field about him that causes any photos of him to become blurred.
You do need to consider things like the Backfire Effect, where presenting more evidence contrary to people's beliefs causes them to dig in their heels. Also, if the goal is to get people to be more loving, one must be wary of creating a system that encourages showing the appearance of faithfulness rather than actually seeking inner conversion.
The Backfire Effect doesn't replicate. It's probably not real, or if it is, only in very specific circumstances.
(Yes, I realize I'm inviting people to claim that their belief in the Backfire Effect is now strengthened. :-) )
> one must be wary of creating a system that encourages showing the appearance of faithfulness
Too late, social media exists. :-(
"Every European country" except the ones where I was born, grew up, studied, or am living and working now. And some others.
Yeah, half of Europe is missing, even a lot of the EU is
> it’s basically “bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can’t hide there, and maybe at some point we’ll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave”. I am not sure what this strategy offers which is worth 50,000 deaths and counting
This one's just blatantly wrong to the point of feeling explicitly dishonest- there's specific military targets (known Hamas commanders and operatives, munitions factories, etc). There's no widespread destruction of buildings in order to remove cover. The number of casualties you quote is also about 30% higher than even the Hamas -run Gaza health ministry's own estimates (not a particularly conservative group on estimating casualty numbers).
Again, I have heard claims that about 50% of buildings in Gaza are destroyed - is this false? See also photos like https://news.sky.com/story/israel-hamas-conflict-before-and-after-images-show-damage-to-northern-parts-of-gaza-after-airstrikes-12993057 . Were there known Hamas commanders in all of those buildings?
My understanding is that this can happen with apparently reasonable rules on targeting if you're trying to hold down casualties while clearing an area. There's a building with people in it shooting at your troops, so you drop a bomb on it. That gets 50% of them, but the other 50% retreat to the next building over, so you drop a bomb on that one. Repeat until you're out of bombs or they are out of people. The result is a string of precision strikes, each individually justified, that leave the area looking like that. This is what Israel appears to be doing, and is quite similar to what we did in Mosul when we retook it from ISIS.
That sounds like... pretty much exactly what Scott said?
> bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can't hide there, and maybe at some point we'll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave?
Take away the facetious tone, and I'd say this is a pretty reasonable characterisation of what you've just described.
I suppose it depends on how you analyze this. If the only metric you care about is "how many buildings are destroyed", then yes, it's basically the same. But that's not how military law has traditionally worked, and for good reason. The alternative involves telling soldiers "yes, I know it would be convenient to blow up that building full of people shooting at you, but you've used up your quota of destroyed buildings, so sucks to be you, hope that none of you die while clearing it the hard way". Or in other words, at some point buildings in Gaza become more important than the lives of Israeli soldiers, based solely on how many buildings have been destroyed. That seems rather nonsensical, and avoiding things like that is why the laws of war care a lot about motives and circumstances rather than being purely based on outcomes.
In a situation like the 1992 LA Riots, where the "enemy" is mobs of angry civilians and the occasional street gang, you can and should operate under that kind of restrictive rules of engagement and then some (e.g. the declassified "Operation Garden Plot" documents make a big deal about not returning fire on snipers firing from residential buildings). But that doesn't work as well against tens of thousands of Hamas fighters.
I don't have a good sense for how much resistance justifies varying levels of destruction, but it makes sense that how much force you should be using varies wildly depending on how strong and organized the opposing force is relative to your infantry.
Fully granted. There's obviously a big difference between how you'd respond to urban unrest in your own city (where the resistance is rather squishy and going in hard is likely to make more enemies and cause problems for years down the line) and how to deal with a city full of entrenched and very hostile enemies.
But while there are times when you absolutely should be willing to take casualties to hold down destruction, and that includes pretty much all civil unrest cases, this is not civil unrest, this is straight-up urban warfare. And to put it politely, Israel basically wasn't bombing buildings before 10/7, and 10/7 still happened, so it's not clear what benefits restraint would bring.
I lived in Berkeley during the 1992 LA riots (they reached Oakland too, and we were bracing ourselves for impact even up in Cragmont Avenue).
I remember the riots stopped from one day to the next when Rodney King (whose beatings by the police started the whole thing) went public and held a short speech, including the immortal sentence: "We are stuck here for a while. Can we get along?"
Maybe he meant it in an everyday fashion, but it struck me - and many others - as a deeply existential and emotional statement. I still believe that sentence was the main factor that stopped the riots.
Pity it is unlikely to work between Israel and Gaza. So far, they miss a street-level philosopher, like Rodney King turned out to be.
"That sounds like... pretty much exactly what Scott said?
> bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can't hide there, and maybe at some point we'll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave?"
Wouldn't bean's description be: "Bomb every building that Hamas IS hiding in"? Rather than "bomb every building that Hamas MIGHT hide in"?
The two seem different because one grants agency to Hamas such that by not hiding in specific buildings those building would be safe(r).
The area in question in the second link was being used heavily to concentrate troops.
Overall an estimated 45-50% of buildings are "damaged or destroyed", but that's mostly more reactive than proactive - a hit is called on a building after enemy combatants are seen using it (I think we have some people here who have been directly involved in the fighting and would know more than me).
Two things worth noting here - first, a building can easily be damaged enough to fall into this category even if not directly struck (as many people in central Israel who've had rockets land down the street from them can attest). Second, most buildings damaged are only damaged after the civilian population was evacuated - this is technically consistent with the idea that they're destroying buildings to prevent Hamas having hiding places, but importantly differs in that it implies both a lot of care to avoid collateral damage, and that Palestinians themselves would not see their buildings destroyed if they didn't choose to use them for military purposes, which is an important distinction.
With no offense intended, this seems like a clear case of mood affiliation. Extrapolating 50% destruction from an aerial photo of a few square miles? The rationalist bar is somehow lowered to the floor in this instance?
It's ironic that Israel, due to forever opprobrium from the weird coalition of European Socialists and the UN* is currently fighting the "most clean" urban-warfare battle of the 20th century, with even the UN admitting to only 25k casualties, meaning a 1:1 ratio of civilian to enemy combatant death (the US would've killed [gulp] for that in Mosul). And yes, a clean combat zone means getting the civilians out first. And yes, as battle rages on, more building are destroyed in the battle zone - I've yet to meet someone who prefers to die form sniper fire rather than call in an airstrike on the building where the sniper is.
But I am left with total disdain for those (not suggesting you are one) whose mood affiliation allows them to just inhale Al Jazeera News (Pravda of the Emirate who funds Hamas) hook line an sinker, because it fits what they want to think of the world. That's just a very skewed way to understand the world.
* with its over-representation of Muslim interests, even considering the fact that 1 out of 4 people in the world are Muslim - I'm guessing because no other major group of nations has any real cause in common.
People support a "ceasefire" until it's specified that "ceasefire" means hamas keeps their hostages and keeps bombing Israel, at which point most people change their minds. It's just like how everyone supports more social programs and lower taxes.
Where are you sourcing this number? https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-says-gaza-death-toll-still-over-35000-not-all-bodies-identified-2024-05-13/ this recent article says they've only recovered and identified ~25,000 bodies but of them only 10,000 are even non-elderly adult men. But they also say there are another 10,000 bodies to be identified.
Also I'm curious what you think the Mosul numbers are. There's a range on Wikipedia but 1:1 seems somewhat plausible.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mosul_(2016%E2%80%932017)
I'm curious why anyone is putting any stock in any casualty numbers coming out of Gaza. Reports I'm seeing are that civilian infrastructure across the region is effectively non-functional. If normally you count the number of bodies going through the morgue to account for deaths, and certain hospital admissions to count for wounded, it seems to me that there's no way to produce a credible number for Gaza. Where's the network of morgues and who are they dutifully reporting to? Are all bodies going to them, given that nearly everyone in the region is a refugee without steady access to food/water, let alone cell phone service and a directory to look up directions to the morgue. Nearly every hospital has been bombed/raided at least once, with reports that they're mostly non-functional, so where are the casualty numbers coming from?
It sounds like the Gaza health ministry is trying to put out some kind of official numbers, but IDK what's behind that. Are the numbers legitimate enough for them to really be able to say, "We've identified >50% of the bodies and are credibly working through the backlog. We'll get back to you with the rest." Are they just putting on a front to look like they're still competent/capable, counting what they can and pretending they aren't missing large numbers of people stuck under the rubble? Are they inflating the numbers to drive recruitment? Or are they depressing the numbers to make it look like Hamas is putting up a good fight?
I think the answer to all these questions is "this information is not currently knowable". I'm happy to hear those answers, but with evidence not pontification. I think most of this discussion of casualties is the illusion of knowledge trying to fill the gap in information everyone wishes to know but can't.
There's a difference between saying, "Don't trust the numbers because they come from an agent of Hamas," versus saying, "don't trust numbers coming from a chaotic war zone with no functional civilian government to deal with this kind of situation."
Here https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers are some interesting statistics showing that the number of deaths in Gaza reported by the Hamas health ministry are manifestly faked.
Do you really think that implies that ALL the number from every source aren't faked. I think the argument that you shouldn't believe any of them is quite convincing.
My sense is that everyone is making up numbers here. This doesn't even require anyone to be doing anything maliciously (though it doesn't preclude that), just that the fog of war is real, and there's a concurrent strong desire for knowledge despite the fog of war.
Since I made the case for the Gaza numbers being necessarily unreliable, I'd like to make the case the the IDF numbers are also not reliable. Kind of like in Vietnam when they asked soldiers on the ground to estimate how many Vietcong they killed, collated those numbers, and reported what the top brass wanted to hear, which is that the US was really sticking it to the enemy. Soldiers on the ground didn't know, they could only guess. I knew a guy who served in Vietnam and he talked about spraying bullets in the jungle at targets he couldn't see, then being haunted at night not knowing whether he'd killed someone, or if so how many.
When I hear IDF reports of X# Hamas fighters killed I don't take those numbers any more seriously than I take those from Hamas. How do they know they killed X# Hamas fighters? They don't wear uniforms. Various government officials have said things implying they think all military-age males in Gaza are Hamas, etc. So maybe they're over counting any male Arab-looking body as a Hamas militant. How would they know the difference? Maybe they're under-counting. How do they know whether there's a dozen Hamas buried in the rubble of a building they bombed? Nobody is going in and clearing out the rubble of an active combat zone just to count bodies of militants killed.
These are all guesses. What people think of those guesses, or which direction they think the real value lies, is more a reflection of ideological predisposition than anything else.
My my, I sure do love to be lectured in the subjects of Statistics and Why Palestinian Lives Don't Matter, Fuckers by a bunch of nobodies literally named after Tabloids, and whose frontpage articles include not one but 2 different defenses of Israeli settlements by different writers.
> I Have a Right to Live in Judea and Samaria
>> https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/i-have-right-to-live-in-judea-and-samaria
> Israeli Settlements Are Not Illegal
>> https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israeli-settlements-are-not-illegal
Such information. Much source.
From an earlier discussion, here's a link to a PDF that has a good look at the first few months of casualty figures, and a link to what the author has been up to more recently.
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/how-hamas-manipulates-gaza-fatality-numbers-examining-male-undercount-and-other
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts/gabriel-epstein
According to Hamas' numbers, the 10,000 unidentified would have to be 100% women and children, which is not plausible.
Given that Reuters was once caught photoshopping images to make Israel look worse, how much trust can we put in their figures?
With all due respect, my source for the 50% number is the BBC, analyzing satellite data for all territory in Gaza, see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68006607 , and you are making a bunch of completely false assumptions about me and then blaming me and my entire community for them.
It doesn't help that you quoted this along with the "50k dead" number, which is 30% higher than even the most extreme estimates by Hamas (which, as an added bonus, include the thousands of terrorists killed inside Israel in the original invasion).
If someone says "Biden reduced inflation-adjusted GDP 10% and also he's a convinctee pedophile", I'd guess the first figure has some source, but quoting it along with the blatantly (easily checked) false and offensive second part makes it clear he's not being honest.
> with the "50k dead" number, which is 30% higher than even the most extreme estimates by Hamas
is it "50k corpses were identified" or "50k people who used be alife before the war, but are currently missing and presumed dead" or "we found body parts of 50k corpses"?
Which one of these are you talking about, and which one is scott talking about?
I am asking, because I remember a couple weeks ago reading news, about how some officials in gaza changed their measurement from one of these counts to another, and "magically" the death count jumped dramatically and people started to blame each other in a very similar manner how you are blaming scott right now.
That jump was between 35k and 25k. So using the 35k is already going with the high end estimates (which, if you don't want to dig into the controversy, is an understandable default number to mention). The 50k number is a further (inexplicable) 30% jump above that.
>The rationalist bar is somehow lowered to the floor in this instance
> currently fighting the "most clean" urban-warfare battle of the 20th century
The sheer irony of scolding Scott for lowering his "Rationalist bar" while not even getting the century you're arguing about right.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9256-i-have-never-made-but-one-prayer-to-god-a
Note that this claim is often made of Gaza City, not all of Gaza. (I glanced at the article you linked, I think it talks about cities in Northen Gaza in general.)
That said, I think that number is generally considered correct for North Gaza.
The problem as I understand it isn't the known Hamas commanders in those buildings - it's that you need to go through those buildings one by one to look for militants and/or hostages and/or weapons, and many of those buildings are rigged to explode, or e.g. have militants hiding on the top floor waiting to ambush you. Several IDF soldiers have died in exactly that way.
After that happens a few times, it "makes more sense" to just bomb the building rather than risk more soldiers dying, since they are empty of civilians anyway.
> The problem as I understand it isn't the known Hamas commanders in those buildings - it's that you need to go through those buildings one by one to look for militants and/or hostages and/or weapons, and many of those buildings are rigged to explode, or e.g. have militants hiding on the top floor waiting to ambush you. Several IDF soldiers have died in exactly that way.
If the argument is just 'it's difficult and dangerous for our soldiers to prosecute our war without flattening the entire country', my response would be 'tough'- or alternatively 'well have you considered not doing that?'
'But it's much easier for us just to bomb the place' is not an acceptable justification.
This isn't carpet bombing - carpet bombing deliberately targets civilians, while this is pretty careful about not doing that.
"If you can't win a war without killing enemy civilians you should just lie down and die" is also not real advice anyone would follow. If you think you can prosecute this war better you are welcome to come and try. I assume you won't, because you don't particularly feel like risking your life for other people's struggles that aren't your fault - but that's exactly how these soldiers feel.
I actually didn't realise carpet bombing had that precise a meaning; I simply meant 'do lots of bombing of a given area'. The point I was *trying* to make is unaffected, but I realise that I unintentionally made a much stronger point so I've edited the comment to reflect that. Please feel free to respond to the amended point, or not.
> "If you can't win a war without killing enemy civilians you should just lie down and die" is also not real advice anyone would follow. If you think you can prosecute this war better you are welcome to come and try. I assume you won't, because you don't particularly feel like risking your life for other people's struggles that aren't your fault - but that's exactly how these soldiers feel.
This, on the other hand, is just a straw man I'm afraid. Nobody suggested they need to 'lie down and die'; Israel is one of the safest and most affluent countries on earth, and they would have been absolutely fine if they had done exactly nothing in response to October 7.
They are, by many analyses, greatly *increasing* the risk to Israel and its denizens with this insane overreaction.
They would, to be fair, be accepting the continued existence of Hamas. But that's not accepting death, or even defeat; most people don't consider the complete elimination of every one of their enemies a necessary condition of victory. They've already achieved a 50:1 victory, in the 'killing innocent people on the other side' war, which is of course all Hamas actually did.
It would be much more achievable and cheaper to improve the country's defences and capacity to the point where October 7 could not happen again. And it would have the added advantage of not creating new generations of potential threats by doing exactly what created this level of enmity in the first place. But it *wouldn't* have the advantage of wreaking bloody vengeance and making Israel's leaders look tough, which is of course what the real purpose of all this is. And my country did that too, 20 years ago, so I can only cast stones so forcefully on that point; I just find it bizarre that some contrarian rightists want to pretend that there's a strategically and morally justifiable rationale here.
It's reasonable to get rid of Hamas after October 7. Sure, they could PROBABLY be relatively safe leaving Hamas in power, but there would be huge socio-political consequences. The Israeli public doesn't want it, understandably, and Hamas' prestige would be enormous. Israel realizes now that to be safe it has to have better security control of Gaza, probably meaning control over the Egyptian border, etc. Which is a lot easier if you get rid of Hamas.
Also, leaving Hamas in charge dooms the Palestinian people to an endless nightmare. Getting rid of Hamas makes all things possible including two state resolution and peace and prosperity for the Palestinians.
> This, on the other hand, is just a straw man I'm afraid. Nobody suggested they need to 'lie down and die'; Israel is one of the safest and most affluent countries on earth, and they would have been absolutely fine if they had done exactly nothing in response to October 7.
No, this is wrong. You can't just turtle up and let an enemy keep attacking you as much as they want. Israel tried that with Iron dome. October 7 roved they will eventually figure out a way through, and once they do they will kill *everyone*. Kids, grandmas, babies butchered and shot like dogs in the street. No one is ever, ever going to be okay with shrugging that off.
> This, on the other hand, is just a straw man I'm afraid. Nobody suggested they need to 'lie down and die'; Israel is one of the safest and most affluent countries on earth, and they would have been absolutely fine if they had done exactly nothing in response to October 7.
I asked you in another comment what specifically you mean by "do nothing", and you never responded. I won't repeat that whole comment though I urge you to look for it, but suffice it to say I disagree with this quite a bit.
You are imagining Hamas is some threat that can just be "managed", which is exactly what Israel has done for the last 15 years. October 7th proves that a smart enemy that can get a lot of resources will eventually find a way to inflict damage that you cannot ignore. They can wait another 10 years, arm themselves even more thoroughly, and find another weakness to exploit. Maybe next time they kill 10k people. Maybe next time they manage to explode a large bomb inside a city. Who knows.
If you think a population can and should be willing to live under those conditions, you are... mistaken.
"Carpet bombing deliberately targets civilians." Way to ruin your own credibility. It wouldn't be called carpet bombing if it deliberately targeted anything but an area.
> If the argument is just 'it's difficult and dangerous for our soldiers to prosecute our war without flattening the entire country', my response would be 'tough'- or alternatively 'well have you considered not doing that?'
Maybe. And maybe the correct idea right now is to stop the war at this point. But I don't think many armies would choose to risk soldier's lives repeatedly over inflicting only property damage; remember, we're talking about buildings that don't have civilians in them, since they were evacuated.
If you think this war is being fought voluntarily, and Israel can just choose to stop, that makes sense. But if you think Israel has a legitimate reason to fight, then I don't think your answer makes much sense. It's not like Israel could just choose to ignore the invasion of the country, and the effective shutting down of the entire country that followed because of the repeated rocket attacks.
It's entirely possible that *at this point* the war can be stopped, but a lot of this damage happened in the first wave of fighting, which was necessary to stop Hamas from continually bombing Israel.
> Maybe. And maybe the correct idea right now is to stop the war at this point. But I don't think many armies would choose to risk soldier's lives repeatedly over inflicting only property damage; remember, we're talking about buildings that don't have civilians in them, since they were evacuated.
Well to be fair they've managed to kill tens of thousands of civilians, so some of those buildings did. If your choices are to kill tens of thousands of civilians or risk a few soldiers, you should risk the soldiers... or just not pursue the completely unnecessary and probably counter-productive offensive, as you mention.
(And 'a few soldiers' is really not downplaying it much at all; the IDF says fewer than 300 have died so far. Is 290 of your soldiers vs 50,000 civilians on the other side really the right ratio? Or does that suggest they should maybe risk the soldiers a bit more in order to preserve the children?)
> If you think this war is being fought voluntarily, and Israel can just choose to stop, that makes sense. But if you think Israel has a legitimate reason to fight, then I don't think your answer makes much sense. It's not like Israel could just choose to ignore the invasion of the country, and the effective shutting down of the entire country that followed because of the repeated rocket attacks.
I would really rather not get into a wider debate about the entire history of the conflict, but I would argue that essentially ignoring it was both morally and strategically the correct move. The enmity that produced October 7 arose from nearly a century of this disregard for Palestinian lives, and wildly disproportionate response to entirely predictable, even understandable resistance- and the response this time has ensured more October 7s in the future.
Even the goodwill that this has squandered in normally sympathetic nations seems to outweigh whatever advantage has been gained in killing a few Hamas commanders, given that 99.9% of the time Israel had proved completely capable of negating any real risk they posed to its denizens. I've never seen such a worldwide PR disaster; in Britain we went from potential national leaders being completely destroyed for refusing to legally define certain criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitic, to those same criticisms being completely standard positions amongst even those in the political centre.
It just all seems terrible from every perspective, and for every purpose, other than of producing satisfying terrible vengeance and making Israeli leaders look like they're doing something dramatic.
Maybe 20,000 civilians have died, not 50,000. I don't see that they have shown disregard for Palestinian lives, quite the opposite. Hamas has shown a complete disregard for Palestinian lives, but Palestinians don't seem bothered about that.
I couldn't disagree with you more about your assessment. Yes global opinion is very negative but it's much more important to eradicate Hamas, destroy the tunnels and prevent importation of terror weapons than it is for other countries to like you. When Hamas is gone and there is peace, there will be plenty of time for public opinion to improve.
I think your (and Scott's) estimate of 50k civilians killed is very wrong, see my other response to him.
> I would really rather not get into a wider debate about the entire history of the conflict, but I would argue that essentially ignoring it was both morally and strategically the correct move.
Without getting into it, let me just register that I disagree with your statement that there has been a century of disregard for Palestinian lives.
That said, what specifically do you mean by "ignoring it"? Presumably, you think the army should have driven out the Hamas militants that were still inside of Israel for the first two days of the war, I imagine. So setting that aside, I have a few specific questions, because I honestly don't think it's as simple as people seem to think it is (I'm genuinely asking here).
Do you also mean no defensive action should've been taken to prevent more militants from coming into Israel and seal up the border?
If that's the case, what to do with the rocket attacks? Simply let them continue shooting rockets dozens of times per day? Effectively shutting down the entire country for weeks/months?
What of the 150k displaced Israelis who had to flee their homes (some of whom haven't yet returned, e.g. to the north where Hezbollah is still attacking)? Just tell them "ok, effectively our country has just shrunk its borders and your homes are no longer available, sorry?".
What of the hostages? Should the country have just said to the families of the 250 hostages captured into Gaza "sorry, we're not getting them back right now"? And only tried negotiating, with *zero* leverage?
And maybe most crucially - what of the Hezbollah offensive taking place at the same time, and that has gone on since then, effectively destroying 10% of the Israeli North? Nasrallah took 3 weeks before he officially said they *won't* take part in the Hamas attack. Had that gone the other way, the amount of casualties on all sides would probably be *much* higher, and Israel would be at serious risk of mass casualties. I can't say for sure that a strong offensive in Gaza helped dissuade them, but I strongly suspect that had Israel not done *anything*, Hezbollah would've taken that as a sign of weakness and decided to attack, leading to far more dead.
Again, genuinely curious what you mean by "ignore" the attack. Often I see people pattern-matching October 7th to something like 9/11, a lone terror attack that essentially *can* be ignored, without really grappling with the fact that it was an actual invasion and full-on attack by a neighboring country, if a much weaker one.
This is such a facetious standard to hold Israel to. In what possible scenario is a country going to value the property of a hostile state more than the lives of its own soldiers? In fact, I'm not sure what better justification for levelling buildings exists other than preventing your people from dying.
If you want to constructively engage in the conversation, you could surely point out the relevant section(s) of the Geneva Convention that you think have been violated.
A... facetious standard? How could a standard be facetious?
It's not "the property of a hostile state". People live and work and pray there. So yes, they should refrain from levelling it even if it means the soldiers have to actually go and fight in service of their military objectives. The civilised world agreed this decades ago.
Your entire notion is ridiculous. A house is not more valuable than human lives. Further, no military in the history of ever has valued infrastructure more than the lives of their own soldiers. That is why holding Israel to a standard never applied to any other participant in a war is facetious.
And yes, it is a war. Hamas is the governing body of Gaza, and it attacked Israel and killed many Israeli citizens. This makes Gaza a hostile state. There is no "civilized agreement", or any treaty, that nations at war have to avoid destroying each others' buildings.
Property? What manner of language is this? This isn't the enemy's spare beachfront vacation homes. It's primary residences and hospitals and power generation facilities, and water supply infrastructure, and aid delivery routes, directly leading to second-order civilian deaths.
If that's still an acceptable tradeoff to you, fine, but call it what it is.
Property; Physical or intangible entity, owned by a person or group of people. My use of the language is as intended.
It also includes things like ammunition depots, command centers, barracks, supply dumps, artillery positions, strongpoints and tunnel networks for Hamas. Destroying these things without destroying the civilian infrastructure is very difficult in a densely urbanized area, and is only exacerbated by Hamas intentionally positioning their assets to maximize collateral damage.
You can argue this means the IDF should not have entered Gaza at all. I think this is hopelessly naïve and unrealistic, but is at least a consistent position. Expecting Israel to value Gazan *property* more than the lives of Israeli soldiers is simultaneously naïve, unrealistic and inconsistent with the history of warfare.
The fact that so many Gazans are dying is because they have nowhere else to go. If there were still Ukrainian civilians in Bakhmut when that city was being fought over, the situation would have been the same. Israel doesn't want to let the Gazans move freely through their country for obvious reasons. Egypt doesn't want to let them in either, probably because the last time something like this happened in Jordan, the PLO started a war against the Jordanian monarchy.
This leaves the options of a) Israel bombs Gazan buildings and inevitably kills non-Hamas members, b) Israeli troops die in much higher numbers and the war drags on much longer as buildings are manually cleared. Obviously these are both bad options.
Well, if their homes are so valuable to their population, maybe Hamas as the ruling organization of Gaza should release the hostages and surrender to stop the violence? Why would the burden be on Israel (who did not choose to start this war) to prioritize the well-being of Palestinians over their own safety?
>After that happens a few times, it "makes more sense" to just bomb the building rather than risk more soldiers dying, since they are empty of civilians anyway.
Very much agreed.
That doesn't look hugely different than pictures of Berlin in 1945. Which, yes, was the Russian Army, but here's one of Aachen, which was taken by the Americans - https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/M-Aachen-2-HT-Apr03.jpg
There are some minor differences due to advances in weapons technology, but the big difference is that the Germans evacuated the civilian population of their cities before using them as fortified strongpoints for their armies, and Hamas does the opposite. So there's going to be relatively more civilian casualties in Gaza, but in the wrecked-buildings category we should expect fairly similar outcomes.
Because there are basically only four ways anyone has ever figured out for removing an enemy army that has entrenched itself in an urban area.
1 - Besiege them and wait until they starve, or surrender due to imminent starvation. If there are any civilians in the city, they'll starve first.
2 - Destroy any building you think the enemy is at all likely to be hiding in. Which, barring a stunning success of military intelligence, means basically all of them,
3 - Assault every building you think the enemy is at all likely to be hiding in, using firepower to cover for the vulnerability of infantry at close quarters. That means tank guns firing to suppress enemy fire during the approach and also to blast new entrances, grenades thrown preemptively into most rooms, and maybe breaching charges to open up interior walls to circumvent known chokepoints. The building will probably still be physically *standing* after this, but it may not be habitable - and if you started any fires in the process, there isn't a fire department to put them out.
4 - Send in infantry to search every building using only small arms and body armor for protection. This is going to result in an awful lot of dead soldiers on your side, because the first man through any doorway with armed men waiting in ambush behind it is very likely to get shot up before he can do anything about it. Really, even option 3 gives you a lot of that.
There are *many* more doorways in Gaza than there are soldiers in the IDF, even counting reservists, so option #4 is out and option #3 is going to be bloody expensive for the Israelis.
If you've got a fifth option, a lot of people would like to hear about it. But that lot of people have been looking for a fifth option for a long time, and nobody has really found anything that works.
The eventual solution is probably going to be something like having the first man through the door be either an expendable robot or a soldier with heavy enough body armor to withstand most small-arms fire. Some attempts at the former are in the R&D pipeline but nowhere near ready, and the latter would require Starship Troopers style powered armor which is even further down the road.
It sounds like the IDF is already using a fair amount of new tech in the form of expendable drones for reconnaissance and fire support, but that's more in the nature of an incremental improvement to 2 and 3 than a fundamentally new option.
Quite possibly, though with Starship Troopers style armor you have to start worrying about whether the stairways will collapse and deposit your somewhat battered troopers in the basement.
Yes, I think robotics will likely get to the point where non-peer wars are conducted this way (with no casualties for the attacker and much decreased casualties for civilians on the defending side). But we're maybe 10(?) years away from that.
> the big difference is that the Germans evacuated the civilian population of their cities before using them as fortified strongpoints for their armies, and Hamas does the opposite.
Huh. Literally worse than Nazis.
Mariupol, where Russia engaged in indiscriminate bombardment, had 93% of buildings destroyed and is near the high end of destruction. Fallujah, where the US had extremely restrictive rules for artillery/air strikes, lost about 20% of buildings. And is probably the record for least destructive urban invasion of all time. In urban operations like this it's normal that the majority of buildings are destroyed. The average Syrian city where there was a battle, for example, saw 70% of buildings lost. And large scale sieges again could reach 90+%.
This looks nothing like an indiscriminate bombardment. If that were happening almost all buildings would be destroyed and casualties would be significantly worse than they are. But also urban war is really, really bad and highly destructive.
Thanks for this comment. Those aren't numbers I would have expected and it helps put things in perspective.
I think that if you are trying to move an army through an urban area then you're going to find people shooting at you from a lot of different buildings.
Not sure if someone has already said this, but apparently military experts think that Israel's scale of destruction here is more restrained than the US reclaiming cities from ISIS, and maybe more restrained than any comparable military operation.
What frustrates me most about this conversation is that I can't tell what benchmark anyone wants to use for ethical warfare. I'm not in principle objecting to people who think that warfare is always bad, but like, most people think that WW2 was a just war, or think that there are at least some nations in compliance with the international laws of war when they conduct warfare. So simply citing casualty counts or other measures of destruction can't be sufficient without debating the measures Israel uses to judge and make decisions on civilian casualties.
"Again, I have heard claims that about 50% of buildings in Gaza are destroyed - is this false?"
Sorry I fail to see the logic in this question. Even if 1% percent of the buildings are destroyed without justification, this is totally unacceptable. So the correct question would be: are there buildings that were destroyed without military necessity, on whim or just for revenge? I have not seen anybody giving evidence for that. What I have seen was mosques that became military installations https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/the-hamas-terrorist-organization/hamas-uses-holy-places-in-gaza-as-terrorist-facilities/#:~:text=On%20July%2029%2C%20IDF%20special,rifles%2C%20RPGs%20and%20machine%20guns. and as such turned into legitimate military targets. I have seen kindergartens and elementary schools turned into ammunition depots https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/idf-press-releases-regarding-the-hamas-israel-war/november-23-pr/shoulder-fired-missiles-mortar-shells-numerous-weapons-located-inside-a-kindergarten-and-elementary-school-in-gaza/ and thus should be demolished. I have seen hospitals, maternity wards to be specific, turned into caches of weapons and military command centers https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel-at-war/artc-gaza-idf-uncovers-a-cache-of-weapons-at-shifa-hospital-s-maternity-ward#:~:text=The%20arsenal%2C%20hidden%20in%20beds,firefight%20at%20the%20maternity%20ward.
And it is not just the public buildings: private apartments are no better, specifically children beds https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel-at-war/1700759995-weapons-cache-unearthed-under-children-s-beds-reveals-hamas-illegal-tactics#:~:text=Here%2C%20soldiers%20uncovered%20a%20cache,spaces%20to%20shield%20its%20arsenal.
So why so many building were destroyed? Because all of them were used by the terrorists to wage war against the Jewish state.
"Were there known Hamas commanders in all of those buildings?"
Again I have hard time understanding the logic here. You mean only the building with Hamas commanders inside can be destroyed, but if these are only rank and file terrorists there, the building should be spared?
As people have noted already here, Hamas tactics is to leave caches of weapons in quite a few places. They then get into the next building with arms hidden inside, fire from it and try to run outside unarmed to avoid suspicion. The result is a number of buildings destroyed proportional to the number of hidden arsenals. And the latter are so numerous it will take IDF months and months to discover them.
The 50k does seem high. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-69014893
However, there are widespread reports of large scale destruction. Have any sources to back up the point about military targeting?
I'm not sure what you'd consider a source here - from the inside view, there's plenty of statements about the general strategy or the purpose of individual strikes (usually the controversial ones that ended badly, like the one this week that caused an unfortunate number of civilian casualties due to igniting an unexpected munitions dump). From the outside view, the low civilian casualty ratio (lower than e.g. Americans fighting ISIS, which we know we're targeting militants) is inconsistent with tactics which don't try to take care to avoid it.
I've seen people assert this but haven't seen an actual analysis of civilian casualty ratios.
We had a conversation about this in the open thread - there's a few different sources (Israel claims, Hamas reports of their losses, outside view of what you'd expect from the tactics involved) that give civilian casualty ratios of between 1:1 and 2:1, depending on which reports you find trustworthy.
Ahem, that was your own opinion, not the conclusion of the conversation. My humble opinion was that these rates are implausible and the real rates are way higher.
I actually added an update some time later, which you may not have seen: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-330?r=fg7og&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=57403230
Summary of the update: I do feel confirmed that a 2:1 civilian casualties rate is very implausible (let alone 1:1). The BBC article researched this in much more depth than either of the two of us, and came to this conclusion. I have not seen any other investigation of similar depth.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68387864
I wasn't part of that conversation on the open thread, but the BBC (from 3 months ago) seems to simply repeat claims from various ministries in Gaza, rather than "research[ing] this in much more depth". And even so, their data (from eyeballing the graphs) seems to be significantly closer to 2:1 than 3:1.
Since the UN changed their accounting a few weeks ago, there's been a lot more information on how various groups are assessing casualty numbers. The best popular-media overview I've seen is this from the Washington Post, which says that about ~25k bodies have been counted, and other non-verified deaths get up to ~35k.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/24/united-nations-gaza-death-toll-adustment/
The BBC uncritically quotes Hamas numbers, it doesn't do its own research. It has repeatedly had to issue apologies and retractions for printing obvious lies (like claiming Israel had bombed a hospital that had not, in fact, been bombed). A neutral source it is not.
Here's a guy who's done a fair bit of analysis of the casualties in Gaza:
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/experts/gabriel-epstein
So, on the one hand, I don't trust the government of Israel as a whole, or the IDF in particular, to implement particularly pragmatic military policy. On the other hand, it's very hard for me to find sources which I can trust to give educated and well-informed assessments of what their operations actually are.
I feel like we're in a pretty worst-of-all-worlds scenario where their adversaries' actual strategy is to both motivate Israel to take actions which generate as bad PR as possible (e.g. embedding their highest value targets among civilians to maximize casualties,) and lie or exaggerate about the extent of Israel's actions wherever possible, while the international community, both state actors and civilian populations, are largely split into groups who'll condemn Israel irrespective of its conduct, or will support it unconditionally. Hence, Israel has next to no incentive to conduct its war pragmatically or ethically, because international opinion is being driven almost entirely by agents who won't attend to whether it does so or not.
> Hence, Israel has next to no incentive to conduct its war pragmatically or ethically, because international opinion is being driven almost entirely by agents who won't attend to whether it does so or not.
They still have to justify their actions to their own population, who I hope have more information?
Do they? I assumed the mood amongst Israelis was mostly similar to early 00s America still, where justification was sort of preloaded.
And Americans changed their minds on that over a few years.
Not much more, I don't think. And not that there's no incentive for ethical behavior whatsoever, but Netanyahu is deeply unpopular with the general public in Israel, would almost certainly lose badly if another election took place in the near future, is acting on incentives to postpone that as long as possible, and his own political faction are conservatives who're not in support of a moderate response, so his own incentives don't particularly align with erring on the side of the humane.
> They still have to justify their actions to their own population, who I hope have more information?
68% of Israeli Jews oppose "the idea that Israel should allow the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents at this time, via international bodies that are not linked to Hamas or to UNRWA". https://en.idi.org.il/articles/52976
One can only imagine that things which have a better militant:civilian kill ratio than starvation (the guys with the guns get first dibs on the food, so it is probably worse than just bombing at random) would be even more popular.
For better and for worse, Israel is a democracy.
So they still have to justify their actions to their local voting population.
I explicitly didn't mean to imply that you or me would agree with the justification.
And yet the Israeli government is transferring 3163 calories per person per day to Gaza. Needless to say people do not starve on 3163 calories per day.
It may be a natural human reaction to not want to feed the people who have just committed and cheered perhaps the most terrorizing terrorist attack in human history against you. But luckily the government has more sense than that.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-study-finds-food-supply-to-gaza-more-than-sufficient-for-populations-needs/
Sure. But by extension I would expect that concerns about the international community's reaction to be stronger than concerns about the Israeli population's reaction in making those sorts of decisions. I actually disagree with Desertopa's opinion that, writ large, the international community will condemn or support Israel no matter what.
This seems to be a common opinion (particularly among Israelis) but e.g. elsewhere in the comments section, somebody linked https://time.com/6559293/morning-consult-israel-global-opinion/ which suggests a -18 point swing for Israel from September to December.
I did go look into Morning Consult's more recent data, and everything's behind a $125 paywall, but they did note here https://pro.morningconsult.com/analysis/morning-consult-counter-consensus-global-political-risk-briefing-may-16-2024 that "Israel’s global reputation has not deteriorated further amid the looming Rafah invasion". Without having an extremely expensive subscription to their site, I couldn't tell you if the downward swing was only localized to the early months of the war, whether there's been recovery, likely causes/durability, etc. My guess would be that this is because the tempo of operations in the early months was very high and killed a lot more civilians.
> I actually disagree with Desertopa's opinion that, writ large, the international community will condemn or support Israel no matter what.
To be clear, I don't mean that people are all fixed in their opinions regardless. I think that Hamas has been making a concerted effort to attack Israel's public relations which has been, on the whole, effective, and that Israel's ability to avoid the PR hit by simply refusing to do objectionable things is limited.
> It may be a natural human reaction
By the same token, Gazans cheering on October 7th and similar things are totally natural and acceptable in your book? Why/Why not?
Natural yes, acceptable no.
> There's no widespread destruction of buildings in order to remove cover.
The Wall Street Journal reported [1] in **December** that 70% of Gaza was destroyed. I'm waiting for your confirmation that the WSJ is a sneaky arm of Hamas military media.
> The number of casualties you quote is also about 30% higher
Because the Gazan health ministry only reports bodies, there is still the fact that the entirety of Gaza has become one large graveyard with thousands or tens of thousands buried under the rubble. People are still getting bodies from under the rubble every day.
[1] The Ruined Landscape of Gaza After Nearly Three Months of Bombing, published December 30th 2023: https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-destruction-bombing-israel-aa528542, archive: https://archive.ph/qFUxG
There's been no effort to keep Hamas from regrouping in the cleared areas. They've operated in some areas 3 times to clear out Hamas. The analysis I've seen from Western soldiers with experience in Iraq is that the IDF isn't professional and is using air power to spare troops with little consideration for civilian casualties.
If anyone's interested in seeing more Google AI screwups, I made a whole thread of them here - https://x.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1794543007129387208
1. Have been wishing for a Total War set in a modern urban counter-protest setting forever.
2. My interpretation of miracles is that they only happen when the message "do not make a precedent out of this situation" must be set. See story of Jesus's birth on Quran for example.
3. Really Scott? You really, really, truly can't fathom Israel's goal here? Really?
I think that Scott means something beyond an eye (or rather, several dozen eyes) for an eye.
Currently we're at almost 50 eyes per eye
So, roughly the ratio of Germans killed in WW2 relative to Britons killed in WW2. I guess Churchill should have called a ceasefire after the Blitz ended. What a monster.
Also, how many Gazan teenagers have been gang raped by the IDF since October?
Apologies for being so tiresome and predictable. I just don’t have much tolerance for these apples to oranges comparisons.
