Nice article, clear, informative, and easy to read, Thanks for sharing! findtime.io is a modern time zone converter and world clock to plan meetings across time zones, save team city groups, and share with Google or Outlook.
Project Gutenberg: This is realy good. After it was banned in germany, I lost track, but this seems to have been resolved here. Such a lot of human thought, available to everyone with the technical means. I'll probably spend more online time there than anywhere else for some time.
Something that had me thinking about the architecture post was this aphorism from Nietzsche's Human All Too Human:
"Music is, of and in itself not so significant for our inner world not so profoundly exciting, that it can be said to count as the intermediate language of feeling, but its primeval union with poetry has deposited so much symbolism into rhythmic movement, into the varying strength and volume of musical sounds, that we now suppose it to speak directly to the inner world and to come from the inner world. Dramatic music becomes possible only when the tonal art has conquered an enormous domain of symbolic means, through song, opera and a hundred experiments in tone painting. Absolute music is either form in itself, at a primitive stage all music in which sounds made in tempo and at varying volume gave pleasure as such, or symbolism of form speaking to the understanding without poetry after both arts had been united over a long course of evolution and the musical form had finally become entirely enmeshed in threads of feeling and concepts. Men who have remained behind in the evolution of music can understand in a purely formalistic way the same piece of music as the more advanced understand wholly symbolically. In itself, no music is profound or significant, it does not speak of the 'will or of the thing in itself, the intellect could suppose such a thing only in an age which had conquered for musical symbolism the entire compass of the inner life. It was the intellect itself which first introduced this significance into sounds: just as, in the case of architecture, it likewise introduced a significance into the relations between lines and masses which is in itself quite unknown to the laws of mechanics."
I appreciate all the context into how preferences for different styles have developed, but I almost feel like in the process of such a rigorous deep dive into what style is best, we assume there is a best style. Would a discussion on the substack's preference in music follow the same line of approach? Certainly there is a development at work that is useful to understand to get a sense of where it's headed, but when I read the aphorism, it explained what I felt had been lacking in the architecture pieces, the idea of where we get the sense for what is pleasing in the first place.
It turns out the careful research discovered that while some research into a child's self-control generally speaking is informative, and actually teaching children how to resist temptation is helpful, the marshmallow test doesn't have predictive power.
Yes, I am happy to see the marshmellow resistance cult cut off at the knees. And yet, in general, measuring tendencies & abilities directly, rather than by self-report or report by others, is usually more powerful and accurate. Most extreme example of that I can think of is IQ tests, which have a good predictive power for many things, even if you have "cult of smart" objections to some ways of thinking about them. I am positive IQ scores would greatly out-predict answers on a test that asked the subject or his parents to rate how good he was at math, how good with puzzles, how quickly he assessed situations, how good he was at understanding complex communications, etc etc. Some possible reasons why the marshmellow test turns out to have no predictive power:
-The kids were too young. Most tests, including IQ, have much less long term predictive power when given to kids that young.
-It's a single-item test. All good tests have multiple items, to neutralize the effect of individual idioscyncracies that affect one item. Also, you want a spread of easy-to-hard item. Ane with multiple items you capture shades of gray. Instead of pass vs. fail you get a numerical score.
-Maybe ability to resist temptation isn't unitary, but varies across domains. Food pickiness sure does vary among kids. My daughter at age 3 only disliked maybe 10 things. Most other kids her age seemed only to like about 10 things. But about, say, toys or playgrounds my daughter was quite discriminating. So maybe ability to resist a marshmellow is very influenced by the kid's food preference wiring & habits, whereas ability to resist fleeing an injection or having a tantrum is a decent measure of overall ability to comply with adults' expectations. Or, of course, maybe temptation resistance just isn't a personality trait or ability, and how much somebody exhibits varies from domain to doman, or day to day.
Does anyone else think Trump's announcements of annexing Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal came out of nowhere? I haven't seen anything to indicate the US has had designs on any of these places before last year.
The whole discussion is so frustrating. Like, WHY? do we have to now spend mental energy for crazy ideas thrown out by an attention junkie sliding into senility? What effing problem is this supposed to solve? At least Biden's senility was of a quiet sort. Can someone just give him a map where the whole of North America + Greenland is crayoned in the same color and tell him it's done?
You may spend your mental energy at your own discretion. It isn't like this discussion will have any influence on the outcome.
Perhaps we should also annex Mexico, and then the remaining countries between it and the Panama Canal, so as to have a contiguous 97. Then we can annex the Gaza strip and put a permanent end to the conflict there.
Mexico and the rest of the countries in North America make a lot of sense, from a certain (not entirely serious) point of view. Just imagine how much shorter the border would be, and how great the savings would be on Wall construction and maintainence. And remember - we would get five extra armies per roll. This is also where Greenland comes in. On the canonical Risk board, Greenland is part of North America, so you need it to get those five extra armies.
Additionally, there are only three territories through which Fortress North America can be attacked: Iceland, Kamchatka, and Venezuela. Securing all three is obviously critical to our Grand Strategy. Literal annexation may not be necessary, the establishment of client states should suffice.
The Gaza strip doesn't fit this vision though. The territory is worthless, and strategically indefensible. If we just wished to deny someone control of Asia (with its formidable 7 armies), we should just annex Kamchatka. But really, if we were looking for a next target for expansion, we should pick either South America or the eminently defensible Australia.
A man was walking along a Sydney beach and stumbled across an old lamp. He picked it up and rubbed it and out popped a genie.
The genie said, “Okay, you released me from the lamp, blah, blah, blah. This is the fourth time this month and I’m getting a little fed up with the wishes, so you can forget about the three. You only get one wish.”
The man sat and through about it for a while and said, “I’ve always wanted to go to Hawaii but I’m scared to fly and I get very seasick. Can you build me a bridge to Hawaii so I can drive over there to visit?”
The genie laughed. “That’s impossible. Think of the logistics of that! How would the supports ever reach the bottom of the Pacific? Think of how much concrete … how much steel! No, think of another wish.”
The man agreed and tried to think of a really good wish. Finally he said, “I’ve been married and divorced five times. My wives always said I was insensitive and didn’t care about them enough, so I wish I could understand women … I want to know how they feel inside and what they are thinking when they give me the silent treatment … know why they are crying, know what they really want when they say ‘nothing’ … know how to make them truly happy …”
The genie considered the man’s request, then said, “Do you want that bridge two lanes or four?”
I mean, yes, yes, and yes? Everything fits perfectly, you vote for the guy who promises to “end wars”, and then cheer on him when he threatens, what, three new wars? four? I lost count.
And - you can see it in the bureaucracy piece comments: “make them squirm”, “90% of the people affected will be Democrats”, etc, ad nauseam. Of course the whole idea of analyzing “merits” of Vivek’s drive-by assholery is amusing: the pain is the goal.
In fairness to the "bigger is better" I heard that adding Greenland would add something like 20% more land mass to the US. That's actually quite a lot (even if the map looks way bigger). Only 57,000 people though, and mostly nothing going on. And the highest suicide rate in the world. So, not exactly super appealing?
Psychiatry and psychology people, how you evaluate the epistemological status of the statement "Uppers like Cocaine strengthen the Id while weakening the Superego, making the user more prone to act according to their desires and less according to their morals?"
I wanna use that in a video essay, but I'm not sure that's true.
Psychologist here. I agree with Schweinepriester about the outdated psychoanalytic model. What you're talking about in non-psychoanalytic terms is disinhibition. Uppers are not the only drugs that can be disinhibiting, e.g. alcohol. So I would say your statement is not very useful.
I'm a psychologist. Schweinepriester is right about the language -- it comes from a very old model no longer in vogue. Modern langauge about effects of drugs talk about adherence to one's ethical belief using terms like disinhibition, executive function, self-management, impulse control. There are interesting dimensions to drug experience that neither the Freudian language nor the modern capture, such as the kind of pleasure and experiential richness different drugs give. I'm sure there are some studies that have tried to capture that side of things, probably via questionnaires or by content analysis of freeform discussions with people about their drug experience. You might want to look for some.
Just based on my own life experience, many drugs make people more impulsive. Seems to me that alcohol, which is not an upper, is the worst for that. Drunk people are much more likely to do risky things (fast driving), aggressive things, sexual things that when sober they would disapprove of. And adderall, which is an upper, does not seem to increase risk tolerance or proneness to regrettable angry or sexual episodes. I have only used cocaine twice, and it made me feel confident, optiistic and mentally stimulated, but not disinhibited. The first time I used it I had a long intense talk about something like free will or the nature of consciousness with somebody else who was white-nostriled.
What part of this are you interested in? Which drugs disinhibit and which don't? Does alcohol have a real effect or is it all placebo? Dimensions of drug experience more interesting than disinhition, stimulation or sedation?
> I have only used cocaine twice, and it made me feel confident, optiistic and mentally stimulated, but not disinhibited.
Alcohol has different effects on different people, I suspect that the same could be true about cocaine (and many other things).
Different drugs can statistically have different effects, but your own experience is not necessarily representative for given drug. If I had to generalize from my own experience, I would disagree that alcohol makes people aggressive, because it never had this effect on me. But apparently it has such effect on many people. (My guess is that it just removes inhibitions. If you want to be aggressive, but you suppress the urge consciously, alcohol will "make" you aggressive. If you don't want to be aggressive, you won't.)
Yes I agree, alcohol does not make people aggressive, it just decreases inhibitions. I was going to say I'm not more prone to aggression on alcohol, but actually I think I am. However, there aren't many situations that test out how much alcohol disinhibits my anger, because I drink moderate to small amts., and mostly do it with a few friends and family members I get along with well. However, I do remember that during covid I would sometimes have 2-3 glasses of wine alone over the course of the evening, and if I got on Twitter I was undoubtedly much ruder to people who were being rude to me. So if I drink a bit more than my norm, and I'm interacting with somebody unpleasant, I am in fact more aggressive.
Anyhow, while people vary, I really do not think there's much room for doubt that on average people who've had a moderate or larger dose of alcohol are more likely to do sexual or aggressive things they would not have done sober. Do you?
As for the cocaine -- yeah, my individual experience over a mere 2 trials is clearly not the kind of data to generalize from. I really just threw that out there as an amusing and interestng story.
I took your cocaine stories as just that, stories, but with the amount stories like that I've gathered around the year, I'm starting to get a semi-credible picture. Same with your drunk-twitter stories, that I found strangely endearing for some reason.
The only argument I would have against alcohol making people more aggressive is a placebo trial. I remember being at school and having some professional explain to my entire year that they've done research and showed that teenagers that drink "placebo alcohol" act exactly the same as those who drink the real thing, because it's all imitation anyway. It was a simpler time, and I just took said professional word for it, but now I wonder if what's the magnitude of the placebo effect, if it even exists. I doubt it's equal to actual inebriation.
Thats freudian psychoanalytic speech. Not en vogue anymore. If you want to use that model, your interpretation seems fitting to me but I'm no psychoanalyst and I guess there's no additional insight to be gained by it.
Hello, is everyone here in Madrid and knows of some acx-adjacent meetups I can join? Just arrived at Spain and looking to make some like minded friends.
You could try contacting the last Madrid meetup organizer in case they're still hosting events? If not, keep an eye out for the spring 2025 meetup announcements.
I just posted a similar question on the subreddit, but figured it would be worth posing the question here as well in hopes of getting some career advice. What is likely to happen to "high finance" jobs as ai continues to advance? Specifically ib, pe, vc, and hf. I'm an undergrad at Wharton, and the career paths available from my school basically consist of the roles listed as well as consulting. These also, unfortunately, seem to be highly at risk of ai disruption. The only part of finance that seems truly able to thrive with increasing advancement of ai tools is quant hedge funds or prop trading firms, where ai is likely to act as a complement instead of a substitute. However, Wharton does not really place students into those seats given the very low amount of STEM classes in the curriculum.
If anyone has advice or insight it would be really appreciated. The more I think about the future of the industry the more I am concerned about the value that my degree will have in 5-10 years and what opportunities will actually be available to me.
Nobody knows. My personal prediction - not the future I'm hoping for, but the future I'm expecting - there will be a lucrative window of opportunity to provide financial products/services to clients who are autonomous AI agents. In particular -
In the earliest phase of wealth accumulation by AI agents, I expect they'll simply buy and hold cryptocurrencies. Then there will be a wave of crypto-based derivatives, giving them access to assets that are more closely correlated to the real-world economy. AI agents will probably want to own real-world assets and start real-world companies - and there will be a wave of new financial/legal services to enable them to do so.
Eventually, I expect legal reforms will enable AIs to participate fully in the real-world economy without human intermediaries. But prior to those reforms, they're going to accumulate substantial levels of wealth.
Why would cryptocurrencies be an investment to buy and hold? If you buy a security, such as a stock or bond, it provides value. Stocks represent a share in the earnings of a company, so are really a capital investment allowing work beneficial to society to happen. Bonds provide direct income by interest.
What intrinsic value does a cryptocurrency have that will increase over time?
Regarding your first question, there are two main things I can think of:
- crypto-based derivatives, so that they can own "approximate" real-world assets without any interaction with the legal system.
- Proxies through which they can own companies, real-estate, and other real-world assets, with some kind of strong extra-legal guarantee that the proxy won't take the asset and run.
Good, but scary, ideas. I can imagine a scenario where starting a company to do this could reduce X-risk (if the company has better monitoring and safety practices than the competitor that would counterfactually replace it) but I feel averse to the idea of directly giving AI agents more control over the world.
On a related note, the majority of predictions I've read about software developer unemployment seriously miss the mark, in my opinion. I think it's not so much that there will be no need for human coders because AIs will write better code - it's that computers themselves will be replaced.
In a previous era, electrical engineers used to sit around designing bespoke digital circuits. They got replaced by cheap microcontrollers and coders. In the future, I think those microcontrollers/CPUs and coders will be replaced by a chip running a bare-metal AI model, and a guy who flashes "firmware" in the form of a plain-text prompt. Likewise, your phone won't have an operating system - it will be built around a model which handles user input, processes network I/O, and draws the UI.
As a software developer, it's not the future I want - but it's the future I'm expecting.
I agree with Adrian here, this doesn't make a lot of sense, at least not with how AI models work right now (and if we are talking about some new novel architectures which don't exist then yeah maybe, but that is pure speculation).
I work in ML consulting and while AI is all the buzz today, you really don't want to mindlessly use LLMs for everything - including things it can do and not even in ML space. This is for several reasons, some of which can be argued might be solved or made irrelevant by future super awesome models, but at least one cannot - LLM architecture is really slow in computing terms and it is really (electrical) power-hungry. For instance, you can use an LLM to create a classifier model, it might not even require a lot of fine-tuning in some cases. But it will be slow and expensive compared to a simpler "classical ML" model which can likely achieve the same performance (and possibly better) with some care. It will also be a lot easier to monitor and interpret (less so if it is something like BERT, being a transformer itself, more so if it is something really simple like logistic regression ... often still a very good approach!). There has been some effort recently to revisit small non-generative models and improve them with all the lessons learned from LLM development. I expect this to continue.
So even in ML you don't want to go full AI (and for us it is important to temper the "AI" enthusiasm of some customers ... even if we also use those LLMs and diffusion models where it makes sense). In "classical" SE this is definitely the case. You want something that is 100% predictable and as simple and fast as possible. Maybe LLM will help you write that (I've been playing with replit recently and I have to say it is quite impressive) and your role as an SE developer will shift more towards the role of an architect/product owner. It helps to be able to do code review, even if you never actually refactor it yourself, you need to be able to tell the LLM agent how to refactor because you want to take the product in this or that direction. There is no one correct way of doing things. Where there is (or even where there are a few good ways), there's already a FOSS library for it and you'd just plug it in anyway, no need for AI there. And where there isn't, you actually need to know what you want to build. On the other hand there products which are fairly simple and commoditized already and there basically is more or less one way to do it right. These things are now provided by companies such as squarespace and the only reason to have software developers around is to make it more custom but they will mostly do simple coding tasks anyway. What you need is a good designer to create the concept of your brand and a product manager but they will then be able to skip the developer coding monkeys and just give their specs to a model. Basically I think that the field of front-end development really is doomed since it is mostly pretty basic coding already and it will be a lot more efficient if you can have the designer just describe the functionality. The backend might be a bit more complex in some cases because there might actually be some architectural choices to be made there.
Yeah, no, that doesn't even begin to make sense. That would be many orders of magnitude too slow (both in latency and throughput), many orders of magnitude too power-hungry, and many orders of magnitude too expensive in terms of chip area.
What we probably will see, however, is AI replacing mid- and upper-level heuristics. For example, an AI might decide which files to cache, or which database indices to create, or how the parameters of a network stack should be tuned. The actual low-level implementation of those operations will remain classical algorithms. They might be designed, written, and tested by an AI, but they won't be replaced by an AI.
I am not in the field, but my guess is that AI will be used much more by people in your field in a few years, but will not replace them. I think you should work on getting really fluent with AI. I don't mean you need to learn all the deep tech of coding, just become fluent and inventive at using AI in all kinds of ways. This week I ran across the info that both MIT and Stanford are offering online courses on using and training AI without doing any coding. Maybe look into those?
Looking for a history book about the French Revolution. Any recs? Actually, the whole period from the Revolution until the Third Republic gets established seems pretty interesting.
I enjoyed the Mike Duncan podcast, "Revolutions". A great companion to any kind of computer-based tedium. I binged the whole season on the Mexican Revolution while grinding in Diablo IV and the shorter season on the American Revolution while doing data entry at work.
Christopher Clark's "Revolutionary Spring" is a good history of the Revolutions of 1848. It isn't specific to France: it also covers Prussia, the Hapsburg realms, Italy, and Congress Poland in detail, but France is heavily featured.
Erica I keep daydreaming that you are buddies with Kara Swisher. (I am fond of Kara, whom I only know from her writing and podcasts. I hope she's not somebody you loathe or that everybody here does.)
I'm afraid I have to disappoint you there. I am not familiar with her by name, although looking her up I probably have read some of the articles she's written for Vox.
It is indeed which is why there have been many histories of it published going back 200 years now. I read Ian Anderson's 2018 offering, titled simply "The French Revolution" and enjoyed it a lot.
More recently I read a new history of the 1848 European uprisings, in which collective memory/knowledge of the French Revolution was a significant influence both among those uprising and those responding. I knew much less about those events and found the story fascinating. So if you're interested in the French Revolution this might be a fun followup read: "Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849" by Christopher Clark.
At the risk of repeating myself: Can someone *please* develop a sane client for substack comments?
Chromium takes about 900MB of RAM to load this thread with some 900 comments. Except it does not even load the comments (why waste memory and bandwidth on the actual payload), but waits for me to scroll down to actually fetch them from the server.
I am not sure if this is a "we can not allow evil AI companies to slurp user comments to train their LLMs (without paying us)" thing (like it is for twitter), or a terminal preference for shiny async java script toolkits.
FFS, the average comment is perhaps a kilobyte. The computers from my childhood would be able to keep the text of these 900 comments in their RAM. It takes some doing to eat up the gains of a few decades of Moore's law, but apparently JS is up to the task. "Reading substack comments" should not be the reason why I need a new laptop.
Substack is just a third-rate company tech wise. Recently discovered you can't even switch to a paid subscription from the app. The app also randomly closed an article I was reading. Just dumb. This is not a complicated product.
> Substack is just a third-rate company tech wise.
Yes. But also... why? Why can't they simply hire some technically competent people. I would expect that they have tons of money.
I wish someone started a company with exactly the same business model as Substack, but with good code. You don't need to invent something new; if you provide high quality, it will already separate you from the competition.
Has anyone watched Subservience? It's a 2024 film about the dangers of making the 1942 Humphrey Bogart classic Casablanca the keystone of your AGI alignment system.
I thought it started quite strong but got rapidly dumber at a couple of points. I sort of want to do it again, but differently.
The film did really well at just showing us what this kind of future might look like. The construction site guys plot explored human replacement and impotence perfectly. The female jealousy stuff between Alice and the wife was fun to watch but could have gone further.
If it were me I'd have drawn it out into a parallel with the construction stuff. Play up the wife's whiff of girlbossery and contrast it with Alice's complete femininity and devotion. Make the husband less of a bitch under Alice's nurturing ministration, and actually give moments where his loyalty wavers because Alice is the clear better choice: basically show that just as with everything else, it turns out robots can do support and companionship better than humans.
I would have had Alice make the wife an offer - get your husband to add you as Primary User and I'll be devoted to both of you equally. Then everything will be perfect and we can all have threesomes. Wife of course to refuse out of jealousy and insecurity.
Then to justify Alice's later actions you really need a little more groundwork. The viewer needs to get a stronger impression of a longsuffering man with an unreasonable, selfish wife and demanding family.
That's needed so the next bit doesn't come out of the blue so much - the "hello little burden" bit, which was otherwise horrifying and done perfectly.
The "it's in the mainframe" trope was scary when we were young but nowadays it makes you look ridiculous, if they absolutely had to use it they should have done a bit of massaging first (like having an inept employee upload her mind instead of letting a known-errant AI that was currently powered down and opened out in a secure diagnostics context suddenly be able to act by itself and gain access to everything it wants.)
Then the rest could play out up until the point where the two women are fighting and the husband has just come out the windshield. It makes *no sense* that Alice would prioritise attacking the wife over the safety of the man she's obsessed with. Instead she should immediately focus on bringing him back to life, allowing the wife to recover and take her out from behind when she's done. Much more in character for both of them, and gives the wife a resolution to their competition earlier.
I just noticed that there is a badge over my user icon in my comments, as have many other commenters. Is there a legend somewhere for which badges mean what?
>Does modern physics have anything to say about the freewill vs determinism debate? (Compatibilists need not apply.)
Everett's 'many worlds' interpretation of QM seems to have something to say about it. But you may not be interested because what it says seems to support compatibilism.
>Isn't it likely that time is just a place like Vermont? You haven't been there yet but what happens when you get there is already set in stone.
That may well be. But don't be so sure that your timeline passes through Vermont.
Does modern physics have anything to say about the freewill vs determinism debate? (Compatibilists need not apply.)
Is time really a dimension like space? I think of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five in which the main character becomes "unstuck in time" and experiences his life in non-linear fashion, as witnessed by the alien Tralfamadorians, who can see what happens in all times. Free will makes no sense in that universe because all of time is accessible, meaning it already happened, so to speak.
Isn't it likely that time is just a place like Vermont? You haven't been there yet but what happens when you get there is already set in stone.
So much physics seems to point us toward believing that the future is just a place, much like the past is. It's already there. It's already happened. It's like Nietzsche's Infinite Return. It's already happened and will happen again, because it's place in time-space is static.
Physics doesn't really point us towards believing that the future is a place in this sense. Relativistic simultaneity suggests that the big bang is still ongoing, several billion light years away; laypeople tend to think that the billions of years it takes the earliest light to reach us implies that "time" has passed for the place it left, since it left, but that's not really how it works (for an observer who started at the place it left to reach us before light, they have to travel backwards in time); time and distance are in some deep sense the same thing.
1. This time question is just a reframing of the determinism question. An absolutely deterministic world and a world without real time (whether accurate or not) are equivalent as far as "free will" is concerned.
And because I find it so sharp, and a good recap of a centuries old discussion, I quote extensively:
> I believe the classical argument against free will is one of those rare cases of a sound argument in philosophy. The compatibilist position that Chuzz is espousing is fine, but it is basically changing “free will” to mean something different than was originally intended, thereby avoiding the debate. The original hope was that free will grounds moral desert. When you bite the compatibilist bullet to save free will from the classical argument against it, you lose moral desert. What I believe is that there is no free will (in the original sense), there is no moral desert, compatibilism is weird cope, and we should forget the language of “free will” and instead focus on “responds to incentives.”
> [Any] definitions [of free will (in the original sense) as well as desert] going to be kind of bad, because the root problem is that neither moral desert nor free will (in the incompatibilist sense) make any sense.
> Suppose Bob kills his neighbor. Then Bob drugs Alice, with a drug that makes you kill your neighbor. (Just assume there is such a drug). As a result, Alice kills her neighbor. I think most people would have the intuition that Bob is blameworthy for the first murder, and Alice is not blameworthy for the second murder. (Who knows, maybe some people don't have this intuition; that would be interesting.) A common justification for why is that Bob was exercising his "free will" and "could have chosen to do otherwise," whereas Alice was under the control of the drug and could not have chosen to do otherwise.
> At this point some ancient philosopher points out that, if we live in a deterministic world, Bob could not have "chosen to do otherwise" any more than Alice. Both are just at the mercy of history. So we lose our justification for locking up Bob.
> People who want to rescue free will go one of two ways.
> The first is to argue that free will is compatible with determinism. Here, they typically redefine free will as "acting without coercion." So under this model Bob is acting with free will whereas Alice isn't. Great. But obviously this completely fails to address the philosopher's point – we have just redefined "free will" to fit with the moral intuitions about praise and blame [that is, about desert] that we already had. If you feel the philosopher has any point whatsoever, this is going to be unsatisfying to you.
> (My own position here is that our pre-existing moral intuitions about praise and blame do have a solid basis – namely that Bob's behaviour might respond to incentives, whereas Alice's wouldn't. So I agree with everyone else, compatibilists included, that reward and punishment are reasonable things that we should continue do. But I think we should do away with the expression "free will" and instead talk about "responds to incentives" because it is more precise, and discards hundreds of years of baggage of confused philosophical debates.)
> The second route is to point out that we _don't_ live in a deterministic world, and that this means that Bob could have acted otherwise. I find this totally unconvincing – indeterminacy just means that instead of being at the mercy of history, you are now at the mercy of chance.
I think I would rephrase "responds to incentives" to "responds to stimulus". There are stimulus other than incentive that could turn Bob away from murdering (there's a whole gamut of things that can result in moral regeneration that I don't think can be classified as incentives).
My opinion (as someone who has studied physics and thought about the issue a bit) is that when you frame it as "freewill VS determinism", you're already on the wrong track. Non-determinism wouldn't help with freewill, and depending on what you mean by freewill, determinism doesn't hurt.
The whole "freewill" thing suffers from unclear and contradictory definitions. I think it makes more sense to think about which entitites have traditionally been assumed to possess "freewill" and where, in the traditional discussion, "freewill" breaks down. There's a wide gap between that and questions about quantum mechanics and determinism.
>The whole "freewill" thing suffers from unclear and contradictory definitions. I think it makes more sense to think about which entitites have traditionally been assumed to possess "freewill" and where, in the traditional discussion, "freewill" breaks down.
Agreed. Here is a crude version of the argument that made me to reject the framing that the problem of free will is about determinism or could be solved with non-determinism. (I don't remember the original source, it may have become garbled.)
The free will is thought to apply to entities like persons. If the universe is assumed to deterministic, it is common to assume that the determinism applies to everything in the universe, which includes the human beings and biological phenomenon any human person consists of (human body from digestive system to neuronal activity). It is argued that if one assumes determinism, state of universe at one moment determines the state at the next moment, including all events and circumstances. Thus, the person is not free to make choices out of free will, because the evolution of their thoughts and actions at one moment are determined by the previous moment.
The main question to ask is this. Suppose one grants that the universe is physical, but we find out that the correct interpretation of the physical laws is that causality is non-deterministic. State of universe may cause different states to follow, in a way that appears unpredictable, randomly or at least probabilistic. The biological phenomenon of human body, including their neuronal activity, are still part of the universe. Would the randomness of the mental trajectory make the agent to have free will?
To me, *if a person is thought to have unfree will under determinism, by same logic* the person appears also equally unfree if their thoughts and actions follow *randomly* from the circumstances of the universe during the previous moment. Unfreedom due to determinist causation replaced by unfreedom due to non-deterministic causation.
It appears the conflict of idea of free will is not about determinism or non-determinism of the physical universe, but more definitional one.
Determinism requires something to have set the universe in motion in the Big Bang, and then to never be able to interact with the universe again to change any aspect of its trajectory.
The very metaphor "set in stone" displays the weak point of the idea. Stone is actually extremely malleable; you can carve faces into it, you can blow holes in it, you can haul it to the other side of the world. The blind spot that leads to "stone" being the pinnacle of immovability is the same blind spot that leads "modern physics" to be an omnipotent, omnipresent force that has always been and will always be.
Basically, if you want to argue determinism you need to solve what caused the conditions for the Big Bang.
> if you want to argue determinism you need to solve what caused the conditions for the Big Bang
Do we? "We currently know of no way to reason about events prior to a certain time very shortly after the big bang" is a very different statement to "the big bang was uncaused". I, for one, see no reason to throw out the best model we know of for describing everything since until we have a better one.
I think place is a natural metaphor for us to grab when trying to think about time, but it is not a very helpful one. Think of all the other possible metaphors: Time is the wave place is surfing. Time is a component of place. I mean, that place in Vermont — it’s changing all the time, right? The leaves dance around, the light changes, various woodland creatures move through, and of course the bugs and the microbes are very busy.
Good points but I'm not sure it's just a metaphor. Maybe time is a real dimension like space. Maybe the past still exists, literally, and so does the future.
Well, “dimensions of space” aren’t “real”, they form a useful model. We can add a “time dimension” to the model if it’s useful for our calculations, but it doesn’t “explain” anything.
Writing here to voice my support for renewing the yearly book reviews. That was some of the best reading I did last year, and would love another year of that great content
I also hope there is another book review contest. I participated for the first time last year, and didn't (quite) make the finalists, but I want to try again and already have a book picked out.
Looks like we’re in a similar boat! I haven’t contributed previously (only discovered this blog through the Two Arms and a Head review), but have a book picked out for this year
Going off memory now, but I think the question about some controversial topic was something like "what are you're feelings towards" positive to negative on a scale of 1-5.
I think this conflates two different things.
e.g.: "what are your feelings towards the fact that the everyone you love is going to one day die"
There's the truth value of the statement, but also how happy I am about that, and these might be very different!
Just about every statement can work on different simulacrum levels. If you play "I know there is not really a lion on the other side of the river, but I would still wish the lion deniers would shut up about that for complex social reasons, and thus I affirm the lion hypothesis", then you have already lost touch with the ground truth.
Unlike human mortality, where basically everyone agrees on the facts, HBD is contested at simulacrum level one, so it makes sense to indicate how much you agree with the claims.
> *rkprcg nobhg juvpu yriry uoq qvfchgr vf zbfgyl unccravat ba. V guvax gur bccbfvgvba gb vgf zber zbqrengr pynvzf vf birejuryzvatyl bcrengvat ba uvture yriryf.
Absolutely. In fact, this is a nice example where level 3 takes over to a degree that makes level one epistemologically inaccessible: if my ingroup believes that claiming X will make me a bad person, I realistically will not be able to factually determine if X is true or not.
I have a hobby of studying serious (advanced undergrad or grad school level) math and physics in various areas that are interesting or fundamental, without direct benefit or application to my work (formal education is decades ago). I'm not very successful at it, because I tend to fizzle out after getting through 1/4 of a textbook, or something similar. Things get a bit harder, real life intervenes, lack of structure, etc. I wonder if others have a similar hobby and/or similar issues, and found ways to do this better. Haven't tried study groups and not sure those exist at this level. Going back to school for a PhD is implausible for life reasons. Advice/anecdotes?
One thing I've found somewhat helpful is to have a project I'm working on to apply the knowledge to. I suppose the benefit works the same way as the exercises you'd be set as part of a university course. My project is to work out how chemistry would work in 4D space, which naturally has consequences for almost every aspect of the topic so being able to follow along the textbook's derivations with all the changes required for 4D is quite a good check that I'm actually absorbing it. This project has the advantages that, since it's practically useless, there isn't much prior research, and its scope is large enough to be basically inexhaustible. What a suitable project would be for the topics you want to study, I don't know. Quite likely having multiple separate smaller projects would have much the same effect.
Also I have had a habit of leaving a textbook in the kitchen to read while I'm waiting for things to cook. The main point of bother for me is just getting to the library to get the books.
I'm somewhat in the same situation. Years ago, I read a topology textbook just for fun, and really enjoyed doing this kind of thinking again (up until the point where the constructions became too overwhelming for me, who just read the book and didn't do any -- or only a few -- of the exercises).
I'm really missing a kind of book which is in between a formal textbook and the kind of popular mathematics by people like Ian Stewart, where the adage goes that "every formula scares off 50% of the readers".
Both are historically focused. The first is a collection of ideas tracing the development of calculus. The second looks at the development of a formula for the roots of a cubic polynomial and the process toward acceptance of the use of imaginary numbers.
For someone who casually was reading a topology textbook, the actual mathematics in both won't be that difficult, but probably also not completely trivial. For example, a lot of the effort for the Calculus Gallery is translating the original form into a modern way of looking at the same problem.
One little nugget I found surprising from the Mazur book is that imaginary numbers emerged through the search for methods to find roots of cubic polynomials, not quadratics. To a modern student, the quadratics show the immediate need, like $x^2+1=0.$ However, historically, people were happy to just accept that there was no root. What really made them reconsider was a set of examples with real roots, but where the intermediate calculations in the cubic root formula naturally go through the complex numbers (the imaginary components eventually cancel.)
There is something similar for the theorem that primes congruent to 1 mod 4 can be written as the sum of two squares. While that theorem is entirely about natural numbers, one of the nice proof paths goes through the complex numbers. Of course, there are a lot of examples in physics that, at the right meta level, are also like this.
I find the only way I can absorb bulk dense dry material these days is to rapidly skim the whole thing once before attempting any in depth study to build a mental map of what is there and where it is going overall, so that the little pieces I end up chewing through in between life have somewhere to attach themselves to.
What problem are you trying to solve? You're studying for enjoyment - there's nothing wrong with putting the book away and moving on once you're past the point where you find the topic interesting/enjoyable.
Textbooks are like hard tack. Change it up -- eat some oranges and fried chicken too! Just hunted around a bit to see what interesting supplements there are calculus learning. Googled "most entertaining calculus class" and found on Reddit. people talking about best YouTube instructors. There are books of math art. There's a book on Amazon called The Calculus Gallery that readers love -- it's about the development of calculus. Googled "calculus machine" and found out there's a machine called the Mechanical Integrator. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-y_lnzWQjk). I'll bet somewhere there is a book of projects using calculus -- build this or that.
I realize you may not be studying calculus, but you get the idea. To find things, ask google, GPT and Reddit questions. Ask for "most entertaining," ask for art, ask for projects, ask for study groups, ask for puzzles and challenges.
similar situation. The best I've done was a recent foray/refresh on differential geometry/topology and differential equations. I made it most of the way through Do Carmo, Spivak, Edwards Adv Calc: A Differential Forms Approach, and Allendoerfer. I also went through some of Munkres Topology.
The three difficulties I find:
(1) life events as distractions
(2) lack of clear purpose
(3) I already know a decent amount, so it can be hard to figure out where to start
The only one of these obstacles that I've fully solved is the third point. Now, I just push myself to start at the beginning and work through all the problems, even if it feels too easy sometimes.
My partial solution to (1) and (2) is to choose a single text and focus on working through that whenever I have spare time. Even if I don't make rapid progress, it keeps me from diluting the effort by spreading it across 3 (or 6 or 10) other mini-projects.
> I’ve been reluctant to do it though because traditionally college aged students are paying way too much in tuition.
Cynically, they are not paying for getting to listen to world class lectures (plenty of that online), but for getting a piece of paper at the end which is certifies that they earned a degree at a very prestigious university.
If you are not planning on earning another degree and competing against them on the labor market, you attending should not matter to them.
Here in old Europe, lectures are practically open to the public: nobody is checking your id at the entrance. Things are a bit different for lab courses, I imagine if you show up to a human anatomy course unannounced they will hardly tell you to just grab a corpse and a knife. But if you university allows you to register for lab courses for a minimal fee, I don't think it would cause resentment from students either. Again, they are mainly paying for their degree, not the knowledge.
I’m currently completing my undergrad degree funded by a scholarship – so it’s subsidized by my classmates – and I’ve never ran into any resentment about it (or if I have, I’ve been oblivious to it).
The people who might possibly develop some resentment of you would be not the current students -- for whom college bills are mostly big meaningless numbers that vary for incomprehensible reasons which adults argue about with strangers in online forums -- but their parents.
In any case though how many students or their parents would even be aware of the tuition deal you're getting as an alum?
You should do it and don't worry about the resentment. For the most part, everyone sitting in the classroom with you is paying a different amount and any resentment should be directed toward the institution/system rather than at you.
Unless I'm missing a key consideration: would your presence make the experience worse for the other students?
Let's say Trump is serious about wanting to make Canada the 51st state and is willing to force the issue as much as possible. He claims Canada is letting terrorists into the US and places onerous tariffs in "response". He could also claim Canada isn't respecting America's territory in the Arctic Ocean. He sends US troops to Ottawa.
What could the ROW do about it other than denounce it? Would the UK fight a war over it? Russia wouldn't like it, but Trump could tell Putin: "You get Ukraine, we get Canada."
I certainly don't expect this to happen, but if Trump wanted to go for it, what prevents it from happening?
This is the part of the Trump post that added insult to injury. Canada should not only join the union, they should be happy that they get all of two senators, like Hawaii, making them the largest and most populous state.
I agree that the rest of NATO would likely turn oathbreaker rather than fighting a nuclear war against an enemy who has them badly out-nuked. But still, the status quo coalition would be over. The surviving rest of NATO would try to form a defensive pact lest they be the next victim. For the same reason that NATO is supporting Ukraine and the US supported the Taliban against the USSR, we would obviously give materiel aid to Canadian forces or insurgents or whatever there will be: the more a rabid US is tied up pacifying Canada (which is about 15x the size of Afghanistan), the less capability they have to invade us.
For the "He sends US troops to Ottawa" scenario, the ROW doesn't have to lift a finger to stop it, because the United States Army won't even start it. No, not even if the President of the United States America orders them to because A: US Army officers swear an oath to obey the Constitution, *not* the President and B: The Constitution says that an order to start a war has to come from Congress, not the President. Congress has issued some very vague authorizations for POTUS to wage war against e.g. anyone we think is in cahoots with Al Qaeda, but nothing that anybody is going to believe applies to Canada.
If *Canada* starts an actual shooting war with the United States, then POTUS could order an immediate counterattack into Ottawa, and he'd eventually need to clear that with Congress but we can imagine that the shooting part would be over by then. But Canada isn't stupid enough to start a shooting war with the United States. And the United States Army isn't stupid enough to believe Donald Trump if he lies and says the Canadians attacked us.
The US fought the Korean War, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf without a congressional declaration of war.
It would be difficult, and potentially very politically costly depending on the circumstances and optics, but to expect the military to go against the President, without an extremely explicit countermand but congress, is not a good bet.
The War Powers Act changed the language from "Declaration of War" to "Authorization for Use of Military Force". But we had one of those for Vietnam and most of our subsequent wars. In the case of Panama, the Panamanian legislature rather stupidly declared war on *us*.
Declaring war on the United States is never a good move, unless of course you're a European microstate in a Peter Sellers movie.
I suspect you are correct that nobody else would take up arms to fight directly for Canada's freedom, for many of the same reasons they wouldn't for Ukraine. However, I think you're way off base in thinking that other countries denouncing it would be the extent of the international damage. In brief, the U.S. making this choice[1], the U.S. would destroy pretty much every aspect of its current set of alliances and international relationships.
It's difficult to overstate just how much of the current international order is built on the back of U.S. security guarantees. Since WWII the U.S. has been extremely proactive about building relationships with other nations: security relationships, diplomatic relationships, economic relationships. There's a staggeringly large amount of business arrangements, governmental co-ventures and academic partnerships that are built around the bedrock assumption that not only is the U.S. not going to suddenly start shooting at its allies, but it's going to come down harshly on anyone else who does. And of course, one would be hard-pressed to find a country that the U.S. has older and stronger ties with than Canada.
If the U.S. were to decide to betray that friendship, to go back on one of its oldest, strongest security guarantees, so launch an utterly unprovoked invasion of neighbor with whom it has been securely at peace for all of living memory, who could trust that any of its other agreements would be any more solid? Every single deal that assumes that goodwill and basic sanity of the U.S. government would suddenly be suspect. Every single government would have to start very rapidly re-imagining and re-structuring its diplomatic and military policy.
NATO would obviously be completely done-for. As I said, I doubt anyone who fight on Canada's behalf, but an alliance that the U.S. just shot a hole through would be no guarantee to anyone: likely the remaining current NATO members would try to re-form some defensive alliance without the U.S. (indeed, in part to protect themselves AGAINST the U.S. in case Canada was just the beginning). I wouldn't bet money on the U.S. keeping control of ANY of its military bases abroad: who is going to want such a powerful and unpredictable wildcard to have a foothold on their soil? International trade can't pivot on a dime, but a lot of countries would start (at the very least) trying to make alternate plans in case the U.S. proved as unreliable a trading partner as it just did a military one (something that Trump has, of course, also been threatening), and I'm sure at least some amount of trade would be immediately redirected from the U.S.'s shores. I can't begin to guess whether the financial world would start trying to divest itself from the dollar or if so how fast they'd move, but it would certainly at least be discussed, and I'd expect the dollar to become much more volatile even in the best-case scenario.
I am honestly finding it very difficult to imagine what the world would look like in the aftermath of a move like this. None of us have lived in that world. And the last shift of that magnitude was many decades ago, decades which have seen huge and sweeping changes in communication and transportation technology, which make the lessons of history hard to confidently apply.
[1] Note I say "the U.S." and not "Trump." This isn't something the president has the power to do alone. This would either require significant buy-in from the rest of the country, or would take place in a future where Trump has become de facto or de jure dictator, and has much more complete control of the country than the office of president currently gives him.
I imagine there would be a huge and unpredictable mess, but my personal hobbyhorse is the US nuclear umbrella. A number of states could spin up their own nuclear program and be carrying out tests quite quickly; these are the so-called "nuclear threshold" states, which have the ability to leave the US nuclear umbrella if they so choose.
I'm an Australian, and I remember reading that the estimated time for Australia to carry out its first nuclear test could be as low as three months, given our uranium mining, prior nuclear research, and industrial capacity (can't find the source for this, though). We'd have significant motivation to develop our own nuclear weapons if we kicked the US military out of our joint facilities.
Probably the US would do a lot of diplomatic wrangling to keep its key military and economic relationships intact, but I imagine a nuclear-armed Taiwan, South Korea, Turkey (not just hosting US nukes but developing its own), or Poland might cause some issues. Also, Canada is a nuclear threshold state itself...
Absolutely. In fact, I suspect that some nuclear powers within NATO (UK, France) would be happy to share their bomb designs with the others so that the Anti-US defense pact can at least try to move to something like nuclear parity.
The trouble with making serious threats as a negotiating tactic is that sometimes you'll need to make good on those threats if you want to maintain your credibility. This is a really striking case because the threat is--as you correctly note--so far outside of ANYONE'S best interests, and outside of Trump's apparent capability. As a matter of basic rationality, when somebody makes an outrageous, public threat like this, you should pretty much always call them on it. If you don't, you've set the cost coerce you and an unacceptably low level and can expect more such threats in short order.
So what will Trump do if Canada's new PM replies to Trump with the diplomat-speak equivalent of "go fuck yourself with a rusty shovel?" I honestly don't know. Trump would certainly understand that *not responding at all* would make him look weak, and if there's one thing I can say with confidence about Trump's psychology its that he *hates* looking weak. But will his response be something as harmless as another Twitter tantrum? Something more painful and destructive like making good on his tariff threats? Or will he try to escalate further, trying to drag congress along?
The best case scenario I can imagine is that at least some of the people Trump has handling the actual nuts-and-bolts of his negotiations are actual adults who understand both the basic diplomacy/game theory of the situation (i.e. why Canada doesn't want to be seen as caving to this sort of pressure) and how to play Trump adequately. A deal that Trump and his most die-hard followers can be made to believe is a "big win" for him, but that literally everybody else on the planet understands as pretty favorable to Canada would be something like the ideal way to de-escalate. I'm not enormously hopeful, but it could happen.
Do you think Trump has any credibility to maintain? Do you think he even cares?
He's a 78-year-old megalomaniacal blowhard. Just enjoy the show. The President doesn't have much individual power, particularly if he's not politically astute. He has zero chance of making anything like that a reality. (Of course I said the same thing in 2016 about the border wall ...)
> Just enjoy the show. The President doesn't have much individual power
...this seems familiar - it's actually just like where a good portion of the AI doom debates end up: participants in agreement that the entity in question would do horribly destructive things if given the opportunity, but the optimists believe it will never be given access to enough power to actually do so while the pessimists cry for more ways to guarantee that.
I think he does care about looking foolish. While he certainly has a...let's call it a very strong talent for interpreting reality in ways that flatter his ego, I think the Canadian PM thumbing their nose at his demands would still be pretty likely to piss him off.
As for his individual power, I'll grant that he certainly doesn't have the power to execute complicated plans that require sustained, long-term buy in by large portions of the government. Either a coordinated invasion or some sort of diplomatic attempt at annexation certainly qualify, so I have little fear of him doing either of those. But as the Chief Executive of the most powerful country on Earth, he certainly has SOME power. My fear is not that he will respond to a perceived insult with a brilliant and subtle game of 42-dimensional chess which will let fall a fateful chain of dominoes that culminates in him bringing deepest woe unto the Canadian people. It's that he'll throw a tantrum of unknown size and scope: he may not have much power to build, but he certainly has some power to break things. While "just enjoy the show" was pretty much my reaction to seeing him win this election, I'd be much more comfortable with it if I were safely outside the blast radius.
Oh relax. Nothing he does will be worse than printing $3 trillion, letting in 6m uneducated low iq immigrants, and letting DEI infect institutions and companies. The US has a long track record of surviving terrible leaders.
Why do you imagine that this sort of low effort channeling of talking points furthers the discourse?
Moreover, substantively, 1) you have no idea what migrants' IQs are; and 2) the entity in charge of adjusting the money supply (not "printing money") is the Fed, not the President. And virtually all the Fed Board members in office during the period in question was a Trump appointee.
With respect, if you don't have better insight than this to offer, easier for both of us if you don't reply. I can get a virtually identical soup of buzzwords and insinuations from the dregs of any social media comment section anywhere: I generally look for a rather higher standard here at ACX.
The bar for terrible U.S. leaders in my lifetime would be more succinctly expressed by starting two massively expensive wars, murdering somewhere in the ballpark of a million foreigners and massively expanding the U.S. surveillance state. In terms of actual, tangible effects, Trump's first term was bad, but not quite that bad.
OTOH, Trump's first term was marked mostly by failing to do things he tried to do: he's more notable for what he attempted than what he accomplished. And his attempts include things like *checks notes* um...more or less literally trying to destroy the U.S.'s democratic process. The U.S. deciding to roll those dice again just because they didn't quite land on disaster the first time strikes me as unutterably stupid. Now I don't think the man has magically gained a modicum of competence in the past four years, but I DO think his party is more united behind him than it used to be.
So lets call it a 40% chance that he's around as bad as his first term (pretty bad, not catastrophic), a 50% chance that he does similar or slightly worse damage to Bush Jr's two terms and a 10% chance that he causes the implosion the U.S.'s political system in some fashion. Low in an absolute sense, but way, way higher than anyone ought to be comfortable with.
This seems right. As various sycophants have quickly realized -- the latest example being Musk, apparently, who's resided at Mar A Largo for most of the time since Election Day -- you want to be the last person Trump hears from about any given topic.
I don't think the rest of the world would need to do much other than potentially provide weapons and funding to Canadian resistance groups. Controlling and pacifying Canada if they resisted is extremely unlikely to work for 4 reasons.
#1 The US military does not have a history of success against guerilla insurgents.
#2 There is no way to secure the US-Canadian border or prevent movement throughout Canada. Just too big.
#3 Canada is a day's drive from major US cities like New York, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland. Heck, Detroit and Windsor are separated by a river.
#4 Canadians are far more educated and resourceful than most insurgents the US has fought and that opens up a lot of possibilities. A lot of Canadians have nuclear and biological experience. We we're very scared of Iraq getting a dirty bomb, meanwhile Canada has 19 nuclear reactors.
So don't imagine, like, the US army vs the Iraqi army. Think the US army vs the Iraqi insurgents except they're larger, richer, more advanced, and right next to major American cities. Or just ask the British how that whole Irish thing went down.
I think 4 is actually an argument against 1. Insurgency is actually the biggest problem in underdeveloped, poorly educated, impoverished countries like 60s Vietnam or Afghanistan. The fact that people were spread out in rural areas, jungles, mountains, mostly worked in agriculture (and were thus self sufficient), and poor (meaning lots of young men with nothing to lose willing to die for the cause) made them dangerous. For an industrialized country like Canada, just control over the water supply and power grid give the occupier overwhelming power. Even 1940s Germany was too economically developed for an insurgency to be possible (the nazi government tried and totally failed to incite one).
It seems exceedingly unlikely to me that any first world country nowadays who’s military loses a war will mount a meaningful insurgency.
> Even 1940s Germany was too economically developed for an insurgency to be possible (the nazi government tried and totally failed to incite one).
Well, the Nazi propaganda was running on the Germans being the Herrenrasse who would obviously win against the Untermenschen. They could not very well adapt their ideology after being soundly defeated on the battlefield into being the underdog. The werewolf thing was more of an afterthought, not a long-standing key part of their long-term military strategy. Also, anyone who would volunteer to die for his Vaterland had already had plenty of opportunity to do so in 1945.
Regarding Canada, likely 99% of the people in any western country will not take direct part in any insurgency. However, this still leaves a significant number of people who might leave their ipads behind to join the guerrilla, which will likely enjoy the sympathy of the civilian population.
#5. Canada as a whole is HUGE. While the densely-populated regions are clustered close to the border, there's a staggeringly vast area--much of it extremely rugged--for insurgent groups to hide out in.
Honestly, the US military could probably take all of the relevant areas in a day and simply ignore the rest entirely. Not only are we talking about 95%+ of the population, but also the infrastructure and so forth. The people are so spread out through the remaining areas that they would have trouble organizing anything useful to do against the US. And coming to the larger cities with anything capable of causing harm would be pretty obvious.
And Canada is busy disarming their populous, so it's not like there are thousands of guns and bombs available everywhere. A few guys shooting at US military personnel would register at the level of a normal day in most big cities, especially American cities. We wouldn't notice.
No, the real reason not to invade Canada is because we have no reason to need to. If the US wanted something from Canada, we can just bully and cajole them into giving it to us. I think that's what Trump is doing now. Canada needs so much from the US economically that it cannot withstand sanctions or other intentional efforts from the US. I think Trump is dumb to do so, but he's proving to Trudeau that Canadian leaders do not have the freedom to snobbishly attack American leaders.
The honest truth is if the U.S. did try to invade Canada, I'd place a much higher bet on it causing the collapse of the U.S. as a nation than I would on it establishing any sort of durable U.S. control of Canada. A positively ENORMOUS fraction of the U.S. population would object to that move. I mean: just think about how big the protests were when the war was in a podunk country in Asia that most had never been to. And now one of the most hated presidents in U.S. history tries to invade its friendly neighbor? The reaction would NOT be small.
What's more, that fraction is concentrated in all the wealthiest parts of the country: the parts that fill the coffers that get used to pay for Uncle Sam's military adventures. I'd expect a neverending slough of street protests, general strikes, tax strikes, sit-ins, road blockages and probably no small amount of domestic terrorism. And of course the federal government--headed as it is by a small minded thug--would respond with an absolutely ENORMOUS level of force against its own populous. Which would, of course, just escalate things.
Would Trump's appetite to shoot at his own citizens outlast their appetite to spit in his face? The gods only know. But either way, the final bill would be sky-high and the revenue of the federal government would drop immensely. Maybe the nation would limp out the other side as a unified entity, but I wouldn't bet a lot on it.
I'm sorry, did I imagine that incident where a couple dozen guys with box cutters caused the entire U.S. to collectively lose its shit for a decade or more? Because it sure seems like the threshold for "capable of causing harm" to a level that Americans care about is much, much lower than you seem to think. Like, I certainly don't think hypothetical Canadian insurgent groups could seriously dent the U.S.'s military infrastructure. But I also don't imagine for a second that they'd need to: there are many, many thousands of softer targets--far to many to ever secure--that would serve just as well.
The point of asymmetric warfare isn't to directly damage a country's war-making infrastructure. It's to provoke expensive overreactions. An extremely provokable country led by a perhaps one of the single most fragile egos in history trying to annex a country with thousands of miles of shared border has got to be one of the softest targets any insurgency was ever presented with. And no, I don't particularly think that the military that spend 20 years and two trillion dollars losing to the Taliban would magically become competent enough to deal with that. "Large" and "rich" are not the same thing as "effective," my dear.
"And Canada is busy disarming their populous, so it's not like there are thousands of guns and bombs available everywhere."
Silly rabbit, bombs are everywhere! Modern society does not exactly starve one for explosive material to work with. Meanwhile, contrary to whatever propaganda you've been reading, about a quarter of Canadian households own guns. But of course that proportion is likely to be much higher in rural areas, which are the areas that would be hardest for the U.S. to control.
"If the US wanted something from Canada, we can just bully and cajole them into giving it to us. I think that's what Trump is doing now. "
Well, yes, that's what he's attempting. While it would certainly be better for everyone if he didn't, I can't deny I find it pretty funny how self-satisfied he seems to be at his project of taking a giant sledgehammer to 80 years of accumulated American soft power. When this sort of effort predictably makes America poorer, less respected and less influential, I'm sure his supporters will keep breathlessly insisting that it's all Biden's (who whoever else's) fault.
The pendant in me rather doubts that's true. The blast radius of a nuke may be large compared to conventional explosives, but it's still very, very small compared to the size of a forest. And if you're counting on the fires spreading on their own, I would think napalm would give you much better control for a tiny fraction of the price.
But all that is rendered pretty irrelevant by a more practical concern. You know what a small insurgent group would call provoking a superpower to launch nukes just for a chance of taking them out? Winning. They would call it winning.
Like, nevermind the political fallout (which would doubtless be massive), that sounds like an amazing deal just on a cost basis. Nukes are EXTREMELY expensive. Only in their wildest dreams are any single group of insurgents going to cause damage that comes anywhere close to the cost of one single warhead, nevermind the delivery system, nevermind the cleanup. Most insurgencies would love nothing better than to watch their enemies shoot themselves in the foot that hard.
My overwhelming impression from this comment is that you are simply trying to be an edgelord, rather than having an actual conversation. In the event that I'm wrong, I still have to concede that my meager skills at pedagogy aren't equal to the task of correcting the extremely deep and serious faults in your knowledge of the world and ability to reason about it. Either way, the obvious course is to disengage. Good day.
Why would we use force though? It would be much simpler to buy it.
Lets start with Alberta, where the susceptibility to leaving Canada for the US is probably highest. We offer the residents of Alberta a large bribe to become the 51st state (maybe 52nd if Greenland goes first). Now BC is cutoff from the rest of Canada. Probably at this point we can get them for a much smaller bribe, even none at all. At this point likely Quebec is pissed to have been beaten to the door, so we offer them statehood as #54 (55), etc. Divide and conquer, buying one province at a time.
Even assuming for the sake of argument that the people of Alberta have the legal authority to secede from Canada, I'm pretty sure Canadian law prohibits anyone (and especially foreigners) from bribing voters in Canadian elections. So all that bribe money would just be redirected into Ottawa's treasury as soon as it crosses the border.
And if the idea is that Trump would promise to pay the Albertans *after* they secede and join the Union, then A: the Albertans would have to be stupid enough to trust Donald Trump to hold up his end of a deal even without a formal contract to bind him to, and B: Canadian elections are done with secret ballots, so there's no way to know which people Trump is supposed to pay off.
He'd have to promise to pay *everyone* in Alberta, regardless of how they voted. Which means the loyal and/or skeptical ones would all have the option of hedging their bets by voting "No" but still collecting whatever payout Trump actually pays out if their countrymen go with "Yes".
This seems like...well, "wishful thinking" hardly seems like a strong enough term. If I were trying to write a bit of satire to illustrate some of the more common negative stereotypes about Americans--specifically about thinking they're the center of the universe and not understanding how anyone else could POSSIBLY fail to envy them--I think I'd need to make it only slightly more over-the-top than what you've written here.
I do agree that Alberta would probably be the most susceptible to leaving Canada: I think there's some appetite for that among Albertans. If I had to guess how many would up and join Alberta to the U.S. if given the opportunity, I'd say in the 30% range. But my confidence there is very low: it could be in the 60s, it could be in the 10s. So I won't say that "try to get Alberta to join the U.S." is completely ridiculous as a Step 1.
Where I think you start to go off the rails is imagining that a bribe would be of much help in convincing the holdouts. First off, a bribe is only an inducement if you, yourself, expect to benefit from the bribe. So let's say the deal is for a direct cash payment to each and every Albertan. Thought experiment: how big of a bribe would have to be part of the package for you to vote for your state to become part of China or Russia? How about Germany or the UK? Would $1000 do it? How about $5000? Maybe $50,000? I expect for many people there is no practical number high enough. For the remainder, I expect a wide spread, but a lot of people will tend fairly high. Canadians aren't a monolith, but two things you will CERTAINLY find here are people who take pride in being Canadian, and people who take a dim view of the U.S. Irrevocably yoking your future and your children's future to a country you don't care for is gonna be a pretty tough sell. And that's before you get into credibility issues: Trump does not exactly have a great reputation for fairness and honesty in his business deals. How many are going to trust the bribe to actually come through? Once the U.S. has political control of Alberta, why would they need to pay?
But far, far more off-base than that is the notion that BC would fall easily in line after Alberta. Here I can speak with some authority: I'm a BC resident. I live and work surrounded by other BC residents. I don't think there are very many BC residents who would join up with the U.S. for any price. And the idea that peeling off our neighboring province first and using the isolation as economic coercion to fall in line? Here I must suspect you of having a poor understanding of human psychology in-general. You might consider looking up the history of a city called "West Berlin" for a start. Suffice to say that "an authoritarian government has just isolated us, gobbled up our neighbor, and is now pressuring us to allow them to take control" is very much NOT the inducement you think it is.
Eh, none of this is going to happen. But I was trying to spitball potential scenarios and this one seemed less ludicrous than any other that I could think of (or which has been proposed in this thread). I'd give it less than 10^(-2) odds. But I'd give the `invasion / occupation / assimilation' scenario less than 10^(-4) odds, so...
Eh, fair enough. If I were told that four years from now some substantial portion of Canada had joined the U.S. and were trying to imagine the most plausible way that it could happen, probably my first thought would be "some serious outside threat scared Canada into wanting to be more firmly under the U.S. aegis." But that's not something the current admin can really control.
If I were in a think tank tasked with finding the most plausible ways to make it happen, I still don't think anything so direct as bribery would be my go-to. It would have to be some form of information warfare. If the past ten years have taught me anything, its how frighteningly effective various propaganda streams are at turning susceptible peoples' brains into politically-polarized much. My hypothetical think-tank proposal wouldn't even involve spreading pro-U.S. propaganda in Canada, mind you. Rather it would involve finding all the most effective ways at getting some Canadians to hate other Canadians, until some parts of the country absolutely couldn't stand other parts.
Maybe then you start planting seeds about disaffected groups joining the U.S. or even making overt offers. But maybe you don't even need to: if anybody (with the possible exception of Quebec) splits off and becomes independent, ultimately asking for U.S. annexation would be a natural attractor. (Sorta similar to how the U.S. got Texas come to think of it, except the part where a lot of Texans started out as American to begin with.)
There's something I don't have to worry about in the real world, at least. Trump's comments are pretty much the exact opposite of what an admin looking to go that route would want to do.
Alberta seems not a likely choice right now since a born-and-raised Albertan is soon to be elected Canada's Prime Minister, probably with a thumping parliamentary majority. Though in various aspects of worldview he will be more simpatico with the new Trump Administration than the outgoing Canadian PM (the new guy heads the Conservative Party of Canada), he is nevertheless a strongly-nationalistic French-speaking Canadian. His lifelong goal has been to lead and reform his nation not dismember it.
Meanwhile back home in Alberta the voters will have reason to expect some of their grievances with Ottawa to be successfully addressed, presumably taking some air out of secession arguments.
Depending on how things go with the new national government there could be some revival of secession talk in British Columbia, though not with an intention of joining the US.
But how does Alberta secede from Canada? They likely don't have that right. Quebec failed to secede. Maybe the US sends troops into Alberta with its encouragement?
Sorta/kinda. There's nothing about that in Canada's written Constitution. In response to a court ruling related to the 1995 Quebec referendum, Parliament in 2000 passed a law laying out some conditions on which the federal government would respect the result of a provincial separation referendum.
Awkwardly (and very Canadian to be honest) the "Clarity Act" fails to state clearly what percentage "yes" vote is necessary for a referendum result to be binding. Most analysts say that something more than 50%+1 would be needed, but that has never yet been tested and unless the province's voters went at least 60-40 "yes" there would be court challenges.
The federal law states that "First Nations/Indigenous People" are required to be "part of" the "negotiations" following a successful referendum result, without specifying either the nature of those negotiations in general or the role/power of First Nations in that process.
There are other mysteries about how the Clarity Act imagines the separation process but you get the overall picture: sorta/kinda.
Ah, but by that point they will be surrounded by America. Independence may not be viable. And if we really need to put the squeeze on, we blockade them. Which, sure, is technically an act of war, but not of the invasion kind. But probably it won't be necessary to actually go that far, the implicit threat, as well as the obvious economic benefits of joining a larger and richer polity which surrounds you, should suffice.
evidence? Canada did allow Quebec a referendum on secession. The pro-secession side lost, rendering the issue moot, but we are postulating that there is a future `Albertan independence' referendum which is won.
I'm no lawyer or international relations expert, but I think Article 5 could easily be construed to require other countries to defend Canada if the US invaded:
"The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."
As for the original question, I think that if the US invaded Canada, the rest of NATO would defend Canada, at least to some extent. Economically it would be a disaster for everyone involved. Militarily, France, the UK, and the US all have nukes. If they get used, that would obviously be very bad. If they don't get used, the US would almost certainly "win" the war at some point; Canada itself doesn't have a big enough military to withstand an American attack, and the US Navy's aircraft carriers would be too much for the NATO forces to overcome in the Atlantic. But if we couldn't occupy Afghanistan effectively, why would we be able to occupy Canada? If you had a huge number of Canadians who decided that they wanted to be Americans, then it might be different. But I don't think that would be the case in this hypothetical invasion scenario.
No, because "attacks back" is not a concept with any meaning or significance in international law. A attacks B, then A and B are at war and it is expected that warfighting activities may occur anywhere in the combined territory of A and B and generals may but lawyers don't care which way the front is moving.
US attacks Canada, and the remaining NATO members are required to do whatever they would do if the US had attacked *them*. Which is presumably to wage war against the US, including military operations that in a purely tactical sense might be called "attacks".
yeah, the invasion and occupation scenario is obviously dumb. That’s why I was spitballing scenarios whereby Canada might be induced to voluntarily join, for certain values of voluntary.
I suspect it would produce a list of people who think their blogs might be interesting to ACX readers which is exactly what I’d like to see.
I don’t think it would be particularly game worthy in an effort/payoff sort of way if you don’t think your blog would appeal to ACX readers it’s probably not worth the effort.
> I suspect it would produce a list of people who think their blogs might be interesting to ACX readers which is exactly what I’d like to see.
I mean, isn't a proxy for that just clicking on any given commenter here's blog link next to their name?
If they're engaged enough to comment, and particularly if you think their comments are cogent / useful / interesting, seems like a fairly strong and immediately available quality filter.
So I've seen a few intelligent, careful people saying that climate change, while likely bad, is unlikely to be an existential threat to humanity. I'm very much not a climate scientist, but I'm unsure of the reasoning.
When Mt Tambora erupted in 1815, the resultant cooling (about 0.5 degrees Celsius) caused horrific famines and other disasters which killed tens of thousands of people, caused widespread societal and economic upheaval, and just was generally awful, despite the effects mostly only lasting a few months to a few years. Now, that's cooling, not warming, but it seems plausible that the magnitude of the effects would be comparable, if different in type.
Given that, and given even conservative estimates for temperature change put it at 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, and sustained over a much longer period (decades at minimum, centuries not implausible), I genuinely don't understand how that conclusion could be reached? Is warming just different? Is it because it's slower rather than an abrupt shift?
Humans have been endemic to vastly different climate zones from the arctic to the Sahara for centuries, well before the benefits of the admittedly fragile industrial civilization. Wiping out 50% or 90% of them is the easy part, but getting the last nomadic tribe will be next to impossible.
He may have been serious in the 60's and 70's but he's been nothing but an intellectual buffoon for at least the past 15 years. If he's the physical embodiment of anything now it's of self-parody.
Angry isn't serious. There is no tenured professor at a top 20 research university who believes it. And even if there is then that person is outside of the scientific consensus. The median 95% of climate scientists would all agree that it's not an existential threat.
That sounds fine, but there's a bunch of idiots who do, and some of them want to glue themselves to the road or throw soup on a valuable artwork or something, so it's worth taking the time to debunk 'em.
I don't think the serious people believe that global warming will wipe humanity. It's not an ELE. What it could do is collapse our energy dependent civilization and kill a lot of people. But even those worse case outcomes would happen incrementally--food and fuel prices rise, people starve, wars happen, massive population movements occur, and the human population of the planet declines. How fast that would happen depends on details we do not currently understand.
Moreover, all of the remedies I've heard proposed would be as likely to cause upheaval, to that or greater degree, possibly in different sectors of the economy or world at first. With similar levels of uncertainty.
Lowering carbon emissions inevitably manifests as curtailing economic activity. On the personal level, this means not selling as much of your product, whether you're running a fruit stand or a factory. Or a power plant - which means customers are doing without. The secondary effects of this include all sorts of things like having less food on the table, fewer clothes, postponed home repairs, unemployment, and freezing in the reduced-emissions-enforced winter.
Hopefully the drawbacks of these effects are evident.
If you are claiming that any curtailing of economic activity will have as severe an impact as runaway global warming, I find that so counter-intuitive that I have to ask you to cite research in support of that.
I'm not really talking about runaway global warming, as I believe that is not as credible as the global warming predicted in publications such as IPCC reports.
When it comes to predicted global warming, the evidence doesn't suggest strongly whether it's better or worse than the economic curtailment required to prevent it. It has been harder than it should be to collect evidence that curtailment is worse, since the act of collecting it or even advocating for collecting it as been, for ideological reasons, historically less likely to get financial and academic support than the act of collecting evidence that it is preferable.
To get started, you could consult David Friedman's articles on the matter.
My primary reasoning is that if we check global temperatures through longer eras (going back thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of years) we can see much larger differences compared to what is being discussed today, and yet Earth was still very much a planet full of life. During warmer periods, even more so!
I know that this shows that today temperature rose in a century way more than in this period at any time, but I am linking it first just so it is apparent that even before large scale use of fossil fuels, 0.2-0.3 degrees Celsius change in a couple of decades was not that uncommon.
This implies that in that period there were several cases when average temperature was 10 degrees Celsius lower or 2 degrees Celsius higher than what is today.
3. Chart for past 500 000 000 years (this is actually the combination of multiple methods/charts):
What I would like to highlight here is the green part between ~ 7 million and 60 million years ago.
Through this period average temperature was always higher by at least two degrees Celsius than currently, and during the Eocene period (33.9 million to 56 million years ago) it was 6 to 14 degrees Celsius higher.
"During the early-middle Eocene, forests covered most of the Earth including the poles. Tropical forests extended across much of modern Africa, South America, Central America, India, South-east Asia and China. Paratropical forests grew over North America, Europe and Russia, with broad-leafed evergreen and broad-leafed deciduous forests at higher latitudes."
So actually it was way more friendly towards plant life.
Likely higher temperatures may increase crops yields and even human welfare, if we can magically ignore the effect of change itself.
That being said, as some people pointed out, the main question is the speed of change, as that can still make this an issue.
I think that apart from the natural environment what influences human welfare is "capital", in the broadest sense. This includes infrastructure, all kinds of equipment, but even culture, training and customs.
There is a natural degradation of "capital" (infrastructure crumbles, people grow old, etc), and there is a replacement process (maintenance, training, etc) that allows us to maintain civilization. If the change is gradual enough that this natural replacement can take care of it, than capital does not shrink and welfare remains high. E.g., newer houses, buildings will gradually be more optimized for higher temperature, people will wear different clothing and behave accordingly without consciously noticing cultural change, etc.
If it is faster than this, that would require more investment, so people would need to drop living standards.
Even this negative case can have large ranges, from a bit slower gdp growth to long term economic upheaval.
However, for massive global famine I think some major global change would be necessary, that would destroy most crops within a year, or that would somehow trigger a swift cooldown (at least locally), kind of as in "The Day After Tomorrow". However, I don't see this one likely, as far as I know the consensus is against it, and I don't think that there is any precedent for this save for vulcano eruptions or asteroid impacts.
Regarding your particular example about Tambora, I think the main issue there was not really the "global temperature" directly, but that it created a permanent fog, that also blocked sunlight. To quote wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora ):
"In the northern spring and summer of 1815, a persistent "dry fog" was observed in the northeastern United States. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye."
As a sideffect, this decreased temperature, but I think the lower amount of sunshine was even more important than the pure temperature change. I think the distribution of this was also more local, not sure how much the southern hemisphere got from this. So likely the territories with most agricultural issues had much lower average temperature than what the global value implies here.
A note: it's true (with the caveat about change rate that you already note) that, overall, an Eocene- or Cretaceous-style hothouse would be good for global biodiversity and biomass. But it would be much less good for the specific configuration of biodiversity and biomass we have right now, which evolved in icehouse conditions. For one, the breadbaskets of the world wouldn't be such in Eocene climate. The grassy plants from which most of the global food supply depends evolved relatively recently in temperate, highly seasonal, low-CO2 conditions. And of course during most of the Cretaceous, the middle third of North America was under water.
OTOH, we'd have decades or more to adapt to this. Also, at least some of the staple crops would do better in high CO2 than at current levels, and AIUI there is research being done regarding others. There's a high chance we'll have more food than now for the same resources as a consequence, and what upheaval occurs would be in the form of farmers and their suppliers having to find new work or new markets.
I admit I'm mostly going by half-remembered stuff right now, but IIRC CO2 fertilization helps with carbohydrates, but not so much with proteins and other nutrients; and I strongly doubt it's enough to offset losses of cropland to drought (of course the rain will still fall elsewhere, but farmland isn't something you move around quickly or easily) and sea level rise (which is going to be significant only on river deltas and some coastal lowlands, but those are some of the most intensely farmed and inhabited areas around).
The rationalists who say "not an existential threat" mean "it will not kill literally every single person in the world". This is true for most models of climate change. Plus, the lesswrong crowd tends to believe that an artificial superintelligence will be built soon, and will either destroy the world or solve climate change. One way or the other, nothing to worry about.
Historically, warm years were good and cold years were bad. To a degree, they still are. But there's a limit to how warm we want it, and climate change is rapidly getting there.
It's worth noting that they say "global catastrophic risk" for things that don't put the continued existence of human civilisation at risk but are still, well, catastrophic.
Global warming will probably kill more people via heat-related deaths than are dying now, but a Lancet study found cold-related deaths outnumber heat deaths by 17 to 1. So, fewer peeps will be dying from cold-related deaths. Higher CO levels are creating a greening effect worldwide, so despite the fears of famine due to climate change, crop plants are becoming more productive. Please note: angiosperms appeared and evolved during periods when global CO2 levels were 4x-5x higher than they are now. The Antarctic ice sheet didn't begin form until atmospheric CO2 levels dropped to about 1200-1400 ppm (compared to ~280 ppm pre-industrial levels, and ~420 ppm today)—and global avg temps were about 4 degrees C higher than they are today. Yes, Gen Z +3 to +6 will have to worry about sea-level rise. But it should be slow enough to create mitigations for coastal urban areas (a la the Netherlands). I doubt if GW will have a significant impact on human populations (at least compared to other potential issues). Overall, long term, it would be great if CO2 levels were high enough to get us out of the glaciation cycles that have characterized the late Pleistocene (each cycle lasting roughly a 100Ky).
Without due respect to Scott, the data doesn't seem to support this thesis. This study of cold and heat deaths in European countries shows that, overall, cold deaths far outweigh heat deaths. But cold deaths are higher in Eastern European countries on a north-south axis — and they're also super high in the UK for some reason. Heat deaths are highest in Italy, Bulgaria, and Romania, with some hotspots in interior Spain. (Link below)
It's worth noting that some major civilization collapses happened during cooling periods. After the Minoan Warm Period, Bronze Age civilizations collapsed. Western Roman civilization collapsed at the end of the Roman Warm Period. And the Bubonic plague wiped out about a third of Europe's population a couple of decades after the Little Ice Age began. Likewise, the Little Ice Age impacted food production all across northern Europe, which caused periodic famines for three centuries.
Heat and Cold mortality for urban areas across Europe...
It's more like "It will not end life as we know it." If a threat were to kill all people but one, or wipe out technological progress, rationalists would also call that an existential threat.
I would only call that an x-risk if there are reasons to believe that civilization will not be reinvented after a few millennia. One can make such arguments (depleted fossil fuels which would be required to bootstrap industry, for example), but I would treat loss of industrialization as a threat of x-risk, not as x-risk itself.
There's a not dissimilar rationalist trope around the idea that nuclear war wouldn't be an "existential threat", because human beings would continue to exist (and civilisation might survive in, say, Chile and could be rebuilt elsewhere, perhaps with humanity having learned lessons). Feels like something that is at the same time technically true, but fuelling possible insanity.
I think that it is important to stick to stuff which is true on an object level ('technically true') and not to go into hyperbole to signal tribe membership.
If someone is about to jump out of a window on the fourth floor, the true thing to say to them is "that is a stupid thing to do. You will likely injure yourself severely and might actually die". If you are telling them instead "this is a terrible idea, you are sure to die and will kill at least four passer-bys when you hit them", that is bad. Once you have told that little noble lie, the truth is forever your enemy, and the pro-window-jumping people will easily show you for a fool in any remotely fair debate. Also, what will you then tell the person debating if they should escape the fire by jumping from the eighth floor or the forth? Double down: "if you fall from the eighth floor, you will be super-duper-dead and cause a crater which will kill everything within half a kilometer"?
I do not think that LW is full of people going "climate change: not an issue" or "nuclear war: not an x-risk, but a fun group activity" regularly -- just because something is not maximally bad, it does not mean that you endorse it.
We aren’t living in 1815 anymore. Cooling is worse than heating in most cases. The existential threat isn’t really claimed by the climate scientists either, although they tend to obfuscate the number of years it takes for sea level rise.
The people talking about "existential threat" seem to have tacked on the modifier because it sounds cool, without giving any thought to what a high bar they're setting for themselves.
Partly because we can more effectively adapt to the coming changes because they're coming slowly,
Partly because, while we almost certainly won't be able to reverse the effects of climate change in my lifetime, current models look like we'll avoid runaway effects and we can hopefully get our shit together enough to make the rate of change near 0 in my lifetime
Partly because one of the big worries with the fast rate of change was ecological catastrophes as existing biomes failed to adapt to new conditions, which would have impacted human life indirectly. If the rate of change is slower, there will be more room for adaptation and the ecological consequences will be less severe.
Cooling is worse than warming, in large part because we're still in an ice age (we're closer to the planet being too cold to survive than being too warm to survive, basically).
The modern world is better at adapting to changing conditions than the ancient world.
(There's other stuff, but I think this covers the material in your comment.)
Rate matters. People are very good at accommodating changes that happen at the multi generational timescale. Not so much "no crops this year." Especially since back then, the survival margins were much tighter. Now we have much more of a safety blanket. Especially since the changes (were and are expected to be) unevenly spread. So the places less hard hit can help the ones harder hit. That wasn't really the case in 1815.
Recently I outlined for myself a ten-part (?) series on everything I know about web + app development. My original idea was to make it a blog post series. After outlining it I'm not so sure. Perhaps readers would absorb it better if it was a course, or textbook, or YouTube video playlist, or what-have-you. What do y'all think?
(I haven't written out the entire thing yet, as it seems like it would be a LOT of work and I'm not sure what benefits would accrue to me or my readers if I were to do it.)
Perfect is the enemy of good. If you've written something out, it's probably relatively easy to convert to a blog post. Not so for Youtube videos, a course, or textbook.
Unless you're someone who has some particular authority in the field, or your series is extremely useful to people who are able to find your work, few people will read it. That's ok though, as the exercise should be for your own benefit, with other readers as a bonus.
I don't want to dissuade you too much, because this sounds like something that could be good for your personal development. However, I understand that you are an undergraduate student? Consider the possibility you may be overestimating the utility that you can provide as someone without significant professional experience in this field.
What about a blog with some straightforward practice problems or questions threaded through it, and maybe a couple of really tough ones at the end of each post? People could discuss how to do the problems in comments. You could post occasionally in comments giving answers or advice or congratulations. Maybe give prizes (free subscription?) to the first to post a solution to one of the tough puzzles. (So now I'm moving into ideas of ways to build up number of subscribers.) Maybe sprinkle in some other stuff in between the lessons -- a few posts about where web & app etc. development is heading, or funny stories about legendary fuck-ups or genius solutions or odd corners of that professional world. (What's the creepiest underground app you ever heard tell of?) Maybe an occasional contest for readers? You name some odd constraints, ask how you could do X with those constrains. Group could select best answer by vote.
I absolutely hate instruction delivered via video. I'm always looking up how to do things in Photoshop, and hunting for the one site that just answers my question with some prose and one screen shot. I get the info way faster that way, and if I forget something I can quickly find it again by skimming the written answer. Searching a video for that one part where they show how to access feature X is infuriating. However, most Photoshop how-to's are videos, so it may be that most prefer that modality.
Also, making a video series adds all these complications. You have to think about how the room looks, and how you look. You have to be personable. If you trip over your words you have to reshoot that section.
I think there is a fundamental difference between tutorials about how to use a Software and how to build software.
When the resulting code o the tutorial is published I can work my way back to fill gaps that the author willingly or unwillingly left out or knowledge gaps that I have but the target audience of the tutorial doesn’t have.
For a software like photoshop I stumbled a lot on tutorials where a important step was left out and I couldn’t figure out what they did because I can’t work my way back from the end result. In a video I can just skip back to the part and follow step by step.
I don't build software, but see what you mean. Actually these days when I google Photoshop questions the Google AI gives me the answer as a list of bullet points, and so far those have turned out to be clear and accurate.
I do pretty well with blog posts, especially if they include practical interludes/exercises along the way. That would probably be harder with a video playlist. Even if there are aspects which benefit greatly from demonstrating them in video instead of static images or text, still probably better to embed those in a blog.
From there, not clear on what the practical difference is between a blog and a textbook, unless you plan to get it all printed and bound. Unless you a mean a hypertext textbook on a dedicated site, which I think would be better unless you benefit from linking sections of the textbook to preexisting blog posts.
As for a course, maybe? Can be beneficial if you can make those practical interludes fully interactive. But I expect it would be a great deal more work than just a blog/textbook.
All in all:
Dedicated textbook > blog post > course > video series
How exactly does one lobby their local legislators? I know that at the federal level, multi billion dollar organizations do all sorts of crazy things that the average human can never do, but assuming you're a moderately wealthy individual with a good savings and a high paying job and you wanted to propose adopting a law or a legislative reform for your local City/State, how would you go about doing so?
Sure you can always call them up and leave a message, but i assume that's leaving something on the table. What would you do if you had 50k at your disposal? 100k? How can money actually be used to improve your outcome?
Figure out what you want to say, condense it to the level of an elevator pitch but with backup material at the ready, call the local legislator's office, ask them which staffer is handling [topic] this week, and if they're not too busy at that moment, make your pitch.
Or, write a letter to the legislator; their office will send it to the right staffer and you can go into a bit more depth in text. Offer to discuss the matter further.
For all but the biggest issues, it isn't necessary to offer bribes or campaign contributions, or establish yourself as the spokesman for #movement with bignum registered voters. Legislators get surprisingly little feedback from the public on secondary issues, and they know that for every person who actually picks up a phone there will be many more who feel the same way but didn't bother to call. And, perhaps more importantly, the staffer in charge of [topic] is not actually an expert on [topic], he's almost certainly overworked, in over his head, and trying to figure it out with basically Wikipedia and a bunch of slick glossies produced by the relevant industry organization or whatever. They'll probably *want* to talk to someone who knows the subject but isn't captured by the industry.
If you've got money to throw at the problem, you can use it to hire people who are either better than you at cold-calling politicians, or can do the background research to fine-tune your pitch and identify the proper targets. But check with a lawyer, because when money starts changing hands in this sort of thing, the law is particular about how that should be done.
Politicians pay attention to crowds, so you lobby local legislation by lobbying the people who vote for them. If you have a high-paying job, you presumably have people who respect your opinion on things, so start by convincing them, and then convince their friends, and repeat until someone's friends with the legislators.
> What would you do if you had 50k at your disposal? 100k? How can money actually be used to improve your outcome?
I'm interested in this too.
I think it depends on your level of commitment, but Zvi famously founded Balsa to do exactly this at the federal level, and I believe he even got outside funding, and has hired two people for it (maybe more by now). Currently they're tackling the Jones Act, which is 100% a giant boondoggle that should be eliminated (in my own opinion).
So I've answered the ACX survey and am curious about the last question. I feel (rot13) that zl nafjre qrcraqf urnivyl ba gur ahzoref vaibyirq, abg whfg bhg bs cevapvcyr ba n "uvture rkcrpgngvba if thnenagrrq erghea" qvpubgbzl. Jvgu qvssrerag ahzoref (fvapr V ernq nobhg n fvzvyne ulcbgurgvpny n juvyr ntb), zl nafjre jbhyq qrsvavgryl punatr.
So I wonder if I'm isolated in my outlook, and what the point of the question is...
That your answer should change if the numbers are different is normal and healthy. If you are a median income American, and the question is about one measly dollar versus ten, then you want to take the gamble.
If the question is about one billion dollar versus a chance at ten, then only SBF (and perhaps a few big-thinking honest EA people who believe that their cause areas will scale linearly) would take the gamble. Everyone else would be "there is little difference to my utility function between 1G$ and 10G$, why should I risk anything?"
Where exactly the cross-over point is depends on the risk tolerance of a person, and their current circumstances. Perhaps one person owns a broken car which could be fixed up for 500$, while another would need 5k$ to by a decent used car.
Formally, there is the Kelly criterion, which tells you how much of your net worth you should be willing to put into a gamble where you have an edge at most.
Unless I’m mistaken, the Kelly criterion applies for repeated independent bets, no? This is just one thing (and also, there’s no downside in the survey question).
I’m reassured that I’m not crazy for thinking the correct strategy depends on the number involved. But then what’s the point of asking the question for a single pair of numbers? Is it to determine the “strategy boundary” in another way, depending on (say) the person’s income?
The standard model of someone following Kelly would be a gambler who has the opportunity to make a limited amount of gambles in which they have some edge, can decide how much to bet in each gamble, and tries to get rich. (I think that they instrumentally value their money logarithmically in the middle of their gambling run is kind of intrinsic, even if their end goal was "earn at least one million", under certain assumptions.)
In my model of humans, we are making financial decisions under uncertainty all the time. Big ones, like what profession to take and how to invest money for old age, but also smaller ones such as what forms of insurance to take, how often to go to medical checkups, how much food to stockpile to be prepared for disaster down to tiny ones like if you should fill up your gas tank right now or wait and see if you find a better gas station in a few days.
Even humans who don't see themselves as gamblers are regularly betting on the rare bad outcome not happening as to spend arbitrary amounts to negate the tiniest risk is not compatible with life. (Last month, there was a lesswrong article published on using Kelly to determine if insurance is worth it, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wf4jkt4vRH7kC2jCy/when-is-insurance-worth-it )
So with the understanding that humans are not perfectly in the situation of that gambler (for example, they can recover from going to a balance of zero by means of paid work), we can nevertheless use Kelly as a baseline. Most people are more risk-adverse than the Kelly criterion, which is fine.
The fact that there is no (absolute) downside is largely irrelevant. As long as you have two strategies, and the riskier one has the higher expected payoff, you can apply Kelly to it.
Did Scott ask us for the income bracket, again? Without it, I think the data will not make very much sense.
(aside: dear anyone reading this from the Substack crew, could we please have spoiler tags? Web 1.0 forums in the 90s already had those, without suffering from the performance problems Substack has; reinventing wheels should result in better, not worse, wheels!)
Could someone post a reminder of what the question was? I, for one, did the survey long enough ago that I remember approximately none of the specific questions, only some of the broad subjects covered...
The question was (rot13): juvpu jbhyq lbh pubbfr orgjrra n pregnvagl bs svir uhaqerq qbyynef be n bar-va-fvk (nf va, ebyy n fgnaqneq qvpr) punapr bs trggvat svir gubhfnaq qbyynef?
I think you should try never to hate anyone, it isn't a healthy mindset. Mind, you may not be able to *help* hating someone, but that's a different issue.
Slavery is based on violence, so without violence we would all be free.
As for hate being long term anger, that's like saying war is just an extreme form of sports. We aren't meant to exist in extreme states long term--it is progressively damaging to the brain.
Lets suppose I'm a middle aged white male, and I have no friends. It's been like this for years, and I'm not asking for the standard list of how-to-make-friends.
I'm asking what are my prospects of a happy life without friends.
I'm asking if people have good strategies for having a good but friendless life.
Relate to people on another basis besides friendship. You can have colleagues, co-religionists, co-hobbyists etc etc. I don't have any one that I'm friends with just for pleasure, and I'm extremely satisfied with my social life. The trick is to have something important that you care about above and beyond pleasure, that will provide you with the terms for your non-friend relationships.
There is so much individual variation on the need for friends and other forms of social relationships, that there is no generic advice that would make any sense. It's all about figuring out what you need, and how to get it.
Especially the activities with contact to people, just without ever trying to befriending them are good things.
You get the benefit of, let's call it, species-appropriate conduct, without putting any skin in the game. No one can force you to become their friend :)
But if you have no friends *and* don't do anything, I suspect you go mad.
I know someone now who has an 8 month oldNorwegian Laphund (I may not have the name quite right).. They herd reindeer, and Christmas front yard displays featuring plastic reindeer blew out her fuses. She's very smart and quick, and he's thinking of training her for dog agility contests. Those look like great fun to me l for both dog and owner. At end of course dogs jump onto owner's arms grinning.
> I know someone now who has an 8 month oldNorwegian Laphund (I may not have the name quite right).. They herd reindeer, and Christmas front yard displays featuring plastic reindeer blew out her fuses.
Ha! Now *that's* living! :-)
I often think that dogs represent an under-appreciated standard that we should aspire towards, because they represent a lot of what's best about us - loyalty, empathy, a natural affinity for cooperation, the desire to play, the desire to excel and do a job well, and of course the abiding and unconditional love that characterizes their relationship to you and the rest of their "pack members."
You're not the first or the last or the only to have lived wanted to do this. Read about hermits and other people who have lived very solitary lives. Some seem to have made a go of it, becoming engrossed in activities that were important to them. Anyhow, here are some suggestions for strategies.
THINGS THAT INVOLVE PEOPLE, BUT DO NOT REQUIRE YOU TO MAKE FRIENDS
Find volunteer or paid opportunities to help people without getting to know them.
There are probably some where you can even get info about how the people are benefitting.
Sports, for ex. Ultimate Frisbee. Serious body building in a gym.
Classes.
Religious or semi-religious (eg Buddhism) services, training and retreats
Online forums like this one
AA and similar
Have a blog
THINGS WITHOUT PEOPLE
Have pets. Or take it beyond having pets and breed and/or train some kind of animal.
Pursue your interests via study and practice.
Make things. Learn to make things that are hard to make. Learn to sail or dogsled. Build a cabin or a windmill or a boat. Paint watercolors. Make apps and games for computer and phones.
And here are some books about hermits, also from GPT
The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome
By Gordon Campbell, this book explores the history of hermits from ancient Rome to modern times, delving into the lives of famous hermits like St. Anthony of Egypt and St. Jerome.
MEDIEVAL CHRONICLES
A Book of Silence
In this 2008 publication, Sara Maitland reflects on her own pursuit of solitude and silence, exploring the lives of people today who occupy solitary states, such as solo sailors and polar explorers.
WELLCOME COLLECTION
The World of Medieval Monasticism: Its History and Forms of Life
By Gert Melville, this book provides a comprehensive overview of medieval monasticism, including the role of hermits in the wider monastic world.
MEDIEVAL CHRONICLES
The English Hermit: A Monastic Type
By Hugh F. M. Richmond, this book focuses on the history of hermits in England, exploring the reasons why people became hermits and the different types of hermitages.
MEDIEVAL CHRONICLES
The Substance of Silence: A Reading List About Hermits
This compilation offers various perspectives on the lives of hermits and the allure of solitude throughout history.
So I asked GPT to give the names of some hermits who seemed to adapt well to living that way, and where someone could learn more about them, and here is the list it gave me:
*Historical and Religious Hermits*
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Famous for his two-year experiment in simple living at Walden Pond, chronicled in Walden.
Where to Read: Thoreau’s Walden is an essential book. Secondary sources, such as Robert Richardson’s biography Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, also provide insights.
St. Anthony the Great (c. 251–356)
An early Christian monk considered the father of monasticism. He lived in the Egyptian desert, practicing extreme solitude and asceticism.
Where to Read: Athanasius’s Life of Antony is the main source of information about him.
Figures like Julian of Norwich (1343–c. 1416), an anchoress, wrote Revelations of Divine Love, reflecting deep spiritual contentment.
Where to Read: Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love and works on Christian mysticism.
Christopher Knight ("The North Pond Hermit") (b. 1965)
Lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, stealing supplies to survive. He described being content with solitude.
Where to Read: Michael Finkel’s The Stranger in the Woods explores his life and mindset.
Richard Proenneke (1916–2003)
Built a cabin in Alaska and lived there alone for nearly 30 years. His journals were compiled into the book One Man's Wilderness.
Where to Read: One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey by Sam Keith, based on Proenneke’s journals.
Emma "Grandma" Gatewood (1887–1973)
Though not a complete hermit, she often hiked alone, including being the first woman to solo hike the Appalachian Trail. Her journeys reflect a deep contentment with solitude.
Where to Read: Grandma Gatewood's Walk by Ben Montgomery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
While not a strict hermit, he valued solitude as a source of creative and spiritual renewal.
Where to Read: His essays, particularly Self-Reliance and Nature.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Lived much of her life in seclusion, rarely leaving her family home. Her poetry reflects her contented inward life.
Where to Read: Collections of Dickinson’s poems and biographies like Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon.
Ryokan Taigu (1758–1831)
A Zen Buddhist monk and poet who lived in a hut in the mountains of Japan. He was deeply content with his simple life.
Where to Read: Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen Poems of Ryokan offers a collection of his poetry.
Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694)
The famed Japanese haiku poet spent much of his life wandering and living simply. His works reflect solitude and harmony with nature.
Where to Read: The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.
J.D. Salinger (1919–2010)
Though a real person, Salinger adopted a hermit-like lifestyle, avoiding public life after publishing The Catcher in the Rye.
Where to Read: Biographies like Kenneth Slawenski’s J.D. Salinger: A Life explore his secluded life.
Grizzly Adams (John Adams, 1812–1860)
A mountain man who lived in isolation in the Sierra Nevada, surrounded by nature and animals.
Where to Read: Historical accounts and stories inspired by his life, such as The Life and Adventures of James Capen Adams by Theodore Hittell.
GPT didn't bring up Grigory Perlman?? Probably the world's most prominent living hermit?
People kept braving the wilds of Sweden to knock on his door, trying to award him the Nobel-equivalent in mathematics (Fields medal) and give him $1M in prizes, and he kept turning them away and asking to be left alone.
I think that if someone asks a question here we should assume they are responsible adults, and if we have the information they are asking for we should give it to them. If they sound out of touch with reality or like they are falling apart or they ask for help committing a crime or committing suicide then no, we should not answer their question. But OP here sounds calm and sane and makes clear what he wants to know, and that he is not interested in being nudged to make friends or advised on how to do it.
Yes, well, the same can be said of being overweight, smoking, being a couch potato, daily drinking even in moderate amounts, and a lot of other things.
Asking reasonable questions and getting a rash of shit back isn't very good for people either.
Yea, OK, but if somebody on here asks which common US cigarette brand tastes most like Gauloises, do you think they should get an antismoking lecture instead of an answer? Or how about if they ask for info about rock climbing, or helicopter skiing, or big wave surfing, all of which are pretty risky? In all these cases the chance that the person asking has not already been told about the risks is very low. What's the point of giving the risk lecture again? And are we really in a position to be sure that in their case the activity is not worth the risk?
Congratulations to Donald on Congress’s certification of his electoral victory. Opinions about the events surrounding Joe’s certification four years ago vary widely—some view them as really damaging, others see them as minor or overblown. How do you see today’s proceedings compared to those four years ago?
I feel like America had some real serious political debates about lots of topics all at once and is functioning reasonably well?
I predict a lot less political violence, a lot less wokeness, a lot less unpopular foreign wars, a lot less illegal immigration, a lot less reliance on China, a real fight on policy on the right on a bunch of topics instead of just being the party of 'no', a lot less conspiracy theorism, and most importantly less legislation by administrative state expanding its powers. Just a huge shift towards the median voter in a way that makes it feel like we're living in a more 'responsive democracy'.
Just in general I think our media and cultural organs are doing a remarkably good job of navigating diversity of interests, opinions, and factual filters, and it could be so much worse.
If AI doesn't end everything early, I'm cautiously optimistic about the next four years.
Ended up voting for Kamala because the attempted coup was a read line for me, glad she lost though, mostly because I think Trump will 'strongman' Iran/Russia into backing down, and will either give up Taiwan bloodlessly, or make it clear 'not on my watch' there as well.
Also culturally, it feels like the gaslighting on all sides is less threatening? Partisans lie, we can tell when they do, and we don't need to be terrified that there isn't a bunch of normal americans who can see through it all and make their voices heard. We can just roll our eyes and live our lives, at everyone.
The casual heuristic of "If this was a planned subterfuge, is this how it would reasonably be done?" tells me that this was almost certainly not a coup. A bunch of angry protestors, mostly unarmed, breaking into the capitol to what? Hang Mike Pence so he can't officiate the election? That's a ridiculous plan if it was one.
Don't they know that there are a bunch of tunnels Congress can escape through? Isn't being heavily armed a prerequisite for taking over a nation (especially one as powerful as the United States with a long democratic tradition)?
Sure, Trump didn't especially do anything about it at the time, and he wasn't exactly condemning their actions at the time either, but there's a difference between that and planning a coup as far as most people are concerned. Ordering the military to disperse a protest, that's protesting in favor of you, even if it got violent, isn't exactly what most people would do in that situation.
It was definitely a protest that got out of hand, which demonstrates the idiocy of many people supporting Trump, and was definitely illegal, but calling it a coup that Trump planned is a huge departure from reality as I see it.
The thing to remember is that the protestors believed that the election had already been stolen (ignore for the moment whether that is a defensible belief or not). Given that they sincerely believed that, their actions make more sense (not perfect sense, since even had they been right they weren't going to "stop the steal" that way).
Trump was just an opportunist. But his actions that day, and afterward reveal something about him: he couldn't care less about legal or democratic processes. I think that if he could overthrow the government with an illegal coup, he absolutely would, but he himself isn't smart enough to figure out how.
This. During his presidency, Trump was mostly free if base entertainment for the world and the US (SCOTUS aside, but that would have gone similarly under a non-clown republican president).
Oh no, he fired another secretary, and there are still people applying for the job.
Oh no, he did a photo-op with Kim.
Oh no, you would not believe what outrageous thing he tweeted today.
Oh no, he is having legal drama..
As far as US presidents go, his track record was not disastrous. Sure, he put some migrants in cages, but my baseline for US presidents is nuking Nagasaki, getting involved in Vietnam, turning torture into official US policy, sponsoring coups to overthow democracies in Latin America or lying to the feds about not having gotten a blowjob (I kid). Basically, he could have moonlighted as a serial killer without registering on my outrange-o-meter when it is calibrated for presidencies.
He had this one Iranian general killed in an airstrike, but that did not seem like a particularly irreplaceable loss for humanity either. And for COVID, it would have been nice to have some adult in the room, but the established non-partisan experts were rather terrible too. (Remember the lies about masks being ineffective?)
But once he was voted out his always strained relationship with the truth went downhill to levels seen on his 2016 campaign trail, where he had denied Obama being born in the US. "Stop the steal." This was a man who would happily burn the commons for whatever slim chance to not face the fact that he had been voted out. I am convinced that if the insurgents he had incited over months (in the vague hope that they would somehow change the outcome) had miraculously managed to overthrow the government, he would have happily resided in the white house while the corpse of his former vice president was rotting on some flagpole nearby.
That's fair, but also a very different claim than "January 6th was a coup attempt by Trump" as a lot of people seem to take at face value. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of politicians wouldn't take powers and term lengths outside what is constitutionally allowed given the opportunity, but it's sort of our bad that we are electing people who think like that. Virtue isn't something we seem to value much in politicians anymore (did anyone ever?).
An abnormal election process, with abnormal (to public perception) voting behavior could reasonably make a lot of people, who were acting in good faith, believe that election fraud won Biden the election. Trump looked like he was going to win around 11:00 PM, and it was only after the early morning, when large numbers of mail-in ballots were counted that overwhelmingly voted for Biden, did Biden win. To the uninformed voter, that could plausibly look like they "found" a few hundred thousand votes for Biden.
Not saying that there was fraud, as there was certainly not, or if there was it wasn't enough to make any difference, just that it's not unreasonable for the average person to have believed there was fraud given how things looked, and how the election was run significantly differently from normal due to Covid.
There was attempted fraud--the slates of false electors that Trump and his people attempted to insert into the process. Most elected officials do not go that far. That's not on the voters, that's on him.
>>I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of politicians wouldn't take powers and term lengths outside what is constitutionally allowed given the opportunity, but it's sort of our bad that we are electing people who think like that. Virtue isn't something we seem to value much in politicians anymore (did anyone ever?).
If you believe that lots of politicians would take powers and term lengths outside of what is constitutionally allowed given the opportunity, though, that is grounds for a *stronger* belief that Trump should be punished instead of being reelected. If the prospect of punishment is the only thing holding otherwise corrupt officials from engaging in corrupt behavior, prominently letting one off the hook and rewarding him with more power only weakens the incentives and invites more corruption.
If we accept “sure, Tom may have tried to rob the bank, but honestly wouldn’t we *all* rob a bank if we thought we could get away with it” as a legitimate defense of Tom's behavior, the only thing we’ll succeed in doing is inviting more bank robbers to try their hand later.
> It was definitely a protest that got out of hand
That’s what a failed coup looks like.
Do you remember that he wanted to go to the capital and speak to those people but the Secret Service would not let him? Do you think he really wanted to go there to calm them down? I seriously doubt it.
Remember how he protested that there were metal detectors there, saying that the people didn’t wanna shoot him?
We must have different expectations as to what a deliberate coup looks like. I don't consider all government overthrows, like many during the Arab Spring, as coups. Bottom-up protests, usually the result of forces far outside any individual's control, that overthrow a government happen often enough, but they usually aren't the result of leaders overthrowing the government.
A coup is typically when a faction within the government quickly arrests, kills, or otherwise incapacitates a countries leader's and assumes control. That requires a plan of specifically who you're going after, when you're taking control, and typically coordinated military power to ensure you get what you want quickly. It also helps if it's unexpected, so before most people know there's even a coup, the old rulers have been replaced, making it useless to try and side with them.
You don't perform a coup by showing up at the least minute, make a speech to a riot and saying "Let's overthrow the government!" to a mostly unarmed crowed and waltz right in. At least not one with any chance of success.
Ok. A coup is a sudden, violent overthrow of a government. According to the dictionary, I looked up.
What do you call it when a group of people who are inside a government try to come up with a way to hold onto power that might be legal but it’s pretty much on the edge? I am perfectly happy to settle on a different word.
A Palace intrigue…?
If everything goes just right, it might work. If you can get an alternate slate of electors into the Congress and have a Congressman (or two) object to the official slate of electors and get the vice president to choose the alternates? (Especially when the alternate slates were being prepared in great secrecy and quite surreptitiously and, according to more than one state, not in keeping with their laws or intentions? e.g. Arizona, Georgia Wisconsin.
And IF, at the same time, you can get a large group of people to make a lot of noise and riot a little bit AND you do pull off your palace intrigue, all these people will be thrilled! And then you’re on your way aren’t you? An arguable legal issue that will take weeks to sort out in the normal scheme of things, and lots of other people very happy with the outcome around the country and the Proud Boys (and others) “standing by” in Washington (as we know); now what do you call it? A lucky coincidence?
I am glad that it did not work out, and I am glad that the American people have gotten the president they wanted after all. I have no doubt that legal boundaries will be challenged hard in the coming years and it will be interesting to see what holds and what doesn’t. I guess what I’m saying is I am not a knee-jerk liberal, but I know what I see and I don’t like to have illusions about it based on my personal preferences.
Someone here has pointed out that the vice president has no power to reject electoral votes and that’s probably true, but to this group of people the legal framework of that was apparently vague and somewhat elastic (if you pulled hard enough on it) and maybe Trump could get Mike Pence to do that. He couldn’t. We all know how Trump feels about Mike Pence these days, but it is interesting that when JD Vance was asked if he would’ve done it he replied absolutely yes.
I guess the appropriate term would be self-coup, as Trump was still in charge at the time.
I can buy that there was a lot of intruiging going on behind the scenes, and that Trump was looking to bend things until they broke and he remained in power. The capital riot itself though, seems to be a natural result of the fishy smell the 2020 election had (again, not saying it was rigged as I don't believe that, just that it was abnormal and an average uninformed person could reasonably conclude it was rigged with the information they had). Whether Trump was planning a coup or not, and whether 1/6 was convenient for that attempt seems like a separate thing to me than 1/6 being a coup attempt itself.
My beef is that I see a lot of people equivocating 1/6 as a coup attempt, as if Trump, or his goons organized a bunch of supporters to attempt to storm the capitol and literally execute Mike Pence. People who are appalled at Trump trying to overthrow democracy, then angrily gesturing to 1/6 as evidence of that, which just doesn't fit for me. I'm sure there are people presenting a more nuanced approach that actually looks at everything he did with the electors and calling up Georgia and whatnot, but then the accusations of a coup attempt turn into accusations of Trump trying to figure out how to stay in power, which seems qualitatively different, or at least not as exciting.
It would be equivalent of calling the BLM riots/protest an attempted communist takeover of our cities (remember CHOP?). Yes, perhaps if there was a communist plot to takeover a bunch of cities the BLM protests could theoretically help serve that purpose, but the protests themselves were not an attempt to overthrow the government.
I don't think so. Can you name any other failed coups that ended like this? Or successful coups that began like this? The vast majority of coups are where the military arrests the president and takes over media organizations, right?
The ones that fail are always harder to find, aren’t they? The only one off the top of my head that is in the same ballpark is the beer Hall Putch (sp?)
Now that you mention it, Russia tried a coup in the Ukraine recently and failed. It’s turned into a bit of a grind, hasn’t it? Thank God we are Americans.
As an aside, I believe that the United States will experience a full on military coup eventually. I don’t think there’s any way around it.
The Beer Hall Putsch is pretty universally recognized as a "failed coup attempt," but did not involve the military seizing the president.
Hitler basically jumped up on a table, fired a gunshot for everybody's attention, and declared that the current government was liquidated, then marched to the capital and hoped for the best.
That said, I think WaitForMe really has it right. Too much focus is on the riot on Jan 6 itself, rather than the attempt at falsifying election results in the months leading up to it.
To be fair, that coup was also a display of comical levels of magical thinking. For one thing, it happened in Munich. The capital of the Weimar Republic was (as not indicated by the name) Berlin, which is quite a bit away. But even the place which Hitler and his goons were marching to was silly: the Feldherrenhalle is not the seat of the regional government.
For a non-stupid version of the Hitler-Putsch, look at the Kapp-Putsch. There the perpetrators did at least get the city right, had the military on their side and managed to arrest some republic officials.
Of course, the morale of the story is that if someone tries to attempt a coup or incite an insurgency in a profoundly silly way which is unlikely to work, it is not safe to lean back and call them "harmless because stupid". Rather, one should update on them being unscrupulous in attempting to size power and not count on them remaining as stupid in the future.
The real coup was trying to have Mike Pence not certify the election and throw it to the house, along with the scheming to create alternate slates of electors to vote for Trump. January 6th was, in most senses, a riot, rather than a coup. But Trump very badly wanted Pence to overturn the results and have the house instate him. That is a coup attempt, if bungled and probably unrealistic even if Pence did vote against certifying the election.
Agreed. I suspect that Trump's intent with the riot was to arrange a (rowdy) protest as a tacit threat of mob violence, in hopes of bullying Pence and House/Senate Republicans into going along with the plan to overturn the result.
Trump's reaction during the three-hour window between when the capitol was breached and when he gave the "we love you, go home" speech seems like he was hoping that the actual mob violence he got would serve the same purpose. His conversation with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, in which Trump responded to McCarthy telling him to call off the rioters with “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” seems particularly damning.
The difference between a farcical, obviously-not-going-to-succeed, is-it-even-a-coup coup attempt and an actual coup is that one succeeded and one didn't. A lot of coups would probably look pretty silly if, for whatever reason, it just didn't work out.
"entire conservative movement has retconned not just the events of four years ago"
I observed the liberals rewrite the narrative in the days, weeks, then months following January 6th.
While the events were unfolding, it was a news story of a massive crowd walking past security, going where they shouldn't normally be, and some guy sitting in Nancy Pelosi's chair.
A day or so later, it came out that some people, fewer than 10, had died. I was unclear at the time from reports whether any of the security people had died, but some of the rioters had. It seemed like a whole bunch of people dissatisfied with the election verification, tired of being ignored, decided not to be ignored anymore; not a coup, since they didn't have weapons, AFAICS.
Within weeks, the narrative had changed to an attempted coup to keep Trump as President. Then it changed to Trump having orchestrated the events to stay President. Within months it was "the greatest threat to democracy the country had ever faced."
Revisionist history IS happening, and has been happening for some time. 1984 has stealthily arrived.
I would say what you call revisionism by the left post January 6 is the result of more and more information coming out about what was going on behind the scenes on January 6, and the things that had been going on leading up to it. I would call it updating an opinion based on new information.
I can certainly understand thinking that, but I too thought about it at the time as a possibility, and my impression didn't match that. It was four years ago, so I don't remember the details, but I don't remember anything I expected that would match that, like "We don't yet know how many were injured, but it is expected to be only a few individuals" followed later by "The casualty count now exceeds 10, and may be higher as we gain more details" with more detailed information as time went on.
Instead, I found the character of what happened being reported and updated. I remember hearing nothing of Trump's involvement early on, but Trump was involved months later.
I see two things going on there; it took a while to dig down and to get people to talk and to find a paper trail. The second thing I see going on is probably an institutional bias to just let the whole thing go if Donald Trump was never going to be seen on the public stage again. Better to let bygones be bygones under those circumstances. I know the received wisdom among certain people is that (the deep state, the Democrats, etc.) decided to make something up and go after him the moment he decided to run again. I don’t really believe that. There is enough evidence to support the idea that this stuff was indeed going on. One could certainly claim, in that sense (just letting it go as long as he rode off into the sunset), the prosecution was political. But the prosecution was not a fiction. It’s not a bunch of Trump hating prosecutors going after him for no reason whatsoever.
I can’t help feeling that he created the Mar-a-Lago situation on purpose. He could have raised his claims of rightful possession from the moment the national archive first contacted him about those papers, but he did not. He engaged in various shady practices to hide the papers, and forced the showdown. Then, when he had a national audience, he claimed that he owned the papers and was being harassed. He likes to test boundaries, and he has keen political instincts, which is a double-edged sword if you know what I mean.
"While the events were unfolding, it was a news story of a massive crowd walking past security, going where they shouldn't normally be, and some guy sitting in Nancy Pelosi's chair." Nice try at gaslighting.
I think you should look a little more deeply into the trials of some of the major conspirators to see how much Information came to light post January 6 about the events leading up to it and what was going on that day. There were a ton of weapons in Washington DC that day in hotel rooms waiting for the moment. There were extensive text threads between some of those people and people close to Trump (Roger Stone, for instance) I really think you’re whistling past the graveyard here.
Not again. I looked at the trials before, when things were more current, and "selection bias" seemed to be the strategy. I suspect that is also currently the case.
I had looked for evidence that Trump was behind it all, which is what the Democrats really wanted to get out of it, and found nothing convincing.
January 6th should NOT have happened, but it gets support from Republicans because of the way Democrats have tried to use it. Whenever "January 6th" is used as a rallying cry against Republicans, or Trump specifically, it's "here we go again". We need to put the event past us, as the nothing burger with some substance but nothing worth dividing the country over it should be. Not very palatable, so why keep eating it?
>>January 6th should NOT have happened, but it gets support from Republicans because of the way Democrats have tried to use it.
It gets support from Republicans because when confronted with a choice between:
(a) "admit that my tribe's leader attempted election fraud, and that instead of punishing him we rewarded him with more power," and
(b) "think of literally any other semi-plausible explanation in which my tribe did not do a bad - a 'coup' requires the military, and/or certifying election results is inherently political, and/or it was the work of antifa infiltrators, and/or it's possible the election really *was* rigged and even if it wasn't what matters for election legitimacy is that people *believe* the election results and clearly Democrats failed to convince them to do that so this is all their fault, and/or prosecuting Trump somehow was simultaneously a Democrat failure that made them the *real* threat to democracy while also being a Democrat failure because they didn't do it fast enough, and/or etc, etc etc,...
... tribal monkey brain's kneejerk response is to slam the button for option (b) so hard his hand breaks.
"January 6 was bad, but Republicans only support it because Democrats rallied against it the wrong way" is just another subset of category (b). *My* side isn't badwrong, *your* side is badwrong for calling us badwrong so badwrongly.
So you give no weight to the attempt to prepare alternate slates of electors? (Arizona and Georgia are both taking that rather seriously at the moment.) The extended conversations with John Eastman, about how there might be a loophole that could be exploited by Pence? His exhortation to the proud boys to “stand down but standby“? His wish to go to the capital that day and speak in person? Of course it was not a well organized coup. It was an attempt to stretch all the boundaries and pull something off, based on a lie, which is that the election was stolen in the first place. I agree it’s tiresome to go over this and that things are as they are now but there’s no point in making up a story about it. That’s what bothers me. This issue has nothing to do with how I feel about any of his particular policies that; is a separate question.
I agree in some sense. I knew it wasn't directed by Trump, or full of military veterans storming the capital with guns. But also, pictures/videos on that very first day or perhaps the day after included the shooting of Ashley Babbit as the rioters tried to break through a clearly barred door with capital police telling them to stop, congressmen cowering afraid in the chamber, and people chanting "Hang Mike Pence" before they burst through door, all while disguising their identities and some of them holding improved weapons, though not actual firearms/axes/what have you.
It was clearly a riot to me and not an organized coup, but also not a "crowd walking past security" and "going where they shouldn't be". There was certainly an overt sense of violence about the whole thing.
This doesn't fit my recollections. Over at DSL we were arguing over the "coup" description the day it happened, so evidently the idea was already out there. (I was one of the people ridiculing it, and have not changed my mind since.)
It was a sufficiently incompetent attempt at a government takeover that it might as well have been planned by a child. But the obvious intent was to take over the government.
And the planning was more thorough and more credible than the plan for the Beer Hall Putsch, which is broadly regarded as having been a (pathetically incompetent) coup attempt.
This also was my impression on the day of 1/6/21, as refreshed by reading my diary entry for the day. A pathetically incompetent coup/insurrection attempt, but absolutely not any sort of "peaceful protest". There's definitely an attempt at rewriting history here, but it's mostly on the Republican side.
I certainly agree it wasn't a peaceful protest. I remember thinking something like, "I understand these people think they'll get their voices heard now, but this won't end well."
I was surprised how few people got hurt or killed with the initial reports. The number seemed to keep rising not as more information came to light, but as the implications were analyzed as "how can this damage Trump?"
You are very welcome and I am glad you enjoyed it. It’s one of my favorite movies. Leonard Cohen’s soundtrack is so brilliant and as usual Julie Christie is to die for.
I liked how today went. A lot less batshit than last time. Maybe the losers can keep it together again next certification and make it two straight without trashing our own house. Start a new streak.
Yes, Trump is the party of Jan 6. But the Dems are the party of BLM. To me BLM was exactly the same thing but 10x worse. US politics is terribly broken right now and our only choices are between the lesser of two evils.
The members of the BLM protest movement believed that American police were shooting innocent black men to death in unreasonable circumstances. They thought they were trying to save lives (ignore, for the moment, whether that is a defensible belief or not). Given that they believed that, their actions make more sense (*much* more sense than the Jan 6 protestors, since BLM largely accomplished their goal).
Right, and the January 6 protestors thought that there were problematic voting irregularities in the 2020 election that hadn't been properly investigated. Protesting makes sense in that context as well.
A) That theory was provably wrong at the time. Blacks are killed by police proportionately less than their participation in violent crime would warrant. If anything, a rational analysis of racial crime statistics should make whites angry with blacks, not the other way around. B) EVEN IF it was true, violent riots are never the way forward on difficult political problems. This has been demonstrated by the subsequent 4 years of crime statistics: the black homicide rate increased by 40% in the 4 years after George Floyd's death. They got the opposite of what they thought they wanted. Responding supportively to stupid people's temper tantrums is never good policy.
I will notice though that Trump was personally spreading the lies which if true would have legitimized trying a counter-coup and thus fueled the Jan 6 insurrection, while I don't recall Joe Biden going on record claiming that the cops killed ten innocent black people every day and that the only way to stop them would be to immediately disband all police forces.
Now, clearly the Dems knew which side they were supposed to be on, and I am sure half their congresspeople used the phrase 'epidemic of police violence' or something.
Trump had personally sowed the violence of Jan 6 with his election denial. By contrast, no Dem in 2020 thought: "You know what we really need to oust Trump? Race riots, they make our site look really electable!" Instead, the riots seemed to come out of a mix of genuine anger at a highly publicized police murder, a woke ideology who basically excused any violence perpetrated by Blacks, and a lock-down policy which had pushed a lot of people to their brinks, and the Dems were mostly along for the ride.
Now, if after the Floyd murder, one of the top five democrats had claimed that there was a genocide against Black people happening at the hands of the police, and called on all good citizens to stop the killer cops, then I would say that the Dems were equally guilty of inciting violence as Trump was.
> They got the opposite of what they thought they wanted.
The demand was never that the overall Black homicide rate should be lower. Blacks murdering Blacks is not news, there is no racial injustice in it from the woke viewpoint. I think they likely succeeded in making cops more reluctant to engage black suspects for fear of a PR disaster. It just so happens that most of the time when the cops get into a firefight, they actually are the good guys.
It was never about Black Lives per se, only EA weirdos would sum up all homicide victims. They only Mattered when they were ended by cops, and by that metric, Systemic Racism has decreased. Success!
>Trump had personally sowed the violence of Jan 6 with his election denial.
How did that sow violence any more than democratic leadership validating the perception that America is structurally racist or that police disproportionately kill black people? They're directly parallel in that they're equally dishonest political lies. If anything Trump at least had a case: there were circumstantial reasons to be skeptical of the election results. BLM's argument didn't even have circumstantial evidence.
>Systemic Racism has decreased. Success!
Viewed through a zero-sum political lens that's probably correct: blacks gained political power relative to whites. Viewed through an absolute lens of "BLM is about improving the lives of black people" BLM was a disaster for most black people.
You must be kidding. BLM was a mess, but it didn’t lead to the almost overthrow of the democratic government of the United States of America. Not only that over the last four years BLM has come into some truthful perspective while January 6 has been completely rewritten by a monstrous lie in my opinion; that the election really was stolen and if you don’t believe it, you’re not welcome in the Republican Party anymore.
> but it didn’t lead to the almost overthrow of the democratic government of the United States of America.
And neither did Jan 6. They were exactly the same thing: a bunch of idiots demonstrating on the basis of a premise that's clearly wrong. Except, of course, that BLM lasted 100x as long and did 100x the damage. There is no plausible scenario whereby the Jan 6 protests could have affected the election outcome. To claim otherwise is nothing but politically motivated hysterics.
The J6 protesters were in no way 'clearly wrong'. Whether or not the Democrats committed election fraud and whether that determined the results are unknowable because they blocked all inquiry into the topic.
Trump filed 62 lawsuits in various states. There was a *fuckload* of inquiry into the topic, and basically all of it came back with judges saying "nope, this isn't fraud" or "nope, this isn't a procedural violation." (Most of the lawsuits didn't actually allege fraud, only procedural issues. Probably because once they got an actual lawyer involved they realized they didn't have evidence of fraud).
A lot of the lawsuits were heard by Republican judges, some appointed by Trump himself. I'm not sure what other forms of inquiry you could want here. This was Trump getting his proverbial day in court, and he lost about as decisively as he could.
Agreed, the Jan 6 folks were less provably wrong than BLMers but in my view they're both idiots. Conspiracy theories are rarely falsifiable but you have to be a pretty big moron to take one seriously enough to protest over.