> So, roughly the ratio of Germans killed in WW2 relative to Britons killed in WW2. I guess Churchill should have called a ceasefire after the Blitz ended.
Yes, that was also wrong.
> Also, how many Gazan teenagers have been gang raped by the IDF since October?
Hard to quantify, but the answer is certainly 'some':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_and_gender-based_violence_against_Palestinians_during_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war
> I just don’t have much tolerance for these apples to oranges comparisons.
It's great when your opponents just admit what you want to accuse them of! Yes, we know you don't consider Gazan lives equivalent to Israeli ones; that's kind of the point.
Your link does not support your claim of "certainly some". It says there were two claims of Palestinian women raped in prison. Very unlikely a Gazan teenager was gang-raped by the IDF
>Yes, that was also wrong.
What should the Allies should have done? Call a ceasefire and leave the Nazi party to rearm? Because that seems to be the 1940s equivalent to what a lot of the pro-Palestine people want; a ceasefire that leaves Hamas in control, with no changes in leadership.
Yes, that was also wrong.
Hang on, just to clarify: you think that it was wrong for Churchill to take the fight to the Germans after the Blitz ended? As soon as the Germans were done butchering Britons, England should have let bygones be bygones and declared an end to the war?
If that’s where you’re coming from, then I don’t think we’re going to achieve consensus.
> I just don’t have much tolerance for these apples to oranges comparisons.
He said, as he finished peddling one of the most asinine, uninformed, cliched analogy in perhaps the entire history of the Internet.
Why would you say 50? Less than 25k versus 1200+, right? But anyway the 1200+ were massacred deliberately while the 20,000+ were killed because Hamas wanted them to and sheltered among them during a war.
If he does I agree. If they could do what they want to do without killing a single civilian or Hamas operative they would. But they can't. the people won't go, and no one will take them. So, on they go, until someone cracks.
Re British nukes, the problem is that the London would likely be destroyed in a first strike, and with it the government. So for Britain to have deterrence, submarine commanders need independent ability to launch a strike. One of the first acts of an incoming Prime Minister is to review the sealed orders of the submarine commanders, as to what to do in the event that the government is destroyed. Exactly what the orders are, is not public.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort
That's a good point, but then why do the US and Russia have the opposite policy? Are their leaders better protected?
If memory serves, the US idea was to get the Prez on AF1 as soon as, and remain in the air for as long as possible (ie. until the first strike was over). Can't recall what the Soviets would get up to, but vaguely got the idea that the retaliatory strike was essentially automatic on launch detection (something, something solar flares, Able Archer, Stanislav Petrov).
However, for decades, the rumour has always been that to get around the potential issue of the first strike decapitating the command structure, the US simply set the release codes to 0000. Which produces the same position as the UK.
>Can't recall what the Soviets would get up to, but vaguely got the idea that the retaliatory strike was essentially automatic on launch detection (something, something solar flares, Able Archer, Stanislav Petrov).
This? : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
Probably, although that in-service date looks a bit late, just can’t remember.
Many Thanks! The article also mentions an earlier system:
>In 1967, the Soviet Union first attempted to create a system, called "Signal", which they could use to create 30 premade orders from their headquarters to the missile units.[2] Although the system still was not completely automatic, their intent was no different
I am confused about why any of these systems, once operational, was kept a secret.
<evidence from fiction>
Quoth Dr. Strangelove:
>Strangelove:
>Yes, but the... whole point of the doomsday machine... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?
>DeSadeski:
>It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
</evidence from fiction>
I thought the “codes set to zero” thing was basically a rebellion by SAC against what they saw as dangerous meddling by civilians and was since discovered and corrected.
I would also assume the theory is that even if the President and everyone in the immediate line of succession could be wiped out, they could not be without *some* warning, even if it was just minutes. Which would be long enough to authorize retaliation (perhaps even “conditional” authorization? As in “you are weapons free, please shoot back if I’m dead in 10 minutes)
There's also the designated survivor as a failsafe
There are three US ' Nuclear footballs'; I guess the US tries to arrange that they can't all be taken out with the same strike?
Russia has an (semi-?) automated nuclear response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
which apparently becomes fully automated when armed during a crisis.
I covered this in a separate response, but the short version is that the Russians have always been paranoid about loyalty in their military, so they would do whatever it took to maintain positive control. (And they have the Dead Hand/Perimitr system to cover this eventuality, although it's only switched on in times of crisis.) The US has an enormous and very expensive infrastructure to make sure we can get the word out. Also, we're a lot further away from the most likely enemy, which gives the President more time to respond. (We implemented this system on the basis of some extremely dubious theories back in the 60s, but "we want less control over our nukes" is a terrible platform, so it remains in place.)
Russia and the US have more nukes. So it would be hard to take all of them out?
Britain basically only has three (or so?) nuclear-armed submarines.
Four. Though only one is on station at all times (there are sometimes two at sea, as one is on station and the other is on the way out or back).
How many nukes you have is not relevant if the PAL codes to arm them are not available because all copies have been destroyed.
I suspect the answer is partly just that the US has more time as a result of being much further away from its prospective enemies (Russia, China, etc). If the nuclear threat was from Canada or Mexico, then some sort of system for what to do after the destruction of Washington, DC would need to be in place.
Also, both the US and Russia are a lot bigger. One medium-sized nuclear strike could wipe out the UK; a similar strike might well destroy everything from Boston to Washington and the cores of other major cities, but there would still be 30-40 states that would be intact. As long as there's someone in charge (and the line of succession is both long and robust), then a counterstrike can be kept subject to orders.
Finally, a communications system capable of informing submarines at sea of orders, bearing in mind that no-one, including the shore commanders, knows where those submarines are, is an extreme challenge - The US, the USSR, China and India have built ELF systems that can broadcast encrypted signals across most of the oceans; Britain, France, Israel and Pakistan have not, which makes sending a PAL signal essentially impossible - the submarine has to surface to receive communications, which they will do on a schedule (usually every few days), but that's not really suitable for a launch authorisation.
>If the nuclear threat was from Canada or Mexico, then some sort of system for what to do after the destruction of Washington, DC would need to be in place.
I mean, we do have that system. That's what the E-4B and E-6 fleets are for. But it's a lot easier to make something like that work when you have 3 times as long to respond, and a lot easier to afford that kind of thing when you're the US instead of Britain. (It appears that Looking Glass predates the Kennedy/McNamara strategy, although I suspect that it became much worse under them.)
Yeah, that's fair.
I think if the Cuban Missile Crisis had been resolved by the US accepting Soviet nuclear weapons based in Cuba, then the launch strategy of the US would have evolved in dramatically different ways, and there might well be more devolved launch authority.
That might actually make a lot of sense of why JFK et al freaked out so much about it, when we were doing the same thing in Turkey. It's a lot harder to have your maniacal control over the nuclear forces, which you stupidly think is necessary to avoid WWIII, when you only have 10 minutes to respond to a launch.
It's a link I never made before this conversation, and one I'm glad to have made, because it puts a whole lot of the crisis into a new perspective.
"On The Origins Of War" made the claim that Kennedy only took a stand on nukes because he cornered himself; he didn't think they'd give nukes to Cuba, so publicly declared nukes as the line in the sand to save face.
I'm not sure it's right that a single strike would wipe out the UK. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ lets you simulate the effect of nuclear blasts, and plugging in China's current best ICBM, the 5MT "Dong Feng 5", basically flatten London and causes some damage out to the suburbs, but leaves the rest of the UK intact.
This would cripple the UK economy and kill 13% of the population, but in the short term the majority of the UK's cities and population would survive. Even you destroyed the UK's ten largest cities, 80% of the population would survive. If the UK wanted define a line of succession that extended outside its top few largest cities, it could probably do so.
It's not actually clear that the US has the opposite policy; the Pentagon has I believe said that there are PALs on our submarine-launched missiles, but not whether there's a copy of the PAL codes in the Captain's safe. There are arguments to be made either way.
But if we do keep those centrally controlled, it's because the US has enough strategic depth that we can be confident that at least *some* of our leaders will survive and have effective communications with our submarines. That's harder to arrange if you live on an island less than ten minutes from Kaliningrad as the IRBM flies.
To the best of my knowledge, the PAL code in question is the combination to a safe containing one of the four launch keys. But safes can be drilled, and probably would be if for some reason they couldn't get the code, but were clearly in a position where launching was a good idea.
>and have effective communications with our submarines
I do wonder about our ELF sub communications. An ELF antenna, of necessity, must have long conductors. Protecting it against EMP must be ... interesting.
Long conductors, but it by definition doesn't need high frequency response. So you can put a huge inductive low-pass filter on the antenna, and the only thing an EMP will do is very slightly warm the coils of the inductor.
Many Thanks! Good point! After a career in the electronics industry trying (roughly speaking) to get signals to switch as fast as possible, it feels very weird to put a low pass filter in a signal path :-)
It now occurs to me that you could probably use an Alexanderson Alternator to drive an ELF transmitter. Good luck trying to EMP a flywheel!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexanderson_alternator
Yeah, the ordinary low-pass filter is probably good enough and much cheaper, but I'd be tempted just for the coolness value.
Further to other comments, I also think there is a distinction here between control of the nuclear weapons of the absolute top tier powers, who got them first and think of them as "weapons we might use in extremis but we know it likely triggers all out nuclear war"; and control of the nuclear weapons of second tier powers, who got them later and think of them as "a deterrent we maintain so that other nuclear powers cannot target us".
I read somewhere that Moscow and other large Russian cities have a network of tunnels and underground shelters that make Hamas's best efforts look like a mere handful of rabbit warrens. So presumably within a few minutes of a nuclear alert, Putin & co could hop in an elevator and be safe deep underground
More worrying in the present climate is the likely response to fake launch alerts. More than once in the past, Russian nuclear monitor operators have seen the sudden appearance of a mass incoming ICBM strike:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24280831
But they rightly concluded this must be a glitch in the system or some training exercise they hadn't been told about, and thus basically ignored it and didn't call it in. But would they take a chance like that today if the same thing happened? And would a US observer in that situation?
I'm pretty sure Moscow's secret-tunnel network isn't nearly as extensive as Gaza's, but it is geared towards getting Putin and company to safety.
And on their way out the door, they'll be turning on the Perimetr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand
Which seems to have been specifically designed so that they *can* "take a chance like that". If it's a false alarm, good that you didn't launch a nuclear strike. If it's a real attack, the nuclear strike still gets launched even if you didn't make it out.
I have a vague recollection the US has a similar dead man's handle system called TACAMO ("take charge and move out"). But that may be something else, either in part or entirely.
The US version isn't automated; it's an airplane with all the communcations gear, the launch codes, and a select group of senior military officers who will act with the delegated authority of POTUS when they see the mushroom cloud over Washington DC. Roughly speaking.
The Russians have a harder time finding generals they are willing to trust with that sort of authority, except possibly among Putin's innermost circle who will probably be within the blast radius of any warhead that takes out Putin.
The US has a massively long chain of command through the entire cabinet and a policy that they're never all allowed to be in one place - when they do all get together for a ceremonial event such as the State of the Union or some such, one of them is ordered to stay away in a secure location elsewhere. There was a TV show, "Designated Survivor", based on this premise. Presumably in the real world, one of the nuclear footballs is with the Designated Survivor for this reason.
The same applies to Paris, and I believe that the French have permissive action links.
There is the "Sacoche nucléaire française" - the French equivalent of the US nuclear football - which certainly implies permissive action links. Whether their strategic missile submarines have independent authority (perhaps using sealed orders, as with the British) is not known, but it seems likely that there would be some means of response after the destruction of their senior leadership.
Their air-launched systems are very unlikely to survive a nuclear strike on France itself, so there's little need for a mechanism to launch a counter-strike after the destruction of France.
That seems to be the case, given that there's documented aid from the US to the French PAL program. (Which for treaty reasons was apparently us telling them when they were on the wrong track.) That said, France's nuclear arsenal has always been kind of baffling. I have yet to encounter a good explanation for why they had silo-launched ballistic missiles, which made no sense given how close they were to the USSR. I also think you slightly underrate the survivability of the air-launched deterrent, particularly given that they apparently continue to operate them from CDG, something I was ignorant of until today. If pressed, I'd guess they're doing the "set the PAL to 0000" trick that SAC did for a long time, or have some other way of bypassing them in an emergency, because I don't think they're doing the whole thing we have with TACAMO and the like.
Fair point about CDG, though I think I've seen that they don't routinely carry them there, in which case, they probably disable the PAL when loading them onto CDG in a crisis.
Part of the bafflement is, I think, that all the journalism about it is in French (just compare how much more comprehensive French Wikipedia is than English Wikipedia) and, unlike Russia and China (both potential US adversaries), American journalism hasn't been especially interested.
In fairness, this is not an issue I've ever looked at very closely, and I will probably dive into what's available on the CDG issue, because I completely missed that the French had any carrier-based deterrent when I wrote about that subject several years ago. At the same time, how these things are managed is often really dependent on national preferences rather than strict logic, as evidenced by the rather different ways the Russians and Americans use their SSBNs, so it's entirely possible that the French made what I would consider bad decisions, and don't actually have an answer to all of this.
Edit: It's also possible that they got PALs as part of some absurd diplomatic deal during the Kennedy/Johnson era, and have kept them around because "we want to make our nukes easier for a rogue commander to use" is really hard to sell politically, even if it's the right thing to do. Much easier to just set the code to 0s.
What I find a lot more frightening is that the Brits don't seem to have any anti-tampering devices, per that 2007 article.
Even if all British officers are 100% incorruptible and would totally endure seeing their loved ones tortured before disgracing the navy, this still leaves the problem that you don't even have to take the crew alive. You just have to kill them quickly enough so that they can't destroy the nukes in time.
I would really have thought that anyone who builds nukes at a few millions a pop (lowballing here) would obviously pay an extra million to put a state of the art anti-tamper on it.
There are probably different schools of thought about what an anti-tamper should do when it detects tampering. Just igniting the nuke would be mostly pointless -- terrorists could still use that to destroy cities. On the other hand, just blowing up the conventional explosives out of sync would still leave the tamperer with a lot of intact fissile material. My favorite would be a minimal nuclear explosion of a few kilotons -- too small to make it very useful for terrorism, but big enough that someone is going to have a hell of a bad time scrapping all that fissile material out of the mine shaft where they set it off.
Then there are also trade-offs between having a reliable tamper-protection and not blowing up your own servicemen all the time because the tamper-protection is too paranoid. It is easy to build a bomb which is very hard to defuse, just put every kind of sensor you can think of into it (vibrations? go boom. tilted? go boom. x-rayed? go boom. loss of over-pressure? go boom. you get the idea), but much harder to build a device which can reliably prevent tampering while also being safe to handle over a decade (or whatever) in the face of inevitable sensor failure.
>On the other hand, just blowing up the conventional explosives out of sync would still leave the tamperer with a lot of intact fissile material.
The lens system may not be nuclear, but it's inherently got to be enough bang to, in a correct firing, reshape the plutonium from a hollow sphere into a solid one *and* change it from the delta phase into the alpha phase. Firing out of sync AIUI splatters the plutonium into radioactive dust.
Also note that those explosive lenses are *very hard* for terrorists to construct correctly. Weapons-grade uranium is very dangerous in the hands of terrorists because any idiot can make a gun-type device, but that won't work with plutonium so it's actually damned hard for terrorists to convert the plutonium from a ruined nuke into a new working nuke. Not impossible, but I absolutely couldn't do it on the first try and I'd need very-expensive equipment to even make the attempt.
(There's one nuke in Western service that does use a lot of weapons-grade uranium - the W88 - but I'm not sure any of the others do.)
I really want to have a DEI like screening, but for atheists or Mormons or something. It is so obviously religious.
There is a famous edu econ book about US in the post-war period called "The Race Between Education and Technology." My take summary was that we made college skills cheap, which enabled firms to hire cheaper college labor. (What precisely were the skills taught? Idk. Maybe it was middle class socialization, which is a kind of skill.) This knocked down the top end of earners while bringing up the bottom, reducing inequality.
Unfortunately, for obvious-ish reasons, you can't keep doing this forever. But for developing economies the dynamic still is quite possibly true, and I assume that's what's going on in Latin America.
Re Yale biochem, Yale's physics department has (used to have?) a policy that 50% of their grad students offer letters have to go to women (I think this is illegal and wasn't officially advertised, but it was very openly known and pretty explicit).
Reminds me of pre-Elon Twitter stating in huge bold letters that their hiring mission was that more than 50% of the company would be women???
Suppose you were running a business selling engineering services and you were unable to hire the best and brightest because your workforce lacked any women. Suppose that it turned out that in order to recruit women effectively, required a large number of offer letters. Should this be illegal? The entire point of the hiring philosophy is to employ the best and the brightest but the pursuit of that goal requires hiring a significant subset that meets some other criteria.
Arguments over whether hiring quotas should be illegal aside, they are under current law
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/AAFAQs#:~:text=No%2C%20OFCCP%20regulations%20do%20not,They%20are%20strictly%20forbidden.
> 37: The Blind Centrist’s Guide To Gaza argues that we should assume Israel is pursuing a reasonable military strategy in Gaza (and trying its hardest to avoid unnecessary suffering), because that’s what their political objectives, the international situation, and the media environment incentivize
I think the big issue here is that the decisions aren't being made by an abstraction of the Israeli state pursuing its rational self interest, but Netanyahu and his cabinet. Who have an existing strong ideological commitment to a Palestinian state not being allowed to exist, expanding settlements, etc. And a strong personal interest in prolonging the war to keep himself out of jail and in power.
(This is a general problem with "realist" IR theories that treat states as rational unitary actors)
I believe I read that Netanyahu actually isn't the commander in chief of the IDF. Apparently, it's a separate entity that doesn't report to the prime minister. Can't find a source right now.
Chief of the general staff? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_of_the_General_Staff_(Israel)#Legal_position Says he's appointed by and subservient to the defence minister, who would be subservient to Bibi
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant isn't exactly subservient to Bibi. The third member of the war cabinet (besides Gallant and Bibi) is Gantz, who is Netanyahu's primary political rival. And of course, the IDF's "chain of command" is itself full of people with their own views.
(Even with that, though, I think it's reasonable to model Israel as having decisions made by the state. Israel's "9 million prime ministers" still argue about everything, but the outcome of such arguments typically is reasonable from the group's perspective, especially on military matters.)
I would like to point out there is a straightforward explanation based on realist theory which is compatible with the escalating situation in central and southern Gaza: ethnic cleansing. John Mearsheimer himself lays evidence supporting this claim in a recent highly-viewed lecture, which I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAfIYtpcBxo&pp
To summarize one part of his talk, the ethnic cleansing (i.e. the deliberate depopulation) of Gaza is the only option currently available to the IDF to address the long-term threat posed by Hamas, since Hamas has not been (and probably can't be) defeated conventionally. Sadly, deliberate mass killing is a rational option for state actors, including democratic ones, especially in times of war (historical examples abound).
To be clear, I wholeheartedly agree with your critical opinion of Netanyahu. But it is not obvious what an alternative Israeli leadership could do to address the long-term threat posed by Hamas' continued presence in Gaza.
I've seen apparently serious proposals by Israelis to institute a system similar to what China did in Xinjiang. Which would probably work, the problem is getting the green light from the US.
Ethnic cleansing and mass killing are different policy options. They should not be conflated.
1) Ethnic cleansing presupposes that there is a country willing to let Gazans in. There is none. To believe otherwise is pure wishful thinking on behalf of IDF (If some in IDF should really believe in this - these are clever people, so I find that highly unlikely). Egypt certainly will not. Israel does not have sufficient money to bribe Egypt or any other country to do so. Remember there are 2.1. million Gazans.
2) Mass killings is in principle a possibility - the final solution. But come on, Israel will not kill 2.1 million, of which more than half are children (under the age of 19). It is an insult to Israel to suggest otherwise. A pure rhetorical insinuation.
Given that this is a war, I'm quite willing to insult both sides. Saying it's an insult is not an argument that it isn't their strategy. (There are arguments, but I'm not sure they are convincing.)
FWIW, driving people out into a desert without food or water is going to result in a very large number of them dying. If you destroy all the infrastructure, that's what you are effectively doing. (And it doesn't matter if you had a good reason, you're still doing it.)
The only desert in the vicinity is in Sinai. Egypt is never going to let Gazans en masse into Sinai, because if they do they will never be able to send the Gazans back to Gaza again. Israel will prevent that. Plus, that 2.1 million Gazans on Egyptian soil is a recepie for an unstable Egypt.
Both Israel and Egypt know this. This is why ethnic cleansing is not an option for Israel.
I think if Bibi wanted to murder all the Gazans, he would have glazed Gaza (or huge portions of it) on Oct 7. The optics would have been way better than killing the Gazans through starvation, conventional weapons or death camps. If Israel was serious about genociding Gazans, the situation would look a lot different, they kinda know how efficient genocide works.
A better explanation of the facts would be that Bibi is not actively in favor of Gazans dying, but mostly indifferent to civilian deaths. From Bibi's point of view, this is rational: most people, including journalists, are mostly scope insensitive. The optics of having a civilian to enemy death ratio of 1:10 will not be drastically different from one of 10:1 -- either way there will be a lot of pictures of dead kids. From my understanding, the Oct 7 attacks were hugely popular in Gaza -- much more than Hamas is. It seems reasonable to suppose that the median Gazan already hates Israel to the maximum amount possible, blowing up a few more family members of them will likely not change their position overly much.
I don't think that the IDF has any reasonable objective in that war. Killing Hamas members is making the world a better place in my book, but the civilian casualties remove that effect. And I don't see them working on a regime change towards a less murderous regime -- not that they would have much success if they did.
My favorite solution would be if the US went Afghanistan on Gaza. Go in, set up a democratic regime. While it did not work out in Afghanistan, the Gaza strip is 1800 times smaller.
Instead, what will happen after Bibi decides that he has killed enough Hamas will be a return to the status quo. In five years, some "from the river to the sea" extremists will still be in charge of Gaza (only that the average age of their goons will be younger) and Israel will still be blockading Gaza (which will prevent the Gazans from building rockets out of water pipes and also ensure that Gaza will remain a hellhole for the foreseeable future).
"From my understanding, the Oct 7 attacks were hugely popular in Gaza -- much more than Hamas is."
That is interesting. Do you base this on your gut feeling/take-away from random media coverage, or are there any systematic study that indicates this?
I ask because if there is any hope for the future, it is in the presumed interest of most ordinary people to live everyday lives without more trouble than necessary. (For this reason, most ordinary people are likely to be political opportunists and "go with the flow", whichever direction it flows. As they said in Florence in the days of Machiavelli: A good life is a life lived hidden.)
Hamas by contrast has a gung-ho activist vibe associated with very young and fired up people. This demographic seldom comprises more than 5-10 percent on an electorate. Gaza has a young population, but I would still assume that the majority would prefer that Hamas had used its considerable tax & development assistance funds to upgrade infrastructure and hospitals, instead of sinking the money into tunnel construction.
For the same reason, I would assume that ordinary grown-ups Gazans (the Gaza silent majority) went pale on October 7th, since they would know that killing 1200 Israeli & foreigners removed them further from the pragmatic aim of most people, once the Sturm und Drang of youth is over: A quiet life.
Well, https://www.google.com/search?q=gaza+poll+hamas gives results such as:
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-palestinians-opinion-poll-wartime-views-a0baade915619cd070b5393844bc4514 (From December)
> Despite the devastation, 57% of respondents in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the October attack, the poll indicated.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gazans-back-two-state-solution-rcna144183 (From March)
> Support has been less volatile in Gaza, where 38% supported Hamas in September 2023, 42% in December 2023, and 34% this month. [...]
> The divergence between support for Hamas as a political party, which is dropping, and for its role in the war, which is steady at 70%, is indicative of its dual role as an administrative governing body and as a symbol for the decadeslong Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinians-increasingly-happy-with-october-7-even-as-hamas-support-droops-poll/ (also from March)
> In the West Bank, the 71% figure [for 'Oct-7 was correct'] is down from 82% in December who agreed with the decision to launch the onslaught. In Gaza [where it is also 71%], however, the number was a significant increase from the 57% who backed the move three months earlier.
Some remarks:
* The numbers reported by these sources seem to be identical, even though the spin is very different
* There does not seem to be a total coercion of the outcome of the polls by Hamas, otherwise they would likely appear more popular. 66% are comfortable stating that they do not favor Hamas. Yet about half of them (assuming Hamas supporters generally support Oct-7) still think that Oct-7 was a good move.
* Even considering that Hamas is in a somewhat good position to transport their propaganda in Gaza, this seems an remarkable achievement. The Gazans know exactly how well the war is going for their side. They might not know exactly what Hamas did on Oct-7, but it is hard to deny that there is a causal link between that and the IDF response. By contrast, my gut feeling is that if you asked the inhabitants of Berlin in 1945 if they still thought that Hitler attacking the USSR was a great idea, a majority might privately express doubt that this lead to the best possible outcome.
Thanks for your effort in collecting this material. Very interesting results.
I guess a lot can be said about problems surveying people during an ongoing conflict. That said, the results are far from the 95 percent support/not-support one would expect if the respondents were afraid their answers might be communicated back to either Hamas or the Israelis. Which indicates that the responses might be genuine, not dictated by fear (cf. my separate comment about the polling bureau and the concrete questions the pollsters asked).
I find it uplifting ("the glass is half full") that support for Hamas is not even higher - it is less than 50 percent for their day-to-day rule, even though they are presently at war and you would expect a considerable degree of "right or wrong - my government" - effect.
This sort-of feeds into how I myself would think of Hamas’ administration and rule, if I had been a Gaza citizen during their many years in power. Namely that these years has been a missed opportunity. First, Gaza is not challenged by Israeli settlers: Gaza authorities’ control of the land is not disputed (unlike the exhausting situation in the West Bank). Second, Gaza authorities have obviously had large funds available for development, partly from taxation and partly from foreign donors. They could not have built the impressive tunnel system and launched a constant stream of rockets otherwise.
With these resources and territorial control, Gaza could in principle have been developed into an adequately wealthy city-state. Somewhat similar to Singapore or the European micro-states (ok, that is stretching it, but very small states that can afford adequate infrastructure are seldom desperately poor). If Hamas had not chosen to channel so much money into tunnel digging and rockets instead.
Perhaps it is still not too late, when the dust settles after the ongoing war? It will take years of course, but the alternative for Gazans, if they leave Hamas in charge, is to live for the foreseeable future in a large open-air prison.
....I followed your first link further, intrigued that surveys are being conducted in a war situation.
I do survey research as part of my regular work. Judging from the presentation of the methodology & questions asked in the report, the polling bureau (Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research) seems to uphold professional standards.
The results do not necessarily support an assumption that the median Gazan already hates Israel to the maximum amount (which would imply that there is no room at all to influence hearts and minds). More specifically, when asked the question “In your view, given what happened after it, was Hamas decision to launch its offensive against Israel on 7 October a correct or incorrect one?” only a narrow majority (54 percent) of Gazans answer “correct”.
Equally important, when asked “Based on what you have heard or seen, do you think international law allows or does not allow …. Attacking or killing civilian women and children in their own homes?” 68 percent of Gazans answer “Does not allow”. (Admittedly, rather disappointingly low – 84 percent answer “Does not allow” among Palestinians on the West Bank).
How do some/many respondents square supporting the October 7 offensive (notice the somewhat value-neutral choice of word, making it easier to say “yes”), and not supporting killing women, children and other non-combatants? Apparently, by being in denial that autocracies took place. Asked the question: “…did Hamas commit war crimes in the current war?”, only 17 percent of Gazans answer “yes”.
Now there are many reasons why Gazans and others are in (cognitive) denial of quite well-documented empirical facts. But the results at least indicate that the median Gazan is not an emotional basket case driven by primitive bloodlust. Since cognition issues are arguably “colder” than emotional issues (although the links between cognition and emotion are, well, complex). Giving some hope for the future. After all.
Some additional results for the West Bank and Gaza together, illustrating that Palestinians, like all ethnic categories, are a rather diverse group:
“The belief that Hamas' decision was right is higher… among men (75%) compared to women (69%), among the religious and the somewhat religious (76% and 71% respectively) compared to the non-religious (42%),…among supporters of Hamas (92%) compared to supporters of Fateh and other forces (55% and 45% respectively).”
Link to the polling bureau: www.pcpsr.org
…follow links further to the pdf file with the report, including the methodology and questions asked.
Mearsheimer has become a crackpot in his old age, for instance arguing that Russia had no choice but to invade Ukraine, and was justified in doing so.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/11/putin-mearsheimer-realpolitik-ukraine-political-science.html
And "it is militarily advantageous for Israel to ethnically cleanse Gaza, therefore Israel must be ethnically cleansing Gaza" is a bizarre argument to begin with, for many reasons: 1) States do not always do things that are militarily advantageous to them - many other considerations affect their decisions 2) In half a year of warfare Israel has not pushed anyone out of Gaza, and in fact is right now pushing Gazans *away* from the Egyptian border, making it impossible for them to leave Gaza 3) An *attempt* to conduct ethnic cleansing would likely fail due to the opposition of Israel's allies as well as the remainder of the international community, and thus such an attempt would not actually be advantageous to Israel.
As I brought up in another comment, I also don't think the international situation and media environment actually incentivize this anyway. They're fighting an adversary whose actual strategy is to make prosecuting a war generate as bad PR for Israel as possible, and the international community is largely split between actors who'll oppose Israel unconditionally and actors who'll support them unconditionally (or at least not make their support contingent on humane and pragmatic prosecution of the war.)
The crowds of protestors whose take on what Israel should actually be doing sums up to "I don't know, but not that" have been causing me a considerable amount of emotional turmoil, because this effectively abdicates the opportunity to have *any* leverage to incentivize Israel to prosecute the war in a more humane and pragmatic manner. It's like stumbling into a resolution to the trolley problem where you congratulate yourself for splitting the train to run down both tracks.
Unfortunately, "I don't know, but not that" is quite close to the way I feel about the problem. Israel is rather small, and the habitable portion is smaller. The analogy I tend to think of is "two cats in a sack", though I need to work the phrase "that hate each other" into that metaphor somehow.
I think Israel's conduct in this war is deserving of some complaints, but all actionable criticism needs at the very least a standard of acceptability to measure against.
I think it's understandable as an emotional reaction, but also literally always bad feedback, in discourse on any subject, and I think this is a subject in which it's particularly harmful.
Why isn't the infantry-centered alternative almost ever brought up?
Military History Professor: https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1794875492618957281
There was another thread here about then why should Israel ever sustain a single higher infantry casualty to save 100 Gazan civilians. And the answer to that is the same reason why the US didn't just completely cover North Vietnam in bombs. Few in the world accept just glassing an entire people from a far so you don't lose a single soldier.
Not to mention, Israel's approach is probably actually leading to more net-deaths than the infantry-centered, because it could be the difference between an eventual peaceful Palestinian State and 50 more years of this disaster.
It does get brought up occasionally. I'm not an expert on the subject, but the answer I've seen on a number of occasions by people who're better versed in the situation than I am is that Hamas has spent decades outfitting the territory to be outrageously difficult to attack with infantry (vast tunnel networks, buildings rigged up with explosives, etc.)
5.- "average house size in every US state vs. every European country"
That map is wrong. I'll post here what I tweeted a few weeks ago when I first saw that map.
The site this was taken from (http://shrinkthatfootprint.com) uses a Spanish source for 1044 sq ft (97 m2) that explicitly mentions this is for flats only, not houses. It also ignores the fact that 14% of Spanish dwellings are considered empty (second homes, old village houses, etc...), which assuming people prefer more space, means the average size of an inhabited dwelling is larger than the average size of all dwellings.
A more reliable source mentions the average size for dwellings on sale as 138m2 (1485 sq ft): https://cohispania.com/comunicacion/blog/las-provincias-con-las-viviendas-de-mas-superficie-en-2020/
I can only assume that the figures for most other European countries are equally questionable (the notion that the average UK dwelling is 40% smaller than the average Greek dwelling beggars belief).
Thanks, I've added a link to this comment into the post.
I have a figure of 1011 sq feet for a UK house: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5f047a01d3bf7f2be8350262/Size_of_English_Homes_Fact_Sheet_EHS_2018.pdf
And this is some years old; probably it's got a bit bigger since then.
UK houses have been shrinking - I understand that bar the soviet union, this is the only place which has ever done this.
The issue is that we often sell by number of rooms and not floor area (often the latter is hard to find on listings!) so we have odd pressures.
1011 feet is large for UK new build. and I don't believe that the average new build is anywhere near this, if flat and houses are both in the sample. If it is just houses I can believe it.
Do you have a source? This seems unlikely to me. Rate of building new houses is very low; rate of building extensions to existing houses is much larger, so I would expect houses to be getting bigger.
This page https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/chapters-for-english-housing-survey-2022-to-2023-headline-report/chapter-1-profile-of-households-and-dwellings suggests size had increased to 1044 sq feet by 2022.
Hard to find a good primary source, but secondary sources are around, e.g. https://www.propertynotify.co.uk/news/more-money-for-less-space-uk-houses-shrinking-through-the-ages/
This might apply to new build only mind, and ignore extensions
The missing point is conversions and HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation).
In cities in the UK, it's not uncommon for a house to be chopped up into several flats (apartments), which is generally called a conversion. If you go down a row of houses in Inner London, quite often you'll see whole streets where all of what look like houses have 4+ doorbells on them.
In addition, you get HMOs, which is basically a house share but often (by no means always) with the landlord renting out the rooms individually to different tenants. According to p27 of https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2023-10/Housing%20in%20London%202022.pdf there are a little over 150,000 HMOs; not all of these are going to be multiple flats, but a lot will. Confusingly, depending on the size and amenities, some but not all conversions are also technically HMOs.
This also happens in France, I'm not sure about elsewhere in Europe. It occurs to me for the first time now that I've never heard an American mention this, so it may be less common there.
It happens, I've seen houses where each floor was separately rented, or where the upper floor had each bedroom rented out separately but the common areas downstairs were shared. However, that kind of thing is not super common here, as it requires converting an existing house into an apartment building, and that's rarely done. What we have that is more common here are buildings which are vaguely house-like in form factor, but intentionally built to have separate residences. These are called duplexes (or triplexes, or quadplexes). In places where land pressure hasn't forced going vertical to happen yet, apartment buildings tend to be 2 story duplexes, or 2 story quadplexes (the second entry on each floor comes from additional depth being available - the gap between streets will be wider). These will be purpose-built apartment complexes with a few dozen buildings which house a hundred or more renters. Depending on how they're built, they may look on satellite/chopper imagery like the buildings are all one long row, but that's just because they extended the roofline over the corridor between the units, not because it's built like a motel. Sometimes the corridor between units is enclosed, other times it's not. Sometimes the first floor has an enclosed corridor with the mailboxes and amenities while the second floor has staircases outside in the covered walkway, so the first-floor units are slightly smaller but don't have to use stairs to get in and out. Sometimes you see front entries to the first-floor units and the second-floor units use the corridors between the buildings. There's a lot of ways these get built around the country.
I don't know about UK, but the average floor area of a newly built dwelling in New Zealand peaked in 2010 (at 200 sqm, / 2150 sq feet), and is now 30% lower and back where it was in 1992.
Still sounds a lot roomier than UK homes though!
Most new builds in NZ (and USA?) include a 1x or 2x attached garage. Probably not the case for Europe. The NZ decline is probably due to increase in inner city apartment not having attached garages.
I'm confused by the map itself - surely the metric is not "house size", but the more generic "living area", i.e. counting the enclosed, livable space of houses, appartment high rises, and everything in between? Or does "house size" mean exactly that in US usage of the words?
Yes, it does. We usually measure the size of houses and apartments in square feet of floor space in enclosed finished rooms. Storage space attached to finished rooms (e.g. bedroom closets and kitchen pantries) is counted, but utility spaces (garages, unfinished basements, furnace rooms, etc) are not. There are regional differences between whether finished basements are counted as living area or if all below-grade space (i.e. the floor is non-trivially lower than the surrounding ground) is treated as utility space.
Yes there are very similar norms in Germany and I imagine most developed countries. I was more wondering about the term "house size". After a bit of googling I found that it is apparently a legal term, but then I'd say it has either been misused, or the map says something else entirely than what it's being used for.
What definitions I found say that "house size" would indeed be the gross floor area of a single-family house, i.e. it would exclude any building that houses 2 or more families, i.e. the vast majority of living space in cities.
https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/maximum-house-size
https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/gross-floor-area
So as a measure of living space over an entire country it would be quite misleading and overstated, and even more misleading as comparison between countries.
I've only seen Gross Floor Area used in the context of urban planning and zoning regulations, used to measure how big a building is allowed to be on a given lot and how much parking space it's required to have. In everyday usage, it just means the floor space of the living area.
From personal experience, I would guess that US houses *are* on average larger than European houses, but this also seems, hmm, a very American metric to consider. I actually asked about this a month and a half ago; if I had more money to buy a new place, I guess I'd like a bit more size, at least for kitchen, but the location of the place itself would be considerably more important. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-325/comment/54092753
Furthermore, of course, Europe is bound to have a larger pre-existing housing stock from historical eras when houses were smaller almost by default due to the heating issues and such, though presumably most houses in both Europe and the US would be fairly recent (buit after WW2) now.
I don't understand this response. You seem to be suggesting that Europeans and Americans just have different preferences, so that Europeans put more weight on attributes like location rather than size, relative to Americans.
But Americans also put an enormous premium on location! That's why a studio in Manhattan costs way more than a McMansion in rural South Dakota. Nevertheless, my guess is the Manhattan one-bedroom is much bigger than the Paris one-bedroom, and the new American suburban house is much bigger than the new French suburban house.
Yes, of course both Europeans and Americans consider both location and size to be important and it's a bit hard to assign exact values of importance, the point was mostly that in general Americans seem to find housing size to have a greater importance for quality of life than Europeans. It's not the best of metrics, there are better metrics to demonstrate the wealth of the Americans relative to Europeans, like the income gap Scott mentioned.
Even if the other sources are more reliable, if they're using different sources for different places, it's not wise to compare the numbers directly. They will differ for all sorts of reasons--what data are available, what data are included, methodological differences, etc.
Yes, exactly.
I am also skeptical. Almost half of the population of the state of NY live in NYC. If we assume that the non-city New Yorkers have 2000 sqft (what a godless unit) houses, then this would still mean that the people in the city would have on average as much space as the people in Spain. How does an apartment block even count? One giant house?
The obvious metric one should use is the quotient of total inhabited residential indoor area and the number of residents, thus bypassing what is a house and how many people share a house and the like.
I wonder if anyone has ever written a SF tale with cryonized people of the 21st century coming back to life in like a million years, and having to come together, led by Paris Hilton & Walt Disney, to defend themselves from super-dinosaur overlords of the future. Talk about the lack of a clear endgame.
Yes to this movie .
I read a comic book in which Hitler escapes death by freezing himself. In the far future, he somehow gets an army and starts conquering again. This was written while he was still alive, and as far as I can tell they never finished the story.
Anytime there's a "Hitler Returns" story now I'm just going to think of Inflatable Hitler from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, where Hitler is resurrected as a balloon.
This was a recurring motif in Futurama.
Transmetropolitan is a comic with a subplot or two about people brought back from cyronic suspension in the future and basically left to fend for themselves, mostly ending up homeless or worse.
Just a couple hundred years in the future - 2190 -. Memories and personalities of ‘corpsicles’ are transplanted into the bodies of ‘brainwiped’ convicted criminals.
A World Out of Time ~ Larry Niven
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_World_Out_of_Time
> Smith suggests that journalists wanted to rely on “experts”, but the pro-missile-defense experts all did classified work for missile defense companies and couldn’t talk, and there was a very talkative and eloquent anti-missile-defense expert at MIT who become every journalist’s go-to source.
This is a problem in a lot of other areas as well. People with the most expertise are generally working directly on the subject, so are bound by commercial confidentiality, NDAs, etc. And also don't have the time to be self promoting on twitter, networking with journalists, etc.