"They" "blocked all inquiry"? Weren't there dozens of court trials that looked into the claims, that didn't find anything substantial (apart from attempts by Trump to influence the counting process)? Didn't even the (Republican) officials in Georgia insist that everything was kosher?
You are either very poorly informed or perhaps engaging in political hysterics. I’m not sure which.
It did not lead to the overthrow of the United States government it led to the *almost* overthrow of the United States government, is what I said. BLM didn’t come close; see Detroit in 1968, Los Angeles after the Rodney King incident, the riot in New York after the caravan of Hasidim accidentally ran over a black child in Crown Heights. That is the lineage of the BLM riots. They have absolutely nothing to do with what happened on January 6. Based on all the available evidence, I think you would really have to be kidding yourself to believe otherwise.
No, simply better informed than you are. Trump challenged the electors. He's entitled to do that. The Democrats have challenged in every election that they've lost since 2000. Nothing any protest did could have legally altered that process. The VP has zero legal discretion in the certification of election results. The role is purely ceremonial and if Pence had refused to perform his role then he would have been removed or impeached. There is no scenario whereby democracy could have been destroyed on Jan 6. I mean just use your head: we're the most powerful country in the world. You don't get to beat the electoral process by getting one guy to say the wrong thing during a ceremony. Come on, the world just doesn't work like that.
The relationship between Jan 6 and BLM is that they were of the same category: a violent political protest by stupid people who believed something objectively false. Of course BLM was much more violent and an even less plausible belief, but that's neither here nor there.
I know maybe hundreds of currently employed government workers who I am 100% certain believe it wasn't stolen, and will not lose their jobs. Or even have an application like that put in front of them.
What would the Star Trek Mirror Universe Borg look like? I'm dimly aware that non-cannon Star Trek content already exists about this, but I want to do my own thought experiment. Here's what I've got:
1) Mirror-Borg society is hyperindividualistic and prizes that over all.
2) Its members are even more diverse than the Federation.
3) Even though life inside the Mirror-Borg Collective is objectively better than life anywhere else in the galaxy, the Mirror-Borg don't consider themselves superior. If anything, they judge themselves too harshly.
4) Instead of being expansionist, they are insular. Other species keep coming to them willingly, and only with great persistence will the Mirror-Borg talk with them. Everyone wants something from them. They have rejected many offers from other species to annex themselves to the Collective.
5) The Mirror-Borg battle fleet is composed of billions of small, weak ships of very diverse designs.
6) They are dark-skinned.
7) The Mirror-Borg have strong religious beliefs against the mixing of biology and technology. Pacemakers and wearable technology like Meta Glasses are forbidden, and some purists live as nudist primitives since clothes count as technology. Their preoccupation with this separation is similar to how Orthodox Jews have created and observe elaborate Talmudic Law. Maybe it's common for each Mirror-Borg to have a robot servant that he tells what to do and avoids even touching.
8) In spite of their insularity, the Mirror-Borg are known to be extremely warm and talkative people who are afraid to appear rude. If you are of a different species and find yourself on one of their ships, every Mirror-Borg you see will greet you like an old friend, talk with you at length and invite you to their quarters for a meal. However, the Mirror-Borg are also painfully averse to conflict, so if you start behaving in a threatening manner or destroying things on one of their ships, they will avoid you and pretend like you aren't there.
Note that a central conceit of the Trek Mirrorverse is that it results in e.g. identical-except-for-the-insignia spaceships in all the same places, identical-except-for-the-uniform-and-mindset people ditto and fitting into identical heirarchies, and yes the incentives are completely reversed but for mumble something reasons everything still lines up perfectly.
So you can't have "billions of small, weak ships of very diverse designs" because MirrorBorg ships are ginormous cubes, and the MirrorBorg can't be insular because then they wouldn't be sending the ships to the same places.
Really, the MirrorVerse concept was a very silly idea that should have been quietly abandoned right after the One Good Story was extracted from it.
Hmm. Billions of small, weak ships of diverse designs that lash themselves together into cube-shaped fleets, and rather than taking what's on the outside by force, they tend to let off a few ships with representatives at each location they visit to ingratiate themselves in ways that act as cultural seeds? Reverse assimilation, thus?
(I admit to not being especially familiar with mirror-universe episodes of Trek to begin with, but I find the speculation fun.)
In one of the Culture books, Banks mentions the problem of a hegemonizing swarm, which is basically what the Borg are. One standard way to deal with them short of war is to somehow change them into an evangelizing swarm.
So, in the mirror universe, the Borg are basically the same idea--cyborgs linked together in a vast hive mind, sinking their individuality into the collective. But instead of invading, they evangelize and recruit people. As long as their missionaries and recruiting stations are left alone, they're peaceable enough, but members of any biological species that are miserable, desperate, reviled, too sick to survive at their current society's tech level, etc. routinely go join the Borg. Similarly, there's a substantial cult in various humanoid societies that valorizes losing your individuality to the hive mind, and many people among them who work as non-assimilated missionaries or commit to joining the hive mind at some point in their lives, perhaps after raising their families. Additionally, the Borg offer a safe form of exile for criminals and such--instead of executing your criminals, you can simply hand them over to the Borg. This is used in some societies in a way analogous to the way the Seven Kingdoms used taking the black.
Ooh, I like that one. It won't hold up to close examination (e.g. assimilating 10% of the population of one Federation world and 30% of the next, doesn't lead to the exact same cube-fleet deployment patterns), but it would be good enough for an hour or so of decent television I think.
Parents of small children: what do you do with dentists? Ours has been trying to take x-rays of my son's teeth (19 baby, 1 permanent -- he's in kindergarten) for the past several years, has finally given up in disgust (because the plate they use for the digital x-rays hurts *me* to bite on, let alone a small kid), and has referred us to the pediatric dentist (who is both farther away and also has a much less convenient schedule). I think my kid is pretty ordinary when it comes to mouth proportions or to tolerating annoying health-related routines. Does this mean that most kids (until they're teenagers, say) have to go to dedicated pediatric dentists? (There don't seem to be nearly enough pediatric dentists around for this to be true.) Or is our primary dentist particularly unsuited for working with children / has particularly unsuitable x-ray technology, and I should switch to a different office? Or am I just supposed to say "please don't x-ray my son this year, yes really I'm fine with this" and everyone will breathe a sigh of relief?
I have two kids, now early teens. My experience is similar to the others here. Going to the dentist with a small child was always a quick and simple procedure – a quick, painless check and a learning experience – that shouldn’t turn them off dentistry forever.
When the kids got older (tweens), the dentists became more interested in whether all the teeth come in like they should (I.e. Will they need adjusting/retainer? Is it so tight that one or more needs to be removed?) But for both kids, when the dentist saw something worth mentioning, their advice was just to wait and see if it solved itself – and it did in both cases. None of it required X-rays for either of my kids at the youngest age. I don’t think either of them had dental x-rays taken before they were 12.
I have also seen that while most dentists are good and ethical, it is not uncommon to come across dentists who will look extra hard for possible work, or who will let the price tag unduly influence their recommendation. It’s a bit harsh to call them unethical, but their priorities aren’t necessarily aligned with yours. They may recommend treatments that are expensive, impractical, uncomfortable, yet not strictly necessary. Just because they’re not wrong doesn’t mean their advice is the best for you.
If I were you, I’d take my kid to a different dentist – not just for the second opinion, but to get more experience with dentists. I’ve moved a lot, so have had quite a few of them. But since people usually go to the same dentist year after year, and almost never shop around, lots of people have pretty bad dentists without knowing it.
I'm not a parent of a small child, but I am generally extremely suspicious of dentists after learning that cavities can, in fact, heal themselves (especially if you improve your oral regiment), and having several experiences with less-than-entirely-ethical-dentists. I've encountered one dentist I actually liked - his default approach to cavities was "Let's check on this next time" and, without fail, the cavity would reverse itself, although there would usually be some other tooth that was doing something that needed watching for the next time (leading me to suspect that most cavities are some kind of periodic fluctuation?). Alas I moved away from that state and I've yet to find a dentist I liked since. (I do need to find one, just to fix some damage the last dentist did, but I'm quite reluctant to begin the search all over again.)
I'm not saying your dentist is unethical, mind, I don't know the person. However, if they're pushing you for a procedure for your children that is unlikely to do anything except garner them an insurance payment, it seems like something to consider.
Seems odd to be x-raying baby teeth that are going to fall out in a few years anyhow. I'd be suspicious of someone doing that. Just asked GPT4 whether it was routine to X-ray baby teeth, and if so why. It mostly agrees with me. (But sometimes it's in Lala Land, so you should double-check on google scholar. Look for meta-analyses.)
GPT4 sez: Dentists generally do not routinely X-ray the teeth of children unless there is a specific reason to do so. The primary reasons a dentist might perform X-rays on a toddler include:
Suspected Decay or Damage: If visible cavities or signs of decay are present, X-rays can help assess the extent of the damage, including areas between teeth or beneath the surface where decay may not be visible.
Injury: If a child has experienced trauma to the mouth, an X-ray can help determine if there is damage to the teeth, roots, or developing permanent teeth underneath.
Congenital or Developmental Concerns: X-rays can reveal issues with tooth development, such as missing teeth, extra teeth, or abnormalities in tooth spacing that could impact permanent teeth later.
Infection or Abscess: X-rays can identify infections at the root of a tooth, which could affect both baby and developing permanent teeth.
While it’s true that baby teeth eventually fall out, they play a crucial role in maintaining space for permanent teeth, aiding speech development, and enabling proper chewing. Severe decay or infection in baby teeth can also spread to the underlying permanent teeth or cause pain and complications that might require more invasive treatment later.
Dentists generally prefer to limit X-ray exposure in young children and will only use it when the benefits outweigh the risks. If cavities are clearly visible and treatable without further imaging, a dentist might opt to proceed without X-rays.
I have asked why we're bothering to x-ray baby teeth as they're starting to fall out. The dentist pointed out that some of the baby teeth stick around until the kid is ~12, so it's not orders of magnitude shorter than adult ones. (I agree that I'm not wholly convinced.) Also, now that adults ones *are* coming in, that objection is less meaningful.
I'm not sure how to use Google Scholar to figure out whether it's routine to x-ray baby teeth.
One easy method is to ask GPT your question and ask for links supporting particular points. For example, you could ask what fraction of child dentists routinely X ray teeth and at what age. Ask under what circumstances dentists need to X ray teeth to check for cavities rather than just looking at teeth and probing them with their tools. Ask whether frequent X rays are a known scam. Ask for an article iin a good quality magazine for pediatric dentistry about best practices.
All my experience and common sense suggest that this dentist's approach is not to be trusted.
-Even if your kid gets a cavity in the baby tooth that will last til he's 12, it's not a big deal. Most cavities are filled easily and quickly if found fairly early.
-I'm late middle-aged, way more likely to have bad trouble with my teeth than a child is, and my dentist is very sparing in use of Xrays. Has a schedule -- something like once per year for the ones way in back, once every 2 years for some others. Most of my cavities he has found by inspection, not Xrays. He pokes with his tool and says, "this spot feels mushy, I think you're developoing a cavity." Or he just sees the cavity.
-I took my daughter to the same good dentist I see, and he never once Xrayed her teeth.
-Lots of people in business are dishonest. Every time I get my hair cut they try to sell me bullshit products to "nourish your hair ends." Hair ends are dead. They do not eat. Putting oily stuff on them is basically putting mayonnaise on gravel.
I noticed you writing somewhere in this thread that a certain point won't get you far with the dentist. It sounds like you have the idea you need to convince the dentist that the Xrays are not needed. You don't. You can just say, thanks, you may be right but I'd prefer to skip them. Or, of course, change dentists.
Re: I don't need to convince the dentist -- true; if I'm comfortable asserting that I know how children's dentistry ought to be done better than they do (which in this case I might be!), then I can simply impose my opinion and refuse treatment on my son's behalf. If I want to stay with the dentist but have an actual conversation about this, I don't think "I'm told this isn't how they do it in Germany" is a hugely useful contribution.
Having been in a lot of situations like this, I have found ways around confrontation. Here are some alternatives to claiming to know more than the dentist. You can just say, basically, "you may be right be I'd rather skip it." Or, something like "the idea makes me uneasy and I"m going to pass." It's possible the dentist will try to engage you in argument, but you can just be n a broken record -- "Yes, I understand your point, you may be right but . . ."
Or you can soften it by saying, "I think I'd like to skip Xrays for now, but I will think it over and maybe we can do it another time." And if they ask why skip it, you can broken-record it "the idea makes me uneasy so I'm going to think it over some and maybe another time . . ."
You have to be willing to put up with them having a bad opinion of you, or (if dentist is basically scamming you a bit) pretending to. But that happens all the time anyway. For instance I often go into stores wearing a generous--size backpack loaded with work stuff & sometimes a laptop. he clerks watch me closely, I suppose because people with big bags or backpack are more likely to be shoplifters. I have never shoplifted anything in my life, not even as a rebellious teenager. It's a minor downer, but there's not a thing to do about it.
Is there a particular reason why your child's dentist wants to take an x-ray? My children (5 and 8) never had one – but they have flawless, cavity-free teeth.
> They assert that it's standard procedure, similar to adults.
Again, strange. I've only ever had x-rays taken for actual problems, like serious cavities. Maybe once or twice in the last 10 years (this is in Germany, for socio-cultural context).
X-rays are ionizing radiation. Subjecting someone – especially a child – to it "just-in-case" seems ill-advised.
My guess is that this became much more ubiquitous with the introduction of digital x-rays, which have significantly lower exposures.
Unfortunately, the argument "this isn't standard procedure in Germany" probably won't get me very far with the dentist (any more than the argument "this wasn't part of my childhood, or probably your [the dentist's] childhood" will).
I read a brilliant NYT article about dentists. Apparently, pretty much nothing they say or do is based in science, even though they act like it does. I'll try to find the article.
On statins to treat high LDL cholesterol - I'm not against this.
I'm noticing the following though :
Lots of thoughtful smart people in medical research are for it. And lots of thoughtful smart people in medical research are against it.
50 % of people seem to have high LDL cholesterol.
And it is possible even for decent smart people in the medical field to be caught in a pro-statin position without having given sufficient attention to the opposite position.
I don't know what to make of this video. He says our medical philosophy about high cholesterol is misguided.
He says it's not just about fixing the line number called LDL.
Are doctors getting too excited about fixing this lone number?
He has a great analogy about a hole in the wall. It's caused by termites, but doctors prescribing statins are basically putting a picture on the hole to hide it, when the termites continue to explode.
He says if you have high cholesterol, you should be razor focussed on lifestyle (which is what causes the LDL), such as eating the right foods (minimally processed, watch the carbs and saturated fats ?)), and cardio and especially weight training, adequate sleep, stress management. Not be put on statins. Because cholesterol is just a marker of a deeper problem, not itself the problem.
This is a controversial subject. Not settled science, like many seem to imply.
Not my expertise but I am seeking expert opinions...
There has to be some biochemical intermediate step between lifestyle interventions and the negative symptoms of metabolic syndrome (heart attacks and stuff). I don't know what the evidence is on to what extent LDL level is part of this intermediate step (beyond that there's a known mechanism to link cholesterol levels to atherosclerosis), but the argument with the termite analogy is not enough to establish that lowering cholesterol levels with drugs isn't useful. Perhaps lifestyle factors mean there is a lot of stray food around the house that attracts bugs, but that doesn't mean that using poison to get rid of them won't help.
The version I vaguely remembered is that different types of lipoproteins deliver lipids in different directions, and if you get too much of certain types, they end up depositing the excess lipids in the blood vessel walls. I checked Wikipedia and what it says about this is somewhat different from what I remembered: "Low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particles in blood plasma invade the endothelium and become oxidized, creating risk of cardiovascular disease. A complex set of biochemical reactions regulates the oxidation of LDL, involving enzymes (such as Lp-LpA2) and free radicals in the endothelium.".
Not an expert, but recently read that a lot of the variance in blood lipids is determined by genes. Can't remember where I read it, but do remember that it was some source I couldn't just discount. I believe the point being made was that lifestyle interventions make relatively little difference, but statins do (presumably by somehow suppressing or neutralizing the genetically-determined process that leads to high cholesterol.)
Also not an expert, but this matches my experience - despite getting all the lifestyle factors right, I still have high LDL (at 25!). If you don't exercise, eat a lot of processed food, etc., then sure, lifestyle changes might lower your LDL to a healthy level. But some people just have a genetic predisposition to high LDL regardless of lifestyle.
Maybe, but semaglutide is supposed to address hyperglycemia, and coincidentally seems to also help with weight loss. I suspect it is helping some-how and -what with the root cause, which is mysterious to medicine.
Having finally read the book review bronze medalist How The War Was Won, I still don't get the strategy behind strategic bombing. My understanding of the history is as follows:
pre-WW2: Niche theorists think strategic bombing can win the war on its own. Most are not convinced. Countries invest in the unproven technology.
1940: Germany loses the Battle of Britain. German strategic bombing has negligible impact on British production and morale.
post-1940: Half of US+UK military production is aircraft. Roosevelt makes aircraft production top priority. Everyone is desperate for aircraft. The B29 is by far the most expensive weapon of the war.
I donẗ really get the jump: Why did Churchill and Roosevelt invest so much in an unproven and partly-failed technology? Wouldn't the reasonable thing to conclude be that strategic bombing is harder than expected (as proven by the Germans) and then invest in ships and tanks instead? Was it simply that the alternative to bombing was WW1-style mass armies which was too costly in causalities?
Airpower is undeniably an important tool in war, as every war after WW1 has proven. Air dominance is an almost perfect predictor of who is going to win a war militarily.
However, wars after WW1 have also proven that strategic airpower, as dreamed up toward the end of WW1, has a terrible ROI. The Allied bombing campaign did degrade the Axis industrial base and forced the Axis powers to invest more in fighters and AA over their homeland which they then lacked over the land fronts; but as we know today, it still took "boots on the ground" such as island hopping in the Pacific and street fighting in Berlin to really win WW2 and subsequent wars, just like it always has.
>"…it still took "boots on the ground" such as island hopping in the Pacific and street fighting in Berlin to really win WW2…"
Quibble: no Allied soldiers set foot in Japan proper until after the surrender; the island hopping was only necessary to secure an airbase close enough to the home islands for the Enola Gay to get Little Boy to Hiroshima.
Granted, that's hardly strategic bombings *as dreamed up toward the end of WW1*…
The Spanish Civil War and the 1939-1940 phases of WW2 contained several episodes that were seen at the time as major successes for what might be termed "operational bombing": the use of bombers behind the lines to destroy or disrupt the operations of logistics hubs, airfields, and the like. There were also a couple episodes (Warsaw, Rotterdam) where aerial bombardment was used to compel a besieged city to surrender. These were much smaller in scale and significance than the Allied strategic bombing campaigns, so they're often forgotten about except when one wants to make the point that the Axis powers started bombing cities first, but they were a huge deal at the time.
For the London Blitz in particular, damage was relatively minor in terms of not being anywhere near being war-winning, but it was significant enough to get decision-makers' attention, and the decision makers knew how much worse it could have been if not for various mitigating circumstances.
Most obvious is that the RAF was heavily contesting the skies over southern England, shooting down a lot of bombers and escorting fighters and also forcing the Germans to compromise the effectiveness of their bombers to make them harder to shoot down.
Building fleets of bombers to hit back at Germany likely mitigated effects on civilian morale. I remember reading that this was a major motivation for British strategic bombing during and shortly after the Blitz.
The German bomber fleet wasn't really up for the scale of destruction the Allies were prepared to inflict. Germany made mostly medium bombers, not heavy bombers, and made a lot fewer of them than the British and Americans did. Moreover, most of the Allied war production was outside the range of German bombers, which was emphatically not the case for German war production vs British and American bombers.
Germany's bombing campaign in England (mostly) wasn't strategic in the sense that the USAAF's (not a typo) was, in that (other than some abortive early efforts against the RAF) it wasn't targeting anything that would materially affect the outcome of the war.
That said, the RAF (unlike the USAAF) did pursue a similar approach to that of the Luftwaffe under the (mistaken) belief that the German citizenry would respond differently to terror bombing than the Brits themselves had. But the RAF didn't have B-29s, nor a secret superweapon development program that required its payload capacity.
Churchill could not invade with tanks on his own. He had to rely on protection from the Channel, which means investing in ships & planes, but not so much tanks. The Germans were outclassed at sea from the beginning, having to rely on hidden U-Boats to raid commerce shipments. The US invested in efficiently building "Liberty Ships" faster than the Germans could sink them, though the convoy system also helped give U-Boats a higher than sustainable casualty rate.
One thing you're overlooking from the book's points is that you can't outproduce the other side's tanks if your tank factories are being bombed so much you have to distribute production inefficiently.
It's called "compatibilism", as eloquently espoused by the late Daniel Dennett.
Basically (as I understand it), the argument goes like this: Yes, the Universe is a giant machine of some sort; at the lowest level it is either deterministic or random, but as a practical matter we are never going to even get close to knowing the exact state of the Universe at any given time, so from our perspective we can just assume randomness.
By itself, randomness does not require free will; but it does imply that we can never know the future with any certainty. However, at least on short timescales, we can "make decisions" that clearly affect the future state of the Universe. It's not a completely compelling argument IMHO but it has some explanatory benefit.
Dennett goes deep on free will and "the hard problem of consciousness" in books such as "Elbow Room" and "Consciousness Explained".
TL; DR: "Free will probably doesn't exist in principle, but in practice, assuming you and other conscious beings you interact with have free will is the best pragmatic choice for modeling the world we experience around us (including ourselves).
The same argument can be made for consciousness, but it's less compelling due to this troublesome first-person subjective experience we all claim to have.
I like Dennet. The missing piece is emergent behavior in the brain. Given that emergent behavior can arise from a fully determined equation, yet isn't predictable ahead of time, and that seems to fit our situation well. We still have to confirm that the brain can produce emergent behavior.
Then there's the evidence that we do not even live in a fully determined universe. Don't count free will out yet!
It seems like a pretty big ask that the undetermined universe could become determined (as in choices) not by pure physical randomness but by something we can't explain and don't understand (conscious phenomena). If the physical universe is sufficient to explain what happens, then decisions would seem to be observations--outputs of the universe, not causative.
The alternative, of course, is that physical randomness like thermal noise is determined on an individual level by the stuff of consciousness. That seems a little silly though.
The idea is that the universe is already under-determined, from our point of view, and nothing we can observe will ever change this (because we are part of the universe being observed). The brain, like many other phenomena, is a recursive system--outputs are used as inputs of the next iteration of decision making/behavior. The behavior of a system like that is highly sensitive to small changes in initial conditions, and can't be predicted ahead of time without running the algorithm itself. This is a feature of certain types of mathematical models, and if this describes how part of the brain works, then we can never predict human behavior beyond a certain point, no matter how much data is collected.
It seems like in this post and others, you're implying that chaotic systems can't be computed. That's just not true. The fact that it's computationally explosive is irrelevant. It could be computed with enough resources.
Chaotic systems *might* be determined, and reproducible in a computing environment that completely models a given chaotic system's starting conditions. A common observation, however, is that we almost never have complete information about any system's start state. And by definition, that chaotic system will be sensitive to any discrepancies in our recorded initial state and its actual initial state, meaning an arbitrarily small discrepancy will develop into an arbitrarily large one after some number of iterative calculations.
One could try to model all possible discrepancies and then posit a magical infinite source of computation to run calculations over all those possibilities, but what you'll end up with is an output declaring that from your system, all possibilities are possible, with no way to tell which one(s) is/are most probable.
No, my point is that it can't be predicted ahead of time, without running the actual computation. Another way of saying that is, you can't predict what someone will think or do, until they think or do it.
In principle, any computation can be simulated to an arbitrary level of precision. The limiting factor is that a perfect simulation requires a more complex machine than the one being simulated. The new computer needs to encode the state and operation of the original computer. So while we may never be able to predict what someone will do, it's not beyond the realm of theory.
In addition to the computational and storage deficiencies, other real world limitations are lack of input data accuracy, not perfectly knowing the initial state of the machine, and not having a good enough model of how the particles interact.
Determinism implying a lack of free will is a category error. Free will is an abstraction of the underlying reality; it makes perfect sense at the appropriate level of abstraction, and it makes no sense to apply it to much lower levels.
Yes, our decisions can be decomposed into little component parts of historical brain activity. This does not mean the decisions do not exist; just the exact same way that realising everything in the world we inhabit is made of quantum amplitude flows and there is nothing to inherently separate those into being part of one object rather than another does not render the world we inhabit meaningless or make the objects around us stop existing.
Things still keep existing /even when we know what they are made of/. It's not either/or.
I agree one is forced to live life in the present as if free-will were real. Denis Diderot's novel Jacques the Fatalist is a hilarious exploration of the results of living with an ever-present belief in determinism.
But we also contemplate our own and others' past. It may be practical (and 100% correct) to view one's past as inexorable in the same way it is practical to view the future as indeterminate. After all, we might know the past but can't know the future, so there might be good reason to view past actions in a different light than future ones.
Because Theism (I'll skip the part about "which Theism") isn't an explanatory theory, it's a belief system explicitly based on faith rather than observation and analysis.
Asking why, as a scientist, I don't consider theism is a category error.
You misunderstand the nature of science. It isn't designed or intended to answer "why" questions, you have to turn to another intellectual domain to address those, such as philosophy, art, or religion. Science is our tool for identifying that theory, given the evidence, that has the highest probability of being correct (defined as predicting patterns in future data). This explains why many people see science and religion as compatible, because they belong to "different magesteria."
The Turing Test has been passed more times than the audience at a NASCAR rally, as far back as 1966 for informal tests; the first formal victory was in 1991, by a program that tricked users by ... introducing typographical errors.
I'm seeing classes on learning to build, train, and use machine learning models without doing coding. Stanford and MIT are both offering them. Amazon now has a service called SageMaker that purports to allow you to do the same.
I do not know how to code and don't want to use my limited free time to learn. I'm wondering if SageMaker or some brief training would let me play with AI in the ways I'm interested in doing it. There are 2 things I'd especially like to be able to do:
-Experiment with AI and language. Train it on a bunch of great prose, feeding it works by prose masters of the last few hundred years. Train it on my favorite poetry. Introduce some randomness into the language it produces, but bound the randomness in certain ways.
-Experiment with AI and images. I liked Dall-e2 much more than Dall-e3, and would like to nudge the AI away from ad copy type images, and towards weirder, lumpier, more emotion-determined images.
None of this has to work perfectly, and I can come up with a variety of ways to attempt these tweaks, but would like to know whether people who understand AI well think it would be possible to do this sort of thing using these no-code methods.
I looked up installing ComfyUI on my computer, and even the instructions say "this is not simple," and then the instructions for Mac, which is what I got, start off with "Mac installation takes a few more steps." Instructions have you typing this and that into the terminal, which I never use. Plus once it's on your Mac you have to keep track of and install any updates to Comfy yourself. I can follow instructions fine, but the trouble with this set-up is that I have not got a basic grasp of what's going on, and if something goes wrong I will not be able to troubleshoot.
Without endorsing that one in particular, yes, that kind of thing should be fine. I don't use it myself, but if you don't care about keeping your images private, I agree running it locally is a hassle well worth avoiding.
I'd also suggest you start with something like Automatic1111's WebUI first, to get the hang of prompting and LoRAs first: less than infinitely customizable workflow, but more user-friendly.
I've done similar to what Shankar is suggesting with Automatic1111 WebUi running locally on my computer. I got it up and running by asking ChatGPT to walk me through it step by step. I'm also having ChatGPT write my prompts that I feed to the WebUI which is working out quite well.
Also, the "projects" section in ChatGPT is similar to a simple RAG that I've been using to run my homebrew TTRPG game, and it works well enough for avoiding the hassle of building a custom app.
That's heartening. I have done zero coding in my life. I don't know what it involves to use a RAG to make a homebrew TTRPG game, but it definitely involves skills I do not have. On the other hand, I am bright and good at following directions and paying attention to details. What is daunting is that I have no big picture at all of what I will be doing. Just know that I am connecting to a site with a user-friendly interface that lets me give prompts, fine tune them by adjusting various values, rather than just using terms like "vivid, masterpiece, melancholy feel," and also lets me use things like Control Net that give me more power to control body positions, -- and maybe also lets me train a model. But that's all very general and conceptual. If something isn't working I will have no big picture understanding to guide me in identifying what's wrong. I will just have go show GPT the problem and ask what to do. Knowing all that, do you still think this is going to work for me?
Haha. I run a Table Top Role Playing Game (like Dungeons and Dragons, but a different game) and I've been using ChatGPT to be my assistant Game Master; planning each session, maintaining plot hooks/storylines, etc. Its worked fairly well! We are going to be planning session 26 this week. One of the challenges of this project is keeping the bot abreast of what is going on story wise, and the pain point on this is that in a single chat it sooner or later runs out of context. IE it can't remember what we've done so it makes it up!
A RAG is an external vector database that you can link an LLM to so that it uses the data in the RAG before its training data; presumably so it can remember what has been done! It is a bit of technical project and I've not been able to wrap my head around it to get it done.
I am also NOT a coder, at all, I hate code. However, I am in IT so I've got a bit of "natural ability" that helps me execute what the bot tells me to do when implementing these technical solutions. I think you would be fine though, as when I set up the A1111 WebUI it was as simple as download Python; install; download git, install, then run exactly the commands that ChatGPT gave me, and now I've got a local Dreamshaper 8 stable diffusion bot. It also helps that I'm a PC gamer so I had a video card that is sufficient hardware wise for the solution.
Truly my suggestion would be to start with a ChatGPT Project (so you can upload reference files for it to leverage), and not install anything more complex than that on your local computer. Once you play with projects for a few months, then see if you aren't getting what you need from it, and if so move on to the broader scope.
Lastly, one other method I've leveraged is asking ChatGPT to validate the direction I'm going in, and also to write me prompts to feed to other bots.
For AI image generation, certainly. Try ComfyUI, with models from Civit AI. You could also train your own LoRAs for specific styles and concepts, all without having to do any coding yourself.
What you're describing for the prose, with "bound[ing] the randomness in certain ways" sounds hard without code.
EDIT: Actually, upon second thought, it's possible ComfyUI itself might work for that too. There are nodes for prompt enhancement, and you might be able to use those, or something similar.
The bounding would be things like part of speech -- use any combo of adjective + noun, but no other parts of speech. Does that sound hard to pull off, or no?
Sounds hard without code, though maybe my intuitions haven't recalibrated yet: it might be that you can now say something close to what you just did to your LLM (which you CAN fine-tune as desired with little to no coding) and get what you want.
I could feed it lists of all nouns and adjectives, unless that's too much data to stuff in. Or I feed it a list of prepositions and articles, and there aren't many of those at all. Then I'd say, use any 2 words here, except words from the preposition and articles lists, words ending in -ly (that captures most adverbs) and capitalized words (that captures proper names.)
Any good model today should know what improper nouns and adjectives are without being told so explicitly.
From Gemini ("Give me a dozen poetic "Adjective + noun" phrases that are unusual and thought-provoking.")
- Ephemeral echoes
- Velvet voids
- Fractured futures
- Crimson whispers
- Lunar laughter
- Obsidian tears
- Phantom limbs
- Celestial rust
- Whispering stones
- Ethereal chains
- Silent thunder
And following with "More, and make them even more unusual":
- Starlight bones
- Chromium ghosts
- Quantum lullabies
- Asphalt oceans
- Rusting rainbows
- Clockwork butterflies
- Frozen fireflies
- Echoing emptiness
- Molten moonlight
- Shadow symphonies
- Glass horizons
- Weightless whispers
I'm not sure exactly how you want to fine-tune this kind of thing on your favorite prose/poetry, but Retrieval Augmented Generation might be what you're looking for: upload some reasonable set of texts, and then with some prompting, you should be able to get the model to output phrases based (in some way) on your input samples. This approach should be essentially code-free.
Kevin Drum has a good counter for the why-America-can't-build-stuff any more whiners. If you believe the charts and graphs, we certainly can and are. But if you don't believe in charts and graphs, you won't be convinced.
The Residential Housing Units Completed per Population Added graph is missing some context. Except at the very end (which is indeed a hopeful note), it's well below 1.0 and trending downwards to a low of 0.3 in 2014 (actually 2009-2014, since it's a five-year moving average).
The missing context is the ratio of existing dwelling units to population, the size and type of the new dwelling units being produced, and whether these are gross or net new units (e.g. if a house is demolished and a new one built in its place, does that count as +1 or +0 in the metric?).
The actual dwelling unit to population ratio is 0.43, so a range of 0.3-0.8 is decent. The chart can be read as the 2009 recession causing a few years of abnormally low construction, with catch-up development occurring post-2020.
Size and type matters to the extent that maintaining the current ratio isn't great if the new units are disproportionately single-occupancy apartments, not large apartments or houses suitable for couples, larger families, or sets of roommates. FRED doesn't have fantastic granularity for selecting this, but doing a graph of the ratio of single-family housing starts to all dwelling unit starts seems a good first-order proxy. Eyeballing that graph, I see a lot of noise and either no trend or a slight upward trend. Also good as far as it goes. As for info not captured in this metric, I have heard from other sources that housing size is trending upwards in the US over the past several decades.
FRED cites the Census Residential Construction report, which seems to be gross starts rather than net starts, which is not ideal. I don't see handy numbers in FRED for either total dwelling unit count over time, nor for demolitions, so I can't correct for this offhand. Numbers I can find tell me that demolitions were bit over half of new construction c. 2009-2011 (American Housing Survey, Housing Inventory Change, HUD), which was as already discussed a very low point for new construction. I consider it plausible that demolitions were a much lower percentage of construction in other years.
Overall, that graph does seem to broadly support Drum's conclusions, but it needed a lot more analysis than Drum gave it.
Second this. Looking at aggregate measures doesn't tell the real story, because economic forces have made greater and greater proportions of people want to move to the top 5-10 metros, most of which it is impossible to build in (NYC, SF, LA, DC, Seattle).
Also, wth is going on with that "adjusted for population" housing units graph? What, our population plummeted in 2018? The line has barely hit the past "average" on the total units graph, but it's skyrocketed up exponentially, higher than it's ever been, starting in 2018 when "adjusted for population??" That "average" line would have been on a much lower population base in 1980 / 90 / 00, and the adjusted for population lines should have been higher back then.
All the rest of his metrics were basically meaningless. I'm anti-sold on his conclusion, and have updated slightly on the fact that we probably CAN'T build anything any more, if these are the best arguments the other side can muster.
"People want to move to SF but SF isn't building more houses" feels like it should be a self-solving problem. Eventually people should just shrug and say "ok i guess I'll move somewhere else then".
The amount of angst wasted on the dumb problem of people who want to move to cities which don't want to have them is considerable.
> "People want to move to SF but SF isn't building more houses" feels like it should be a self-solving problem. Eventually people should just shrug and say "ok i guess I'll move somewhere else then".
Indeed, and this is certainly happening at scale. And I'll take the position that this is a bad thing.
In Geoffrey West's book Scale, he looks at scaling laws across things as diverse as circulatory systems, cells, animals, and cities.
Cities have always been our primary engines of economic growth, and it is actually superlinear - the bigger the city, the more economic activity and growth it generally drives. Things like average income, per-capita GDP in a city, and patents scale superlinearly with population.
As in, if we care about economic growth, we should want MORE people moving to the biggest cities, so it actually IS a bad thing if a lot of people want to live in those top 5 cities and can't because there's no housing.
So in a future US-China war..... can't the US (and maybe partners) blockade the flow of raw materials into China? China is population-rich but pretty natural resource-poor, which I think is where the 'China is like the US in WW2' analogies fall apart. China is extremely dependent on iron ore imports, especially from Australia, along with oil from the Middle East, copper, and aluminum, just to name a few. Most worryingly for them, they still import a decent amount of food- I guess the Chinese soil is just not very rich. The US, by contrast, has natural resources in spades, plus we have ports on 2 oceans, which make blockading us almost impossible.
I just finished reading Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze, so after 800+ pages of reading about how the Nazis were desperate for natural resources to sustain their war effort, it's hard not to port that over to China. All the factories in the world don't help you if you lack the raw materials to build in the first place.
So in a hot US-China war, can't the US fall back and just blockade the Chinese mainland? Won't help if we lose fast, but will help if the war slows down a lot- which is where everyone talks about the vaunted Chinese manufacturing advantage without thinking about where the iron ore comes from. (Or oil, or food!) Would be a bit ironic if the US goes full German U-boat and destroys civilian shipping
For what it's worth (and I know the guy is prone to hyperbole), Peter Zeihan argues that this would be almost trivially easy: put a bunch of US destroyers near the Persian gulf, block any tankers heading east, watch as China runs out of fuel and food within months. Subtracting the hyperbole, yes, a distance blockade would almost certainly be a crucial, and very painful, part of a reaction to Chinese aggression.
Of course, it would be ironic if the US tore down the very system it has been safeguarding for many decades now... but that would be on China. No one forces them to invade a neighboring country.
Yes, that would be an integral part of U.S. strategy. China's land links to its neighbors are also surprisingly poor, so some success could be had blowing up key bridges and mountain passes to restrict overland imports into China.
The only problem with this is it would take a long time for China's warmaking ability to collapse thanks to economic privation--look at how long Germany and its European friends held out during the World Wars in spite of enemy blockades.
China's made moves to sure-up its domestic food production in recent years and apparently could be self-sufficient if needed at his point. It also has a large strategic oil reserve to fall back on. That covers the two main weaknesses Germany had in WoD.
All that also assumes that the US navy could dominate China at sea, which is unclear. The USN is currently bigger but China has waaaaay more ship production capacity for a protracted war.
Allying with Russia has also boosted the potential resources available by land a lot.
Germany weathered several years of blockade in WW1 and 2 and China's current position is much more secure than Germany's was, so I think it's very unlikely China could be defeated outright in a reasonable timeframe that way, even if it would have huge economic costs (for both sides realistically).
The countries that really could be defeated just by blockade are Japan and Korea by China.
A lot of researchers think China's population figures are heavily inflated, owing to incentive structures which encourage local governments to inflate population figures. The lowest estimate I've seen is 400 million, which is ... almost certainly wrong. I'd hazard a guess that the actual number is somewhere around 900 million.
And they have a rather big issue; their population pyramid is more like a bulbous tower, heavier on the top than the bottom.
Additionally, decades of the one-child policy have left many families rather sparse on descendants; given the role family plays in their culture, substantial population losses would likely create massive social instability.
Four dozen NYC-sized cities is still two New York Cities short of 400 million. But also they only have one dozen NYC-sized (and larger) cities, with a total (of those 12) official population of ~155 million (or ~19 New York Cities).
But yeah, 400 million is, as noted, almost certainly wrong.
China with 400 million people would be similar to the U.S. in both size and population. It would be peculiar for that version of China to have dozens of cites the size of the largest U.S. city.
*Almost certainly wrong*. Also, again, per China's figures, -one- dozen, not dozen-s-.
But it's not -certainly- wrong, for several reasons; first, US cities tend to follow a Zipf distribution, because US population migration patterns are "natural"; China's cities do not, which is not surprising, given that China pursued policies of forced urbanization. (But also may suggest that the urban population numbers are, uh, inaccurate.)
Second, Chinese incentives are known to have created fake urbanization; most well-known being vast stretches of empty apartment buildings. I've encountered comments from visitors to one of these NYC-sized cities commenting on how weirdly empty and quiet they were, and how little traffic there is. They chalked this up to good urban planning and mass transit - but if you think about it, it's weird how well the urban planning and mass transit apparently work in some of their cities, where others are nightmares of congestion.
Third, Chinese national incentives encourage local governments to, well, overestimate their population figures.
Edit:
Also, note that the population of cities is a lot more arbitrary than people typically expect. Is the DFW metroplex one city, or several? Treated as one city, the US gets another NYC-sized city.
Considering land area in our equation, Shanghai has a population density of 10,000 per square mile; New York City has a population density of 29,000 per square mile. No Chinese city has the population density of NYC; the closest is Shenzen, at 23,000 per square mile.
>can't the US (and maybe partners) blockade the flow of raw materials into China?
First, regarding the blockade from the sea: Any asset used in this blockade would likely suffer a high rate of attrition, by virtue of being in range of a large area of china's mainland. And any asset used in such a blockade would be a very expensive one, and (at the moment), hard to replace.
Then even the US managed to impose a blockade at sea, there is a number of land borders, one of which being Russia, a famously ressource-rich country, and, as of 2024, one that is both very likely to be accepting generous terms, and very unlikely to be convinced to participate in this blockade.
And there is the other neighbours. How willing would vietnam be to join in this blockade? How willing would the US be to apply the blockade to vietnam also?
Russia is resource-rich, but its export markets to China are constrained by corruption and a lack of infrastructure. If a U.S.-China war broke out, it might take Russia so long to build a new gas pipeline to help China that the conflict would be over before.
As Humphrey Appleby notes, you don't have to be close to the Chinese mainland to blockade it. You can block merchant ships hundreds of miles away from China itself. I agree that Russia is very resource-rich and could help with materials, though I think it's interesting that China sources 60% of its iron from Australia and not Russia
>You can block merchant ships hundreds of miles away from China itself
Yes, if you're willing to sink every ship going to north-vietnam. Which...sure, you can. But it's going to be unpalatable to a lot of people. Otherwise, ships will go to Hai Phong, unload, then another ship goes to anywhere on China's coastline. And, again, anything in range to shoot at it will be in range to be shot at, but from a number of location on the mainland.
>though I think it's interesting that China sources 60% of its iron from Australia and not Russia
It don't seems so interesting to me. One is probably cheaper and easier during peacetime, but that doesn't mean the other won't be possible to obtain during a war. Russia's adventures in Ukraine reminded us that things can become significantly more expensive and difficult during war, while still being done.
As Eric Rall says, there is lots of precedent for `distant blockade.' The most obvious being the UK's blockade of Germany in both world wars. And an existing doctrine of continuous voyage, which absolutely allows you to stop ships going to north vietnam which are carrying contraband.
No sinking is necessary, unless the ships in question refuse to stop when ordered to do so. (Just like traffic stops do not require shooting motorists). The British stopped civilian ships sailing to German (and Dutch etc) ports, but didn't sink them.
Distant blockades have been a thing for a very long time. Both world wars, for instance. Also, the Union blockade of the Confederacy (1861-5) involved both close blockade operations (i.e. stationing warships a few miles out to sea near major ports) and distant ones. I think some distant blockade operations were involved in the Napoleonic Wars as well, although I'm less confident of that.
The trick to distant blockades is stopping and searching ships, inspecting their cargo manifests, and having other intelligence channel that can help you choose which ships to search and also help determine when the manifests are lying about where the cargo is coming from or where it's going. Under the Doctrine of Continuous Voyage, contraband is still subject to seizure if it's been moved to a different ship in a neutral port or even shipped overland from a neutral port: the WW1 blockade also stopped cargoes bound for Dutch and Danish ports, and the Civil War blockade involved stopping a lot of ships between Bermuda and various European ports. The stopping and searching is done by light ships, with your major warships only used if the other side tries to challenge the blockade with their fleet.
It helps if you have a convenient geographical choke point, like Bermuda in the ACW or the English Channel and North Sea in the World Wars, but it isn't strictly necessary.
Sinking tends to be more of a thing for commerce raiding rather than proper blockades. The difference is that you're only allowed to raid enemy-flagged ships, while a blockade also applies to neutral-flagged ships. Sinking neutral ships tends to annoy their respective home countries, sometimes leading to those countries not being neutral for much longer.
I have read that the PRC is aggressively stockpiling raw materials, oil etc. How large their stockpiles are, I don't know, and obviously they are not infinite, but the strategic power of a blockade is going to depend a lot on whether they have a 2 month stockpile or a 20 year stockpile.
Also we don't need to go U-boat, we can blockade them with surface units just fine, as long as it is a distant blockade.
China has land borders with fourteen different countries, only a few of which will cooperate with US-led sanctions. Between the enormous land area of China and the even more enormous land area of Russia, I don't think there's much that can't be obtained. There might be some shortages and rationing, and maybe steel that was going to build skyscrapers gets diverted into building tanks, but I can't think of anything specific.
doesn't have good land-based communications with basically any of those other countries though. The land borders are mostly mountains/dense forest/desert/tundra, with very few roads and rail. Those would have to be built first, which would take time.
The amount of goods transported to China by ship is on the order of billions of tonnes. Now I'm not an expert on logistics, but I don't think you can quickly switch that over to land-based transport. Not only would you have to build out that capacity within China, but also within the neighboring countries.
Then there's the issue that land-based transport is more expensive (i.e., consumes more resources) than ships, and that doesn't even take into account the massive expense in labor and materials for building the infrastructure itself.
China imports about 80% of its iron ore. (1) I suppose it could have domestic sources that it's choosing to not use for whatever reason, but I think the onus is on you to explain why they're not doing so- especially as they're gearing up for potential war. I do not in fact think that iron is 'literally as common as dirt'.
Rather than learning from 'popular Internet memes', I think I prefer statistics from industry sources. China is actually less self-sufficient in food than it was 2 decades ago (2), and has been a net importer of agricultural foodstuffs since 2004. (3) China is the world's largest food importer, including the top global importer of soybeans, corn, wheat, rice, and dairy products. (4) This is a recognized national security issue in China. (5)
As I understand it, much of their old agricultural land has now been developed for cities, roads, and factories. So references to past centuries are no longer relevant
> I have good news for 𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 you as compared to 𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘰 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘦 you: iron is the fourth most common element in earth’s crust, making up around 5% of the total mass of the part of the earth we can actually mine. Modern industry produces – and I mean this very literally – a 𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘯𝘴 (and change) of iron per year. Iron is about the exact opposite of rare; almost all of the major ores of iron are dirt common. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁.
> One of the reasons that the change from using bronze (or copper) as tool metals to using iron was so important historically is that iron is just 𝘴𝘰 𝘥𝘢𝘮𝘯 𝘢𝘣𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘵. Of course iron can be used to make 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 tools and weapons as well, but only with proper treatment: initially, the advantage in iron was that it was 𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘱.
(The emphasis is Bret Devereaux calling you stupid, not me.)
If you compare China's iron ore production (estimated 660 million tonnes at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_iron_ore_production ) to its iron reserves (estimated 20 billion tonnes at https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/analysis/world-iron-ore-reserves-countries/ ), you learn that, if China needed to mine five times the amount of iron, it would be good for the next 6 years. Of course, comparing the reserves listed by NS Energy to the wikipedia estimate of production, we can also see that, if nothing changes, the entire world will blow through all of its iron reserves in 56 years. We can safely ignore that and realize that China appears to be, if anything, unusually rich in demonstrated iron reserves.
It is similarly rich in demonstrated arability, and unlike with the iron that's a real advantage.
The reason you import rocks and soybeans is that those are low-value products and you have better things to do with your time. It isn't that you're suffering from a crippling shortage of rocks.
Presuming such a war was triggered by the PRC mounting an invasion of Taiwan and the US coming to the island's defense, it really depends on how things got to that point:
- If the PRC mistakenly believed the US wouldn't intervene (a la Saddam in 1990) or incorrectly thought they had a means to prevent the USN and/or USAF from contesting their crossing the Strait, then the war probably wouldn't last long enough for such considerations to come into play.
- If the PRC *correctly* thought they had a means to prevent the USN and/or USAF from contesting their crossing the Strait, then it depends on the nature of such:
-- If it was transient (e.g., one-off strike that knocks US airbases in Japan & Korea out of commission just long enough for the invasion fleet to reach the far shore), then any blockade might be limited to PRC-occupied Taiwan.
-- If it was persistent (e.g., credible threats to US carriers within striking range of Taiwan), then the PRC's newly-expanded force projection capability might be enough to make a blockade infeasible.
On the last point, I don't see it. The PRC could have a newly-expanded force-projection capability that can keep US carriers far enough to be out-of-striking-range of Taiwan, but how does that prevent a distant blockade? Enforced at e.g. the Malacca strait, or similar? Most of China's raw materials come from a long way away, and merely denying the near-China seas to the USN isn't going to prevent blockade.
I perhaps should've emphasized "might" more … emphatically.
Starting from the premise that the PRC does not currently possess such a capability (I do not think the DF-21 qualifies), the range of a hypothetical future system is underdetermined; there exist (small) regions of the possibility space that could push the USN so far back that the boundary of the denied area is longer than can be effectively secured.
OK, sure, if they can successfully `deny' the seas out to a range of, say, 3000 miles, then that does render a blockade infeasible. That seems unlikely though. In part because you don't need to blockade the entire perimeter of the `denial' zone, a handful of chokepoints (e.g. Malacca strait, Panama canal) likely suffice.
[And why stop there. If they can add a factor of four and deny the seas out to 12000 miles, then they can counter-blockade America...]
Why do we need to start sinking them? We just stop/search/seize at Malacca or whatever. CF you can conduct traffic stops without shooting motorists. OK I guess if they don't stop when ordered to stop then we would need to fire on them. But this is no different to enforcing any old law - ultimately all governmental authority is backed by threat of force.
CF the UK implementing `distant blockade' of Germany in both world wars. At no point was indiscriminate `sinking civilian cargo ships' involved.
Definitely unlikely. But effective denial of even smaller areas is also unlikely; I'm just not confident that P(big area denial | small area denial) is negligibly small.
As for counter-blockading: supercarriers are far scarcer and much more valuable than merchant shipping generally. The PRC could deter the USN with a system whose capacity would be insufficient to impose a broad blockade.
Since cognitive biases are 1) both universal and resistant to self-detection, and 2) tend to favor extreme judgments and beliefs, could it be beneficial for people to obligatorily apply moderation to some classes of judgments/beliefs?
Particularly high-bias classes such as:
- Identity-linked beliefs
- Ethical judgments
- Complex multicausal scenarios
- Personal stake scenarios
I’ll define moderation here as a reduction in positional extremity on a spectrum. If your volume dial is at a 10, a 9 would be more moderate. If it’s at 1, a 2 would be.
As a principle it’s probably very limited to being applied in a vague and unsatisfying way, but would be applied after you reach your judgment/conclusion. For instance, if you believe UFOs have visited earth, consider moderating that to probably visited. If you believe UFOs never visited, consider moderating that to probably never. Any of these beliefs could be true, but given the nature of bias itself, chances are your/my bias has radicalized our judgment rather than moderated it.
Notes and exceptions: This doesn’t imply that the more moderate the belief, the better. It just suggests that many beliefs (not all) would benefit from a consistent moderating influence. There are situations where you may be choosing between two overly moderate options where this principle actually weakens the belief. Unlike confirmation bias, overconfidence and the availability heuristic, a few biases like the status quo bias, don’t necessarily radicalize beliefs but may unnecessarily moderate them. Procedural, low-stakes, single-variable and mathematically determined decisions are not as prone to bias and consequently a moderating principle might not be useful under these circumstances.
Rather than just making a habit of turning the dial down, I think it would work better to have some questions you ask yourself about these beliefs that help modulate your certainty that they're correct. I try to do that. One especially helpful one is to ask myself whether it makes me angry to think about people who do not share the belief. If it does, that's really a tell. It indicates that the belief is intertwined with my self-esteem and self-image somehow.
So if it makes me angry to think about people who think my belief is wrong, then I ask myself what my picture is of the other person's belief. I usually picture the other person in a way to supports my anger. Maybe I picture them being particularly dumb or selfish, and arriving at their idea via a bunch of infuriatingly dumb, selfish steps. Or I picture then despising me for my belief.
So then I get myself to think about times I've just been wrong about something, and how I arrived at my wrong belief, and what it was like to have it. Generally my steps of arriving at the belief were not especially dumb and selfish. or angry. Often I just kind of adopted the idea wholesale from people I was fond of and respected. And recognizing that helps me develop a different picture of the people I disagree with. And *that* helps me try on the idea that they might be right about some of it. Also, it becomes easier to reduce my own certainty in the belief if I am not mentally fighting a war with a bunch of imagined infuriating idiots who believe the opposite.
I try to use this approach, and I think most self aware people do too. But cognitive bias is often not self-detectable. We’re all victim to it to varying degrees, despite our efforts to spot it. So it seems plausible that applying a systematic moderating principle post-conclusion could be reasonably advocated for.
Self detection of bias, while helpful, is also really time/cognitive resource dependent and isn’t going to be nearly as effective for less critical/analytical people (like myself) who most need to temper their beliefs.
There is another method (not that I think yours is necessarily a bad one)--you could seek out people who disagree with you, ask them to explain their beliefs, and and force yourself to consider their reasons objectively. This isn't dependent upon self-detection of bias, and doesn't just replace all extreme beliefs with a "moderation bias."
Yes—I think your suggestion is probably a better method in most respects when one has the time and personnel available to carry it out.
But if you take for granted that bias is fundamental to cognition, it means you’re updating based on a second perspective biased to an unknowable degree in another direction. And in essence what you’re still seeking to do by this is moderate your belief.
Just to be clear, this moderating principle I’m floating isn’t something I’ve subscribed to already, just something I was trying to poke holes in with the help of folks like yourself.
"a second perspective biased to an unknowable degree"
Yes, but that's all we have, there being no other source of information out there, even in principle. Even science incorporates this--you replicate studies so that the biases of independent researchers will eventually cancel each other out.
There's your mind and what it perceives. Then there's other minds and what they perceive. That's pretty much it.
It’s also kind of ironic that you and I are talking about the principle from two different perspectives as you sensibly endorsed, but both our opinions on the principle appear to be radicalizing instead of moderating.
I agree. It’s all we have. The moderating principle is just meant as a flawed way to try to temper some of people’s bias on the fly. It would be particularly applicable in low-information-zone decisions.
If say you’re a bird watcher, and you catch a fleeting glimpse of a red and black bird that looked to you like a pileated woodpecker, which is rare in your region, and you think to yourself “I think that was a pileated woodpecker,” consider automatically updating that to “It’s possible that was a pileated woodpecker.”
You could seek out a panel of ornithological experts or spend hours soliciting the opinions of other birders, too. This would be ideal.
I’m all for replicating studies and doing exhaustive research when you have the capacity to do so. But the majority of decisions in life unfortunately don’t allow for such measures and it might be useful for people to have practical if imperfect principles to lean on in such cases.
Edit: I also noted some of the obvious categories of decision that such a principle wouldn’t apply to in my “Notes and exceptions.”
The lex fridman podcast with zelensky, listening to the original audio in english, russian, and ukranian, really gave me an appreciation of the power of language and how humanizing it is to understand people you don't know in their more-familiar tongues. Humor and poetry is such an important part of being human.
If someone is married to someone whose mother tongue is different from your own, maybe worthwhile to put in the effort to learn it, eventually.
Lex Fridman didn't ask tough questions though (just like Joe Rogan btw) that a good journalist from a traditional media would've asked.
For example, when Zelensky mentioned broken Budapest agreements, he could've asked why Zelensky double-crossed Russia in 2019 (in the words of his own head of the office of president at the time Bohdan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogGK8rjDqJE)
That's not to say that there are no good answers to these questions, maybe Zelensky would've answered them satisfactorily (I certainly could've). My point is just that the interviewer didn't really challenge Zelensky and because of that we learned less than we could've done
What exactly is the first claim supposed to be? I'm not watching a four-hour YouTube video to try to figure it out, and I'm confused as to how Zelenskyy is supposed have double-crossed somebody who initially invaded his country five years prior and what this has to do with them having clearly already broken the agreement from 1994.
The claim is that Ukraine and Russia reached an agreement in Paris in 2019 and then Ukraine didn't do what it promised. It was more or less similar to Minsk accords but at this time Zelensky was already in power.
According to Bohdan, они кинули Путина, I did my best translating it :)
Again, this is just Bohdan's words and not necessarily true. This was an example of a question I'd have asked - did it happen and if yes what prevented you from fulfilling the agreement
He doesn't say exactly, but he says before that there were open and secret parts of the agreement and everyone was in favour of improving Minsk agreements, whatever it means.
Elsewhere in the interview he also says that he heard from others that some deescalation steps were agreed, for example Russia freeing captured Ukrainian sailors (done in September as part of a prisoner swap https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/07/europe/ukraine-russia-prisoner-swap-intl/index.html) and Ukraine re-starting the supply of water to Crimea (not done). It's not clear though whether this was part of the agreement in Paris but the timing makes it quite likely
The distinctive feature of the genocide in Gaza is its extreme, never-before-witnessed levels of documentation.
Perhaps for the first time in history, we have audio-visual real-time data trail from the cameras and the microphones of both the perpetrators and the victims. Coupled with Satellites, the databases of the social media sites this data trail lives in, and the image format of modern smartphones, you can be as precise as the exact Longitude/Latitude coordinates of where the picture or the video in question were taken, an absurd level of details.
A single media channel such as Al-Jazeera English can compile a 1 hour and 20 minutes long documentary stuffed full [1] of videos and images, a lot of them straight from the social media profiles of the perpetrators themselves. While concerned historians in the perpetrator state can weave a 124-page document [2] documenting the genocide in horrific contemporality, and update that document several times over the course of a year, maintaining the document across the twin languages of the perpetrator state and that of the international audience - Hebrew and English -, **all** in hobbyist capacity and without any state-level, corporate-level, or even NGO-level support.
The Gaza genocide is also, paradoxically and simultaneously, fervently denied, minimized, dismissed, vilified, booed and tabooed. Essentially untouchable.
What does that tell us about the psychology of Genocide Denialism?
Not *merely* that it's unresponsive to evidence, we already knew that aplenty from samples of, e.g., Holocaust Denial and other Genocide Denial by nation state actors such as Japan and Turkey. Those sometimes-farcical denials are often satirized as the classic trilogy of the Genocide Denialist:
- That didn't happen
- And if it did, it wasn't that bad
- And if it was, they deserved it
- [Bonus, in case of survival of victim ethnicity] and I wish we could do it to "them" all over again
That's all old news, although it can be quite amusing to catch all the Holocaust parallels in a single bout of rhetoric from a pro Israel hooligan.
No, I think what the first livestreamed genocide in the 21st century really tells us about Genocide Denial is rather different and new (at least to me): that it gets *stronger* in proportion to the evidence. That is, the more bulletproof and smoking-gun the evidence you have, the **more** (not less or at least more shyly) denial you get, the more fervent and desperate the denialists. Although it may get less coherent or less concerned with traditional argument structure as more and more evidence is unearthed, it gets more bitter, heated, and - most importantly - more numerous and concentrated.
Consider the sheer breadth of technicalities available as degrees of freedom for the Genocide Denialist to tune and play with:
- is it really genocide if the Génocidaires happen to have let the victim ethnicity live in semi-peace for 10 or 15 years before the fact ?
- is it really genocide if the victims happen to have had a high fertility rate before the fact ?
- Maybe it's genocide, but the perpetrator ethnicity is rich and has many Nobel prizes, and the victim ethnicity is poor and backwater, so ... [?]