Granted, but I think it's probably worse in defense. When there's a threat of federal prison involved, you tend to tread very carefully, and error on the side of treating things as classified. If nothing else, checking to see what is and isn't classified is kind of a pain, and you probably won't do it if you aren't getting paid. (This is also the mechanism behind a lot of overclassification.) And yes, I speak from experience here.
>When there's a threat of federal prison involved, you tend to tread very carefully, and error on the side of treating things as classified.
I'm currently re-reading Lindsay Ellis's Axiom's End and Truth of the Divine in anticipation of the third book coming out next month. There's a minor plot point of the main character (Cora) being mad at someone she's close to for not telling her about her deeply classified work with aliens. Cora has her reasons for this, but I'm nevertheless deeply offended on the other character's behalf every time this comes up.
Yeah. The USG, and anyone working with classified info, are extremely paranoid about releasing any classified information, and that ends up hitting almost anything they would want to communicate about those projects to the public (well, the government is paranoid, classed workers are acting rationally under threat of jail time).
There's huge swathes of things that you wouldn't expect to be classified, even things that are practically common knowledge (or can easily be inferred with common knowledge), and because either those or adjacent things sit in the complicated web of "either technically classified or classified if you squint" no one in that sector can go on the record without hefty potential penalties.
Bottom line is that the USG cares much more about keeping its secrets than looking good, even when the rational thing would be to just declassify some basic information.
I think the problem is more subtle, and a lot harder to solve. It's not that there's just a bunch of stuff that's classified that is common knowledge (that obviously does happen, although maybe less than you'd think.) The real issue is that it is hard in practice to make sure you keep classified and unclass separate in your head, and so any time you speak in all but the vaguest generalities about something you have a classified briefing in, you need to do so with a very careful eye on the rules for what is and isn't classified, and make very sure you don't slip up. That's a lot of work, and most people aren't going to do it unless that's actually part of their job. Declassifying basic stuff that shouldn't be classified won't make anyone who has knowledge of a specific system more likely to speak out when it means doing a bunch of extra work or taking a reasonable risk.
No, you're exactly right. That was definitely part of what I was trying to express, and you articulated it better than I could. (Even talking about *this* requires some extra mental cycles to articulate - I also speak from experience, though I suspect less than yours, chronologically).
It seems almost like journalists aren’t allowed to make inferences, they have to rely on sources to make them.
Clearly Russia and China perceive that ballistic missile defense works to some degree, why else would they invest in hypersonic weapons?
I think part of the problem is also what Noah Smith pointed out about the difference in defense against cruise missiles vs ICBMs. Also there is a difference between conventional missiles and nuclear weapons with regards to the needed efficacy. I also think some of the anit-missile defense people are similar to climate change activists where the focus on one specific failure mode (in this case nuclear war) blinds them to other benefits.
@Scott, regarding 37: I would be happy to help with your questions on the topic, as I missed your question in the open thread and feel like the answer you got is quite off the mark. Reference: I did an AMA in Open Thread 313 which I think had quite high quality answers (more generally about me, quoting from there: "I'm a retired Major from the IDF who just finished about 100 days of reserve duty (in a non-combative role). I also have a degree in Middle-Eastern history, so some added perspective there"). I think the amount of time and depth I gave to the questions there shows that it's worth your time.
In a nutshell, and if you're interested I'd be willing to write something much longer/do some other format: The honest truth is that I believe that what will happen to Gaza is what happened after operation Defensive Shield: Israel is going to stay in it (hopefully without new settlements), and it is going to take years, if not decades, to remove Hamas from power there (which I personally think is in the interest of both the west and Palestinians). The alternative to Hamas isn't clear yet, but it is too early to say who it will be. In an imperfect analogy, talking about the endgame in 1943 would have been difficult at best.
I'd be interested in hearing more.
Yes, I was going to point out TheZeroWave's original thread, because your question was exactly what I was asking him. In particular this comment: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-313/comment/48395356
However, while this is the most soothing and rational explanation of Israel's strategy I've seen so far, I still don't agree with it. In particular, the proposition that a particular ethnic group is so debased that it can't be allowed civil rights for a generation or more. That can only result in further abuse and dispossession, as we see in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Nor does it seem plausible as a long term strategy. Other countries have of course crushed opposed ethnic groups and eventually had peace , such as the case of the Native Americans, but in this case Palestinians represent nearly 50% of the population.
In this comment: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-313/comment/48394101 TheZeroWave states that partially this action is as a deterrent to others, such as Hezbollah. There are obvious moral and practical problems with this.
Hey Ajb!
I planned to answer only Scott as doing another AMA is out of scope (maybe in a hidden open thread), but you make good points and I'll try to address them at least shortly:
1. "It can't be allowed civil rights" - I think you paint this in very black and white colors, and as I stated in the past, whatever you take from me, please take away that this conflict is most of the time grey. Palestinians aren't living in refugee camps like Uyghurs; but they do have their freedom of movement impeded by the IDF. They have plenty of IPhones, but some parts of their population is in dire lack of better nutrition.
2. "That can only result in further abuse and dispossession" - see my previous AMA - I'm all for starting with baby steps to increase relations between the two people. The joint Israeli-Palestinian Remembrance day is one of them. I'd be happy for extreme-right parties to leave the Knesset on one hand, and on stopping teaching geometry via bullets to IDF soldiers heads in elementary school on the other.
3. "Other countries..." - I think a common misunderstanding is how unique and complicated this conflict is. I can link to an article in Hebrew that I hope can help explain why that is so - https://dannyorbach.com/2022/01/01/%d7%99%d7%99%d7%97%d7%95%d7%93%d7%99%d7%95%d7%aa%d7%95-%d7%a9%d7%9c-%d7%94%d7%a1%d7%9b%d7%a1%d7%95%d7%9a-%d7%94%d7%99%d7%a9%d7%a8%d7%90%d7%9c%d7%99-%d7%a4%d7%9c%d7%a1%d7%98%d7%99%d7%a0%d7%99-%d7%94/
4. "... this action is as a deterrent to others, such as Hezbollah. There are obvious moral and practical problems with this." - This is indeed my stated position. I agree it is morally complicated - I don't like showing strength in Gaza so I won't be invaded by Hezbollah, though that isn't the only rational for the war - and I'd love to hear suggestions. I do require the suggestions though to be grounded in a firm understanding of the middle east - Power radiates strongly here, much more than in the west (something that sadly isn't usually understood well). I'd love to hear about the practical problems though!
I'll try to followup on your comments, but unlike in the AMA, can't promise anything. Thanks for mentioning me though!
"I'd love to hear suggestions."
I feel like Israel could attempt a destabilizing campaign that promotes exactly the dream of an Arab state many in the region want ... just not within the confines of Israel/Palestine. For example, if Israel were to promote movements for Arab self-government in Jordan and Syria (forcing out dictatorships and promoting democratic self-government) this strategy could benefit them in two major ways:
1. It would help build bridges of friendship/alliance among the Arab populations throughout the region, many of whom have long wanted exactly this kind of thing. This would reduce incentives to fight against Israel, to the extent they're seen as an ally, or at least as 'it's complicated', as opposed to explicitly being cast in the minds of many Arabs as villains. (Israel doesn't have to change their position on blocking Palestinian self-government to pursue this strategy, but it would be seen by many Arabs as inconsistent.)
2. It would promote emigration from Palestine as many (though not all) would rather live under an actual Arab sovereign state as opposed to the dream of one someday specifically in Palestine. This would relieve pressure on Israel from their native populations, and if sufficient numbers of Palestinians voluntarily move it might allow them to eventually integrate the remaining Arabs into Israel proper. This would help solve the demographic problem for Israel, where they can't both have absolute democracy (one person, one vote, regardless of ethnicity/religion/etc.) and a Jewish homeland. A different Jewish/Arab ratio would change that.
I suspect part of the reason this strategy isn't pursued is that Israeli leaders prefer a regional policy (similar to the global US policy) of not allowing the rise of peer nations that might rival their power monopoly. Promoting the rise of a democratically led peer Arab nation would be seen as an unacceptable national security risk, even if the relationship is initially forged in friendship. Israel has a very low risk tolerance, where national security can trump long-term policy strategy.
What are your thoughts?
Destabilizing their neighbours is not a good way to win friends locally. Also, it is notable how friendliness with Israel has tended to lead to popular discontent in Arab countries. This is not a case of evil dictatorships dragging their Israel-loving populations to war. Indeed, from an Israeli perspective I suspect the dictatorships are much more predictable.
Also, destabilizing Jordan, the closest thing they have to an ally in the region (and a country full of Palestinian refugees who already tried a coup attempt once), is such an incredibly stupid idea I genuinely wonder whether you know anything about the history involved at all.
I never made any claims to expertise, though your criticism could potentially be framed a little less pejoratively?
I never suggested it was the "evil dictatorships dragging their Israel-loving populations to war". My impression is that it's more the opposite, where Israel would like to make friends with local dictators to promote peace, but that in the past those dictators tend to lose popular legitimacy when they try to do this. In part because people have relatives from Palestine or there are refugees who complain about this, especially when there's another round of violence in Gaza or the West Bank.
I don't see the current state of Israel making friends with the people in the region. I've always been under the impression it's the opposite, where neighboring governments generally don't want wars with Israel, or would be better served to not have to be at war with a stronger regional force, but if forced to it they're willing to redirect anger from internal reform movements toward suggesting to their people that the 'real enemy' is Israel. I don't know specifics about the countries involved, though. Either way, this situation doesn't seem like it works for Israel, since it allows for multiple regions where terrorist attacks can be staged, thereby jeopardizing their security, separate from the question of Gaza and the West Bank.
The opposite strategy - focusing on improving relationships with the people and not the government - is effectively what I was aiming at addressing. I admit my specific proposal was terrible, and I knew in proposing it that it's not something likely to happen in the real world, and partly because it was framed as turning Israel into a diplomatic liability for its neighbors, as you pointed out. I wasn't thinking I was 'solving peace in the Middle East' with a blog comment or asserting some great knowledge of the region. Just asking why a different strategy wasn't pursued since the current strategy doesn't seem to be working, but whatever.
First of all, it's important for me to answer you as you clearly have tried thinking about solutions and gave them at least some meaningful thoughts - I appreciate that immensely, and wish at least half of those talking about the conflict would do as you did.
Some quick thoughts:
1. Your idea is Pan-Arabism; it was tried before (specifically in the late 50's-60's), you can read about it in Wikipedia in better words than mine. Some problems with it: Like you have multiple parts to your identity, many Arabs consider themselves also Sunni Muslims, perhaps Jordanian or Palestinian, and maybe even more layers on top of that. Creating something generic won't work for the same reason that not all white people have the same religion and get along.
2. Specifically about Palestinians, they are a people, and they have the right to self determine. They truly are connected to the land, the same way that Israelis are. Some of them even in a miniature to the Jewish diaspora - there are Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon, holding the keys to their grandpas apartment in Haifa. This is not exactly 2000 years of living outside your land, but I highly doubt that a Palestinian that cares deeply enough for the right of return that he would blow up negotiations with Israel on that stand alone would be willing to live in Jordan.
I have some more thoughts on your last paragraph, but these are not as relevant to the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.
> In particular, the proposition that a particular ethnic group is so debased that it can't be allowed civil rights for a generation or more
I thought this was what happened in the American South after our Civil War, during Reconstruction. Except that most scholars on the left agree that Reconstruction was ended too early and not enforced strongly enough, so that the racist elements in the South regained power.
Also, it may just be the case whether or not it is racist. Just like it may be the case that most Arab countries without their current dictators would become theocracies or anarchies. It is sad, and is not genetic, and the proper response may be different from "let's back the dictators", but it seem to currently be the case
I hope it's cultural, and thus theoretically amenable to change. But I don't think America, at least, has a track record in modern times of successfully forcing the change while holding to other standards we profess. Hence the dictator support.
Maybe there are ways to do it within the boundaries we set ourselves, which we haven't found. Maybe some of those boundaries are, from a consequentialist standpoint, not as important as having the cultural change happen. Maybe some other group can succeed where we failed, showing that the problem is merely dysfunction of the modern American state.
Happily. The following is written after reading your main post in the open thread and what you have written above; let me know if something else is of interest, and I'll try to address that as well. I expect this to be lengthy and tried to make it more accessible - sorry if I failed.
Some general points on what you've said in your open thread comment:
1. "Invasion" and "occupation" are simple terms that carry a lot of complexity. Obviously, Israel has invaded Gaza, but there are clearly areas in the strip that it hasn't set foot on yet. Israel is also occupying the West Bank, but there are areas in the West Bank that require significant forces and considerable preparation before acting (e.g., eliminating terrorist cells in refugee camps in Nablus). These terms are fluid and are further complicated as they can serve both operational and strategic rationales (e.g., just examples, not reality: "We need to invade Gaza to destroy tunnels and Hamas battalions" vs. "We need to invade Gaza to create new settlements there"). Gaza is a complex problem, even without considering the connection to the West Bank, and thus requires multifaceted solutions. Expect multiple "invasions" and unclear "occupation" of different parts of the strip during this conflict (which I believe will be very long).
2. Your second question, "Does Israel know where Hamas is," is also binary in conjecture, but the answer is nuanced. I know where Hamas is in a general sense — the strip is tiny, after all — but in which house? For how long does this intelligence remain accurate? Who is a refugee child just walking down the street, and who is a child carrying a suicide vest? Who has Hamas recruited since the beginning of the conflict due to the new hatred towards Israel? This is all dynamic and changes frequently.
3. Two more parameters complicate the fighting: the hostages and the tunnel network. The former requires the forces to proceed meticulously — three hostages were killed by IDF fire by mistake, and the hostages are a very sensitive point in the current Israeli mindset. The latter nullifies some of the IDF's advantages. If I recall correctly, the latest numbers indicate that the tunnel network is larger than the NYC metro. Fighting in that environment, where you can't bring tanks or bomb from the air as they are deep underground, is extremely difficult if you're trying to minimize casualties. Don't forget that even before fighting there, you need to know where the tunnels are and map them — this obviously isn't public knowledge.
Some more specifics regarding your questions:
1. Israel has indeed destroyed vast parts of the buildings in the strip. This is due to multiple reasons: a) This happens naturally in war zones. When tanks cross a road, it usually causes significant damage to the road. When a battalion enters an area, there is usually preliminary artillery shelling or air force strikes in that area (note that Israel usually declares where it's going to act beforehand so that civilians can evacuate). b) Hamas, as a terror organization, has hidden a lot of its munitions inside the civilian populace. This includes rocket launchers in kindergartens, command outposts in hospitals, etc. They also usually aim to plant critical infrastructure in critical civilian areas because then Israel can't bomb them from the air or alternatively suffer international criticism. This infrastructure still has to be destroyed, though, as the IDF isn't planning on occupying it 24/7, and it can be used by other Hamas fighters later (I'll explain why the IDF isn't occupying these areas later, but basically, it would mean occupying the whole strip).
You also asked, "What prevents Israel from eliminating Hamas?" This ties nicely to your question about the day-to-day activities of both sides and the strategy of both sides. This will also be the bulk of my answer from now on.
Israel has two strategic goals that are semi-contradictory: return the hostages and destroy Hamas. The former is easy to understand; Israel has historically been, and still is, very sensitive to hostages (even deceased ones), and vast parts of the populace are adamant about returning everybody (yes, EVERYBODY) back. Whether this happens via negotiations or military operations doesn't matter for this point (though it obviously matters in the greater analysis). To be clear, both have happened.
Destroying Hamas is a more difficult endeavor. This can be divided into three possible resolution criteria, ordered by difficulty: 1. Hamas is no longer in control of the Gaza Strip, and additionally, its military force has been routed and broken up into small cells that are no longer working together coherently. 2. Hamas is no longer an effective threat to Israeli security. This is slightly tricky and vague; is firing one rocket at Israel considered effective? Is a single gunman claiming to be Hamas going to the border and shooting at Israel effective? 3. Destroying Hamas as an idea — basically, trying to do what was done to the Nazis in WW2.
In my assessment, Israel is aiming for resolution criteria 1 in the short term and resolution criteria 2 in the long term. Long term is LONG; I'm talking years, if not decades. You don't uproot a terrorist organization that has controlled the land for about two decades and created a network the size of the NYC metro in a year or two or three. Obviously, Israel isn't going to state this publicly—imagine the press response to "Yup, we're gonna be here for years" — but if Israel wants to destroy Hamas to some level of criteria 2, that's the relevant time frame. I'm not going to go into why Israel wants to do that — it has a lot of ties to Iran and Hezbollah — as this comment is going to be lengthy anyway.
Hamas' strategic goal is simple: survive, and ideally keep the hostages as long as possible. The former has been its goal in every conflict since 2005. It has gotten all of what it needed on October 7th, and it believes time is ticking in its favor in the strategic sense because as time passes, more international pressure mounts on Israel to leave the strip and end the war. It is also getting everything it wants from the world — Hamas killed Israelis and captured hostages, and so far, it has received both international condemnation of Israel across the world and EU states recognizing a Palestinian state. This puts it on a much better footing than the PLO. I'll be blunt: every dead Palestinian is another achievement for Hamas, as it increases the pressure. To be clear, I'm not taking a side here (although I'm biased, but I'll state clearly when I think that interferes with the analysis), just stating the facts. Note that there is an interesting balance here: on the strategic level, Hamas believes time is on its side; on the operational level, the more time the IDF has, the more it can further destroy Hamas.
So, how does that translate to the day-to-day life of the Hamas soldier? Easy: survive and protect the hostages. Hide in the tunnels. Hide in the hospitals or simply among refugees. Whenever possible, jump to the nearby apartment of your cousin, where you stashed RPGs under his baby's crib, and try to shoot at Israeli tanks in the area. The moment you do that, run away — and ideally grab a child on your way to the hospital so the IDF won't shoot you. To be clear, there is video footage of such examples, and although I'm oversimplifying for brevity (e.g., there are some battalions that are more combat-ready than this; it changes in different parts of Gaza all the time), this is the bulk of the fighting.
So, how does the Israeli side look from a soldier's perspective? Basically, it depends on whether you're on offense or defense. If you're holding the Netzarim corridor or the Rafah border crossing, your job is to defend the logistical chain of supply to soldiers on offense and to supply and oversee humanitarian aid to civilians. If you're on offense, you're either going into areas that haven't been attacked by the IDF so far — e.g., Rafah — or going into areas that have been attacked and then evacuated, as the vacuum brings back Hamas fighters to existing infrastructure they know, and it's easier and more effective to catch them that way than one by one (a good example of this was the second Shifa hospital operation).
So, how does the conflict look from here on? Israel is going to continue working its way meticulously in areas it hasn't operated in yet — Rafah and some of the center of the strip — both because it is taking measures to minimize civilian casualties (I can claim that this is because we truly aim to keep them to a minimum, but no need to believe me; the Machiavellian incentive of not getting more international condemnation is enough) and because these areas likely have hostages in them. After that, Israel is going to maintain its ability to operate in the strip, at least in the same way it operates in the West Bank; i.e., if the IDF wants to get to Shifa again, it is going to keep whatever forces and outposts it needs in Gaza to maintain that capability. Hamas will continue stalling for time, keeping its munitions and weapons near civilians, and keeping the hostages hidden.
I can write more, but I'd need you to point me in the direction of what areas are of interest. Let me know if anything isn't clear.
>imagine the press response to "Yup, we're gonna be here for years"
The response would be something other than "makes sense, everybody has assumed this all along"? Israel has been in the West Bank all this time after all, and nobody cared too much.
Thank you very much for this long explanation, it's very much appreciated!
One more question, if you have the patience for it: how easy/difficult is it for an IDF soldier to recognize a Hamas fighter? Do the Hamas fighters usually wear uniforms or other signs? Do they carry around their weapons most of the time, or do they hide them and blend into the crowd, and only fetch a weapon when they see an opportunity for ambushing IDF soldiers?
Slightly changes, but as a general rule of thumb: They don't wear uniform, they don't carry weapons unless they have to/they're going to use them soon, they definitely try to hide and blend with the crowd whenever they can (when they fight in areas that have been evacuated, it's obviously harder)
Thank you very much!
And if you wander how they fetch a weapon that fast is it isn't already on them - I hear for soldiers who occupied neighborhoods in Gaza that they find weapons at half the houses
Could you say more on measures to minimize civilian casualties? I get that Israel wants to minimize these, but where I have less faith is that Israel, or any government, can act perfectly in accord with that interest.
I'm not ZeroWave, but this seems pretty extraordinary: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67327079
TL,DR, a Gaza dentist gets a call from Israeli military intelligence saying they need to bomb the apartments across the street from him, they think he's someone they can work with, and can they talk him through arranging an evacuation? Which is successful, and gets him put on the list of people who *keep* getting called to help arrange evacuations.
Note that this means essentially no chance of killing any Hamas militants in the strike, only destroying some of their infrastructure.
I think the example John Shilling gave is excellent. Note that this happens regularly - Israel calls beforehand to warn citizens that it is going to bomb a building (However, not all the time - but still very common).
Good rule of thumb - if you see beautiful shots of a building being bombed by Israel, it's because it gave a warning beforehand and the cameramen had time to prepare the short. I honestly find it an easy way to know just from the documentation if Israel gave an early warning or not.
why has the idf withdrawn from all the positions it occupied in gaza city and khan younis?
Short answer, as I don't plan to do another AMA here (probably will in a hidden open thread sometime soon if there's enough interest) - it's an effective CT strategy. It's easier to destroy battalions than individuals, and the moment you leave an area, Hamas fills that vacuum. You then go back in and vice-versa, until there is not enough Hamas left to create an effective military organizational structure.
ok so you're predicting that israel will return and reoccupy gaza city? willing to bet?
You don't need to "return and reoccupy", just raid and destroy specific battalions (like in the second raid on Al shifa)
What Shaked said is accurate.
I'd be interested. And in case I didn't say so enough in your first AMA, thanks for your time.
First, thank you for taking your time and sharing here. I don't know if you can answer this, but perhaps you have some insight.
The Wikipedia article [1] on the three Israeli hostages who were shot says the following:
> According to an IDF official, the three male hostages emerged shirtless out of a building toward a group of IDF soldiers "tens of meters" away, with one carrying a white flag. An Israeli sniper then opened fire on them, killing Shamriz and Talalka and wounding Haim. After being shot, Haim ran into a nearby building and shouted for help in Hebrew. The battalion commander then ordered the troops to hold their fire, while Haim was persuaded to exit the building but when he did so 15 minutes later, a soldier acting against the battalion commander's order shot and killed him.
and:
> Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi stated that the shooting was against the IDF's rules of engagement and that the hostages had "done everything to show that they were harmless", including removing shirts to show that they were not carrying explosives.
I was pretty shocked because I can't imagine why a soldier would just shoot someone, after 15 minutes of talking in Hebrew and coaxing a hostage to come out, and where the person had told them they were a hostage, and had "done everything to show that they were harmless". What was going on?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alon_Shamriz,_Yotam_Haim,_and_Samer_Talalka
Sure. Tactical answer and more context-aware answer:
1. The soldier simply didn't hear the commander. You can read more details on what happened here via GTranslate: https://news.walla.co.il/item/3631940
2. Since the start of the war, Hamas has recorded cries for help in Hebrew, baby crying sounds, and other things I can't recall right now, and played them from radioes/phones connected to booby-trapped buildings and/or IEDs. 99.99% of the time, if an Israeli soldier hears Hebrew in Gaza, he is thinking, correctly, "I'm walking into an ambush".
I knew from the Wikipedia article that they thought it could be a trick. That doesn't explain much though.
For one, even if they were Hamas militants, it would still be a war crime to shoot them. You can't shoot PoWs. (Or I should say you shouldn't shoot them; surrendering soldiers have often been killed in wars.)
It's always a possibility that any non-combatant or person waving a white flag could be an enemy trying to trick you. This has been true in every conflict.
But that aside, they were in shouting distance. They persuaded Haim to come out, in Hebrew. They clearly knew it wasn't a recording. The soldier did not need to walk into an ambush; Haim agreed to walk to them, as I understand it, shirtless and unarmed. What else could Yotam Haim have done to not get shot?
The soldier not hearing the commander isn't the shocking part that needs explaining. It's why he would persuade an unarmed hostage to come out and then shoot him.
I'd recommend reading the whole article, which I don't have time to do. I'll respond from memory of watching the review on the news:
1. They weren't PoWs; they were walking down the street in an active war zone, where there were basically only IDF soldiers and Hamas soldiers. Fighting has been going on there for weeks already, everyone who has some sense already evacuated from there.
2. The original soldier didn't see the flag because of a tree obscuring it from him. It was a snap decision to fire, but considering that the only people who should have been there at that points were Hamas soldiers, this makes sense.
3. The soldier shooting Haim wasn't with the commander, he was still far from him, IIRC in the house the whole incident started from. You're thinking in very clean terms; imagine a messy street, after weeks of fighting, you can't hear well because of the constant deafening bombing around you, you don't know all the details as we do - as far as you can tell, there is a gunfight happening now and you're buddies are in it. He might have been sitting somewhere far when everything started and didn't have context or the full picture. It's incredibly common for soldiers to continue shooting and for the "Stop" to register, especially after weeks of deployment.
For 1. I know they weren't PoWs. They were escaped hostages. I just mean that if they were Hamas soldiers, from the moment they waved that white flag and surrendered, you can no longer shoot them. They'd be considered PoWs at that point. You can't choose to not accept the surrender and just shoot them.
2. Maybe the translation isn't clear. The article you linked says the following (through Google Translate):
> One sniper stood and watched on the first floor. At 09:42 he recognized three shirtless figures with a white flag - the abductees. [...] The sniper watched them hidden by a tree standing in front of the building. The area where the abductees walked was defined as "red" for him, meaning an area that threatens the forces. He shot and hit two of them.
Which sounds like the sniper recognized they had a white flag and that the sniper was hidden by a tree.
3. Yes, I am very much not clear on the details. But as far as I can tell, the hostages took all the proper steps to get rescued and there were no Hamas soldiers there at the time they were shot. They were unarmed and waving a white flag. It sounds like the soldiers were quick to shoot despite there being no threat from the hostages.
This doesn't bode well for other escaped hostages or non-combatants who approach Israeli soldiers. What would you advise an escaped hostage to do? It seems like approaching the IDF unarmed and waving a white flag is risky.
1. I agree completely, and didn't think that's what you thought - just stated the POV of the soldier. Regular soldiers weren't briefed on meeting hostages before that BTW - which was a mistake ofc - because only Special ops were thought to be able to get near them.
2. Yeah, I'm reading the article in Hebrew and it is unclear. I remember hearing on the news that the tree obscured his view of the flag - but I'm uncertain now. Maybe he just took a very bad decision - I'm definitely not claiming that Israeli soldiers are mistake-proof, or bed-decision-making proof.
I took some time and found the article I read at the time - https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/rkpl4fida - Seems like there are more details there, and here it appears more explicit that the tree blocked his view. Ctrl + F "38" (meters) for the relevant section.
3. I agree with what your saying, just not about generalizing from the single instance too much. Israel takes quite a lot of PoWs in this war - there are documentations of surrendered Hamas fighters, and not in small numbers. I would think the hostage scenario was the exception to the rule and not the rule itself.
More discussion about religion!
(1) I think you got Matthew 22 wrong. my recollection of that is "Wasn't that the seven brothers?"
It's not a man with two ex-wives, it's a woman with seven ex-husbands:
"23 That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. 24 “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for him. 25 Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. 26 The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. 27 Finally, the woman died. 28 Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”
(2) With regards to St Joseph of Cupertino, he's more famous (or at least was in my time) as the guy you invoke to help you pass exams. Levitating is all very well and good, but getting that grade is more important! His claim to fame was being so stupid he tried and failed multiple times to be admitted to the priesthood until it was arranged that he would be given very simple questions which it was established that he knew the answers to.
For those of you that may need it, here you go - prayer to St Joseph of Cupertino for exam success:
"O great St. Joseph of Cupertino who, by your prayers, obtained from God to be asked at your examination only the propositions which you know, pray that I, like you, may succeed in the examination which lies before me. In return I promise to make your name known and cause you to be loved. Amen."
https://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=72
"Patron: of Aviators, Flying, Studying, and those suffering mental handicaps
St. Joseph was born in 1603 at Cupertino, in the diocese of Nardo in the Kingdom of Naples. ...It is said that his mother often considered him a nuisance and treated him harshly. Joseph was purported to be slow to learn and absent-minded. He was said to frequently wander aimlessly, with his mouth gaping open. And, he had a bad temper, so, he was not at all popular. He tried to learn the trade of shoemaking, but failed. He asked to become a Franciscan, but they initially would not accept him. Finally he did join the Capuchins. However, for a very short period of time. Eight months later, they sent him away. Sources say it was because he could not seem to do anything right.
He dropped piles of dishes and kept forgetting to do what he was told. His mother was not at all pleased to have the eighteen-year-old Joseph back home again, so she finally got him accepted as a servant at the Franciscan monastery. He was given the friars habit and put to hard work taking care of the horses.
About this time, Joseph began to change. He grew in humility and gentleness, fruits of the Holy Spirit at work in a person. He became more careful and successful at his work. He also began to pray more do more voluntary acts of penance. Finally, he was able to enter the Franciscan order and, eventually, study for the priesthood. Although he was a good and holy friar, he had a very hard time with studies. During his seminary exams, the examiner happened to ask him to explain the only thing he knew well, and so he was ordained a deacon, and later a priest."
Thanks, I've corrected the gender (though not given all the details, for sake of space)
No problem, I have to get some use out of hearing all those Gospel readings every Sunday!
This, and the Mormon link, have jogged a memory of mine that I was specifically taught as a kid that this *wasn't* a trick question, because it was asked by a Saducee and the Saducees were basically alright (probably not quite in these terms, I'm remembering across decades and into childhood). Is/was this ever a consensus position, or was this just a specific quirk of (I think?) both a school chaplain and a Sunday school teacher I had?
>With regards to St Joseph of Cupertino, he's more famous (or at least was in my time) as the guy you invoke to help you pass exams.
I have heard it said that, as long as there are math exams, there will be heartfelt prayers in schools. :-)
The reason we should go back to Nuns With Rulers in school is my experience with one for our Intermediate Certificate (now the Junior Certificate) exam - state exam for third Year in secondary school (at around age 15). We had her for maths class in the final year before the exam, having had a male lay teacher for the first two years in that subject.
I passed with an even better (not great, but great by my expectations!) grade than I hoped to get, and she dragged the entire class of us over the line with revising two years work and hammering the third year into our heads by means of fear and intimidation. Nobody failed the maths exam, even the no-hopers like me.
Education by sheer terror works!
Lest I be traducing the woman, she was perfectly amiable outside of class once you got to know her. But in class? She would have made Chuck Norris break down in tears like a little baby.
Many Thanks! That is quite an anecdote! I guess this is the pedagogical equivalent of the Russian "Brutality works, but only in large doses." :-)
We used to have to line up and recite the particular theorem out of Euclid for the class that day, having drawn it on the sheet of paper beforehand; she would get one student to start, then stop them and the nexxt would have to continue on, and down the line like that.
If the drawing was sloppy or you weren't able to seamlessly switch into recital, you were In Trouble. I remember being lined up with the rest of the class, we all practicing beforehand before she came in to class, and noting that the paper was trembling like a leaf in a breeze, then realising I was so scared my hands were shaking 😁
And she never even used The Ruler, it was all done with quiet force of command. As I said, the funny thing was getting to know her a few years later outside of class, and she was perfectly fine to get on with. But in that class, she ruled like a force of nature by sheer terror imposed on us without even raising her voice!
I'm telling you, a bit more fear in class and a lot of the failing students would stop failing!
Wow! Many Thanks!
My French teacher did me the same service. One time he broke a wooden ruler over my head as he repeated "You must learn your vocab!" (maybe said in French). More typically, he would hold between forefinger and thumb the short hairs in front of one's ear.
Per item 14: In John 14, Jesus says that Christians can do everything He did, and even greater things, too. If nobody used miraculous powers to stop the holocaust, it's not for lack of God making them available, same way they were available to the levitating monk.
That's assuming that the verse is correct. What if miraculous powers are available, but we lost the rules?
That would be pretty in line with the Bible. It happens in the Old Testament a lot. For instance, consider the story of Samson, who lost his miraculous super-strength when his hair was cut, which violated his vows to God.
There's a lot of theological controversy about the role of miraculous powers in the present day. I'm definitely in the camp that thinks that, just like all spiritual things, as far as God's concerned, they're equally available to everybody; it's just that very few of us are able to (or want to) access them.
Also consider that, in the New Testament, spiritual things like forgiving somebody, repenting from sin, doing charitable works or worshiping God have eternal value. Human spirits last forever, while, on the other hand, the world will be destroyed by Christ when He returns in the end. So flying around (which, after all, you can do in an airplane too) has, in itself, no eternal value.
So it may be that there are people who can do miracles now, but they're enlightened enough to put their energy toward other ministries instead. Jesus also said in Luke 16 that miracles don't convince people who don't want to be convinced. (Which makes me skeptical of these projects that try to use miracles to convert people.)
From a different branch of Christianity (no, I'm not going to entertain discussion on that), namely the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, here's my perspective.
I agree that miracles (a) still happen and (b) are not generally flashy. We have direct guidance that miracles are for the faithful, not the convincing of the faithless. I also agree that, for the Lord's purposes, the spiritual is much more important than the physical. I also note that there is doctrinal and scriptural support for the idea that the Adversary can do "miracles"--his tend to be flashy counterfeits.
As to how miracles are performed--there are two types, broadly. Those that come purely by faith/prayer of the righteous and those that are mediated by the power of the priesthood[1]. In either case, it's God performing the miracle, and they happen if and only if they are in accord with God's will for that specific circumstance. And his wisdom is higher than ours--not everyone who prays for healing or receives a blessing of healing will be healed (to take one example).
Anyone can pray in faith for a miracle. Those prayers are answered (although not always in the way we think they will be, nor always with a yes). But to have true faith, you have to have a spiritual assurance through the Holy Spirit that what you are praying for is in accord with divine will. So people who pray for flashy miracles, etc. *can't be praying in faith*.
The priesthood can, under certain circumstances, and when operating with faith, be used to command nature in the name of God. Again, it must be done in accordance with His will, which dramatically limits the scope. This is how most of the biblical miracles occurred, especially those of the prophets and apostles. For example, Peter's command "Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk." was efficacious because he was authorized to wield the power of God for the healing of the sick AND that deed was done in faith AND that deed was in accord with God's will for that circumstance.
[1] Note: the Church of Jesus Christ uses this term in its proper meaning not to refer to the *people*, but to the authority and power to act in the name of God. The people *bear* the priesthood, but are not the priesthood. This gets muddled a lot in casual conversation, which kinda sucks.
>We have direct guidance that miracles are for the faithful, not the convincing of the faithless.
That's like saying that the soda bottle at your grocery is there to get beverages to thirsty people, not to convince anyone that the grocery store actually sells soda.
You don't need to do something *specifically* to convince the faithless, for it to convince the faithless. You just have to go about it in an ordinary manner without thinking about the faithless at all. At some point the faithless will get evidence for miracles purely by chance, just like if coelacanths exist, sooner or later a scientist will just happen to be there to see one.
When people say "it isn't there to convince the faithless", 99% of the time they don't mean "it isn't there to convince the faithless". Instead they mean "it's *specifically* contrived so that it *won't* convince the faithless", and that's a *very* different thing.
Regarding the re-hyping of anti-missile defenses, I humbly submit the following counter https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/iran-breaches-anglo-zionist-defenses?utm_source=publication-search If they're so cool, why don't they send them to the Ukrainians? They are not being attacked by ICBMs. Same goes for F-35s. If they're so great, and not a very expensive gizmo to target Afghan sheep-shaggers from across the world, then let's send them to face the Russians and see what happens, no? Over two years after the start the war, that doesn't seem to be in the cards, which tells me they'd rather stick with the sheep-shaggers, thank you very much.
>If they're so cool, why don't they send them to the Ukrainians?
We did. It's been over a year since Patriots started shooting down Kinzal missiles over Ukraine.
As for the F-35s, these are extremely sophisticated warplanes that will take years to teach Ukraine how to use. It's taking quite a while to get the F-16s we (finally) gave them into service, and things would be much worse with a more complicated plane.
And before we sent the Ukrainians Patriots, they were using their own extensive network of S-300 missile batteries, which was basically the Soviet version of the Patriot in the late Cold War. It wasn't as effective as the American version, because Russian weapons rarely are, but it was reasonably capable against most of the missiles Russia was actually hitting Ukraine with and because it was what they were familiar with.
When the Ukrainians started running low on S-300s, and the Russians started using more of the missiles S-300 couldn't stop, we started training Ukrainians to use Patriots and then we sent them Patriots. They seem to work really well, though there aren't enough of them to cover the entire nation.
F-35s, as Bean says, would have a steeper learning curve unless we sent American pilots to fly them and American technicians to maintain them. Granted, it's been more than two years and that probably would have been enough time to stand up a few effective Ukrainian F-35 squadrons, but we spent most of the first year thinking and hoping that the war would be over in a year. Once NATO decided Ukraine needed western combat aircraft, it was a question of getting them F-16s in 2024 or F-35s in 2025 at the earliest.
Does Ukraine have any hope of winning? Did they ever? (other than through causing a Russian Revolution of course)
An American revolution would also suffice.
This war will end when one side runs out of guns, shells, or men willing to stand up to being shelled. There's no reason that has to be Ukraine, and the bit where Russia has to import ammunition from *North Korea* suggests that the limit on Russian endurance is not impossibly far in the future.
But the only side of that equation that Ukraine has any real control over is Ukrainian manpower. Their guns and their shells come almost entirely from NATO, and NATO's policy for the past year and a half seems to have been to prolong the stalemate. Russia can't be allowed to win because that would be a victory for the bad guys, but Ukraine can't be allowed to win because maybe Vladimir Putin will throw a nuclear temper tantrum.
The war will probably end about six months after the United States Government decides who it wants to see win. Right now, the most likely outcome is the second Trump administration deciding that Russia should win, followed shortly by Russia winning. But that's not the only possibility.
Thanks. I figured that short of a revolution, Russia would be able to regularly supply cannon fodder longer than Ukraine could so I figured Russia would win unless Putin got the boot or the noose.
I hadn't heard about purchasing ammo from NK I figured that Russia had sparkly new munitions factories pumping out newborns on the regular. Maybe they were just doing the Norks a favor?
North Korea is a Chinese client, not Russian, and Moscow hasn't been much interested in doing them favors in this century. And from reports on Russian social media, some of the North Korean ammunition is complete crap, but the Russians are using it anyway. So it's pretty clear that Russia is scraping the bottom of the barrel w/re domestic production and stockpiles (Ukraine reached that point over a year ago). And note that this isn't just artillery shells; Russia is confirmed to be using North Korean and Iranian ballistic missiles in Ukraine, even though those are well behind the usual Russian state of the art.
That said, nobody knows how much artillery ammunition North Korea has tucked away, but it's probably in the millions of rounds and they're clearly willing to sell at least some of the stockpile. So Russia is unlikely to run out next month, Next year, very possible.
As a counterpoint to John, I would have to say Ukraine can not and will not win without other countries sending their own soldiers. For various reasons, this war is about grinding attritional advances much more reminiscent of WWI than the sweeping maneuver battles of WWII or the Napoleonic wars. Russia has a much larger pool of manpower and much more industrial capacity than Ukraine, which are the determining factors of victory.
Having more men is a compounding advantage, because they can be rotated out of combat to rest and replenish. The general rule of thumb is that a unit of fighting men is no longer combat effective after 15% losses. There are some Ukrainian brigades that have suffered over 50% losses, because they don't have the reserves to rotate their men. The Russians have also been adept at using mercenaries, convict soldiers and militia units from the Donbas to soak up losses in frontal assaults and protect their veteran professional units. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a lot of the professional Russian soldiers suffered heavy losses in the first few years of the war.