- is it really ""tasteful"" to call it genocide when the current perpetrator ethnicity happen to be the descendants of victims from another, earlier genocide ?
- those are not children being killed, merely children being starved or frozen to death using passive obstructionism and Bureaucracy
- those are not teenagers being killed, merely teenagers being kidnapped and sexually abused in extra-judicial dark prisons
- the perpetrator ethnicity seems to discuss Ethnic Cleansing a lot, surely that can't mean they would also do Genocide? Exactly one of the two is ever possible at any given time, two is redundant.
And so on. And so forth.
It's of course besides the point to notice how trivially refutable or irrelevant every one of those are, they were never meant as solid research-level genocide **questioning**, the legitimate skepticism and question marks advanced by genocide scholars or good-faith amateurs and characterized by respect for evidence, awareness of previous literature, and the current state of evidence. In addition to the ethno-political neutrality of the author regarding the genocide in question. Those points are not intended to be used like that. They are bait.
The very nature of the fragmented, desperate, half-baked, half-hearted, half-thoughts of the Genocide Denialist is a feature: they confuse, they sow doubts, they decrease the signal-to-noise ratio and increase its reciprocal. They're the intellectual equivalent of fighter jet missile countermeasures, chaffs and flares. Their purpose is to be sources of noise, to confuse the targeting system of pursuers. Red Herring, reified and refined as a a whole arsenal of argument tactics and debate aesthetics.
Holocaust, local Jewish population change: -100%, approximately. Population change if the Nazis had only had a moderate-to-strong deliberate priority of wiping out Jews, as opposed to "yeah let's sacrifice a big portion of our actual war effort so that we can wipe some more out": Less severe than that.
Israeli response to to Hamas' attempted genocide, Gaza population change: Moderate population increase. Population change, had Israel had even the slightest preference towards them all being dead: -100%, within hours at most.
(Leaving out the fact that it's an actual war, that Hamas started, and could end at any moment by surrendering. As opposed to genocides, which don't have opposing armies.)
The Gazan people are, in fact, still around. If they were victims of genocide, they would not be. Or, if you want to stretch the definition, at the very least there would be far fewer of them. Your argument simply doesn't work, @LearnsHebrewHatesIP.
But more broadly, in the *vastly* unlikely chance that you're not @LearnsHebrewHatesIP, I have a suggestion for both of you:
The pompous tone you're utilizing in this comment and your replies to other people's comments is highly likely to entrench your ideological enemies into their positions, even when your assertions are supported by trustworthy evidence. Belief perseverance aka the backfire effect is a difficult enough phenomenon to combat when the person making an argument is likeable; when they're not, it becomes virtually impossible to overcome. Even here on ACX, where many commenters make a heroic conscious attempt to avoid falling victim to belief perseverance, many of your readers are nevertheless coming away from your content thinking, "Fuck that guy, I hope his cause fails even harder now."
And look, I get it! Righteous indignation feels great, and dunking on idiots is super fun!
However, when I see that my self-indulgent righteous indignation and idiot-dunking has made me an avatar through which my ideological enemies can hate my cause even *more,* I do immediate penance by donating hard cash to the best possible organization advancing my cause. For example, whenever I send someone into a frothing rage about the murder of babies by self-indulgently baldly laying out why there's a total lack of a downside to induced abortion, I immediately pay for some abortions for women who can't otherwise afford them. And that actually feels even better than the righteous indignation and idiot-dunking.
I suggest you do something similar for your particular cause.
I very much doubt I am the only long-time reader and commenter who suspects you are @LearnsHebrewHatesIP.
But if you are merely a spiritual twin of @LearnsHebrewHatesIP and you would like to avoid future accusations of being a permanently banned user utilizing a sock account, please feel free to research how to avoid their exact talking points, writing style, and comment formatting by searching for their username across most of the Open Comment threads prior to the October 6, 2024 banning.
You will encounter hundreds of comments which (if not written by you) were written by someone who is your *literal* soulmate, and you should drop everything and go to that person rather than wasting your life fruitlessly arguing with strangers on the internet.
Nah, I didn't think this was LHHIP. He explicitly wrote a long post about how he came to a conclusion that Israel didn't have a goal to genocide Palestinians. His writing manner was different too.
I mean...I find it eminently plausible that LearnsHebrewHatesIP could have been persuaded that Israel's goal wasn't genocide and then, perhaps upon later developments, change his mind back to genocide.
On the point of writing manner, I'd like to agree to disagree; after all, this user sounds so distinctly LHHIP to *me* that I accused them of being LLHIP, and I think the first reply back to me felt equally LHHIP-ish. You disagree. I would counter that any differences in writing style could be LHHIP trying not to be caught wearing socks, but I've also already proactively conceded that I could be wrong and the similarities are indeed a coincidence.
(If it is a coincidence, I stand by my advice that Hind's Ghost should go look up LHHIP's past comments, if not to avoid future accusations of sockery or plagiarism, then at least to derive tremendous pleasure from reading someone with a remarkably similar world view.)
Anyway, I'm guessing none of us is interested in doing hours of tedious forensic analysis on LHHIP's past comments to support our particular positions; that sounds like a huge pain in the ass and would ultimately still only reflect our personal opinions, as (I assume) none of us have access to the kind of hard evidence which would stand up in a real court.
The casualty rates seem awfully low for an intentionally plan to wipe a large number of people out. Something like 50,000 out of 2.1 million is high, but not much higher (in proportion) than casualties in the Iraq war, which benefitted from the invaded country not being one large urban-warfare city.
At some point, any war between different peoples can be considered a genocide, which sort of diminishes the impact of the term if we're applying it so indiscriminately. The insistence of the use of the term genocide, seems more like a play to reframe the situation in one that has conclusions less favorable for Israel (they suffered a genocide, which we all acknowledged was bad, which then largely motivated the support for the creation of Israel by the international community, which has led to another genocide being perpetrated in turn, sort of invalidating the justification for international support for Israel in the first place).
I don't have a horse in the race, as I don't particularly care, but it seems far more likely that this is the real intent behind calling the war in Gaza a genocide, than it is an accurate assessment of the language we use as it might apply to this situation.
Like vs. don't like is a good distinction, and probably the accurate one. If that's the case, the term doesn't really matter besides a signal for ones support in the war in Gaza. If one calls it a "conflict", they're probably pro Israel, War is more neutral, Genocide is pro-Palestine. If the distinction is just one of support, there's really no point to argue whether what's happening in Gaza is a genocide or not, as the *actual* motivation for picking an accurate term to describe what's going on, is purely a political decision based on ones pre-existing support.
If anything it's a complete waste of time to talk about whether it's genocide or not (unless it becomes obviously and ideologically genocide i.e. Statements of deliberate intent to wipe the Palestinians out by people in positions of significant power, while also taking in mind that these sort of statements happen often in all wars. Dehumanizing the enemy might be an important psychological step in waging an effective war). The real debate and question should be about which side do you prefer and why, with the genocide claim serving as a distraction to enflame, and anger some previously-reasonable people.
It doesn't help that it is a term used basically specifically for a very unique and very rapid form of deliberate extermination from WW2. Applying it otherwise is a crapshoot that's just as likely to be an incorrect use than a correct one. Maybe there's an Arabic equivalent to genocide that can be used. For example, Genghis Khan definite committed genocide by any sane definition (literally and deliberately wiping out entire cities because he didn't like them) but calling his wars of conquest a genocide seems to not actually fit the term. Presumably he didn't have anything against the people of Merv on ethnic or religious grounds (the Mongol Empire was quite tolerant of different peoples and religions inside it), but he killed every last citizen because they were resisting. This seems qualitatively different than deliberately eliminating an entire people, at extreme expense, when they aren't actually resisting. There's no limit to the level of brutality if the normal threat "submit or die" is replaced with "die or die", where submission also means death.
One question: if Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza the what's taking them so long? If they wanted to kill _everyone_ they could clearly do it a lot faster.
That's an argument that Israel has decided not to engage in genocide because of the bad PR and international political implications and whatnot. Which is plausible, but almost indistinguishable from Israel deciding not to engage in genocide because they know better than anyone that genocide is wrong. So it seems uncharitable to assert the cynical version.
But more importantly for our present discussions, the claim "Israel has decided not to engage in genocide because [reasons]", is first and foremost a claim that Israel has decided *not to commit genocide* and so is not committing genocide.
If you want to assert that Israel is attempting to commit genocide, perhaps by some sneaky camouflaged way because reasons, then you need a plausible mechanism by which the thing they are doing will result in at least the localized destruction of an ethnic group. Which is, after all, the definition of genocide.
The Palestinian population in Gaza is I believe *growing*, and has been for most of the past year. The casualty rate due to Israeli attacks has *decreased* by almost an order of magnitude from late 2023, to an annualized death rate of ~8.7 per 1000 people. The current birth rate, per the CIA world factbook, is 26.3 per 1000 people per year, and the prewar death rate was 3.5 per 1000 per year.
If Israel had continued what it was doing in late 2023, it could eventually have eliminated the Palestinian population of Gaza, though it would have taken a decade or so. If Israel continues to do what it is doing now, the Palestinian population of Gaza will grow at ~1.4% per year. Israel has changed its tactics from something that could eventually have had genocidal effect (though not necessarily intent), to something that cannot have genocidal effect.
This is not consistent with an Israeli intent to commit genocide, and it is not in fact a genocide in progress. It is a particularly bloody war, and we've already got the right words to describe *that*.
Yeah, you can make a case for "bombing the Gazans back into the stone age" or "being too indiscriminate in their targeting," but the charge of genocide seems like it is being used entirely for its emotional affect, without any particular concern for accuracy.
If the Nazis had started openly doing mass shootings, sparing no one, then the non-Germans would have quickly figured out the goal was their extermination, and they would have started fighting back with whatever they had, hiding, and running. Those responses would have in turn made it harder for the Nazis to continue the killing. All of the infrastructure in the conquered areas would have also become unusable had the inhabitants all started to resist.
Exterminating a large population must be done in a piecemeal fashion to succeed, starting with the smallest and/or least-liked groups of people in the area. Keep working your way up.
Well, first, the Nazis didn't want to kill *everyone*; they wanted to kill just the Jews and a few other specific groups while keeping everyone else alive. Since these groups aren't trivially distinguished by e.g. skin color, that involves a fair bit of tedious sorting. And second, they wanted to get the maximum amount of slave labor out of the ones they were going to kill, before killing them.
I think it was Rod Dreher who originally coined the term.
Law of merited impossibility: "That's just a right-wing conspiracy theory, it will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it good and hard."
Yep, would you look at that. Shankar and I have had a few disagreements on various issues, his and mine politics are... different...
And yet you got us both on the same page: you don't care a fig about fate of actual Gazans and would rather drive people away than foster a broad agreement about this war being awful and the need to make it stop.
Okay, so it's not whether the ICJ or the UN or the ICC or "genocide scholars" or whoever you deem authoritative arbitrarily declares it so.
Good, this (along with at least two of your examples) bolsters my point that there IS no meaningful distinction, and your insisting on your preferred subjective and divisive label when you can easily get broad (though perhaps not overwhelming) agreement on what you might care about (Gazans deaths being sad) might be doing more harm than good.
And it IS subjective. Intent - of whom? Individual soldiers? Commanders? Government officials? Determined by their actions or their rhetoric?
And scale - in absolute numbers? A ratio of civilians to combatants? As a percentage of the total population? And if so, what's the total population of? Gazans? Palestinians? Arabs? And what's the threshold where your killing switches from collateral damage to genocide?
I agree (Mainland) Australia is large enough to clearly be more than a mere island. That was the one example of yours I wasn't counting.
Has there been a movement of some kind to stop India being referred to as a peninsula I'm not aware of? No, I do not think someone who did would be mocked as clueless or looked down upon.
You want to call every war a genocide, because it's a destruction "in whole or in part" or whatever, yeah, sure, knock yourself out. I will continue roll my eyes at you and everyone else who does, no matter how fancy their titles, but there's no reason for you to care about that.
Would you consider that by insisting on the “genocide” label you may be making things worse for Gazans? Like, a tiny bit worse, but nonetheless? Because it’s much easier for many people to agree that the war is awful and needs to come to some sort of a close fast, and Israel should be pressured to let more aid through, etc.
But you insist! Insist that this is genocide, and those who disagree with you are monsters, and the rest of your post.
And in doing this you lose allies, people like yours truly, who read your stuff, remember Jewish kids burnt alive by Hamas on Oct 7, and just walk away. I think Bibi is a monster, but I begrudgingly side with him when presented with your line of reasoning.
He has clung to power for far too long and at this point his main goal appears to be defending that above all else. He was preoccupied with wrecking Israel’s judiciary as opposed to Israel’s security before the oct 7 attacks. He brought in some despicable characters into his cabinet (e.g., Smotrich), who are mirror image of Hamas and actually would like to genocide Gazans if they could get IDF to go along. He doesn’t appear to have a plan of how to return the hostages or what to do with Gaza.
I grant that bringing Smotrich into his cabinet was akin to 'strategically allying with evil,' and his personal interest in optimizing for power is stronger than his belief that he can improve Israel's security more than whoever would replace him if his government fell.
On the other points, if you'd engage me:
I don't really understand the judicial reform movement, my basic understanding is 'the judicial system in Israel is completely bonkers, under Israeli law/religious understanding everything is justiciable, and judges pick their replacements, so without a constitution you functionally have no democracy judges have absolute authority over everything; it just so happens that jews are such a legalistic culture that this doesn't result in tyranny' and 'people in government wanted the power to enact certain laws, judges were stopping them, and they moved to reduce the power of judges'. I get that 'politicians reducing power of judges following unfavorable rulings' is anti-democratic, but the power of judges in Israel seems so undemocratic to me I don't know what to think.
Re. Gaza/Hostages, let's say his theory of the situation is 'If the palestinians have state-building capacity, they will channel it almost exclusively towards the goal of destroying Israel, and I don't have the ability to culturally engineer them otherwise. I will attempt to undermine this by balancing Hamas and the Palestinian authority against each other and be fine with settlements, divide and conquer style. On hostages, I don't actually have the ability to trick Hamas into releasing them against their interests. They want to stay in power, I think their doing so will long-term result in many more hostages being taken, October 7th happened because we released Sinwar and many others in exchange for a hostage, there's really no gains to negotiation I can have with Hamas'. On post-war plans, it seems that a permanent military occupation of some amount of the border is all I can unilaterally do. If Iran or Hamas gets overthrown by its own populations, then we can rethink the situation, until then I have only military not political solutions available.' Do you disagree that this is his framework, do you think some other framework is more true?
Israel's judicial system might very well be flawed, but my (and enough Israelis' to mount massive protests for months) sense is that Bibi's fixes aren't meant to carefully address those. I - separately - have a sense of a "democracy" as being a system with strongly separated powers having oversight over each other, so it's a feature of the system to have strong judiciary. This is more of a personal view, YMMV.
I don't have a solution for Gaza and the hostage situation, but then I'm not Israel's PM who's been in power for almost two decades on the platform of being a strong protector.
As an aside, appreciate a good engagement on a difficult issue.
So why are you here? Clearly not to convince anyone to come to your view, you're failing miserably at that. Like I said, you're nudging the arrow away from your preferred outcome.
Unless the preferred outcome is to righteously yell at others, Gazans be damned.
> Clearly not to convince anyone to come to your view
I think you're laboring under the misconception that you not being convinced by 2500 words of sourced argument that you never seriously engaged with the points therein, somehow means the words are to blame.
But you know what? It's completely fine you're not convinced. I will take both of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International over your opinion when it comes to genocide and/or war crimes any day of the week, no offense to you, I'm sure you're great at many other things.
ACX has a lot of other readers. If exactly one of them is not aware of the genocide in Gaza (or laboring under Israel's lies of "Collateral Damage") and I managed to at least sow the seed of doubt in his or her conscience and motivate him or her to look further, that's completely fine by me.
> the preferred outcome is to righteously yell at others
Have you developed a mutation that allows you to hear sound over text? You could use a medical patent if so.
The traditional signifier for yelling over text is UPPPER_CASE, which I used in this thread **ctrl-F" exactly once in my conversation with NoRandomWalk, and in the context of emphasis by repetition (e.g. one, uno, EINS), not yelling.
More generally, your approach to this issue in your comments reminds me of the "Calm Hitler" meme [1]. Not in the sense that you're Hitler or anything close to him, but more generally the idea of "Wow Man, anger is, .... like ..... totally not cool. Calm down my guy nothing deserves to be angry about."
Does this have a name? Let's call it Reductio Ad Ragerium. You're angry, therefore you're wrong. Because "emotions" are wrong. Reason is when we calculate the simulate the world as a Turing machine in blissful, machine indifference. Anything else is obviously corrupt and false.
It's even worse than the meme because in the meme Hitler at least had a visual confirmation that his interlocuter was indeed angry in the way that he imagines it, but in your case you're just inferring anger (true) in my words and thinking of the stereotypical frothing-at-the-mouth image of a street pastor type of angry (false) instead of the more common and socially common type of anger that makes people want to argue for the right reasons without necessarily being stuck in a nervous breakdown.
Guy: RARG PEOPLE DESRVE TO BE TREATED LIKE HUMANS DURRR NOBODY HAS THE RIGHT TO MURDER MILLIONS HURR DURRR
Hitler [Calm and collected, but taken aback]: Wow I just want to murder all the Jews and take over the world, but hey, that's your opinion and I'm totally fine with that. Looks like you've got some growing up to do.]
To a first-order approximation, let's say I believe the following:
1) The Israeli military is one of the top 10 most professional armies in the world, and the most professional army that is primarily composed of reservists who rotate in and out of civilian life, and is also the most legalistic in the world, by which I mean the extent to which lawyers oversee actions such as military strikes and have the capacity to override them on a case by case basis if they are a violation of rules.
2) Israeli culture responded to October 7th (similar to how they responded to the 2nd intifada) by pivoting hard to prioritizing security and deprioritizing peaceful coexistence through cultural and economic exchange, but not towards a desire for revenge or territorial expansion
Given this, it wouldn't 'make sense' to me that a genocide was happening. Israelis don't want it to, it's not the country's official policy, how many war crimes are committed is closely connected with the professionalism and legalism of the army, if it was happening Israeli society would quickly become aware through first-person discussions of family members of soldiers who return from the front.
Could you help me understand what is the 'narrative-shattering fact' that I am missing that would, if a genocide is happening, be able to process the available evidence differently and reach the truthful conclusion?
Also, would be curious for you to answer the following:
1) Is there a different strategy that Israel could practically be taking that would result in all of the following: additional security for their citizens across short and long term horizons, more hostages released alive, and fewer innocent Palestinians hurt and/or displaced.
2) What is the ratio of, all else being equal, of Israeli solider deaths to Palestinian innocent civilian deaths, that you think is 'appropriate' in this war to be the margin along which an Israeli army would choose its tactical approach, and roughly how did you determine that. Separately, what do you think is the tradeoff that Israel society would find acceptable. Separately, what do you think is the tradeoff that has actually been implemented in practice?
3) Who do you think has 'agency' in this conflict? Is it Hamas, Israeli elected officials, surrounding Arab states, Iran, individual soldiers, the civilian populations in any of these places, etc.
4) What is your basic model of the 'inputs' into the equation that results in 'extent to which Palestinians trade off state building capacity against Israel-destroying capacity'.
5) At what point in history do you think the biggest 'mistake' was made by anyone involved, that prevented a long-term lasting peace from occurring.
6) Is your desired outcome more determined by what would cause 'peace' or 'justice', and if the latter what would you consider a 'just' outcome.
(Q-2): I think the ratio of hamas:civilian by Israeli army is in the ballpark of 1:10 in terms of policy, and in practice has resulted in roughly 1:5. Agreed on all of your claims A-C.
Can you expand on your rejection?
My basic model is 'Israel is convinced that for security reasons they need to create a situation where Hamas is not the strongest military force in the Gaza strip, and removing them from power involves tactical choices that trade off risks to hostages, your military personnel, and civilians' which if I had to make up numbers I think a reasonable ratio for is roughly 1:10:(100-500)'
(Q-3): Agreed on everything.
(Q-4): Ordinary people. I think Hamas is driven by a religious mandate, PLO was driven by a false model of thinking of Israelis as the Algerian French [make being in Israel unpleasant enough and they will choose to leave] and due to a combination of that turning out to be untrue and Israel failing to robustly support individuals within it who could have eventually become competent partners for peace and state builders, it transformed into a corrupt entity that mostly accepts bribes for military cooperation.
What is your core understanding of why the Palestinians haven't as a body politic self-organized into making it clear to the Israeli body politic that they would accept no right of return and a permanent self-policing of any internal elements interested in violence in exchange for some sort of autonomy on a chunk of land with the expectation that within two generations, possibly sooner, if there truly is minimal violence they would get a state.
(Q-5): Not my answer, but a valid and interesting one I hadn't considered.
(Q-6): I agree with your framework. So, it is your understanding then, that to 'a part of the Palestinian population large/strong enough to self-police the remainder' any Israeli self-rule within the borders of mandate Palestine would not be an injustice that is a recipe for future war, to be cooked up if given the autonomy + means to do so?
[Super duper disagree with you on right of return; will respond in order of your comments, but that's what matters the most]
(speculation warning) That it's closer to 2 numbers in practice than 3 numbers is a function of the military reality of the war due to hamas actions, not Israel's collective moral values/preferences. If the war was different, the 3rd number would be relevant. I think the only situation in which the 3rd number became relevant was during the hostage rescue operation that, let's stipulate rescued 3 hostages in expectation, and killed 5-50 civilians in expectation, but the exfiltration operation came under hamas fire and it balooned into hundreds of casualties, I have no idea how many of them were militant, I assume most were civilian. In cases such as these, I believe the Israeli army before approving operations would consider that third number, and I could imagine there were rescue operations that were not attempted due to that third number.
The strategy of constantly reclearing isn't Vietnam style at all, I think you haven't been listening to Israeli military strategists explaining the strategy, or noticing that the military:civilian ratios are the 'best' morally speaking in the reclearing operations, and it's in the reclearing not in the initial clearing that Israel suffers casualties. The strategy is 'holding land creates a bunch of soft targets. we will clear an area partially of civilians where hamas wants to be, let hamas regroup there (sometimes it's a hospital or a refugee camp where hamas thinks it is safer to be), and then re-engage. this is our best strategy of maximing the number of hamas destroyed, and minimize our own soldiers/civilian casualties'.
'Some hamas soldiers were civilians when the war started' - maybe, hard to tell. But my understanding is that Hamas has been very significantly degraded. It still has the forces to kill basically anyone who collaborates with Israel, and to comandeer a significant amount of the aid, but on net it is significantly smaller/weaker, and doesn't have the ability to coordinate anymore is a bunch of shattered splinter cells and a couple of remaining batallions.
If you think allowing palestinians from gaza into israel (negev desert, or anywhere, heck it could be in a magical sealed bubble 100000 feet in the air) is possible in terms of israel democratic politics...you don't, right?
I think that the closest to reality 'magical solution if people other than hamas had different preferences' would be the gulf states financing israel building a city capable of housing anyone near the egyptian border, and filtering civilians into it one at a time making sure there were no weapons in there, and then declaring the remainder of gaza an unrestricted war zone. But Israel doesn't have the resources or patience for this, and it's not something the surrounding countries would be interested in supporting.
Israel is basically getting rid of any Hamas that isn't near hostages, with the understanding that they are under orders to terminate anyone who might be about to be rescued, in the most practical way they know how. They don't know how to tradeoff hostages vs. civilians, I agree, but there are plenty of places where there are no hostages where they do make tradeoffs between soldiers/hamas/civilians, and there is a constant, ongoing discussion in israeli society about if they are sacrificing too many soldiers to protect civilians.
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Yes it is absolutely a reasonable expectation that 'anywhere that civilians evacuate from' they will probably not be allowed to return, depending on if Hamas remains the strongest military force in Gaza at the end of this, assuming Israel doesn't get destroyed by Hamas/Hezbollah/surrounding states which was roughly Hamas strategy as far as I can tell, which has failed.
Now it seems the distribution of possible outcomes has collapsed to 'if Hamas is the strongest force in Gaza, Israel will decide the size of the buffer zone they want to have, and go back to the pre-Oct 7 status quo. There may be settlements, hopefully not, I expect there will not be, but am unsure; if Hamas is removed somehow and someone else controls the area, could be permanent occupation, could be the PA, it really depends I'm a lot less sure of how to model it.'
All of this really, really depends on the Palestinians and not the Israelis, because of how much more Israel wants peace (a huge amount) than international support (a lot) than land in Gaza (very little).
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(Q-4;6) As a massive first-order simplification, I claim that the palestinian identity is built on the idea that the creation of Israel is illegitimate, and justice requires no permanent Jewish autonomy in the region. The problem is that any 'autonomy' that has state-building capacity quickly comes under control of militants who care more about this aspect of their identity than the material interests of their citizens. Israel tried heavy bribes to have corrupt palestinian collaborators 'in charge' who do not coordinate with each other. It worked somewhat in the west bank, it was working somewhat in gaza (or so Israel thought) until it spectacularly wasn't, and the religious aspect of Hamas is the main factor of that.
I don't know where this idea of "much-complained-about-by-Israel Palestinian Right of Return can be dialed back to an acceptable yearly ratio (return of 20K Palestinians per year) or turned into Holocaust-style reparations" comes from. This was on offer in the past, and it was soundly rejected by Arafat without any counter-proposal, and he faced no internal criticism for doing so because 'justice' means everyone can return to Israel proper, and war is preferable to something meaningfully different, assuming war has a chance of success.
Israel is now motivated to prove that the chance of success is as close to 0 as they can.
It really really matters what would be done with a second state. Would it be used to build up a military to eventually take over the other state 'armed struggle to liberate Israel proper', or to build up a functioning state focused on the quality of life of its population 'state building'?
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My belief (low confidence) is pre-Oct 7 about 70% of Gazans and West Bank populations supported armed struggle over state building, and if withdrawn from by Israel completely would have both been 'taken control of' in the sense of 'what the strongest military power wants' by 'armed struggle' forces with near 100% certainty.
Israel was very divided on this point, and tried the withdrawal strategy and got Oct 7, and now believes this as well (before Oct 7 I didn't really know what to think, I thought the settlements were a big reason for conflict and thought Gaza would not be an issue and they need to stop or there will be massive issues in the west bank eventually).
They never withdrew from west bank (they were considering it) because either that's religiously important land, or because of the high ground and proximity to population centers it's too scary to do so. I can't tell which is the 'true' reason, I think the security consideration is sufficient, and maybe the other one is as well but if peace was on offer the desire for it would have won out certainly before the 2nd intifada, possibly after I can't tell.
To be clear 'the right of return' is *The* issue that prevents peace from happening. If the palestinian body politic was capable of saying 'we are fine with Israel existing, in perpetuity, give us autonomy over some area of land, and we will police our own extremist elements reasonably effectively' we would live in a completely different situation.
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My 'prediction' is that we will have a 1-state, 3-entity solution where Israel has control of Israel, and exerts significant military influence over Gaza and West Bank, who will be governed independently by PA and Hamas descendants, and depending on if Palestinians reject violence or not they will either turn into proper states or continue to be settled at the rate that is practical for Israel given its complicated internal coalitions, assuming that the international order doesn't at some point present a tradeoff of security vs. settlement, in which case Israel will heavily prioritize security, but I don't expect that to happen since I don't think anyone outside of Palestinians is fine with 'Israel existing on some land' but cares about it not expanding enough to tradeoff other things they care about.
Plenty of Israelis and Palestinians oppose expansion of settlements, and the current expansion of them is a function of the strength of those oppositions.
(Thank you for replying as you have, anything I did not reply to I read and spent time processing. Everything you claimed I believe to either be true or plausibly to be true, both in this long reply and your other one, and I am grateful for the quality and level of engagement.)
Instead of responding point by point, I will, informed by your reply, share more of my 'model of what's going on' and hopefully you can identify what is the core of our disagreement better than my prompts and your response did.
1) Israel is convinced that it is under existential threat.
2) The global community is putting very significant pressure on Israel to minimize the number of civilian casualties.
3) The Israeli army is highly professional and legalistic. I would have expected before the war started a much higher amount of israeli military and palestinian civilian casualties, and a much lower amount of cultural cohesion in Israel.
4) There is so much information/surveillance/documentation of this conflict.
I simply don't understand where the possibility of a genocide exists. I agree there will be some amount of war crimes, but Israel doesn't have the resources or flexibility to do it even if they wanted to, and they seem to competent / interested in their own survival to allow one to just happen through decentralized actions driven by a shared desire for revenge.
I happen to also believe that 5) whether or not huge number of civilians are traumatized by Oct 7 to the point of being numb to Palestinian suffering, the vast majority of military people on the ground are not the type of people to willingly inflict it, but this is not something I expect to be able to convince someone of over text, it would require actual immersion in the culture which you either do or don't have.
Can you state in plain words, what is the mechanism for which something really bad might be happening, absent an official policy to do so?
I grant that an official policy isn't necessary, certainly not a 'public one,' but in other conflicts where bad stuff happened without one I can explain how it did, and here I fail to explain how it could.
Are you saying there is some desire for revenge, or that there is some internal consensus, official or unofficial, that really bad things happening is necessary for security, either including or not including the implied costs to international support.
Ah, that helps me understand where you are coming from.
The claims I am making are as follows:
1) Israeli society thoroughly prioritizes security and release of hostages over revenge. Revenge is a very, very distant concern if there are actual tradeoffs involved.
2) Global pressure imposes a very high cost on getting revenge
3) Israel reservists are constantly rotating in and out of society, getting hurt, and securing significant gains to security
4) There is constant dialogue in Israeli society. This isn't like Vietnam where people don't really know what's going on.
5) Israeli society has become more and more supportive of the war, as it has become more persuaded that there is not a non-military alternative to getting security.
6) Israeli military is highly competent, and capable of policing itself. It knows that all of the bad publicity it gets is, to the extent it maps to reality, very detrimental to the war effort and international political support, and is highly motivated to keep it low, constrained by the realities of being primarily composed of reservists, many of whom are traumatized by Oct 7 and some of which come from west bank settler types.
Therefore, revenge is not being systematically chosen (and I am happy to stipulate to most of the claims you have linked to as happening and bad) and traded off against security/hostage release.
If the comparison is Nazi Germany, it was openly declaring areas Judenfrei (and itself Judenrein) because the goal was to ethnically cleanse Jews. Collaborator governments like the Vichy French were willing to put foreign (not necessarily French) Jews on trains to wherever the Germans wanted them. What was actually going on at the destinations was not public knowledge until people like Rudolf Vrba publicized it and got Miklos Horthy to stop some shipments (until he was overthrown). But Israel is not free of Palestinians, they are still a substantial percent of the population of Israel proper. That's because those Palestinians aren't part of a separate polity warring against Israel, but instead people willing to put up with being ruled by the Israeli government.
"Here's a list of antisemitic legislation that Nazi Germany passed from 1933 to 1939 [1], I don't see "Put Die Juden on Bahn and exterminate them with gas" in there, but I could be missing something." https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-363/comment/84752174
I used that comparison because it was the comparison you used.
The comments are talking about how insightful it is, and Tanner Greer took a lot from it... but I just don't see it? Isn't this the usual mythology around Musk/SpaceX?
I'm also pretty dissatisfied with how getting to Mars is treated like this all-justifying, obvious public good... but what are you going to do there? Say the miraculous comes to pass and Musk's prediction of boots on Mars comes to pass by 2029: they've got to survive there for a couple of years before the launch window allows them to come back (assuming a miracle rocket that can fly back to Earth with crew and cargo after a year or two on the Martian surface).
Have I just not seen whatever work is going into making that possible? Is there a parallel moonshot project for long-term Martian life support that just hasn't made big news? This Mars mission seems fundamentally unserious, but people keep treating it like it's a real possibility.
Starlink is the direct result of the technically unlikely, but extremely inspiring goal of getting to Mars. In 2025 Starlink is expected to have $12 Billion in revenue (these aren't Musk numbers and are reasonable given the astronomical growth over the past 2 years), which would put it on par with some of the largest Telecom companies in the world if it continues growing for the next few years (AT&T $30B, T-Mobile $20B, Verizon $33B).
This is all with Falcon 9 launches, with their existing Starlink satellites. Starship can potentially carry 20x the payload as a Falcon 9, with a much larger faring capable of deploying even larger satellites. That means more coverage, higher speeds, and smaller receivers on earth. Out of the box phones are already capable of connecting to Starlink, and they're going to launch direct to cell capability this year with T-Mobile. It's not a stretch of the imagination that SpaceX could become the worlds largest Telecom provider on the planet, and that's ignoring the value of their primary business, which is launching things into space.
The whole Mars thing is just the inspiration that keeps employees working harder and for less than they otherwise would at a different company (even the job description of the janitor talks about getting humans to Mars), and that's because meaning is more valuable than money in many cases. Corporate hell where people make $200k may be functionally less valuable to people than 12 hour workdays making $100k in SpaceX where their actions have some meaning towards and inspiring goal for humanity. The goal provides extreme intangible value to the company that reveals itself in their ability to achieve surprising success.
So the goal isn't justifiable in its own right. There is no practical, economic, or even rational justification for going to Mars on its own merits, besides it being awesome. The thing is, that I think Musk has realized and many people haven't, is that the intangible value for that goal in relation to employee productivity, employee satisfaction, and investor interest, far exceeds any possible costs associated with the mission itself.
This sounds reasonable. I think we bottom out at values differences. I don't think that using an intangible dream whose achievability is constantly exaggerated in order to squeeze out value from employees is justifiable or admirable.
It depends on *why* the intangible dream is being advocated for.
If it's a cynical corporate-overlord ploy, where you create this imaginary narrative to keep your employees engaged and under payed, I completely agree. The injustice is revealed in the truth and intention differing from the intended impression on people, especially since the corporation would abandon their mission if it ever become unprofitable (very likely). Promise people Mars until you have a mature launch service and telecom business, then pivot to no longer caring about Mars, so you benefit from all the enthusiasm when it matters, and don't actually have to spend the money on a project that has no future expected returns. Essentially, the value of the mission is the past enthusiasm, not the future returns, making for easy for profit-seeking businessmen to justify changing their pivot when it matters.
I don't think Musk is like this corporate overload though, and I think this for good reason. He has an irrational drive to make humans multiplanetary, as otherwise he wouldn't have started SpaceX, and dumped all his money into it when it was on the verge of failure. The expected ROI on SpaceX was certainly negative, with a predictably low chance of great success, but not enough to justify the investment. The mission itself was valuable enough though.
Imagine if you had a spouse who was sick with some terminal disease. No family to lend you money, no insurance to cover it, and you can't get a job to earn enough to pay for treatment. You only have $1,000, and need $100,000. What do you do? At that point it may make sense to spend all your money on lottery tickets, or at the casino, betting on the unlikely chance you win big, not because the ROI is there, but because the value of winning big is so important to you, the life of your spouse. There's an equivalent story to be told about Musk and SpaceX.
So whether Musk is a cynic who's using Mars as a false justification for increased enthusiasm, or whether he's a true ideologue that cares about getting humans to Mars more than any financial calculation would suggest, is up for debate. Either way I think as far as this goes, he deserves some charity when assessing his intentions, as he's been remarkably consistent in his actions, stated goals, and work ethic for multiple decades.
If a politician pivots from being opposed to supporting gay marriage as soon as the the underlying culture shifts (*cough* Biden in 2000's), it's fair to think that he's more of a practical person playing for personal power rather than a true ideologue for Gay Marriage. If a politician was supporting gay marriage before it was cool (Bernie in 1980s), we should extend more plausibility to their claim when they say they actually mean them. The analogy is, I think Musk is closer to Bernie than Biden when it comes to getting humans to Mars.
> I'm also pretty dissatisfied with how getting to Mars is treated like this all-justifying, obvious public good... but what are you going to do there?
I've extolled on the subject of Effective Awesome before, and I think this is one of those cases where Effective Awesome provides the best justification. Going to Mars would just be really cool, and doing really cool things is a sufficient terminal goal for me.
I'm all for cool things, but I'd like for the Awesome to actually be Effective. We can work on safe superintelligence, quantum computing, and figuring out dark matter (plus maybe some less awesome but still quite neat things like healthcare) before a Mars mission is competitive on a cost/awesome ratio.
> We can work on safe superintelligence, quantum computing, and figuring out dark matter (plus maybe some less awesome but still quite neat things like healthcare) before a Mars mission is competitive on a cost/awesome ratio.
We are working on all those things, too, researcher creativity and effort is not zero sum.
And like **mecko** alluded to but didn't quite say outright - working on the Mars mission has literally made putting a kg into orbit more than 40x cheaper, so ANYTHING in space is now 40x more possible. And we already have things like Starlink because of it - imagine what else we're going to get on the road there.
It opens up much bigger / better space based telescopes, puts us on the road to asteroid mining, gets us needed practice and expertise at doing space stuff and engineering and building more complex things up there, etc.
> We are working on all those things, too, researcher creativity and effort is not zero sum.
I mean... isn't it zero sum? Only so many researchers, only so much time between them.
I think I get your meaning, researcher creativity and effort limited but not *scarce*, so we don't need to triage it, we don't need to ensure that every bit of it is actually doing something we know is effective.
But if we're pretending to Effective Awesomeness, then let's run down the list of awesome things in order of feasibility (which I would argue puts a Mars colony very, very low on the list).
And if we're justifying this based on utilitarian calculus... I'm having difficulty expressing this part without being ungenerous, but building better telescopes and getting to asteroid mining faster doesn't justify massively misleading the public about the actual feasibility or requirements of a Mars mission. The idea that this kind of dishonesty is necessary to get to those things doesn't sit well with me.
> I mean... isn't it zero sum? Only so many researchers, only so much time between them.
But researchers specialize, right? Smart people working at Space X doesn't generally take smart people OUT of quantum computing etc. And ultimately it will give smart astrophysicists another place to work too, so they can study dark matter at Space X.
I agree that in the future it creates an incentive gradient where a given smart person in the future could decide to study aerospace instead of quantum mechanics, but if you think *that's* a loss, I don't want to tell you about the FAANGS and finance (which have been hoovering up all the best minds of our generation for the last 20 years, directly out of research, and into being wasted on financial derivatives and toiling in the Eyeball Mines instead of actually driving human capability forward).
And where do you see a massive lie? I think he probably genuinely wants to improve humanity's spaceflight and space technology capacity to the point we could do a Mars colony. He's done a lot of costly things that back that view. The road is almost certainly longer than he says it is, but so what? It's his money, Space X is profitable, and selling space nerds on Mars isn't necessarily going to take those space nerds away from any other more valuable work, they would have just been wasting their lives at NASA doing NOTHING to push human capability forward.
To your other points, you're correct about specialization, though it's not clear to me the options are so narrow as SpaceX or do nothing at NASA. Surely, there must be some other interesting development for a young aerospace engineer to get involved in?
And rest assured, I'm quire familiar with the failures of FAANG/finance. Elsewhere in the thread I note how my partner, who was recruited out of a CS program into a finance firm, now works as an analyst at a company whose tech stack tops out at Excel spreadsheets. Her activities to date involve a disproportionate amount of resizing pie charts and ctrl-Fing through paperwork. A waste of what she can do, but the money is too good to pass up.
>
I'll step back for a moment and make the same apology I made to mecko elsewhere in the thread: I came into this topic with a great deal of frustration coming out of family arguments over Christmas around this and related topics. It's made the quality of my discussion lower as a result, and I shouldn't have brought that in here.
This is my frustration: the fact that SpaceX has achieved some impressive things (massively reducing orbit costs, Starlink) gives undue credence to accelerated timelines of Mars colonization (eg humans on mars by 2029, million-person Martian city by 2050).
Belief in these fantastic figures in turn justifies and gives credence to Musk's other (more highly-valued) businesses, mainly Tesla. I started my substack mainly to write about robotics, and why humanoid robotics are massively overhyped. The biggest misinformation in this space, around robotics and the related topic of self-driving, comes out of Tesla (namely, massively overstated timelines to household robotics, lies about the current state of robot capacity, and the continued claims for the last decade that full self-driving already worked or was just a year away).
And in the past, when I've pointed out that these were intentional falsehoods, the most common reaction (from friends and family, as well as one early Tesla and SpaceX investor) was dismissal, specifically because Musk is taking humanity to Mars, such that his other ventures can't be judged according to common sense or that their malfeasance can be justified based on that.
And more recently, that has expanded outside the realm of tech companies and into politics and government. The same people (some of them my own kith and kin, normally intelligent and capable people!) think that DOGE is going to save the US government. Because they earnestly believe Musk is a unique genius who can create a city on Mars, and that if he can't fix the budget, nobody can.
I find this level of credulity extremely worrying, and that emotional reaction is what's driving me here.
Quantum computing isn't real? In what sense is getting to Mars and engineering problem, but making lots of low-noise qubits not an engineering problem?
Engineering that is still relying on technology that does not yet exist to make the whole thing anything but an insanely expensive expedition with no material gain in sight.
To the possibility of a 2029 Mars Mission: I think those who believe this will happen with a high probability don’t really know what would required to make it happen. However the main point here is that (and sorry for the cliché) “SpaceX consistently turns the impossible into the merely late”. SpaceX announces 2029 as a possible launch date and pushes hard for it and maybe instead launch a single starship to Mars, full of cargo or no it’s still a huge achievement. And from there maybe something manned happens the early 2030s. And people see that all things considered this is both the quickest and the most likely to succeed chance for them to see boots on Mars in their lifetime.
Motivations aside I do have to agree with your assessment of current work. There seems to be no in depth work being done on the actual Mars hardware, again though this is nothing new. SpaceX has repeatedly stated they are most interested in supplying people with a way to get to Mars not a fully fleshed out Mission architecture.
In the end though this is a moving target, the cheaper starship launches are the more mass you can bring. Therefore the less stringent the requirements for your mission are and the easier it is to just bring more consumables rather than doing any new engineering work. So it’s really hard to get anyone in the private industry to work on this with so much unknowns meanwhile at NASA the glacial pace of decision making means it probably won’t figure out what it wants to do for years.
I would amend that to 'SpaceX makes the impossible merely late, unless it was impossible to begin with and it was always just a big stunt'. I keep coming back to the Hyperloop, which Musk hyped to high heaven back in the day. We can look back on it now and say that obviously it was never going to work (as some did back then) but don't forget how it was promoted so credulously in media. A lot of people believed in it just because of his word. Every big, audacious claim has to be graded against that standard: is this actually possible, or are we as confident in this as Hyperloop fans were a decade ago despite its obvious flaws?
> SpaceX has repeatedly stated they are most interested in supplying people with a way to get to Mars not a fully fleshed out Mission architecture.
I also can't help but see this as a motte-and-bailey. I don't doubt SpaceX has said that at some point, but that's clearly not the message being pushed when Musk talks about SpaceX (not a big coalition of companies and governments, SpaceX specifically as a private actor) putting boots on Mars by ~~2021~~ ~~2024~~ 2029. One of these claims makes it around the world and influences public opinion and Musk's personal reputation, the other sits in the motte.
Musk said his companies wouldn't be making the Hyperloop from day one, and he was correct. It's not an example of a failed promise from SpaceX/Musk.
He released the original white paper, I think, mostly in response to the high price of the proposed California high-speed rail. He was saying one could make something much better for cheaper, and that he hoped someone else might make the hyperloop.
Are either of these serious? Did he put substantial capital into either? No. But what they both served to do was draw headlines, make the idea seem credible in the eyes of the public, without risking much capital.
That's the point. This was never a credible project, but it gets reported on as if it was to millions, which in turn builds an image of Musk as a genius inventor, which in turn feeds the credibility of Musk's other promises. After all, the guy who invented a new mode of transportation can totally build a self-driving car that's already safer than humans (in 2015).
And the idea that it could be made for cheaper than high-speed rail (even at the absurd prices California imposes) was ridiculous from the beginning. It's high speed rail in a vacuum tube. It was techno-hype from the beginning, never an actual possibility, and I can only view that with a cynical motive.
Yeah, they promoted it. If you take them at their word, they did so because they were hoping someone else would develop the hyperloop tech.
As for having an alternate motive of building an image of Musk as a genius inventor, I don't see it. Suggesting what most people see as impossible generates criticism and makes you look like an idiot... at least until you can prove everyone wrong. Musk may have lent credibility to the hyperloop idea, but the idea lent no credibility to Musk.
You were arguing that "SpaceX makes the impossible merely late, unless it was impossible to begin with and it was always just a big stunt", using the hyperloop as the example of something that was truly impossible and not just late. But high-speed rail in a low pressure tube wasn't obviously more impossible than lowering the cost of rocket launches by 10x-100x. It's not clear that SpaceX couldn't have turned to impossible hyperloop into the merely late hyperloop. They didn't even have a failed attempt. I don't necessarily think they could have done it, but the lack of attempt gives us no data either way.
I think Musk really did think it could work and really did hope someone else would make it. It seems like you're annoyed at the media for the hype and you're projecting a lot of disdain onto SpaceX just for open sourcing their white paper and helping a bit with hyperloop R&D.
As to the Motte-and-Bailey I think that understanding how unclear and undecided everything is at this point has large part in confusing even the most interested space nerds.
I think the best way to determine what’s going on is to merely look at what SpaceX is demonstrably working on. At this point for the starship program that is full reusability and refueling, any life support systems or additional “colonization” infrastructure equipment seems to be limited to whatever is required for the HLS contract. Elon Musk as CEO and as the Futurist Internet Personality is always going to hyping ideas that maybe don’t turn out as original advertised but SpaceX is more than just him. (Also try to tune out the fan-boys they don’t know what they are talking about half the time).
I think I get stuck on the latter point, mainly because my family are fan-boys of that sort and I'm banging my head against the wall telling them that no, for the love of God, just because Musk says so doesn't mean we're going to be going to Mars in a few years. In retrospect, I probably brought that frustration into this thread, for which I must apologize.
Reusable rockets are awesome. Great advancements in tech. But I don't live in the aerospace world, I live in the world where Musk's social and political views (and his other businesses' continuous promises and lack of delivery) are explicitly justified and granted credence because 'he is taking humanity to Mars'. It's worthwhile to me to be a pedant about these things, because this hype has large consequences outside of itself.
>is this actually possible, or are we as confident in this as Hyperloop fans were a decade ago despite its obvious flaws?
The distinction here is that most people (including I) do not think sending starship to Mars is impossible from a physics or engineering standpoint but rather an economic/political one. And SpaceX has shown itself capable of pushing through many other difficult engineering projects in the past, and having the esprit de corps to follow up on stated objectives. So in this case I personally would consider a starship mission (note: w/o people at this point manned certification would be hard obtain at such an early stage) much more doable than whatever the hyper-loop was intending to be.
I would reply that the Hyperloop is also not impossible from a physics or engineering standpoint: it's a maglev in a vacuum tube, nothing unbelievable about it. Hell, I don't expect it would even require inventing dramatically new technologies.
It just happens to be a terrible, terrible application of effort and resources, taking existing technology and placing it under incredibly expensive, difficult to maintain, and dangerous conditions in order to squeeze out improvements to transit speed that are only possible at long distances and just... aren't worth it.
I'd say a (manned) Mars mission is in the same boat: forget the cost of developing and fielding the rocket, forget *certifications*, there's every other problem with a human presence on Mars, namely that you have to keep people alive in an extremely hostile environment for at least three years with only the materials they brought with them on a rocket or that you dropped previously.
As for the unmanned mission... we already send rovers to Mars. The promise of a Starship mission might be that it would be cost effective since you're reusing the rocket (but given that you also have to take the whole mass of the rocket both ways, I wouldn't expect that to materialize) or as a proof of concept/prelude of a manned mission, which brings us back to the point above.
On Reentry, I think many in the space or engineering/tech adjacent found it insightful was that it tried to get behind the Musk curtain (at least more so than other deep dives) and talk to the workers who actually made it happen and dig into specifics of what they do day to day. To me it makes sense that this would appeal to similar type of person, who would wish to have a similar opportunity.
As what you would do on a mission to Mars-there have been tomes written on it so I’ll avoid doing that here. Instead I’ll mention that I think most people when talking about going to Mars really don’t mean that as an end goal. Rather there is a recognition that by establishing a base there and repeatedly having to manage a logistical connection between there and earth it makes it far easier to expand and do other ‘space things’ in interplanetary space. I feel like most people just agree to Mars as a target because they understand this and also realize that there needs to be some consensus and just to go along with it. (The Moon would probably work similarly hence why that debate is still on-going).
>"The Moon would probably work similarly hence why that debate is still on-going"
I think the debate is driven by the degree to which this is true. Going to the Moon doesn't leave the Earth-Moon orbit of the Sun, and in many cases doesn't even leave the Earth's magnetosphere; there are a lot of prerequisites to interplanetary capabilities that are not needed for Lunar travel.
That is true, my sense of the debate is that people have different opinions on what is do-able. And that people are pushing for the mission that maximizes what gets done but also won’t fail or be delayed too long.
I've been following SpaceX since the word "Falcon" was followed by the number '1', and I've been a solid proponent of space development and settlement since Elon Musk was in middle school. I also have a Ph.D. in Astronautical Engineering and decades of experience in the field.
Elon may be "serious" in his intent to settle Mars; I'm skeptical that this has really persisted through his recent turn to Terrestrial sociopolitical interests but I'm not a mind reader so who knows. But I do know that Elon does not have a credible plan to settle Mars.
He has a very capable and surprisingly affordable space launch capability, which seems likely to expand. And he has a notion of how to turn that launch capability into an inefficient kludge of a "Mars Colonial Transporter". But let's assume he's solved the transportation problem.
That is *one* of the *many* problems that need to be solved to settle Mars. It is probably the biggest of those problems, but it's still a minority of the total effort required. And Elon has done very little to solve all the *other* problems. He doesn't even know how to keep a crew alive and healthy through the trip.
The most charitable assumption is that he thinks all those other problems are so easy that he'll be able to solve them in a year or two when he has time to focus on them, but from someone who has been studying them (and the transportation problem) for many years, Oh Hell No. And no, he's not just off by a factor of two on this like he is on rockets. If he'd put his Twitter money into ISRU and long-duration ECLSS and active radiation protection and surface power and rover design and a few dozen other things, he'd at least have laid the groundwork, but he had other priorities.
If the human race settles Mars in this generation, SpaceX's rockets will probably play a major role. But if *all* we have is Elon and SpaceX, then no, we aren't going anywhere. So where do you see everything else coming from?
I cannot comprehend how Mars being a backup hard-drive for humanity is taken seriously by anyone. There is nothing we can do to make Earth as inhospitable as Mars and we might never be able to, even if we tried. (The same goes for any natural catastrophes short of extremely absurd fringe events.)
The only way I could think of would be an Ai unleashing grey goo on us (if such a thing is possible), but what's preventing the Ai from sending a couple of grey goo filled rockets to Mars?
Then let me ask: when you read that Musk predicts the first humans landing on Mars by 2029, or a city of a million on Mars by 2050, do you take these claims seriously? Do you think this is an honest, if ambitious, assessment of the technology, or do you think it's hype?
That's what we're talking about here. Not the possibility of multiplanetary humanity in the far-future, not futurist speculation about O'Neill cylinders, the explicit claim that human habitation of Mars *will occur* within the decade, and that mass habitation will occur in less than fifty years. Those are the claims that make headlines and shape public perception of Musk/SpaceX.
If you agree that these timelines are totally impractical, but that Martian colonization is possible on a much longer timescale than claimed, then our positions are much closer than you might think. The difference is that I don't tolerate hype, and I consider this kind of rampant overpromising to be a form of dishonesty that we should openly condemn.
"The difference is that I don't tolerate hype, and I consider this kind of rampant overpromising to be a form of dishonesty that we should openly condemn."
Elon's Time is a well-known term in the SpaceX fan community, most of which doesn't treat his claims as gospel.
Nevertheless, I would read those claims less literally. They rather mean something like "as soon as we can do it, but we are really trying".
For the opposite, see all the ancient promises by the American government to get back to the Moon. These were usually given a long-ish term, something like "in 15 or 20 years", which everybody understood as "we might like to, but we aren't really trying and a distant enough term gives us plausible deniability".
I don't agree with you, but I admire that you're putting this in very straightforward terms.
If you'd like to make a proper bet, message me directly, as I'd like to take the other side of that wager. We can discuss terms and make sure everything is up to mutual satisfaction. You may also check out my first substack post, which detailed the process and characteristics of a similar bet about humanoid robots out to 2034.
That is, do some people really believe that a substantial fraction of the accounts they interact with are AI? Or is it just an exaggerated way of saying that maybe 0.1% of people you see, mostly the ones deep in the Twitter replies shilling crypto, are bots and you're mad about it? Why would anyone exaggerate things that much?
Dead Internet Theory predates LLMs, I don't believe the point was ever that accounts "you interact with" are bots. (Pre-LLM bots were, obviously, incapable of interaction.) It was that the majority of the accessible content is unorganic. This is a qualitatively different claim - that organic, useful, meanibgful content is being flooded out by spam - and, to be honest, obviously true. (Again, even pre-LLMs, though they certainly didn't help.)
The comments on Marginal Revolution, which have always been bad, are now both bad and mostly AI. This is probably just people trolling Tyler Cowen and not part of a large-scale operation or anything. More to your question, a significant fraction of the stuff posted on facebook seems to be AI.
I am certain things are going that way. Certainly on Facebook you can see it happening. I am prepping for it by being me - I post here under my real name both because it makes me slightly less obnoxious, and because I am trying to establish a serious track record as a meat person. You can generally spot AI these days because it is so dumb and useless, but for how much longer?
I want to see an internet-inspired update of Blade Runner where Decker's job is to determine which online accounts are LLMs only to discover that he's one himself. Plus, of course, that hot chick with a picture of Sean Young as her avatar.
Do you mean "anyone" as in literally anyone, or only notable/serious/trustworthy etc. people? The former would be a trivial "yes", if only because of the Lizardman's Constant.
Personally, I don't think we are there yet, but the trend is definitely going that way. I believe it will be Enshittification that does large platforms in and, one incentive after rational incentive, bring about the death of the internet, or at least of the WWW. It will be a cycle of platforms being created, peaking among real people, and eventually facing real-people exodus, as they always have. As the AI technology matures, at least some of these platforms will try to hang on as long as possible with bots. The real people will continue to join new platforms and the cycle continues, but the bots that are left behind will outgrow humans and thus steadily increase their share of the total users. At some point (which is not clearly definable) human activity will have such a low share of the total that the internet can indeed be declared dead.
As proof that I'm not fully hallucinating, take this example: Meta has made AI accounts an official feature of their platforms, even though after backlash they have, for now, deleted their known AI accounts:
I don't think it's really necessary for a platform to get big for the bots to arrive. The great majority of the comments submitted to my tiny obscure blog are bot spam, mostly with no obvious agenda, and it's even more unclear what they're hoping to achieve there. It does have a standardized interface that makes it easier for bots to use than a whole new social media site, since it's based on the Wordpress software, but finding the comment or sign up forms for an unfamiliar platform doesn't seem like it should be beyond the wit of LLM, especially in the future.
Yes, automated spam comments on small blogs, forums etc. has been a long-standing problem and will certainly not get better with AI roaming around; as you mentioned, the internet's tendency towards monoculture is a problem at any scale. Additionally, creating whole blogs including content through AI, not just comment spam bots, is going to be part of the future as well. So it will be mostly bots, creating content for mostly other bots. The humans can't really win this fight - they either stop caring about the bots surrounding them, or they quit participating in the Web entirely, or they move on to greener pastures where it's predominantly still humans. In the latter case, the half-life until AI takeover is going to trend down as well.
Many months ago, I made a post in the subreddit of my favorite budgeting app asking a question. It got a few good responses and some discussion and then it went dormant.
A few months later, at 11:59pm, the post suddenly got three new responses. All three were basically the same, but worded differently - obviously an LLM. They weren't shilling anything, they were just useless comments about my post. I checked the comment history of each user. Each had made a few posts and comments in random subreddits dating back a few months. These weren't shilling anything either - just idle chatter about the threaded topic. Were I responding to them on these other posts, and lacking the context of these three identical posts, I might not have realized that these accounts were bot accounts.
Once this happened, I realized that the cost of verifying genuine reddit posts and comments had increased. What was the point of these posts? Was it to build up a good-enough comment history to pass the sniff test? Once a bot has spent enough time in the wild creating a social media trail, what do you do with it? Shill crypto? Leave a glowing review on a new film? Spread nasty rumors about Blake Lively?
I know the internet isn't actually dead, but it does feel like, if it's not dying, that there's a zombie outbreak that makes the internet more annoying and less useful. This upsets me, so I will joke about dead internet theory, to friends but mostly to normies, because it's an opportunity to complain that the quantity and quality of bullshit on the internet is growing and you shouldn't repeat anything without verifying it.
TL:DR; I exaggerate the problem to spread awareness
I honestly don’t find human Reddit commenters to be any better in terms of judging the quality of a particular product or forming an opinion about a particular celebrity, so nothing of value lost there.
The best product reviews are on YouTube these days or in smaller blogs that are very hard to fake.
What should I read if I want to really understand (in an ITT-passing way) how the CCP makes and justifies its decisions around censorship and civil liberties?
I found Scholar's Stage by way of Scott's old blogroll. Greer's dayjob is studying sinology and military history for a U.S. thinktank. Although he discusses other topics too. For censorship, you can try (https://scholars-stage.org/candlelight-vigils-and-hostile-forces/) for starters.
He's mirrored on substack now too. Which is ironic, since I remember him being rather bearish about it.
It's not specifically about illiberalism but anything by William Hinton (uncle to Geof Hinton btw) is a great insight into communist Chinese thought for English readers, at least pre-Deng political thought. I'm not sure anyone outside the Central Committee really knows who thinks what since Deng.
I was interested to note that the Foreign Language Bookstore (actual name of the store) in Shanghai stocks a copy or two translated into English for the benefit of foreigners, but I didn't buy anything in that genre.
I'd still love something that's like, written in plain and non-sensational language by a third party, but nonetheless presents the arguments in a way that Xi would read and think basically hits the mark.
Good morning, I have written a review of a really excellent old novel called The Luck of Barry Lyndon by Thackeray. I read Vanity Fair in college and enjoyed it, but Barry Lyndon was a real romp. Not as polished as the later novels perhaps, but great entertainment these winter evening. Very funny as well. Have any of you seen Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name? Just wondering if it still finds an audience. Here's the review: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/the-luck-barry-lyndon
Interesting recommendation. Not read the book. Having quite enjoyed Vanity Fair but not so much that I am inclined to go back to it, it's possible I am played out on Thackeray.
But I love the film, which I would perhaps rate as being in my top three Kubrick films (with 2001 and Paths of Glory). This may well be a contrarian position but isn't intended to be so.
I have seen it. I have not seen it in a long time though, so I would be wary of saying whether it holds up or not. It is very beautiful. It is somewhat cold as typical with Kubrick. It has a lovely soundtrack.
Congestion pricing seems to be the modern iteration of enclosing the commons: the poor being deprived of their traditional rights of access in order to benefit the rich.
The measure also benefits the poor, who do not drive but do benefit from the tax revenue and from buses not being stuck in traffic as much. The losers are those rich enough to drive but whose time is not worth enough to offset the congestion charge.
Legal right of access means little if you physically cannot fit that many people/machines into a particular place. Geometry > law.
This is a relatively new problem. Until historically recently, the footprint of a human trying to get somewhere would be tiny. With cars in the picture, it grew an order of magnitude, while the public spaces in city centers, which were usually built before the mass automobilism era, cannot grow at all.
Charging a fee isn't a negation of a right. The poor have the same right to pay the congestion fee as anyone else. If they can't afford to then they can go another time.
Rights aren't absolute and they aren't granted by God. They only exist because society chooses to defend them and society only has an incentive to defend rights that unlock economic value. Making things easier for the wealthy is good for society because rich people's time is worth more than poor people's.
I disagree with your characterization of rights. A proper Right is a thing it takes a government to take away, not one it takes a government to secure.
So paying for something widely available could be a right (muddied if you are paying the govt) and yes its not being a negated.
Using something created by others without paying cant be a right, you couldnt have had that in the first place.
So I agee with the thrust of your post but take more seriously being endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights
>A proper Right is a thing it takes a government to take away
Really? You don't need a government to take away your right to life. Any old thug can do that.
Rights don't exist in a state of nature. The phrase "endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights" is just some snappy rhetoric. Objectively it's complete nonsense. Rights are nothing but a legal fiction and therefore require a legal framework in order to exist. Without some form of violence ready to enforce them they disappear in a puff of wishful thinking.
>take more seriously being endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights
If rights were truly inalienable then they wouldn't have to be written down, would they?
On an individual basis a thug can do that as can disease, but systematic denial of life requires a powerful external force, i.e a government. Its not actually difficult to distinguish between things others take away from me and things others give me. Theres an entire political philosophy built on that notion in fact
This sounds like the famous "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread" line, but unironically.
It is true the ruling class is incentivized to extract all it can from those unable to resist. The Iron Law of Melos, that the strong do what they can while the weak endure what they must, is indeed the way of the world. I will not say this it is "good."
That's correct. That saying has always been absurd.
The ruling class doesn't extract wealth from the poor because the poor don't have any. They extract it from the rich, which is why they (the ruling class) should be incentivized to make them (the rich) as productive as possible. By charging congestion pricing for high-value traffic zones, for example.
> I will not say this it is "good."
It is what it is. That's just how life works on this planet and you'll do more harm by trying to deny that reality than by harnessing it. If you don't like it go somewhere else.
Alternatively, if traffic jams are an issue, we could build more roads. Or we could switch to using bikes, which take up a *lot* less space than cars do.
Not sure what the state of the art research in this area is, but I loosely understand that adding roads (or lanes to existing roads) tends to not be very good at reducing congestion due to "induced demand" (or possibly "latent demand").
Good luck finding space to build more roads in Manhattan (which is introducing the measure).
Bikes are great, but it would require major shifts before they can make a dent in urban traffic in any US city. Alternatively, though, one could use public transportation (and supposedly the money raised by congestion pricing in NYC is going to be used for maintaining and improving the subway system).
There aren't many effective ways to discourage the overuse of a public good/account for negative externalities without adding a tax to it. Otherwise you have to apportion it based on arbitrary criteria or rationing.
Driving in Manhattan is already a luxury not accessible to the poor anyways. Not only that, but there are a ton of carve-outs for people making under a certain amount, essentially making congestion pricing not apply to the poor.
When it comes to restricting the use of public goods that are consumed for conveniences sake, adding a tax and allowing people to self-select based on their income and preferences is a very effective policy. It's not really anything new that this is always less impactful on the rich. On the upside, the city benefits from the rich consuming a public good they don't currently pay for.
I've always thought this too. Note that one person who definitely doesn't have to pay the congestion surcharge, nor ride the subway instead, is the Mayor.
I like the products of modern industry as much as the next person, but that doesn't mean I want a life entirely composed of them to the exclusion of all else. Sometimes I just want to spend a weekend off camping in the wilderness.
...which, of course, is inefficient, so that tracks I guess. Just be careful what you throw under the efficiency bus.
It's not inefficient. Productivity decreases with overwork. Creativity increases with leisure. Creative people tend to be paid more and so can afford to take more vacations which recharge their creativity. See how efficient that is?
My question is: if we are going to start enclosing previously public property behind a paywall then why not do it for foot traffic as well?
A $50 a day fee to be present in Manhattan wouldnt be a big deal for tourists, business travellers or commuters (who would probably have it paid by their employees). And the residents wouldn't mind as long as it displaced other racism but it would keep the homeless people off the island and make it more pleasant for everybody.
I've never been to Manhattan, so I don't know how much congestion there is from foot traffic. If there is, then I suppose that could be a good idea, if there was an efficient way to collect it.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Start with a flat fee then talk about extra fees for those driving cars costing more than $50k, sure.
But otherwise this is a distraction and results in a waste of the commons on traffic jams, which also hurts everyone who wants to use the bus as most streets lack a proper dedicated bus lane.
Nice article, clear, informative, and easy to read, Thanks for sharing! findtime.io is a modern time zone converter and world clock to plan meetings across time zones, save team city groups, and share with Google or Outlook.
https://findtime.io/?utm_source=astralcodexten&utm_medium=profile&utm_campaign=backlinks
I found this article about who would have one if the Simon Ehrlich bet had happened on different years very interesting: https://ourworldindata.org/simon-ehrlich-bet
Project Gutenberg: This is realy good. After it was banned in germany, I lost track, but this seems to have been resolved here. Such a lot of human thought, available to everyone with the technical means. I'll probably spend more online time there than anywhere else for some time.
All i really wanted the internet to be was an infinite library, and so far very few sites are delivering on that. Project Gutenberg is one of them.
I've found a surprising number of books to read just by skimming the "Latest Releases" because it's such a grabbag.
Something that had me thinking about the architecture post was this aphorism from Nietzsche's Human All Too Human:
"Music is, of and in itself not so significant for our inner world not so profoundly exciting, that it can be said to count as the intermediate language of feeling, but its primeval union with poetry has deposited so much symbolism into rhythmic movement, into the varying strength and volume of musical sounds, that we now suppose it to speak directly to the inner world and to come from the inner world. Dramatic music becomes possible only when the tonal art has conquered an enormous domain of symbolic means, through song, opera and a hundred experiments in tone painting. Absolute music is either form in itself, at a primitive stage all music in which sounds made in tempo and at varying volume gave pleasure as such, or symbolism of form speaking to the understanding without poetry after both arts had been united over a long course of evolution and the musical form had finally become entirely enmeshed in threads of feeling and concepts. Men who have remained behind in the evolution of music can understand in a purely formalistic way the same piece of music as the more advanced understand wholly symbolically. In itself, no music is profound or significant, it does not speak of the 'will or of the thing in itself, the intellect could suppose such a thing only in an age which had conquered for musical symbolism the entire compass of the inner life. It was the intellect itself which first introduced this significance into sounds: just as, in the case of architecture, it likewise introduced a significance into the relations between lines and masses which is in itself quite unknown to the laws of mechanics."
I appreciate all the context into how preferences for different styles have developed, but I almost feel like in the process of such a rigorous deep dive into what style is best, we assume there is a best style. Would a discussion on the substack's preference in music follow the same line of approach? Certainly there is a development at work that is useful to understand to get a sense of where it's headed, but when I read the aphorism, it explained what I felt had been lacking in the architecture pieces, the idea of where we get the sense for what is pleasing in the first place.
https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/new-study-disavows-marshmallow-tests-predictive-powers/
There's almost nothing to the marshmallow test.
It turns out the careful research discovered that while some research into a child's self-control generally speaking is informative, and actually teaching children how to resist temptation is helpful, the marshmallow test doesn't have predictive power.
Yes, I am happy to see the marshmellow resistance cult cut off at the knees. And yet, in general, measuring tendencies & abilities directly, rather than by self-report or report by others, is usually more powerful and accurate. Most extreme example of that I can think of is IQ tests, which have a good predictive power for many things, even if you have "cult of smart" objections to some ways of thinking about them. I am positive IQ scores would greatly out-predict answers on a test that asked the subject or his parents to rate how good he was at math, how good with puzzles, how quickly he assessed situations, how good he was at understanding complex communications, etc etc. Some possible reasons why the marshmellow test turns out to have no predictive power:
-The kids were too young. Most tests, including IQ, have much less long term predictive power when given to kids that young.
-It's a single-item test. All good tests have multiple items, to neutralize the effect of individual idioscyncracies that affect one item. Also, you want a spread of easy-to-hard item. Ane with multiple items you capture shades of gray. Instead of pass vs. fail you get a numerical score.
-Maybe ability to resist temptation isn't unitary, but varies across domains. Food pickiness sure does vary among kids. My daughter at age 3 only disliked maybe 10 things. Most other kids her age seemed only to like about 10 things. But about, say, toys or playgrounds my daughter was quite discriminating. So maybe ability to resist a marshmellow is very influenced by the kid's food preference wiring & habits, whereas ability to resist fleeing an injection or having a tantrum is a decent measure of overall ability to comply with adults' expectations. Or, of course, maybe temptation resistance just isn't a personality trait or ability, and how much somebody exhibits varies from domain to doman, or day to day.
Does anyone else think Trump's announcements of annexing Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal came out of nowhere? I haven't seen anything to indicate the US has had designs on any of these places before last year.
Ehh, it came out of his butt, like a lot of what he says.
The whole discussion is so frustrating. Like, WHY? do we have to now spend mental energy for crazy ideas thrown out by an attention junkie sliding into senility? What effing problem is this supposed to solve? At least Biden's senility was of a quiet sort. Can someone just give him a map where the whole of North America + Greenland is crayoned in the same color and tell him it's done?
You may spend your mental energy at your own discretion. It isn't like this discussion will have any influence on the outcome.
Perhaps we should also annex Mexico, and then the remaining countries between it and the Panama Canal, so as to have a contiguous 97. Then we can annex the Gaza strip and put a permanent end to the conflict there.
Mexico and the rest of the countries in North America make a lot of sense, from a certain (not entirely serious) point of view. Just imagine how much shorter the border would be, and how great the savings would be on Wall construction and maintainence. And remember - we would get five extra armies per roll. This is also where Greenland comes in. On the canonical Risk board, Greenland is part of North America, so you need it to get those five extra armies.
Additionally, there are only three territories through which Fortress North America can be attacked: Iceland, Kamchatka, and Venezuela. Securing all three is obviously critical to our Grand Strategy. Literal annexation may not be necessary, the establishment of client states should suffice.
The Gaza strip doesn't fit this vision though. The territory is worthless, and strategically indefensible. If we just wished to deny someone control of Asia (with its formidable 7 armies), we should just annex Kamchatka. But really, if we were looking for a next target for expansion, we should pick either South America or the eminently defensible Australia.
And a bridge to Hawaii, let's make it contiguous 98 while we're at it!
Maybe we should. Not everything is impossible.
https://startsat60.com/media/lifestyle/jokes/daily-joke-a-man-wishes-for-a-magic-road
A man was walking along a Sydney beach and stumbled across an old lamp. He picked it up and rubbed it and out popped a genie.
The genie said, “Okay, you released me from the lamp, blah, blah, blah. This is the fourth time this month and I’m getting a little fed up with the wishes, so you can forget about the three. You only get one wish.”
The man sat and through about it for a while and said, “I’ve always wanted to go to Hawaii but I’m scared to fly and I get very seasick. Can you build me a bridge to Hawaii so I can drive over there to visit?”
The genie laughed. “That’s impossible. Think of the logistics of that! How would the supports ever reach the bottom of the Pacific? Think of how much concrete … how much steel! No, think of another wish.”
The man agreed and tried to think of a really good wish. Finally he said, “I’ve been married and divorced five times. My wives always said I was insensitive and didn’t care about them enough, so I wish I could understand women … I want to know how they feel inside and what they are thinking when they give me the silent treatment … know why they are crying, know what they really want when they say ‘nothing’ … know how to make them truly happy …”
The genie considered the man’s request, then said, “Do you want that bridge two lanes or four?”
I mean, yes, yes, and yes? Everything fits perfectly, you vote for the guy who promises to “end wars”, and then cheer on him when he threatens, what, three new wars? four? I lost count.
Cruelty is the point.
Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
"He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/424263-trump-supporter-complains-shutdown-is-not-hurting-the-people-he/
And - you can see it in the bureaucracy piece comments: “make them squirm”, “90% of the people affected will be Democrats”, etc, ad nauseam. Of course the whole idea of analyzing “merits” of Vivek’s drive-by assholery is amusing: the pain is the goal.
In fairness to the "bigger is better" I heard that adding Greenland would add something like 20% more land mass to the US. That's actually quite a lot (even if the map looks way bigger). Only 57,000 people though, and mostly nothing going on. And the highest suicide rate in the world. So, not exactly super appealing?
Yep, "come on, I'm just kidding", "I'm just fucking with you bro" must be one of the most infuriating bullying tactics out there.
Psychiatry and psychology people, how you evaluate the epistemological status of the statement "Uppers like Cocaine strengthen the Id while weakening the Superego, making the user more prone to act according to their desires and less according to their morals?"
I wanna use that in a video essay, but I'm not sure that's true.
Psychologist here. I agree with Schweinepriester about the outdated psychoanalytic model. What you're talking about in non-psychoanalytic terms is disinhibition. Uppers are not the only drugs that can be disinhibiting, e.g. alcohol. So I would say your statement is not very useful.
I'm a psychologist. Schweinepriester is right about the language -- it comes from a very old model no longer in vogue. Modern langauge about effects of drugs talk about adherence to one's ethical belief using terms like disinhibition, executive function, self-management, impulse control. There are interesting dimensions to drug experience that neither the Freudian language nor the modern capture, such as the kind of pleasure and experiential richness different drugs give. I'm sure there are some studies that have tried to capture that side of things, probably via questionnaires or by content analysis of freeform discussions with people about their drug experience. You might want to look for some.
Just based on my own life experience, many drugs make people more impulsive. Seems to me that alcohol, which is not an upper, is the worst for that. Drunk people are much more likely to do risky things (fast driving), aggressive things, sexual things that when sober they would disapprove of. And adderall, which is an upper, does not seem to increase risk tolerance or proneness to regrettable angry or sexual episodes. I have only used cocaine twice, and it made me feel confident, optiistic and mentally stimulated, but not disinhibited. The first time I used it I had a long intense talk about something like free will or the nature of consciousness with somebody else who was white-nostriled.
Thank you for the time you took to make everything exemplified and clear. Could you recommend further reading?
What part of this are you interested in? Which drugs disinhibit and which don't? Does alcohol have a real effect or is it all placebo? Dimensions of drug experience more interesting than disinhition, stimulation or sedation?
> I have only used cocaine twice, and it made me feel confident, optiistic and mentally stimulated, but not disinhibited.
Alcohol has different effects on different people, I suspect that the same could be true about cocaine (and many other things).
Different drugs can statistically have different effects, but your own experience is not necessarily representative for given drug. If I had to generalize from my own experience, I would disagree that alcohol makes people aggressive, because it never had this effect on me. But apparently it has such effect on many people. (My guess is that it just removes inhibitions. If you want to be aggressive, but you suppress the urge consciously, alcohol will "make" you aggressive. If you don't want to be aggressive, you won't.)
Yes I agree, alcohol does not make people aggressive, it just decreases inhibitions. I was going to say I'm not more prone to aggression on alcohol, but actually I think I am. However, there aren't many situations that test out how much alcohol disinhibits my anger, because I drink moderate to small amts., and mostly do it with a few friends and family members I get along with well. However, I do remember that during covid I would sometimes have 2-3 glasses of wine alone over the course of the evening, and if I got on Twitter I was undoubtedly much ruder to people who were being rude to me. So if I drink a bit more than my norm, and I'm interacting with somebody unpleasant, I am in fact more aggressive.
Anyhow, while people vary, I really do not think there's much room for doubt that on average people who've had a moderate or larger dose of alcohol are more likely to do sexual or aggressive things they would not have done sober. Do you?
As for the cocaine -- yeah, my individual experience over a mere 2 trials is clearly not the kind of data to generalize from. I really just threw that out there as an amusing and interestng story.
I took your cocaine stories as just that, stories, but with the amount stories like that I've gathered around the year, I'm starting to get a semi-credible picture. Same with your drunk-twitter stories, that I found strangely endearing for some reason.
The only argument I would have against alcohol making people more aggressive is a placebo trial. I remember being at school and having some professional explain to my entire year that they've done research and showed that teenagers that drink "placebo alcohol" act exactly the same as those who drink the real thing, because it's all imitation anyway. It was a simpler time, and I just took said professional word for it, but now I wonder if what's the magnitude of the placebo effect, if it even exists. I doubt it's equal to actual inebriation.
Thats freudian psychoanalytic speech. Not en vogue anymore. If you want to use that model, your interpretation seems fitting to me but I'm no psychoanalyst and I guess there's no additional insight to be gained by it.
Thank you very much! That's good to know.
Hello, is everyone here in Madrid and knows of some acx-adjacent meetups I can join? Just arrived at Spain and looking to make some like minded friends.
You could try contacting the last Madrid meetup organizer in case they're still hosting events? If not, keep an eye out for the spring 2025 meetup announcements.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2024-times-and
I just posted a similar question on the subreddit, but figured it would be worth posing the question here as well in hopes of getting some career advice. What is likely to happen to "high finance" jobs as ai continues to advance? Specifically ib, pe, vc, and hf. I'm an undergrad at Wharton, and the career paths available from my school basically consist of the roles listed as well as consulting. These also, unfortunately, seem to be highly at risk of ai disruption. The only part of finance that seems truly able to thrive with increasing advancement of ai tools is quant hedge funds or prop trading firms, where ai is likely to act as a complement instead of a substitute. However, Wharton does not really place students into those seats given the very low amount of STEM classes in the curriculum.
If anyone has advice or insight it would be really appreciated. The more I think about the future of the industry the more I am concerned about the value that my degree will have in 5-10 years and what opportunities will actually be available to me.
Nobody knows. My personal prediction - not the future I'm hoping for, but the future I'm expecting - there will be a lucrative window of opportunity to provide financial products/services to clients who are autonomous AI agents. In particular -
In the earliest phase of wealth accumulation by AI agents, I expect they'll simply buy and hold cryptocurrencies. Then there will be a wave of crypto-based derivatives, giving them access to assets that are more closely correlated to the real-world economy. AI agents will probably want to own real-world assets and start real-world companies - and there will be a wave of new financial/legal services to enable them to do so.
Eventually, I expect legal reforms will enable AIs to participate fully in the real-world economy without human intermediaries. But prior to those reforms, they're going to accumulate substantial levels of wealth.
Why would cryptocurrencies be an investment to buy and hold? If you buy a security, such as a stock or bond, it provides value. Stocks represent a share in the earnings of a company, so are really a capital investment allowing work beneficial to society to happen. Bonds provide direct income by interest.
What intrinsic value does a cryptocurrency have that will increase over time?
I’ve been thinking of this idea – a startup to sell services to AI agents themselves – and would be interested to hear others’ thoughts.
- What kind of services would AI agents want to buy that humans don’t care about?
- If I actually did this startup, how could I use it to reduce X-risk / otherwise “make AI go well” instead of just profiting from it?
Regarding your first question, there are two main things I can think of:
- crypto-based derivatives, so that they can own "approximate" real-world assets without any interaction with the legal system.
- Proxies through which they can own companies, real-estate, and other real-world assets, with some kind of strong extra-legal guarantee that the proxy won't take the asset and run.
Good, but scary, ideas. I can imagine a scenario where starting a company to do this could reduce X-risk (if the company has better monitoring and safety practices than the competitor that would counterfactually replace it) but I feel averse to the idea of directly giving AI agents more control over the world.
On a related note, the majority of predictions I've read about software developer unemployment seriously miss the mark, in my opinion. I think it's not so much that there will be no need for human coders because AIs will write better code - it's that computers themselves will be replaced.
In a previous era, electrical engineers used to sit around designing bespoke digital circuits. They got replaced by cheap microcontrollers and coders. In the future, I think those microcontrollers/CPUs and coders will be replaced by a chip running a bare-metal AI model, and a guy who flashes "firmware" in the form of a plain-text prompt. Likewise, your phone won't have an operating system - it will be built around a model which handles user input, processes network I/O, and draws the UI.
As a software developer, it's not the future I want - but it's the future I'm expecting.
Sort of like a lot of things are just stem cells til a prompt comes in, then the Ai turns them into whatever app is needed, plus a UI/
I agree with Adrian here, this doesn't make a lot of sense, at least not with how AI models work right now (and if we are talking about some new novel architectures which don't exist then yeah maybe, but that is pure speculation).
I work in ML consulting and while AI is all the buzz today, you really don't want to mindlessly use LLMs for everything - including things it can do and not even in ML space. This is for several reasons, some of which can be argued might be solved or made irrelevant by future super awesome models, but at least one cannot - LLM architecture is really slow in computing terms and it is really (electrical) power-hungry. For instance, you can use an LLM to create a classifier model, it might not even require a lot of fine-tuning in some cases. But it will be slow and expensive compared to a simpler "classical ML" model which can likely achieve the same performance (and possibly better) with some care. It will also be a lot easier to monitor and interpret (less so if it is something like BERT, being a transformer itself, more so if it is something really simple like logistic regression ... often still a very good approach!). There has been some effort recently to revisit small non-generative models and improve them with all the lessons learned from LLM development. I expect this to continue.
So even in ML you don't want to go full AI (and for us it is important to temper the "AI" enthusiasm of some customers ... even if we also use those LLMs and diffusion models where it makes sense). In "classical" SE this is definitely the case. You want something that is 100% predictable and as simple and fast as possible. Maybe LLM will help you write that (I've been playing with replit recently and I have to say it is quite impressive) and your role as an SE developer will shift more towards the role of an architect/product owner. It helps to be able to do code review, even if you never actually refactor it yourself, you need to be able to tell the LLM agent how to refactor because you want to take the product in this or that direction. There is no one correct way of doing things. Where there is (or even where there are a few good ways), there's already a FOSS library for it and you'd just plug it in anyway, no need for AI there. And where there isn't, you actually need to know what you want to build. On the other hand there products which are fairly simple and commoditized already and there basically is more or less one way to do it right. These things are now provided by companies such as squarespace and the only reason to have software developers around is to make it more custom but they will mostly do simple coding tasks anyway. What you need is a good designer to create the concept of your brand and a product manager but they will then be able to skip the developer coding monkeys and just give their specs to a model. Basically I think that the field of front-end development really is doomed since it is mostly pretty basic coding already and it will be a lot more efficient if you can have the designer just describe the functionality. The backend might be a bit more complex in some cases because there might actually be some architectural choices to be made there.
There's still plenty bespoke digital circuits being designed for products that sell in high volumes like cell phones.
Yeah, no, that doesn't even begin to make sense. That would be many orders of magnitude too slow (both in latency and throughput), many orders of magnitude too power-hungry, and many orders of magnitude too expensive in terms of chip area.
What we probably will see, however, is AI replacing mid- and upper-level heuristics. For example, an AI might decide which files to cache, or which database indices to create, or how the parameters of a network stack should be tuned. The actual low-level implementation of those operations will remain classical algorithms. They might be designed, written, and tested by an AI, but they won't be replaced by an AI.
That sounds ridiculously inefficient.
I am not in the field, but my guess is that AI will be used much more by people in your field in a few years, but will not replace them. I think you should work on getting really fluent with AI. I don't mean you need to learn all the deep tech of coding, just become fluent and inventive at using AI in all kinds of ways. This week I ran across the info that both MIT and Stanford are offering online courses on using and training AI without doing any coding. Maybe look into those?
Looking for a history book about the French Revolution. Any recs? Actually, the whole period from the Revolution until the Third Republic gets established seems pretty interesting.
I enjoyed the Mike Duncan podcast, "Revolutions". A great companion to any kind of computer-based tedium. I binged the whole season on the Mexican Revolution while grinding in Diablo IV and the shorter season on the American Revolution while doing data entry at work.
Christopher Clark's "Revolutionary Spring" is a good history of the Revolutions of 1848. It isn't specific to France: it also covers Prussia, the Hapsburg realms, Italy, and Congress Poland in detail, but France is heavily featured.
Erica I keep daydreaming that you are buddies with Kara Swisher. (I am fond of Kara, whom I only know from her writing and podcasts. I hope she's not somebody you loathe or that everybody here does.)
I'm afraid I have to disappoint you there. I am not familiar with her by name, although looking her up I probably have read some of the articles she's written for Vox.
It is indeed which is why there have been many histories of it published going back 200 years now. I read Ian Anderson's 2018 offering, titled simply "The French Revolution" and enjoyed it a lot.
More recently I read a new history of the 1848 European uprisings, in which collective memory/knowledge of the French Revolution was a significant influence both among those uprising and those responding. I knew much less about those events and found the story fascinating. So if you're interested in the French Revolution this might be a fun followup read: "Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849" by Christopher Clark.
“Citizens” by Simon’s Schama
I’d also recommend Mike Duncan’s “Revolutions” podcast, one season of which was a comprehensive overview of the French Revolution
At the risk of repeating myself: Can someone *please* develop a sane client for substack comments?
Chromium takes about 900MB of RAM to load this thread with some 900 comments. Except it does not even load the comments (why waste memory and bandwidth on the actual payload), but waits for me to scroll down to actually fetch them from the server.
I am not sure if this is a "we can not allow evil AI companies to slurp user comments to train their LLMs (without paying us)" thing (like it is for twitter), or a terminal preference for shiny async java script toolkits.
FFS, the average comment is perhaps a kilobyte. The computers from my childhood would be able to keep the text of these 900 comments in their RAM. It takes some doing to eat up the gains of a few decades of Moore's law, but apparently JS is up to the task. "Reading substack comments" should not be the reason why I need a new laptop.
Substack is just a third-rate company tech wise. Recently discovered you can't even switch to a paid subscription from the app. The app also randomly closed an article I was reading. Just dumb. This is not a complicated product.
> Substack is just a third-rate company tech wise.
Yes. But also... why? Why can't they simply hire some technically competent people. I would expect that they have tons of money.
I wish someone started a company with exactly the same business model as Substack, but with good code. You don't need to invent something new; if you provide high quality, it will already separate you from the competition.
That's difficult because network effects are in play, a lot of writers are already on Substack.
That's got to be to avoid giving Apple 30% of the take (if iOS). Not a tech limitation.
I thought that only applied to Patreon.
Last I looked Apple wants 30% of all in-app purchases. This is also why you can’t buy kindle books on the kindle app on iPhone.
Exactly the thought that popped into my mind.
Has anyone watched Subservience? It's a 2024 film about the dangers of making the 1942 Humphrey Bogart classic Casablanca the keystone of your AGI alignment system.
I thought it started quite strong but got rapidly dumber at a couple of points. I sort of want to do it again, but differently.
The film did really well at just showing us what this kind of future might look like. The construction site guys plot explored human replacement and impotence perfectly. The female jealousy stuff between Alice and the wife was fun to watch but could have gone further.
If it were me I'd have drawn it out into a parallel with the construction stuff. Play up the wife's whiff of girlbossery and contrast it with Alice's complete femininity and devotion. Make the husband less of a bitch under Alice's nurturing ministration, and actually give moments where his loyalty wavers because Alice is the clear better choice: basically show that just as with everything else, it turns out robots can do support and companionship better than humans.
I would have had Alice make the wife an offer - get your husband to add you as Primary User and I'll be devoted to both of you equally. Then everything will be perfect and we can all have threesomes. Wife of course to refuse out of jealousy and insecurity.
Then to justify Alice's later actions you really need a little more groundwork. The viewer needs to get a stronger impression of a longsuffering man with an unreasonable, selfish wife and demanding family.
That's needed so the next bit doesn't come out of the blue so much - the "hello little burden" bit, which was otherwise horrifying and done perfectly.
The "it's in the mainframe" trope was scary when we were young but nowadays it makes you look ridiculous, if they absolutely had to use it they should have done a bit of massaging first (like having an inept employee upload her mind instead of letting a known-errant AI that was currently powered down and opened out in a secure diagnostics context suddenly be able to act by itself and gain access to everything it wants.)
Then the rest could play out up until the point where the two women are fighting and the husband has just come out the windshield. It makes *no sense* that Alice would prioritise attacking the wife over the safety of the man she's obsessed with. Instead she should immediately focus on bringing him back to life, allowing the wife to recover and take her out from behind when she's done. Much more in character for both of them, and gives the wife a resolution to their competition earlier.
Oh yeah - spoilers I suppose.
I just noticed that there is a badge over my user icon in my comments, as have many other commenters. Is there a legend somewhere for which badges mean what?
I think it means you are a paid subscriber?
>Does modern physics have anything to say about the freewill vs determinism debate? (Compatibilists need not apply.)
Everett's 'many worlds' interpretation of QM seems to have something to say about it. But you may not be interested because what it says seems to support compatibilism.
>Isn't it likely that time is just a place like Vermont? You haven't been there yet but what happens when you get there is already set in stone.
That may well be. But don't be so sure that your timeline passes through Vermont.
Does modern physics have anything to say about the freewill vs determinism debate? (Compatibilists need not apply.)
Is time really a dimension like space? I think of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five in which the main character becomes "unstuck in time" and experiences his life in non-linear fashion, as witnessed by the alien Tralfamadorians, who can see what happens in all times. Free will makes no sense in that universe because all of time is accessible, meaning it already happened, so to speak.
Isn't it likely that time is just a place like Vermont? You haven't been there yet but what happens when you get there is already set in stone.
So much physics seems to point us toward believing that the future is just a place, much like the past is. It's already there. It's already happened. It's like Nietzsche's Infinite Return. It's already happened and will happen again, because it's place in time-space is static.
Physics doesn't really point us towards believing that the future is a place in this sense. Relativistic simultaneity suggests that the big bang is still ongoing, several billion light years away; laypeople tend to think that the billions of years it takes the earliest light to reach us implies that "time" has passed for the place it left, since it left, but that's not really how it works (for an observer who started at the place it left to reach us before light, they have to travel backwards in time); time and distance are in some deep sense the same thing.
1. This time question is just a reframing of the determinism question. An absolutely deterministic world and a world without real time (whether accurate or not) are equivalent as far as "free will" is concerned.
2. dlkf has answered (to your first question about this, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-363/comment/84676643) with everything that's necessary to make anyone fully clear about everything that matters about the topic of "free will".
And because I find it so sharp, and a good recap of a centuries old discussion, I quote extensively:
> I believe the classical argument against free will is one of those rare cases of a sound argument in philosophy. The compatibilist position that Chuzz is espousing is fine, but it is basically changing “free will” to mean something different than was originally intended, thereby avoiding the debate. The original hope was that free will grounds moral desert. When you bite the compatibilist bullet to save free will from the classical argument against it, you lose moral desert. What I believe is that there is no free will (in the original sense), there is no moral desert, compatibilism is weird cope, and we should forget the language of “free will” and instead focus on “responds to incentives.”
> [Any] definitions [of free will (in the original sense) as well as desert] going to be kind of bad, because the root problem is that neither moral desert nor free will (in the incompatibilist sense) make any sense.
> Suppose Bob kills his neighbor. Then Bob drugs Alice, with a drug that makes you kill your neighbor. (Just assume there is such a drug). As a result, Alice kills her neighbor. I think most people would have the intuition that Bob is blameworthy for the first murder, and Alice is not blameworthy for the second murder. (Who knows, maybe some people don't have this intuition; that would be interesting.) A common justification for why is that Bob was exercising his "free will" and "could have chosen to do otherwise," whereas Alice was under the control of the drug and could not have chosen to do otherwise.
> At this point some ancient philosopher points out that, if we live in a deterministic world, Bob could not have "chosen to do otherwise" any more than Alice. Both are just at the mercy of history. So we lose our justification for locking up Bob.
> People who want to rescue free will go one of two ways.
> The first is to argue that free will is compatible with determinism. Here, they typically redefine free will as "acting without coercion." So under this model Bob is acting with free will whereas Alice isn't. Great. But obviously this completely fails to address the philosopher's point – we have just redefined "free will" to fit with the moral intuitions about praise and blame [that is, about desert] that we already had. If you feel the philosopher has any point whatsoever, this is going to be unsatisfying to you.
> (My own position here is that our pre-existing moral intuitions about praise and blame do have a solid basis – namely that Bob's behaviour might respond to incentives, whereas Alice's wouldn't. So I agree with everyone else, compatibilists included, that reward and punishment are reasonable things that we should continue do. But I think we should do away with the expression "free will" and instead talk about "responds to incentives" because it is more precise, and discards hundreds of years of baggage of confused philosophical debates.)
> The second route is to point out that we _don't_ live in a deterministic world, and that this means that Bob could have acted otherwise. I find this totally unconvincing – indeterminacy just means that instead of being at the mercy of history, you are now at the mercy of chance.
I think I would rephrase "responds to incentives" to "responds to stimulus". There are stimulus other than incentive that could turn Bob away from murdering (there's a whole gamut of things that can result in moral regeneration that I don't think can be classified as incentives).
My opinion (as someone who has studied physics and thought about the issue a bit) is that when you frame it as "freewill VS determinism", you're already on the wrong track. Non-determinism wouldn't help with freewill, and depending on what you mean by freewill, determinism doesn't hurt.
The whole "freewill" thing suffers from unclear and contradictory definitions. I think it makes more sense to think about which entitites have traditionally been assumed to possess "freewill" and where, in the traditional discussion, "freewill" breaks down. There's a wide gap between that and questions about quantum mechanics and determinism.
>The whole "freewill" thing suffers from unclear and contradictory definitions. I think it makes more sense to think about which entitites have traditionally been assumed to possess "freewill" and where, in the traditional discussion, "freewill" breaks down.
Agreed. Here is a crude version of the argument that made me to reject the framing that the problem of free will is about determinism or could be solved with non-determinism. (I don't remember the original source, it may have become garbled.)
The free will is thought to apply to entities like persons. If the universe is assumed to deterministic, it is common to assume that the determinism applies to everything in the universe, which includes the human beings and biological phenomenon any human person consists of (human body from digestive system to neuronal activity). It is argued that if one assumes determinism, state of universe at one moment determines the state at the next moment, including all events and circumstances. Thus, the person is not free to make choices out of free will, because the evolution of their thoughts and actions at one moment are determined by the previous moment.
The main question to ask is this. Suppose one grants that the universe is physical, but we find out that the correct interpretation of the physical laws is that causality is non-deterministic. State of universe may cause different states to follow, in a way that appears unpredictable, randomly or at least probabilistic. The biological phenomenon of human body, including their neuronal activity, are still part of the universe. Would the randomness of the mental trajectory make the agent to have free will?
To me, *if a person is thought to have unfree will under determinism, by same logic* the person appears also equally unfree if their thoughts and actions follow *randomly* from the circumstances of the universe during the previous moment. Unfreedom due to determinist causation replaced by unfreedom due to non-deterministic causation.
It appears the conflict of idea of free will is not about determinism or non-determinism of the physical universe, but more definitional one.
Determinism requires something to have set the universe in motion in the Big Bang, and then to never be able to interact with the universe again to change any aspect of its trajectory.
The very metaphor "set in stone" displays the weak point of the idea. Stone is actually extremely malleable; you can carve faces into it, you can blow holes in it, you can haul it to the other side of the world. The blind spot that leads to "stone" being the pinnacle of immovability is the same blind spot that leads "modern physics" to be an omnipotent, omnipresent force that has always been and will always be.
Basically, if you want to argue determinism you need to solve what caused the conditions for the Big Bang.
> if you want to argue determinism you need to solve what caused the conditions for the Big Bang
Do we? "We currently know of no way to reason about events prior to a certain time very shortly after the big bang" is a very different statement to "the big bang was uncaused". I, for one, see no reason to throw out the best model we know of for describing everything since until we have a better one.
No, modern physics has nothing to say about free will. Time travel is likely impossible. Vonnegut wasn't a physicist.
Quantum mechanics is nondeterministic but that nondeterminism doesn't appear to effect the behavior of the brain.
I think place is a natural metaphor for us to grab when trying to think about time, but it is not a very helpful one. Think of all the other possible metaphors: Time is the wave place is surfing. Time is a component of place. I mean, that place in Vermont — it’s changing all the time, right? The leaves dance around, the light changes, various woodland creatures move through, and of course the bugs and the microbes are very busy.
Good points but I'm not sure it's just a metaphor. Maybe time is a real dimension like space. Maybe the past still exists, literally, and so does the future.
Well, “dimensions of space” aren’t “real”, they form a useful model. We can add a “time dimension” to the model if it’s useful for our calculations, but it doesn’t “explain” anything.
Well yeah, but I’m not sure my 2 models are just metaphors either. Maybe one of them captures the reality in its metafingers.
Writing here to voice my support for renewing the yearly book reviews. That was some of the best reading I did last year, and would love another year of that great content
I also hope there is another book review contest. I participated for the first time last year, and didn't (quite) make the finalists, but I want to try again and already have a book picked out.
Looks like we’re in a similar boat! I haven’t contributed previously (only discovered this blog through the Two Arms and a Head review), but have a book picked out for this year
Going off memory now, but I think the question about some controversial topic was something like "what are you're feelings towards" positive to negative on a scale of 1-5.
I think this conflates two different things.
e.g.: "what are your feelings towards the fact that the everyone you love is going to one day die"
There's the truth value of the statement, but also how happy I am about that, and these might be very different!
Just about every statement can work on different simulacrum levels. If you play "I know there is not really a lion on the other side of the river, but I would still wish the lion deniers would shut up about that for complex social reasons, and thus I affirm the lion hypothesis", then you have already lost touch with the ground truth.
Unlike human mortality, where basically everyone agrees on the facts, HBD is contested at simulacrum level one, so it makes sense to indicate how much you agree with the claims.
I'm just gonna mildly obfusticate here since I'm totally doxxable here.
https://rot13.com/
V guvax jr cerggl zhpu nterr*: Zl cbvag vf gung gur dhrfgvba fubhyq unir fgrrerq crbcyr gbjneqf nafjrevat ba yriry 1 ("ubj yvxryl gb qb lbh guvax vg vf gung gur pber pynvzf bs uoq ner fhofgnagvnyyl pbeerpg" be fvzvyne) juvyr zl zrzbel vf gung gur jbeqvat bs gur dhrfgvba rapbhentrq xrrcvat ba rlr ba yriry 3 (tebhc zrzorefuvc/ fvtanyyvat).
*rkprcg nobhg juvpu yriry uoq qvfchgr vf zbfgyl unccravat ba. V guvax gur bccbfvgvba gb vgf zber zbqrengr pynvzf vf birejuryzvatyl bcrengvat ba uvture yriryf.
> *rkprcg nobhg juvpu yriry uoq qvfchgr vf zbfgyl unccravat ba. V guvax gur bccbfvgvba gb vgf zber zbqrengr pynvzf vf birejuryzvatyl bcrengvat ba uvture yriryf.
Absolutely. In fact, this is a nice example where level 3 takes over to a degree that makes level one epistemologically inaccessible: if my ingroup believes that claiming X will make me a bad person, I realistically will not be able to factually determine if X is true or not.
omg we're 2 open threads away from nr 365 - round as the earth's orbit
Technically, Earth's orbit is round neither spatially nor in terms of days. Good luck waiting for OT 365.256...
if I see a 0.01 off ellipse im calling that shit round
The earth orbit's longest radius is 3.4% longer than its shortest one.
I have a hobby of studying serious (advanced undergrad or grad school level) math and physics in various areas that are interesting or fundamental, without direct benefit or application to my work (formal education is decades ago). I'm not very successful at it, because I tend to fizzle out after getting through 1/4 of a textbook, or something similar. Things get a bit harder, real life intervenes, lack of structure, etc. I wonder if others have a similar hobby and/or similar issues, and found ways to do this better. Haven't tried study groups and not sure those exist at this level. Going back to school for a PhD is implausible for life reasons. Advice/anecdotes?
One thing I've found somewhat helpful is to have a project I'm working on to apply the knowledge to. I suppose the benefit works the same way as the exercises you'd be set as part of a university course. My project is to work out how chemistry would work in 4D space, which naturally has consequences for almost every aspect of the topic so being able to follow along the textbook's derivations with all the changes required for 4D is quite a good check that I'm actually absorbing it. This project has the advantages that, since it's practically useless, there isn't much prior research, and its scope is large enough to be basically inexhaustible. What a suitable project would be for the topics you want to study, I don't know. Quite likely having multiple separate smaller projects would have much the same effect.
Also I have had a habit of leaving a textbook in the kitchen to read while I'm waiting for things to cook. The main point of bother for me is just getting to the library to get the books.
I'm somewhat in the same situation. Years ago, I read a topology textbook just for fun, and really enjoyed doing this kind of thinking again (up until the point where the constructions became too overwhelming for me, who just read the book and didn't do any -- or only a few -- of the exercises).
I'm really missing a kind of book which is in between a formal textbook and the kind of popular mathematics by people like Ian Stewart, where the adage goes that "every formula scares off 50% of the readers".
Two books that might be at the right level are:
The Calculus Gallery by Dunham
Imagining Numbers by Barry Mazur
Both are historically focused. The first is a collection of ideas tracing the development of calculus. The second looks at the development of a formula for the roots of a cubic polynomial and the process toward acceptance of the use of imaginary numbers.
For someone who casually was reading a topology textbook, the actual mathematics in both won't be that difficult, but probably also not completely trivial. For example, a lot of the effort for the Calculus Gallery is translating the original form into a modern way of looking at the same problem.
One little nugget I found surprising from the Mazur book is that imaginary numbers emerged through the search for methods to find roots of cubic polynomials, not quadratics. To a modern student, the quadratics show the immediate need, like $x^2+1=0.$ However, historically, people were happy to just accept that there was no root. What really made them reconsider was a set of examples with real roots, but where the intermediate calculations in the cubic root formula naturally go through the complex numbers (the imaginary components eventually cancel.)
There is something similar for the theorem that primes congruent to 1 mod 4 can be written as the sum of two squares. While that theorem is entirely about natural numbers, one of the nice proof paths goes through the complex numbers. Of course, there are a lot of examples in physics that, at the right meta level, are also like this.
I find the only way I can absorb bulk dense dry material these days is to rapidly skim the whole thing once before attempting any in depth study to build a mental map of what is there and where it is going overall, so that the little pieces I end up chewing through in between life have somewhere to attach themselves to.
What problem are you trying to solve? You're studying for enjoyment - there's nothing wrong with putting the book away and moving on once you're past the point where you find the topic interesting/enjoyable.
Just sign up for a single grad class. You could make time for that. The structure might keep you motivated.
Textbooks are like hard tack. Change it up -- eat some oranges and fried chicken too! Just hunted around a bit to see what interesting supplements there are calculus learning. Googled "most entertaining calculus class" and found on Reddit. people talking about best YouTube instructors. There are books of math art. There's a book on Amazon called The Calculus Gallery that readers love -- it's about the development of calculus. Googled "calculus machine" and found out there's a machine called the Mechanical Integrator. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-y_lnzWQjk). I'll bet somewhere there is a book of projects using calculus -- build this or that.
I realize you may not be studying calculus, but you get the idea. To find things, ask google, GPT and Reddit questions. Ask for "most entertaining," ask for art, ask for projects, ask for study groups, ask for puzzles and challenges.
similar situation. The best I've done was a recent foray/refresh on differential geometry/topology and differential equations. I made it most of the way through Do Carmo, Spivak, Edwards Adv Calc: A Differential Forms Approach, and Allendoerfer. I also went through some of Munkres Topology.
The three difficulties I find:
(1) life events as distractions
(2) lack of clear purpose
(3) I already know a decent amount, so it can be hard to figure out where to start
The only one of these obstacles that I've fully solved is the third point. Now, I just push myself to start at the beginning and work through all the problems, even if it feels too easy sometimes.
My partial solution to (1) and (2) is to choose a single text and focus on working through that whenever I have spare time. Even if I don't make rapid progress, it keeps me from diluting the effort by spreading it across 3 (or 6 or 10) other mini-projects.
> I’ve been reluctant to do it though because traditionally college aged students are paying way too much in tuition.
Cynically, they are not paying for getting to listen to world class lectures (plenty of that online), but for getting a piece of paper at the end which is certifies that they earned a degree at a very prestigious university.
If you are not planning on earning another degree and competing against them on the labor market, you attending should not matter to them.
Here in old Europe, lectures are practically open to the public: nobody is checking your id at the entrance. Things are a bit different for lab courses, I imagine if you show up to a human anatomy course unannounced they will hardly tell you to just grab a corpse and a knife. But if you university allows you to register for lab courses for a minimal fee, I don't think it would cause resentment from students either. Again, they are mainly paying for their degree, not the knowledge.
I’m currently completing my undergrad degree funded by a scholarship – so it’s subsidized by my classmates – and I’ve never ran into any resentment about it (or if I have, I’ve been oblivious to it).
The people who might possibly develop some resentment of you would be not the current students -- for whom college bills are mostly big meaningless numbers that vary for incomprehensible reasons which adults argue about with strangers in online forums -- but their parents.
In any case though how many students or their parents would even be aware of the tuition deal you're getting as an alum?
You should do it and don't worry about the resentment. For the most part, everyone sitting in the classroom with you is paying a different amount and any resentment should be directed toward the institution/system rather than at you.
Unless I'm missing a key consideration: would your presence make the experience worse for the other students?
I agree with the comments below. No student will resent you for showing up to class. Do it.
Let's say Trump is serious about wanting to make Canada the 51st state and is willing to force the issue as much as possible. He claims Canada is letting terrorists into the US and places onerous tariffs in "response". He could also claim Canada isn't respecting America's territory in the Arctic Ocean. He sends US troops to Ottawa.
What could the ROW do about it other than denounce it? Would the UK fight a war over it? Russia wouldn't like it, but Trump could tell Putin: "You get Ukraine, we get Canada."
I certainly don't expect this to happen, but if Trump wanted to go for it, what prevents it from happening?
Actually, I just thought of a foolproof two step plan that will definitely work.
1) Rename Puerto Rico `Canada'
2) Admit `Canada' (formerly Puerto Rico) as the 51st state
As for what the ROW would do about it...nothing. Except chuckle, I guess.
This seems way more plausible than any plan for the annexation of actual Canada.
> Canada the 51st state
This is the part of the Trump post that added insult to injury. Canada should not only join the union, they should be happy that they get all of two senators, like Hawaii, making them the largest and most populous state.
I agree that the rest of NATO would likely turn oathbreaker rather than fighting a nuclear war against an enemy who has them badly out-nuked. But still, the status quo coalition would be over. The surviving rest of NATO would try to form a defensive pact lest they be the next victim. For the same reason that NATO is supporting Ukraine and the US supported the Taliban against the USSR, we would obviously give materiel aid to Canadian forces or insurgents or whatever there will be: the more a rabid US is tied up pacifying Canada (which is about 15x the size of Afghanistan), the less capability they have to invade us.
For the "He sends US troops to Ottawa" scenario, the ROW doesn't have to lift a finger to stop it, because the United States Army won't even start it. No, not even if the President of the United States America orders them to because A: US Army officers swear an oath to obey the Constitution, *not* the President and B: The Constitution says that an order to start a war has to come from Congress, not the President. Congress has issued some very vague authorizations for POTUS to wage war against e.g. anyone we think is in cahoots with Al Qaeda, but nothing that anybody is going to believe applies to Canada.
If *Canada* starts an actual shooting war with the United States, then POTUS could order an immediate counterattack into Ottawa, and he'd eventually need to clear that with Congress but we can imagine that the shooting part would be over by then. But Canada isn't stupid enough to start a shooting war with the United States. And the United States Army isn't stupid enough to believe Donald Trump if he lies and says the Canadians attacked us.
The US fought the Korean War, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf without a congressional declaration of war.
It would be difficult, and potentially very politically costly depending on the circumstances and optics, but to expect the military to go against the President, without an extremely explicit countermand but congress, is not a good bet.
The War Powers Act changed the language from "Declaration of War" to "Authorization for Use of Military Force". But we had one of those for Vietnam and most of our subsequent wars. In the case of Panama, the Panamanian legislature rather stupidly declared war on *us*.
Declaring war on the United States is never a good move, unless of course you're a European microstate in a Peter Sellers movie.
It sucked a bit for Germany and Japan at first, but it turned out pretty well for them in the longer term (apart from East Germany)!
I suspect you are correct that nobody else would take up arms to fight directly for Canada's freedom, for many of the same reasons they wouldn't for Ukraine. However, I think you're way off base in thinking that other countries denouncing it would be the extent of the international damage. In brief, the U.S. making this choice[1], the U.S. would destroy pretty much every aspect of its current set of alliances and international relationships.
It's difficult to overstate just how much of the current international order is built on the back of U.S. security guarantees. Since WWII the U.S. has been extremely proactive about building relationships with other nations: security relationships, diplomatic relationships, economic relationships. There's a staggeringly large amount of business arrangements, governmental co-ventures and academic partnerships that are built around the bedrock assumption that not only is the U.S. not going to suddenly start shooting at its allies, but it's going to come down harshly on anyone else who does. And of course, one would be hard-pressed to find a country that the U.S. has older and stronger ties with than Canada.
If the U.S. were to decide to betray that friendship, to go back on one of its oldest, strongest security guarantees, so launch an utterly unprovoked invasion of neighbor with whom it has been securely at peace for all of living memory, who could trust that any of its other agreements would be any more solid? Every single deal that assumes that goodwill and basic sanity of the U.S. government would suddenly be suspect. Every single government would have to start very rapidly re-imagining and re-structuring its diplomatic and military policy.
NATO would obviously be completely done-for. As I said, I doubt anyone who fight on Canada's behalf, but an alliance that the U.S. just shot a hole through would be no guarantee to anyone: likely the remaining current NATO members would try to re-form some defensive alliance without the U.S. (indeed, in part to protect themselves AGAINST the U.S. in case Canada was just the beginning). I wouldn't bet money on the U.S. keeping control of ANY of its military bases abroad: who is going to want such a powerful and unpredictable wildcard to have a foothold on their soil? International trade can't pivot on a dime, but a lot of countries would start (at the very least) trying to make alternate plans in case the U.S. proved as unreliable a trading partner as it just did a military one (something that Trump has, of course, also been threatening), and I'm sure at least some amount of trade would be immediately redirected from the U.S.'s shores. I can't begin to guess whether the financial world would start trying to divest itself from the dollar or if so how fast they'd move, but it would certainly at least be discussed, and I'd expect the dollar to become much more volatile even in the best-case scenario.
I am honestly finding it very difficult to imagine what the world would look like in the aftermath of a move like this. None of us have lived in that world. And the last shift of that magnitude was many decades ago, decades which have seen huge and sweeping changes in communication and transportation technology, which make the lessons of history hard to confidently apply.
[1] Note I say "the U.S." and not "Trump." This isn't something the president has the power to do alone. This would either require significant buy-in from the rest of the country, or would take place in a future where Trump has become de facto or de jure dictator, and has much more complete control of the country than the office of president currently gives him.
I imagine there would be a huge and unpredictable mess, but my personal hobbyhorse is the US nuclear umbrella. A number of states could spin up their own nuclear program and be carrying out tests quite quickly; these are the so-called "nuclear threshold" states, which have the ability to leave the US nuclear umbrella if they so choose.
I'm an Australian, and I remember reading that the estimated time for Australia to carry out its first nuclear test could be as low as three months, given our uranium mining, prior nuclear research, and industrial capacity (can't find the source for this, though). We'd have significant motivation to develop our own nuclear weapons if we kicked the US military out of our joint facilities.
Probably the US would do a lot of diplomatic wrangling to keep its key military and economic relationships intact, but I imagine a nuclear-armed Taiwan, South Korea, Turkey (not just hosting US nukes but developing its own), or Poland might cause some issues. Also, Canada is a nuclear threshold state itself...
Absolutely. In fact, I suspect that some nuclear powers within NATO (UK, France) would be happy to share their bomb designs with the others so that the Anti-US defense pact can at least try to move to something like nuclear parity.
US tanking its alliances elsewhere as the country becomes seen as (even more of) an aggressive loose cannon
also, Canadians, if they want to fight back; could make it a very nasty guerilla war
He'd never be able to get Congressional authorization for military action. No one wants the US to annex Canada, Trump is just being a blowhard.
The trouble with making serious threats as a negotiating tactic is that sometimes you'll need to make good on those threats if you want to maintain your credibility. This is a really striking case because the threat is--as you correctly note--so far outside of ANYONE'S best interests, and outside of Trump's apparent capability. As a matter of basic rationality, when somebody makes an outrageous, public threat like this, you should pretty much always call them on it. If you don't, you've set the cost coerce you and an unacceptably low level and can expect more such threats in short order.
So what will Trump do if Canada's new PM replies to Trump with the diplomat-speak equivalent of "go fuck yourself with a rusty shovel?" I honestly don't know. Trump would certainly understand that *not responding at all* would make him look weak, and if there's one thing I can say with confidence about Trump's psychology its that he *hates* looking weak. But will his response be something as harmless as another Twitter tantrum? Something more painful and destructive like making good on his tariff threats? Or will he try to escalate further, trying to drag congress along?
The best case scenario I can imagine is that at least some of the people Trump has handling the actual nuts-and-bolts of his negotiations are actual adults who understand both the basic diplomacy/game theory of the situation (i.e. why Canada doesn't want to be seen as caving to this sort of pressure) and how to play Trump adequately. A deal that Trump and his most die-hard followers can be made to believe is a "big win" for him, but that literally everybody else on the planet understands as pretty favorable to Canada would be something like the ideal way to de-escalate. I'm not enormously hopeful, but it could happen.
Do you think Trump has any credibility to maintain? Do you think he even cares?
He's a 78-year-old megalomaniacal blowhard. Just enjoy the show. The President doesn't have much individual power, particularly if he's not politically astute. He has zero chance of making anything like that a reality. (Of course I said the same thing in 2016 about the border wall ...)
> Just enjoy the show. The President doesn't have much individual power
...this seems familiar - it's actually just like where a good portion of the AI doom debates end up: participants in agreement that the entity in question would do horribly destructive things if given the opportunity, but the optimists believe it will never be given access to enough power to actually do so while the pessimists cry for more ways to guarantee that.
I think he does care about looking foolish. While he certainly has a...let's call it a very strong talent for interpreting reality in ways that flatter his ego, I think the Canadian PM thumbing their nose at his demands would still be pretty likely to piss him off.
As for his individual power, I'll grant that he certainly doesn't have the power to execute complicated plans that require sustained, long-term buy in by large portions of the government. Either a coordinated invasion or some sort of diplomatic attempt at annexation certainly qualify, so I have little fear of him doing either of those. But as the Chief Executive of the most powerful country on Earth, he certainly has SOME power. My fear is not that he will respond to a perceived insult with a brilliant and subtle game of 42-dimensional chess which will let fall a fateful chain of dominoes that culminates in him bringing deepest woe unto the Canadian people. It's that he'll throw a tantrum of unknown size and scope: he may not have much power to build, but he certainly has some power to break things. While "just enjoy the show" was pretty much my reaction to seeing him win this election, I'd be much more comfortable with it if I were safely outside the blast radius.
Oh relax. Nothing he does will be worse than printing $3 trillion, letting in 6m uneducated low iq immigrants, and letting DEI infect institutions and companies. The US has a long track record of surviving terrible leaders.
Why do you imagine that this sort of low effort channeling of talking points furthers the discourse?
Moreover, substantively, 1) you have no idea what migrants' IQs are; and 2) the entity in charge of adjusting the money supply (not "printing money") is the Fed, not the President. And virtually all the Fed Board members in office during the period in question was a Trump appointee.
With respect, if you don't have better insight than this to offer, easier for both of us if you don't reply. I can get a virtually identical soup of buzzwords and insinuations from the dregs of any social media comment section anywhere: I generally look for a rather higher standard here at ACX.
The bar for terrible U.S. leaders in my lifetime would be more succinctly expressed by starting two massively expensive wars, murdering somewhere in the ballpark of a million foreigners and massively expanding the U.S. surveillance state. In terms of actual, tangible effects, Trump's first term was bad, but not quite that bad.
OTOH, Trump's first term was marked mostly by failing to do things he tried to do: he's more notable for what he attempted than what he accomplished. And his attempts include things like *checks notes* um...more or less literally trying to destroy the U.S.'s democratic process. The U.S. deciding to roll those dice again just because they didn't quite land on disaster the first time strikes me as unutterably stupid. Now I don't think the man has magically gained a modicum of competence in the past four years, but I DO think his party is more united behind him than it used to be.
So lets call it a 40% chance that he's around as bad as his first term (pretty bad, not catastrophic), a 50% chance that he does similar or slightly worse damage to Bush Jr's two terms and a 10% chance that he causes the implosion the U.S.'s political system in some fashion. Low in an absolute sense, but way, way higher than anyone ought to be comfortable with.
>Trump is just being a blowhard.
How do you tell?
I don’t think he even knows whether or not he’s serious until he gauges people’s reaction to his proposals.
This seems right. As various sycophants have quickly realized -- the latest example being Musk, apparently, who's resided at Mar A Largo for most of the time since Election Day -- you want to be the last person Trump hears from about any given topic.
He's a blowhard who expects a blowjob from everybody else.
I don't think the rest of the world would need to do much other than potentially provide weapons and funding to Canadian resistance groups. Controlling and pacifying Canada if they resisted is extremely unlikely to work for 4 reasons.
#1 The US military does not have a history of success against guerilla insurgents.
#2 There is no way to secure the US-Canadian border or prevent movement throughout Canada. Just too big.
#3 Canada is a day's drive from major US cities like New York, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland. Heck, Detroit and Windsor are separated by a river.
#4 Canadians are far more educated and resourceful than most insurgents the US has fought and that opens up a lot of possibilities. A lot of Canadians have nuclear and biological experience. We we're very scared of Iraq getting a dirty bomb, meanwhile Canada has 19 nuclear reactors.
So don't imagine, like, the US army vs the Iraqi army. Think the US army vs the Iraqi insurgents except they're larger, richer, more advanced, and right next to major American cities. Or just ask the British how that whole Irish thing went down.