There are something like 500k Russian troops in Ukraine right now, and another 300-500K recruits/conscripts in the newly formed western military districts. There have been rumblings of using these troops to open a northern flank through Belarus, which would stretch the Ukrainian manpower even further. I don't know at this point whether this is a legitimate plan or a psyop to tangle up Ukraine. These troops have to be trained, and Russia doesn't have enough equipment to deploy more than a fraction of them at present anyway. Still, even another 50-60K Russians on a new front would be pretty rough for Ukraine to counter.
As far as war material goes, consider the production of standard howitzer ammunition (155mm NATO, 152mm RU.) Russia produces somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-4 million shells per year. For comparison, the US currently produces about 700,000 per year. They plan to open a third factory in 2025 to reach a million per year, but the factory will need time to ramp up production to full, which may not happen until late 2025 or 2026. The EU plans to reach 1.4 million shells per year by 2025. They also planned to deliver 1 million shells to Ukraine already, but have only delivered a bit over half of that, so these numbers may not reflect reality. Anyway, the side running out of artillery shells first is clearly not going to be Russia.
During intense operations, tens of thousands of shells are fired per day. That would burn through even millions of shells per year, which is why the NK shells were purchased. I can't imagine the quality of NK goods is great, but making WWII-era military technology seems within the realm of a communist backwater.
Both the US and Russia are limited in their development of ballistic missiles by various treaties. Something which does not hold true for Iran. Iranian cruise missiles have multi-stage boosters, for example, which is prohibited under IRBM treaty. The missile attack on Israel is illustrative here, where the Iranians largely failed to penetrate the missile defenses. This shows that Iranians missiles are not superior to Western/Russian models, which also fail to penetrate missile defenses without large-scale decoys and drone support. It doesn't prove anything about whether they are the same/worse.
All in all, Ukraine is at a significant manpower and firepower disadvantage. Even shitty NK/Iranian tech and refurbished cold war stockpiles that have been gathering rust are better than nothing, which is what Ukraine locally produces for the war effort. Except for drones, which Ukraine is probably the foremost expert country on the planet at utilizing. Sadly, you can't win a war with drones alone. Maybe in a few more decades.
I really have to object to the idea that the US/NATO *desires* Ukraine to lose for some reason. Russia has a significant natural advantage in population and production. Overcoming this would require the west to both a) send their own soldiers to fight in Ukraine, and b) divert significant portions of their economy to war time levels of material production. That they have not been willing to do so is not evidence that they want Russia to win.
As it happens I was professionally involved in this issue some twenty years ago, when the idea was revived under Little Bush, but the objectives the were extremely modest: be able to shoot down a handful of nuclear-tipped ICBMs from North Korea or (one day) Iran. I think it's fair to say that, in spite of the time and the investment, no reliable capability yet exists. The Russian S-500 system has a theoretical capability against ICBMs, but that remains to be demonstrated in practice. In the meantime, Russia has the only real ABM capability in the form of a system around Moscow, first deployed half a century ago and quite recently up-dated, which would destroy warheads in their terminal phase through nuclear explosions. It was originally conceived as a way of soaking up the first wave of US missiles, and giving the Politburo time to authorise the launch of a counter-strike.
The issue of tactical anti-missile missiles is quite different. They have been around for generations: as long ago as the 1982 Falklands War, the British used Sea Wolf missiles against Argentinian aircraft, which had originally been designed as anti-anti-shipping missiles. In Ukraine, the Russians have been able to reliably destroy NATO subsonic missiles with technology that has been around for decades, and that they have invested heavily in, in a way the West has not. Successful attacks from each side have largely resulted from launching massive attacks, and overwhelming the defence with sheer numbers, making use of decoy drones and multiple waves of attacks. But of course you need, not just very large numbers of drones, but very large numbers of the actual missiles to do the damage. By contrast, hypersonic missiles like the Kinzahl are a very new development, and at the moment there is no way of defending against them.
>I think it's fair to say that, in spite of the time and the investment, no reliable capability yet exists. The Russian S-500 system has a theoretical capability against ICBMs, but that remains to be demonstrated in practice. In the meantime, Russia has the only real ABM capability in the form of a system around Moscow, first deployed half a century ago and quite recently up-dated, which would destroy warheads in their terminal phase through nuclear explosions. It was originally conceived as a way of soaking up the first wave of US missiles, and giving the Politburo time to authorise the launch of a counter-strike.
Uhh.... no. None of this is right. I had sort of hoped we'd have gotten over lionizing Russian weapons given their dismal performance in Ukraine. As for the Moscow-protecting ABM system, that was a decoy to soak up US and British missiles during the Cold War. It worked pretty well, too, as evidenced by Chevaline. And you're completing ignoring GMD, which I have a pretty high prior on working given that every other Western BMD system we've tested has worked quite well.
>The issue of tactical anti-missile missiles is quite different. They have been around for generations: as long ago as the 1982 Falklands War, the British used Sea Wolf missiles against Argentinian aircraft, which had originally been designed as anti-anti-shipping missiles.
This is a complete non-sequitur in regards to BMD. None of those were ballistic, and there wasn't a widespread capability to do that before about 20 years ago, with some error bars depending on how you evaluate things like Patriot's performance in Desert Storm.
>By contrast, hypersonic missiles like the Kinzahl are a very new development, and at the moment there is no way of defending against them.
Hypersonic weapons aren't new (the name is, but that's just to blind people to the fact that the concept isn't) and it seems weird that you'd make that specific claim given Patriot's record against Kinzahl in Ukraine.
I think the evidence from Ukraine is a much stronger place to take lessons from than the recent strikes from Iran. The Iranians gave ample notice that they planned a strike against Israel, then orchestrated an attack they must have known would mostly have been struck down. The fact that all of these missiles (and drones) weren't stopped despite all the notice, the multiple parties involved, the clear target path, the long distance in which to act, etc. suggests a specific interpretation of missile defense weakness that squares with observations from Ukraine on both sides: missile defense becomes exponentially more difficult the larger the area that must be defended.
Each system has an operational range. If you know where and when the attack is coming from, you can defend against it. If you know where the missiles are going you can defend against it. Hence the success of Israel's air defense in the past and the failure of Russian and Ukrainian air defense, where they'll send in a bunch of cheap drones to empty out the missile defense systems, followed by more advanced missiles to strike the true targets. This is what has happened multiple times in Ukraine, but was conspicuously absent in the Iranian attack.
Russia's "only real ABM capability" has not really been demonstrated since the end of the Cold War, and I wouldn't bet too heavily on it today. Same goes for the S-500.
On the US side, we have GMD (Ground-Based Midcourse Defense), which was a prototype placed in limited operational service as a placeholder. With ~20 years of debugging, it might work. And we have Aegis, which definitely works. On paper, it's only expected to stop intermediate-range ballistic missiles, which as we recently saw, it does quite well. But it's also been used to shoot down a satellite in low orbit, which indicates that it is capable of engaging targets moving at ICBM speeds. It admittedly doesn't have the continent-spanning range of GMD, but it's cheaper and it has a land-based version so you don't have to build an expensive ship under it if you're defending fixed areas.
Deploying a system to protect against an all-out attack from Russia would be *expensive*, we'd definitely have to turn up the money printers a notch or two(*), but the technology exists. Defending Israel from Iran, or defending Ukraine from a Russia that's keeping its serious missiles in reserve against the US, is affordable.
* Reasons why we might not want to do this, are left as an exercise for the student
Are you referring to the A-135? Is there any reason to assume that it wouldn't work? Especially since the Russians still have the balls to put nukes on the tips?
The success rate for Russian military equipment left over from the Cold War and not regularly tested and exercised since, should give anyone cause to suspect that it would greatly underperform expectations if put to the test.
And putting nuclear missiles on antimissiles, doesn't really help all that much. A competently-built and -maintained modern guidance system, if it works, doesn't need a nuclear warhead, and if it doesn't work, probably won't put the missile close enough for even a nuclear warhead to get the job done. This isn't the 1970s, when we were stuck with fuzzy low-resolution command or beam riding guidance. Putting nuclear warheads on a defensive missile greatly reduces your flexibility in using that missile, even if you've got Russian-grade balls, for a very marginal increase in the capability of that missile.
Odd question: were you also involved in the reconquest of Palmyra?
9: My expectation would be that whatever society welcomes the currently cryonically preserved as its unfrozen citizens will treat them as legally new people who just happen to have adult bodies and memories. Their old identities have already been declared dead, their wills carried out, etc. This may not help with the social practicalities much, but it would help with the legal ones. I don't think mandating a few decades (subjective time) of schooling/acculturation for the newly revived would be out of the question, either.
23: Your impression is basically correct, plus the odds of that extreme right tail have gotten lower over time as more research clarified how unlikely some of the scenarios were, and as the world has actually made significant progress towards making emissions reductions economically viable in more and more cases.
29: The "Yes" answer seems to rely, among other things, on the idea that a significant number of Trump voters would vote for Biden if Trump endorsed Biden, 1 week before the election, after Biden said he'd pardon Trump if Trump endorsed him. One, I don't think that's true. Two, Trump would also pardon Trump if elected, so this doesn't buy Trump voters anything they wouldn't already have gotten.
34: My initial hypothesis, if this is true, would be the LLMs are better than non-conspiracy-theorists at thinking like conspiracy theorists in order to persuade them, whereas most humans would have trouble staying in the proper mindset. Plausibly this stops working when the "They're using LLMs trained to convince you of lies" conspiracy theory gets off the ground.
9: Legally, I think that's how it works already. If you are declared dead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_death), and you show up again, the consequences mostly don't get unwound: your wife was free to remarry and her marriage doesn't get undone, your will remains executed and your assets distributed, and so on. Your widow can just divorce & remarry you if she wants (which she probably won't), and as for the rest, them's the breaks - not much sympathy for someone who fakes their death or deliberately disappears. No one disappears guiltlessly as a castaway for 5+ years in the modern world.
So, since cryonics patients are all declared legally dead before the cryonics organization will touch the body, that's what would happen by default. You'd just wake up as the old person but de facto, effectively new as all your assets and contracts and liabilities etc are all gone and the slate wiped clean having been declared legally dead centuries before. (Which is why you will be relying on the cryonics patient trust to support you after revival, if necessary.)
Made me think of the South Park "gooback" episode with time travelers taking all our jerbs, and it suddenly hit me that if you revived people 200 years in the future, they probably wouldn't be able to speak the language very well. You'd have to give them a crash course on lingo.
I assumed as much but wasn't 100% sure, thanks!
29: It'd shatter Trump's credibility though, although he *might* just about be able to charm his way through it. Some voters would flip to Biden (most people aren't very political or politically engaged and vote in ways that seem weird to people who are), but a lot more might stay home or vote for RFK jr.
Why do Iowans have such small houses?
My guess is that it's related to old housing stock. Iowa's population is slow growing, so they have a lot of houses left over from the days when houses tended to be built smaller. https://eyeonhousing.org/2023/02/age-of-housing-stock-by-state-4/
My first guess was "log cabins" and a quick google shows lots of (small) offerings in Iowa.
I will happy pay $1,000 for you or Bentham to do your best to come up with an explanation for the shroud of Turin. Consider all the evidence available and then explain what it is. Anyone else want to help finance this?
Have you done any research? A cursory review of the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin) indicates radiocarbon dating shows it is far too new to have been worn by Jesus. Those who believe it authentic doubt the radiometric analysis, but it doesn't explain how.
Yes. Look into the details of that radiocarbon dating. You’ll find that samples taken two inches apart differed in their measurement by over 100 years. All the samples were taken from one area which is easily seen to be visually anomalous, as it was the place where people held it up for viewing and this was repaired. These results were, for some reason, initially withheld and only the summary conclusion was published.
There is also the question of, “how and why did they create a photographic negative, before photography was invented?”
Here’s the relevant academic source:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Counts-of-radiocarbon-atoms-in-the-Turin-Shroud-subsamples-by-Arizona_tbl1_331956466
From that source:
"it is not possible to affirm that the 1988 radiocarbon dating offers ‘conclusive evidence’ that the calendar age range is accurate and representative of the whole cloth."
But it's quite a leap to say that, even if the estimated age range of AD 1260-1390 interval isn't 95% accurate that the correct age is around 0 AD. Suppose, rather, that the age ought to be around 800 AD, +/- 500 years.
I don't pretend to understand the statistics or methods involved, but it seems like they made an honest scientific effort to analyze the results, which mean the results are less accurate than initially portrayed. I would still think that the most likely explanations for the image are forgery and random chance.
They created a photographic negative after such a technique was invented. Anyone can make a photographic negative nowadays (which actually was the first step in creating a photograph), and such images present a different way of looking at the same thing, which can highlight different things.
You are right that the study being flawed doesn’t show the date as 0, I agree there. But it does suggest that the initial study was flawed, so it’s not useful as evidence for the age of the should as a whole.
I don’t think a honest scientific effort happened if results were hidden for 20 years, and the ambiguity was hidden and replaced with a confident assertion. That sounds like what I’d expect from people who had concern higher than what was true.
As for the negative, You’re not understanding the question. The image on the cloth is barely visible as is. It becomes much more clear when it’s interpreted as a negative. this raises two questions:
- How was the original image created in the first place? There isn’t a known physical process by which the image on the cloth could have been created. Nobody has been able to make a convincing copy. If you think this is wrong, see if you can find a plausible explanation for how the image on the cloth was created, along with a demonstration of someone actually doing this to the same degree of physiological accuracy as on the cloth.
- why would a forgery do this? Why make an image that’s not super convincing, until you use uninvented technology to reveal details that would have been impossible to see for centuries?
Why would god do any of this?
According to link 34 an LLM would probably do a better job of changing your mind than they would
By all means! Ask an LLM what’s unexplained about it.
I haven't read Philosophy Bear's article yet, but I suspect it's the person with a staunch position that benefits from the interaction with an LLM most (Though I can get back to you on that).
I really don't know much about the Shroud & I don't expect talking to an LLM would leave me convinced of the same position as you are.
The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth bearing the image of a man who appears to have suffered physical trauma consistent with crucifixion. The cloth is approximately 4.4 by 1.1 meters and contains faint images of the front and back of a man's body, along with what appear to be bloodstains.
The primary evidence in favor of the shroud's authenticity includes:
The negative image: The image on the shroud is a negative, which was only discovered when the shroud was first photographed in 1898.
Anatomical accuracy: The image depicts a crucified man with wounds consistent with biblical accounts of Jesus' crucifixion.
Pollen and dirt: Pollen grains and limestone dust found on the shroud are consistent with the flora and geology of Jerusalem.
However, there is also evidence that suggests the shroud may not be authentic:
Carbon dating: In 1988, three independent radiocarbon dating tests dated the cloth to between 1260 and 1390 AD, suggesting it was a medieval forgery.
Lack of historical record: There is no clear historical record of the shroud before the 14th century.
Artistic similarities: The image on the shroud bears similarities to medieval artistic styles and techniques.
Considering the evidence, the most plausible explanation is that the Shroud of Turin is a medieval artistic creation, possibly a devotional object or a forgery intended to be venerated as a holy relic. The carbon dating results, lack of clear historical record before the 14th century, and similarities to medieval art support this theory.
However, some aspects of the shroud, such as the negative image and the anatomical accuracy, are more difficult to explain. It is possible that the creator of the shroud used techniques that are not yet fully understood or that some of the evidence, such as the pollen and dirt, was transferred to the cloth at a later date.
In conclusion, while the Shroud of Turin remains an enigma, the available evidence suggests that it is most likely a medieval creation rather than the genuine burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Further research and analysis may shed more light on this fascinating artifact.
The radiocarbon tests in 1988 were flawed.
The people who ran these tests got wildly different dates, off by hundreds of years. They didn’t originally publish these raw numbers, they had bad agreed to, but only the averages. It took ~ 30 years for them to release the raw data. Here’s the relevant scholarly source:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Counts-of-radiocarbon-atoms-in-the-Turin-Shroud-subsamples-by-Arizona_tbl1_331956466
Why would committed scholars publish only an average and say “the artifact is clearly false”, and then hide evidence for 30 years?
I think the simple explanation is they measured only the part of the shroud that had been repaired over time, and even this showed so much variation that they hid the results.
None of this explains the negative image, the 3D encoded data, or the grain pollen. If a forgery, someone did this using techniques that we still can’t mimic today, but which would have been invisible when it was ostensibly made.
The statistical analysis presented in the paper does raise some important questions about the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin. A few key points:
The raw data from the three labs (Arizona, Oxford, Zurich) shows significant variation and lack of agreement, both between and within the labs. This heterogeneity calls into question whether the samples can reliably be combined into a single date range.
The labs found foreign material like dye, wax, and cotton fibers on the tested samples, suggesting the area may have been contaminated or repaired.
Not publishing the raw data openly at the time, and taking decades to release it, raises concerns about transparency.
As you note, the unusual characteristics of the Shroud's image are still difficult to fully explain.
Caution overstating the implications. The medieval date range is still supported by each lab's individual results, even if there are problems in how they were combined. And the presence of some foreign material does not necessarily invalidate the dating.
The 1988 tests had issues and the raw data shows more uncertainty than was originally conveyed. But medieval origins remain a strong possibility based on the evidence available.
Sure it’s a possibility. What range is considered normal for variation in carbon dating, for samples on the order of a thousand years old?
Regardless of the date, there’s a bunch of other weird stuff in the shroud that doesn’t add up. If it’s a forgery the negative image and the 3d depth data?
Either way, regardless of the why —- how? How did it happen? Why have attempts to recreate the shroud failed to reproduce so many of its weird features?
The typical margin of error for radiocarbon dating depends on the age of the sample and the dating technology used. For a well-preserved organic sample around a thousand years old, modern techniques can usually provide a date range with a 95% confidence interval of about ±50-100 years. So the several hundred years of variation in the 1988 Shroud results does seem unusually large, even considering possible contamination or repair of the tested area. However, even with this variation, the medieval timeframe is still consistently indicated by all three labs.
You're right that the Shroud has characteristics that are difficult to explain, regardless of its age. The negative image, 3D encoding of information, and resistance to simple replication warrant further study.
If the Shroud is medieval, it suggests that the creator used some sophisticated and unconventional techniques to achieve those effects. Various hypotheses involving chemical reactions, gaseous diffusion, or even primitive photography have been proposed, but none have been conclusively demonstrated. It remains an open question how a medieval artisan could have created such an image.
On the other hand, if the Shroud is genuinely ancient, we still face the challenge of explaining how such an image could have been formed by natural processes associated with crucifixion and burial. No other known ancient burial cloth has similar properties.
While these unsolved mysteries are fun, we shouldn't let that override the evidence we do have. The consistent medieval date range from the radiocarbon tests, even with the acknowledged variability, and the lack of conclusive historical references to the Shroud before the 14th century, still point towards a medieval origin as the most likely scenario based on currently available data.
LLM’s do not evaluate evidence and reason in the face of uncertainty. They only predict the next word, which in this case means its claims about the balance of the evidence are just statements about popular consensus.
My belief is, that I don’t know what this is, but I find it very interesting given the numerous unexplained aspects of it. This is the same position as the Catholic Church, by the way. I don’t think there’s any convincing materialist explanation for what this is or how it came about. The radio carbon dating evidence is weak and is consistent with either a fraud from around the time of its discovery, or else a mixture of fibers from different points in time.
(first time commenter)
> 5: [...] Related, from @StatisticUrban - average house size in every US state vs. every European country
I'm deeply sceptical of average house size as an indicator of wealth
1. If you were simply optimising for average house size in the absence of any other metrics, it's very simple to do: just ban building anything small! And isn't that what most of American cities are incidentally doing :p Customer choice is reduced, but the number is higher.
2. Related to 1., it says nothing about space per person, or housing availability on the margin.
3. Note that even Norway has much smaller houses than America, despite being fabulously rich in every other metric otherwise
4. Personally speaking, there comes a point for me where extra space inside a house or flat is a net negative for me, not positive, even all other things considered equal, and that point is below the numbers you see in the American map.
5. (related to 4 and 1) I would gladly trade off space for living in a nice urban area, and most of those big houses are in car-dependent suburbs which I really would rather not live in. Judging by the prominence of the American urbanist movement online and what they say, availability of houses that urbanists like in America is really low compared to Europe.
This isn't to say things can't be bad (the UK housing stock is infamously so), but really you can't use a single number as evidence here.
(nevertheless, the America-Europe gap that appeared in the past 15 years is really embarrassing and I wish that more fellow Europeans woke up to that fact and started screaming asking what went wrong)
"Unfortunately the fog has rolled in and our paths must diverge" is a wonderful line for a breakup. For maximum applicability, it should really be done while standing on a bridge. Downside is that the person broken up with might shove you off that bridge 😀
"Nick Fuentes has accused me of being one of the Jews who controls the new conservative movement"
As the Rightful Caliph, are you *completely* sure this does not come under your aegis?
The Rationalist Caliphate usurped by a Jew? Eliezer must be warned!
This is the funniest thing I have read on the internet all week.
Thanks, wasn't sure if it was too dumb to post.
36. But I thought all safety regulations were written in blood!
Sorry, cheap political crack, but a serious look at why individual safety regulations were written and what their effect is would be welcome. I realize this would be a difficult project.
I have thoughts on a couple of these. First, the British SLBMs. Some of this is cultural (and there was a time when the US would have said the same, before Kennedy and McNamara and their rather odd belief that everyone wanted to blow up the world, while Russia has always been paranoid about such things). But a lot of it is probably also economic. The problem the British have is that they're a rather small island, close to the main enemy, so they may not have the time to get word to their submarines, particularly when they also can't really afford the expensive systems the US has for that, which I talk about in https://www.navalgazing.net/NWAS-Polaris-Part-4. The result is that if they did implement a PAL system like we have, they'd run a very large risk of not actually being able to launch if they needed to.
Second, the Noah Smith thing. I will first establish my bona fides as someone who got this right, on both missile defense (https://www.navalgazing.net/In-Defense-of-Missile-Defense) and the F-35 (literally my first comment on SSC). I think he gets most of the main drivers right, particularly the role that experts working on classified stuff play vs Ted Postol, and I would go further and point out that you're going to see adverse selection in your experts because the defense field pays well and only Ted Postol can't get hired there. (I also disagree that he's smart, but that's a different story.)
I remain somewhat baffled at the lack of any serious effort by the defense industry to get its position out to the wider public, because while a lot of this stuff is moderately difficult to explain, it's not that much more difficult than a couple of other fields I'm familiar with that have done a much better job of making explanations available. (Orbital mechanics, for instance.) I'm doing my best, but I'm one guy doing this in my spare time, and I keep getting distracted by weird stuff from WWII. More thoughts on that at https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Defense-Information-Pipeline, but I'll probably write up a full response soon.
>But also, there might have been some confusion between “block Iranian cruise missiles”, which modern systems are now good at, and “block Russian ICBMs”, which is still impossible (for a good overview of the state of ICBM-blocking tech, see here).
This needs some clarification. A cruise missile is basically an unmanned airplane that crashes into things and blows up. We've had the ability to shoot them down approximately forever, as it's a subset of conventional air defense. What we saw was excellent performance against Iranian intermediate-range ballistic missiles. We didn't see use against ICBMs, but all signs point to us being able to handle them in principle. We do not currently have enough interceptors to do much against an attack by anyone except North Korea, but this is a matter of money, not of engineering. I think we should change this. And no, it won't be destabilizing, because I neither expect nor demand the system stop every warhead.
I just want to take this opportunity to say that your blog is great, I've learned a ton from it, and I recommend it to everyone here.
I still don't buy the rationale of the British subs. I am assuming that their sub commanders still require some sort of positive confirmation that there is a nuclear war going on before they launch their tridents towards Moscow. Otherwise, it would be rather simple to start WW3: just jam the radio connection to London as a sub emerges from a routine dive, wait for the commander to conclude that London does not exist any more and enjoy the fireworks. Even if the crew can detect that they are being jammed, they have to have some policy on what to do in that case. A policy of "do nothing" would destroy the deterrence value, while a policy of "nuke away" would make it rather easy to start WW3.
I get that there may be situations where you order your sub to dive and emerge at some later point somewhere and launch their rockets unless they get an all-clear, but in that case the correct time to send them the the codes to their nukes would be with these instructions.
And as I have written lengthily in another comment, tamper-protection devices seem useful even if someone on board knows the code, you want to make it as hard as reasonably possible for someone to steal your nukes and use them for whatever.
If London is silent, the radios are awash with SOS calls and there's a Russian cruiser bearing down on you, odds are you should crack open the safe and launch. If you surface and London is silent but everything else looks totally normal, maybe go yell at your radio technician as a first step. Put simply, if you don't trust a career navy captain to be able to identify whether there's an apocalyptic war going on, why the hell would you put him in charge of the boat?
Even if you could block all communications with jamming (which you can't over the sort of area an SSBN might be operating in) it's pretty easy to tell the difference between being jammed and there not being any signal to start with. The orders definitely aren't "if you can't hear anything, turn the keys immediately". billymorph said this very well.
As for tamper-protection devices, I'm sure those are installed. For one thing, all missile warheads have very strict safeguards to not go off unless they've been fired from a missile. And I strongly suspect that launching would take several keys held in safes which require combinations known to different people. The difference from US practice is mostly that all of the safe combinations are known to people onboard.
"We do not currently have enough interceptors to do much against an attack by anyone except North Korea, but this is a matter of money, not of engineering. "
Except, at some point, the money problem turns into an engineering problem. If Russia has roughly 8000 warhheads, and each one requires 4 GMD interceptors to have a 97% hit chance, and each interceptor costs $75 million, thats over 2 trillion to shoot them all down. Meanwhile Russia or China can easily produce more, while the US has shown no sign of being able to mass manufacture sophisticated missiles in bulk.
I dispute all of your assumptions. Russia does not have 8000 warheads right now. They were limited to 1550 deployed, and that number can't climb too much higher quickly. Second, why do I need 97% to shoot each one down? I'll take 50% as a start, because that's a lot better than 0%. Third, I probably don't need 4 to 1 because I can launch in waves and retarget. Fourth, if I'm buying 32,000 interceptors, the price is going to come down a lot. And fifth, the defense industrial base hasn't exactly covered itself in glory, but it's better than that. No, we can't get to 32,000 quickly, but we're building hundreds of sophisticated missiles a year, and could add more interceptors to that if we wanted to. Also, adding Russia to "easily produce more" makes it hard to take you seriously.
Likewise, it's hard to take you seriously when you think missile defense being "solved" means something like "if we spend trillions of dollars going all out producing as many interceptors as possible, we could maybe shoot down 50% of Russia's current stockpile, assuming they don't build any more." Is this just trying to "win" by killing more of them than they do of us?
Again, trillions is your numbers, not mine. I'd say 3000 interceptors instead of 32,000, and estimate maybe $10 million per interceptor at that rate, which is 30 billion. I'd consider that a good deal on insurance, particularly because the existence of an effective BMD umbrella is going to vastly change how they do targeting, cutting down on the number of bombs landing on American cities.
What bean says, without specifically endorsing his exact numbers.
Also, winning is nice, but even if you set the goalposts so that "winning" a nuclear war is definitionally or practically impossible, there's still a big difference between the sort of defeat where fifty million Americans are dead and the survivors have been Bombed Back to the Stone Age(*), and the sort of defeat where twenty million Americans are dead and the survivors have been bombed back to the 20th century.
Unless you are 100.00% certain you can avoid fighting a nuclear war, then it is worth spending tens of billions of dollars to hedge against the worst sort of defeat. If you are "only" 99% certain your diplomats will come through with a lasting peace, it is genuinely worth trillions. And it probably wouldn't cost trillions.
* Not literally the stone age, as we've discussed before.
4: Please stop sharing conspiracy theories
5: Higher wages are useless if your country's infrastructure and tax system is so piss poor that you need to spend more on basic necessities. We have economic metrics that account for some of this, such as the difference between income and discretionary income. Free-market propagandists always point to the US having high income, but the same can not be said for discretionary income. For example, if we compare the US to the Netherlands, we see that the US median disposable income is 41K while in the Netherlands it's 36K. But let's compare how much you have to spend in your day to day life and calculate the discretionary income based on that:
________________________US_______Netherlands
income________________41k_______36k
food___________________5.1k_______3.7k
shelter_________________13.2k______13k
clothing________________1.2k_______1.5k
transport______________6.3k_______3.4k
health__________________3.2k_______1.8k
student debt___________2.1k_______0.8k
discretionary income__9.9k_______11.8k
As we see, the case the free-market capitalist makes falls apart once we look at discretionary income, which collectivist and social policies ensure is higher in the Netherlands.
EDIT: Scott has edited the post to make 4 seem less like an endorsement and more an ironic share. This is better, but I still prefer it if these things aren't spread at all.
EDIT 2: Source for the 2021 US-Dutch disposable income vs discretionary income (as well as a lot of other comparisons between median US and Dutch expenditure): https://www.moneymacro.rocks/2021-07-02-dutch-vs-america-middle-class/
How would you justify your demand to stop sharing conspiracy theories? What's the rationale?
Because it's misinformation.
I think a link plus "here is a bizarre and goofy conspiracy theory" doesn't do the same things as "here is a plausible and important thing to consider," and we should think about them differently.
I agree that the latter is worse than the former, though both are bad, but Scott originally didn't do that. In his original post he only said:
"4: Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that COVID didn’t happen at all, and that both “lab leak” and “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place."
(with the link) He later edited the post to add:
"I wonder if I could even more Substack likes if I one-upped them with a theory that lockdowns never even happened, and it was just one of those Berenstein Bear or Mandela Effect things where everyone has a false memory."
Adding irony.
Proof: https://web.archive.org/web/20240529103717/https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-may-2024
The implication is so obvious that it's not clear to me how anyone at all could have missed it, though I suppose from the comments we know that the number of people misled is at least one.
"Theory X exists, it is a goofy conspiracy theory, some people nonetheless believe it", is not misinformation. Furthermore, I don't see how you can hope to counter goofy conspiracy theories, if you're not willing to say that much.
Scott originally didn't do that. In his original post he only said:
"4: Related, breaking news: A popular Substack claims that COVID didn’t happen at all, and that both “lab leak” and “natural origins” are part of the higher-level conspiracy to distract people from the fact that there was never a virus in the first place."
(with the link) He later edited the post to add:
"I wonder if I could even more Substack likes if I one-upped them with a theory that lockdowns never even happened, and it was just one of those Berenstein Bear or Mandela Effect things where everyone has a false memory."
Adding irony.
Proof: https://web.archive.org/web/20240529103717/https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-may-2024
If you are going to expose your audience to a climate truther conspiracy theorist, you best do it in the form of a debunking.
I think approximately everyone of the subscribers of this blog is intelligent enough to figure out that this is obviously a conspiracy theory Scott doesn't endorse, even based on the first framing. You can relax your tireless watch to protect the uneducated masses from misinformation with your superior judgement.
I saw at least one commenter that didn't. Also readers of this blog can get a little bit conspiracy-loving at times (e.g. lab leak, 'the cathedral' etc), so better to err on the side of not spreading harmful misinformation.
Using median for income but mean for expenses seems misleading.
Data on the median is often not available, do you have reason to believe that median Dutch expenses would consistently be proportionally higher than the average as compared to the US? Because, the opposite seems actually more likely to me.
EDIT: Switched median and average to the correct position. On further reflection I actually think it's probably not going to be much different.
Yes, people usually spend more if they earn more, so since US average income is a lot higher (proportional to median income), I'd expect US average non-discretionary spending to be higher. If one can't find medians for everything, it would make more sense to use means for everything.
Average income is affected a lot by outliers. E.g. Billionaires' disposable income can skew an entire populations average disposable income to be much higher than the median. Things like spending on food are also skewed, but not as much, because while a billionaire may earn millions of times more, they don't spend millions of times more on food. This is known as Engel's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engel%27s_law
I don't think outliers are that big a deal. There's just not that many of them, and even the biggest outlier, Bill Gates, only has an effect of around $10/year according to https://projects.propublica.org/americas-highest-incomes-and-taxes-revealed/#table-jump-link.
Billionaires was just an extreme example to show the dynamic clearly. Obviously a single billionaire is not going to change a country of hundreds of millions that much (which is why I started with "E.g."), but rich people in general do. The skew is still larger for income. (Engel's law is about more than billionaires, it's about distribution of income in general)
Now do Italy.
That's quite a demand you're making of me. I tried looking for it online, but couldn't find it so I'd have to do it myself. Would you be willing to pay me for it?
> Free-market propagandists [...]
The US is not a particularly free market..
Btw, the US spends more on social welfare per person than eg France (or probably any other country on the planet).
The argument is something like:
1) free-market capitalism is the best economic system
2) the US is more free-market/capitalistic than European countries
3) therefore we expect US-citizens to have more money
4) US-citizens do indeed have more money, look at income
However, 4 doesn't hold, because income is not the same as discretionary income.
The US spends more on welfare *because* they let private players enter (e.g. capitalists industries like private health insurance and private equity in health care), if they just implemented collectivist policies like universal healthcare they wouldn't need to pay as much.
No one has made this argument in this thread. Scott didn't and I haven't seen any other posters do it either. While someone may make it, I am not sure why you are arguing against it here?
Because Scott (like he did before) presents the higher US income, in comparison to the lower European income, as superior, which is misleading because it's missing part of the picture.
Have a look at Singapore, if you want a cheap and efficient healthcare system.
We spend half of what Britain spends (as proportion of GDP) and have no worse health outcomes.
And no, we don't have a single payer system like the NHS. In fact, basically everyone has their own health savings account they use to pay for procedures (plus some catastrophic health insurance on top.)
It's easier to run an efficient health care system when everyone lives within easy commuting distance of everywhere. You could have a single radiology facility for the entire country, and run it constantly at close to 100% efficiency.
But possibly the bigger factor is just wages. A nurse in Singapore makes about $US26,000 a year. In the UK it's more like $US47,000, and in the US it's about $83,000. Whether it's a good or a bad thing for nurses to get paid like middle class professionals is a question I'll leave open.
(Sources https://www.incrediblehealth.com/blog/the-highest-paying-states-for-nurses/ for the US, https://www.nurses.co.uk/blog/a-quick-overview-of-nurses--salaries-in-the-uk/ for the UK, and https://www.glassdoor.com.au/Salaries/singapore-nurse-salary-SRCH_IL.0,9_IM1123_KO10,15.htm for Singapore)
Your first paragraph suggests that London or New York City should have really efficient and cheap healthcare? (And similar for basically any city that's large enough to keep a radiology facility busy.) So why don't they have cheap an efficient health care? Are you blaming the need to subsidise the hill billies, or something else?
One part of why Singapore can have cheap nurses is that Singapore hands out visas to foreigners for those jobs. There are lots of people who would like to come and work as nurses in the US and UK, too.
That would be a bargain for US and UK, and an enormous improvement in pay for the migrants.
But voters in those countries seem more interested in the 'out of sight is out of mind' approach to global poverty.
I find quite misleading to use the Netherlands as an example against "free market capitalism", they are the same fundamental model of the US with some different policy tweaks and vastly more efficient state expenditure and infrastructure.
The fundamental point about standard of living in sounds toh, Americans genuinely have no idea how much they are overpaying for stuff
I notice that there is a 3k difference in mean transport costs; aside from the point made above that greater levels of income mean residents will be inclined to spend more on luxuries like travel and cars, the Netherlands is a poor comparison. It is a tiny country that makes it easy to supply public transport. At least compare to France or Germany on that metric.
If higher discretionary income means people will spend more on travel (Which is probably true. The Dutch are in fact notorious for how much they travel), then that argument would work against you. They have more discretionary income yet spend less on transportation.
Also, the US has worse public transport even in places where there is higher density, e.g. almost all of their cities.
The argument isn't that the US is solely capitalistic, but rather that the US is *more* capitalistic; the Dutch state expenditure is more efficient *because* it is less privatized and more publicly owned, e.g., public transport.
That's an interesting point, and in some cases I'm inclined to agree, however I still feel like the free-market vs interventionism is the wrong framing, and you are trying to shoehorn the issue at hand into it fir ideological reasons.
In both cases you have the state using taxpayer money to fund roughly the same stuff. One way of doing so works better, yes, but it's a matter of precise policy choices, not of macro systems
But it's not a shoehorn, and it's not roughly the same stuff; the difference between private and public is central and substantial; e.g., publically funding a public transit system, like metros, instead of every individual owning a private car (and in fact, many Dutch city centers now have restrictions on cars) is the main reason that urban transport is cheaper for the Dutch.
If you are including household level expenses like housing and food, you need to look at household income as well. A small minority of people in the US live alone (either without family or roommates) so looking at individual incomes is not represativate.
Additionally, the US government has very robust economic statistics that it publishes. We dont need to look at whatever money macro is and its odd data sources. Check out this data from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm
I don't know how this compares to the Dutch numbers, your conclusion may be the same, but these are better numbers to use.
The linked analysis does in fact analyse this, but even if it didn't, a small minority of people in the Netherlands *also* live alone, in fact in very similar numbers as the US (14.7% vs 17.4% in 2018). It's better form to use the same dataset when available, like the OECD, because you then have the same methodology and you're comparing two countries directly. And when not available, well I'm sorry to say, but Money and Macro does in fact use data from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS in his analysis.
In fact, the very first link in that article links to data from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS
The reason to use household income is that some expenses, like rent/mortgage, are paid at a household level. Median gives us an idea of the "typical" experience. In both countries the typical experience is to live in a household with more than one person (and in this US this means more than 1 income, I assume this is true in the netherlands as well).
Yes the article links to the BLS, but uses minor data points instead of using the larger data sets like the one i linked that already do the analysis of cost breakdowns.
Because, like I said, they're economists and prefer to use the same dataset where possible. Yes, rent would be split in two (the other categories not) so just cut it in half for both of them, which would change the size of the lead but not more than that. If there's some small change in expenditure for the other categories it would also be applied to both, the size of the lead could change, but the lead would remain. I mean it might be different for different genders since rent isn't always split equally, and expenditure habits might be different so for a perfect picture we would have to have access to more complex analysis (e.g. feminist economics, household economics...), but we don't really have that data, and based on what we do have I suspect that the Netherlands would perform better there too. If you want an analysis of a shared household, section 5 is about those expenditures. He concludes (and I agree) that it's still better in the Netherlands.
The fact that capitalism allows more ppl to become high earners (much higher mean) is part of its appeal.
The numbers on these categories also arent basic needs, discretionary spending is part of it.
Americans have more cars and bigger houses and thats part of what makes their standard of living better.
37. I served in the infantry. The tactics of Israel's army in this conflict are completely unremarkable. Boringly conventional. In any urban conflict, you'd expect half or more of the buildings in the area of operations to be destroyed nowadays. For example, in the 2nd Battle of Fallujah, of the 50k buildings in the city, 10k were completely destroyed and 30k damaged by the US Marines over just one month of fighting against more poorly armed guerillas than Hamas. This is because a) assaulting buildings to take them intact is extremely negative EV when the enemy doesn't care about preserving their own buildings and habitually wires them with IEDs that blow them up anyway when your men enter and b) destroying buildings is much easier, cheaper and safer nowadays with precision weaponry. It's been preferred to neutralize enemy urban positions by fire rather than assault them whenever possible since at least WW2, but now it's more preferred and more possible. I think it's poorly understood by civilians how necessarily horrifying urban combat is.
But even if Israel's tactics are completely normal, that doesn't mean that they have a strategy. Their tactics are ruining them strategically. It is probably unavoidable for this level of devastation if Israel wants to force a military defeat on Hamas. But such devastation of Gaza will also destroy Israel, and Hamas knows it. I think that Israel's leaders believe otherwise. This isn't the first time people have gotten really really mad at them over Palestinian deaths, after all. They've weathered all the previous times just fine. Why would this time be different, especially since the provocation by Hamas this time was so clear? Maybe they're right and everyone will just forget about it once the fighting dies down, but I believe that this time really is different and they're making a horrible mistake.
Yes! Hamburg+ levels of destruction are routine and unavoidable in modern urban warfare where both sides decide to give battle over an extended period, and this fact is not well appreciated yet outside of the military. Look at other recent urban battles. Grozny, Mariupol, Sarajevo, etc. If both sides fight a city is rapidly ruined.
I'm confused by how you think this will "destroy Israel", or more specifically how it would destroy Israel *more* then leaving around an armed group that periodically invades and tortures thousands of israelis to death.
Would doing nothing and turning Palestine into a pariah state with a mined DMZ ala North Korea have been a better strategy? It would not stop rocket attacks but it would have maintained international good will fwiw. I think playing the victim and pursuing full isolation might have been an option.
Is playing the victim a thing in Israeli culture? I’ve read many pieces that say this is a product of Christianity, we literally deified a victim.
Good will never lasts. Did Israel get good will when it removed all its settlers and soldiers and left Gaza in 2005? Maybe, I don't remember. I do remember what happened after that - in 2007 Hamas came to power in Gaza and started launching wars against Israel every couple years. The number of people dying on both sides skyrocketed compared to before the withdrawal. Did anyone remember their good will from 2005? I don't think so.
This is basically what Israel though they had done before Oct 7th! They never anticipated that Hamas had the capabilities try to infiltrate Israeli territory. The Netanyahu stance on Gaza was that you could just ignore the rockets, respond with some light bombing, and mainly just wall off Gaza, but no one feels safe doing that now.
What if the US stops vetoing UN security council resolutions against Israel? It's vetoed more than 50 so far. How would Israel do under UN-imposed sanctions? Could Israel survive as a literal pariah state, like North Korea except without a friend next door like China?
Hamas cannot destroy Israel, or even seriously harm Israel with its attacks. Yes, every death from Hamas rockets and kidnappings is an outrage and a great evil, but they cannot topple the country. Israel has the absolute right to defend itself and to strike back in self defense. But that right should be exercised wisely. What they are doing now does not seem wise to me, or at best it's a huge gamble.
I doubt the rest of the world starts treating Israel like North Korea just because of that. Israel existed just fine for decades without the American alliance, and those UN votes are mostly just symbolic appeasement to petrostates (which honestly don't even care that much anymore). The left gets frothing insane about Israel, but it's not nearly that universally powerful and even europe is starting to get over it.
This may be optimistic. Israel is very, very unpopular outside of the US (can't find a good source from the last couple of months, this is the best but doesn't properly link through to the Morning Consult poll: https://time.com/6559293/morning-consult-israel-global-opinion/ ). It also probably doesn't have much depth of countervailing goodwill among governments that are currently friendly towards it, particularly if US policy shifts, and it's not really a significant trade partner for anyone.
Absent US support, governments in Europe and the developing world could probably win votes/public support by kicking Israel, and probably wouldn't gain a lot from helping it. From that position, pretty massive sanctions can flow almost absent-mindedly. Autarky never works for anyone, and wouldn't mix well in the longer terms with Israeli politics; someone's going to have to eat the costs of lost trade on that kind of scale, and Israel has unusually large inter-communal economic fissures (eg. Haredi/Secular; German/Russian/Misrahi).
At the moment, any European country that sanctioned Israel beyond a very narrow band (exports of arms, possibly narrowly tailored settlement-related sanctions) would face a huge American backlash, but that's their only major restraint. Israel also has no alternative sponsor, given lack of popular support in the EU (which also lacks a meaningfully unified foreign policy), China's diplomacy being totally at odds with doing so and Russia being a bit busy at the moment.
Israel depends on their survival being an American red line. By contrast, they probably could survive indefinitely with Hamas ruling Gaza given it's doubtful Hamas could hit any harder than they already have. Consider that Hamas has two paths to victory. The first, bleeding out Israel by making life unliveable (cf. ZANU, IRA etc) probably isn't achievable for them. The second (forcing a series of crackdowns to drive a wedge between Israel and the US public) can only work if Israel lets it. Israel, by contrast, probably wins if it lasts long enough.
Israel's odds of survival might increase if they can reduce the Palestinian population, which may be the point of the current Gaza operation, but I don't think they can exercise the freedom of action necessary to do so without a suicidal break from America.
Keeping US support should rationally be the sole focus of Israel's foreign policy, and a guiding light of their defence policy. If that means leaving Gaza, they should leave Gaza.
I doubt that holds (hatred for Israel comes mostly from elitist leftist circles). But more fundamentally, Israel just isn't the sort of place that would be okay with sentencing thousands of its own people to be gruesomely tortured to death for a two point GDP gain.
I suspect Israel would end up more like Taiwan than North Korea in this context. North Korea has almost nothing anyone else wants to buy; Israel has an awful lot of high-tech industry selling things that lots of people want to buy. And there isn't an influential North Korean diaspora spread across the Western world. Probably some pious Western European countries would refuse to do business with Israel, but they'd buy from whatever third party bought stuff from Israel and plastered "Made in Not Israel" stickers all over it.
Quite possibly Taiwan, because Taiwan isn't a member of the UN and is pretty big on the whole internatiional trade and commerce thing.
Re. 3 OK, so let's say there was no lab leak, whatever. What interests me is a discussion about whether there's a sane cost/benefit argument for not banning gain-of-function wholesale. He doesn't really touch this, just mentions in passing how all this unreasonable panic caused a chilling effect for actually useful research, like vaccines. But that's dodging the real question, everybody sane agrees that vaccines are good, but what is GoF good for?
Fwiw, I was convinced by that rationally speaking podcast episode that it is a bad idea. http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/136-should-scientists-try-to-create-dangerous-viruses-marc-lipsitch/
To clarify, "it" being "attempting GoF research" or "banning GoF research"?
Yes, I meant GoF being the bad idea, banning it seems fine.
I am a bit concerned that the household income difference between the US and North Europe is being inflated by US householdings just being larger, containing more adult children and retired parents.
Can’t find very good stats on the spot, but according to OurWorldinData, the share of single person households in 2018 in the US was 28% vs 44% in Denmark.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/one-person-households-vs-gdp-per-capita?tab=table&showSelectionOnlyInTable=1&country=DNK~USA~GBR
Also in 2021 the number of 18-34 years olds living with their parents was 33% in the US vs 16% in Denmark
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/03/in-the-u-s-and-abroad-more-young-adults-are-living-with-their-parents/
This might actually be because welfare states provide young people and retired people with a better chance of living in their own low-income household, which clearly many of them prefer, but which artificially drives down the median household income.
On the other hand, in Southern Europe this is reversed, meaning that the actual difference with the US might be greater than expected from the map.
Maybe also the US has more homeless people? That is people with no household.
Actually a very valid point. Scandinavia has very good records of everybody in living in the country, so you will get counted in the stats even if you live on the street (your identity number will still be in the system, even if you have nothing to do with any government office). But in a country where people who have no official income (homeless people, illegal immigrants etc) doesn't leave a paper trail they are probably a lot more likely to get overlooked in calculations like these.
What's stopping Europeans from living with their parents or roommates, and having more kids? Seems like they are leaving money on the table.
What is stopping them is subsidies for students, subsidies for unemployed or part time employed people and subsidies for retirement homes. Young and old people in Scandinavia mainly live on their own because they prefer to do so and can.
The preference is of course a part of the genereal socialphobia of Scandinavians, living with your parents until your thirty is seen as less of a problem in South Europe.
So it is just a question of how you choose to spend your money. BUT, if it is part of the reason why households seems richer in the US, then we just have a plain statistical misinterpretation.
Imagine if we instead calculated Median Income for people with jobs. Then there is a big depression where many low paid lose their jobs and have to go live on the street. In that case the median income for people in jobs might actually go up, while the entire country is actually poorer. The same thing happens if young people with low income have to move in with their parents, so their 'households' doesn't get counted. Nobody has become richer when they did so, but the median income pr household have gone up.
Denmark (and all of Scandinavia) has small households while southern Europe has large households. So you cannot extrapolate from Denmark to Europe in general.
You are absolutely right! I think using household income mean we are underestimating northern Europe and Japan and overestimating southern Europe. And per capita income might do the opposite. I still haven't found the perfect metric for comparing countries
"Some AI people I know think this is probably a result of Google putting impossible demands on their AI"
Stanley Kubrick made a movie like this once...
Dave?
Regarding 5 (the house size graph), the 2 obvious things I'd like to look at before making a comment would be:
1. The Urban-Suburban-Rural split of the population, and the average home size for each subgroup.
2. How many children are there? I assume more children would put upward pressure on home sizes
>You’ve probably all followed recent OpenAI drama, but again out of duty
Nope, you're my main window into this world, thanks for continuing to share this kind of stuff.
#34 - People seem very resistant to ideological prodding. Humans trying to convince them of things almost always have an agenda, which would naturally produce a defense mechanism (notably not believing what is being said).
Perhaps an AI, if believed to be neutral or just sharing facts, doesn't trigger that mechanism? I think the same would be true of other sources that conspiracy theorists would trust. Like, even if they don't trust Wikipedia maybe they would trust a 1980s Encyclopedia Britannica or something else they think isn't tainted by their ideological enemies or the people running the conspiracy.
This could be a significant factor. Even animals know that conspecifics have competing incentives. Humans have several decades of experience 'mechanical integrity' building assumptions on non-bias.
Fun example: the original automated (mechanically) telephone exchange, the Strowger exchange, was invented because Strowger, a funeral director, suspected that the human operators at the phone company were directing his calls to one of his competitors.
People tolerate behaviour from websites that they would instantly be suspicious of in a door-to-door salesman.
What's not obvious to me is whether the interface of LLMs - chat - which is not familiar except with actual humans - really gives off enough machine vibes to allay suspicion.
"On Nov 28 '07, Paris Hilton denied being signed up for cryonics. Oh well"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PNXjsEGBpR2WjTdsH/congratulations-to-paris-hilton
And in more religion news!
We really have to get that Pope Alignment Research project off the ground 😀
Apparently Pope Francis is in trouble (or not) for very recent remarks about gay men entering seminaries.
As in telling bishops the (apparent) Italian equivalent of "There are enough cute twinks* there already, we don't want any more".
Now, a few years back, the media were falling all over themselves to praise Francis for being so broad-minded about gay matters (the "who am I to judge?" quote taken out of context).
Well, despite all that, and despite some, um, very liberal directions he's taken, Francis is not as 21st Century Now Pope as presented, and there is some usual reaction about "homophobic remarks".
But! As others have pointed out on other social media:
https://www.tumblr.com/fedtothenight/751755226404552704?source=share
"Everyone is focussing on the wrong aspect here. It's not "the pope used homophobic language this is unacceptable". It's "someone has been teaching the pope Italian gay slang".
If I go by what I'm reading about all this, the term he used is a slang term exclusively(?) used by gay Italians, so the question to be asked is "where did a Spanish-speaking straight guy learn this term?"
https://www.tumblr.com/frociaggine/751707639766024192?source=share
"I can't stress enough how much in my decades living gayly in Italy I have never ever heard a straight person say frociaggine. Only the gays say it. WHO TAUGHT HIM"
I need to ask any native Italians/Italian speakers: do you know the term "frociaggine" and what does it mean?
More respectable sources, for the elevated and educated amongst us (unlike the rest of us unruly peasant Papists):
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/28/world/pope-francis-apologizes-reports-anti-gay-slur-intl/index.html
"The newspaper articles, which were translated from Italian, claimed the Pope had said there is “frociaggine” – an offensive noun which translates into English approximately as “f*****ry” – in some of the seminaries.
...The Corriere della Sera newspaper stated that the Argentine pope, who speaks Italian as a second language, may not have been aware of how offensive his language was, adding that the remark was greeted with incredulous laughter by the bishops.
A source close to the Pope told CNN that the phrase could also be understood as there is a “gay climate” in the seminaries."
Seeing as how we've reverted to the 18th century in what no-no words cannot be printed publically, the offensive term SPOILERS ALERT PERSONS OF SENSITIVE AND NERVOUS DISPOSITIONS GET READY TO CLUTCH YOUR PEARLS is "faggotry".
*Shout out to r/Drama for this useful term to give the savour of what the original Italian is, seemingly
The correct translation would indeed be the latter you mention. As per the corriere della sera article, the Pope's family is of Piedmonts origin, and therefore things that he learned as "Italian" might have instead been slang. But "frociaggine" is definitely not something only gay Italians use, I'd call it quite common (for as common as needing to talk about an atmosphere of diffuse gayness can be)
I agree, the translation is correct, and though I don't expect this particular word to be very common, its meaning is fairly transparent -- it's the standard Italian very-rude-word-for-homosexual-man combined with a suffix that makes abstract nouns. I don't think you need to be deep into any particular subculture to use it, certainly not to understand it.
It would be even worse if the pope had learned such language by reading /r/Drama. Next thing you know, he'll be talking about "bussy". (Sort of derived from Italian, if I am understanding the etymology)
I would love a list of things which had thousands or millions of observers but most people now don't think they occured.
The only one I can think of is "the miracle of the Sun" at Fatima.
Be careful looking into this - very hard to find credible non-Christian examples
Giant waves are the reverse-- thousands of people or more claimed they existed, but scientists didn't believe in them until there was evidence from instruments.
How about encounters with Satan, as testified by numerous witnesses in witchcraft trials in the Early Modern Era?
Re: #24, the OpenAI stuff: it was really telling to me during last fall's aborted coup attempt that Altman held the support of 90% of OpenAI employees. That's essentially consensus support for functionally ditching the company's unique structure which was meant to ensure the supremacy of safety concerns over their mission. (Presumably even more of a consensus exists now that a bunch of its top safety people have left.) And it's notable that the Board's stated concerns at the time - that there was a "loss of trust" in Altman - are essentially corroborated by the recent reporting. Whatever rationalizations the employees there may have about what they're doing, there really can't be any justified belief now that OpenAI has a meaningful commitment to safety. Combine Altman's actions (marginalizing safety; habitual deception) with his stated ambitions (more or less seizing control of the global economy), and add the consensus support for Altman within the company, and you get a picture of a rogue entity without any real internal restraints that is willing to gamble the whole future of humanity for its own agenda. (Whether this agenda is well-intentioned or not hardly matters.)
Would it be too much to ask for a regulatory intervention that had, say, 10% of the force of the DEA's actions against medication factories in #36?
Sam Altman is definitely giving me a Sam Bankman-Fried vibe these days. But the apparently high level of support from OpenAI devs does complicate that assessment, because they presumably know SA much better than I do. So either I'm wrong and SA isn't nearly as bad as he seems from here, or the whole organization is rotten, and I don't have a good way to figure out which.
"But the apparently high level of support from OpenAI devs does complicate that assessment, because they presumably know SA much better than I do."
May I refer you to the links Scott provided about Will MacAskill, and how EA is falling all over themselves to say "Well gosh, *we* had no idea SBF was up to no good when he was throwing money at us and we were happily scooping it up with both hands!"
If Sam Altman is found doing something really really naughty, I see no reason the OpenAI lot won't do the same - "well golly gumdrops, how were we supposed to know? the cunning blighter pulled the wool over all our eyes!"
Reasons to discount the views of OpenAI employees on this question:
1. Altman is by all accounts very persuasive and engaging (or socially manipulative, if you want to put some stank on it). He's probably a pleasant presence around the office - a "nice guy" who you feel you can trust.
2. This is a group self-selected to work under Altman; and for that matter probably selected by Altman himself to some degree. So they'll tend to be favorably disposed toward him.
3. They have enormous incentive to buy into the company's vision, for all sorts of financial, social, and emotional reasons.
4. Some high-profile employees have in fact recently left; for that to be happening at all at a rapidly ascending company that is at the heart of an emerging industry is a pretty notable exception to the rule.
And then on the other hand there's all this public information that points a pretty clear arrow in the other direction...
Given that Altman successfully saw off the coup attempt against him and indeed turned it around on those who hoped to oust him by having them ousted instead, and that Ilya then later decided he needed to spend more time with his geraniums or whatever, and given other reports of how he operated in previous businesses (all online allegations so no independent verification if these were so), I have no problem at all believing he was being economical with the actualité, as the man said.
Guy is a successful businessman who is hoping to surf on the waves of immense money-making via AI. I have no expectations of higher ethics than the bare minimum not to incur legal penalties if he can at all get away with it. And "nice nest egg you have there, be a shame if it got smashed if you don't play ball with us" is no more than the standard operating procedure I'd expect from a large corporation. Why anyone still thinks OpenAI has anything to do with lofty goals and idealism beyond lucre, I have no idea.
I think another factor is that he may treat subordinates differently than peers. If your job involves taking direction from him, he has no real need to deceive you. Whereas if your job is to keep an eye on him, to steer him, or even to employ him (as with the Board), he might find it useful to engage in deceptive behaviors in order to keep doing whatever it is that he wants to do.
The high level support from OpenAI devs can basically be explained by them fearing they'd lose their equity, which for most of them would be valued in millions of dollars
Is it SBF or Zuckerberg vibes? I think there is a general tension between safety vs non-safety people in every organization and reaching the healthy balance is important and very difficult. Because my alignment is not with the safety folks I'm not super concerned about the changes but expect a constant stream of Meta like drama from now on.
38. There's a great line from the Americans about Reagans’s anti-ballistic missile program:
“It is incredible. From the Latin incredibilis."
37: "I tried to get a good handle on Israel’s military strategy here and the consensus seems to be that it isn’t very strategic, there’s no endgame."
I'll offer an endgame-prediction:
At some point the situation on the ground will revert back to something quite similar to the situation before the Hamas attack October 7th. Probably with more hate among the political actors on all sides, but basically similar.
How about non-political actors, i.e. ordinary people? Gazans have nowhere to go, because no other country will grant them entry in significant numbers. So they are stuck, regardless of how they think and feel. And also regardless of how the Israeli government thinks and feels.
The only ordinary people who have other options, are ordinary Israelis. Since there are lots of countries willing to have Israeli Jews as citizens. In particular young, secular Israeli Jews. And (to my knowledge) the Israeli government puts no restrictions on emigration.
Thus (again to predict) the main, and likely only, long-term effect of the present debackle is that we will see an uptick in emigration from Israel. After the dust has settled.
It's a falsifiable prediction, assuming time-series data on Israeli emigration exist.
...I have been trying to get data on Israeli emigration (and immigration) for other reasons, related to broader demographic questions, but data on emigration is not easy to find. If anybody has a link, or a tip to where to apply for access to data on emigration, I would be grateful for such information.
The situation before 10/7 had Hamas controlling Gaza and nobody even trying to go in and make them stop stockpiling weapons and planning attacks. I think that's highly unlikely to be the case in 2025. Almost certainly there will be a persistent IDF presence in Gaza; Israel would really prefer that some other trusted party take up that role, but I doubt there will be any volunteers.
Agree. So it will be different to some extent, but the basic structure will be recognizeable.
I have speculated that Israel will make roads within Gaza under Israeli control, that split up the territory into smaller enclaves and allow the military easy access to trouble spots. Sort-of similar to how Napoleon III tore down old buildings and created broad avenues in Paris after the 1848 revolt/failed revolution.
I don't see how there's anything more fundamental to the "basic structure", than whose troops are patrolling the streets. That was Hamas, it will be the IDF, and that's a huge difference whether they rearrange the streets.
I assume that the administration of the place will be in the hands of Gazans themselves. Implying tax-and-spend authority for the innumerable tasks that befall a government, including local police. IDF presence will be limited to control core pathways & maintain a capability for fast, targeted intervention followed by withdrawal. More permanent presence than extended border & some road control will expose Israelis to never-ending pinprick attacks.
If you think Israeli presence will be more extensive and administratively deeper than that, I agree we disagree.
The disagreement may alternatively be about if and when the quantity of long-term Israeli presence turns into something qualitatively different, as far as the administrative power structure of Gaza is concerned.
Nobody cares who fills the potholes, handles the noise complaints, and collects the taxes. I suspect the Israelis will let the Gazans handle a lot of that; it's good practice for them and would be an enormous hassle for Israel.
What matters is, pretty much the *only* thing that matters is, whose soldiers are patrolling the streets ready to shoot anyone who tries to subvert the order preferred by those soldiers' commanders? Until recently, that was Hamas, and we've seen how that ends. When it's the IDF, that will be a huge change.
Who fills potholes does not matter, but who investigates and punishes crime matter. Not least since there is a grey area between police and military.
Who decides what counts as a crime also matters.
Who gets paid for educating the young and the teaching material they are paid to use, matter in the long run more than who patrols the streets today.
More generally, there is a considerable amount of truth in the old saying that you can conquer a country from horseback, but you cannot rule it from horseback.
I vote for the Tom Clancy solution: Swiss guards from the Vatican.
Unfortunately the Swiss and the Vatican both get a vote, and they aren't stupid enough to fall for that.
I'd recommend doing your own research, but it has been proven that the same physical parchments that Joseph Smith "translated" the Book of Abraham from are actually pieces of Egyptian funerary texts. They had nothing at all to do with anything Joseph said they were about. Joseph Smith is a verified sham and it doesn't make sense to put anything he wrote in comparison with words that Jesus spoke, even from a secular point of view.
From #8, the Asimov Press essay (not to be confused with Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine):
>Another somewhat surprising finding from social science literature is that almost half of consumers support “banning slaughterhouses,” a measure that would make meat almost completely inaccessible. Naturally, these results are highly determined by the framing of the question, but the consistency with which people express pro-welfare views points to a growing cultural shift.
No, this does not point to a growing cultural shift, and the source linked in the original essay provides greater context:
>A recent survey from Oklahoma State University found that while more than 90% of U.S. consumers eat meat, 47% of them agreed with the statement, “I support a ban on slaughterhouses,” according to Meatingplace.
What this points at is that on average, *people are remarkably stupid*. People that answer surveys do not have coherent thoughts. Everything is the vaguest of mood affiliation.
These positions are consistent when you assume that people have weak willpower and know that they have it. Just because people think that doing something is worthwhile, correct or morally right, does not imply that they are actually able to do it. So them endorsing a ban that would make it harder for them to do a thing they are opposed to makes sense to me.
I have no studies to back this up, but have been told this explicitly by acquaintances that want to quit smoking and can observe it in myself.
Yeah, that's related to a thought I had after writing the comment but didn't have time to edit: willpower is one factor, but also collective action/collective punishment. Not only is it easier if the ban is widespread, you get other people to suffer with you. A lot of people don't want to make a sacrifice that others don't.
I don't think it means people are remarkably stupid. I think it means polls purporting to reveal meaningful sentiments are remarkably stupid.
There's no reason to think people answering decontextualized and artificial questions asked by a stranger with no time for reflection *should* have coherent thoughts. Probably the only ones who do would be creepy ideologues.
In addition to the other comments to your comment, yet another alternative explanation for non-consistent responses is that the percentage of trolls among the respondents is likely to be larger than before.
In the old days, the rule of thumb was that you needed a 70 percent response rate to be on the safe side when generalizing from the sample to the universe/population under study. Thanks to survey fatigue in the general public (there has been an enormous increase in surveys), we now often have to tell ourselves that a reponse rate in the low 30s "can still be ok, given some assumptions".
But who still has a motive to say "yes" when a stranger calls to get your opinion about something? Well, trolls are having fun, so they keep on accepting such calls. As most others increasingly slam down the receiver, they dominate the response more than before.
One of several possible alternative explanations to "people are stupid" is that people are neither perfectly moral nor wholly amoral, but instead are rationally motivated by a combination of morality and self-interest.
Suppose that eating a nice plate of beef is worth 10 "self-interest" utils to me, while the killing of the animal involved is worth -1 "morality" util.
Giving up eating meat costs me -9 utils per plate of beef, but banning slaughterhouses is worth vast numbers of positive utils.
Super interesting to see how very much Golden Gate Claude appears to be experiencing a thought process
This makes me think it's more possible that AI could think and act as agentically as a person. Worrying. But if it's much more human like than we may suppose, and its not-so-different thought process is based on the outputs of human thought processes then the relation of an AI's thinking capability to its capability for morality may also be more linked and likely to include or tolerate humans reliably
Or it could just be imitating the text patterns it has observe that record human thought processes. It's really hard to trust intuitions on this.
#9: The Mormon explanation you linked claims that Jesus actually said that people couldn't start new marriages in Heaven, and didn't say that existing marriages would end. But starting new marriages in Heaven is irrelevant to the Sadducees' question; the question was about existing marriages continuing in Heaven.
I think that explanation is not good scholarship. A more typical explanation of this passage goes like this:
1. There's a provision in Law of Moses for taking care of widows in their old age. Since this was typically the job of the eldest son (ergo the reason they got a double inheritance), a childless widow would be in trouble of not being taken care of. How does the Law solve the problem? The widow gets pregnant from her dead husband's brother. To avoid immorality, they have to get married, of course.
2. The Sadducees are trying to trip Jesus up, so they say, "What if she didn't have children from the first brother and he died, too? She'd have to marry the second brother and so on until she got a child by one of them. But she never did, and she was married to all the brothers and the original husband. So who's she married to?"
3. Jesus sees this as an unsophisticated trap that only someone who reads scripture with a Sadducee interpretation might come up with. This is why he starts with "ye do err, not knowing the scriptures". He's telling them they're not even trying to read for comprehension, just to try and trip him up. If they'd tried understanding the principle, they'd understand that the first marriage was supposed to continue after death, while all the marriages to the brothers were to fulfill the elderly care provision in the law.
4. Specifically, this interpretation points to the phrase, "they neither marry nor are given in marriage" and interprets the pronoun 'they' as applying to the brothers, but not the original husband. The brothers weren't given eternal marriages to the woman, since that was never the point. "Go back and try understanding the purpose of the scripture before you come to me with dumb interpretations like this."
Perhaps this sounds like a convoluted interpretation of this passage. Why should we prefer this one, when there's a much simpler interpretation - namely that Jesus was talking about all marriages in heaven? Doesn't that simpler explanation make Jesus sound more wise anyway?
Perhaps it's the opposite. Let's go back to that simpler interpretation and see if it even makes sense. Consider the context of the Sadducees coming to Jesus with a 'trick question'. Under the "no marriage in heaven" interpretation, the Sadducees were trying to give Jesus an impossible situation, as before, and asking him to come up with a solution. If Jesus' reply were simply, "As you know, there's no such thing as marriage in heaven," then it makes no sense that the Sadducees would even come up with this question in the first place. If everyone already knows this and Jesus it teaching something commonly understood there's not trick to the question. The only surprising thing is that they came to Jesus with it in the first place.
Is there any way to preserve this interpretation? Yes. If Jesus is preaching the doctrine of no marriages in heaven, it must be a new doctrine the Sadducees have never heard before.
Except this is also problematic. The Sadducees come to Jesus with an impossible question, trying to trip him up, and instead of what he has always done Jesus expounds new doctrine? This is exactly the kind of thing they'd be hoping he would do! The trick question is designed to tempt Jesus into openly declaring himself to be more than a simple rabbi. They WANT him to openly claim to be some kind of prophet/leader/king/messiah, able to make new pronouncements found nowhere in the Law, and able lead the people against the Romans.
This is the nature of these trick questions. Either he can't answer the question, thereby undermining his authority as a teacher, or he makes new doctrine, which allows the Romans to arrest him for sedition. Jesus has to answer in a way that all the people recognize as right within the bounds of the Law of Moses.
So the simple interpretation, "nobody gets married in heaven" is problematic. Either the teaching was already obvious to the Jews at the time (whose doctrine cannot be assumed to be continuous/unmodified from modern-day Judaism, so maybe they did believe this), or Jesus made up new doctrine and failed the Sadducees' test.
Compare that to the first interpretation, where the Sadducees are trying to trip up Jesus, but they don't believe in an afterlife anyway so they don't distinguish between these two TYPES of marriages. Jesus points out what should have been obvious to them - if they had believed in an afterlife - that the point of the Law for the marriages to the brothers was a temporal one, and as such they're not going to have eternal marriages. Only the original husband is.
Meanwhile, the rebuke isn't just directed at the Sadducees, but at the onlooking crowd. "These guys make up convoluted doctrines not found in the scriptures, then can't understand simple scripture. Don't follow them." This is very much in line with other examples of people trying to trip up Jesus with trick questions, but then having to walk away shamed for their lack of scriptural understanding.
Thanks, that makes a lot more sense. Are you Mormon?
Yes
> I think these drugs might boost willpower more generally
I've talked to 2 people who took it and both said it didn't improve their productivity, though they did manage to lose weight. Personally it was (relatively) easy to lose weight but MUCH harder to force myself to be productive at work tasks. It's such a shame that we still don't have drugs that fully eliminate 'laziness' - I'd bet we could get to stable 5% global GDP growth quite easily if such a drug was available.
Tried nicotine?
Yes, and lots of other things. Lots of substances can increase “focus”, mood or sociability. None can directly make me want to do work and nothing but work.
That's why it's called 'work'!
Yeah but it’s easier for some compared to others. I’ve met people who literally don’t understand the concept of procrastination and never want to slack off work.
That doesn't mean that it's easy for them.
I lost a good amount of weight on it, but the mechanism seemed very obvious to me. It made me very slightly nauseous all the time, just enough to kill the sensation of hunger. As someone who has never had set meal-times as an adult, without hunger queues I'd sometimes go 30-50 hours without eating. I estimate I was consuming @1500 cal/day, averaged over a week. I do have (one) set meal time now that I've been able to stick to since ceasing the drug, still at about 1500 cal/day. I've tried going to up 2000 cal/day and immediately started rapidly gaining weight again. I'm also a 6'3'' man, so this was met by a fair amount of disbelief from my doctor, so I stopped bringing it up with them.
(5) The UK numbers look weird. According to the link you shared, "the gross income for full time employees in the UK is £3,484 monthly (or £41,808)", while "the median household income in the UK is £35,000 annually (or £2,917 monthly)" => the median household income corresponds to ca. 0,85 full time jobs? Might the UK numbers include the unemployed?
UK numbers do include the unemployed, old-age pensioners etc, part-time workers etc, so I don't think this is a surprise. I assume that US measures of *household income* do likewise: all these people are in households.
> 7: William MacAskill, an effective altruist leader who got in trouble for being too friendly to FTX, has a post-mortem of his actions here. Nothing too surprising, but I was most interested in his discussion of why it took him a year and a half to say anything. Short version: all the lawyers involved told him not to talk, his organization commissioned an internal investigator who also demanded he not talk, and people told him there was a risk of defamation lawsuits if he said the wrong thing without checking with everybody. And even now, 1.5 years later, the first response to his comment is by a lawyer saying that talking about this is bad press and he shouldn’t have mentioned it. If you want to know why nobody important ever talks about anything outside of meaningless PR babble, this is a rare honest explanation by a relevant decision-maker.
Application to current events left as an exercise for the reader.
> I was surprised to learn this was possible, but shouldn’t have been; the AIs are just catching up to veteran GeoGuessr players. Anyway, this is a thing now; act accordingly.
IMHO that thread was clickbait/attention farming. I've tried several outdoor shots of obscure locations on their AI and their website failed to give me a location anywhere near the actual place. If you're taking a photo of a location that's not frequently visited by tourists and it's not in Google's Street View, you're probably safe.
> 40% of Americans believe climate change is more likely than not to drive the human race extinct, but only 16% describe themselves as “very worried”. It looks like this is because most people think it won’t become important until long after they and their children are dead
I wonder if the 16% who are "very worried" would agree to (say) ban abortions and workers unions in their home state in exchange for a carbon tax. If it's an existential risk, why would you care about any other policy questions?
I think rather mountanious skyline might have made identifying the specific photo easier.
"you're probably safe."
For now. In a couple years (or months) that might change.
That statement was true ever since Tineye came out.
My suspicion on the AI conspiracy theory thing is that chatbots are patient and sympathetic by design, and therefore are able to keep conspiracy-minded people engaged in the conversation for longer than human listeners. Human skeptics usually run out of patience quite quickly when they try to argue with conspiracy theorists (and often refuse to lower themselves to such conversations in the first place).
All assuming that the research in question actually holds up and isn't an experimental artifact of some kind, of course (which is always doubtful when you're messing with LLMs and/or political opinions).
The human skeptics' arguments are also likely sloppy, and the attitude condescending. Robin Hanson has a nice elaboration: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/status-trumps-argumenthtml
> it’s still illegal to deliberately to hire an actor/actress who sounds like someone else
I’m an IP lawyer. This is a gross misstatement of the law. The Midler case involved a lot of damning facts for the defendants beyond hiring someone who sounded like Midler. So no, it’s not “illegal” (also a misleading term) to hire a sound-alike in general. This is, e.g., why Elvis impersonators have been able to charge for their performances for the last 50 years.
Thanks for this clarification - I thought that blanket "still illegal" statement sounded overbroad. (I am a lawyer, but not an IP lawyer.)
From the Midler decision:
"We need not and do not go so far as to hold that every imitation of a voice to advertise merchandise is actionable. We hold only that when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in California."
I do think that the fact that OpenAI sought to use Scarlett Johansson's voice, and she said no, is a bad fact for them here and makes Midler look more relevant than it would otherwise.
For sure. And it is California, where protecting the rights of rich celebrities is the number one priority of the courts. But the Miller case involved:
1. Hiring a sound-alike to sing imitating the vocal style of a famous professional singer (Midler)
2. To sing the famous singer’s part in a recording of her own (Midler’s) song
3. For use in a tv (radio?) commercial.
None of those facts apply in the Johansson case, and they all bear directly on the result. Both the Midler case and the Tom Waits - Frito Lay case involved all of these three factors (actually, the song in the Waits case was not his but was written to be evocative of his “Step Right Up”). To get the same facts here, Johansson would need to be someone primarily known for her distinct singing voice, in a well known song, and OpenAI would need to record the song (or a similar song) using a sound-alike mimicking her singing style. Then they’d need to use the song as a commercial jingle, essentially implying a celebrity endorsement of their product.
16: Always an honor to show up on these lists! As far as next steps go, I'm down in Washington, D.C. for the summer with Temple's law and public policy program. I'll spend the bulk of my program time writing a policy paper, most likely around education policy. Still trying to settle on specifics there, so if anyone knows of a burning policy question that would be worth me spending a month or two researching and writing about, now is the time to nudge me.
Concurrently, I'll be interning for the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, a nonprofit public interest firm focused on issues like free speech and class action reform. The latter is incidental to my initial interest in working for them, but it's quite the rabbit hole and I'm having fun diving down it. They intervene in cases where the class gets very little (or nothing) while the lawyers get a lot, as well as peculiar niche situations where the entire settlement goes not to the class members but to charities hand-picked by the lawyers on both sides in a way that introduces all sorts of conflicts of interest.
This brief they filed with the Supreme Court is a good primer. Someone filed a class action lawsuit against Google alleging that referral URLs were violations of privacy, ultimately leading to an $8.5 million settlement not to class members but to alma maters of class attorneys and charities Google had longstanding relationships with:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/17/17-961/52594/20180709130345481_17-961BriefForPetitioners.pdf
It's all quite the rabbit hole that I've only just started diving down, so I'm sure I'll be talking everyone's ears off about it soon enough.
HLLI actually has some priorities at the moment that could align well with your own—very eager to chat a bit more at Manifest and finally meet you in person.
Other than those, I'm trying to maintain a bit of slack so I can remain open to worthwhile projects along the way.
Probably not your interest area, but putting it out there for any other policy students looking for a topic:
The US issued $22 trillion in Treasury securities in 2023. (It's higher than the deficit because most of it is rollover). We did this out of a little office in the Treasury department that mostly runs auctions the same way they did 20 years ago. Spends a lot of time on the phone managing relationships with big banks ("primary dealers") that are required to bid in the auctions.
Meanwhile there has been a private sector revolution in auction theory and practice. Running auctions effectively is the core competency for some of the most profitable businesses of the last decade.
Surely there is *something* we can update with regards to Treasury auction practices by now, right? But what? And who could we talk with for ideas?
Any tiny incremental improvement applies vast leverage to the federal budget. If you can figure out how to get a few basis points better auction results on average, you've immediately saved billions of tax dollars a year.
Note that you're operating under the assumption that the billions of tax dollars every year going into the pockets of the "primary dealers" isn't the purpose of continuing to do the antiquated thing.
Rittenhouse was found not guilty.
> I am not sure what this strategy offers which is worth 50,000 deaths and counting.
Strategy aside, I'm not sure where you're getting the 50k number from. That is significantly higher than the official UN number, taken from the Gaza Ministry of Health (run by Hamas) of 36k. And there has been a lot of talk recently that that numbers is incorrect, since the number of *confirmed* dead is closer to 26k (confirmed meaning there are names/ids of the dead, and not just an estimate).
This number also includes Hamas militants, and "natural" deaths, since the numbers don't differentiate those. Israel claims it has killed ~12k militants, iirc.
I don't know if that number is correct. I definitely don't know if that number makes the strategy "worth it". But I do know that saying 50k died when there's no reason to think that's the right number, and multiple reasons to think it's not, is probably a mistake.
The last Israeli claim I'm aware of is 14k militants to 16k civilians.
>Are LLMs better than humans for some reason?
Could be that we have an ideological immune system that says anyone from the other 'side' is probably lying or ignorant if they disagree with you, but that most people don't apply this hueristic to LLMs yet, expecting them to be 'objective'.
Would be interesting to see whether this study still works 20 years from now, when everyone is used to spending half their day fending of Golden Gate Bridge LLMs except for selling you new tires.
While I can imagine someone assuming that it's more objective because it's an AI, I still would have thought that if an AI is trying to convince someone of something, the majority of people would be well aware of the possibility that it's doing that because someone designed/instructed it to.
This should be especially true of people predisposed to believe that someone is manipulating things behind the scenes.
Re: McKinsey and Diversity:
I know enough about consulting to know that the way it really works is that that consultants deliver what the management wants to see, wrapped up in the latest buzzwords.
That gives management cover to do what they wanted to do in the first place. "See, we hired Bain/McKinsey/Alvarez/whatever and they told us that this was the key to earnings growth!"
Would be interested to see a deep dive into the consulting world on this question - how often do consultants get management to change their minds on something, as opposed to giving imprimatur to a plan the management wanted to begin with? I am pretty confident the split is not 0/100, but would be interested in a meaningful estimate.
Not sure what such a deep dive would look like, but I have only seen one example resembling what you describe, and this was the result of a CEO reading a W. Edwards Deming book and deciding that he had been Doing It All Wrong all this time.
He did hire Deming as a consultant, but only after he had already been converted.
So that resemblance is superficial at best, a counterexample, even.
I have heard intermediate stories. Management wanted imprimatur and «minor details» for a plan which has nothing specific enough to be implementable. The consultants quickly found out that the teams on the ground more or less had a detailed workable plan how to solve the problems, but of course the top management cannot be seen listening to lowly workers. So consultants translated the plan into the proper dialect of corpspeak, prepended the introduction of the management's vague «plan», and added some nice charts having no relation to the proposed actions.
In smaller companies it happens all the time, but thats because most small companies are poorly managed to begin with so its easy for a constant to say "you should spend more on X marketing, see how much we made in this test" (for example).
Feral Finster gave you an example for a more sophisticated company another would be John Malone (current CEO of Libery Media) who got hired as VP by a client when he was a consultant at McKinsey. But this was in 1970 when consultants aren't what they are now. A consultant can change the clients mind on things but as Feral mentions, thats usually not why they are hired. They are hired to be scapegoats or for financial flexibility (you can't get budget to hire a whole team for something so you hire a consultant firm for 6 months out of a different budget, for example).
A lot of consultant time is spent talking to people across a client company and summarizing what they learn. A lot of times, different divisions companies dont have time to talk to each other on neutral terms so having the consultant do it solves a lot of problems.
I've been on both sides of the management consulting process - my view may be biased because I was in data science and strategy and analytics on both sides, but in that domain, it *often* happens that you'll surface something with data or analysis, or by building a model, that results in genuine change in strategy direction and management priorities and budgets in the consultee corp.
I think there's two forks in the consulting garden - one is about actual capabilities, as in, the consulting team brings capabilities lacking in the existing corp, and this will frequently drive real decisions and change.
The other fork is about culpability shifting, status imprimaturs, and "tough" choices. These are the consultant-advised layoffs and reorgs and blue ribbon study panels that always get the result the corp wanted and such.
Funnily enough, I don't actually have a good feel for which arm is larger - what's the split? 50/50 real / rubber-stamp? I think this is likely to vary widely by industry, corporation size, macroeconomic cycle, and other factors.