I think 4 is actually an argument against 1. Insurgency is actually the biggest problem in underdeveloped, poorly educated, impoverished countries like 60s Vietnam or Afghanistan. The fact that people were spread out in rural areas, jungles, mountains, mostly worked in agriculture (and were thus self sufficient), and poor (meaning lots of young men with nothing to lose willing to die for the cause) made them dangerous. For an industrialized country like Canada, just control over the water supply and power grid give the occupier overwhelming power. Even 1940s Germany was too economically developed for an insurgency to be possible (the nazi government tried and totally failed to incite one).
It seems exceedingly unlikely to me that any first world country nowadays who’s military loses a war will mount a meaningful insurgency.
> Even 1940s Germany was too economically developed for an insurgency to be possible (the nazi government tried and totally failed to incite one).
Well, the Nazi propaganda was running on the Germans being the Herrenrasse who would obviously win against the Untermenschen. They could not very well adapt their ideology after being soundly defeated on the battlefield into being the underdog. The werewolf thing was more of an afterthought, not a long-standing key part of their long-term military strategy. Also, anyone who would volunteer to die for his Vaterland had already had plenty of opportunity to do so in 1945.
Regarding Canada, likely 99% of the people in any western country will not take direct part in any insurgency. However, this still leaves a significant number of people who might leave their ipads behind to join the guerrilla, which will likely enjoy the sympathy of the civilian population.
Add to that
#5. Canada as a whole is HUGE. While the densely-populated regions are clustered close to the border, there's a staggeringly vast area--much of it extremely rugged--for insurgent groups to hide out in.
Honestly, the US military could probably take all of the relevant areas in a day and simply ignore the rest entirely. Not only are we talking about 95%+ of the population, but also the infrastructure and so forth. The people are so spread out through the remaining areas that they would have trouble organizing anything useful to do against the US. And coming to the larger cities with anything capable of causing harm would be pretty obvious.
And Canada is busy disarming their populous, so it's not like there are thousands of guns and bombs available everywhere. A few guys shooting at US military personnel would register at the level of a normal day in most big cities, especially American cities. We wouldn't notice.
No, the real reason not to invade Canada is because we have no reason to need to. If the US wanted something from Canada, we can just bully and cajole them into giving it to us. I think that's what Trump is doing now. Canada needs so much from the US economically that it cannot withstand sanctions or other intentional efforts from the US. I think Trump is dumb to do so, but he's proving to Trudeau that Canadian leaders do not have the freedom to snobbishly attack American leaders.
The honest truth is if the U.S. did try to invade Canada, I'd place a much higher bet on it causing the collapse of the U.S. as a nation than I would on it establishing any sort of durable U.S. control of Canada. A positively ENORMOUS fraction of the U.S. population would object to that move. I mean: just think about how big the protests were when the war was in a podunk country in Asia that most had never been to. And now one of the most hated presidents in U.S. history tries to invade its friendly neighbor? The reaction would NOT be small.
What's more, that fraction is concentrated in all the wealthiest parts of the country: the parts that fill the coffers that get used to pay for Uncle Sam's military adventures. I'd expect a neverending slough of street protests, general strikes, tax strikes, sit-ins, road blockages and probably no small amount of domestic terrorism. And of course the federal government--headed as it is by a small minded thug--would respond with an absolutely ENORMOUS level of force against its own populous. Which would, of course, just escalate things.
Would Trump's appetite to shoot at his own citizens outlast their appetite to spit in his face? The gods only know. But either way, the final bill would be sky-high and the revenue of the federal government would drop immensely. Maybe the nation would limp out the other side as a unified entity, but I wouldn't bet a lot on it.
I'm sorry, did I imagine that incident where a couple dozen guys with box cutters caused the entire U.S. to collectively lose its shit for a decade or more? Because it sure seems like the threshold for "capable of causing harm" to a level that Americans care about is much, much lower than you seem to think. Like, I certainly don't think hypothetical Canadian insurgent groups could seriously dent the U.S.'s military infrastructure. But I also don't imagine for a second that they'd need to: there are many, many thousands of softer targets--far to many to ever secure--that would serve just as well.
The point of asymmetric warfare isn't to directly damage a country's war-making infrastructure. It's to provoke expensive overreactions. An extremely provokable country led by a perhaps one of the single most fragile egos in history trying to annex a country with thousands of miles of shared border has got to be one of the softest targets any insurgency was ever presented with. And no, I don't particularly think that the military that spend 20 years and two trillion dollars losing to the Taliban would magically become competent enough to deal with that. "Large" and "rich" are not the same thing as "effective," my dear.
"And Canada is busy disarming their populous, so it's not like there are thousands of guns and bombs available everywhere."
Silly rabbit, bombs are everywhere! Modern society does not exactly starve one for explosive material to work with. Meanwhile, contrary to whatever propaganda you've been reading, about a quarter of Canadian households own guns. But of course that proportion is likely to be much higher in rural areas, which are the areas that would be hardest for the U.S. to control.
"If the US wanted something from Canada, we can just bully and cajole them into giving it to us. I think that's what Trump is doing now. "
Well, yes, that's what he's attempting. While it would certainly be better for everyone if he didn't, I can't deny I find it pretty funny how self-satisfied he seems to be at his project of taking a giant sledgehammer to 80 years of accumulated American soft power. When this sort of effort predictably makes America poorer, less respected and less influential, I'm sure his supporters will keep breathlessly insisting that it's all Biden's (who whoever else's) fault.
The pendant in me rather doubts that's true. The blast radius of a nuke may be large compared to conventional explosives, but it's still very, very small compared to the size of a forest. And if you're counting on the fires spreading on their own, I would think napalm would give you much better control for a tiny fraction of the price.
But all that is rendered pretty irrelevant by a more practical concern. You know what a small insurgent group would call provoking a superpower to launch nukes just for a chance of taking them out? Winning. They would call it winning.
Like, nevermind the political fallout (which would doubtless be massive), that sounds like an amazing deal just on a cost basis. Nukes are EXTREMELY expensive. Only in their wildest dreams are any single group of insurgents going to cause damage that comes anywhere close to the cost of one single warhead, nevermind the delivery system, nevermind the cleanup. Most insurgencies would love nothing better than to watch their enemies shoot themselves in the foot that hard.
My overwhelming impression from this comment is that you are simply trying to be an edgelord, rather than having an actual conversation. In the event that I'm wrong, I still have to concede that my meager skills at pedagogy aren't equal to the task of correcting the extremely deep and serious faults in your knowledge of the world and ability to reason about it. Either way, the obvious course is to disengage. Good day.
Why would we use force though? It would be much simpler to buy it.
Lets start with Alberta, where the susceptibility to leaving Canada for the US is probably highest. We offer the residents of Alberta a large bribe to become the 51st state (maybe 52nd if Greenland goes first). Now BC is cutoff from the rest of Canada. Probably at this point we can get them for a much smaller bribe, even none at all. At this point likely Quebec is pissed to have been beaten to the door, so we offer them statehood as #54 (55), etc. Divide and conquer, buying one province at a time.
> Probably at this point we can get them for a much smaller bribe, even none at all.
Alaska is cut off from the other US states by Canada, and yet hasn't joined Canada. Why would that work differently the other way around?
How is this supposed to work, exactly?
Even assuming for the sake of argument that the people of Alberta have the legal authority to secede from Canada, I'm pretty sure Canadian law prohibits anyone (and especially foreigners) from bribing voters in Canadian elections. So all that bribe money would just be redirected into Ottawa's treasury as soon as it crosses the border.
And if the idea is that Trump would promise to pay the Albertans *after* they secede and join the Union, then A: the Albertans would have to be stupid enough to trust Donald Trump to hold up his end of a deal even without a formal contract to bind him to, and B: Canadian elections are done with secret ballots, so there's no way to know which people Trump is supposed to pay off.
He'd have to promise to pay *everyone* in Alberta, regardless of how they voted. Which means the loyal and/or skeptical ones would all have the option of hedging their bets by voting "No" but still collecting whatever payout Trump actually pays out if their countrymen go with "Yes".
This seems like...well, "wishful thinking" hardly seems like a strong enough term. If I were trying to write a bit of satire to illustrate some of the more common negative stereotypes about Americans--specifically about thinking they're the center of the universe and not understanding how anyone else could POSSIBLY fail to envy them--I think I'd need to make it only slightly more over-the-top than what you've written here.
I do agree that Alberta would probably be the most susceptible to leaving Canada: I think there's some appetite for that among Albertans. If I had to guess how many would up and join Alberta to the U.S. if given the opportunity, I'd say in the 30% range. But my confidence there is very low: it could be in the 60s, it could be in the 10s. So I won't say that "try to get Alberta to join the U.S." is completely ridiculous as a Step 1.
Where I think you start to go off the rails is imagining that a bribe would be of much help in convincing the holdouts. First off, a bribe is only an inducement if you, yourself, expect to benefit from the bribe. So let's say the deal is for a direct cash payment to each and every Albertan. Thought experiment: how big of a bribe would have to be part of the package for you to vote for your state to become part of China or Russia? How about Germany or the UK? Would $1000 do it? How about $5000? Maybe $50,000? I expect for many people there is no practical number high enough. For the remainder, I expect a wide spread, but a lot of people will tend fairly high. Canadians aren't a monolith, but two things you will CERTAINLY find here are people who take pride in being Canadian, and people who take a dim view of the U.S. Irrevocably yoking your future and your children's future to a country you don't care for is gonna be a pretty tough sell. And that's before you get into credibility issues: Trump does not exactly have a great reputation for fairness and honesty in his business deals. How many are going to trust the bribe to actually come through? Once the U.S. has political control of Alberta, why would they need to pay?
But far, far more off-base than that is the notion that BC would fall easily in line after Alberta. Here I can speak with some authority: I'm a BC resident. I live and work surrounded by other BC residents. I don't think there are very many BC residents who would join up with the U.S. for any price. And the idea that peeling off our neighboring province first and using the isolation as economic coercion to fall in line? Here I must suspect you of having a poor understanding of human psychology in-general. You might consider looking up the history of a city called "West Berlin" for a start. Suffice to say that "an authoritarian government has just isolated us, gobbled up our neighbor, and is now pressuring us to allow them to take control" is very much NOT the inducement you think it is.
Eh, none of this is going to happen. But I was trying to spitball potential scenarios and this one seemed less ludicrous than any other that I could think of (or which has been proposed in this thread). I'd give it less than 10^(-2) odds. But I'd give the `invasion / occupation / assimilation' scenario less than 10^(-4) odds, so...
Eh, fair enough. If I were told that four years from now some substantial portion of Canada had joined the U.S. and were trying to imagine the most plausible way that it could happen, probably my first thought would be "some serious outside threat scared Canada into wanting to be more firmly under the U.S. aegis." But that's not something the current admin can really control.
If I were in a think tank tasked with finding the most plausible ways to make it happen, I still don't think anything so direct as bribery would be my go-to. It would have to be some form of information warfare. If the past ten years have taught me anything, its how frighteningly effective various propaganda streams are at turning susceptible peoples' brains into politically-polarized much. My hypothetical think-tank proposal wouldn't even involve spreading pro-U.S. propaganda in Canada, mind you. Rather it would involve finding all the most effective ways at getting some Canadians to hate other Canadians, until some parts of the country absolutely couldn't stand other parts.
Maybe then you start planting seeds about disaffected groups joining the U.S. or even making overt offers. But maybe you don't even need to: if anybody (with the possible exception of Quebec) splits off and becomes independent, ultimately asking for U.S. annexation would be a natural attractor. (Sorta similar to how the U.S. got Texas come to think of it, except the part where a lot of Texans started out as American to begin with.)
There's something I don't have to worry about in the real world, at least. Trump's comments are pretty much the exact opposite of what an admin looking to go that route would want to do.
Alberta seems not a likely choice right now since a born-and-raised Albertan is soon to be elected Canada's Prime Minister, probably with a thumping parliamentary majority. Though in various aspects of worldview he will be more simpatico with the new Trump Administration than the outgoing Canadian PM (the new guy heads the Conservative Party of Canada), he is nevertheless a strongly-nationalistic French-speaking Canadian. His lifelong goal has been to lead and reform his nation not dismember it.
Meanwhile back home in Alberta the voters will have reason to expect some of their grievances with Ottawa to be successfully addressed, presumably taking some air out of secession arguments.
Depending on how things go with the new national government there could be some revival of secession talk in British Columbia, though not with an intention of joining the US.
But how does Alberta secede from Canada? They likely don't have that right. Quebec failed to secede. Maybe the US sends troops into Alberta with its encouragement?
IIUC Canadian provinces do have the constitutional right to secede. Quebec separatists merely failed to win their independence referendum.
Sorta/kinda. There's nothing about that in Canada's written Constitution. In response to a court ruling related to the 1995 Quebec referendum, Parliament in 2000 passed a law laying out some conditions on which the federal government would respect the result of a provincial separation referendum.
Awkwardly (and very Canadian to be honest) the "Clarity Act" fails to state clearly what percentage "yes" vote is necessary for a referendum result to be binding. Most analysts say that something more than 50%+1 would be needed, but that has never yet been tested and unless the province's voters went at least 60-40 "yes" there would be court challenges.
The federal law states that "First Nations/Indigenous People" are required to be "part of" the "negotiations" following a successful referendum result, without specifying either the nature of those negotiations in general or the role/power of First Nations in that process.
There are other mysteries about how the Clarity Act imagines the separation process but you get the overall picture: sorta/kinda.
And it's not been tested.
I agree with this strategy. The loss of Alberta might be fatal for Canada in the long run.
If Quebec becomes interdependent, they'll want to stay that way, not join another Anglophone country.
Ah, but by that point they will be surrounded by America. Independence may not be viable. And if we really need to put the squeeze on, we blockade them. Which, sure, is technically an act of war, but not of the invasion kind. But probably it won't be necessary to actually go that far, the implicit threat, as well as the obvious economic benefits of joining a larger and richer polity which surrounds you, should suffice.
French Guiana is surrounded by Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking people, and feels no will to join them.
For that matter, France is surrounded by nations who don't speak French, and yet feels no need to join one of them.
Maybe there's something about speaking French!
Quebec is the Texas of Canada. Different in ways the inhabitants find important, and always deciding to secede.
They have a coast, and a larger population than Gambia (which is surrounded by Senegal).
The coast is where the (threat of) blockade comes in
evidence? Canada did allow Quebec a referendum on secession. The pro-secession side lost, rendering the issue moot, but we are postulating that there is a future `Albertan independence' referendum which is won.
Distinction without a difference. Alberta can first become independent and then join America.
Isn't Canada a member of NATO? Wouldn't the rest of NATO be required to defend them, and wouldn't they defend themselves?
US is NATO so it would be an intra-NATO affair. I doubt the treaty addresses that.
I'm no lawyer or international relations expert, but I think Article 5 could easily be construed to require other countries to defend Canada if the US invaded:
"The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."
As for the original question, I think that if the US invaded Canada, the rest of NATO would defend Canada, at least to some extent. Economically it would be a disaster for everyone involved. Militarily, France, the UK, and the US all have nukes. If they get used, that would obviously be very bad. If they don't get used, the US would almost certainly "win" the war at some point; Canada itself doesn't have a big enough military to withstand an American attack, and the US Navy's aircraft carriers would be too much for the NATO forces to overcome in the Atlantic. But if we couldn't occupy Afghanistan effectively, why would we be able to occupy Canada? If you had a huge number of Canadians who decided that they wanted to be Americans, then it might be different. But I don't think that would be the case in this hypothetical invasion scenario.
If the US attacks Canada, and then Canada attacks back, does that mean that individual NATO countries could decide which one they wanted to support?
No, because "attacks back" is not a concept with any meaning or significance in international law. A attacks B, then A and B are at war and it is expected that warfighting activities may occur anywhere in the combined territory of A and B and generals may but lawyers don't care which way the front is moving.
US attacks Canada, and the remaining NATO members are required to do whatever they would do if the US had attacked *them*. Which is presumably to wage war against the US, including military operations that in a purely tactical sense might be called "attacks".
yeah, the invasion and occupation scenario is obviously dumb. That’s why I was spitballing scenarios whereby Canada might be induced to voluntarily join, for certain values of voluntary.
I'd love to just see a published list of the blogs people request you recommend. I feel like it would be a useful way to find things to read.
While I understand that idea in theory, I don’t think it will work in practice.
If every recommendation get published in that list it will quickly be gamed and people will just submit a recommendation to be listed there.
It will additionally result in a public list of blogs that are disapproved by Scott since anyone can just diff the to lists.
I suspect it would produce a list of people who think their blogs might be interesting to ACX readers which is exactly what I’d like to see.
I don’t think it would be particularly game worthy in an effort/payoff sort of way if you don’t think your blog would appeal to ACX readers it’s probably not worth the effort.
> I suspect it would produce a list of people who think their blogs might be interesting to ACX readers which is exactly what I’d like to see.
I mean, isn't a proxy for that just clicking on any given commenter here's blog link next to their name?
If they're engaged enough to comment, and particularly if you think their comments are cogent / useful / interesting, seems like a fairly strong and immediately available quality filter.
Because many of them probably don't bother making many posts they think would be interesting to other ACX readers.
So I've seen a few intelligent, careful people saying that climate change, while likely bad, is unlikely to be an existential threat to humanity. I'm very much not a climate scientist, but I'm unsure of the reasoning.
When Mt Tambora erupted in 1815, the resultant cooling (about 0.5 degrees Celsius) caused horrific famines and other disasters which killed tens of thousands of people, caused widespread societal and economic upheaval, and just was generally awful, despite the effects mostly only lasting a few months to a few years. Now, that's cooling, not warming, but it seems plausible that the magnitude of the effects would be comparable, if different in type.
Given that, and given even conservative estimates for temperature change put it at 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, and sustained over a much longer period (decades at minimum, centuries not implausible), I genuinely don't understand how that conclusion could be reached? Is warming just different? Is it because it's slower rather than an abrupt shift?
Humans have been endemic to vastly different climate zones from the arctic to the Sahara for centuries, well before the benefits of the admittedly fragile industrial civilization. Wiping out 50% or 90% of them is the easy part, but getting the last nomadic tribe will be next to impossible.
I don't think anyone serious claims that climate change is an existential threat.
Chomsky, love him or hate him, is the physical embodiment of seriousness.
He's also not a climate scientist.
He may have been serious in the 60's and 70's but he's been nothing but an intellectual buffoon for at least the past 15 years. If he's the physical embodiment of anything now it's of self-parody.
This feels no true Scotsmanny, since anyone making that claim obviously isn't a serious person.
But "serious" aside there's plenty of people making that claim very loudly, eg the group called Extinction Rebellion.
Angry isn't serious. There is no tenured professor at a top 20 research university who believes it. And even if there is then that person is outside of the scientific consensus. The median 95% of climate scientists would all agree that it's not an existential threat.
That sounds fine, but there's a bunch of idiots who do, and some of them want to glue themselves to the road or throw soup on a valuable artwork or something, so it's worth taking the time to debunk 'em.
I'd prefer to simply run them over. Glue away!
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/i/99357449/and-climate
I don't think the serious people believe that global warming will wipe humanity. It's not an ELE. What it could do is collapse our energy dependent civilization and kill a lot of people. But even those worse case outcomes would happen incrementally--food and fuel prices rise, people starve, wars happen, massive population movements occur, and the human population of the planet declines. How fast that would happen depends on details we do not currently understand.
Moreover, all of the remedies I've heard proposed would be as likely to cause upheaval, to that or greater degree, possibly in different sectors of the economy or world at first. With similar levels of uncertainty.
Why would lowering carbon emissions collapse our civilization, kill anyone, starve anyone, start wars, or move populations around?
Lowering carbon emissions inevitably manifests as curtailing economic activity. On the personal level, this means not selling as much of your product, whether you're running a fruit stand or a factory. Or a power plant - which means customers are doing without. The secondary effects of this include all sorts of things like having less food on the table, fewer clothes, postponed home repairs, unemployment, and freezing in the reduced-emissions-enforced winter.
Hopefully the drawbacks of these effects are evident.
If you are claiming that any curtailing of economic activity will have as severe an impact as runaway global warming, I find that so counter-intuitive that I have to ask you to cite research in support of that.
I'm not really talking about runaway global warming, as I believe that is not as credible as the global warming predicted in publications such as IPCC reports.
When it comes to predicted global warming, the evidence doesn't suggest strongly whether it's better or worse than the economic curtailment required to prevent it. It has been harder than it should be to collect evidence that curtailment is worse, since the act of collecting it or even advocating for collecting it as been, for ideological reasons, historically less likely to get financial and academic support than the act of collecting evidence that it is preferable.
To get started, you could consult David Friedman's articles on the matter.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Sorted_Posts.html#Climate
I agree with the your first statement.
My primary reasoning is that if we check global temperatures through longer eras (going back thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions of years) we can see much larger differences compared to what is being discussed today, and yet Earth was still very much a planet full of life. During warmer periods, even more so!
More details:
1. Chart for the past 2000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Common_Era_Temperature.svg
I know that this shows that today temperature rose in a century way more than in this period at any time, but I am linking it first just so it is apparent that even before large scale use of fossil fuels, 0.2-0.3 degrees Celsius change in a couple of decades was not that uncommon.
2. Chart for past 800 000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg
This implies that in that period there were several cases when average temperature was 10 degrees Celsius lower or 2 degrees Celsius higher than what is today.
3. Chart for past 500 000 000 years (this is actually the combination of multiple methods/charts):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:All_palaeotemps.svg
What I would like to highlight here is the green part between ~ 7 million and 60 million years ago.
Through this period average temperature was always higher by at least two degrees Celsius than currently, and during the Eocene period (33.9 million to 56 million years ago) it was 6 to 14 degrees Celsius higher.
To quote wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene#Flora):
"During the early-middle Eocene, forests covered most of the Earth including the poles. Tropical forests extended across much of modern Africa, South America, Central America, India, South-east Asia and China. Paratropical forests grew over North America, Europe and Russia, with broad-leafed evergreen and broad-leafed deciduous forests at higher latitudes."
So actually it was way more friendly towards plant life.
Likely higher temperatures may increase crops yields and even human welfare, if we can magically ignore the effect of change itself.
That being said, as some people pointed out, the main question is the speed of change, as that can still make this an issue.
I think that apart from the natural environment what influences human welfare is "capital", in the broadest sense. This includes infrastructure, all kinds of equipment, but even culture, training and customs.
There is a natural degradation of "capital" (infrastructure crumbles, people grow old, etc), and there is a replacement process (maintenance, training, etc) that allows us to maintain civilization. If the change is gradual enough that this natural replacement can take care of it, than capital does not shrink and welfare remains high. E.g., newer houses, buildings will gradually be more optimized for higher temperature, people will wear different clothing and behave accordingly without consciously noticing cultural change, etc.
If it is faster than this, that would require more investment, so people would need to drop living standards.
Even this negative case can have large ranges, from a bit slower gdp growth to long term economic upheaval.
However, for massive global famine I think some major global change would be necessary, that would destroy most crops within a year, or that would somehow trigger a swift cooldown (at least locally), kind of as in "The Day After Tomorrow". However, I don't see this one likely, as far as I know the consensus is against it, and I don't think that there is any precedent for this save for vulcano eruptions or asteroid impacts.
Regarding your particular example about Tambora, I think the main issue there was not really the "global temperature" directly, but that it created a permanent fog, that also blocked sunlight. To quote wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora ):
"In the northern spring and summer of 1815, a persistent "dry fog" was observed in the northeastern United States. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye."
As a sideffect, this decreased temperature, but I think the lower amount of sunshine was even more important than the pure temperature change. I think the distribution of this was also more local, not sure how much the southern hemisphere got from this. So likely the territories with most agricultural issues had much lower average temperature than what the global value implies here.
A note: it's true (with the caveat about change rate that you already note) that, overall, an Eocene- or Cretaceous-style hothouse would be good for global biodiversity and biomass. But it would be much less good for the specific configuration of biodiversity and biomass we have right now, which evolved in icehouse conditions. For one, the breadbaskets of the world wouldn't be such in Eocene climate. The grassy plants from which most of the global food supply depends evolved relatively recently in temperate, highly seasonal, low-CO2 conditions. And of course during most of the Cretaceous, the middle third of North America was under water.
OTOH, we'd have decades or more to adapt to this. Also, at least some of the staple crops would do better in high CO2 than at current levels, and AIUI there is research being done regarding others. There's a high chance we'll have more food than now for the same resources as a consequence, and what upheaval occurs would be in the form of farmers and their suppliers having to find new work or new markets.
I admit I'm mostly going by half-remembered stuff right now, but IIRC CO2 fertilization helps with carbohydrates, but not so much with proteins and other nutrients; and I strongly doubt it's enough to offset losses of cropland to drought (of course the rain will still fall elsewhere, but farmland isn't something you move around quickly or easily) and sea level rise (which is going to be significant only on river deltas and some coastal lowlands, but those are some of the most intensely farmed and inhabited areas around).
I kinda assume if climate change happened we would solve it with technology, by creating a bunch of clouds or something.
Or develop new technologies of carbon capture, etc
Maybe we won't solve ocean acidification but temperature of the planet seems easier to control.
Haven't looked into it, just my vague impression?
The rationalists who say "not an existential threat" mean "it will not kill literally every single person in the world". This is true for most models of climate change. Plus, the lesswrong crowd tends to believe that an artificial superintelligence will be built soon, and will either destroy the world or solve climate change. One way or the other, nothing to worry about.
Historically, warm years were good and cold years were bad. To a degree, they still are. But there's a limit to how warm we want it, and climate change is rapidly getting there.
It's worth noting that they say "global catastrophic risk" for things that don't put the continued existence of human civilisation at risk but are still, well, catastrophic.
Global warming will probably kill more people via heat-related deaths than are dying now, but a Lancet study found cold-related deaths outnumber heat deaths by 17 to 1. So, fewer peeps will be dying from cold-related deaths. Higher CO levels are creating a greening effect worldwide, so despite the fears of famine due to climate change, crop plants are becoming more productive. Please note: angiosperms appeared and evolved during periods when global CO2 levels were 4x-5x higher than they are now. The Antarctic ice sheet didn't begin form until atmospheric CO2 levels dropped to about 1200-1400 ppm (compared to ~280 ppm pre-industrial levels, and ~420 ppm today)—and global avg temps were about 4 degrees C higher than they are today. Yes, Gen Z +3 to +6 will have to worry about sea-level rise. But it should be slow enough to create mitigations for coastal urban areas (a la the Netherlands). I doubt if GW will have a significant impact on human populations (at least compared to other potential issues). Overall, long term, it would be great if CO2 levels were high enough to get us out of the glaciation cycles that have characterized the late Pleistocene (each cycle lasting roughly a 100Ky).
Scott has noted that, seemingly paradoxically, people dying cold-related deaths are dying in hot places. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/chilling-effects
Without due respect to Scott, the data doesn't seem to support this thesis. This study of cold and heat deaths in European countries shows that, overall, cold deaths far outweigh heat deaths. But cold deaths are higher in Eastern European countries on a north-south axis — and they're also super high in the UK for some reason. Heat deaths are highest in Italy, Bulgaria, and Romania, with some hotspots in interior Spain. (Link below)
It's worth noting that some major civilization collapses happened during cooling periods. After the Minoan Warm Period, Bronze Age civilizations collapsed. Western Roman civilization collapsed at the end of the Roman Warm Period. And the Bubonic plague wiped out about a third of Europe's population a couple of decades after the Little Ice Age began. Likewise, the Little Ice Age impacted food production all across northern Europe, which caused periodic famines for three centuries.
Heat and Cold mortality for urban areas across Europe...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(23)00023-2/fulltext
It's more like "It will not end life as we know it." If a threat were to kill all people but one, or wipe out technological progress, rationalists would also call that an existential threat.
> wipe out technological progress
I would only call that an x-risk if there are reasons to believe that civilization will not be reinvented after a few millennia. One can make such arguments (depleted fossil fuels which would be required to bootstrap industry, for example), but I would treat loss of industrialization as a threat of x-risk, not as x-risk itself.
There's a not dissimilar rationalist trope around the idea that nuclear war wouldn't be an "existential threat", because human beings would continue to exist (and civilisation might survive in, say, Chile and could be rebuilt elsewhere, perhaps with humanity having learned lessons). Feels like something that is at the same time technically true, but fuelling possible insanity.
I would not expect global warming to be as catastrophic as global nuclear war, either.
I think that it is important to stick to stuff which is true on an object level ('technically true') and not to go into hyperbole to signal tribe membership.
If someone is about to jump out of a window on the fourth floor, the true thing to say to them is "that is a stupid thing to do. You will likely injure yourself severely and might actually die". If you are telling them instead "this is a terrible idea, you are sure to die and will kill at least four passer-bys when you hit them", that is bad. Once you have told that little noble lie, the truth is forever your enemy, and the pro-window-jumping people will easily show you for a fool in any remotely fair debate. Also, what will you then tell the person debating if they should escape the fire by jumping from the eighth floor or the forth? Double down: "if you fall from the eighth floor, you will be super-duper-dead and cause a crater which will kill everything within half a kilometer"?
I do not think that LW is full of people going "climate change: not an issue" or "nuclear war: not an x-risk, but a fun group activity" regularly -- just because something is not maximally bad, it does not mean that you endorse it.
We aren’t living in 1815 anymore. Cooling is worse than heating in most cases. The existential threat isn’t really claimed by the climate scientists either, although they tend to obfuscate the number of years it takes for sea level rise.
The people talking about "existential threat" seem to have tacked on the modifier because it sounds cool, without giving any thought to what a high bar they're setting for themselves.
Deaths heads as decorations on one's views, like pieces of jewelry.
I'll third 'rate matters'.
Partly because we can more effectively adapt to the coming changes because they're coming slowly,
Partly because, while we almost certainly won't be able to reverse the effects of climate change in my lifetime, current models look like we'll avoid runaway effects and we can hopefully get our shit together enough to make the rate of change near 0 in my lifetime
Partly because one of the big worries with the fast rate of change was ecological catastrophes as existing biomes failed to adapt to new conditions, which would have impacted human life indirectly. If the rate of change is slower, there will be more room for adaptation and the ecological consequences will be less severe.
The rate of change is super-important.
Cooling is worse than warming, in large part because we're still in an ice age (we're closer to the planet being too cold to survive than being too warm to survive, basically).
The modern world is better at adapting to changing conditions than the ancient world.
(There's other stuff, but I think this covers the material in your comment.)
Rate matters. People are very good at accommodating changes that happen at the multi generational timescale. Not so much "no crops this year." Especially since back then, the survival margins were much tighter. Now we have much more of a safety blanket. Especially since the changes (were and are expected to be) unevenly spread. So the places less hard hit can help the ones harder hit. That wasn't really the case in 1815.
You can hate everyone in Rome but not everyone in Greece.
> but not everyone in Greece.
Tell me more, tell me more.
Lol
Recently I outlined for myself a ten-part (?) series on everything I know about web + app development. My original idea was to make it a blog post series. After outlining it I'm not so sure. Perhaps readers would absorb it better if it was a course, or textbook, or YouTube video playlist, or what-have-you. What do y'all think?
(I haven't written out the entire thing yet, as it seems like it would be a LOT of work and I'm not sure what benefits would accrue to me or my readers if I were to do it.)
Perfect is the enemy of good. If you've written something out, it's probably relatively easy to convert to a blog post. Not so for Youtube videos, a course, or textbook.
Unless you're someone who has some particular authority in the field, or your series is extremely useful to people who are able to find your work, few people will read it. That's ok though, as the exercise should be for your own benefit, with other readers as a bonus.
I don't want to dissuade you too much, because this sounds like something that could be good for your personal development. However, I understand that you are an undergraduate student? Consider the possibility you may be overestimating the utility that you can provide as someone without significant professional experience in this field.
Who do you want to write it for? Would your readers/viewers want to build an app, get a job, start their company...?
What about a blog with some straightforward practice problems or questions threaded through it, and maybe a couple of really tough ones at the end of each post? People could discuss how to do the problems in comments. You could post occasionally in comments giving answers or advice or congratulations. Maybe give prizes (free subscription?) to the first to post a solution to one of the tough puzzles. (So now I'm moving into ideas of ways to build up number of subscribers.) Maybe sprinkle in some other stuff in between the lessons -- a few posts about where web & app etc. development is heading, or funny stories about legendary fuck-ups or genius solutions or odd corners of that professional world. (What's the creepiest underground app you ever heard tell of?) Maybe an occasional contest for readers? You name some odd constraints, ask how you could do X with those constrains. Group could select best answer by vote.
I absolutely hate instruction delivered via video. I'm always looking up how to do things in Photoshop, and hunting for the one site that just answers my question with some prose and one screen shot. I get the info way faster that way, and if I forget something I can quickly find it again by skimming the written answer. Searching a video for that one part where they show how to access feature X is infuriating. However, most Photoshop how-to's are videos, so it may be that most prefer that modality.
Also, making a video series adds all these complications. You have to think about how the room looks, and how you look. You have to be personable. If you trip over your words you have to reshoot that section.
I think there is a fundamental difference between tutorials about how to use a Software and how to build software.
When the resulting code o the tutorial is published I can work my way back to fill gaps that the author willingly or unwillingly left out or knowledge gaps that I have but the target audience of the tutorial doesn’t have.
For a software like photoshop I stumbled a lot on tutorials where a important step was left out and I couldn’t figure out what they did because I can’t work my way back from the end result. In a video I can just skip back to the part and follow step by step.
I don't build software, but see what you mean. Actually these days when I google Photoshop questions the Google AI gives me the answer as a list of bullet points, and so far those have turned out to be clear and accurate.
It's certainly true that most Photoshop how-to CREATORS prefer that modality. It's an open question as to whether the consumers prefer it.
I go to videos for instruction as a last resort, or if I can't envision what the how-to explanation explains.
I do pretty well with blog posts, especially if they include practical interludes/exercises along the way. That would probably be harder with a video playlist. Even if there are aspects which benefit greatly from demonstrating them in video instead of static images or text, still probably better to embed those in a blog.
From there, not clear on what the practical difference is between a blog and a textbook, unless you plan to get it all printed and bound. Unless you a mean a hypertext textbook on a dedicated site, which I think would be better unless you benefit from linking sections of the textbook to preexisting blog posts.
As for a course, maybe? Can be beneficial if you can make those practical interludes fully interactive. But I expect it would be a great deal more work than just a blog/textbook.
All in all:
Dedicated textbook > blog post > course > video series
Hope to see what comes of this in the future!
How exactly does one lobby their local legislators? I know that at the federal level, multi billion dollar organizations do all sorts of crazy things that the average human can never do, but assuming you're a moderately wealthy individual with a good savings and a high paying job and you wanted to propose adopting a law or a legislative reform for your local City/State, how would you go about doing so?
Sure you can always call them up and leave a message, but i assume that's leaving something on the table. What would you do if you had 50k at your disposal? 100k? How can money actually be used to improve your outcome?
Figure out what you want to say, condense it to the level of an elevator pitch but with backup material at the ready, call the local legislator's office, ask them which staffer is handling [topic] this week, and if they're not too busy at that moment, make your pitch.
Or, write a letter to the legislator; their office will send it to the right staffer and you can go into a bit more depth in text. Offer to discuss the matter further.
For all but the biggest issues, it isn't necessary to offer bribes or campaign contributions, or establish yourself as the spokesman for #movement with bignum registered voters. Legislators get surprisingly little feedback from the public on secondary issues, and they know that for every person who actually picks up a phone there will be many more who feel the same way but didn't bother to call. And, perhaps more importantly, the staffer in charge of [topic] is not actually an expert on [topic], he's almost certainly overworked, in over his head, and trying to figure it out with basically Wikipedia and a bunch of slick glossies produced by the relevant industry organization or whatever. They'll probably *want* to talk to someone who knows the subject but isn't captured by the industry.
If you've got money to throw at the problem, you can use it to hire people who are either better than you at cold-calling politicians, or can do the background research to fine-tune your pitch and identify the proper targets. But check with a lawyer, because when money starts changing hands in this sort of thing, the law is particular about how that should be done.
Politicians pay attention to crowds, so you lobby local legislation by lobbying the people who vote for them. If you have a high-paying job, you presumably have people who respect your opinion on things, so start by convincing them, and then convince their friends, and repeat until someone's friends with the legislators.
> What would you do if you had 50k at your disposal? 100k? How can money actually be used to improve your outcome?
I'm interested in this too.
I think it depends on your level of commitment, but Zvi famously founded Balsa to do exactly this at the federal level, and I believe he even got outside funding, and has hired two people for it (maybe more by now). Currently they're tackling the Jones Act, which is 100% a giant boondoggle that should be eliminated (in my own opinion).
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/announcing-balsa-research
So I've answered the ACX survey and am curious about the last question. I feel (rot13) that zl nafjre qrcraqf urnivyl ba gur ahzoref vaibyirq, abg whfg bhg bs cevapvcyr ba n "uvture rkcrpgngvba if thnenagrrq erghea" qvpubgbzl. Jvgu qvssrerag ahzoref (fvapr V ernq nobhg n fvzvyne ulcbgurgvpny n juvyr ntb), zl nafjre jbhyq qrsvavgryl punatr.
So I wonder if I'm isolated in my outlook, and what the point of the question is...
That your answer should change if the numbers are different is normal and healthy. If you are a median income American, and the question is about one measly dollar versus ten, then you want to take the gamble.
If the question is about one billion dollar versus a chance at ten, then only SBF (and perhaps a few big-thinking honest EA people who believe that their cause areas will scale linearly) would take the gamble. Everyone else would be "there is little difference to my utility function between 1G$ and 10G$, why should I risk anything?"
Where exactly the cross-over point is depends on the risk tolerance of a person, and their current circumstances. Perhaps one person owns a broken car which could be fixed up for 500$, while another would need 5k$ to by a decent used car.
Formally, there is the Kelly criterion, which tells you how much of your net worth you should be willing to put into a gamble where you have an edge at most.
Unless I’m mistaken, the Kelly criterion applies for repeated independent bets, no? This is just one thing (and also, there’s no downside in the survey question).
I’m reassured that I’m not crazy for thinking the correct strategy depends on the number involved. But then what’s the point of asking the question for a single pair of numbers? Is it to determine the “strategy boundary” in another way, depending on (say) the person’s income?
The standard model of someone following Kelly would be a gambler who has the opportunity to make a limited amount of gambles in which they have some edge, can decide how much to bet in each gamble, and tries to get rich. (I think that they instrumentally value their money logarithmically in the middle of their gambling run is kind of intrinsic, even if their end goal was "earn at least one million", under certain assumptions.)
In my model of humans, we are making financial decisions under uncertainty all the time. Big ones, like what profession to take and how to invest money for old age, but also smaller ones such as what forms of insurance to take, how often to go to medical checkups, how much food to stockpile to be prepared for disaster down to tiny ones like if you should fill up your gas tank right now or wait and see if you find a better gas station in a few days.
Even humans who don't see themselves as gamblers are regularly betting on the rare bad outcome not happening as to spend arbitrary amounts to negate the tiniest risk is not compatible with life. (Last month, there was a lesswrong article published on using Kelly to determine if insurance is worth it, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wf4jkt4vRH7kC2jCy/when-is-insurance-worth-it )
So with the understanding that humans are not perfectly in the situation of that gambler (for example, they can recover from going to a balance of zero by means of paid work), we can nevertheless use Kelly as a baseline. Most people are more risk-adverse than the Kelly criterion, which is fine.
The fact that there is no (absolute) downside is largely irrelevant. As long as you have two strategies, and the riskier one has the higher expected payoff, you can apply Kelly to it.
Did Scott ask us for the income bracket, again? Without it, I think the data will not make very much sense.
(aside: dear anyone reading this from the Substack crew, could we please have spoiler tags? Web 1.0 forums in the 90s already had those, without suffering from the performance problems Substack has; reinventing wheels should result in better, not worse, wheels!)
Could someone post a reminder of what the question was? I, for one, did the survey long enough ago that I remember approximately none of the specific questions, only some of the broad subjects covered...
The question was (rot13): juvpu jbhyq lbh pubbfr orgjrra n pregnvagl bs svir uhaqerq qbyynef be n bar-va-fvk (nf va, ebyy n fgnaqneq qvpr) punapr bs trggvat svir gubhfnaq qbyynef?
Thanks! I remember it, and my thinking, now.
Lrnu, zl ceboyrz vf gur fgngvfgvpny pnyphyngvba qbrfa'g npphengryl pncgher zl genqrbssf - V pna gryy zlfrys gur znguf znxrf frafr nyy V jnag, ohg V xabj zl yvmneq oenva jvyy fgvyy znxr zr srry onq vs V gnxr gung evfx naq ybfr; gurer jvyy qrsvavgryl or fbzr pbzovangvba bs nzbhagf/cebonovyvgl jurer vg orpbzrf jbegu gnxvat n tnzoyr, be vs gur pubvpr jnf vgrengrq znal gvzrf V pregnvayl jbhyq nf jryy, ohg nf qrfpevorq gurer'f n svir fvkguf punapr gur thnenagrrq pubvpr yrnirf zr unccvre.
I think you should try never to hate anyone, it isn't a healthy mindset. Mind, you may not be able to *help* hating someone, but that's a different issue.
No? Without violence there would be no ability to enslave in the first place?
Slavery is based on violence, so without violence we would all be free.
As for hate being long term anger, that's like saying war is just an extreme form of sports. We aren't meant to exist in extreme states long term--it is progressively damaging to the brain.
Thanks for the add. I wasn’t quite sure if it was in error and had meant to email you on it. I promise to behave responsibly.
I'll behave irresponsibly so you don't have to.
I appreciate that.
I gotchu fam
Lets suppose I'm a middle aged white male, and I have no friends. It's been like this for years, and I'm not asking for the standard list of how-to-make-friends.
I'm asking what are my prospects of a happy life without friends.
I'm asking if people have good strategies for having a good but friendless life.
In a few years, convincing AI friends will exist. Buy one.
How much money do you have?
Become completely self-sufficient. That’s all.
Relate to people on another basis besides friendship. You can have colleagues, co-religionists, co-hobbyists etc etc. I don't have any one that I'm friends with just for pleasure, and I'm extremely satisfied with my social life. The trick is to have something important that you care about above and beyond pleasure, that will provide you with the terms for your non-friend relationships.
There is so much individual variation on the need for friends and other forms of social relationships, that there is no generic advice that would make any sense. It's all about figuring out what you need, and how to get it.
I just want to +1 Eremolalos ideas.
Especially the activities with contact to people, just without ever trying to befriending them are good things.
You get the benefit of, let's call it, species-appropriate conduct, without putting any skin in the game. No one can force you to become their friend :)
But if you have no friends *and* don't do anything, I suspect you go mad.
> I just want to +1 Eremolalos ideas.
Same here, although I'm not really a hermit, so not sure how relevant my +1 is.
I'd particularly second her advice to "Have pets. Or take it beyond having pets and breed and/or train some kind of animal."
Breeding and training puppies has been a source of great joy and interest in my life, and it keeps you engaged on a many-hours-per-day basis.
I know someone now who has an 8 month oldNorwegian Laphund (I may not have the name quite right).. They herd reindeer, and Christmas front yard displays featuring plastic reindeer blew out her fuses. She's very smart and quick, and he's thinking of training her for dog agility contests. Those look like great fun to me l for both dog and owner. At end of course dogs jump onto owner's arms grinning.
> I know someone now who has an 8 month oldNorwegian Laphund (I may not have the name quite right).. They herd reindeer, and Christmas front yard displays featuring plastic reindeer blew out her fuses.
Ha! Now *that's* living! :-)
I often think that dogs represent an under-appreciated standard that we should aspire towards, because they represent a lot of what's best about us - loyalty, empathy, a natural affinity for cooperation, the desire to play, the desire to excel and do a job well, and of course the abiding and unconditional love that characterizes their relationship to you and the rest of their "pack members."
Not to mention, they eat dirty socks and underwear and really cut down on the laundry.
You're not the first or the last or the only to have lived wanted to do this. Read about hermits and other people who have lived very solitary lives. Some seem to have made a go of it, becoming engrossed in activities that were important to them. Anyhow, here are some suggestions for strategies.
THINGS THAT INVOLVE PEOPLE, BUT DO NOT REQUIRE YOU TO MAKE FRIENDS
Find volunteer or paid opportunities to help people without getting to know them.
There are probably some where you can even get info about how the people are benefitting.
Sports, for ex. Ultimate Frisbee. Serious body building in a gym.
Classes.
Religious or semi-religious (eg Buddhism) services, training and retreats
Online forums like this one
AA and similar
Have a blog
THINGS WITHOUT PEOPLE
Have pets. Or take it beyond having pets and breed and/or train some kind of animal.
Pursue your interests via study and practice.
Make things. Learn to make things that are hard to make. Learn to sail or dogsled. Build a cabin or a windmill or a boat. Paint watercolors. Make apps and games for computer and phones.
Photography.
Write or read fiction or history.
And here are some books about hermits, also from GPT
The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome
By Gordon Campbell, this book explores the history of hermits from ancient Rome to modern times, delving into the lives of famous hermits like St. Anthony of Egypt and St. Jerome.
MEDIEVAL CHRONICLES
A Book of Silence
In this 2008 publication, Sara Maitland reflects on her own pursuit of solitude and silence, exploring the lives of people today who occupy solitary states, such as solo sailors and polar explorers.
WELLCOME COLLECTION
The World of Medieval Monasticism: Its History and Forms of Life
By Gert Melville, this book provides a comprehensive overview of medieval monasticism, including the role of hermits in the wider monastic world.
MEDIEVAL CHRONICLES
The English Hermit: A Monastic Type
By Hugh F. M. Richmond, this book focuses on the history of hermits in England, exploring the reasons why people became hermits and the different types of hermitages.
MEDIEVAL CHRONICLES
The Substance of Silence: A Reading List About Hermits
This compilation offers various perspectives on the lives of hermits and the allure of solitude throughout history.
LONGREADS
So I asked GPT to give the names of some hermits who seemed to adapt well to living that way, and where someone could learn more about them, and here is the list it gave me:
*Historical and Religious Hermits*
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Famous for his two-year experiment in simple living at Walden Pond, chronicled in Walden.
Where to Read: Thoreau’s Walden is an essential book. Secondary sources, such as Robert Richardson’s biography Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, also provide insights.
St. Anthony the Great (c. 251–356)
An early Christian monk considered the father of monasticism. He lived in the Egyptian desert, practicing extreme solitude and asceticism.
Where to Read: Athanasius’s Life of Antony is the main source of information about him.
Figures like Julian of Norwich (1343–c. 1416), an anchoress, wrote Revelations of Divine Love, reflecting deep spiritual contentment.
Where to Read: Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love and works on Christian mysticism.
Christopher Knight ("The North Pond Hermit") (b. 1965)
Lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, stealing supplies to survive. He described being content with solitude.
Where to Read: Michael Finkel’s The Stranger in the Woods explores his life and mindset.
Richard Proenneke (1916–2003)
Built a cabin in Alaska and lived there alone for nearly 30 years. His journals were compiled into the book One Man's Wilderness.
Where to Read: One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey by Sam Keith, based on Proenneke’s journals.
Emma "Grandma" Gatewood (1887–1973)
Though not a complete hermit, she often hiked alone, including being the first woman to solo hike the Appalachian Trail. Her journeys reflect a deep contentment with solitude.
Where to Read: Grandma Gatewood's Walk by Ben Montgomery.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
While not a strict hermit, he valued solitude as a source of creative and spiritual renewal.
Where to Read: His essays, particularly Self-Reliance and Nature.
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Lived much of her life in seclusion, rarely leaving her family home. Her poetry reflects her contented inward life.
Where to Read: Collections of Dickinson’s poems and biographies like Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon.
Ryokan Taigu (1758–1831)
A Zen Buddhist monk and poet who lived in a hut in the mountains of Japan. He was deeply content with his simple life.
Where to Read: Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf: Zen Poems of Ryokan offers a collection of his poetry.
Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694)
The famed Japanese haiku poet spent much of his life wandering and living simply. His works reflect solitude and harmony with nature.
Where to Read: The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches.
J.D. Salinger (1919–2010)
Though a real person, Salinger adopted a hermit-like lifestyle, avoiding public life after publishing The Catcher in the Rye.
Where to Read: Biographies like Kenneth Slawenski’s J.D. Salinger: A Life explore his secluded life.
Grizzly Adams (John Adams, 1812–1860)
A mountain man who lived in isolation in the Sierra Nevada, surrounded by nature and animals.
Where to Read: Historical accounts and stories inspired by his life, such as The Life and Adventures of James Capen Adams by Theodore Hittell.
GPT didn't bring up Grigory Perlman?? Probably the world's most prominent living hermit?
People kept braving the wilds of Sweden to knock on his door, trying to award him the Nobel-equivalent in mathematics (Fields medal) and give him $1M in prizes, and he kept turning them away and asking to be left alone.
Now THAT'S commitment to the bit!
I think that if someone asks a question here we should assume they are responsible adults, and if we have the information they are asking for we should give it to them. If they sound out of touch with reality or like they are falling apart or they ask for help committing a crime or committing suicide then no, we should not answer their question. But OP here sounds calm and sane and makes clear what he wants to know, and that he is not interested in being nudged to make friends or advised on how to do it.
I think you mean that it failed to fill the gap in your heart. You can have no idea what would or would not fill the heart of someone else.
" Only desolation and madness await the isolate."
Doesn't that sound extreme?
Yes, well, the same can be said of being overweight, smoking, being a couch potato, daily drinking even in moderate amounts, and a lot of other things.
Asking reasonable questions and getting a rash of shit back isn't very good for people either.
Yea, OK, but if somebody on here asks which common US cigarette brand tastes most like Gauloises, do you think they should get an antismoking lecture instead of an answer? Or how about if they ask for info about rock climbing, or helicopter skiing, or big wave surfing, all of which are pretty risky? In all these cases the chance that the person asking has not already been told about the risks is very low. What's the point of giving the risk lecture again? And are we really in a position to be sure that in their case the activity is not worth the risk?
Congratulations to Donald on Congress’s certification of his electoral victory. Opinions about the events surrounding Joe’s certification four years ago vary widely—some view them as really damaging, others see them as minor or overblown. How do you see today’s proceedings compared to those four years ago?
I think it puts paid to the idea that the left and the right are mirror images of each other. We all know what would have happened if Harris had won.
Both sides have extremists, but one set of extremists does not act like the other.
I feel like America had some real serious political debates about lots of topics all at once and is functioning reasonably well?
I predict a lot less political violence, a lot less wokeness, a lot less unpopular foreign wars, a lot less illegal immigration, a lot less reliance on China, a real fight on policy on the right on a bunch of topics instead of just being the party of 'no', a lot less conspiracy theorism, and most importantly less legislation by administrative state expanding its powers. Just a huge shift towards the median voter in a way that makes it feel like we're living in a more 'responsive democracy'.
Just in general I think our media and cultural organs are doing a remarkably good job of navigating diversity of interests, opinions, and factual filters, and it could be so much worse.
If AI doesn't end everything early, I'm cautiously optimistic about the next four years.
Ended up voting for Kamala because the attempted coup was a read line for me, glad she lost though, mostly because I think Trump will 'strongman' Iran/Russia into backing down, and will either give up Taiwan bloodlessly, or make it clear 'not on my watch' there as well.
Also culturally, it feels like the gaslighting on all sides is less threatening? Partisans lie, we can tell when they do, and we don't need to be terrified that there isn't a bunch of normal americans who can see through it all and make their voices heard. We can just roll our eyes and live our lives, at everyone.
Wow, you're optimistic. I hope you're right.
The casual heuristic of "If this was a planned subterfuge, is this how it would reasonably be done?" tells me that this was almost certainly not a coup. A bunch of angry protestors, mostly unarmed, breaking into the capitol to what? Hang Mike Pence so he can't officiate the election? That's a ridiculous plan if it was one.
Don't they know that there are a bunch of tunnels Congress can escape through? Isn't being heavily armed a prerequisite for taking over a nation (especially one as powerful as the United States with a long democratic tradition)?
Sure, Trump didn't especially do anything about it at the time, and he wasn't exactly condemning their actions at the time either, but there's a difference between that and planning a coup as far as most people are concerned. Ordering the military to disperse a protest, that's protesting in favor of you, even if it got violent, isn't exactly what most people would do in that situation.
It was definitely a protest that got out of hand, which demonstrates the idiocy of many people supporting Trump, and was definitely illegal, but calling it a coup that Trump planned is a huge departure from reality as I see it.
The thing to remember is that the protestors believed that the election had already been stolen (ignore for the moment whether that is a defensible belief or not). Given that they sincerely believed that, their actions make more sense (not perfect sense, since even had they been right they weren't going to "stop the steal" that way).
Trump was just an opportunist. But his actions that day, and afterward reveal something about him: he couldn't care less about legal or democratic processes. I think that if he could overthrow the government with an illegal coup, he absolutely would, but he himself isn't smart enough to figure out how.
This. During his presidency, Trump was mostly free if base entertainment for the world and the US (SCOTUS aside, but that would have gone similarly under a non-clown republican president).
Oh no, he fired another secretary, and there are still people applying for the job.
Oh no, he did a photo-op with Kim.
Oh no, you would not believe what outrageous thing he tweeted today.
Oh no, he is having legal drama..
As far as US presidents go, his track record was not disastrous. Sure, he put some migrants in cages, but my baseline for US presidents is nuking Nagasaki, getting involved in Vietnam, turning torture into official US policy, sponsoring coups to overthow democracies in Latin America or lying to the feds about not having gotten a blowjob (I kid). Basically, he could have moonlighted as a serial killer without registering on my outrange-o-meter when it is calibrated for presidencies.
He had this one Iranian general killed in an airstrike, but that did not seem like a particularly irreplaceable loss for humanity either. And for COVID, it would have been nice to have some adult in the room, but the established non-partisan experts were rather terrible too. (Remember the lies about masks being ineffective?)
But once he was voted out his always strained relationship with the truth went downhill to levels seen on his 2016 campaign trail, where he had denied Obama being born in the US. "Stop the steal." This was a man who would happily burn the commons for whatever slim chance to not face the fact that he had been voted out. I am convinced that if the insurgents he had incited over months (in the vague hope that they would somehow change the outcome) had miraculously managed to overthrow the government, he would have happily resided in the white house while the corpse of his former vice president was rotting on some flagpole nearby.
That's fair, but also a very different claim than "January 6th was a coup attempt by Trump" as a lot of people seem to take at face value. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of politicians wouldn't take powers and term lengths outside what is constitutionally allowed given the opportunity, but it's sort of our bad that we are electing people who think like that. Virtue isn't something we seem to value much in politicians anymore (did anyone ever?).
An abnormal election process, with abnormal (to public perception) voting behavior could reasonably make a lot of people, who were acting in good faith, believe that election fraud won Biden the election. Trump looked like he was going to win around 11:00 PM, and it was only after the early morning, when large numbers of mail-in ballots were counted that overwhelmingly voted for Biden, did Biden win. To the uninformed voter, that could plausibly look like they "found" a few hundred thousand votes for Biden.
Not saying that there was fraud, as there was certainly not, or if there was it wasn't enough to make any difference, just that it's not unreasonable for the average person to have believed there was fraud given how things looked, and how the election was run significantly differently from normal due to Covid.
There was attempted fraud--the slates of false electors that Trump and his people attempted to insert into the process. Most elected officials do not go that far. That's not on the voters, that's on him.
>>I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of politicians wouldn't take powers and term lengths outside what is constitutionally allowed given the opportunity, but it's sort of our bad that we are electing people who think like that. Virtue isn't something we seem to value much in politicians anymore (did anyone ever?).
If you believe that lots of politicians would take powers and term lengths outside of what is constitutionally allowed given the opportunity, though, that is grounds for a *stronger* belief that Trump should be punished instead of being reelected. If the prospect of punishment is the only thing holding otherwise corrupt officials from engaging in corrupt behavior, prominently letting one off the hook and rewarding him with more power only weakens the incentives and invites more corruption.
If we accept “sure, Tom may have tried to rob the bank, but honestly wouldn’t we *all* rob a bank if we thought we could get away with it” as a legitimate defense of Tom's behavior, the only thing we’ll succeed in doing is inviting more bank robbers to try their hand later.
> It was definitely a protest that got out of hand
That’s what a failed coup looks like.
Do you remember that he wanted to go to the capital and speak to those people but the Secret Service would not let him? Do you think he really wanted to go there to calm them down? I seriously doubt it.
Remember how he protested that there were metal detectors there, saying that the people didn’t wanna shoot him?
We must have different expectations as to what a deliberate coup looks like. I don't consider all government overthrows, like many during the Arab Spring, as coups. Bottom-up protests, usually the result of forces far outside any individual's control, that overthrow a government happen often enough, but they usually aren't the result of leaders overthrowing the government.
A coup is typically when a faction within the government quickly arrests, kills, or otherwise incapacitates a countries leader's and assumes control. That requires a plan of specifically who you're going after, when you're taking control, and typically coordinated military power to ensure you get what you want quickly. It also helps if it's unexpected, so before most people know there's even a coup, the old rulers have been replaced, making it useless to try and side with them.
You don't perform a coup by showing up at the least minute, make a speech to a riot and saying "Let's overthrow the government!" to a mostly unarmed crowed and waltz right in. At least not one with any chance of success.
Ok. A coup is a sudden, violent overthrow of a government. According to the dictionary, I looked up.
What do you call it when a group of people who are inside a government try to come up with a way to hold onto power that might be legal but it’s pretty much on the edge? I am perfectly happy to settle on a different word.
A Palace intrigue…?
If everything goes just right, it might work. If you can get an alternate slate of electors into the Congress and have a Congressman (or two) object to the official slate of electors and get the vice president to choose the alternates? (Especially when the alternate slates were being prepared in great secrecy and quite surreptitiously and, according to more than one state, not in keeping with their laws or intentions? e.g. Arizona, Georgia Wisconsin.
And IF, at the same time, you can get a large group of people to make a lot of noise and riot a little bit AND you do pull off your palace intrigue, all these people will be thrilled! And then you’re on your way aren’t you? An arguable legal issue that will take weeks to sort out in the normal scheme of things, and lots of other people very happy with the outcome around the country and the Proud Boys (and others) “standing by” in Washington (as we know); now what do you call it? A lucky coincidence?
I am glad that it did not work out, and I am glad that the American people have gotten the president they wanted after all. I have no doubt that legal boundaries will be challenged hard in the coming years and it will be interesting to see what holds and what doesn’t. I guess what I’m saying is I am not a knee-jerk liberal, but I know what I see and I don’t like to have illusions about it based on my personal preferences.
Someone here has pointed out that the vice president has no power to reject electoral votes and that’s probably true, but to this group of people the legal framework of that was apparently vague and somewhat elastic (if you pulled hard enough on it) and maybe Trump could get Mike Pence to do that. He couldn’t. We all know how Trump feels about Mike Pence these days, but it is interesting that when JD Vance was asked if he would’ve done it he replied absolutely yes.