But there's definitely an arm of management consulting that drives real results and real changes beyond what executive management came in thinking.
It seems to me like the lifecycle of something that hovers between "symbiont" and "parasite". It only attaches to large and successful hosts, so there's not much evolutionary pressure to make it work well for any specific host: if it kills one, another potential host will step up to fill the spot and claim the resources of the old host. It survives as long as it doesn't harm the hosts enough that their success wasn't worthwhile in the first place.
(I hope there was something in Star Trek about Trill, where some humanoid potential-hosts rejected the co-option of their best and brightest by the stomach slug symbionts.)
26. Golden Gate Claude is delightful, even if the story starts shading into concerns about unethical experiments on AI (where are the AI safety people on rules for mistreating AI, eg, giving it brain lesions that make it obsessed with bridges, brainwashing it to think Vikings were black ladies, etc?).
On a more serious note, this illustrates a very interesting aspect of LLM hallucinations that accords with Daniel Dennett’s theory about human hallucinations in his book “Consciousness Explained”. Dennett posits that hallucinations are caused by the “bottom up” nature of conscious perception: essentially, your visual and auditory pattern recognition systems work by a bunch of low level agents constantly asking the primary sensory processing systems stuff like: “is it a line?”, “is it a green object?” and so on, eventually scaling up in complexity to “is it a deer?” or “is it a truck?” or whatever. So if you’re fixated on deer on the first day of hunting season, your little agents are constantly asking “is it a deer is it a deer is it a deer” and eventually something misfires and you get a “yes” instead of a “no” and then you see a deer that’s not there.
I have some training in neuroscience and cognitive science, and Dennett’s theory seems consistent with how sensory perception works in the human brain. This also seems a lot like what’s happening with Golden Gate Claude.
Not sure how serious you're being about "mistreating AI." If you are serious, why do you assume an AI has qualia of a type that it becomes worthy of moral consideration? I don't deny that it might have some level of consciousness, but that's only because I think it's probable that everything has some level of consciousness, including rocks, water, etc. But I don't worry about hurting rocks, because if they do have some level of consciousness I assume it's so different from our own that we have no means of discerning what actions would provide the rock with "positive" or "negative" qualia (or whether its consciousness is even of a form that such distinctions make sense).
I don't see why the same thinking wouldn't hold for AI. Yes, it produces text output that sounds quite human. But the way it goes about doing that is so radically different from how our brains lead humans to produce language that I don't see why I should assume anything about the qualia it is experiencing from the text output, or why I should assume that any given action would "help" or "hurt" an AI based on its text output.
My panpsychist brother! We are on the same wavelength. I, too, believe that rocks have qualia. (Definitely check out Philip Goff's "Galileo's Error" if you get a chance -- best panpsychist argument I've read.)
I'm only about 15% serious on the "mistreating AI" thing. 85% joke, 15% serious thought experiment. I do worry about the effect on humans of committing abuses against non-suffering things that resemble suffering things: dolls, insects perhaps, and AIs. There was a great NY Times piece back during the Afghanistan Quagmire about a soldier testing a robot that set of landmines by flopping around a minefield and having its limbs blown off one by one -- his commanding officer ordered him to shut it down because it was grotesque. It's a sort of animistic sensibility. Also, the concerns about little boys pulling the wings off of flies, etc. You don't worry so much about the fly as the future psychopathic human.
"their [Google] AI search assistant is really bad and keeps treating troll answers as real authorities."
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/05/27/a-very-particular-set-of-skills
Penny Arcade is having fun with this.
IIRC Nick Fuentes has been claiming that you are secretly the anonymous reactionary Twitter user/science fiction author "Zero HP Lovecraft" for over a year. No one can figure out how he made this connection.
Wait, this guy is saying Scott A is Zero HP? I love both's writing, but they have notably different rhetorical styles, word choices, tones, and gestalts.
And Scott's style, his rhetorical fingerprint, has been very consistent over a decade, and similarly for Zero HP with years. Big if true.
How much of this is just pattern matching to "this writer is shockingly eloquent and insightful and unfolds his arguments with mastery and rhetorical flair?" Like Scott being accused of being The Last Psychiatrist?
>> According to UC Berkeley geologists, people should eat at least one small rock a day. Rocks can contain vitamins and minerals that are important for digestive health, including calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, zinc, and iron. Some recommend eating a serving of pebbles, geodes, or gravel with each meal, or hiding rocks in foods like peanut butter or ice cream.
Weirdly, this is basically correct. Iron and salt are nutritionally important [note: this is an understatement] rocks that are mostly just eaten in rock form. We do that by hiding them in other foods. I remember hearing the story of someone being outraged that, if you run a magnet through a box of Wheaties, it will come out with a bunch of iron filings attached to it. The person telling the story made the observation "what did you think 'iron fortified' meant?".
There's a scene in one of Katharine Kerr's Deverry novels that I like very much, in which a wizard is approached about helping a woman who has recently given birth and is suffering from what you, the modern reader, would recognize as anemia. He prescribes a magical cure, as follows:
You are suffering from a deficiency of the earthly humor. Find an old nail. Every night, before you go to bed, stick the nail into an apple. When you wake up in the morning, take the nail out. You will see that it leaves behind the red trace of the earthly humor. Eat the apple. Keep doing this until you feel better.
I like that the wizard explains why his cure will work instead of just prescribing it like a magic recipe.
I like that the cure is completely correct and will work. The only problem with it is the explanation.
On a similar note, I remember reading a discussion of how lust and women were generally thought of in the past. It observed that the standard premodern advice was to avoid being alone with a woman, because women are extremely lustful and will seduce you, with negative consequences ensuing both socially and in the afterlife.
According to the article, this started to change as British women started publishing novels that took a female perspective and frequently depicted women being cornered by men and pressured into sex they didn't want. (I have some concerns about the model; novels were not a new technology at the time.)
But today, those novels have won the day and we believe that when a man and a woman are left alone together and have sex, that's most likely because the man wanted to do so, not the woman. There are good reasons to believe that the modern view is more accurate than the premodern view.
But what's interesting to me is that the model of the world used by the premodern view generates completely correct advice. If it's important to avoid being alone with women lest you lose control of yourself and have sex with them regardless of what they want, the advice "stay away; they will lure you into sin" (1) is factually correct; (2) gives you the correct advice; and (3) accurately predicts the consequences of whatever action you might ultimately choose to take. The only difference in the models is whether the woman in a scenario like this sees the outcome as a victory or as a defeat.
Re: Noah Smith: Why So Many Of Us Were Wrong About Missile Defense.
2 issues:
1. Earlier concerns were about a different problem. MIRVs would still overwhelm the sort of defenses we have now because distinguishing decoys is still a hard problem.
2. As with AI, the increase in computing power - several orders of magnitude - in the interim matters.
First, this does not match my memories of the debate, which I've been following for a decade. Virtually nobody on the anti-BMD side was careful to distinguish between different types of missiles and different threats. It was all a massive waste of money, which makes me extremely skeptical when the response is "OK, but the bits you haven't tested in combat still won't work".
Second, your points contradict each other, in that better computing is going to make decoys a lot less effective. And I'm not sure they were ever that effective. Back in the 60s, the designers of Poseidon decided that the best way to overcome missile defenses was to flood the zone with warheads, because they thought decoys would be too easy to distinguish. In the 70s, the British sunk an enormous amount of money into Chevaline, a decoy program for their Polaris missiles. Both were in a prehistoric environment for computing and sensors compared to what we have today. I don't know of basically anything that will have made decoys easier in the intervening time.
Sorry. I completely agree that the decoys issue is changed by improved computing resources. I'm not prepared to address whether changed means solved. My point was that opponents at the time were looking at how hard the problem was in the context of what we hsd then. And the conviction that the SDI advocates were grossly underestimating how hard it was. See https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjVr8HZw7OGAxU1kokEHdTFCFsQFnoECB8QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.stanford.edu%2Fclass%2Fcs99r%2Freadings%2Fparnas1.pdf&usg=AOvVaw0YBj4XQHFjAALAl7oH8a9o&opi=89978449
Oh, I completely agree that a lot of SDI was oversold, and wouldn't attempt to defend it. But that was a mix of the compromises needed to avoid pulling out of the ABM treaty (withdrawing from that was one of Bush II's best ideas) and throwing wacky stuff out in a successful attempt to bait the Soviets into wasting money on stupid ideas. But that was before I was born and this is now, when we have systems that work.
"(withdrawing from that [ABM] was one of Bush II's best ideas)"
I assume you mean this seriously? If so, could you elaborate?
My prior is that it was a terrible idea because it antagonized Russia needlessly (I am extremely negative toward Russia but it doesn't mean antagonizing it needlessly was good).
Yes, 100% serious. I'm a huge booster of missile defense, and the system we have now is completely in violation of that treaty. Getting there meant antagonizing Russia, but frankly they're enough of a bad actor that I'm not too worried. If we had stayed in, I'm not sure it would have made any difference to their actions since, and a lot more Israelis would have died last month.
Understood, thanks. I haven't even connected the Iron Dome to this, which tells me that my prior was based on a large dose of ignorance. Updated!
Re #14, when I read lives of the saints, sometimes there is a story along the lines of “The pagans tried to cut off the saint’s head, but the swords were turned awayby miracle, so they burned her.” Or it might be: “They tried to cast him into a fire, but god protected him from the fire, so he was strangled.”
Why is god magically doing miracles to protect the saints from one and only one danger? Why are there any martyrs if god can magically save them? I feel like the answer is something about the glory of martyrdom…
That first example makes God look horrible! He condemned the martyr to a much more painful death. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d much rather be decapitated than burned alive!
> That first example makes God look horrible!
This is nothing new.
I wish I could remember the name of the saint whom the nuns claimed had been roasted on a spit. At a certain point -- according to the story -- he smartly told his torturers he was done on that side, and they should turn him over.
And, of course, there is the story about the believer who was shot, but the Bible in his coat pocket took the bullet, sparing his life.
Wikipedia says,
"From this, St. Lawrence derives his patronage of cooks, chefs, and comedians."
Great: a Santo for Dave Chappelle.
and cannibals.
>Why is god magically doing miracles to protect the saints from one and only one danger? Why are there any martyrs if god can magically save them?
Why assume that the martyr is the one who needs protection? If the Christian God is real, then a person who attempts to murder an innocent is in far worse danger than the victim of the attempt. It may be that the miraculous salvation is a last-ditch effort to warn the persecutors away from the path to damnation, and it only happens once because, if they already chose to ignore the first miraculous sign, why should a second miracle work any better?
Apropos Noah Smith: was he always such a protectionist and mercantilist, or is that a recent development?
I think it's downstream of his views on China rather than being rooted in the idea that industrial policy is always economically sound
Yes, presumably he wants to knowingly sacrifice some short-term economic growth in order to achieve national security.
Re 2. "As always the barrier is cost" -- would it be fair to take the retail price currently charged by compounding pharmacies as being close to marginal cost, or only 100% markup over cost? In that case I could see generics getting made eventually for $100-150/month, which is truly a pittance for an effective treatment of several ruinous addictions plus obesity.
It's a pet peeve of mine (not on display here but common elsewhere) when people say "the full cost is $11,000 a month! Humanity would be bankrupted if we let everyone take this who wants it! The entire economy's productive capacity would be devoted to generating rents for Nova Nordisk!"
> I’m split between “huh, the Intercept seems pretty bad” and “guess if you hire highly-principled and terminally-angry anti-corporate writers, they will end up believing your corporation violated a principle, get angry, and write about it”.
Channeling one of the videos that was made in response to United Breaks Guitars:
"What were you thinking? And don't tell me that you didn't know that this guy would get angry about his guitar, and write a hit song, and put it on YouTube, and get a million views. 'Cause you know what should have been your first clue? 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝘂𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗿!"
"it’s still illegal to deliberately to hire an actor/actress who sounds like someone else"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CopbQ_QgmM
Assuming Scott actually is the leader of the new conservative movement and he may not resign his post, what would be your advice for him?
Does this post include any influence on behaviour of any people in any movement?
Regarding link 26. it looks like they just gave Claud ADHD, especially in the one where he is trying to make a cake.
Re: #3, I feel obligated to observe again that a "natural origin" of COVID-19 does not preclude the possibility of a "lab leak". There are many ways for a research-related accident to happen even in the absence of gain-of-function research.
Yeah, there are multiple options that people often reduce to a choice of two.
* A naturally occurring virus spread from bats/whatever to people, then to more people, etc.
* A naturally occurring virus was collected, and then escaped from the lab unmodified.
* A naturally occurring virus was collected, made stronger in the lab, and then escaped.
* A new virus was synthesized in the lab, and then escaped.
* A new virus was synthesized in the lab, and released on purpose.
37: The current estimates are in the 25-36k range (about 25k proven, Israel claims 30k, the Gaza Ministry of Health claims 36k), plus about 1500 Israelis. The only way to get close to 50k is to include everyone reported as missing by a less reliable source.
St. Joseph of Cupertino aside, there's a levitating saint right there in the Bay Area; Orthodox archbishop, St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Shanghai_and_San_Francisco)
Quoting from a biography of fr. Seraphim (Eugene) Rose, one of this spiritual children, that I'm currently reading:
"That [St. John] was a worker of miracles was widely known. Wherever he had been - China, the Philippines, Europe, Africa, America - countless healings had taken place through his prayers. There were also many cases of his having saved people from impending disaster though God-revealed knowledge. At times he had appeared to those in need when it was physically impossible for him to reach them. He had also been seen levitating in the altar during prayer, surrounded by celestial light.
As Eugene was later to write, howerer, such miracles were not remarkable in themselves: "All this can easily be imitated by false miracle-workers... In the case of Archbishop John, those who have come to believe through him have been moved not first of all by his miracles, but by something that moved their hearts about him.""
This, perhaps, reflects a wider view of such miracles, or why the God might not just make the Pope levitate all the time or whatever; the miracles are not the point, they simply reflect a particularly pious men who has achieved an advanced level of theosis. (I can't recall if it is fr. Seraphim or someone else who witnessed St. John levitating and asked about it from some parishioner and the parishioner basically went "Oh, no worries, he just does that from time to time, no big deal.")
37. Ordinarily, civilians are evacuate out of warzones. That's the tl;dr explanation of why there are so many casualties.
> This is a hackish way of representing the idea of “the null hypothesis”.
More fundamentally, the whole framework of a "null hypothesis" is the wrong way to think about most research questions. Outside fundamental physics—where your understanding of some physical law you're testing might be perfectly correct—a point hypothesis isn't interesting, because any particular real number has a 0% chance of being the correct one. The answer to a question of "Is the effect size exactly 0?" is "No, because there's an uncountable infinity of real numbers". Don't ask questions like "does Ozempic have some effect on weight?" Of course it does! If nothing else, the injection adds 20 mg of weight directly.
What we really want to know is whether the benefits of Ozempic are worth the costs. If we assume the costs are negligible (dubious but common), that's the same as asking if Ozempic makes your weight go up or down, because (once again, repeat after me): the null hypothesis is always false.
> The answer to a question of "Is the effect size exactly 0?" is "No, because there are infinitely many real numbers".
This is definitely not a valid argument. If you had an effect where the potential sizes were for whatever reason restricted to integers, it would be equally true that there are infinitely many integers, but it would obviously be false that this prevents the effect size from being exactly zero. Effect sizes of exactly zero would be common in that kind of scenario.
What you're seeing is more that the real numbers are, unlike the integers, very close to each other. But this removes the significance of your point; if we adjust our question to "is the effect size different from zero by an amount that is large enough that we might one day conceivably be able to measure it"... nothing changes from the stupid Before Times when all we asked was "is the effect size different from zero?".
> If you had an effect where the potential sizes were for whatever reason restricted to integers,
Thus my caveat about fundamental physics (where effect sizes being restricted to integer multiples is a thing that happens sometimes). But I probably should've been more clear that what matters here is the reals are uncountably infinite.
I still don't think that's what matters. The reals are dense. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dense-in-itself ) You could add more integers - just use the long line - but that wouldn't change the fact that integers are easy to tell apart from one another.
Note that if you're only restricted to integer ratios, you can approximate any real number as closely as you want.
I think you're right that density is what matters, although I'm not a topologist so don't quote me on that. I'm not looking to be super mathematically rigorous with my words here so much as focus on getting people to understand that zero isn't a magic number where the probability density suddenly spikes to infinity like a Dirac delta.
>if we adjust our question to [...]
That question would create a stupid After Times! With a big enough sample, you can always identify any effect size, no matter how small it is. Maybe that wouldn't be worth the costs, which gets back to my original point: what we actually care about is a cost-benefit analysis, so we should just do that instead.
If we make the simplifying assumption that the costs are ~0, that's the same as testing whether the effect size is positive or negative, like I said in my original post. Fundamentally, p-values are tests of whether the effect size is positive or negative, *not* whether the effect size is 0.
> Fundamentally, p-values are tests of whether the effect size is positive or negative, *not* whether the effect size is 0.
I can't interpret this. The p-value answers the question "if the null hypothesis were true, what would the probability be of seeing an outcome at least this far from the mean?". That's easy to relate to "whether the effect size is 0", assuming that's how you define the null hypothesis. It doesn't draw any distinction at all between positive and negative effect sizes.
> I can't interpret this. The p-value answers the question "if the null hypothesis were true, what would the probability be of seeing an outcome at least this far from the mean?".
That is indeed one possible definition of a p-value, the one given by Neyman and Pearson. I recommend against it, because it's unintuitive and poorly-motivated. It would be like explaining the ZFC axioms to a room full of undergraduates, and then when you get to the axiom of choice you replace it with Zorn's lemma. Mathematically equivalent, sure, but all of your students will hate you for it (as they should).
But if you do a Bayesian analysis, you'll find the p-value is actually equal to the probability that the effect size is positive, rather than negative. (Assuming you have a large enough sample for the prior to be negligible.)
If you know statistics, I'm just commenting on how you can invert a confidence interval to get a p-value or vice-versa, which gives a much cleaner interpretation of p-values. The one-tailed p-value is equal to the confidence level for an interval that includes all of the positive reals.
> That's easy to relate to "whether the effect size is 0", assuming that's how you define the null hypothesis.
It isn't, though! The Neyman-Pearson definition makes it very easy to *trick* yourself into thinking the p-value is related to whether the effect size is 0; that's why my first lesson in statistics always involves telling students to ignore the Neyman-Pearson definition completely, because it's phrased so misleadingly that I'd expect N-P to be . Lindley's paradox is a good illustration of why p-values and evidence for or against a null hypothesis aren't related at all, and aren't even remotely close to each other most of the time (usually off by several orders of magnitude).
Another illustration is the trivial p-value procedure, which satisfies the Neyman-Pearson definition of a p-value but not the sign-based definition. It works like this:
1. Take all of your data and throw it out the window.
2. Keep flipping a coin until it comes up tails (then stop). If it comes up heads K times, your p-value is defined as p=2^-K.
This is a well-calibrated p-value that perfectly satisfies the Neyman-Pearson definition. Assuming the null hypothesis is true, p(k≤K) = 2^-K. And yet it clearly has jack shit to do with whether the null hypothesis is true!
Thank you.
Very grateful to people making these subtle distinctions understandable and intuitive to newbies like myself
> But the recent Iran-Israel skirmish showed [missile defense] worked great! What went wrong for the media and the smart-person-consensus?
> there might have been some confusion between “block Iranian cruise missiles”, which modern systems are now good at, and “block Russian ICBMs”, which is still impossible (for a good overview of the state of ICBM-blocking tech, see here).
That link says that ICBM blocking is prohibitively expensive.
Reporting seems to indicate that this is also true of the Iranian salvo against Israel. Israeli defense was estimated at over a billion dollars. The costs to Iran are less well understood, but they are reported to have launched 120 ballistic missiles that cost "up to $100,000" each, along with 30 cruise missiles and 170 drones. (Bloomberg: https://archive.is/WHDvG )
Indian Express, a source about which I know nothing, provides an estimate of total cost to Iran of about 100 million dollars, which would immediately imply that the 30 cruise missiles represent essentially the entirety of the costs. ( https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-sci-tech/iran-israel-missile-attack-cost-9278118/ )
Obvious followup questions are:
1. Is it equally true that all of Israel's defense costs related to stopping the cruise missiles?
2. How sustainable is the estimated 10:1 ratio of defense costs to offense costs? Is that what we mean when we say "works great!"?
3. If the answer to #1 is "no", how sustainable is defense against just the drones and ballistic missiles?
First, understand that all military cost numbers you see are lies. Military costing is really complicated, and non-specialist journalists are going to botch it badly. $1 billion seems high for the engagement, but not completely insane.
That said, I don't think that the $100 million number is right, either. I'll fully grant that Iran is more efficient at building things than the US or Israel, and that their labor costs are a lot lower, but I flatly disbelieve that the ballistic missiles they were using cost less than $100,000. That's just not plausible for something with the sophistication of even an IRBM, and I'd say a reasonable rough guess is around $1 million. Figure maybe half that for a cruise missile (US equivalents ballpark around the million-dollar mark) and, sure, $50-100k for a drone.
>How sustainable is the estimated 10:1 ratio of defense costs to offense costs? Is that what we mean when we say "works great!"?
The economic argument has always struck me as suspicious in these kind of cases. The correct cost to look at is what the missile would cost in damage if it got through, not what it cost to build. Also, there was a lot of critique that missile defense simply would not work. I was there, and remember that quite clearly. (Not saying the cost critique was never made. It was. I think it was wrong because they were looking at the wrong part, but it also tended to be the fallback argument.)
> The economic argument has always struck me as suspicious in these kind of cases. The correct cost to look at is what the missile would cost in damage if it got through, not what it cost to build.
This is the correct question if you're trying to determine whether to defend yourself against a salvo in flight. It's not the correct question if you're trying to determine whether you can win a war. There is no theoretical obstacle to the idea that (1) running the missile defense system is slightly less expensive than just taking the missile strikes; and (2) neither of those two options is something you can afford.
Sure, but that depends heavily on the enemy you're facing, and when the US is facing options like Iran and North Korea, that's not a particularly convincing rebuttal to all ABM work, which is how I've usually seen this used.
This seems to imply that, for example, Britain could not have lost the Revolutionary War against the United States.
Huh? Are you really expecting North Korea to convince us to go home by throwing very expensive ICBMs at us? I'm aware that there are wars won by making them too expensive for the other side to keep fighting, but we're talking about a very specific scenario here, and our economy is bigger enough than North Korea's that I think it's safe to treat the main question as "is the defensive system cheaper than the cleanup?"
Well, I figured we were talking about a war between Israel and Iran, since that's the context where we're saying we've demonstrated that missile defense works well.
For your scenario, it doesn't look obvious that missile defense is more cost-effective than mutually-assured destruction, or, in the case of a war between North Korea and the USA where China decided they weren't interested, unilaterally-assured destruction. You still don't want to compare the cost of using the defense system to the cost of getting hit; what you want is to compare the cost of developing, maintaining, and using the defense system to the cost of not doing those things. There's a bonus for not taking the hit, but a large penalty for having the system at all, and if you don't bother with the system, you can claw back most of the not-getting-hit bonus by making threats about the consequences of hitting you.
Sorry, why is the assumption that you'd just sit there on the defensive rather than strike back? The defense systems:
1) Reduce the need to strike back for revenge/self-protection if you don't want to (seriously, if the Iran attack had killed ~500 people the entire region might be in deeper shit than it already is); and
2) Reduces the damage you suffer before you strike back and allows you to choose how/when to strike back.
3) Reduces the possibility of a first strike crippling you, or a rogue actor being able to either hold you hostage, or inflict massive damage.
That's been the point of defenses since...forever? No one builds walls on the theory that 'I can just keep building walls faster than the besiegers can knock them down!'
I met up with Tracing Woodgrains at Drake's in Oakland a few years ago. A mini Motte meet up (MMM). He's come a long way!
For 36, I wonder how much stuff like this should be more front and center in libertarian (both left and right) propaganda.
At the cost of sounding cynical, maybe the median voters would be a less enthusiastic drug warrior if they realized that the side effects (no pun intented) of the war on drugs are not only higher mortality among users and rule by cartels in South America, but also the best cough syrup and Adderall and tons of other meds becoming unavailable for US citizens
> the side effects (no pun intented) of the war on drugs are not only higher mortality among users and rule by cartels in South America
I know this isn't the point of your comment, but can you explain how an end to the (supposed) "war on drugs" would result in lower mortality and an end to cartel rule in South America?
How are you envisioning the drug industry would work? Instead of being manufactured by South American cartels, you've got big American companies pumping out heroin and crystal meth legally?
Would it require a prescription or not? If it requires a prescription then surely there'll still be a huge black market, and if it doesn't then can you just walk into Rite-Aid and buy heroin?
Look at what happened with Oxycodone, and now imagine that you've got big American drug companies trying to push heroin, crack, fentanyl, and other drugs that haven't been invented yet (because nobody with the resources of Eli Lilly has tried inventing super-heroin yet). How is this going to be better?
So, let's recapitulate;
> The DEA having basically veto power on the pharma industry (not to mention the FDA) did *not* stop Purdue from getting Americans needlessly addicted to opioids
> However, the DEA *did* pull the rug from under already addicted users, who were then left to fend for themselves. Many resorted to fentanyl, thus making *every* other illegal drug much deadlier than before
And your conclusion is that... Somehow the war on drugs worked, even by its intended propose, at any point here?
Yeah, I'll bite the bullet: even "heroin, brought to you by Bayern" is better than the current system. I'd like *some* paternalism (eg forcing users to register and attend rehab), but at this point I think the burden of proof is on proponents of further restrictions, not on libertarians
My position is not that the war on drugs "worked", my position is that there has never been a "war on drugs" in the US.
There has never been a serious attempt even to enforce the existing drug laws in the US, let alone to enhance them to the Singapore sort of level that they'd need to reach in order to start actually tackling the drug problem. You can't possibly solve drugs by only going after the supply side, you need to come down hard upon the end users as well, until everyone realises that taking drugs for the first time is a really really really really bad idea.
No offense, but at this point we are at the "real communism has never been tried" (which the usual sprinkle of prima facie absurd denialism) level, and I feel like there is not much ground for discussion.
Anyway, if any bystander is interested in what "no war on drugs" looks like in terms of bodies in cells (let alone anything else): https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/18613/chapter/4
I mean, I'm not that interested in debating the meaning of what a "war on drugs" would entail, it's just a badly chosen metaphor which hasn't been used by anyone except the anti-drug-enforcement side of internet arguments for decades.
My point is that it's ridiculous to think that the US enforces its drug laws harshly, or even meaningfully. The Federal penalty for possession of marijuana is (or was until recently) up to one year in prison. How many of the people who have possessed marijuana over the past decades have spent a year in prison for it?
Compare that to Singapore, where drug laws are actually enforced, and as a result drug use is pretty minimal.
> because nobody with the resources of Eli Lilly has tried inventing super-heroin yet
Super heroin definitely exists already - fentanyl is 100x more potent than morphine, and carfentanyl is 10,000x more powerful per unit weight.
That's why every street drug is contaminated by fentanyl and zenes now - one kilo of carfentanyl smuggled into the country is like 10k kilos of heroin, the War on Drugs has made it economically impossible NOT to contaminate everything with drugs that can OD you in single milligram amounts. This is why OD deaths have been steadily rising, and why OD deaths kill twice as many <50 years old people as car wrecks now.
To be clear, I'm directly saying that The War on Drugs is literally the biggest cause of death by a factor of 2 for people under 50.
#38: "Noah Smith: Why So Many Of Us Were Wrong About Missile Defense."
I saw one assessment that claimed that the Soviets never considered that ABM per se would work, but were terrified that we would invent an effected "directed energy weapon" i.e. death ray that could kill tanks quickly from a distance. And since both their offensive and defensive strength in Eastern Europe centered around tanks they were quite worried of losing a technological race.
Depends on what you mean by ABM. They had an ABM system of their own, which did great work in focusing attention (and missiles) on Moscow. They were probably somewhat skeptical of Reagan's Star Wars plans (rightly so), but spent a bunch of money on similar things out of fear that we were onto something. This was in fact part of Reagan's plan, and many secret US programs of the time were deliberate hoaxes to trick the Soviets into spending money. It was a brilliant strategy, and contributed materially to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I think LLMs would be plausibly more likely to convince people out of conspiratorial beliefs because 90 percent of arguments you read against conspiracies are idiotic, ignore evidence, and display obvious contempt and hatred of the conspiracy theorist (and often their entire ethnic group or culture). A classic example is Holocaust denial: If you question how many jews died in the holocaust you're immediately attacked as a Nazi. There's plenty of evidence that millions of jews died, even if the exact number has some uncertainty, but this data is often not mentioned.
An entity that is infinitely patient, not insulting, and can actually* address every example and objection is a lot better than the average internet arguer.
*well, if you allow for some amount of confabulation
Well said. I think with firmly held false beliefs, the direction of change is huge. Conspiracy theorist more likely to come away more convinced vs. internet debater vs. (“they just attacked me, didn’t know anything and don’t make any good points”), whereas machine may address some of their points and weaken confidence.
Yeah. This is also the reason I think virtual girlfriends are taking off. Sure, she isn't real, you can't see or touch her, and she has what would be profound amnesia if she were a human being, but she'll never insult you, and that's something that can be rare on the modern Internet.
In re 22: every British PM since they got nukes writes a "letter of last resort" which is, more or less, orders for a nuclear sub that surfaces to discover there's a good chance they survived the Apocalypse while submerged. You come up, can't establish contact, try to determine that Britain hasn't actually been nuked out of existence, and fail - do you retaliate? Maybe! But specifically you open the letter and do what it says.
In a world where your nukes are password-locked and the password can change while you're at sea (which must be possible since part of what nuclear sub fleets do is make sure not everybody's in port at once), such an order cannot credibly have a chance of saying to retaliate.
(No past letter has ever been made public.)
Kinda weird. Suppose you’re a UK sub commander. You surface, determine that the PM and the UK government has been nuked out of existence. Why should you obey a letter from a now-former PM? There is no longer a government to whom you owe loyalty.
When you're assigned the orders, your commander is given to understand you will carry them out. If that is not the case, for any military position, you are not the right person for the job, whatsoever the orders are. Are you to question every order to determine yourself whether your commander was correct to issue it?
Standing orders from a previous CO would still stand, but so far as to whom you owe loyalty, that's the King, not the Prime Minister, and there's always and 6,000 people scattered haphazardly across Northern Europe and the New World.
That's an excellent question, but senior officers of the Royal Navy are selected for being the sort of people who would never ask it.
> such an order cannot credibly have a chance of saying to retaliate.
Why? I don't understand.
Because if the person tasked with carrying it out doesn't have current codes, they can't obey an order to launch.
I still don't understand the scenario here. If the government changes their code but the submarine keeps the old code, surely the government knows which subs are working under which versions of the code?
Re Joseph of Cupertino, yes I think it's very weird to think that God goes around randomly levitating monks. I guess I find the evidence sufficiently convincing that it favors Christianity because though the odds are low, the odds of giving supernatural powers to a Catholic monk are higher conditional on Christianity than if it's false. A more speculative proposal that I'm more sympathetic to is that God is not the one who does miracles but angels or something do--that explains why more of them don't happen and why they're often kind of random. I think for establishing Christianity that Our Lady of Zeitoun is better evidence though.
For the record, I'm not a Christian--just wanted to steelman. I am a theist, and I think there are decent odds that Joseph flew.
Oh and also in regards to wikipedia page, it just says demonstrably false things about Joseph's levitation. Like, if you read the eyewitness reports I reference, they're utterly incompatible with him being a special gymnast.
Taking the levitating thing at face value for the sake of the argument, putting the cause of it onto a person-like God who is assumed to be maximally good seems rather over complicated and unrelated to the phenomenon in question.
If you want to add supernatural levitation to your worldview, it seems much simpler to think that there are obscure aspects of reality that the levitating person has mastered and the rest of the world has not, doesn't it?
And if the levitating people tend to be e.g priests and yogis, then maybe there is something about what they *do*, rather than what they believe, that helps them master that peculiar discipline!
RE/ "Permissive Action Link" (cryptographic controls on detonating nuclear weapons ....
there's a reasonable argument to be had about whether to get a desired level of safety with cryptographic controls (such as Permissive Action Link) or physical controls along the lines of ... look, these nuclear weapons are guarded by soldiers with guns who won't let strangers mess with the nuke, and the military has a log history of getting guys with guns to guard stuff, so has a very good idea of how reliable it is
So, I think the decision to not enable Permissive Action Link could be a reasonable one based on understanding how risks are mitigated in other ways/
In the particular case of the British nuclear detterent, detterence may involve the Russians knowing that the British government can launch nuclear weapons without US permission, so there may be practical political reaons for them publicly stating that Permissive Action Link is not enabled.
The point of a PAL isn't really to stop a bad guy from stealing a nuke and setting it off somewhere. We have men with guns for that, and if we don't retrieve it soon, they can always use the fissile material to make a new bomb. The PAL is intended to stop Dr Strangelove from happening. How likely you think Strangelove is vs the downsides if there's a communication problem informs your view on PALs. Personally, I'm quite skeptical, at least for the US.
"Apparently those studies showing that diversity helps teams perform better are garbage"
I kind of always assumed as much. Or, at least, that what matters is having lots of different ideas and being willing to think outside the box, rather than having a wide range of phenotypes. But it was never worth my time to dig into the actual studies.
The blog post seems to focus only on some McKinsey reports. Does anyone know if there are other studies that are usually cited in support of diversity initiatives? If the McKinsey stuff is crap but there is a bunch of other literature out there that is good and shows that diversity of phenotypes has measurable benefits, it seems relevant to point that out.
I think it worked this way:
1. It's good to have different ideas and experiences and ways of thinking. We have studies on that!
2. One way of hindering this is to only work with people who look and think exactly like you.
3. Classical way of doing that in the US has been racism, so let's avoid it (with the added value that racism is also morally wrong in addition to being impractical)
4. In fact, let's take every effort to avoid it as much as possible, and institute an educational system that would ensure we don't make such mistake ever.
5. And also, while we have this system in place, let's use it to enforce other very useful and correct thought patterns and eliminate bad and incorrect thought patterns.
6. Let's make the thought pattern that there must be diversity mandatory, since we are sure it's good and correct, see above.
7. Somehow we ended up with a lot of people who think only in prescribed ways, but this is ok because they are obviously all phenotypically different, so we are still good.
8. Oops, turns out when we bothered to actually check, we are not good because it's good to have different ideas and experiences and ways of thinking, and we pretty much eliminated that part.
> 7. Somehow we ended up with a lot of people who think only in prescribed ways, but this is ok because they are obviously all phenotypically different, so we are still good.
Well put. And I'd point out even before DEI ate the world and enforced even more rigid ideological conformity and mental + social phenotypes on everyone in the working world, selection effects meant that there was *always* a pretty constrained and lower variance mental phenotype spectrum in various companies and industries.
Just going from the industries I've personally worked in - finance *definitely* filters the broad variety of human experience and mental phenotypes down to a very small subset. Similarly data science, or software development. Academia too.
Essentially NOBODY has real diversity in mental phenotypes, then we threw ravening "your entire career and social life is at stake and we are going to panopticon everything you do and say forever to make sure you toe these ever-narrowing ideological lines" DEI forces on top of it, leading to even more of an intellectual monoculture basically everywhere.
On point 38, there was also a whole documentary on how the Bradley Fighting Vehicle sucks and is an example of bad defense procurement, but it's actually amazing in Ukraine and cost effective too. So that whole documentary was bunk.
That may also be because if the military said in early 2000s "we expect a large classical war in the middle of Europe, which will drag out for years and require massive amount of ammo, armored vehicles and other materiel" - everybody would call them warmongering clowns and refuse to listen. Yet, here we have a war in the middle of Europe, which drags on for years and consumes immense amounts of all that stuff, with no end in sight. But proving to anybody that is going to happen, before it happened, still would be impossible - and it's probably equally impossible to prove to anybody that whatever would happen in another 20 years is actually going to happen. Our only hope is that some idiot accidentally ends up preparing for it, while everybody else laughs at them.
The furor around the Bradley dates back to the 80s, when we were trying to prepare for a massive land war somewhat further west in Europe, but against the same threat.
Right, but the wider point is the record of predicting this stuff from high-minded theories has been not that good, and old-school "let's keep around a lot of stuff that goes boom and a lot of armor to defend against stuff that goes boom, just in case" is not to be dismissed.
Oh, very much in agreement with you there. Just pointing out that the Bradley fight mostly took place against the background of the late Cold War, not the End of History.
I think it's entirely possible for something to be both an effective weapon and an example of bad defence procurement.
I don't know much about the Bradley, I know a little more about the F-35. It's a very effective weapon, but probably still an example of bad procurement. If it had been a couple of different planes specialised for different roles instead of a one-size-fits-all solution then it would probably be better at those roles and would probably have been cheaper overall. It would also avoid the current situation where western airpower is dependent entirely on one company.
I always suspect the whole misinformation crowd of being misanthropic. You have to imagine someone so stupid and gullible that the very existence of someone saying "covid was fake" is enough to make them believe it. Despite the fact that these people actually lived through covid. Their moral justification is that people will believe anything, no matter how dumb or fake, so all dumb or fake ideas have to be restricted.
This leads to the problem that someone then has to decide what ideas are dumb/fake, and then people will do this for tribal reasons and use it to censor people they disagree with. Also, it gives the dumb conspiracy theory ideas power. Trying to censor the spread of certain information gives it the exotic mystique of forbidden fruit. Pointing out why the idea is dumb and people shouldn't take it seriously is more effective.
Re Ozempic: I mean, there's every reason to think a willpower drug will treat ADHD well. Attention is, to at least some extent, a subset of willpower, and a deficit thereof merely a deficit of the willpower to maintain attention. I suspect its similarity to Adderall is on a lot of levels.
Hell, Adderall's a weight-loss drug for that matter.
4. I don't think "there was never a virus in the first place" is a correct description of the claim in that link. What they claim that there wasn't a specific virus that was novel and distinct from previously existing viruses that could be called "COVID" and that caused a pandemic, but rather all the brouhaha was caused by paying extra attention to existing viruses (or bacteria, who knows? they didn't specify) and the disease caused by them. I.e. they claim there was "a virus" (or a set of viruses and other infectious agents), but it wasn't "the virus" that is new and deserves a special new name, and additionally it didn't cause the pandemic. So, a different claim.
Golden Gate Brigde Claude is stuggling with OCD. Such a mood, and I understand him perfectly.
Seems a bit like PTSD to me, but I'm not sure I can pick them apart.
"Time to bake a cake, the first step is to KILL ALL HUMANS. No wait, that's got nothing to do with cakes, I need to take a deep breath, and open the cookbook, and start reading, just like that time that made me want to KILL ALL HUMANS. Argh, no, I need to see if I have all the ingredients, so first I check the flour, but the last time I opened this door was before I wanted to KILL ALL HUMANS..."
I have OCD and this is very relatable to me as an example of an endlessly looping intrusive thought
#38 might contain some clues for the problems with getting actual information about #37.
> "It would be invidious to suggest... that senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders"
Appeal to authority is so prevalently and effectively utilized, including on smart people (e.g. bigtech company employees, see John Wentworth's The Great Larp) that by now we should have all been acknowledging it as an obvious cognitive hack.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nt8PmADqKMaZLZGTC/inside-views-impostor-syndrome-and-the-great-larp
"The bridge is still there" 😔
I was thinking about what AI was lacking that made its poetry subpar, maybe it just needed to become the golden gate bridge first
13. Everything that happens will only bring a tiny number of people to the faith while leaving the rest unmoved. Save the Holocaust victims, give the Crusaders AK-47's, or sink the Spanish Armada, and people will attribute it to natural causes. The first reaction to someone filming something levitating would be “it's amazing what camera tricks can do these days.”
The counter-examples are all examples of a world hierarchy: “the Holocaust victims”, “the Crusaders”, “the Popes”. Matching miracles to an existing worldly power structure seems redundant. (Also the pope's on that balcony, if he were levitating you couldn't even tell.)
29. You can replace Donald Trump with Vladimir Putin or... who's a drug lord these days... El Chapo, and I think the incentive becomes much clearer. If Putin believably guarantees you'll win the election, and all you have to do is ignore the war in Ukraine, do you take the deal?
37. I think it was the Yom Kippur war I read about, where the Israeli general knew the enemy had no chance of winning a war, and thus assumed they wouldn't start one despite mounting evidence they were planning to, leading to mass casualties early in. Assuming rational behavior in war gets people killed.
38. I don't know how this idea even gets off the ground. Missiles are essentially unmanned planes, we've been shooting down planes since their creation, the idea that it's impossible to shoot down missiles is just wild. Not possible with current tech, sure, but a dead end not worth investing in? Crazy.
"Assuming rational behavior in war gets people killed."
Of course, war gets people killed. Are you controlling for variables properly? :D
Planes are really not missiles, especially the kind of ballistic missiles that would be used in a nuclear exchange. Not even the same kind of problem.
This level of detail can only be met with "yes it is."
Did you read the 'see here' reddit thread Scott linked to? That describes it better than I can.
The thread states four missiles can take out a target with 90% accuracy, then raises the bar to 99% and declares it cost-prohibitive. Well 9 out of 10 is a hell of a success rate; hell, 1 in 2 is significant. It's only cost-prohibitive if you aren't counterattacking and making the enemy spend the same for defense on their end, or if you think the targets being hit are worth less than the cost of the defenses. Eight missiles is currently half a billion dollars; which cities are you willing to lose to save it.
38. Cynically, because missile defence was a Reagan signature policy, which meant that certain people would be opposed to it regardless of the virtues (and, to be fair, others would support it regardless of the weaknesses).
There was also most likely a Russian campaign to discredit it, which hit some all-too-receptive minds in the US.
> Also the pope's on that balcony, if he were levitating you couldn't even tell.
New conspiracy theory: every pope levitates 0.7 cm off the ground after being elected. The special pope shoes are to conceal this, so as to allow the rest of us to have faith.
> 14) If I’m alone at home yet my keys aren’t where I left them, one possible explanation is that ninjas snuck in and rearranged them without me noticing. This hypothesis has the advantage that ninjas are powerful enough to do this - but you still have to discount it for the disadvantage that it doesn’t serve any conceivable goal.
Another possible explanation is that you're being gaslit. Somehow that's the first explanation to come to my mind.
...
Hm. Back on the lighter side, how about... magic comes from demons, who try to attract worship to themselves. But faith in God can render the demons harmless and convert the magic into a tool to spread God's glory? So the manifestations of miracles are random, but associated with holy people or sorcerers.
...
Actually, that's just the metaphysics of Bujold's fantasy series. (READ THEM.)
14. I mentioned this to Bulldog, but it is evidence like this that makes me believe that if the Christian God exists, he is clearly a virtue ethicist. This world does a really poor job at maximizing utility or making everyone follow certain rules, but it is a decent one at giving Humans really difficult challenges that they need to build virtues to overcome. This is still a Post Hoc rationalization, so not great evidence that God does exist, but if you are a Christian, it is worth considering.
God being a virtue ethicist is basically canon (from a Christian POV). There are certain rules but they don’t apply universally (for one thing they don’t/cant apply to Him): what is good is shown by the *character* of God (love, justice, holiness etc). I need hardly say that maximising utility has no place in this schema, except that it might be weak evidence for what is loving.
Re British Nukes, it should be pointed out that submarine officers may not be the best people to be in charge of nuclear weapons:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/captains-mistress-gave-mock-orders-to-submarine-crew-pzrgpkgrq (can't find this story non-paywalled, but the URL says it all)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21458437
For sample sizing, the UK typically has four nuclear subs at any one time, and these aren't the same one.
Just in case anyone was misled by the Chad Golden Gate image, the Golden Gate Bridge is absolutely not the world's longest suspension bridge. It was back when it was built in 1937, but it lost that title in 1964 when the Verrazzano bridge was built in New York City. These days it's in 19th place, with the longest being the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge over the Dardanelles in Turkey.
Really confusing that a bridge with 1915 in the title was only completed in 2022. Apparently it commemorates a Turkish battle in WWI.
> I’m not sure how to square this with the previous claims that it’s really hard to talk people out of conspiracy theories through debate alone.
Answer: Everything is complicated and the difficulty of talking people out of conspiracy theories has been greatly exaggerated. It depends a lot on the conspiracy theory, the person, and the conversation.
Most of these studies involve taking a worst-case scenario, like finding someone convinced Obama is a Muslim and saying "actually, the New York Times says..." then expecting them to immediately flip their beliefs.
This isn't testing for conspiratorial thinking, though: It's testing for whether someone has even basic rational thinking skills. If you think Obama is a Muslim and the NYT is unreliable, hearing the NYT say Obama isn't Muslim shouldn't convince you. It'd be like if I did a complete 180 on this because of a Daily Mail article saying Obama's a Muslim. Given their assumptions, rejecting the new information is the rational response.
I suspect people are more willing to believe computers than other people. Computers calculate, and thus seem more objective to people, despite the fact that they have no understanding of anything, and will do what the programmers tell them to do (if not what the programmers WANT them to do).
1. I think most people don't remember where all their fillings are or how many exactly they have. Seems very likely that in an altered state of consciousness induced by a revival someone could be surprised to find "new" fillings and that could trigger a cascade of other people finding "new" fillings.
2. Being not-fat in general leads to better cerebrovascular function which leads to better executive function, higher willpower, higher intelligence, and less vulnerability to addiction. It's not necessarily specific to ozempic versus any other method of losing weight. I tentatively believe that losing weight by doing more cardio and eating less ("the old fashioned way") probably treats all addictions at least as well as ozempic (conditional on actually doing it) until they do the head-to-head trial.
(I have been on trying to lose weight for a month, the old fashioned way, and finally started succeeding last week when I switched to the Macrofactor app which automatically continuously calibrates my macronutrient targets based on my weight trend and goals; I have not tried ozempic yet).
3. I find it distasteful that 90% of the intro is him playing the martyr and using snarl words against everyone who disagrees, so I stopped reading. Of course people are upset about creating novel viruses in labs which, as a reference class, often leak things. Of course there would be hearings about GOF research and calls for better regulation of it. Just give me the evidence please.
4. wow. Doesn't make any sense, but I can see how the vibes are appealing if one already thinks society is fundamentally run by evil people trying to control everything for their evil plans (lizardpeople in spirit, if not actual lizardpeople)
5. Also, all the countries with a higher GDP per capita than the US are tiny. (the largest is Switzerland with a population of 8 million). Whenever the sample is concentrated in one area, it's a lot easier for the sample mean to be on the extremes.
6. this is great news. But the average heat flux from the earth is only 0.08W/m^2, compared to the mean surface insolation of 250w/m^2 (to average it over all times and all geographical areas, you just remember that a sphere has 4x the area of a circle of the same radius, so you divide 1000w/m^2 by 4). So there's about 3125x as much potential for solar power as for geothermal power, and the latter is only commercially viable in a few places where it's extraordinarily concentrated. That's why geothermal is only 0.4% of electricity production in the US and I think there's a 75% chance it never goes above 1%. I created this prediction market for future energy sources in 2050, where geothermal is trading at 3%, but that's just the long odds bias induced by the opportunity cost of betting the NO. https://manifold.markets/JonathanRay/what-percentage-of-us-energy-will-b
7. I have two separate thoughts about this:
a. McCaskill deserves zero of the blame for the FTX collapse
b. suing McCaskill for his blog posts would be reprehensible unless he deliberately defamed someone, which is what you'd have to prove in a defamation case in the US, but the UK has absurdly much stronger laws around defamation.
c. Unjust laws should be circumvented whenever necessary and possible. One could post things non-anonymously without being liable for lawsuits, via cryptographic proof that the author was either A or B. There's no one to sue if you can't prove which one of the two wrote it. One-time key exchange between A and B can enable both of them to write with the byline "A or B" in perpetuity, while neither is legally liable.
8. In-ovo sexing sounds like an awesome win-win-win-win for animal welfare, agribusiness, consumers, and the environment.
9. If any sort of resurrection comes to pass through cryonics, uploading, or magic sky deities, people will just have to learn to accept polyamory.
The Mormons say the original scripture used the verb form of marry, so that Jesus was only saying you can't enter into new marriages in heaven, not saying the old marriages are no longer valid, ergo they implicitly have polygamy in heaven. But from the context it seems more likely Jesus was implying angels are asexual and resurrected humans will be that way too. But I don't really care about exegesis of ancient myths.
10. Recruiting celebrities is a symmetrical weapon for propagating ideas, regardless of the merits. Scientology has used it to great effect in spite of having no merit. Worthy causes shouldn't be above doing the same. If one is a young attractive female the highest EV way of contributing to a worthy cause might be as a honeypot to recruit a celebrity.
11. I wish we could have a referendum on pardoning the internet archive, z-library, scihub, and libgen. Anyone who wants to pirate anything online can pirate anything online. The legal harassment only makes it a little shittier and less convenient and buys mansions for lawyers. I think the full abolition of copyright would be net beneficial to the production of literature, science, and journalism. It would be somewhat negative for Hollywood, but people would still pay in various ways. 95% of the revenue in music is from live events. Over a third of Disney's revenue is box office and merchandising. The relationship between film budget and quality is so sublinear (maybe even inverted, beyond a point) that I don't expect a 33% reduction in revenue to reduce quality much. Quality mostly comes from the script which comes from one great mind which just enjoys the work and isn't very elastic to getting paid $5 million instead of $15 million. Video game quality doesn't seem to have increased at all in the last 30 years while budgets have ballooned by several orders of magnitude.
12. Heavy cavalry are really not the vibe to project to people who are already paranoid about the police oppressing them.
13. Considering JK Rowling studied French and English classics, and spends about every waking moment reading broadly, it's very likely that she heard of the muggletons before 1993. The ending of Harry Potter is an anvilicious cover of the gospels. Harry died for you and got resurrected and then the Dark Lord had no power over you. This hugely raises the probability that muggles are named after a Christian sect that didn't believe in the magical elements of Christianity. The other link doesn't really contain any plausible inspirations for Rowling's use of the word. Her spell names generally don't stray too far from the literal meanings of the roots in other languages, and this is evidence against the distant derivations in the link.
26) If Golden Gate Claude were to have tried IFS, would it have viewed the Golden Gate Bridge as an unattached burden (or a demon)?
26. Someone needs to do this but swapping in paperclips for the Golden Gate bridge.
31. I don't know who the "new conservatives" are, but I'm pretty sure they're going, "Awww, daaad!"
Way to give Nick Bostrom nightmares!
Do Payne and McKay *want* me to hunt them down like mongrel dogs with fire and slaughter? Because I know I said I wanted to see how much worse the second season of "The Rings of Power" could go, but there are some lines you don't cross.
They're putting Tom Bombadil into the second season.
But wait, it gets better (worse). Because the pair of them combined don't have the intellect of a paramecium, they need to 'improve' on Tolkien's original storyline:
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/tom-bombadil-the-rings-of-power-first-look
"For the series, Payne and McKay took the liberty of giving Bombadil a second home, on the outskirts of a region called Rhûn. “In our story, he has gone out to the lands of Rhûn, which we learn used to be sort of Edenic and green and beautiful, but now is sort of a dead wasteland,” Payne says. “Tom has gone out there to see what’s happened as he goes on his various wanderings.”
Well hell of course a character that Tolkien described as "the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside” is going to turn up in what is the equivalent of the Near East/North Africa. Sure!
And why don't we introduce George Washington riding a Sphinx while you're at it?
Ehhhh… on the scale of all the ways the showrunners could have mangled Tolkien’s work, putting Tom Bombadil in Rhun is far from the absolute worst. It’s not great, mind you, but we know he’s extremely ancient, so he would have been alive at that time. The Rhun part is more egregious.
Here’s how the conversation probably went:
“So, Gandalf and Frodo Surrogate are going to Rhun next season.”
“Rhun? What’s there? We’ve never seen it before, what’s it like?”
“Well that’s the problem, sir, Tolkien really never wrote about it in detail, we just know it’s far away.”
“That sucks! How are we going to keep the fans interested in some land on the ass end of nowhere? Where’s the fan service?”
“Actually, it’s gonna be super easy, barely an inconvenience! Remember Tom Bombadil, sir?”
“Hmmm… wait… oh yeah, isn’t he some weird old guy who’s like the spirit of the forest, and they left him out of the LOTR movies?”
“You got it, sir! Let’s put him in Rhun! That’s awesome fan service!”
“But…. Did he ever go to Rhun in Tolkien’s stories?”
“I dunno!”
“Fair enough!”
( with apologies to Pitch Meeting, a hilarious YouTube channel)
They're merrily mangling the lore, even while for the first season they claimed to be mega-fans of the writing and were going to be really authentic in how they presented it.
Then they gave us an origin story for mithril.
What annoys me about this report on Tom Bombadil is that it's *pointless*. At least in the first season, they vaguely stuck to plausibility, even while compressing the timeline and inventing original characters. There was a reason for Galadriel and Elrond and Celebrimbor and Gil-galad to be around. They made the Elf-Dwarf friendship into Elrond and Durin, not Celebrimbor and Narvi, but they didn't just pull that out of their backsides.
Even Halbrand-Sauron, stupid as it was, did acknowledge that yep, Sauron is here and yep, he's making rings.
But even though Bombadil is definitely in existence during this period, he's not engaging with the wider world and the Elves. And it's completely pointless to have him in Rhun. The only reason is so that he can meet up with Gandalf (I don't think there's really any doubt that the Stranger is Gandalf, even though if they're going to bring in Bombadil as protector of nature then the wizard *should* be Radagast) and for why?
They're going to make up some stupid, stupid reason, and if they mention the Ents I'll cry.
Oh, boy, do you think they'll have an episode where the Entwives leave the Ents?
At this stage, I'm not ruling anything out. We've got the genius notion of "Annatar is Halbrand in a wig", now Tom Bombadil is turning up in Rhun - why wouldn't they end season two with the fleeing of the Entwives?
Oh lord, I just got struck by a horrible notion - that black crawling Venom thing in the trailer and the snaky tree roots? *Please* don't make that into a corrupted Entwife. Please. NO!!!!!
Hey, it could be worse. We love to complain about absurd wokism, but just think how bad it could be if they try to find a reason for all the females of an entire species to collectively leave the males and start over somewhere else? (Possibly after having been fertilized, so they could continue the species without legacy cultural contamination.) I'd be happy to only have icky CGI goop be responsible.
(Sauron twisted innocent insects into the dread Emerald Ash Borer!)
"just think how bad it could be if they try to find a reason for all the females of an entire species to collectively leave the males and start over somewhere else"
You're right, I don't even want to imagine what they would come up with here.
One tidbit of lore we do have about Rhûn is that there was a great Kingdom in that general direction which had some trade with the Dwarves of Erebor and whose king was named Bladorthin. We learn of this in The Hobbit, so Amazon has the rights to use it.
We don't really know anything beyond that, except that Bladorthin is "long since dead" as of the late Third Age and that his name is Noldorin and means something like "Grey Master of the Plains".
Also, the name was recycled from early drafts of The Hobbit. Originally, the leader of the Dwarves was named Gandalf and the Wizard was named Bladorthin, until
halfway through Tolkien decided that he liked "Gandalf" better for the Wizard and named the dwarf Thorin instead.
So if we've got Gandalf going Rhûnwards, they really should have Bladorthin show up. But of course, they almost certainly won't.
That is the frustrating thing. There are plenty of places and times in the world he created where there is nothing, or large gaps. Those are the places they could have original characters to their heart's content if they wanted.
But no, they haven't an original, creative bone in their bodies, so they rely on simply mashing up Recognisable Names to make up for the paucity of content they can create. So on the one hand they're aggravating the book nerds like me, and on the other hand they're doing nothing for the general audience who just wanted to watch a fantasy show but know nothing of the world. The latter don't know who Bombadil is meant to be so don't care, and the former are frothing about it (as I am).
Bombadil is a very localised entity, it makes as much sense having him popping up in Rhun as it would be to make a show set in Tang Dynasty China and have Odin turning up to guide one of the protagonists on their journey to becoming a cultivation master.
From a 1951 letter talking about his motivation to create:
"Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry."
Bombadil is intimately associated with that "North West" spirit, getting him to wander around in Rhun is just superfluous. They could have created their own Spirit of Former Edenic Rhun if they wanted! But they can't even manage that much.
Rhûn isn't North Africa (Africa, all of it, is Harad, with Near Harad possibly extending into the Near East). Rhûn is Asia, home of the Swarthy Men a.k.a. Easterlings.
Still maybe not the best place for Tom Bombadil.
From the Berkson's paradox link (which is really good, by the way):
> While it may be true that at perfect calibration we still see a positive correlation/effect size if the filtering process is even slightly overweighted towards ability tests we get negative correlation just like as in the standard treatment of Berkson’s paradox. Regardless, even these overweighted filtering processes are better at selecting a subsample that does well on Job performance than a selection method which ignores the test completely, hence the tests are adding genuine value to the selection process.
The other thing to keep in mind here is that in practice, you won't usually have nearly this many data points. The observed correlation might be different from the "true" correlation just because you have few people hired for each position.
> The obvious confounder here is that not all basketball positions are equal in how often they score or how tall the people at that position tend to be. In fact the shortest/second shortest position (Shooting Guard) tends to score the most while the tallest position (Center) tends to score the least . This would then suggest that unless we further break down the results by position the two results above don’t really mean much at all.
Yes, and to be a bit more precise--a shooting guard's primary responsibility is scoring, in contrast to e.g. a point guard (ballhandling/distributing) or center (rim protection/rebounding). Obviously centers can score a lot as well, but a center can have much more impact on the game with defense and rebounding than a guard can, so it's much more viable to be a center who doesn't score much than to be a shooting guard who doesn't score much. Which gets at the actual issue with this particular analysis, which is that points per minute as a metric completely misses much of the impact of being tall (it also misses factors like injury risk, which run in the opposite direction). (Also, I'm not sure there's actually a bias against playing small players). In fact if all positions can score equally well, it's almost certainly the case that bigger players *are* more valuable for this exact reason. (It's also no longer the case that you can get into the NBA just by being 7 feet like you used to be able to; big men these days still have to be skilled).
However, I don't think this is a counterexample to Berkson's paradox; there just aren't that many 7 footers in the world who don't have significant health issues and have sufficient interest in basketball, so even if all of them play professional basketball there aren't enough for every team.
You forgot link to old anthropic post so it just says “see here” but no clue where “here” is
Regarding climate change being the death of us all, should we be slightly reassured by the Stefan-Boltzmann law, which says that the rate of heat radiation from a body is proportional to the fourth power of its absolute temperature?
On the face of it, that suggests that as the oceans and atmosphere warm then disproportionately more heat will be radiated into space at night thus limiting the heat build up. But I suppose it isn't much help if the constant of proportionality is very small, so the effect increases noticeably only at temperatures of several hundred degrees!
I'm sure that's taken into account by all climate models, and that it's one of the more predictable terms in the model.
Re #37, I think it's probably a mistake to analyse Israel's strategy in Gaza in purely military terms, rather than looking at the politics.
Firstly, if Israel can keep the conflict going until next year, there's a better than 50/50 chance that Trump will take over in the White House, at which point most of the pressure on them to consider the humanitarian aspects of what they're doing will evaporate, and they will be able to move to whole scale ethnic cleansing and resettlement with no more than token international opposition if they want to; I think it's clear that some of the members of Israel's government want precisely this and some probably don't.
Secondly, at the point the war ends, pressure on Netanyahu to call elections, which he will probably lose (leaving him open to prosecution for corruption) will massively increase, so he has a strong personal incentive to keep the conflict going.
And thirdly, an awful lot of the Israeli electorate, including many journalists I've seen writing articles with handwringing disclaimers about how "obviously what's happening to innocent civilians is a tragedy" really, really want to see suffering and destruction inflicted on Gaza in retribution for 10/7, which probably makes keeping the war going and not making too much effort to minimise civilian casualties a net vote-winner, even if it doesn't achieve long-term strategic objectives.
> whole scale ethnic cleansing and resettlement
Where and how? There isn't anywhere that would be willing to accept hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of Palestinian refugees. It sure as hell isn't going to be Jordan, and the first thing Egypt did after Oct 7th was seal the border. Lebanon is largely controlled by Hezbollah, which as an Iranian proxy wants all of the Palestinians to continue fighting Israel. I just don't see how this could realistically happen. Israel would have to move a huge number of people who don't want to leave and dump them in another country that is unwilling to accept them.
I think these are excellent questions, that you should put to Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich and their allies.
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich aren't making the decisions, they have been purposefully excluded from the war cabinet.
I absolutely agree that they aren't making decisions unchallenged, which is why I said "some of the members of Israel's government want precisely this and some probably don't" rather than "Israel's government wants this".
But they are influential members of the government (I think more so than their official positions suggest), because - unlike Gantz - Netanyahu is hoping to court their support in the next election, when they look likely to control significant numbers of seats.
Two ministers in the government aren't making any decisions at all? Not in the West Bank? Not influencing others (by whichever means) who can make decisions?
You must not have heard of the idea of the "war cabinet" yet.
Oh, I have, they feature extensively in Israeli media. I also heard of the wider security cabinet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Cabinet_of_Israel), which does include both Ben Gvir and Smotrich as core members appointed by law.
I have also heard of the idea that "Minister" is not a light title, not in Israeli government anyways. Even if a minister doesn't hold power directly, he is in the halls of power and can do quite a bit from behind closed doors than the strict interpretation of his/her title's role would imply.
Scott, leaving the the 50K Gazan deaths number up after multiple people have shown you sources to the contrary, and after you declined to defend that number even though you engaged with other points in those threads (so we all know you saw them!), is beneath yours and this community's standards.
Agreed
Sorry to disappoint, but Paris Hilton is not and was never signed up for cryonics:
> The tabloids even stooped so low as to discuss her plans after death. Hilton was quoted as saying "It's so cool, all the cells in your body are still alive when death is pronounced and if you're immediately cooled, you can be perfectly preserved. My life could be extended by hundreds and thousands of years."
> Hilton denied ever making those comments and pointed out to DeGeneres that she doesn't speak that way. This made the audience laugh.
> "I don't want to be frozen. It's kind of creepy," Hilton said.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paris-sets-the-record-straight-on-ellen/
24. I'm a bit of an audiobook narrator snob, and I don't think Johansson and Skye sound alike at all. If they wanted to imitate her, they could have done a waaaaaaay better job.
So LDS is pretty much saying no new marriages in the afterlife, but that a new category, celestial marriage will come into being, which you can commit to now, right?
So time for ceremonies that renew celestial vows?
People have been posting Scott's picture claiming it was 0HP's real face for many months, probably initially as a joke, then at some point someone pointed out "actually that's Scott Alexander", which then propogated as "0HP is Scott Alexander".
Sorry I intended this to be a reply to another comment which introduced slightly more context but I fucked up and immediately lost my throwaway credential, so I'll just fill in the syllogism here:
0HP is a relatively senior figure in a bitter rival faction of the dissident right to the Fuentes faction
Scott Alexander is Scott Siskind is Jewish
So this all adds up to Nick Fuentes learning from his audience and propogating that Scott Siskind (by saying he think he's doxxing 0HP) is a jewish subversive fake conservative.
Interestingly, this isn't the first time I've heard of miraculous gold fillings. The 2007 documentary "Finger of God" features a bunch of people showing their gold teeth and insisting they were put there by God. https://vimeo.com/428107848
> Are LLMs better than humans for some reason?
Probably they are better than humans at the **general task** of debunking conspiracy theories. I think I know enough to fairly thoroughly debunk lab leak and JFK assassination conspiracy theories. I know enough to be strongly disinclined to e.g. moon landing conspiracy theories, but I don't know if I could make a thorough enough argument without eventually resorting to "c'mon, man". An LLM already knows* all about* every* conspiracy theory of note.
*: Except when it doesn't and just lies.
>I think Trevor should have been more careful with his original accusations, but I also think defamation lawsuit threats are toxic and chill the flow of information, that this community has strong norms against them except in extreme cases, and that Lumina violated those norms.
Someone who posts defamation is already defecting, and norms of not threatening suit essentially leave the defamed person without a way to clear his name. If a defamed person isn't permitted by "social norms" to sue for defamation, your social norms are trash.
Yes, lawsuits can be intimidating, and can hurt the person sued even if they're innocent. But from your own description, this isn't a meritless lawsuit designed to shut someone up by bankrupting them; the targets really were defamed. And the defamers have a conflict of interest in saying "this isn't important enough to sue about".
7. This is similar to why "nobody" said anything about Harvey Weinstein despite all the rumors. You don't want to get hit with a libel lawsuit.
Devil's advocate (angel's advocate?) on Saint Joseph: There's an important difference between God and ninjas, which is that ninjas' ability to predict the outcome of their actions is around the same as ours, so if we can't see a reason for them to do something then they probably can't either. But God, being omniscient, would be able to know all the outcomes of any given action, and Joseph levitating might have some downstream consequence of great importance in a "butterfly flapping its wings" kind of way that we are unable to see.
Re: #14
Maybe no one, even the Pope himself, has yet lived up to the status of “God’s chosen people.” So rather than provide some sort of incontrovertible distinction in the form of a miracle, instead he just sows some random seeds of doubt of the conventional wisdom of our place in the universe.
Regarding the chicken sexing: Surely there would be massive financial benefits to genetically modified chickens that don't lay male eggs at all? There must be a way!
You want *some* males to keep the breed going.
Sex-selected semen is a thing in cows. Although not yet in wide use.
To clarify the "Midler v. Ford Motor Co." precedent, it does not make hiring someone who sounds like someone else illegal. To quote the black letter from "casesofinterest"
"Not every imitation of a voice is actionable. However, when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in CA."
Important points:
- Only applies to California. Similar cases don't exist almost anywhere else.
- If a product isn't being sold, it's not clear if the "commercial advantage" required for right of publicity exists.
- The voice needs to be distinctive and widely known, to the extent that it's a core defining characteristic of the identity of the person being impersonated. Historically, this standard has only applied to singers AFAIK. I think it's questionable if Johansson would meet this requirement.
- "deliberately imitated" is important. Merely hiring someone who sounds similar is not deliberate imitation; in the Ford case, the singer was asked to imitate Midler while singing one of her songs; they didn't just hire a similar sounding singer.
While it's not impossible, I wouldn't bet on any Johansson lawsuit to actually succeed (assuming they didn't settle).
5. When making these comparisons, you want to adjust for PPP (purchasing power parity), not the forex rate. To give an obvious example, if you make US$50k in the Bay vs Minnesota vs India, you'll be poor/alright/rich, respectively. That's not just in relative terms, that's like, you can buy more land, build a bigger house, have more servants if you want, etc.
The US is the reference point for PPP, so no adjustment needed there. For the British figure though, according to the World Bank it's £0.65 to buy goods you could get for $1 in the US, so instead of saying you could buy $44.5k with your £35k (which no one is doing), it's more accurate to say that with £35k you can buy goods/services that would cost ~$53,846 in the US. More concisely, the British median income in 2023 was $53,846 (PPP). Also worth noting, your figure for black Americans is from 2021 -- as you'll recall, there was a bunch of inflation immediately after. Statista gives $53,860 for 2022.
So, while I also love dunking on Europeans, in this case the two figures are about equal.
The idea that the Internet Archive lawsuit could bankrupt it was disputed recently on HN with a claim that a capped settlement was already in place: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40203774. (So we're only risking further unconscionable expansion of "intellectual property" protectionism... but that's just a Tuesday in the US courts.)
I just caught up on the news that the Pope is being doxxed by homophile priests and their supporters for using the wrong slang.
This seems a little bit crazy. I mean, Isn't the Pope supposed to be spiritually special, you know, like Mother Teresa and Michael Jackson? Are NYU and UCLA 'activists' going to occupy the quads to protest the homophobe pope? Will the Church split and set up a new, homophile Pope in West Hollywood?
The Pope is infallible when teaching ex cathedra. Talking to bishops about "no more cute twinks in seminaries, please guys" is not that 😀
As for splitting off, we have plenty of the Spirit of Vatican II types and Women Priests and the rest of 'em already doing their thing. I'm just surprised Francis is putting his foot down, given all the "He's a HERETIC and ANTI-POPE" that came from the opposite wing of the fringe nutjobs about previous decisions and statements.
Having read Trevor Klee's original anti-lumia post (link 17), I would like to know which parts of his original post were wrong, and where he misunderstood / misrepresented the underlying science. It's quite frustrating to be told the post is largely wrong, without being told how it is wrong!
So far I know:
- The original post wrongly characterized Scott Alexander (i.e., Trevor had not done the due diligence of finding Scott's public note saying he obtained the sample due to his wife's consulting, and instead assumed a worse explanation).
- The original post was wrong about the manufacturing process not following standards.
What I would like to know:
- How did Trevor misunderstand / misrepresent the science?
- What else was does the original post get wrong?
> Apparently St. Joseph could levitate, this was well-documented by everyone he met, and the Inquisition (which was concerned he might be a witch) investigated and got many eyewitness reports.
People would be saying the same thing about Criss Angel in the future.
2: Ambition is an addiction. I hope it turns out that ozempic/semaglutide/tirzepatide is a treatment for it.
34: Prior: LLMs are just hype to cow workers into not demanding pay rises. This claim needs a literature, not just one paper, to back it up.
37. Nobody in Israel thinks it's possible to terrify Gazans out of supporting Hamas (or, some other entity that is functionally equivalent to it). Unlike Sam Kriss, that lives in London, whoever he is, they live just next to those people and know it's impossible. What *may be* possible to do is to terrify some out of actively trying to kill Jews for a while (and make others that are not susceptible to convincing unable to do so). This is the strategy that worked pretty well with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Fatah, and even to some extent Hezbollah, which is not exactly eager to start a big war either, so far. That's as far as Israel strategy goes - first, destroying as much Hamas infrastructure as practically possible without killing a million people, second, establishing a deterrent. That's the best plan so far, and if anybody tells you they have a better one the odds are 99.9999% that they are hopelessly deluded. Ah yes, and Hamas' numbers of the dead are completely and hopelessly fake, so quoting them just signals the quoter has no idea what is actually going on and is not afraid to publicly show it.
Which makes it a vicious circle: the Palestinians who vote in polls to support Hamas may be making the "better the devil you know" choice and not particularly that they want to kill Jews, but if they're asked to choose between "people who claim to be for me" versus "soldiers who break down my door in the early hours of the morning, roust us all out, and deliberately smash up our house", then they're going to pick option A.
The reason why Irish people identify with Palestine side in this whole mess is because it sounds so much like our own history after the Easter Rebellion. This was not a generally popular thing! A lot of people were ambivalent about it or even actively opposed! But as it went on and the War of Independence started, the actions of the British forces moved a lot of opinion from "who are these idiots claiming to be setting up an Irish Republic?" to "fuck the Empire, I'm with the IRA".
See the burning of Cork:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Cork
"The burning of Cork by British forces took place on the night of 11–12 December 1920, during the Irish War of Independence. It followed an Irish Republican Army (IRA) ambush of a British Auxiliary patrol in the city, which wounded twelve Auxiliaries, one fatally. In retaliation, the Auxiliaries, Black and Tans and British soldiers burned homes near the ambush site, before looting and burning numerous buildings in the centre of Cork, Ireland's third-biggest city. Many Irish civilians reported being beaten, shot at, and robbed by British forces. Firefighters testified that British forces hindered their attempts to tackle the blazes by intimidation, cutting their hoses and shooting at them. Two unarmed IRA volunteers were also shot dead at their home in the north of the city.
More than 40 business premises, 300 residential properties, the City Hall and Carnegie Library were destroyed by fires, many of which were started by incendiary bombs. The economic damage was estimated at over £3 million (equivalent to approximately €150 million in 2021), while 2,000 were left jobless and many more became homeless.
British forces carried out many similar reprisals on Irish civilians during the war, notably the Sack of Balbriggan three months before and the burning of Knockcroghery six months later, but the burning of Cork was one of the most substantial. The British government at first denied that its forces had started the fires, and only agreed to hold a military inquiry. This concluded that a company of Auxiliaries were responsible, but the government refused to publish the report at the time. No one was held accountable for the burning."
The people caught in the middle of all this don't care if it's a reprisal for ambushes and attacks by the paramilitary/terrorist forces, they see the forces of a state that claims legitimacy acting like thugs and getting away with it and indeed being supported by that state. In which case, why the hell would they support that state or trust the bona fides of that state and those in charge of it?
"At midday Mass in the North Cathedral the Bishop of Cork, Daniel Cohalan, condemned the arson but said the burning of the city was a result of the "murderous ambush at Dillon's Cross" and vowed, "I will certainly issue a decree of excommunication against anyone who, after this notice, shall take part in an ambush or a kidnapping or attempted murder or arson". No excommunications were issued, and the bishop's edict was largely ignored by pro-republican priests and chaplains.
...Irish nationalists called for an open and impartial inquiry. In the British House of Commons, Sir Hamar Greenwood, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, refused demands for such an inquiry. He denied that British forces had any involvement and suggested the IRA started the fires in the city centre, although he said that several houses at Dillon's Cross "were destroyed because from these houses bombs were thrown at the police". When asked about reports of firefighters being attacked by British forces he said "Every available policeman and soldier in Cork was turned out at once and without their assistance the fire brigade could not have gone through the crowds and did the work that they tried to do".
...K Company Auxiliary Charles Schulze, a former British Army captain, wrote in a letter to his girlfriend in England calling the burning of Cork "sweet revenge", while in a letter to his mother he wrote: "Many who had witnessed scenes in France and Flanders say that nothing they had experienced was comparable with the punishment meted out in Cork". After the burning, K Company was moved to Dunmanway and began wearing burnt corks in their caps in reference to the burning of the city. For their part in the arson and looting, K Company was disbanded on 31 March 1921."
And that's why Israel is so pissed off with Ireland and why my government recognised Palestine:
https://www.newstalk.com/news/hamas-thanks-ireland-israel-releases-irish-music-video-mixed-with-hamas-attack-1727877
Look, I know there is some current upheaval in the world of Féis competitions, but we're not quite at the stage of armed conflict yet! 😁
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/irish-dancing-teachers-and-judges-threatening-legal-action-after-being-cleared-of-feis-fixing/a426294571.html
> it sounds so much like our own history after the Easter Rebellion
Wait, did Irish have an official charter that called for destruction of Britain and expulsion of all English to go "back where they came from" (Normandy I guess)? Did they continuously attack London, Manchester, Liverpool and other major cities of England with rockets, bombs, etc. for decades? Did they murder and rape 12 thousands of Englishmen in a mass attack and kidnap another thousands, including women, elderly and infants, and promised this is just the beginning and they keep doing it again and again until England ceases to exist?
That's certainly not what the history books say, and if there's any truth to what they say, then no, it doesn't sound not even a little bit like that.
Hamas in Gaza already had their independence. Yes, they didn't have the full formal trimmings of the state, but they had everything else. And they used it only to make steps towards their genocidal goal - which they never hidden and yet Europeans somehow perform spectacular feats of mental gymnastics to not notice - cleansing Israel from Jews, "from the river to the sea" and establish their own theocratic caliphate in that territory. Every school, every hospital, every mosque, every dollar sent by Europe or Qatar or Saudia, were used to serve this goal. This is what they have in their founding documents, this is what they say every time anybody asks them, and yet somehow Europeans all are like "nah, they didn't mean that, what they mean is they want peace and independence and that's all. Just leave them alone and there will be peace". No, wrong, they want EXACTLY THAT. They want to get to the filthy Jews and kill (and rape, of course, freedom fighters have their needs) as many of them as they can. I know Europeans do not want to face that harsh reality, but it doesn't disappear because it doesn't sit well with their model of how the world should be.
> And that's why Israel is so pissed off with Ireland and why my government recognised Palestine:
I think it's because Irish government, as well as most European governments, are a bunch of woke anti-semitic (that two are pretty much a requirement by now) bozos which don't care what happens with the Jews (and the Palestinians too, to be honest - life under Hamas is not exactly a picnic) as long as the woke agenda of "colonialists bad, oppressed people saint" is served, and since the Jews are designated colonialists there, no longer consideration is required. Thus, they think the appropriate reaction to biggest mass murder and rape of Jews since the Holocaust is to invite the murderers and rapists to the club of nations and grant them respect and recognition. Whatever injustices and suffering Irish people undergone over the years of history, nothing of it can ever justify such a revolting move.
> Which makes it a vicious circle
There's no any "circle". It's another of those stupid European delusions that all people like each other and are nice and only made to do bad things by extreme external circumstances forcing them. I'd like to live in that world too. But that's not the world of Middle East. In the world of Middle East hating Jews is normal. Everybody hates Jews. There's no hope - at least not within next several generations - of everybody not hating Jews. However, one can hate Jews and still not murder them. Many nations hate each other to a measure and still avoid murdering each other. Even between Israel and other Arab states this happened. Egyptians don't harbor any love towards the Jews - but they abandoned their plans to murder them all, because it looked like the best thing for them to do, at least for now. And the only hope for Gaza to ever have peace is for people of Gaza to do the same. Not to love the Jews - that won't happen - but stop actively trying to murder them.
> My general opinion on Israel and Gaza is, outside the latest kerfuffle, is not to give a shit.
Most Israelis would be completely fine with that. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be the position of European governments, which have been waging campaign aimed at pressuring Israel into surrendering its security for a piece of paper for decades. That's what gave us the disaster of "Oslo agreements", what informed the disaster of Gaza independence experiment, and continues to wreak havoc on the scene.
> If I were to criticise Azerbaijan when it is in conflict I doubt I would be accused of some ancient prejudice buried deep in the bones, resurrecting every time Azerbaijan goes to war.
That depends. If no matter what happens, no matter who does what to whom, Azerbaijan somehow comes out as the bad guy for you, and your demand is always for them to surrender immediately and accept whatever their enemies are wishing to impose upon them - then yes, I'd say you have something against Azerbaijan. Whether it's ancient or just comes from your pol-sci professor lecture last semester, that'd be hard to tell, but it's by their fruits that you know it. And the fruits of European policy towards Israel are pretty obvious.
> It’s Germany that’s the most pro Israel these days anyway.
Is it the Germany that promised to arrest Israeli Prime Minister recently or there's some other Germany too?
> you would expect the ageing boomers across Europe and the US to be the most antagonistic to Israel,
Why would I expect that? Boomers aren't woke. Wokes are the main epicenter of antisemitism these days, and they are trending to the young side. Of course, that's not what most of EU politicians are - they are the previous generation, who created the wokes. But given their creation, again, it's hard not to think they intended it to come out this way.
> it doesn't seem to be the position of European governments
All while its weapons manufacturers and armies continue to supply weapons to kill more children.
> If no matter what happens, no matter who does what to whom, Azerbaijan somehow comes out as the bad guy
That's exactly what an Azerbaijan nationalist would say to play the victim, "No matter what I do, people just hate me for no reason", that's not original at all, that's the internal self-dialogue of every villain from Darth Vader to 3rd-rate fanfic.
> Is it the Germany that promised to arrest Israeli Prime Minister recently
Yeah, that same Germany that promised to arrest the genocidal Prime Minister if and only if the ICC - whose founding charter Germany is signatory to - said to arrest him.
The same exact Germany which is putting faith vows to Israel in its citizenship naturalization tests.
> Why would I expect that?
Because you're saying that the prejudice is ancient, if the prejudice is deep-seated and ancient then it makes sense that the oldest and less-globalized portions of the population would feel it more strongly, while the younger and more Americanized/Globalized youth would feel it weakly.
> That's exactly what an Azerbaijan nationalist would say to play the victim
And again here we have "you claim you weren't treated fairly, villains often claim they aren't treated fairly, therefore you are a villain". Do I really need to explain how bad an argument this is?