I guess the appropriate term would be self-coup, as Trump was still in charge at the time.
I can buy that there was a lot of intruiging going on behind the scenes, and that Trump was looking to bend things until they broke and he remained in power. The capital riot itself though, seems to be a natural result of the fishy smell the 2020 election had (again, not saying it was rigged as I don't believe that, just that it was abnormal and an average uninformed person could reasonably conclude it was rigged with the information they had). Whether Trump was planning a coup or not, and whether 1/6 was convenient for that attempt seems like a separate thing to me than 1/6 being a coup attempt itself.
My beef is that I see a lot of people equivocating 1/6 as a coup attempt, as if Trump, or his goons organized a bunch of supporters to attempt to storm the capitol and literally execute Mike Pence. People who are appalled at Trump trying to overthrow democracy, then angrily gesturing to 1/6 as evidence of that, which just doesn't fit for me. I'm sure there are people presenting a more nuanced approach that actually looks at everything he did with the electors and calling up Georgia and whatnot, but then the accusations of a coup attempt turn into accusations of Trump trying to figure out how to stay in power, which seems qualitatively different, or at least not as exciting.
It would be equivalent of calling the BLM riots/protest an attempted communist takeover of our cities (remember CHOP?). Yes, perhaps if there was a communist plot to takeover a bunch of cities the BLM protests could theoretically help serve that purpose, but the protests themselves were not an attempt to overthrow the government.
If you want to be technical about it, it was an attempted insurrection, not a coup. Trump didn't organize it.
"That’s what a failed coup looks like."
I don't think so. Can you name any other failed coups that ended like this? Or successful coups that began like this? The vast majority of coups are where the military arrests the president and takes over media organizations, right?
The ones that fail are always harder to find, aren’t they? The only one off the top of my head that is in the same ballpark is the beer Hall Putch (sp?)
Now that you mention it, Russia tried a coup in the Ukraine recently and failed. It’s turned into a bit of a grind, hasn’t it? Thank God we are Americans.
As an aside, I believe that the United States will experience a full on military coup eventually. I don’t think there’s any way around it.
Obligatory Godwin-
The Beer Hall Putsch is pretty universally recognized as a "failed coup attempt," but did not involve the military seizing the president.
Hitler basically jumped up on a table, fired a gunshot for everybody's attention, and declared that the current government was liquidated, then marched to the capital and hoped for the best.
That said, I think WaitForMe really has it right. Too much focus is on the riot on Jan 6 itself, rather than the attempt at falsifying election results in the months leading up to it.
To be fair, that coup was also a display of comical levels of magical thinking. For one thing, it happened in Munich. The capital of the Weimar Republic was (as not indicated by the name) Berlin, which is quite a bit away. But even the place which Hitler and his goons were marching to was silly: the Feldherrenhalle is not the seat of the regional government.
For a non-stupid version of the Hitler-Putsch, look at the Kapp-Putsch. There the perpetrators did at least get the city right, had the military on their side and managed to arrest some republic officials.
Of course, the morale of the story is that if someone tries to attempt a coup or incite an insurgency in a profoundly silly way which is unlikely to work, it is not safe to lean back and call them "harmless because stupid". Rather, one should update on them being unscrupulous in attempting to size power and not count on them remaining as stupid in the future.
The real coup was trying to have Mike Pence not certify the election and throw it to the house, along with the scheming to create alternate slates of electors to vote for Trump. January 6th was, in most senses, a riot, rather than a coup. But Trump very badly wanted Pence to overturn the results and have the house instate him. That is a coup attempt, if bungled and probably unrealistic even if Pence did vote against certifying the election.
Agreed. I suspect that Trump's intent with the riot was to arrange a (rowdy) protest as a tacit threat of mob violence, in hopes of bullying Pence and House/Senate Republicans into going along with the plan to overturn the result.
Trump's reaction during the three-hour window between when the capitol was breached and when he gave the "we love you, go home" speech seems like he was hoping that the actual mob violence he got would serve the same purpose. His conversation with then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, in which Trump responded to McCarthy telling him to call off the rioters with “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” seems particularly damning.
The difference between a farcical, obviously-not-going-to-succeed, is-it-even-a-coup coup attempt and an actual coup is that one succeeded and one didn't. A lot of coups would probably look pretty silly if, for whatever reason, it just didn't work out.
Indeed. Recent events in Seoul have exactly that look.
"entire conservative movement has retconned not just the events of four years ago"
I observed the liberals rewrite the narrative in the days, weeks, then months following January 6th.
While the events were unfolding, it was a news story of a massive crowd walking past security, going where they shouldn't normally be, and some guy sitting in Nancy Pelosi's chair.
A day or so later, it came out that some people, fewer than 10, had died. I was unclear at the time from reports whether any of the security people had died, but some of the rioters had. It seemed like a whole bunch of people dissatisfied with the election verification, tired of being ignored, decided not to be ignored anymore; not a coup, since they didn't have weapons, AFAICS.
Within weeks, the narrative had changed to an attempted coup to keep Trump as President. Then it changed to Trump having orchestrated the events to stay President. Within months it was "the greatest threat to democracy the country had ever faced."
Revisionist history IS happening, and has been happening for some time. 1984 has stealthily arrived.
I would say what you call revisionism by the left post January 6 is the result of more and more information coming out about what was going on behind the scenes on January 6, and the things that had been going on leading up to it. I would call it updating an opinion based on new information.
I can certainly understand thinking that, but I too thought about it at the time as a possibility, and my impression didn't match that. It was four years ago, so I don't remember the details, but I don't remember anything I expected that would match that, like "We don't yet know how many were injured, but it is expected to be only a few individuals" followed later by "The casualty count now exceeds 10, and may be higher as we gain more details" with more detailed information as time went on.
Instead, I found the character of what happened being reported and updated. I remember hearing nothing of Trump's involvement early on, but Trump was involved months later.
I see two things going on there; it took a while to dig down and to get people to talk and to find a paper trail. The second thing I see going on is probably an institutional bias to just let the whole thing go if Donald Trump was never going to be seen on the public stage again. Better to let bygones be bygones under those circumstances. I know the received wisdom among certain people is that (the deep state, the Democrats, etc.) decided to make something up and go after him the moment he decided to run again. I don’t really believe that. There is enough evidence to support the idea that this stuff was indeed going on. One could certainly claim, in that sense (just letting it go as long as he rode off into the sunset), the prosecution was political. But the prosecution was not a fiction. It’s not a bunch of Trump hating prosecutors going after him for no reason whatsoever.
I can’t help feeling that he created the Mar-a-Lago situation on purpose. He could have raised his claims of rightful possession from the moment the national archive first contacted him about those papers, but he did not. He engaged in various shady practices to hide the papers, and forced the showdown. Then, when he had a national audience, he claimed that he owned the papers and was being harassed. He likes to test boundaries, and he has keen political instincts, which is a double-edged sword if you know what I mean.
"While the events were unfolding, it was a news story of a massive crowd walking past security, going where they shouldn't normally be, and some guy sitting in Nancy Pelosi's chair." Nice try at gaslighting.
Reported for lack of post content. You should explain something if you're going to attack it.
Fair enough.
Some news websites on Jan 6:
Nytimes: "Mob storms Capitol, inflamed by angry Trump speech"
https://web.archive.org/web/20210106215915/https://www.nytimes.com/
MSNBC: "Pro-Trump protesters storm Capitol, forcing Senate evacuation during Electoral College count"
https://web.archive.org/web/20210106202318/https://www.msnbc.com/
Fox News: "Capitol under Siege" ; "McCarthy condemns 'un-American' breach of US Capitol by pro-Trump demonstrators"
https://web.archive.org/web/20210106211735/https://www.foxnews.com/
Now, you COULD describe that as "a massive crowd walking past security"... but that wasn't exactly the phrasing that was used in news outlets.
I think you should look a little more deeply into the trials of some of the major conspirators to see how much Information came to light post January 6 about the events leading up to it and what was going on that day. There were a ton of weapons in Washington DC that day in hotel rooms waiting for the moment. There were extensive text threads between some of those people and people close to Trump (Roger Stone, for instance) I really think you’re whistling past the graveyard here.
Not again. I looked at the trials before, when things were more current, and "selection bias" seemed to be the strategy. I suspect that is also currently the case.
I had looked for evidence that Trump was behind it all, which is what the Democrats really wanted to get out of it, and found nothing convincing.
January 6th should NOT have happened, but it gets support from Republicans because of the way Democrats have tried to use it. Whenever "January 6th" is used as a rallying cry against Republicans, or Trump specifically, it's "here we go again". We need to put the event past us, as the nothing burger with some substance but nothing worth dividing the country over it should be. Not very palatable, so why keep eating it?
>>January 6th should NOT have happened, but it gets support from Republicans because of the way Democrats have tried to use it.
It gets support from Republicans because when confronted with a choice between:
(a) "admit that my tribe's leader attempted election fraud, and that instead of punishing him we rewarded him with more power," and
(b) "think of literally any other semi-plausible explanation in which my tribe did not do a bad - a 'coup' requires the military, and/or certifying election results is inherently political, and/or it was the work of antifa infiltrators, and/or it's possible the election really *was* rigged and even if it wasn't what matters for election legitimacy is that people *believe* the election results and clearly Democrats failed to convince them to do that so this is all their fault, and/or prosecuting Trump somehow was simultaneously a Democrat failure that made them the *real* threat to democracy while also being a Democrat failure because they didn't do it fast enough, and/or etc, etc etc,...
... tribal monkey brain's kneejerk response is to slam the button for option (b) so hard his hand breaks.
"January 6 was bad, but Republicans only support it because Democrats rallied against it the wrong way" is just another subset of category (b). *My* side isn't badwrong, *your* side is badwrong for calling us badwrong so badwrongly.
So you give no weight to the attempt to prepare alternate slates of electors? (Arizona and Georgia are both taking that rather seriously at the moment.) The extended conversations with John Eastman, about how there might be a loophole that could be exploited by Pence? His exhortation to the proud boys to “stand down but standby“? His wish to go to the capital that day and speak in person? Of course it was not a well organized coup. It was an attempt to stretch all the boundaries and pull something off, based on a lie, which is that the election was stolen in the first place. I agree it’s tiresome to go over this and that things are as they are now but there’s no point in making up a story about it. That’s what bothers me. This issue has nothing to do with how I feel about any of his particular policies that; is a separate question.
I agree in some sense. I knew it wasn't directed by Trump, or full of military veterans storming the capital with guns. But also, pictures/videos on that very first day or perhaps the day after included the shooting of Ashley Babbit as the rioters tried to break through a clearly barred door with capital police telling them to stop, congressmen cowering afraid in the chamber, and people chanting "Hang Mike Pence" before they burst through door, all while disguising their identities and some of them holding improved weapons, though not actual firearms/axes/what have you.
It was clearly a riot to me and not an organized coup, but also not a "crowd walking past security" and "going where they shouldn't be". There was certainly an overt sense of violence about the whole thing.
Again, it was an attempted insurrection, not a coup.
That is a better way to put it.
This doesn't fit my recollections. Over at DSL we were arguing over the "coup" description the day it happened, so evidently the idea was already out there. (I was one of the people ridiculing it, and have not changed my mind since.)
I agree it was discussed on the first day. But my impression was more of a child's rebellion than an attempted government takeover.
It was a sufficiently incompetent attempt at a government takeover that it might as well have been planned by a child. But the obvious intent was to take over the government.
And the planning was more thorough and more credible than the plan for the Beer Hall Putsch, which is broadly regarded as having been a (pathetically incompetent) coup attempt.
This also was my impression on the day of 1/6/21, as refreshed by reading my diary entry for the day. A pathetically incompetent coup/insurrection attempt, but absolutely not any sort of "peaceful protest". There's definitely an attempt at rewriting history here, but it's mostly on the Republican side.
Thank you.
I certainly agree it wasn't a peaceful protest. I remember thinking something like, "I understand these people think they'll get their voices heard now, but this won't end well."
I was surprised how few people got hurt or killed with the initial reports. The number seemed to keep rising not as more information came to light, but as the implications were analyzed as "how can this damage Trump?"
Live long and prosper.
You are very welcome and I am glad you enjoyed it. It’s one of my favorite movies. Leonard Cohen’s soundtrack is so brilliant and as usual Julie Christie is to die for.
I liked how today went. A lot less batshit than last time. Maybe the losers can keep it together again next certification and make it two straight without trashing our own house. Start a new streak.
Yes, Trump is the party of Jan 6. But the Dems are the party of BLM. To me BLM was exactly the same thing but 10x worse. US politics is terribly broken right now and our only choices are between the lesser of two evils.
The members of the BLM protest movement believed that American police were shooting innocent black men to death in unreasonable circumstances. They thought they were trying to save lives (ignore, for the moment, whether that is a defensible belief or not). Given that they believed that, their actions make more sense (*much* more sense than the Jan 6 protestors, since BLM largely accomplished their goal).
Right, and the January 6 protestors thought that there were problematic voting irregularities in the 2020 election that hadn't been properly investigated. Protesting makes sense in that context as well.
A) That theory was provably wrong at the time. Blacks are killed by police proportionately less than their participation in violent crime would warrant. If anything, a rational analysis of racial crime statistics should make whites angry with blacks, not the other way around. B) EVEN IF it was true, violent riots are never the way forward on difficult political problems. This has been demonstrated by the subsequent 4 years of crime statistics: the black homicide rate increased by 40% in the 4 years after George Floyd's death. They got the opposite of what they thought they wanted. Responding supportively to stupid people's temper tantrums is never good policy.
I will notice though that Trump was personally spreading the lies which if true would have legitimized trying a counter-coup and thus fueled the Jan 6 insurrection, while I don't recall Joe Biden going on record claiming that the cops killed ten innocent black people every day and that the only way to stop them would be to immediately disband all police forces.
Now, clearly the Dems knew which side they were supposed to be on, and I am sure half their congresspeople used the phrase 'epidemic of police violence' or something.
Trump had personally sowed the violence of Jan 6 with his election denial. By contrast, no Dem in 2020 thought: "You know what we really need to oust Trump? Race riots, they make our site look really electable!" Instead, the riots seemed to come out of a mix of genuine anger at a highly publicized police murder, a woke ideology who basically excused any violence perpetrated by Blacks, and a lock-down policy which had pushed a lot of people to their brinks, and the Dems were mostly along for the ride.
Now, if after the Floyd murder, one of the top five democrats had claimed that there was a genocide against Black people happening at the hands of the police, and called on all good citizens to stop the killer cops, then I would say that the Dems were equally guilty of inciting violence as Trump was.
> They got the opposite of what they thought they wanted.
The demand was never that the overall Black homicide rate should be lower. Blacks murdering Blacks is not news, there is no racial injustice in it from the woke viewpoint. I think they likely succeeded in making cops more reluctant to engage black suspects for fear of a PR disaster. It just so happens that most of the time when the cops get into a firefight, they actually are the good guys.
It was never about Black Lives per se, only EA weirdos would sum up all homicide victims. They only Mattered when they were ended by cops, and by that metric, Systemic Racism has decreased. Success!
>Trump had personally sowed the violence of Jan 6 with his election denial.
How did that sow violence any more than democratic leadership validating the perception that America is structurally racist or that police disproportionately kill black people? They're directly parallel in that they're equally dishonest political lies. If anything Trump at least had a case: there were circumstantial reasons to be skeptical of the election results. BLM's argument didn't even have circumstantial evidence.
>Systemic Racism has decreased. Success!
Viewed through a zero-sum political lens that's probably correct: blacks gained political power relative to whites. Viewed through an absolute lens of "BLM is about improving the lives of black people" BLM was a disaster for most black people.
You must be kidding. BLM was a mess, but it didn’t lead to the almost overthrow of the democratic government of the United States of America. Not only that over the last four years BLM has come into some truthful perspective while January 6 has been completely rewritten by a monstrous lie in my opinion; that the election really was stolen and if you don’t believe it, you’re not welcome in the Republican Party anymore.
> but it didn’t lead to the almost overthrow of the democratic government of the United States of America.
And neither did Jan 6. They were exactly the same thing: a bunch of idiots demonstrating on the basis of a premise that's clearly wrong. Except, of course, that BLM lasted 100x as long and did 100x the damage. There is no plausible scenario whereby the Jan 6 protests could have affected the election outcome. To claim otherwise is nothing but politically motivated hysterics.
The J6 protesters were in no way 'clearly wrong'. Whether or not the Democrats committed election fraud and whether that determined the results are unknowable because they blocked all inquiry into the topic.
Trump filed 62 lawsuits in various states. There was a *fuckload* of inquiry into the topic, and basically all of it came back with judges saying "nope, this isn't fraud" or "nope, this isn't a procedural violation." (Most of the lawsuits didn't actually allege fraud, only procedural issues. Probably because once they got an actual lawyer involved they realized they didn't have evidence of fraud).
A lot of the lawsuits were heard by Republican judges, some appointed by Trump himself. I'm not sure what other forms of inquiry you could want here. This was Trump getting his proverbial day in court, and he lost about as decisively as he could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related_to_the_2020_U.S._presidential_election
Agreed, the Jan 6 folks were less provably wrong than BLMers but in my view they're both idiots. Conspiracy theories are rarely falsifiable but you have to be a pretty big moron to take one seriously enough to protest over.
"They" "blocked all inquiry"? Weren't there dozens of court trials that looked into the claims, that didn't find anything substantial (apart from attempts by Trump to influence the counting process)? Didn't even the (Republican) officials in Georgia insist that everything was kosher?
You are either very poorly informed or perhaps engaging in political hysterics. I’m not sure which.
It did not lead to the overthrow of the United States government it led to the *almost* overthrow of the United States government, is what I said. BLM didn’t come close; see Detroit in 1968, Los Angeles after the Rodney King incident, the riot in New York after the caravan of Hasidim accidentally ran over a black child in Crown Heights. That is the lineage of the BLM riots. They have absolutely nothing to do with what happened on January 6. Based on all the available evidence, I think you would really have to be kidding yourself to believe otherwise.
No, simply better informed than you are. Trump challenged the electors. He's entitled to do that. The Democrats have challenged in every election that they've lost since 2000. Nothing any protest did could have legally altered that process. The VP has zero legal discretion in the certification of election results. The role is purely ceremonial and if Pence had refused to perform his role then he would have been removed or impeached. There is no scenario whereby democracy could have been destroyed on Jan 6. I mean just use your head: we're the most powerful country in the world. You don't get to beat the electoral process by getting one guy to say the wrong thing during a ceremony. Come on, the world just doesn't work like that.
The relationship between Jan 6 and BLM is that they were of the same category: a violent political protest by stupid people who believed something objectively false. Of course BLM was much more violent and an even less plausible belief, but that's neither here nor there.
I know maybe hundreds of currently employed government workers who I am 100% certain believe it wasn't stolen, and will not lose their jobs. Or even have an application like that put in front of them.
Yeah, I’m on your side in this Gunflint
What would the Star Trek Mirror Universe Borg look like? I'm dimly aware that non-cannon Star Trek content already exists about this, but I want to do my own thought experiment. Here's what I've got:
1) Mirror-Borg society is hyperindividualistic and prizes that over all.
2) Its members are even more diverse than the Federation.
3) Even though life inside the Mirror-Borg Collective is objectively better than life anywhere else in the galaxy, the Mirror-Borg don't consider themselves superior. If anything, they judge themselves too harshly.
4) Instead of being expansionist, they are insular. Other species keep coming to them willingly, and only with great persistence will the Mirror-Borg talk with them. Everyone wants something from them. They have rejected many offers from other species to annex themselves to the Collective.
5) The Mirror-Borg battle fleet is composed of billions of small, weak ships of very diverse designs.
6) They are dark-skinned.
7) The Mirror-Borg have strong religious beliefs against the mixing of biology and technology. Pacemakers and wearable technology like Meta Glasses are forbidden, and some purists live as nudist primitives since clothes count as technology. Their preoccupation with this separation is similar to how Orthodox Jews have created and observe elaborate Talmudic Law. Maybe it's common for each Mirror-Borg to have a robot servant that he tells what to do and avoids even touching.
8) In spite of their insularity, the Mirror-Borg are known to be extremely warm and talkative people who are afraid to appear rude. If you are of a different species and find yourself on one of their ships, every Mirror-Borg you see will greet you like an old friend, talk with you at length and invite you to their quarters for a meal. However, the Mirror-Borg are also painfully averse to conflict, so if you start behaving in a threatening manner or destroying things on one of their ships, they will avoid you and pretend like you aren't there.
Note that a central conceit of the Trek Mirrorverse is that it results in e.g. identical-except-for-the-insignia spaceships in all the same places, identical-except-for-the-uniform-and-mindset people ditto and fitting into identical heirarchies, and yes the incentives are completely reversed but for mumble something reasons everything still lines up perfectly.
So you can't have "billions of small, weak ships of very diverse designs" because MirrorBorg ships are ginormous cubes, and the MirrorBorg can't be insular because then they wouldn't be sending the ships to the same places.
Really, the MirrorVerse concept was a very silly idea that should have been quietly abandoned right after the One Good Story was extracted from it.
Hmm. Billions of small, weak ships of diverse designs that lash themselves together into cube-shaped fleets, and rather than taking what's on the outside by force, they tend to let off a few ships with representatives at each location they visit to ingratiate themselves in ways that act as cultural seeds? Reverse assimilation, thus?
(I admit to not being especially familiar with mirror-universe episodes of Trek to begin with, but I find the speculation fun.)
In one of the Culture books, Banks mentions the problem of a hegemonizing swarm, which is basically what the Borg are. One standard way to deal with them short of war is to somehow change them into an evangelizing swarm.
So, in the mirror universe, the Borg are basically the same idea--cyborgs linked together in a vast hive mind, sinking their individuality into the collective. But instead of invading, they evangelize and recruit people. As long as their missionaries and recruiting stations are left alone, they're peaceable enough, but members of any biological species that are miserable, desperate, reviled, too sick to survive at their current society's tech level, etc. routinely go join the Borg. Similarly, there's a substantial cult in various humanoid societies that valorizes losing your individuality to the hive mind, and many people among them who work as non-assimilated missionaries or commit to joining the hive mind at some point in their lives, perhaps after raising their families. Additionally, the Borg offer a safe form of exile for criminals and such--instead of executing your criminals, you can simply hand them over to the Borg. This is used in some societies in a way analogous to the way the Seven Kingdoms used taking the black.
Ooh, I like that one. It won't hold up to close examination (e.g. assimilating 10% of the population of one Federation world and 30% of the next, doesn't lead to the exact same cube-fleet deployment patterns), but it would be good enough for an hour or so of decent television I think.
Spheres
Parents of small children: what do you do with dentists? Ours has been trying to take x-rays of my son's teeth (19 baby, 1 permanent -- he's in kindergarten) for the past several years, has finally given up in disgust (because the plate they use for the digital x-rays hurts *me* to bite on, let alone a small kid), and has referred us to the pediatric dentist (who is both farther away and also has a much less convenient schedule). I think my kid is pretty ordinary when it comes to mouth proportions or to tolerating annoying health-related routines. Does this mean that most kids (until they're teenagers, say) have to go to dedicated pediatric dentists? (There don't seem to be nearly enough pediatric dentists around for this to be true.) Or is our primary dentist particularly unsuited for working with children / has particularly unsuitable x-ray technology, and I should switch to a different office? Or am I just supposed to say "please don't x-ray my son this year, yes really I'm fine with this" and everyone will breathe a sigh of relief?
I have two kids, now early teens. My experience is similar to the others here. Going to the dentist with a small child was always a quick and simple procedure – a quick, painless check and a learning experience – that shouldn’t turn them off dentistry forever.
When the kids got older (tweens), the dentists became more interested in whether all the teeth come in like they should (I.e. Will they need adjusting/retainer? Is it so tight that one or more needs to be removed?) But for both kids, when the dentist saw something worth mentioning, their advice was just to wait and see if it solved itself – and it did in both cases. None of it required X-rays for either of my kids at the youngest age. I don’t think either of them had dental x-rays taken before they were 12.
I have also seen that while most dentists are good and ethical, it is not uncommon to come across dentists who will look extra hard for possible work, or who will let the price tag unduly influence their recommendation. It’s a bit harsh to call them unethical, but their priorities aren’t necessarily aligned with yours. They may recommend treatments that are expensive, impractical, uncomfortable, yet not strictly necessary. Just because they’re not wrong doesn’t mean their advice is the best for you.
If I were you, I’d take my kid to a different dentist – not just for the second opinion, but to get more experience with dentists. I’ve moved a lot, so have had quite a few of them. But since people usually go to the same dentist year after year, and almost never shop around, lots of people have pretty bad dentists without knowing it.
My child sees a pediatric dentist. The appointments involve a quick visual inspection and cleaning, and are generally less than five minutes.
I'm not a parent of a small child, but I am generally extremely suspicious of dentists after learning that cavities can, in fact, heal themselves (especially if you improve your oral regiment), and having several experiences with less-than-entirely-ethical-dentists. I've encountered one dentist I actually liked - his default approach to cavities was "Let's check on this next time" and, without fail, the cavity would reverse itself, although there would usually be some other tooth that was doing something that needed watching for the next time (leading me to suspect that most cavities are some kind of periodic fluctuation?). Alas I moved away from that state and I've yet to find a dentist I liked since. (I do need to find one, just to fix some damage the last dentist did, but I'm quite reluctant to begin the search all over again.)
I'm not saying your dentist is unethical, mind, I don't know the person. However, if they're pushing you for a procedure for your children that is unlikely to do anything except garner them an insurance payment, it seems like something to consider.
Seems odd to be x-raying baby teeth that are going to fall out in a few years anyhow. I'd be suspicious of someone doing that. Just asked GPT4 whether it was routine to X-ray baby teeth, and if so why. It mostly agrees with me. (But sometimes it's in Lala Land, so you should double-check on google scholar. Look for meta-analyses.)
GPT4 sez: Dentists generally do not routinely X-ray the teeth of children unless there is a specific reason to do so. The primary reasons a dentist might perform X-rays on a toddler include:
Suspected Decay or Damage: If visible cavities or signs of decay are present, X-rays can help assess the extent of the damage, including areas between teeth or beneath the surface where decay may not be visible.
Injury: If a child has experienced trauma to the mouth, an X-ray can help determine if there is damage to the teeth, roots, or developing permanent teeth underneath.
Congenital or Developmental Concerns: X-rays can reveal issues with tooth development, such as missing teeth, extra teeth, or abnormalities in tooth spacing that could impact permanent teeth later.
Infection or Abscess: X-rays can identify infections at the root of a tooth, which could affect both baby and developing permanent teeth.
While it’s true that baby teeth eventually fall out, they play a crucial role in maintaining space for permanent teeth, aiding speech development, and enabling proper chewing. Severe decay or infection in baby teeth can also spread to the underlying permanent teeth or cause pain and complications that might require more invasive treatment later.
Dentists generally prefer to limit X-ray exposure in young children and will only use it when the benefits outweigh the risks. If cavities are clearly visible and treatable without further imaging, a dentist might opt to proceed without X-rays.
I have asked why we're bothering to x-ray baby teeth as they're starting to fall out. The dentist pointed out that some of the baby teeth stick around until the kid is ~12, so it's not orders of magnitude shorter than adult ones. (I agree that I'm not wholly convinced.) Also, now that adults ones *are* coming in, that objection is less meaningful.
I'm not sure how to use Google Scholar to figure out whether it's routine to x-ray baby teeth.
One easy method is to ask GPT your question and ask for links supporting particular points. For example, you could ask what fraction of child dentists routinely X ray teeth and at what age. Ask under what circumstances dentists need to X ray teeth to check for cavities rather than just looking at teeth and probing them with their tools. Ask whether frequent X rays are a known scam. Ask for an article iin a good quality magazine for pediatric dentistry about best practices.
All my experience and common sense suggest that this dentist's approach is not to be trusted.
-Even if your kid gets a cavity in the baby tooth that will last til he's 12, it's not a big deal. Most cavities are filled easily and quickly if found fairly early.
-I'm late middle-aged, way more likely to have bad trouble with my teeth than a child is, and my dentist is very sparing in use of Xrays. Has a schedule -- something like once per year for the ones way in back, once every 2 years for some others. Most of my cavities he has found by inspection, not Xrays. He pokes with his tool and says, "this spot feels mushy, I think you're developoing a cavity." Or he just sees the cavity.
-I took my daughter to the same good dentist I see, and he never once Xrayed her teeth.
-Lots of people in business are dishonest. Every time I get my hair cut they try to sell me bullshit products to "nourish your hair ends." Hair ends are dead. They do not eat. Putting oily stuff on them is basically putting mayonnaise on gravel.
I noticed you writing somewhere in this thread that a certain point won't get you far with the dentist. It sounds like you have the idea you need to convince the dentist that the Xrays are not needed. You don't. You can just say, thanks, you may be right but I'd prefer to skip them. Or, of course, change dentists.
Re: I don't need to convince the dentist -- true; if I'm comfortable asserting that I know how children's dentistry ought to be done better than they do (which in this case I might be!), then I can simply impose my opinion and refuse treatment on my son's behalf. If I want to stay with the dentist but have an actual conversation about this, I don't think "I'm told this isn't how they do it in Germany" is a hugely useful contribution.
Having been in a lot of situations like this, I have found ways around confrontation. Here are some alternatives to claiming to know more than the dentist. You can just say, basically, "you may be right be I'd rather skip it." Or, something like "the idea makes me uneasy and I"m going to pass." It's possible the dentist will try to engage you in argument, but you can just be n a broken record -- "Yes, I understand your point, you may be right but . . ."
Or you can soften it by saying, "I think I'd like to skip Xrays for now, but I will think it over and maybe we can do it another time." And if they ask why skip it, you can broken-record it "the idea makes me uneasy so I'm going to think it over some and maybe another time . . ."
You have to be willing to put up with them having a bad opinion of you, or (if dentist is basically scamming you a bit) pretending to. But that happens all the time anyway. For instance I often go into stores wearing a generous--size backpack loaded with work stuff & sometimes a laptop. he clerks watch me closely, I suppose because people with big bags or backpack are more likely to be shoplifters. I have never shoplifted anything in my life, not even as a rebellious teenager. It's a minor downer, but there's not a thing to do about it.
Is there a particular reason why your child's dentist wants to take an x-ray? My children (5 and 8) never had one – but they have flawless, cavity-free teeth.
In my experience, the usual reason is that they need to make a boat payment.
They assert that it's standard procedure, similar to adults. It's certainly possible that it's only *their* standard procedure.
(I'm biting my tongue on "because insurance will cover it" but I imagine that's a large chunk of it.)
> They assert that it's standard procedure, similar to adults.
Again, strange. I've only ever had x-rays taken for actual problems, like serious cavities. Maybe once or twice in the last 10 years (this is in Germany, for socio-cultural context).
X-rays are ionizing radiation. Subjecting someone – especially a child – to it "just-in-case" seems ill-advised.
My guess is that this became much more ubiquitous with the introduction of digital x-rays, which have significantly lower exposures.
Unfortunately, the argument "this isn't standard procedure in Germany" probably won't get me very far with the dentist (any more than the argument "this wasn't part of my childhood, or probably your [the dentist's] childhood" will).
I read a brilliant NYT article about dentists. Apparently, pretty much nothing they say or do is based in science, even though they act like it does. I'll try to find the article.
“A brilliant NYT article“ is a oxymoron.
On statins to treat high LDL cholesterol - I'm not against this.
I'm noticing the following though :
Lots of thoughtful smart people in medical research are for it. And lots of thoughtful smart people in medical research are against it.
50 % of people seem to have high LDL cholesterol.
And it is possible even for decent smart people in the medical field to be caught in a pro-statin position without having given sufficient attention to the opposite position.
https://youtu.be/ats0QiOWIDQ?si=Bf919aRK7QpKPoxI
I don't know what to make of this video. He says our medical philosophy about high cholesterol is misguided.
He says it's not just about fixing the line number called LDL.
Are doctors getting too excited about fixing this lone number?
He has a great analogy about a hole in the wall. It's caused by termites, but doctors prescribing statins are basically putting a picture on the hole to hide it, when the termites continue to explode.
He says if you have high cholesterol, you should be razor focussed on lifestyle (which is what causes the LDL), such as eating the right foods (minimally processed, watch the carbs and saturated fats ?)), and cardio and especially weight training, adequate sleep, stress management. Not be put on statins. Because cholesterol is just a marker of a deeper problem, not itself the problem.
This is a controversial subject. Not settled science, like many seem to imply.
Not my expertise but I am seeking expert opinions...
There has to be some biochemical intermediate step between lifestyle interventions and the negative symptoms of metabolic syndrome (heart attacks and stuff). I don't know what the evidence is on to what extent LDL level is part of this intermediate step (beyond that there's a known mechanism to link cholesterol levels to atherosclerosis), but the argument with the termite analogy is not enough to establish that lowering cholesterol levels with drugs isn't useful. Perhaps lifestyle factors mean there is a lot of stray food around the house that attracts bugs, but that doesn't mean that using poison to get rid of them won't help.
What is the known mechanism you speak of?
The version I vaguely remembered is that different types of lipoproteins deliver lipids in different directions, and if you get too much of certain types, they end up depositing the excess lipids in the blood vessel walls. I checked Wikipedia and what it says about this is somewhat different from what I remembered: "Low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particles in blood plasma invade the endothelium and become oxidized, creating risk of cardiovascular disease. A complex set of biochemical reactions regulates the oxidation of LDL, involving enzymes (such as Lp-LpA2) and free radicals in the endothelium.".
Not an expert, but recently read that a lot of the variance in blood lipids is determined by genes. Can't remember where I read it, but do remember that it was some source I couldn't just discount. I believe the point being made was that lifestyle interventions make relatively little difference, but statins do (presumably by somehow suppressing or neutralizing the genetically-determined process that leads to high cholesterol.)
Also not an expert, but this matches my experience - despite getting all the lifestyle factors right, I still have high LDL (at 25!). If you don't exercise, eat a lot of processed food, etc., then sure, lifestyle changes might lower your LDL to a healthy level. But some people just have a genetic predisposition to high LDL regardless of lifestyle.
Aiden
Do you have a good sense for the pros and cons of taking statins, presumably forever?
Don't semaglutides make the issue moot?
Is that related to cholesterol too? I thought that was about obesity, which it decreased by changing sugar metabolism.
They appear to change people's eating habits, which I would expect to reduce their cholesterol.
Maybe, but semaglutide is supposed to address hyperglycemia, and coincidentally seems to also help with weight loss. I suspect it is helping some-how and -what with the root cause, which is mysterious to medicine.
That is a phenomenal comment. Thank you so very much for taking the time.
Having finally read the book review bronze medalist How The War Was Won, I still don't get the strategy behind strategic bombing. My understanding of the history is as follows:
pre-WW2: Niche theorists think strategic bombing can win the war on its own. Most are not convinced. Countries invest in the unproven technology.
1940: Germany loses the Battle of Britain. German strategic bombing has negligible impact on British production and morale.
post-1940: Half of US+UK military production is aircraft. Roosevelt makes aircraft production top priority. Everyone is desperate for aircraft. The B29 is by far the most expensive weapon of the war.
I donẗ really get the jump: Why did Churchill and Roosevelt invest so much in an unproven and partly-failed technology? Wouldn't the reasonable thing to conclude be that strategic bombing is harder than expected (as proven by the Germans) and then invest in ships and tanks instead? Was it simply that the alternative to bombing was WW1-style mass armies which was too costly in causalities?
Airpower is undeniably an important tool in war, as every war after WW1 has proven. Air dominance is an almost perfect predictor of who is going to win a war militarily.
However, wars after WW1 have also proven that strategic airpower, as dreamed up toward the end of WW1, has a terrible ROI. The Allied bombing campaign did degrade the Axis industrial base and forced the Axis powers to invest more in fighters and AA over their homeland which they then lacked over the land fronts; but as we know today, it still took "boots on the ground" such as island hopping in the Pacific and street fighting in Berlin to really win WW2 and subsequent wars, just like it always has.
>"…it still took "boots on the ground" such as island hopping in the Pacific and street fighting in Berlin to really win WW2…"
Quibble: no Allied soldiers set foot in Japan proper until after the surrender; the island hopping was only necessary to secure an airbase close enough to the home islands for the Enola Gay to get Little Boy to Hiroshima.
Granted, that's hardly strategic bombings *as dreamed up toward the end of WW1*…
The Spanish Civil War and the 1939-1940 phases of WW2 contained several episodes that were seen at the time as major successes for what might be termed "operational bombing": the use of bombers behind the lines to destroy or disrupt the operations of logistics hubs, airfields, and the like. There were also a couple episodes (Warsaw, Rotterdam) where aerial bombardment was used to compel a besieged city to surrender. These were much smaller in scale and significance than the Allied strategic bombing campaigns, so they're often forgotten about except when one wants to make the point that the Axis powers started bombing cities first, but they were a huge deal at the time.
For the London Blitz in particular, damage was relatively minor in terms of not being anywhere near being war-winning, but it was significant enough to get decision-makers' attention, and the decision makers knew how much worse it could have been if not for various mitigating circumstances.
Most obvious is that the RAF was heavily contesting the skies over southern England, shooting down a lot of bombers and escorting fighters and also forcing the Germans to compromise the effectiveness of their bombers to make them harder to shoot down.
Building fleets of bombers to hit back at Germany likely mitigated effects on civilian morale. I remember reading that this was a major motivation for British strategic bombing during and shortly after the Blitz.
The German bomber fleet wasn't really up for the scale of destruction the Allies were prepared to inflict. Germany made mostly medium bombers, not heavy bombers, and made a lot fewer of them than the British and Americans did. Moreover, most of the Allied war production was outside the range of German bombers, which was emphatically not the case for German war production vs British and American bombers.
Germany's bombing campaign in England (mostly) wasn't strategic in the sense that the USAAF's (not a typo) was, in that (other than some abortive early efforts against the RAF) it wasn't targeting anything that would materially affect the outcome of the war.
That said, the RAF (unlike the USAAF) did pursue a similar approach to that of the Luftwaffe under the (mistaken) belief that the German citizenry would respond differently to terror bombing than the Brits themselves had. But the RAF didn't have B-29s, nor a secret superweapon development program that required its payload capacity.
Churchill could not invade with tanks on his own. He had to rely on protection from the Channel, which means investing in ships & planes, but not so much tanks. The Germans were outclassed at sea from the beginning, having to rely on hidden U-Boats to raid commerce shipments. The US invested in efficiently building "Liberty Ships" faster than the Germans could sink them, though the convoy system also helped give U-Boats a higher than sustainable casualty rate.
One thing you're overlooking from the book's points is that you can't outproduce the other side's tanks if your tank factories are being bombed so much you have to distribute production inefficiently.
It's called "compatibilism", as eloquently espoused by the late Daniel Dennett.
Basically (as I understand it), the argument goes like this: Yes, the Universe is a giant machine of some sort; at the lowest level it is either deterministic or random, but as a practical matter we are never going to even get close to knowing the exact state of the Universe at any given time, so from our perspective we can just assume randomness.
By itself, randomness does not require free will; but it does imply that we can never know the future with any certainty. However, at least on short timescales, we can "make decisions" that clearly affect the future state of the Universe. It's not a completely compelling argument IMHO but it has some explanatory benefit.
Dennett goes deep on free will and "the hard problem of consciousness" in books such as "Elbow Room" and "Consciousness Explained".
TL; DR: "Free will probably doesn't exist in principle, but in practice, assuming you and other conscious beings you interact with have free will is the best pragmatic choice for modeling the world we experience around us (including ourselves).
The same argument can be made for consciousness, but it's less compelling due to this troublesome first-person subjective experience we all claim to have.
I like Dennet. The missing piece is emergent behavior in the brain. Given that emergent behavior can arise from a fully determined equation, yet isn't predictable ahead of time, and that seems to fit our situation well. We still have to confirm that the brain can produce emergent behavior.
Then there's the evidence that we do not even live in a fully determined universe. Don't count free will out yet!
It seems like a pretty big ask that the undetermined universe could become determined (as in choices) not by pure physical randomness but by something we can't explain and don't understand (conscious phenomena). If the physical universe is sufficient to explain what happens, then decisions would seem to be observations--outputs of the universe, not causative.
The alternative, of course, is that physical randomness like thermal noise is determined on an individual level by the stuff of consciousness. That seems a little silly though.
The idea is that the universe is already under-determined, from our point of view, and nothing we can observe will ever change this (because we are part of the universe being observed). The brain, like many other phenomena, is a recursive system--outputs are used as inputs of the next iteration of decision making/behavior. The behavior of a system like that is highly sensitive to small changes in initial conditions, and can't be predicted ahead of time without running the algorithm itself. This is a feature of certain types of mathematical models, and if this describes how part of the brain works, then we can never predict human behavior beyond a certain point, no matter how much data is collected.
It seems like in this post and others, you're implying that chaotic systems can't be computed. That's just not true. The fact that it's computationally explosive is irrelevant. It could be computed with enough resources.
Chaotic systems *might* be determined, and reproducible in a computing environment that completely models a given chaotic system's starting conditions. A common observation, however, is that we almost never have complete information about any system's start state. And by definition, that chaotic system will be sensitive to any discrepancies in our recorded initial state and its actual initial state, meaning an arbitrarily small discrepancy will develop into an arbitrarily large one after some number of iterative calculations.
One could try to model all possible discrepancies and then posit a magical infinite source of computation to run calculations over all those possibilities, but what you'll end up with is an output declaring that from your system, all possibilities are possible, with no way to tell which one(s) is/are most probable.
No, my point is that it can't be predicted ahead of time, without running the actual computation. Another way of saying that is, you can't predict what someone will think or do, until they think or do it.
In principle, any computation can be simulated to an arbitrary level of precision. The limiting factor is that a perfect simulation requires a more complex machine than the one being simulated. The new computer needs to encode the state and operation of the original computer. So while we may never be able to predict what someone will do, it's not beyond the realm of theory.
In addition to the computational and storage deficiencies, other real world limitations are lack of input data accuracy, not perfectly knowing the initial state of the machine, and not having a good enough model of how the particles interact.
Determinism implying a lack of free will is a category error. Free will is an abstraction of the underlying reality; it makes perfect sense at the appropriate level of abstraction, and it makes no sense to apply it to much lower levels.
Yes, our decisions can be decomposed into little component parts of historical brain activity. This does not mean the decisions do not exist; just the exact same way that realising everything in the world we inhabit is made of quantum amplitude flows and there is nothing to inherently separate those into being part of one object rather than another does not render the world we inhabit meaningless or make the objects around us stop existing.
Things still keep existing /even when we know what they are made of/. It's not either/or.
The question isn't whether the will exists or what smaller units compose it. The question is whether any aspect of human will is free.
Libertarian free will can't be an abstraction of underlying deterministic reality, because you can't build indeterminism out of determinism.
Yes you can. Google "Nonlinear systems"--mathematical equations whose outputs are unpredictable.
Well, that means Throwaway1234 is not a libertarian :)
Sam Harris has a pithier version of this:
"There is no free will, but choices matter."
I agree one is forced to live life in the present as if free-will were real. Denis Diderot's novel Jacques the Fatalist is a hilarious exploration of the results of living with an ever-present belief in determinism.
But we also contemplate our own and others' past. It may be practical (and 100% correct) to view one's past as inexorable in the same way it is practical to view the future as indeterminate. After all, we might know the past but can't know the future, so there might be good reason to view past actions in a different light than future ones.
Because Theism (I'll skip the part about "which Theism") isn't an explanatory theory, it's a belief system explicitly based on faith rather than observation and analysis.
Asking why, as a scientist, I don't consider theism is a category error.
You misunderstand the nature of science. It isn't designed or intended to answer "why" questions, you have to turn to another intellectual domain to address those, such as philosophy, art, or religion. Science is our tool for identifying that theory, given the evidence, that has the highest probability of being correct (defined as predicting patterns in future data). This explains why many people see science and religion as compatible, because they belong to "different magesteria."
Was the Turing Test passed yet? How is this Metaculus prediction doing?
https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8329/human-level-language-models/
The Turing Test has been passed more times than the audience at a NASCAR rally, as far back as 1966 for informal tests; the first formal victory was in 1991, by a program that tricked users by ... introducing typographical errors.
I'm seeing classes on learning to build, train, and use machine learning models without doing coding. Stanford and MIT are both offering them. Amazon now has a service called SageMaker that purports to allow you to do the same.
I do not know how to code and don't want to use my limited free time to learn. I'm wondering if SageMaker or some brief training would let me play with AI in the ways I'm interested in doing it. There are 2 things I'd especially like to be able to do:
-Experiment with AI and language. Train it on a bunch of great prose, feeding it works by prose masters of the last few hundred years. Train it on my favorite poetry. Introduce some randomness into the language it produces, but bound the randomness in certain ways.
-Experiment with AI and images. I liked Dall-e2 much more than Dall-e3, and would like to nudge the AI away from ad copy type images, and towards weirder, lumpier, more emotion-determined images.
None of this has to work perfectly, and I can come up with a variety of ways to attempt these tweaks, but would like to know whether people who understand AI well think it would be possible to do this sort of thing using these no-code methods.
Shankar do you think I'll have a satisfactory and set-up if I use this site? https://www.thinkdiffusion.com/sda?via=inpost-install-comfyui
I looked up installing ComfyUI on my computer, and even the instructions say "this is not simple," and then the instructions for Mac, which is what I got, start off with "Mac installation takes a few more steps." Instructions have you typing this and that into the terminal, which I never use. Plus once it's on your Mac you have to keep track of and install any updates to Comfy yourself. I can follow instructions fine, but the trouble with this set-up is that I have not got a basic grasp of what's going on, and if something goes wrong I will not be able to troubleshoot.
Without endorsing that one in particular, yes, that kind of thing should be fine. I don't use it myself, but if you don't care about keeping your images private, I agree running it locally is a hassle well worth avoiding.
I don't have a specific recommendation for which such service to use, but the considerations would be price and persistence of your settings. This discussion here lists some, https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1hv2crf/whats_the_best_online_service_for_running_comfyui/.
I'd also suggest you start with something like Automatic1111's WebUI first, to get the hang of prompting and LoRAs first: less than infinitely customizable workflow, but more user-friendly.
Thank you Shankar. I will follow your advice.
I've done similar to what Shankar is suggesting with Automatic1111 WebUi running locally on my computer. I got it up and running by asking ChatGPT to walk me through it step by step. I'm also having ChatGPT write my prompts that I feed to the WebUI which is working out quite well.
Also, the "projects" section in ChatGPT is similar to a simple RAG that I've been using to run my homebrew TTRPG game, and it works well enough for avoiding the hassle of building a custom app.
That's heartening. I have done zero coding in my life. I don't know what it involves to use a RAG to make a homebrew TTRPG game, but it definitely involves skills I do not have. On the other hand, I am bright and good at following directions and paying attention to details. What is daunting is that I have no big picture at all of what I will be doing. Just know that I am connecting to a site with a user-friendly interface that lets me give prompts, fine tune them by adjusting various values, rather than just using terms like "vivid, masterpiece, melancholy feel," and also lets me use things like Control Net that give me more power to control body positions, -- and maybe also lets me train a model. But that's all very general and conceptual. If something isn't working I will have no big picture understanding to guide me in identifying what's wrong. I will just have go show GPT the problem and ask what to do. Knowing all that, do you still think this is going to work for me?
Haha. I run a Table Top Role Playing Game (like Dungeons and Dragons, but a different game) and I've been using ChatGPT to be my assistant Game Master; planning each session, maintaining plot hooks/storylines, etc. Its worked fairly well! We are going to be planning session 26 this week. One of the challenges of this project is keeping the bot abreast of what is going on story wise, and the pain point on this is that in a single chat it sooner or later runs out of context. IE it can't remember what we've done so it makes it up!
A RAG is an external vector database that you can link an LLM to so that it uses the data in the RAG before its training data; presumably so it can remember what has been done! It is a bit of technical project and I've not been able to wrap my head around it to get it done.
I am also NOT a coder, at all, I hate code. However, I am in IT so I've got a bit of "natural ability" that helps me execute what the bot tells me to do when implementing these technical solutions. I think you would be fine though, as when I set up the A1111 WebUI it was as simple as download Python; install; download git, install, then run exactly the commands that ChatGPT gave me, and now I've got a local Dreamshaper 8 stable diffusion bot. It also helps that I'm a PC gamer so I had a video card that is sufficient hardware wise for the solution.
Truly my suggestion would be to start with a ChatGPT Project (so you can upload reference files for it to leverage), and not install anything more complex than that on your local computer. Once you play with projects for a few months, then see if you aren't getting what you need from it, and if so move on to the broader scope.
Lastly, one other method I've leveraged is asking ChatGPT to validate the direction I'm going in, and also to write me prompts to feed to other bots.
For AI image generation, certainly. Try ComfyUI, with models from Civit AI. You could also train your own LoRAs for specific styles and concepts, all without having to do any coding yourself.
What you're describing for the prose, with "bound[ing] the randomness in certain ways" sounds hard without code.
EDIT: Actually, upon second thought, it's possible ComfyUI itself might work for that too. There are nodes for prompt enhancement, and you might be able to use those, or something similar.
The bounding would be things like part of speech -- use any combo of adjective + noun, but no other parts of speech. Does that sound hard to pull off, or no?
Sounds hard without code, though maybe my intuitions haven't recalibrated yet: it might be that you can now say something close to what you just did to your LLM (which you CAN fine-tune as desired with little to no coding) and get what you want.
I could feed it lists of all nouns and adjectives, unless that's too much data to stuff in. Or I feed it a list of prepositions and articles, and there aren't many of those at all. Then I'd say, use any 2 words here, except words from the preposition and articles lists, words ending in -ly (that captures most adverbs) and capitalized words (that captures proper names.)
Any good model today should know what improper nouns and adjectives are without being told so explicitly.
From Gemini ("Give me a dozen poetic "Adjective + noun" phrases that are unusual and thought-provoking.")
- Ephemeral echoes
- Velvet voids
- Fractured futures
- Crimson whispers
- Lunar laughter
- Obsidian tears
- Phantom limbs
- Celestial rust
- Whispering stones
- Ethereal chains
- Silent thunder
And following with "More, and make them even more unusual":
- Starlight bones
- Chromium ghosts
- Quantum lullabies
- Asphalt oceans
- Rusting rainbows
- Clockwork butterflies
- Frozen fireflies
- Echoing emptiness
- Molten moonlight
- Shadow symphonies
- Glass horizons
- Weightless whispers
I'm not sure exactly how you want to fine-tune this kind of thing on your favorite prose/poetry, but Retrieval Augmented Generation might be what you're looking for: upload some reasonable set of texts, and then with some prompting, you should be able to get the model to output phrases based (in some way) on your input samples. This approach should be essentially code-free.
So many excellent band names!
ooh
Kevin Drum has a good counter for the why-America-can't-build-stuff any more whiners. If you believe the charts and graphs, we certainly can and are. But if you don't believe in charts and graphs, you won't be convinced.
https://jabberwocking.com/yeah-america-can-still-build-stuff/
The Residential Housing Units Completed per Population Added graph is missing some context. Except at the very end (which is indeed a hopeful note), it's well below 1.0 and trending downwards to a low of 0.3 in 2014 (actually 2009-2014, since it's a five-year moving average).
The missing context is the ratio of existing dwelling units to population, the size and type of the new dwelling units being produced, and whether these are gross or net new units (e.g. if a house is demolished and a new one built in its place, does that count as +1 or +0 in the metric?).
The actual dwelling unit to population ratio is 0.43, so a range of 0.3-0.8 is decent. The chart can be read as the 2009 recession causing a few years of abnormally low construction, with catch-up development occurring post-2020.
Size and type matters to the extent that maintaining the current ratio isn't great if the new units are disproportionately single-occupancy apartments, not large apartments or houses suitable for couples, larger families, or sets of roommates. FRED doesn't have fantastic granularity for selecting this, but doing a graph of the ratio of single-family housing starts to all dwelling unit starts seems a good first-order proxy. Eyeballing that graph, I see a lot of noise and either no trend or a slight upward trend. Also good as far as it goes. As for info not captured in this metric, I have heard from other sources that housing size is trending upwards in the US over the past several decades.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CH7m
FRED cites the Census Residential Construction report, which seems to be gross starts rather than net starts, which is not ideal. I don't see handy numbers in FRED for either total dwelling unit count over time, nor for demolitions, so I can't correct for this offhand. Numbers I can find tell me that demolitions were bit over half of new construction c. 2009-2011 (American Housing Survey, Housing Inventory Change, HUD), which was as already discussed a very low point for new construction. I consider it plausible that demolitions were a much lower percentage of construction in other years.
Overall, that graph does seem to broadly support Drum's conclusions, but it needed a lot more analysis than Drum gave it.
I take charts & graphs seriously, but I thought he made some lousy arguments:
https://jabberwocking.com/yeah-america-can-still-build-stuff/#comment-215158
Second this. Looking at aggregate measures doesn't tell the real story, because economic forces have made greater and greater proportions of people want to move to the top 5-10 metros, most of which it is impossible to build in (NYC, SF, LA, DC, Seattle).
Also, wth is going on with that "adjusted for population" housing units graph? What, our population plummeted in 2018? The line has barely hit the past "average" on the total units graph, but it's skyrocketed up exponentially, higher than it's ever been, starting in 2018 when "adjusted for population??" That "average" line would have been on a much lower population base in 1980 / 90 / 00, and the adjusted for population lines should have been higher back then.
All the rest of his metrics were basically meaningless. I'm anti-sold on his conclusion, and have updated slightly on the fact that we probably CAN'T build anything any more, if these are the best arguments the other side can muster.
"People want to move to SF but SF isn't building more houses" feels like it should be a self-solving problem. Eventually people should just shrug and say "ok i guess I'll move somewhere else then".
The amount of angst wasted on the dumb problem of people who want to move to cities which don't want to have them is considerable.
> "People want to move to SF but SF isn't building more houses" feels like it should be a self-solving problem. Eventually people should just shrug and say "ok i guess I'll move somewhere else then".
Indeed, and this is certainly happening at scale. And I'll take the position that this is a bad thing.
In Geoffrey West's book Scale, he looks at scaling laws across things as diverse as circulatory systems, cells, animals, and cities.
Cities have always been our primary engines of economic growth, and it is actually superlinear - the bigger the city, the more economic activity and growth it generally drives. Things like average income, per-capita GDP in a city, and patents scale superlinearly with population.
As in, if we care about economic growth, we should want MORE people moving to the biggest cities, so it actually IS a bad thing if a lot of people want to live in those top 5 cities and can't because there's no housing.
So in a future US-China war..... can't the US (and maybe partners) blockade the flow of raw materials into China? China is population-rich but pretty natural resource-poor, which I think is where the 'China is like the US in WW2' analogies fall apart. China is extremely dependent on iron ore imports, especially from Australia, along with oil from the Middle East, copper, and aluminum, just to name a few. Most worryingly for them, they still import a decent amount of food- I guess the Chinese soil is just not very rich. The US, by contrast, has natural resources in spades, plus we have ports on 2 oceans, which make blockading us almost impossible.
I just finished reading Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze, so after 800+ pages of reading about how the Nazis were desperate for natural resources to sustain their war effort, it's hard not to port that over to China. All the factories in the world don't help you if you lack the raw materials to build in the first place.
So in a hot US-China war, can't the US fall back and just blockade the Chinese mainland? Won't help if we lose fast, but will help if the war slows down a lot- which is where everyone talks about the vaunted Chinese manufacturing advantage without thinking about where the iron ore comes from. (Or oil, or food!) Would be a bit ironic if the US goes full German U-boat and destroys civilian shipping
For what it's worth (and I know the guy is prone to hyperbole), Peter Zeihan argues that this would be almost trivially easy: put a bunch of US destroyers near the Persian gulf, block any tankers heading east, watch as China runs out of fuel and food within months. Subtracting the hyperbole, yes, a distance blockade would almost certainly be a crucial, and very painful, part of a reaction to Chinese aggression.
Of course, it would be ironic if the US tore down the very system it has been safeguarding for many decades now... but that would be on China. No one forces them to invade a neighboring country.
Yes, that would be an integral part of U.S. strategy. China's land links to its neighbors are also surprisingly poor, so some success could be had blowing up key bridges and mountain passes to restrict overland imports into China.
The only problem with this is it would take a long time for China's warmaking ability to collapse thanks to economic privation--look at how long Germany and its European friends held out during the World Wars in spite of enemy blockades.
I looked into this when I reviewed WoD for the book review contest.
https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/book-review-wages-of-destruction
(There's a small section on it at the end)
China's made moves to sure-up its domestic food production in recent years and apparently could be self-sufficient if needed at his point. It also has a large strategic oil reserve to fall back on. That covers the two main weaknesses Germany had in WoD.
All that also assumes that the US navy could dominate China at sea, which is unclear. The USN is currently bigger but China has waaaaay more ship production capacity for a protracted war.
Allying with Russia has also boosted the potential resources available by land a lot.
Germany weathered several years of blockade in WW1 and 2 and China's current position is much more secure than Germany's was, so I think it's very unlikely China could be defeated outright in a reasonable timeframe that way, even if it would have huge economic costs (for both sides realistically).
The countries that really could be defeated just by blockade are Japan and Korea by China.
A lot of researchers think China's population figures are heavily inflated, owing to incentive structures which encourage local governments to inflate population figures. The lowest estimate I've seen is 400 million, which is ... almost certainly wrong. I'd hazard a guess that the actual number is somewhere around 900 million.
And they have a rather big issue; their population pyramid is more like a bulbous tower, heavier on the top than the bottom.
Additionally, decades of the one-child policy have left many families rather sparse on descendants; given the role family plays in their culture, substantial population losses would likely create massive social instability.
I don't think China can afford a significant war.
Four dozen NYC-sized cities is still two New York Cities short of 400 million. But also they only have one dozen NYC-sized (and larger) cities, with a total (of those 12) official population of ~155 million (or ~19 New York Cities).
But yeah, 400 million is, as noted, almost certainly wrong.
China with 400 million people would be similar to the U.S. in both size and population. It would be peculiar for that version of China to have dozens of cites the size of the largest U.S. city.
*Almost certainly wrong*. Also, again, per China's figures, -one- dozen, not dozen-s-.
But it's not -certainly- wrong, for several reasons; first, US cities tend to follow a Zipf distribution, because US population migration patterns are "natural"; China's cities do not, which is not surprising, given that China pursued policies of forced urbanization. (But also may suggest that the urban population numbers are, uh, inaccurate.)