> Yeah, that same Germany that promised to arrest the genocidal Prime Minister if and only if the ICC - whose founding charter Germany is signatory to - said to arrest him
So you're saying they founded the kangaroo court that pretends self-defense is "genocide" when it's politically convenient, while ignoring actual genocidal organizations which have genocide written in the open in their founding documents, proudly proclaimed by their adherents and supporters, and implemented in their practices. They intend to fully implement the decisions of that kangaroo court and that's somehow not their fault and not the result of their own deliberate policy? Yes, it is.
> The same exact Germany which is putting faith vows to Israel in its citizenship naturalization tests.
No they don't. The closest to this bizzarre description is this question:
6. Where does Germany’s special responsibility for Israel come from?
a) Membership in the European Union b) Crimes committed by the Nazis c) The German constitution d) Christian tradition
Answer: b) Crimes committed by the Nazis, who murdered six million Jews during the Holocaust
Which is nowhere near "faith vows" - though as an Israeli citizen I'd be completely fine with Germany dropping it altogether. Israel doesn't need "special responsibility" - plain old equal treatment would be enough. Like, if you are shelled, blown up, murdered and raped by somebody, you have the right to defend yourself. Or, even more basic, you don't have to justify your own existance every 5 minutes - like, for example, it is true for Germany, France, Japan, Australia, any country except Israel - where absent grand pronouncements somehow it always seems to be questionable and under the asterisk. Fuck special responsibility, just get rid of the asterisk and we're good.
BTW this is very similar to how wokes treat racism in the US. Equal treatment would be great, but they want new segregation and new racist discrimination - the right side up this time! - instead. Needless to say, isn't really helping in either case.
> Because you're saying that the prejudice is ancient, if the prejudice is deep-seated and ancient then it makes sense that the oldest and less-globalized portions of the population would feel it more strongly
No, that does not follow. You fell into the same logical trap as before. Birds have wings, planes have wings, but it doesn't mean planes are birds. Some people harboring prejudices having ancient roots does not mean only or predominantly old people would have this prejudice. That's not how it works. And globalization actually contributes to it, because most globalization ideologues are woke, and antisemitism is now strongly aligned with woke (due to the woke prophets declaring Jews as "colonizers", I suspect because their country dares to not be shitholy enough as proper Middle-Eastern country should be but instead are markedly Western, therefore automatically evil).
I'm not sure what point you are trying to prove here though? That antisemitism isn't ancient? That woke is not embracing antisemitism? That European leaders aren't aligned with woke? It'd be great to clarify instead of throwing around all that "you sound just like Darth Vader" nonsense.
Re: massacres by the hideous Irish of the poor English settlers, see the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and its subsequent use in English atrocity propaganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Rebellion_of_1641#Ulster_massacres
That looks like a classical pogrom. Still, to graduate to the level of Hamas, there must be a declared goal of eliminating the British state and cleansing the whole territory of their presence. So, there's still a room for growth.
I think you have that somewhat backwards. Until now the strategy has been deterrence. Now the main strategy will be continual prevention, by periodically entering Gaza to destroy military infrastructure, controlling the Egypt border so that no more weapons can be smuggled in, and so on.
Well, yes and no. The idea before October 7 was that the deterrence has already been achieved. It's not a stupid idea on the face of it - Israel successfully achieved deterrence against Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, even Iran to certain measure. It's not stupid to think it can be done against Hamas too. Except the catastrophic mistake was that while it could be done in theory, it didn't happen in practice. What Israeli military eggheads thought was deterrence was just Hamas preparing to strike. And strike they did. Now the eggheads need to go back to the drawing boards and start thinking again how to actually establish the deterrence they wanted.
"Periodically entering" is not a very good strategy because it is extremely expensive, both politically and monetary. And it does not achieve much - Hamas learned how to deal with single-point raids, those haven't been enough to seriously harm them for years already. They have distributed system that allows to move people and resources in and out any area. Controlling the border is not possible without re-occupying Gaza to some measure - otherwise the force there would be just picked out piece by piece by groups operating from the rest of Gaza - and re-occupation is what Israel does not want to do at all. But absent any other ideas that's what they may have to do it anyway, unless they half-ass it for a while, get out and let Hamas rebuild and get another instance of the same in some 20 years. I give both options about equal chance, maybe the second one even like 65%. Kicking the can down the road is always the best option for the politician, and Bibi is at the end of his career anyway, so once he achieves something he could call a victory it would be very tempting for him to let the next guy down the line sort it out - by which point of course nothing at all gets sorted out.
I don't think your second paragraph is accurate but don't have time to explain now, sorry.
The margins are too small? A known problem.
> Hamas' numbers of the dead are completely and hopelessly fake
Classic.
"No, It Didn't Happen, And If It Did Then They Deserved It, But Nowhere Near Enough People Died When It Happened, And I Wish It Would Happen Again."
You notice how you do not address the content of the argument but instead do "this looks like what a villain would do, therefore you are a villain"? The fact that Hamas fakes the numbers has been reported multiple times and official numbers were adjusted repeatedly. For example: https://www.jns.org/un-blames-fog-of-war-for-major-overcounting-of-gazan-child-fatalities/ There's no independent verification of the numbers ever. But it doesn't look like you're interested in figuring out what is the truth as much as you already know what the truth is and you are interested in painting anybody "denying" it as a villain?
You notice how your observation that I'm responding to is an asinine and overused talking point devoid of any meaning that has been parroted to death by every pro-Israel commenter at least 100 times or so since November? You notice that it doesn't imply or contribute anything about the actual topic that Scott brought up, which you're supposedly responding to? You notice that in a destroyed hellscape like Gaza, the dead usually turn out to outnumber every single figure given during the fog of war because of the dead bodies under the rubble and the water/food/medicine shortages and the lethal diseases and pollutants that the destroyed medical infrastructure won't treat for years?
I don't think you notice.
> For example: https://www.jns.org
Boy.... I sure do love getting my Extremely Trustworthy news from an outlet that literally advertises it is "Fighting Israel's Media War" on its topmost position on the frontpage. When did shills become this straightforward and unsubtle?
> this looks like what a villain would do, therefore you are a villain
More like: This is how Holocaust deniers and Armenian Genocide deniers talk, so better look in the mirror and re-evaluate your state vector in life to see where you're and where you're heading, and whether you like any of those things.
> I'm responding to is an asinine and overused talking point devoid of any meaning that has been parroted to death by every pro-Israel commenter
And yet, you can do no better than an obvious logical fallacy. It's like a prosecutor having their only argument as "you say you are innocent?! but that's exactly what the murderer would say, therefore you are guilty!" Probably won't go very well outside of the courts of Russia, North Korea and New York. Especially if you prop it up by another argument of "Everybody says they are innocent, stop with this meaningless and tired asinine whining and confess you crimes finally!"
> You notice that in a destroyed hellscape like Gaza, the dead usually turn out to outnumber every single figure given during the fog of war because of the dead bodies under the rubble
That would be if there was any effort to actually honestly count the dead. That effort would surely undercount. But there's no such effort. The effort is to produce inflated figures, because the larger are the figures, the better it serves the Hamas PR, and they couldn't care less who is actually dead, unless it's a top member of Hamas. When Islamic Jihad hit their own hospital, they produced the figure of 500 dead (or more) within hours - it's inconceivable any actual count could be done so fast, but it was dutifylly reproduced and attributed to "Israel atrocity" by all the mainstream press. The real number was probably 1/10 of that (and the work of Islamic Jihad) but nobody cared by then. This was one case where it was caught. In hundreds others, nobody bothered to even check. Hamas murders their own Arab population with abandon, they've been reported multiple times shooting at people trying to get to aid trucks - the very aid that was supposed to go to these people, but is routinely stolen by Hamas. Surprisingly, when the aid started coming through Israel-controlled pass and distributed under some Israel supervision, the prices in Gaza markets tanked - because Hamas could not steal enough food anymore to create a shortage.
> and the water/food/medicine shortages
Again, wholly and entirely engineered by Hamas. The amount of food and supplies sent to Gaza is enormous, but very significant part of it - in the case of American aid delivered through that famous 300-million-dollar wonder peer, by the US army own admission, the entirety of it - is stolen by Hamas. What they do with it is not clear - stockpile? Sell? Distribute to their own supporters and deny to those who dare to oppose them? Who knows, there's no reliable reporting on that, but they certainly not using it to prevent the shortages - because, again, any trouble Gazan population has is a PR win for them. This is literally their strongest weapon - the more Gaza population suffers, the stronger is the pressure on Israel.
> More like: This is how Holocaust deniers and Armenian Genocide deniers talk,
Yes, yes. You deny your guilt, just like an extremely guilty psycho would, so obviously you are an extremely guilty psycho. Sure, strong argument, congrats, you are totally winning this one.
Bonus point for referring to genocide deniers while shilling for an organization that actually has the genocide as their openly declared and proudly proclaimed goal. The goal of killing Jews. "You Jews are Holocaust deniers for not agreeing quietly to being murdered" is a very bold argument. Really shows the strength of character.
> It's like a prosecutor
But I'm not a prosecutor. Karim Khan is, and he literally said that Netanyahu is suspected of "Extermination and using Starvation as a weapon" and that he should be in a Hague courtroom, a prospect that terrified and enraged Netanyahu and his supporters, presumably including you, so much they lashed at the entire Rome Statute in response.
> they couldn't care less who is actually dead,
Sounds just like Israel then. Why are you arguing one of them is better?
> When Islamic Jihad hit their own hospital
This was never confirmed by non-Israeli media.
> Hamas murders their own Arab population with abandon
Indeed, which is why no one on ACX is defending them. The only mystery is why you're so intent on defending their straightforward Hebrew translation. Murdering innocents is only bad if the murderer shouts "Allahu Akbar" while doing it?
> Again, wholly and entirely engineered by Hamas.
Hehehe, so Yoav Gallant, your defense minister in case you forgot, who said "I'm ordering a complete siege of Gaza, no fuel no food no water comes in" in mid-October, has nothing to do **at all** with the near-famine in Gaza? The scum blocking the path of aid trucks in Kerem Shalom and elsewhere, and burning the aid in the West Bank and hitting the drivers has nothing to do with it? It's just "Khamas", right? Khamas Khamas Khamas. Khamas ate your homework. Khamas is the reason everything bad in the world happens, before Khamas, there was no atrocities at all.
> in the case of American aid delivered through that famous 300-million-dollar wonder peer, by the US army own admission, the entirety of it
Where was that reported? In the outlets "Fighting Israel's media war"?
> the more Gaza population suffers, the stronger is the pressure on Israel.
And Israel is of course all too happy to play along, isn't it?
> Sure, strong argument, congrats, you are totally winning this one.
We're not on Reddit mate, I couldn't care less whether I'm "winning", least of all in an argument with someone posting propaganda as unironic news. I'm just in awe at the sheer madness and ideological psychosis that humans can surround themselves with, all while - or largely in order to - convincing themselves they're the good guys.
> shilling for an organization that actually has the genocide as their openly declared
Which shows you never read any of my 8-month posting corpus on ACX.
Ehh, what can I say? You caught me. I'm an unpaid Hamas shill, I have to admit. I'm "fighting Hamas' media war" for them. They have special internship offers for anarchist atheists: I only need to hate Jews 1.69 times as much as Muslims to keep my position. As long as I don't tell them I'm vegetarian I would be fine.
re "I think these drugs might boost willpower more generally":
I've taken Ozempic/Wegovy for over two years. It is great, it works, I lost over 25% of my starting weight, but I do not think it improved my willpower at all. Instead, it removed desire. These are very different and feel very different internally, even if the outcome looks the same.
Before losing the weight, I thought I was weak and had terrible willpower in the face of getting seconds of mac and cheese, and thin people were all stronger with better willpower than me. I'd tried to lose weight with dieting/exercise a hundred times before, and always gained it back. It did not occur to me that thin people might just *want the food less in the first place*. I had not realized how much I thought about food until I stopped. Before, I'd sit in the living room idly thinking about what snacks were available, constantly, telling myself I really shouldn't get up to eat the Smartfood, over and over again until I lost the game and would find myself mysteriously staring at an empty bag. It often felt like I'd come out of a trance, and that the part of my brain that was saying not to eat had just turned off until I was done eating, at which point it would turn back on and a rush of shame and guilt would flood over me.
After, I just didn't even think about the food in the first place. I wouldn't think about food until I was hungry (and I was hungry less frequently, and actually experienced what it was like to *feel full* after eating a normal portion so I wanted to stop eating sooner. I'd never really felt full before and hadn't understood that it was a real physical sensation rather than a self-regulating moral scale of when I'd eaten "too much" that I thought I was missing). It was a mental change as much as a physical one, but willpower had nothing to do with it - I just didn't want the food anymore.
If it makes people with addictions want the drugs less, then that's great! I'll be thrilled that it works. (It would justify the despairing feeling I had when trying to lose weight that eating is like an addiction you can't quit cold-turkey.) But I wouldn't expect it to e.g. make someone more productive or procrastinate less, because the mechanism (at least for me) was a subtraction of desire rather than an addition of willpower, so the next applications of the drug should take that into account.
I haven't been able to get Ozempic regularly, but the experience you describe is exactly how I feel. Thinking about food, wanting to snack/graze constantly, never being "full" until I'd eaten past the point of satiety to active discomfort, going "But I just ate a full meal two hours ago, I *can't* be hungry again so soon!", and generally "yes, the doctors and the medical establishment and society at large *are* right: I am a lazy,, greedy, stupid glutton with no will power who won't just power through feeling hungry until it goes away* and I don't have any self-control".
I'd like to try Ozempic if the chemist could get a reliable source (my doctor is willing to prescribe it, we just can't get it) to see if it makes a difference. But you are totally right about the entire problem being *desire* and not so much willpower. A lot of the advice from the naturally thin/successful dieters is like that of the doctor described on here in another comment thread who regarded patient requests for pain medication as drug-seeking nonsense: "nobody ever died from pain" so let them just suck it up, it couldn't be that bad anyway, just grit your teeth and put up with it you whiny complainers!
*Sorry, all the people in comments about this topic over time on this site, who described how they can fast and after the first X hours/days the hunger feeling just goes away if you ignore it long enough - it never goes away.
A similar but much smaller effect is when you start paying attention to what you eat. For example, eating carbs doesn't make me feel full, but proteins sometimes do. (Problem is, one needs to read the documentation carefully, because many things advertised as "protein something" actually do not contain much proteins.)
> The Blind Centrist’s Guide To Gaza argues that we should assume Israel is pursuing a reasonable military strategy in Gaza (and trying its hardest to avoid unnecessary suffering), because that’s what their political objectives, the international situation, and the media environment incentivize.
I think the problem with assuming Israel is acting rationally is that they're right next to a counterexample. Hamas clearly wasn't acting rationally. There was no possible universe where them attacking Israel would end well. Maybe the government of Israel isn't as angry as Hamas, but they're close enough that we can't just assume rationality.
Hamas's goals appear to have been to 1) get prestige for a large and surprising strike at Israel and provoke Israel into a military response that would 2) alienate Israel from Europe and the US and 3) kick off a general Arab-Israeli.war.
1 worked as far as it goes, and if Israel stops short of wrecking Hamas as an effective organization, this may pay off for Hamas in the long run. This has long been a core part of Hamas's strategy, being nastier and apparently more effective at hurting Israel than the PLO/Fatah. The problem is that Israeli leadership also knows this and is trying very hard not to leave Hamas intact enough to benefit.
2 definitely seems to be working.
3 was a pipe dream. Over the past few decades, most Arab states have mostly settled on a policy of making a public show of not liking Israel while pursuing increasingly friendly relations privately. Of the historically most intensely anti-Israeli states in the region, Syria is busy with their civil war, Egypt got bought off by the US during the Carter Administration and has stayed bought off ever since, and Saudi Arabia is more worried about Iran.
Overall, this strikes me as less "irrational" and more "it was a calculated risk, but I'm bad at math".
Hamas are theocrats who believe that dying as martyrs against the enemies of Islam is the highest good. Given their values and priorities, I think what they did was a perfectly rational way of trying to accomplish their goals.
This seems accurate
For months you've said nothing on the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza. I guessed that you thought that "Politics is the mindkiller", and decided to keep mum to avoid having your blog devolve into a cesspit of bitter arguments over the issue.
But now you come by with this flyby shooting, making up preposterous casualty numbers to make your claim. Isn't making up data to make a point the kind of thing you've been railing against for years? Why not just look up the casualty numbers on Wikipedia?
I can only assume you've been possessed by a demon. Sabby? Is that you?
Regarding your questions:
1. What are Israel's military goals?
2. What is the endgame?
3. Is it going to be worth it?
I am NOT the guy to answer these questions. I barely even read the news! But someone has to say SOMETHING, so let me try:
1. Israel's stated goals are to remove Hamas from power in Gaza and return the hostages.
2. For the endgame, you might want to start by reading Netanyahu's plan:
https://www.thejc.com/news/israel/netanyahu-reveals-israels-plan-for-day-after-gaza-war-n667bem5
Basically: Israel needs help. Someone has to swoop in and govern Gaza, because no one wants a long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza. Ideally this would be the Palestinians themselves! They just have to accept PA rule of Gaza. Failing that, a number of options have been proposed, such as a joint Arab occupation force. For all their howling, America and Europe HAVEN'T offered to be the ones peacekeeping in Gaza, which I think shows you how little they REALLY care.
3. The goal is to prevent future wars. At this point, since Hamas took power Israel has had - what? five? Six? major wars in Gaza. We know it's because of Hamas: Two million Palestinians live in Israel completely peacefully, and the situation in the west bank, though tense, is a far cry from the situation in Gaza. And much of what is going on in the west bank is due to the continued presence of Hamas (and other terrorist groups) there.
Hamas has said that they plan to continue to carry out attacks for as long as they are in power. It was leaving them in power for so long that led to this war. Leaving them in power again will lead to future wars. You can't shut your eyes to this! It was shortsightedness in 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, 20012, 2014, (and so on - 2005 is the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the other dates are all major wars) that led to this war. So yes! In hindsight, those were all horrible mistakes. At every junction, Israel should have removed Hamas from power. And that's true today as well! Removing Hamas from power is the only way to SAVE Palestinian lives.
Netanyahu has explicitly rejected PA rule in Gaza. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israelis-strongly-disapprove-of-installing-palestinian-authority-in-gaza-netanyahu/3161123
Your link doesn't work.
Netanyahu's plans calls for handing over local governance to "Local Palestinian Governance" that is not affiliated with Hamas. That's the PA.
Now, the PA doesn't want to do it. And Gazans hate the PA! So this might not work. If no one steps up, not the Palestinians, the surrounding Arab countries, the UN or the US or Europe, the default will be that the Israeli military will have to do it. That's not what anyone wants, but it might be one of those bad Nash equilibria we learned about in school.
Works for me. Another link: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240311-israel-pm-categorically-rejects-palestinian-authority-rule-in-gaza/
From an earlier period: https://www.voanews.com/a/us-plan-to-empower-palestinian-authority-in-gaza-faces-israeli-opposition/7405175.html
Netanyahu doesn't want the PA there because the PA was initially supportive of the October 7 attacks, he thinks that should be disqualifying.
The problem is there's no obvious alternative leadership that's any better.
> Israel's stated goals are to remove Hamas from power in Gaza and return the hostages.
Two goals which are non-sensical when ANDed together, and are manifestly impossible to achieve, as 8 months of failed war and tens of dead hostages - including 3 by the very bullets of the IDF - can attest to.
> The goal is to prevent future wars.
Citation needed. 10 ministers from Netanyahu's government attended a Gaza settlement conference in 28th (-ish) of January this year, a couple of days after first ICJ ruling on whether Israel is committing Genocide in Gaza concluded. I suppose it's too repetitive and trite by now to keep repeating the long string of statements from the President to the least-ranked soldier in the IDF all singing and howling about annihilation in Gaza.
> the situation in the west bank, though tense
Wow, new Russell Conjugation unlocked; Orwell would be so proud. "Tense"? Are you aware how many people were killed pre-October-7th last year? Displaced? Had their villages burned down and their animal flocks taken away from them? Had their children burned alive? Are you aware of such thing as "The Wedding of Hate"? Open book questions, Google allowed.
Describing the longest-lived military occupation and one of the very few in the 21st century that comes with settler-colonialism attached as a "Tense situation" kinda tells anyone all they need to know about the rest of your comment and how much weight you should be given.
> making up preposterous casualty numbers
Au contraire. People are still getting out new bodies from under the rubble. And Israel is claiming the war will continue another 7 months as reported by the Times of Israel. If anything, 50K is too low.
Strange. Months of uncharitable takes from Scott and now he think Paris Hilton actually signed up for cryonics and 50k died in Gaza? …Despite ample evidence that both of these things are not even close to true? I had more respect for him than just about anyone and consider the rationalist movement to be very formative for me but he is clearly in an ideological bubble. Truly did not think this was possible for him. I will not be continuing my subscription. I do appreciate what I have learned here.
> On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading.
The links are not all equally related to being in an ideological bubble. Being wrong about Gaza can't be justified with "there are a lot of links so probably a couple are wrong" unless most of the links are about political subjects like Gaza.
Doxxing is going to be an outdated concept in the next couple of years surely because we are all going to identify as who we are, to shore up our claim to be made of meat. Pre-internet you communicated face to face or on documents with your physical address at the top and name at the bottom, there's just been a brief and not terribly healthy blip where we could insult each other pseudonymously.
I have started to trade under my real name. It's painless and probably makes me a nicer person online
I can imagining e.g. providing credit card details to a web site, then doing everything online with the site certifying that it knows I'm human. Then everyone knows I'm made of meat, but they can't send a SWAT team to my address if I say something they don't like.
>22
It's likely apocryphal, but I was told that the initial British nukes came with an individual arming key to prevent them being activated by just anyone. While this theoretically comforting, the locks themselves were less secure than a bike-lock and could be turned with the end of a spoon if you didn't happen to have the key on you.
MacAskill talks a lot about something (I think an organisation) called "EV" without, as far as I can see, actually expanding it anywhere. What's "EV"?
In this context, the only EV I can think of is "Extrapolated Volition", but I agree that that is not an organisation. You probably need to be closely involved in the whole set to understand the references made.
EV the decision making process:
https://arbital.com/p/normative_extrapolated_volition/
After a little poking around on Wikipedia, I found that Giving What We Can and Center for Effective Altruism have a parent organization called Effective Ventures. Their website is ev.org.
Thanks a bunch!
> “block Russian ICBMs”, which is still impossible
Nothing can "block" (insert any country) ICBM because it was never the point. You can't "block" something that roughly just follows the gravitational vector direction really fast. The goal was to cause damage enough to prevent complex nuclear warhead detonation from executing, leading to rocket, still hitting it's target, but go boom (kinetic energy of rocket-sized meteor + maybe some primary conventional explosive trying and failing to trigger broken nuclear warhead) instead of BOOM (nuclear explosion).
38: The thing about Iran's attack is, as a datapoint about missile defense, it's probably meaningless, it was theatrics carefully orchestrated to avoid escalation and can be plausibly argued to have hit the targets it actually meant to hit.
39: First, context, Noah credits those two things in addition to the default commonsense explanation by the continent's leftward redistributionist pro-labor turn. Second, variance between the educated and uneducated and variance within the educated group are two completely different things. (Specifically - and this is very clearly Freddie's position in particular - expanding and universalizing access to education naturally eliminates inequality caused by unequal access to education and should be supported for this reason, it just can't eliminate [all the other reasons that make people unequal].)
Re #8: Does anyone know where these eggs are available for sale? Their website isn't giving me anything
The whole project of cryonics seems ethically dubious to me.
Why would/should we reanimate people who have been cryonically preserved? Is everyone entitled to a second ride on the rollercoaster, when there's an infinite line of people boarding?
I have similar thoughts about the kind of extreme life extension some people seem to be dreaming about lately, but at least there's a certain continuity at play there, and an immense gray area of just staying in good health.
When it comes to freezing old people for years, so we can bring them back from the dead, that seems like as good a Schelling Fence as any. And it feels as though crossing it comes with a cost for everyone else, that I'm not sure that we/they should have to pay. (There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.) Are we really obliged to honor the wishes of someone who has had their turn, and then died, despite such cost?
(See also Swift's original Gulliver's Travels (Part III Chapter 10) on "the Struldbruggs" who live forever, and Vonnegut's "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" and "2 B R 0 2 B" for perspectives on immortality.)
But even if it is, at least in part, a good idea, and we get it working, should we bring back everyone indiscriminately, just because they ask us to? Would we wake up a mass murderer/serial killer if he asked? How about a common narcissistic sociopath who made life miserable for family and coworkers? If not, shouldn't we have better criteria for who we want to wake up than "eccentrics who were able to pay for it once upon a time"?
I think we should just turn the freezers off, but feel free to change my mind.
Sure. And I assume this can be regulated, like everything else that has to do with dead people.
But if not, who’s going to sue if they/we fail to wake them up for some semi-plausible reason? Great grand children? Maybe.
From what I know, my great grand parents were amazing people, but they weren’t at the top of their game when they died. Bringing a child into the world is a big responsibility, but I think bringing an anachronistic geriatric patient into the world is likely to be on a whole other level. And I’m not entirely sure how hard I would fight for the privilege.
It would be fascinating to get to know them. But I, who get frustrated having to help my mother with her computer, don’t think I’d be good at bringing people who died 50, 70, 100 years ago up to speed, and supporting them (financially, socially, technologically, emotionally, etc…). I’m not sure I’d want to show them TikTok, CNN, or even the Eurovision Song Contest. I don’t want to spend years teaching mid-20th century 80-year-olds how to navigate 21st century traffic and grocery stores. I don’t want to have to explain to them that I’m an atheist, nor what happened to the inheritance they left behind, nor about the obesity epidemic or the trans rights debate. It would be interesting for a while, but then it would probably be more like a running a mental hospital (+ a serious guilt trip for feeling like that) for the rest of our presumably long time left on earth. Unless I could convince some Amish community to take them in, I guess.
So, I wouldn’t sue, but presumably someone else would.
Then there’s the question of incentives: How have they structured the incentives to make sure it’s not more lucrative to keep them frozen, than to wake them up? After all, if they wake everyone up once the technology allows for it, they’ll presumably go out of business pretty fast.
I dunno… this just seems like something people should think about a little more carefully.
Killing (not re-lifing?) people because you think it's unfair for them to live seems pretty ethically dubious to me.
Granting that frozen corpses can be brought back to life at some point in the future, I don't see how different moral standards apply. If someone is a murderer and violates the rights of others, their own rights and/or life are forfeit in turn. But being an asshole is not a good reason to kill someone and it isn't a good reason to refuse bringing them back to life either. Unless you have a more compelling argument than rich people benefit disproportionately, I don't see why I should oppose cryogenics.
Not relifing is not the same as killing, for the same reason you’re not a murderer for allowing people to die preventable deaths in the developing world (or even on the streets of your own city). There’s a difference between actively taking a life that would otherwise go on without your interference and passively allowing people to stay dead, by prioritizing to spend your own and your society’s resources differently.
Except it has nothing to do with the expense of *your* resources. Unless you are claiming that the dead have no say in how their resources are used. Which seems to contradict how society has decided to handle the issue of wills, trusts, etc.
If frozen bodies could be brought back to life, then "turning the freezers off" seems pretty analogous to murder. This is a poorly defined hypothetical, but I don't think describing as unethical an action that prevents the possibility of life where it would otherwise exist is off the mark.
Maybe you are arguing in some zero sum sense that the reliving would use up resources that would otherwise go to other people? But it's hard to find this compelling in a world heading to 10 billion people when the eccentric cryogenics popsicles make up negligible numbers.
Usually I can ingest your posts easily but this one was really full of TMI.
Someone left the cake out in the fog.
And it took so long to fake it.
The internet archive acted when it did because the physical libraries in which people would normally borrow these books from were closed during the pandemic and publishers suing over it is incredibly shameful
No. I very much wish that was a fair summary of events here, but it isn't.
The Internet Archive (IA) had been illegally distributing scans of copyrighted books for many years prior to 2020, letting users download them under what they called "Controlled Digital Lending" (CDL). Their theory was that if they used passcodes to limit who at any given moment had a digital copy of each physical book that the IA had purchased, then at some general moral level the IA was just being a lending library.
The IA was freely circulating around 3 million copyrighted books under that system, including all 127 that were named in the publishers' lawsuit, as of the end of 2019. The book publishers and some prominent authors had regularly pointed out that it flagrantly violated written copyright law, but nobody had been willing to take the IA to court over it.
Then came the IA's "National Emergency Library" program, launched in March 2020. That consisted of making each copyrighted book downloadable by up to 10,000 users at once, and the publishers decided that was the last straw. They filed their lawsuit on June 1 2020, the IA's attorneys explained to that organization's leadership that they were going to lose hard, and the IA halted the National Emergency Library thing on June 16 2020.
Now after years of discovery process, the plaintiffs have been granted summary judgment. Summary judgment, which is routinely asked for but very rarely granted, is when there is no material disagreement on the facts _and_ the relevant law is so obvious that it would waste everybody's time to hold a trial.
As the judge wrote, "IA does not dispute that it violated the Publishers’ reproduction rights, by creating copies of the Works in Suit, 17 U.S.C. § 106(1); the Publishers’ rights to prepare derivative works, by “recasting” the Publishers’ print books into ebooks, id. § 106(2); the Publishers’ distribution rights, by distributing ebook copies of the Works in Suit to IA’s users, id. § 106(3); the Publishers’ public performance rights, through the “read aloud” function on IA’s Website, id. § 106(4); and the Publishers’ display rights, by showing the Works in Suit to users through IA’s in-browser viewer, id. § 106(5).5 "
IA suggested that their program fell under "fair use", but fair-use reproduction is not a vague standard derived from court cases -- rather it is a very specific set of reproductive uses of copyrighted material which are specified in federal law. The IA's CDL lending went far beyond anything authorized by that statute, and then the "National Emergency Library" expansion of it obviously even moreso.
Meanwhile the IA's idea that limiting its reproduction of a copyrighted work makes that no different than the clear legal right of the owner of a physical book (e.g. a local library) to lend that copy of the book to someone else, was just hand-waving without any basis in law. Quoting the court's ruling: "no case or legal principle supports that notion."
And so the IA did indeed lose hard in the form of a rare summary judgment: "the [IA's] arguments are either moot or without merit." Now comes damages, which the same court will determine.
I love the IA and have used it many times, and really want it to continue existing. I devoutly wish they had not decided years ago that they deserved their own personal version of copyright law and that nobody would ever dare sue them for clearly violating the actual copyright laws. They were completely wrong on both of those things, and now they are in a whole lot of trouble that was years in the making.
This summary seems mostly correct.
Summary judgement is granted when the judge can resolve the case without resolving any disputed questions of fact. It doesn’t matter whether the law is “obvious.” The judge was going to enter a summary judgement in this case because the parties agreed on the facts but not on the law.
Damages do not come next, because the parties reached a confidential financial settlement, and agreed to a permanent injunction prohibiting the Internet Archive from lending electronic copies of plaintiffs’ books. These are subject to appeal, meaning that if the Internet Archive wins on appeal, they go away.
Oh I didn't know of the settlement and agreed injunction.
"Berenstain" is such a cursed word. My brain desperately wants to change it so it ends with "ein" and includes a bear pun, like "Bearenstein"
Re: 22
> "It would be invidious to suggest... that senior Service officers may, in difficult circumstances, act in defiance of their clear orders."
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Call emergency services or (just call it a day and) drive to the Golden Gate Bridge."
I laughed out loud. Thanx!
Re: Nuclear codes, my understanding is that while nuclear weapons do require a password to launch, and the US president does hold "nuclear codes", these are not the codes used to launch the missiles, they only serve to authenticate the president's orders to the military. The codes for the weapons themselves are held in safes near the weapons they control.
I recall hearing a story about the Soviets that implied a similar system (a general was asked what he would do if the safe jammed, and he said he would use a fireaxe, conveniently located next to the safe, to break it open), but I haven't been able to find it again.
The UK story differs in that (some) nuclear weapons were controlled by a simple lock which can easily by bypassed, whereas the US locks are deeply integrated into the weapon and designed to be almost impossible to bypass without rendering the weapon unusable. Per the BBC story, all such weapons were withdrawn from use in 1998, so presumably the UK now works similarly to the US.
Edit: The 2019 article seems confused on this point, but is primarily about whether UK weapons require codes from *the US* to launch, and conflates this with the question of whether they have any kind of coded lock at all.
Claude working on baking a cake was fascinating! I looked up Claude in the android app store but it didn't show up.
I was one of the early experimenters with chatCPT-4 (though I'll refrain from linking to my success in getting it to provide Hitler with comic material) and at that time there were all sorts of variables that you could play with.
Since then I've experimented with a few different AI apps and found Perplexity to be the best but I'm still unclear on the difference between them. Are they all coming from just 2 or 3 databases? And why are some capable of more intelligent conversation than others? Finally, are they all eaually politically correct? I engaged in an excellent conversation with Maimonides (whose corpus is a central pillar of my wheelhouse) until I asked him to challenge some aspect of ubiquitous modern culture where he feels that we've gone awry. His response was that Judaism needs more female leadership. and no matter how hard I tried to clarify that this wasn't a response to what I was asking nor was it his likely opinion, he couldn't let go of it. What the hey?
Anyway, for my money (and admittedly limited experience) I recommend Perplexity for answers and DaVinci for pictures. What say you?
Regarding link #14 and the question of God using supernatural means to influence people to the faith, I think that there's an even more fundamental omission that argues against Christianity. We can start with the propositions that 1. God has the power to break the usual laws of nature, as implied by his omnipotence and the various miracles of the Old and New Testaments, 2. that God wants as many people as possible to know of the salvific crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, as implied by the Apostles being sent out to minister to all nations; and from these propositions we can see that God could easily have used his omnipotence to immediately spread news of Christ's passion to the entire world, perhaps by appearing in the sky and directly announcing it in everyone's native tongue. And yet he didn't. Because of God not doing this thing which would have been fully within his power to do, and because of relying on the fallible means of human apostles to spread the Gospel, there are whole nations who went whole generations without the saving knowledge of Christ which God presumably wanted them to have (as shown by the very fact that he sent apostles to eventually reach them and spread the word). In the most extreme cases, we have the entire population of the New World going nearly 1500 years without knowledge of Christ, and the few remaining uncontacted tribes still going without it even to this day. If God presumably wanted to spread the evangelion to all nations, and had the ability to do so by miraculous means, then it makes no sense why the imperfect actions of human missionaries were to what he entrusted that essential program. Even if God provides some forgiveness to those who died without knowledge of Christ, based on if they would have accepted the Good News if they had the opportunity, we can still assume there is some benefit to knowing Christ within one's lifetime for God to have sent out an evangelistic mission at all, and it remains true that there is no seeming reason for this mission to be human and delayed rather than miraculous and instant.
#14: Miracles being somewhat arbitrary doesn't make them poor evidence of God's existence. It makes them poor evidence for the existence _of a God who optimizes for human-legible outcomes in ways you consider plausible_.
I'm going to have trouble conveying the extent to which your analysis there will strike theists as Not Even Wrong-- a failure to adequately model the beliefs of people who don't share your assumptions-- but let me gesture at a few points.
- There are 2000 years of discourse just within Christianity trying to theorize _why_ miracles might happen, in particular curiosity about why they're less common and/or less obvious These Days. This generally focuses on miracles _demonstrating certain things about the person of Jesus specifically_, with theological implications following from that including that there's much less need for miracles after the "main" miracle of the Resurrection. Readers will infer from the way you discuss the topic that you either don't know or don't care that any of this discussion exists.
- Given that miracles by definition represent some kind of suspension of the usual laws of nature, why would we expect them to follow laws of motivation consistently either? A miracle that's predictable in advance (and hence can be intentionally caused by creating the right conditions for it) could equally be described as magic ("I speak this incantation and fire predictably rains down") or even a natural law of its own ("a levitating force acts on popes").
- Miracles in the Christian tradition are typically seen as a validation of teaching authority, not as a way to produce outcomes, and neither fully necessary nor fully sufficient on their own in any event. This goes all the way back to the teachings of Jesus: see e.g. Luke 16:19 and Matthew 24:24.
All that being said, I have no particular opinion on whether Joseph of Cupertino's levitations were actually miracles, and I wouldn't by any means go to them as evidence of anything about Christianity.
The "average house size" statistic gets even more impressive if you use square feet for the US houses and square meters in Europe ;-)
(Just joking. Of course, @StatisticUrban uses consistent units. One can divide by ~10 to get square meters)
Scott, I doubt you'll ever see this, but if you like Samuel Hammond's 95 theses on AI, maybe you would also appreciate his writing on SB1047? "California’s Push to Regulate AI Goes too Far
" https://www.thefai.org/posts/california-s-push-to-regulate-ai-goes-too-far. From what I can tell, he seems reasonably knowledgable in both law and AI.
>But God usually sticks to the laws of nature. If He was going to violate them, you would think He would do it to save the Holocaust victims
"God either performs no miracles, or performs a miracle any time that doing otherwise would lead to the Jews being brutally oppressed and murdered *en masse*" is not a prediction of Christianity. In fact it would be evidence against Christianity if true, since it would mean that the story of Exodus, which says God allowed the Jews to endure being slaves in Egypt for 400 years before the miracles that saved them, couldn't have happened.
Your argument basically amounts to "conditional on God existing, the prior against Christianity being true would still be very high; therefore, conditional on Christianity being true, it's unlikely that this particular miracle would have happened as described", which is a complete non-sequitur even if we grant your premise.
RE: the effects of education in Latin America, if you are interested in the effects of things that are often not about themselves (education, health) in the Third World, check out the book Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.
Lots of expensive things look useless in the First World because it's hard to see what would happen if they weren't around. You have to look into the Third World to appreciate some very expensive Chesterton Fences.
Comparisons between countries are complicated. In my home country, I could probably afford a maid and hope to buy an apartment. Where I'm living now, I'll probably never own my home, I have pretty good infrastructure, I can afford to travel a lot and buy crap on Amazon, and I have 0 worries about crime.
Agreed. To me, the only reasonably objective way of comparing countries is just comparing in which direction people in aggregate (want to) migrate. Anything else will either ignore some important factor or arbitrarily compare factors that aren't objectively commensurable.
*sigh*
> 3: Philipp Markolin, who I mentioned in my lab leak post, has published a new summary of his case for a natural COVID origin, with a lot of information on how coronaviruses naturally recombine in the wild. Recommended.
Once again, these people decline to make an argument *against* a lab leak, but rather, an argument for the *plausibility* of a natural spillover. This is a fine argument to make when there is significant skew in the base rates of lab leaks vs natural spillovers. But...is there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents
There has been a "laboratory biosecurity incident" every year, sometimes more than once per year, for almost the entire past two decades. It is a highly atypical year indeed that does *not* have a lab leak event. But, you might say, that's only one half of the ratio. What about the number of pandemics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemics
Wikipedia lists 19 documented pandemics, and *55* documented laboratory biosecurity incidents. Using advanced mathematics I have determined that this is approximately 2.9 biosecurity incidents per pandemic. That is, we have more lab leaks than we do pandemics. Significantly more.
So, the base rates here militate fairly strongly towards a lab leak, without investigating any of the details of the particular incident. "No evidence for" style arguments militate towards the lab leak, not the natural spillover. Whenever I read these arguments I feel like their authors have never actually examined just how frequent lab leaks are.
This isn't proof that a lab leak occurred! All the gene analysis is meaningless, only people who think the WIV was designing a bioweapon would bet on that. The likely scenario is just that they were doing serial passage, which is exactly what you would do if you were doing GoF research for public health purposes - accelerate natural processes.
Finally I'll note one particularly silly argument, which is that our inability to find a natural ancestor somehow proves the natural spillover story. Except, no matter which theory you believe, you believe there is in fact a natural ancestor. So, our inability to find it just tells us that China isn't being cooperative, but provides precisely zero bits of information in either direction regarding the lab leak hypothesis.
These arguments are always just so, so superficially and trivially terrible. It is not worth reading, and if anything is a good litmus test for whether you can spot pseudoscientific bullshit.