Second, Chinese incentives are known to have created fake urbanization; most well-known being vast stretches of empty apartment buildings. I've encountered comments from visitors to one of these NYC-sized cities commenting on how weirdly empty and quiet they were, and how little traffic there is. They chalked this up to good urban planning and mass transit - but if you think about it, it's weird how well the urban planning and mass transit apparently work in some of their cities, where others are nightmares of congestion.
Third, Chinese national incentives encourage local governments to, well, overestimate their population figures.
Edit:
Also, note that the population of cities is a lot more arbitrary than people typically expect. Is the DFW metroplex one city, or several? Treated as one city, the US gets another NYC-sized city.
Considering land area in our equation, Shanghai has a population density of 10,000 per square mile; New York City has a population density of 29,000 per square mile. No Chinese city has the population density of NYC; the closest is Shenzen, at 23,000 per square mile.
>can't the US (and maybe partners) blockade the flow of raw materials into China?
First, regarding the blockade from the sea: Any asset used in this blockade would likely suffer a high rate of attrition, by virtue of being in range of a large area of china's mainland. And any asset used in such a blockade would be a very expensive one, and (at the moment), hard to replace.
Then even the US managed to impose a blockade at sea, there is a number of land borders, one of which being Russia, a famously ressource-rich country, and, as of 2024, one that is both very likely to be accepting generous terms, and very unlikely to be convinced to participate in this blockade.
And there is the other neighbours. How willing would vietnam be to join in this blockade? How willing would the US be to apply the blockade to vietnam also?
Russia is resource-rich, but its export markets to China are constrained by corruption and a lack of infrastructure. If a U.S.-China war broke out, it might take Russia so long to build a new gas pipeline to help China that the conflict would be over before.
As Humphrey Appleby notes, you don't have to be close to the Chinese mainland to blockade it. You can block merchant ships hundreds of miles away from China itself. I agree that Russia is very resource-rich and could help with materials, though I think it's interesting that China sources 60% of its iron from Australia and not Russia
> though I think it's interesting that China sources 60% of its iron from Australia and not Russia
There's nothing interesting about that; Australia produces nine times as much as Russia does.
China produces six or seven times as much as Russia.
>You can block merchant ships hundreds of miles away from China itself
Yes, if you're willing to sink every ship going to north-vietnam. Which...sure, you can. But it's going to be unpalatable to a lot of people. Otherwise, ships will go to Hai Phong, unload, then another ship goes to anywhere on China's coastline. And, again, anything in range to shoot at it will be in range to be shot at, but from a number of location on the mainland.
>though I think it's interesting that China sources 60% of its iron from Australia and not Russia
It don't seems so interesting to me. One is probably cheaper and easier during peacetime, but that doesn't mean the other won't be possible to obtain during a war. Russia's adventures in Ukraine reminded us that things can become significantly more expensive and difficult during war, while still being done.
As Eric Rall says, there is lots of precedent for `distant blockade.' The most obvious being the UK's blockade of Germany in both world wars. And an existing doctrine of continuous voyage, which absolutely allows you to stop ships going to north vietnam which are carrying contraband.
No sinking is necessary, unless the ships in question refuse to stop when ordered to do so. (Just like traffic stops do not require shooting motorists). The British stopped civilian ships sailing to German (and Dutch etc) ports, but didn't sink them.
Distant blockades have been a thing for a very long time. Both world wars, for instance. Also, the Union blockade of the Confederacy (1861-5) involved both close blockade operations (i.e. stationing warships a few miles out to sea near major ports) and distant ones. I think some distant blockade operations were involved in the Napoleonic Wars as well, although I'm less confident of that.
The trick to distant blockades is stopping and searching ships, inspecting their cargo manifests, and having other intelligence channel that can help you choose which ships to search and also help determine when the manifests are lying about where the cargo is coming from or where it's going. Under the Doctrine of Continuous Voyage, contraband is still subject to seizure if it's been moved to a different ship in a neutral port or even shipped overland from a neutral port: the WW1 blockade also stopped cargoes bound for Dutch and Danish ports, and the Civil War blockade involved stopping a lot of ships between Bermuda and various European ports. The stopping and searching is done by light ships, with your major warships only used if the other side tries to challenge the blockade with their fleet.
It helps if you have a convenient geographical choke point, like Bermuda in the ACW or the English Channel and North Sea in the World Wars, but it isn't strictly necessary.
Sinking tends to be more of a thing for commerce raiding rather than proper blockades. The difference is that you're only allowed to raid enemy-flagged ships, while a blockade also applies to neutral-flagged ships. Sinking neutral ships tends to annoy their respective home countries, sometimes leading to those countries not being neutral for much longer.
I have read that the PRC is aggressively stockpiling raw materials, oil etc. How large their stockpiles are, I don't know, and obviously they are not infinite, but the strategic power of a blockade is going to depend a lot on whether they have a 2 month stockpile or a 20 year stockpile.
Also we don't need to go U-boat, we can blockade them with surface units just fine, as long as it is a distant blockade.
China has land borders with fourteen different countries, only a few of which will cooperate with US-led sanctions. Between the enormous land area of China and the even more enormous land area of Russia, I don't think there's much that can't be obtained. There might be some shortages and rationing, and maybe steel that was going to build skyscrapers gets diverted into building tanks, but I can't think of anything specific.
doesn't have good land-based communications with basically any of those other countries though. The land borders are mostly mountains/dense forest/desert/tundra, with very few roads and rail. Those would have to be built first, which would take time.
The amount of goods transported to China by ship is on the order of billions of tonnes. Now I'm not an expert on logistics, but I don't think you can quickly switch that over to land-based transport. Not only would you have to build out that capacity within China, but also within the neighboring countries.
Then there's the issue that land-based transport is more expensive (i.e., consumes more resources) than ships, and that doesn't even take into account the massive expense in labor and materials for building the infrastructure itself.
> China is extremely dependent on iron ore imports
Is it? The great advantage of iron was that it's literally as common as dirt. Just because you you 𝗰𝗮𝗻 import something doesn't mean you 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼.
> Most worryingly for them, they still import a decent amount of food- I guess the Chinese soil is just not very rich.
Learn something, then try talking. This is the opposite of any conclusion you could ever draw from history.
Or, you know, you could learn from popular internet memes. Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle
Banned for a month for this comment.
China imports about 80% of its iron ore. (1) I suppose it could have domestic sources that it's choosing to not use for whatever reason, but I think the onus is on you to explain why they're not doing so- especially as they're gearing up for potential war. I do not in fact think that iron is 'literally as common as dirt'.
Rather than learning from 'popular Internet memes', I think I prefer statistics from industry sources. China is actually less self-sufficient in food than it was 2 decades ago (2), and has been a net importer of agricultural foodstuffs since 2004. (3) China is the world's largest food importer, including the top global importer of soybeans, corn, wheat, rice, and dairy products. (4) This is a recognized national security issue in China. (5)
As I understand it, much of their old agricultural land has now been developed for cities, roads, and factories. So references to past centuries are no longer relevant
1. https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/the-australian-goose-that-lays-the-multi-billion-dollar-iron-ore-eggs/
2. https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/import-dependency-and-chinas-food-security/
3. https://www.cfr.org/article/china-increasingly-relies-imported-food-thats-problem
4. https://fas.usda.gov/data/china-retail-foods-annual
5. https://www.tibetanreview.net/chinas-continued-rising-dependence-on-food-imports-a-perpetual-geopolitical-risk/
Seriously, it's better to know things before you talk about them.
Compare https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/ :
> I have good news for 𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 you as compared to 𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘰 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘦 you: iron is the fourth most common element in earth’s crust, making up around 5% of the total mass of the part of the earth we can actually mine. Modern industry produces – and I mean this very literally – a 𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘯𝘴 (and change) of iron per year. Iron is about the exact opposite of rare; almost all of the major ores of iron are dirt common. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁.
> One of the reasons that the change from using bronze (or copper) as tool metals to using iron was so important historically is that iron is just 𝘴𝘰 𝘥𝘢𝘮𝘯 𝘢𝘣𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘵. Of course iron can be used to make 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 tools and weapons as well, but only with proper treatment: initially, the advantage in iron was that it was 𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘱.
(The emphasis is Bret Devereaux calling you stupid, not me.)
If you compare China's iron ore production (estimated 660 million tonnes at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_iron_ore_production ) to its iron reserves (estimated 20 billion tonnes at https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/analysis/world-iron-ore-reserves-countries/ ), you learn that, if China needed to mine five times the amount of iron, it would be good for the next 6 years. Of course, comparing the reserves listed by NS Energy to the wikipedia estimate of production, we can also see that, if nothing changes, the entire world will blow through all of its iron reserves in 56 years. We can safely ignore that and realize that China appears to be, if anything, unusually rich in demonstrated iron reserves.
It is similarly rich in demonstrated arability, and unlike with the iron that's a real advantage.
The reason you import rocks and soybeans is that those are low-value products and you have better things to do with your time. It isn't that you're suffering from a crippling shortage of rocks.
Presuming such a war was triggered by the PRC mounting an invasion of Taiwan and the US coming to the island's defense, it really depends on how things got to that point:
- If the PRC mistakenly believed the US wouldn't intervene (a la Saddam in 1990) or incorrectly thought they had a means to prevent the USN and/or USAF from contesting their crossing the Strait, then the war probably wouldn't last long enough for such considerations to come into play.
- If the PRC *correctly* thought they had a means to prevent the USN and/or USAF from contesting their crossing the Strait, then it depends on the nature of such:
-- If it was transient (e.g., one-off strike that knocks US airbases in Japan & Korea out of commission just long enough for the invasion fleet to reach the far shore), then any blockade might be limited to PRC-occupied Taiwan.
-- If it was persistent (e.g., credible threats to US carriers within striking range of Taiwan), then the PRC's newly-expanded force projection capability might be enough to make a blockade infeasible.
On the last point, I don't see it. The PRC could have a newly-expanded force-projection capability that can keep US carriers far enough to be out-of-striking-range of Taiwan, but how does that prevent a distant blockade? Enforced at e.g. the Malacca strait, or similar? Most of China's raw materials come from a long way away, and merely denying the near-China seas to the USN isn't going to prevent blockade.
I perhaps should've emphasized "might" more … emphatically.
Starting from the premise that the PRC does not currently possess such a capability (I do not think the DF-21 qualifies), the range of a hypothetical future system is underdetermined; there exist (small) regions of the possibility space that could push the USN so far back that the boundary of the denied area is longer than can be effectively secured.
OK, sure, if they can successfully `deny' the seas out to a range of, say, 3000 miles, then that does render a blockade infeasible. That seems unlikely though. In part because you don't need to blockade the entire perimeter of the `denial' zone, a handful of chokepoints (e.g. Malacca strait, Panama canal) likely suffice.
[And why stop there. If they can add a factor of four and deny the seas out to 12000 miles, then they can counter-blockade America...]
There is also the question of whether the US has the stomach to start sinking civilian cargo ships.
Why do we need to start sinking them? We just stop/search/seize at Malacca or whatever. CF you can conduct traffic stops without shooting motorists. OK I guess if they don't stop when ordered to stop then we would need to fire on them. But this is no different to enforcing any old law - ultimately all governmental authority is backed by threat of force.
CF the UK implementing `distant blockade' of Germany in both world wars. At no point was indiscriminate `sinking civilian cargo ships' involved.
Definitely unlikely. But effective denial of even smaller areas is also unlikely; I'm just not confident that P(big area denial | small area denial) is negligibly small.
As for counter-blockading: supercarriers are far scarcer and much more valuable than merchant shipping generally. The PRC could deter the USN with a system whose capacity would be insufficient to impose a broad blockade.
Since cognitive biases are 1) both universal and resistant to self-detection, and 2) tend to favor extreme judgments and beliefs, could it be beneficial for people to obligatorily apply moderation to some classes of judgments/beliefs?
Particularly high-bias classes such as:
- Identity-linked beliefs
- Ethical judgments
- Complex multicausal scenarios
- Personal stake scenarios
I’ll define moderation here as a reduction in positional extremity on a spectrum. If your volume dial is at a 10, a 9 would be more moderate. If it’s at 1, a 2 would be.
As a principle it’s probably very limited to being applied in a vague and unsatisfying way, but would be applied after you reach your judgment/conclusion. For instance, if you believe UFOs have visited earth, consider moderating that to probably visited. If you believe UFOs never visited, consider moderating that to probably never. Any of these beliefs could be true, but given the nature of bias itself, chances are your/my bias has radicalized our judgment rather than moderated it.
Notes and exceptions: This doesn’t imply that the more moderate the belief, the better. It just suggests that many beliefs (not all) would benefit from a consistent moderating influence. There are situations where you may be choosing between two overly moderate options where this principle actually weakens the belief. Unlike confirmation bias, overconfidence and the availability heuristic, a few biases like the status quo bias, don’t necessarily radicalize beliefs but may unnecessarily moderate them. Procedural, low-stakes, single-variable and mathematically determined decisions are not as prone to bias and consequently a moderating principle might not be useful under these circumstances.
Rather than just making a habit of turning the dial down, I think it would work better to have some questions you ask yourself about these beliefs that help modulate your certainty that they're correct. I try to do that. One especially helpful one is to ask myself whether it makes me angry to think about people who do not share the belief. If it does, that's really a tell. It indicates that the belief is intertwined with my self-esteem and self-image somehow.
So if it makes me angry to think about people who think my belief is wrong, then I ask myself what my picture is of the other person's belief. I usually picture the other person in a way to supports my anger. Maybe I picture them being particularly dumb or selfish, and arriving at their idea via a bunch of infuriatingly dumb, selfish steps. Or I picture then despising me for my belief.
So then I get myself to think about times I've just been wrong about something, and how I arrived at my wrong belief, and what it was like to have it. Generally my steps of arriving at the belief were not especially dumb and selfish. or angry. Often I just kind of adopted the idea wholesale from people I was fond of and respected. And recognizing that helps me develop a different picture of the people I disagree with. And *that* helps me try on the idea that they might be right about some of it. Also, it becomes easier to reduce my own certainty in the belief if I am not mentally fighting a war with a bunch of imagined infuriating idiots who believe the opposite.
I try to use this approach, and I think most self aware people do too. But cognitive bias is often not self-detectable. We’re all victim to it to varying degrees, despite our efforts to spot it. So it seems plausible that applying a systematic moderating principle post-conclusion could be reasonably advocated for.
Self detection of bias, while helpful, is also really time/cognitive resource dependent and isn’t going to be nearly as effective for less critical/analytical people (like myself) who most need to temper their beliefs.
There is another method (not that I think yours is necessarily a bad one)--you could seek out people who disagree with you, ask them to explain their beliefs, and and force yourself to consider their reasons objectively. This isn't dependent upon self-detection of bias, and doesn't just replace all extreme beliefs with a "moderation bias."
Yes—I think your suggestion is probably a better method in most respects when one has the time and personnel available to carry it out.
But if you take for granted that bias is fundamental to cognition, it means you’re updating based on a second perspective biased to an unknowable degree in another direction. And in essence what you’re still seeking to do by this is moderate your belief.
Just to be clear, this moderating principle I’m floating isn’t something I’ve subscribed to already, just something I was trying to poke holes in with the help of folks like yourself.
"a second perspective biased to an unknowable degree"
Yes, but that's all we have, there being no other source of information out there, even in principle. Even science incorporates this--you replicate studies so that the biases of independent researchers will eventually cancel each other out.
There's your mind and what it perceives. Then there's other minds and what they perceive. That's pretty much it.
It’s also kind of ironic that you and I are talking about the principle from two different perspectives as you sensibly endorsed, but both our opinions on the principle appear to be radicalizing instead of moderating.
I agree. It’s all we have. The moderating principle is just meant as a flawed way to try to temper some of people’s bias on the fly. It would be particularly applicable in low-information-zone decisions.
If say you’re a bird watcher, and you catch a fleeting glimpse of a red and black bird that looked to you like a pileated woodpecker, which is rare in your region, and you think to yourself “I think that was a pileated woodpecker,” consider automatically updating that to “It’s possible that was a pileated woodpecker.”
You could seek out a panel of ornithological experts or spend hours soliciting the opinions of other birders, too. This would be ideal.
I’m all for replicating studies and doing exhaustive research when you have the capacity to do so. But the majority of decisions in life unfortunately don’t allow for such measures and it might be useful for people to have practical if imperfect principles to lean on in such cases.
Edit: I also noted some of the obvious categories of decision that such a principle wouldn’t apply to in my “Notes and exceptions.”
Mostly that happens from weak caricatures or fundamental non-understanding of the opposite viewpoint. That's not easy to solve.
For example, the only way I can understand woke ideology is
a)mistaken factual premises (believing MSM about various things)
b) Pretending to believe because of external pressure.
c) genuine hatred of white people/men/rich people or whatever else you guys don't like.
As a matter of curiosity, do you have a definition of "woke" that isn't just "Left wing extremism?"
The lex fridman podcast with zelensky, listening to the original audio in english, russian, and ukranian, really gave me an appreciation of the power of language and how humanizing it is to understand people you don't know in their more-familiar tongues. Humor and poetry is such an important part of being human.
If someone is married to someone whose mother tongue is different from your own, maybe worthwhile to put in the effort to learn it, eventually.
A pair of Substack pieces on that interview with Zelensky.
https://researchingukraine.substack.com/p/alert-update-zelenskys-interview
https://lesiadubenko.substack.com/p/bravo-mr-zelenskyy-you-rocked-it
Lex Fridman didn't ask tough questions though (just like Joe Rogan btw) that a good journalist from a traditional media would've asked.
For example, when Zelensky mentioned broken Budapest agreements, he could've asked why Zelensky double-crossed Russia in 2019 (in the words of his own head of the office of president at the time Bohdan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogGK8rjDqJE)
Or when they were discussing the language, Fridman could've asked whether Zelensky supported the position of the minister of education who wanted to ban students from speaking Russian during school breaks https://ukranews.com/ua/news/1040644-minosvity-pidtrymalo-zaboronu-spilkuvatysya-rosijskoyu-na-perervah-u-shkolah
That's not to say that there are no good answers to these questions, maybe Zelensky would've answered them satisfactorily (I certainly could've). My point is just that the interviewer didn't really challenge Zelensky and because of that we learned less than we could've done
Lex F knows that if he asks tough questions world leaders won't go on his show.
He asks questions that allow his audience to get valuable information and insight, I appreciate that
What exactly is the first claim supposed to be? I'm not watching a four-hour YouTube video to try to figure it out, and I'm confused as to how Zelenskyy is supposed have double-crossed somebody who initially invaded his country five years prior and what this has to do with them having clearly already broken the agreement from 1994.
The claim is that Ukraine and Russia reached an agreement in Paris in 2019 and then Ukraine didn't do what it promised. It was more or less similar to Minsk accords but at this time Zelensky was already in power.
According to Bohdan, они кинули Путина, I did my best translating it :)
Again, this is just Bohdan's words and not necessarily true. This was an example of a question I'd have asked - did it happen and if yes what prevented you from fulfilling the agreement
Okay, this is slightly more helpful, but what specific thing is it claimed that Ukraine didn't do?
He doesn't say exactly, but he says before that there were open and secret parts of the agreement and everyone was in favour of improving Minsk agreements, whatever it means.
This is the transcript btw
https://gordonua.com/publications/uvolnjaja-menja-zelenskij-skazal-ty-kak-neljubimaja-zhenshchina-polnyj-tekst-intervju-bogdana-gordonu-1517453.html
Elsewhere in the interview he also says that he heard from others that some deescalation steps were agreed, for example Russia freeing captured Ukrainian sailors (done in September as part of a prisoner swap https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/07/europe/ukraine-russia-prisoner-swap-intl/index.html) and Ukraine re-starting the supply of water to Crimea (not done). It's not clear though whether this was part of the agreement in Paris but the timing makes it quite likely
The distinctive feature of the genocide in Gaza is its extreme, never-before-witnessed levels of documentation.
Perhaps for the first time in history, we have audio-visual real-time data trail from the cameras and the microphones of both the perpetrators and the victims. Coupled with Satellites, the databases of the social media sites this data trail lives in, and the image format of modern smartphones, you can be as precise as the exact Longitude/Latitude coordinates of where the picture or the video in question were taken, an absurd level of details.
A single media channel such as Al-Jazeera English can compile a 1 hour and 20 minutes long documentary stuffed full [1] of videos and images, a lot of them straight from the social media profiles of the perpetrators themselves. While concerned historians in the perpetrator state can weave a 124-page document [2] documenting the genocide in horrific contemporality, and update that document several times over the course of a year, maintaining the document across the twin languages of the perpetrator state and that of the international audience - Hebrew and English -, **all** in hobbyist capacity and without any state-level, corporate-level, or even NGO-level support.
The Gaza genocide is also, paradoxically and simultaneously, fervently denied, minimized, dismissed, vilified, booed and tabooed. Essentially untouchable.
What does that tell us about the psychology of Genocide Denialism?
Not *merely* that it's unresponsive to evidence, we already knew that aplenty from samples of, e.g., Holocaust Denial and other Genocide Denial by nation state actors such as Japan and Turkey. Those sometimes-farcical denials are often satirized as the classic trilogy of the Genocide Denialist:
- That didn't happen
- And if it did, it wasn't that bad
- And if it was, they deserved it
- [Bonus, in case of survival of victim ethnicity] and I wish we could do it to "them" all over again
That's all old news, although it can be quite amusing to catch all the Holocaust parallels in a single bout of rhetoric from a pro Israel hooligan.
No, I think what the first livestreamed genocide in the 21st century really tells us about Genocide Denial is rather different and new (at least to me): that it gets *stronger* in proportion to the evidence. That is, the more bulletproof and smoking-gun the evidence you have, the **more** (not less or at least more shyly) denial you get, the more fervent and desperate the denialists. Although it may get less coherent or less concerned with traditional argument structure as more and more evidence is unearthed, it gets more bitter, heated, and - most importantly - more numerous and concentrated.
Consider the sheer breadth of technicalities available as degrees of freedom for the Genocide Denialist to tune and play with:
- is it really genocide if the Génocidaires happen to have let the victim ethnicity live in semi-peace for 10 or 15 years before the fact ?
- is it really genocide if the victims happen to have had a high fertility rate before the fact ?
- Maybe it's genocide, but the perpetrator ethnicity is rich and has many Nobel prizes, and the victim ethnicity is poor and backwater, so ... [?]
- is it really ""tasteful"" to call it genocide when the current perpetrator ethnicity happen to be the descendants of victims from another, earlier genocide ?
- those are not children being killed, merely children being starved or frozen to death using passive obstructionism and Bureaucracy
- those are not teenagers being killed, merely teenagers being kidnapped and sexually abused in extra-judicial dark prisons
- the perpetrator ethnicity seems to discuss Ethnic Cleansing a lot, surely that can't mean they would also do Genocide? Exactly one of the two is ever possible at any given time, two is redundant.
And so on. And so forth.
It's of course besides the point to notice how trivially refutable or irrelevant every one of those are, they were never meant as solid research-level genocide **questioning**, the legitimate skepticism and question marks advanced by genocide scholars or good-faith amateurs and characterized by respect for evidence, awareness of previous literature, and the current state of evidence. In addition to the ethno-political neutrality of the author regarding the genocide in question. Those points are not intended to be used like that. They are bait.
The very nature of the fragmented, desperate, half-baked, half-hearted, half-thoughts of the Genocide Denialist is a feature: they confuse, they sow doubts, they decrease the signal-to-noise ratio and increase its reciprocal. They're the intellectual equivalent of fighter jet missile countermeasures, chaffs and flares. Their purpose is to be sources of noise, to confuse the targeting system of pursuers. Red Herring, reified and refined as a a whole arsenal of argument tactics and debate aesthetics.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPE6vbKix6A
[2] https://witnessing-the-gaza-war.com/
Holocaust, local Jewish population change: -100%, approximately. Population change if the Nazis had only had a moderate-to-strong deliberate priority of wiping out Jews, as opposed to "yeah let's sacrifice a big portion of our actual war effort so that we can wipe some more out": Less severe than that.
Israeli response to to Hamas' attempted genocide, Gaza population change: Moderate population increase. Population change, had Israel had even the slightest preference towards them all being dead: -100%, within hours at most.
(Leaving out the fact that it's an actual war, that Hamas started, and could end at any moment by surrendering. As opposed to genocides, which don't have opposing armies.)
The Gazan people are, in fact, still around. If they were victims of genocide, they would not be. Or, if you want to stretch the definition, at the very least there would be far fewer of them. Your argument simply doesn't work, @LearnsHebrewHatesIP.
Oh, look! @LearnsHebrewHatesIP is wearing a fresh sock!
Look, if you're going to try to sneak around a ban (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-350), maybe try mixing up your writing style and approach?
But more broadly, in the *vastly* unlikely chance that you're not @LearnsHebrewHatesIP, I have a suggestion for both of you:
The pompous tone you're utilizing in this comment and your replies to other people's comments is highly likely to entrench your ideological enemies into their positions, even when your assertions are supported by trustworthy evidence. Belief perseverance aka the backfire effect is a difficult enough phenomenon to combat when the person making an argument is likeable; when they're not, it becomes virtually impossible to overcome. Even here on ACX, where many commenters make a heroic conscious attempt to avoid falling victim to belief perseverance, many of your readers are nevertheless coming away from your content thinking, "Fuck that guy, I hope his cause fails even harder now."
And look, I get it! Righteous indignation feels great, and dunking on idiots is super fun!
However, when I see that my self-indulgent righteous indignation and idiot-dunking has made me an avatar through which my ideological enemies can hate my cause even *more,* I do immediate penance by donating hard cash to the best possible organization advancing my cause. For example, whenever I send someone into a frothing rage about the murder of babies by self-indulgently baldly laying out why there's a total lack of a downside to induced abortion, I immediately pay for some abortions for women who can't otherwise afford them. And that actually feels even better than the righteous indignation and idiot-dunking.
I suggest you do something similar for your particular cause.
I very much doubt I am the only long-time reader and commenter who suspects you are @LearnsHebrewHatesIP.
But if you are merely a spiritual twin of @LearnsHebrewHatesIP and you would like to avoid future accusations of being a permanently banned user utilizing a sock account, please feel free to research how to avoid their exact talking points, writing style, and comment formatting by searching for their username across most of the Open Comment threads prior to the October 6, 2024 banning.
You will encounter hundreds of comments which (if not written by you) were written by someone who is your *literal* soulmate, and you should drop everything and go to that person rather than wasting your life fruitlessly arguing with strangers on the internet.
Nah, I didn't think this was LHHIP. He explicitly wrote a long post about how he came to a conclusion that Israel didn't have a goal to genocide Palestinians. His writing manner was different too.
I mean...I find it eminently plausible that LearnsHebrewHatesIP could have been persuaded that Israel's goal wasn't genocide and then, perhaps upon later developments, change his mind back to genocide.
On the point of writing manner, I'd like to agree to disagree; after all, this user sounds so distinctly LHHIP to *me* that I accused them of being LLHIP, and I think the first reply back to me felt equally LHHIP-ish. You disagree. I would counter that any differences in writing style could be LHHIP trying not to be caught wearing socks, but I've also already proactively conceded that I could be wrong and the similarities are indeed a coincidence.
(If it is a coincidence, I stand by my advice that Hind's Ghost should go look up LHHIP's past comments, if not to avoid future accusations of sockery or plagiarism, then at least to derive tremendous pleasure from reading someone with a remarkably similar world view.)
Anyway, I'm guessing none of us is interested in doing hours of tedious forensic analysis on LHHIP's past comments to support our particular positions; that sounds like a huge pain in the ass and would ultimately still only reflect our personal opinions, as (I assume) none of us have access to the kind of hard evidence which would stand up in a real court.
Yeah we've already spent too much time on this.
The casualty rates seem awfully low for an intentionally plan to wipe a large number of people out. Something like 50,000 out of 2.1 million is high, but not much higher (in proportion) than casualties in the Iraq war, which benefitted from the invaded country not being one large urban-warfare city.
At some point, any war between different peoples can be considered a genocide, which sort of diminishes the impact of the term if we're applying it so indiscriminately. The insistence of the use of the term genocide, seems more like a play to reframe the situation in one that has conclusions less favorable for Israel (they suffered a genocide, which we all acknowledged was bad, which then largely motivated the support for the creation of Israel by the international community, which has led to another genocide being perpetrated in turn, sort of invalidating the justification for international support for Israel in the first place).
I don't have a horse in the race, as I don't particularly care, but it seems far more likely that this is the real intent behind calling the war in Gaza a genocide, than it is an accurate assessment of the language we use as it might apply to this situation.
Like vs. don't like is a good distinction, and probably the accurate one. If that's the case, the term doesn't really matter besides a signal for ones support in the war in Gaza. If one calls it a "conflict", they're probably pro Israel, War is more neutral, Genocide is pro-Palestine. If the distinction is just one of support, there's really no point to argue whether what's happening in Gaza is a genocide or not, as the *actual* motivation for picking an accurate term to describe what's going on, is purely a political decision based on ones pre-existing support.
If anything it's a complete waste of time to talk about whether it's genocide or not (unless it becomes obviously and ideologically genocide i.e. Statements of deliberate intent to wipe the Palestinians out by people in positions of significant power, while also taking in mind that these sort of statements happen often in all wars. Dehumanizing the enemy might be an important psychological step in waging an effective war). The real debate and question should be about which side do you prefer and why, with the genocide claim serving as a distraction to enflame, and anger some previously-reasonable people.
It doesn't help that it is a term used basically specifically for a very unique and very rapid form of deliberate extermination from WW2. Applying it otherwise is a crapshoot that's just as likely to be an incorrect use than a correct one. Maybe there's an Arabic equivalent to genocide that can be used. For example, Genghis Khan definite committed genocide by any sane definition (literally and deliberately wiping out entire cities because he didn't like them) but calling his wars of conquest a genocide seems to not actually fit the term. Presumably he didn't have anything against the people of Merv on ethnic or religious grounds (the Mongol Empire was quite tolerant of different peoples and religions inside it), but he killed every last citizen because they were resisting. This seems qualitatively different than deliberately eliminating an entire people, at extreme expense, when they aren't actually resisting. There's no limit to the level of brutality if the normal threat "submit or die" is replaced with "die or die", where submission also means death.
One question: if Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza the what's taking them so long? If they wanted to kill _everyone_ they could clearly do it a lot faster.
That's an argument that Israel has decided not to engage in genocide because of the bad PR and international political implications and whatnot. Which is plausible, but almost indistinguishable from Israel deciding not to engage in genocide because they know better than anyone that genocide is wrong. So it seems uncharitable to assert the cynical version.
But more importantly for our present discussions, the claim "Israel has decided not to engage in genocide because [reasons]", is first and foremost a claim that Israel has decided *not to commit genocide* and so is not committing genocide.
If you want to assert that Israel is attempting to commit genocide, perhaps by some sneaky camouflaged way because reasons, then you need a plausible mechanism by which the thing they are doing will result in at least the localized destruction of an ethnic group. Which is, after all, the definition of genocide.
The Palestinian population in Gaza is I believe *growing*, and has been for most of the past year. The casualty rate due to Israeli attacks has *decreased* by almost an order of magnitude from late 2023, to an annualized death rate of ~8.7 per 1000 people. The current birth rate, per the CIA world factbook, is 26.3 per 1000 people per year, and the prewar death rate was 3.5 per 1000 per year.
If Israel had continued what it was doing in late 2023, it could eventually have eliminated the Palestinian population of Gaza, though it would have taken a decade or so. If Israel continues to do what it is doing now, the Palestinian population of Gaza will grow at ~1.4% per year. Israel has changed its tactics from something that could eventually have had genocidal effect (though not necessarily intent), to something that cannot have genocidal effect.
This is not consistent with an Israeli intent to commit genocide, and it is not in fact a genocide in progress. It is a particularly bloody war, and we've already got the right words to describe *that*.
Yeah, you can make a case for "bombing the Gazans back into the stone age" or "being too indiscriminate in their targeting," but the charge of genocide seems like it is being used entirely for its emotional affect, without any particular concern for accuracy.
If the Nazis had started openly doing mass shootings, sparing no one, then the non-Germans would have quickly figured out the goal was their extermination, and they would have started fighting back with whatever they had, hiding, and running. Those responses would have in turn made it harder for the Nazis to continue the killing. All of the infrastructure in the conquered areas would have also become unusable had the inhabitants all started to resist.
Exterminating a large population must be done in a piecemeal fashion to succeed, starting with the smallest and/or least-liked groups of people in the area. Keep working your way up.
Well, first, the Nazis didn't want to kill *everyone*; they wanted to kill just the Jews and a few other specific groups while keeping everyone else alive. Since these groups aren't trivially distinguished by e.g. skin color, that involves a fair bit of tedious sorting. And second, they wanted to get the maximum amount of slave labor out of the ones they were going to kill, before killing them.
> Those sometimes-farcical denials are often satirized as the classic trilogy of the Genocide Denialist:
> - That didn't happen
> - And if it did, it wasn't that bad
> - And if it was, they deserved it
I don't think those are particular to anything, certainly not genocide. That's just the way denials are made.
Steve Sailer called this "the Law of Merited Impossibility" in the context of talking about the consequences of political policies.
I think it was Rod Dreher who originally coined the term.
Law of merited impossibility: "That's just a right-wing conspiracy theory, it will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it good and hard."
I can't think of any argument, on either side of the political spectrum, which fits that structure. Are there examples?
What is the practical distinction between a war with civilian casualties as collateral damage, and a genocide?
Yep, would you look at that. Shankar and I have had a few disagreements on various issues, his and mine politics are... different...
And yet you got us both on the same page: you don't care a fig about fate of actual Gazans and would rather drive people away than foster a broad agreement about this war being awful and the need to make it stop.
Ok, I'm impressed by your mind-reading ability. You saw through me. Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.
Okay, so it's not whether the ICJ or the UN or the ICC or "genocide scholars" or whoever you deem authoritative arbitrarily declares it so.
Good, this (along with at least two of your examples) bolsters my point that there IS no meaningful distinction, and your insisting on your preferred subjective and divisive label when you can easily get broad (though perhaps not overwhelming) agreement on what you might care about (Gazans deaths being sad) might be doing more harm than good.
And it IS subjective. Intent - of whom? Individual soldiers? Commanders? Government officials? Determined by their actions or their rhetoric?
And scale - in absolute numbers? A ratio of civilians to combatants? As a percentage of the total population? And if so, what's the total population of? Gazans? Palestinians? Arabs? And what's the threshold where your killing switches from collateral damage to genocide?
I agree (Mainland) Australia is large enough to clearly be more than a mere island. That was the one example of yours I wasn't counting.
Has there been a movement of some kind to stop India being referred to as a peninsula I'm not aware of? No, I do not think someone who did would be mocked as clueless or looked down upon.
You want to call every war a genocide, because it's a destruction "in whole or in part" or whatever, yeah, sure, knock yourself out. I will continue roll my eyes at you and everyone else who does, no matter how fancy their titles, but there's no reason for you to care about that.
Would you consider that by insisting on the “genocide” label you may be making things worse for Gazans? Like, a tiny bit worse, but nonetheless? Because it’s much easier for many people to agree that the war is awful and needs to come to some sort of a close fast, and Israel should be pressured to let more aid through, etc.
But you insist! Insist that this is genocide, and those who disagree with you are monsters, and the rest of your post.
And in doing this you lose allies, people like yours truly, who read your stuff, remember Jewish kids burnt alive by Hamas on Oct 7, and just walk away. I think Bibi is a monster, but I begrudgingly side with him when presented with your line of reasoning.
Curious, when you say 'Bibi is a monster' could you write a few sentences about why? I have an ignorant model of him, and would like to be educated.
He has clung to power for far too long and at this point his main goal appears to be defending that above all else. He was preoccupied with wrecking Israel’s judiciary as opposed to Israel’s security before the oct 7 attacks. He brought in some despicable characters into his cabinet (e.g., Smotrich), who are mirror image of Hamas and actually would like to genocide Gazans if they could get IDF to go along. He doesn’t appear to have a plan of how to return the hostages or what to do with Gaza.
Ok. That makes sense.
I grant that bringing Smotrich into his cabinet was akin to 'strategically allying with evil,' and his personal interest in optimizing for power is stronger than his belief that he can improve Israel's security more than whoever would replace him if his government fell.
On the other points, if you'd engage me:
I don't really understand the judicial reform movement, my basic understanding is 'the judicial system in Israel is completely bonkers, under Israeli law/religious understanding everything is justiciable, and judges pick their replacements, so without a constitution you functionally have no democracy judges have absolute authority over everything; it just so happens that jews are such a legalistic culture that this doesn't result in tyranny' and 'people in government wanted the power to enact certain laws, judges were stopping them, and they moved to reduce the power of judges'. I get that 'politicians reducing power of judges following unfavorable rulings' is anti-democratic, but the power of judges in Israel seems so undemocratic to me I don't know what to think.
Re. Gaza/Hostages, let's say his theory of the situation is 'If the palestinians have state-building capacity, they will channel it almost exclusively towards the goal of destroying Israel, and I don't have the ability to culturally engineer them otherwise. I will attempt to undermine this by balancing Hamas and the Palestinian authority against each other and be fine with settlements, divide and conquer style. On hostages, I don't actually have the ability to trick Hamas into releasing them against their interests. They want to stay in power, I think their doing so will long-term result in many more hostages being taken, October 7th happened because we released Sinwar and many others in exchange for a hostage, there's really no gains to negotiation I can have with Hamas'. On post-war plans, it seems that a permanent military occupation of some amount of the border is all I can unilaterally do. If Iran or Hamas gets overthrown by its own populations, then we can rethink the situation, until then I have only military not political solutions available.' Do you disagree that this is his framework, do you think some other framework is more true?
Israel's judicial system might very well be flawed, but my (and enough Israelis' to mount massive protests for months) sense is that Bibi's fixes aren't meant to carefully address those. I - separately - have a sense of a "democracy" as being a system with strongly separated powers having oversight over each other, so it's a feature of the system to have strong judiciary. This is more of a personal view, YMMV.
I don't have a solution for Gaza and the hostage situation, but then I'm not Israel's PM who's been in power for almost two decades on the platform of being a strong protector.
As an aside, appreciate a good engagement on a difficult issue.
I learned a lot, thank you!
So why are you here? Clearly not to convince anyone to come to your view, you're failing miserably at that. Like I said, you're nudging the arrow away from your preferred outcome.
Unless the preferred outcome is to righteously yell at others, Gazans be damned.
> Clearly not to convince anyone to come to your view
I think you're laboring under the misconception that you not being convinced by 2500 words of sourced argument that you never seriously engaged with the points therein, somehow means the words are to blame.
But you know what? It's completely fine you're not convinced. I will take both of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International over your opinion when it comes to genocide and/or war crimes any day of the week, no offense to you, I'm sure you're great at many other things.
ACX has a lot of other readers. If exactly one of them is not aware of the genocide in Gaza (or laboring under Israel's lies of "Collateral Damage") and I managed to at least sow the seed of doubt in his or her conscience and motivate him or her to look further, that's completely fine by me.
> the preferred outcome is to righteously yell at others
Have you developed a mutation that allows you to hear sound over text? You could use a medical patent if so.
The traditional signifier for yelling over text is UPPPER_CASE, which I used in this thread **ctrl-F" exactly once in my conversation with NoRandomWalk, and in the context of emphasis by repetition (e.g. one, uno, EINS), not yelling.
More generally, your approach to this issue in your comments reminds me of the "Calm Hitler" meme [1]. Not in the sense that you're Hitler or anything close to him, but more generally the idea of "Wow Man, anger is, .... like ..... totally not cool. Calm down my guy nothing deserves to be angry about."
Does this have a name? Let's call it Reductio Ad Ragerium. You're angry, therefore you're wrong. Because "emotions" are wrong. Reason is when we calculate the simulate the world as a Turing machine in blissful, machine indifference. Anything else is obviously corrupt and false.
It's even worse than the meme because in the meme Hitler at least had a visual confirmation that his interlocuter was indeed angry in the way that he imagines it, but in your case you're just inferring anger (true) in my words and thinking of the stereotypical frothing-at-the-mouth image of a street pastor type of angry (false) instead of the more common and socially common type of anger that makes people want to argue for the right reasons without necessarily being stuck in a nervous breakdown.
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DztRBSHUUAAPXlH?format=jpg
[ **Hitler and a guy are discussing politics**
Guy: RARG PEOPLE DESRVE TO BE TREATED LIKE HUMANS DURRR NOBODY HAS THE RIGHT TO MURDER MILLIONS HURR DURRR
Hitler [Calm and collected, but taken aback]: Wow I just want to murder all the Jews and take over the world, but hey, that's your opinion and I'm totally fine with that. Looks like you've got some growing up to do.]
Relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-09-01
To a first-order approximation, let's say I believe the following:
1) The Israeli military is one of the top 10 most professional armies in the world, and the most professional army that is primarily composed of reservists who rotate in and out of civilian life, and is also the most legalistic in the world, by which I mean the extent to which lawyers oversee actions such as military strikes and have the capacity to override them on a case by case basis if they are a violation of rules.
2) Israeli culture responded to October 7th (similar to how they responded to the 2nd intifada) by pivoting hard to prioritizing security and deprioritizing peaceful coexistence through cultural and economic exchange, but not towards a desire for revenge or territorial expansion
Given this, it wouldn't 'make sense' to me that a genocide was happening. Israelis don't want it to, it's not the country's official policy, how many war crimes are committed is closely connected with the professionalism and legalism of the army, if it was happening Israeli society would quickly become aware through first-person discussions of family members of soldiers who return from the front.
Could you help me understand what is the 'narrative-shattering fact' that I am missing that would, if a genocide is happening, be able to process the available evidence differently and reach the truthful conclusion?
Also, would be curious for you to answer the following:
1) Is there a different strategy that Israel could practically be taking that would result in all of the following: additional security for their citizens across short and long term horizons, more hostages released alive, and fewer innocent Palestinians hurt and/or displaced.
2) What is the ratio of, all else being equal, of Israeli solider deaths to Palestinian innocent civilian deaths, that you think is 'appropriate' in this war to be the margin along which an Israeli army would choose its tactical approach, and roughly how did you determine that. Separately, what do you think is the tradeoff that Israel society would find acceptable. Separately, what do you think is the tradeoff that has actually been implemented in practice?
3) Who do you think has 'agency' in this conflict? Is it Hamas, Israeli elected officials, surrounding Arab states, Iran, individual soldiers, the civilian populations in any of these places, etc.
4) What is your basic model of the 'inputs' into the equation that results in 'extent to which Palestinians trade off state building capacity against Israel-destroying capacity'.
5) At what point in history do you think the biggest 'mistake' was made by anyone involved, that prevented a long-term lasting peace from occurring.
6) Is your desired outcome more determined by what would cause 'peace' or 'justice', and if the latter what would you consider a 'just' outcome.
(Q-1): I broadly agree with you.
(Q-2): I think the ratio of hamas:civilian by Israeli army is in the ballpark of 1:10 in terms of policy, and in practice has resulted in roughly 1:5. Agreed on all of your claims A-C.
Can you expand on your rejection?
My basic model is 'Israel is convinced that for security reasons they need to create a situation where Hamas is not the strongest military force in the Gaza strip, and removing them from power involves tactical choices that trade off risks to hostages, your military personnel, and civilians' which if I had to make up numbers I think a reasonable ratio for is roughly 1:10:(100-500)'
(Q-3): Agreed on everything.
(Q-4): Ordinary people. I think Hamas is driven by a religious mandate, PLO was driven by a false model of thinking of Israelis as the Algerian French [make being in Israel unpleasant enough and they will choose to leave] and due to a combination of that turning out to be untrue and Israel failing to robustly support individuals within it who could have eventually become competent partners for peace and state builders, it transformed into a corrupt entity that mostly accepts bribes for military cooperation.
What is your core understanding of why the Palestinians haven't as a body politic self-organized into making it clear to the Israeli body politic that they would accept no right of return and a permanent self-policing of any internal elements interested in violence in exchange for some sort of autonomy on a chunk of land with the expectation that within two generations, possibly sooner, if there truly is minimal violence they would get a state.
(Q-5): Not my answer, but a valid and interesting one I hadn't considered.
(Q-6): I agree with your framework. So, it is your understanding then, that to 'a part of the Palestinian population large/strong enough to self-police the remainder' any Israeli self-rule within the borders of mandate Palestine would not be an injustice that is a recipe for future war, to be cooked up if given the autonomy + means to do so?
[Super duper disagree with you on right of return; will respond in order of your comments, but that's what matters the most]
(speculation warning) That it's closer to 2 numbers in practice than 3 numbers is a function of the military reality of the war due to hamas actions, not Israel's collective moral values/preferences. If the war was different, the 3rd number would be relevant. I think the only situation in which the 3rd number became relevant was during the hostage rescue operation that, let's stipulate rescued 3 hostages in expectation, and killed 5-50 civilians in expectation, but the exfiltration operation came under hamas fire and it balooned into hundreds of casualties, I have no idea how many of them were militant, I assume most were civilian. In cases such as these, I believe the Israeli army before approving operations would consider that third number, and I could imagine there were rescue operations that were not attempted due to that third number.
The strategy of constantly reclearing isn't Vietnam style at all, I think you haven't been listening to Israeli military strategists explaining the strategy, or noticing that the military:civilian ratios are the 'best' morally speaking in the reclearing operations, and it's in the reclearing not in the initial clearing that Israel suffers casualties. The strategy is 'holding land creates a bunch of soft targets. we will clear an area partially of civilians where hamas wants to be, let hamas regroup there (sometimes it's a hospital or a refugee camp where hamas thinks it is safer to be), and then re-engage. this is our best strategy of maximing the number of hamas destroyed, and minimize our own soldiers/civilian casualties'.
'Some hamas soldiers were civilians when the war started' - maybe, hard to tell. But my understanding is that Hamas has been very significantly degraded. It still has the forces to kill basically anyone who collaborates with Israel, and to comandeer a significant amount of the aid, but on net it is significantly smaller/weaker, and doesn't have the ability to coordinate anymore is a bunch of shattered splinter cells and a couple of remaining batallions.
If you think allowing palestinians from gaza into israel (negev desert, or anywhere, heck it could be in a magical sealed bubble 100000 feet in the air) is possible in terms of israel democratic politics...you don't, right?
I think that the closest to reality 'magical solution if people other than hamas had different preferences' would be the gulf states financing israel building a city capable of housing anyone near the egyptian border, and filtering civilians into it one at a time making sure there were no weapons in there, and then declaring the remainder of gaza an unrestricted war zone. But Israel doesn't have the resources or patience for this, and it's not something the surrounding countries would be interested in supporting.
Israel is basically getting rid of any Hamas that isn't near hostages, with the understanding that they are under orders to terminate anyone who might be about to be rescued, in the most practical way they know how. They don't know how to tradeoff hostages vs. civilians, I agree, but there are plenty of places where there are no hostages where they do make tradeoffs between soldiers/hamas/civilians, and there is a constant, ongoing discussion in israeli society about if they are sacrificing too many soldiers to protect civilians.
----
Yes it is absolutely a reasonable expectation that 'anywhere that civilians evacuate from' they will probably not be allowed to return, depending on if Hamas remains the strongest military force in Gaza at the end of this, assuming Israel doesn't get destroyed by Hamas/Hezbollah/surrounding states which was roughly Hamas strategy as far as I can tell, which has failed.
Now it seems the distribution of possible outcomes has collapsed to 'if Hamas is the strongest force in Gaza, Israel will decide the size of the buffer zone they want to have, and go back to the pre-Oct 7 status quo. There may be settlements, hopefully not, I expect there will not be, but am unsure; if Hamas is removed somehow and someone else controls the area, could be permanent occupation, could be the PA, it really depends I'm a lot less sure of how to model it.'
All of this really, really depends on the Palestinians and not the Israelis, because of how much more Israel wants peace (a huge amount) than international support (a lot) than land in Gaza (very little).
----
(Q-4;6) As a massive first-order simplification, I claim that the palestinian identity is built on the idea that the creation of Israel is illegitimate, and justice requires no permanent Jewish autonomy in the region. The problem is that any 'autonomy' that has state-building capacity quickly comes under control of militants who care more about this aspect of their identity than the material interests of their citizens. Israel tried heavy bribes to have corrupt palestinian collaborators 'in charge' who do not coordinate with each other. It worked somewhat in the west bank, it was working somewhat in gaza (or so Israel thought) until it spectacularly wasn't, and the religious aspect of Hamas is the main factor of that.
I don't know where this idea of "much-complained-about-by-Israel Palestinian Right of Return can be dialed back to an acceptable yearly ratio (return of 20K Palestinians per year) or turned into Holocaust-style reparations" comes from. This was on offer in the past, and it was soundly rejected by Arafat without any counter-proposal, and he faced no internal criticism for doing so because 'justice' means everyone can return to Israel proper, and war is preferable to something meaningfully different, assuming war has a chance of success.
Israel is now motivated to prove that the chance of success is as close to 0 as they can.
It really really matters what would be done with a second state. Would it be used to build up a military to eventually take over the other state 'armed struggle to liberate Israel proper', or to build up a functioning state focused on the quality of life of its population 'state building'?
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My belief (low confidence) is pre-Oct 7 about 70% of Gazans and West Bank populations supported armed struggle over state building, and if withdrawn from by Israel completely would have both been 'taken control of' in the sense of 'what the strongest military power wants' by 'armed struggle' forces with near 100% certainty.
Israel was very divided on this point, and tried the withdrawal strategy and got Oct 7, and now believes this as well (before Oct 7 I didn't really know what to think, I thought the settlements were a big reason for conflict and thought Gaza would not be an issue and they need to stop or there will be massive issues in the west bank eventually).
They never withdrew from west bank (they were considering it) because either that's religiously important land, or because of the high ground and proximity to population centers it's too scary to do so. I can't tell which is the 'true' reason, I think the security consideration is sufficient, and maybe the other one is as well but if peace was on offer the desire for it would have won out certainly before the 2nd intifada, possibly after I can't tell.
To be clear 'the right of return' is *The* issue that prevents peace from happening. If the palestinian body politic was capable of saying 'we are fine with Israel existing, in perpetuity, give us autonomy over some area of land, and we will police our own extremist elements reasonably effectively' we would live in a completely different situation.
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My 'prediction' is that we will have a 1-state, 3-entity solution where Israel has control of Israel, and exerts significant military influence over Gaza and West Bank, who will be governed independently by PA and Hamas descendants, and depending on if Palestinians reject violence or not they will either turn into proper states or continue to be settled at the rate that is practical for Israel given its complicated internal coalitions, assuming that the international order doesn't at some point present a tradeoff of security vs. settlement, in which case Israel will heavily prioritize security, but I don't expect that to happen since I don't think anyone outside of Palestinians is fine with 'Israel existing on some land' but cares about it not expanding enough to tradeoff other things they care about.
Plenty of Israelis and Palestinians oppose expansion of settlements, and the current expansion of them is a function of the strength of those oppositions.
(Thank you for replying as you have, anything I did not reply to I read and spent time processing. Everything you claimed I believe to either be true or plausibly to be true, both in this long reply and your other one, and I am grateful for the quality and level of engagement.)
Instead of responding point by point, I will, informed by your reply, share more of my 'model of what's going on' and hopefully you can identify what is the core of our disagreement better than my prompts and your response did.
1) Israel is convinced that it is under existential threat.
2) The global community is putting very significant pressure on Israel to minimize the number of civilian casualties.
3) The Israeli army is highly professional and legalistic. I would have expected before the war started a much higher amount of israeli military and palestinian civilian casualties, and a much lower amount of cultural cohesion in Israel.
4) There is so much information/surveillance/documentation of this conflict.
I simply don't understand where the possibility of a genocide exists. I agree there will be some amount of war crimes, but Israel doesn't have the resources or flexibility to do it even if they wanted to, and they seem to competent / interested in their own survival to allow one to just happen through decentralized actions driven by a shared desire for revenge.
I happen to also believe that 5) whether or not huge number of civilians are traumatized by Oct 7 to the point of being numb to Palestinian suffering, the vast majority of military people on the ground are not the type of people to willingly inflict it, but this is not something I expect to be able to convince someone of over text, it would require actual immersion in the culture which you either do or don't have.
Can you state in plain words, what is the mechanism for which something really bad might be happening, absent an official policy to do so?
I grant that an official policy isn't necessary, certainly not a 'public one,' but in other conflicts where bad stuff happened without one I can explain how it did, and here I fail to explain how it could.
Are you saying there is some desire for revenge, or that there is some internal consensus, official or unofficial, that really bad things happening is necessary for security, either including or not including the implied costs to international support.
Ah, that helps me understand where you are coming from.
The claims I am making are as follows:
1) Israeli society thoroughly prioritizes security and release of hostages over revenge. Revenge is a very, very distant concern if there are actual tradeoffs involved.
2) Global pressure imposes a very high cost on getting revenge
3) Israel reservists are constantly rotating in and out of society, getting hurt, and securing significant gains to security
4) There is constant dialogue in Israeli society. This isn't like Vietnam where people don't really know what's going on.
5) Israeli society has become more and more supportive of the war, as it has become more persuaded that there is not a non-military alternative to getting security.
6) Israeli military is highly competent, and capable of policing itself. It knows that all of the bad publicity it gets is, to the extent it maps to reality, very detrimental to the war effort and international political support, and is highly motivated to keep it low, constrained by the realities of being primarily composed of reservists, many of whom are traumatized by Oct 7 and some of which come from west bank settler types.
Therefore, revenge is not being systematically chosen (and I am happy to stipulate to most of the claims you have linked to as happening and bad) and traded off against security/hostage release.
If the comparison is Nazi Germany, it was openly declaring areas Judenfrei (and itself Judenrein) because the goal was to ethnically cleanse Jews. Collaborator governments like the Vichy French were willing to put foreign (not necessarily French) Jews on trains to wherever the Germans wanted them. What was actually going on at the destinations was not public knowledge until people like Rudolf Vrba publicized it and got Miklos Horthy to stop some shipments (until he was overthrown). But Israel is not free of Palestinians, they are still a substantial percent of the population of Israel proper. That's because those Palestinians aren't part of a separate polity warring against Israel, but instead people willing to put up with being ruled by the Israeli government.
"Here's a list of antisemitic legislation that Nazi Germany passed from 1933 to 1939 [1], I don't see "Put Die Juden on Bahn and exterminate them with gas" in there, but I could be missing something." https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-363/comment/84752174
I used that comparison because it was the comparison you used.
"Genocide" includes an element of intent that, if Israel possessed, would have produced very different results than we actually see.
*That* is why all your hysterical shrieking is so easily dismissed.
"hysterical shrieking" is obviously an emotional dismissal without any evidence at a coherent argument. Attack the argument with logic or evidence.
The argument is the paragraph preceding the dismissal.
> and if it was a genocide, you're being hysterical
Not even close to what I was saying.
Is your reading comprehension really that bad, or are you just so committed to your blood libel shtick that you think this makes sense?
> reading comprehension
Glass Houses and Rocks little buddy, glass houses and rocks.
This isn't Reddit; go away.
> This isn't Reddit
Correct, your level of argumentation is Twitter. Reddit is what you will achieve when you work on it for a year or so.
"Before we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in Hell."- Admiral William Halsey Jr.
Or that if Oct 7 hadn't happened, Israel would have attacked anyway?
Can you look it up for me? I'm particularly interested in how many airstrikes were involved.
I found myself pretty cold on the latest Psmith review of Reentry by Eric Berger: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-reentry-by-eric-berger
The comments are talking about how insightful it is, and Tanner Greer took a lot from it... but I just don't see it? Isn't this the usual mythology around Musk/SpaceX?
I'm also pretty dissatisfied with how getting to Mars is treated like this all-justifying, obvious public good... but what are you going to do there? Say the miraculous comes to pass and Musk's prediction of boots on Mars comes to pass by 2029: they've got to survive there for a couple of years before the launch window allows them to come back (assuming a miracle rocket that can fly back to Earth with crew and cargo after a year or two on the Martian surface).
Have I just not seen whatever work is going into making that possible? Is there a parallel moonshot project for long-term Martian life support that just hasn't made big news? This Mars mission seems fundamentally unserious, but people keep treating it like it's a real possibility.
Starlink is the direct result of the technically unlikely, but extremely inspiring goal of getting to Mars. In 2025 Starlink is expected to have $12 Billion in revenue (these aren't Musk numbers and are reasonable given the astronomical growth over the past 2 years), which would put it on par with some of the largest Telecom companies in the world if it continues growing for the next few years (AT&T $30B, T-Mobile $20B, Verizon $33B).
This is all with Falcon 9 launches, with their existing Starlink satellites. Starship can potentially carry 20x the payload as a Falcon 9, with a much larger faring capable of deploying even larger satellites. That means more coverage, higher speeds, and smaller receivers on earth. Out of the box phones are already capable of connecting to Starlink, and they're going to launch direct to cell capability this year with T-Mobile. It's not a stretch of the imagination that SpaceX could become the worlds largest Telecom provider on the planet, and that's ignoring the value of their primary business, which is launching things into space.
The whole Mars thing is just the inspiration that keeps employees working harder and for less than they otherwise would at a different company (even the job description of the janitor talks about getting humans to Mars), and that's because meaning is more valuable than money in many cases. Corporate hell where people make $200k may be functionally less valuable to people than 12 hour workdays making $100k in SpaceX where their actions have some meaning towards and inspiring goal for humanity. The goal provides extreme intangible value to the company that reveals itself in their ability to achieve surprising success.
So the goal isn't justifiable in its own right. There is no practical, economic, or even rational justification for going to Mars on its own merits, besides it being awesome. The thing is, that I think Musk has realized and many people haven't, is that the intangible value for that goal in relation to employee productivity, employee satisfaction, and investor interest, far exceeds any possible costs associated with the mission itself.
This sounds reasonable. I think we bottom out at values differences. I don't think that using an intangible dream whose achievability is constantly exaggerated in order to squeeze out value from employees is justifiable or admirable.
It depends on *why* the intangible dream is being advocated for.
If it's a cynical corporate-overlord ploy, where you create this imaginary narrative to keep your employees engaged and under payed, I completely agree. The injustice is revealed in the truth and intention differing from the intended impression on people, especially since the corporation would abandon their mission if it ever become unprofitable (very likely). Promise people Mars until you have a mature launch service and telecom business, then pivot to no longer caring about Mars, so you benefit from all the enthusiasm when it matters, and don't actually have to spend the money on a project that has no future expected returns. Essentially, the value of the mission is the past enthusiasm, not the future returns, making for easy for profit-seeking businessmen to justify changing their pivot when it matters.
I don't think Musk is like this corporate overload though, and I think this for good reason. He has an irrational drive to make humans multiplanetary, as otherwise he wouldn't have started SpaceX, and dumped all his money into it when it was on the verge of failure. The expected ROI on SpaceX was certainly negative, with a predictably low chance of great success, but not enough to justify the investment. The mission itself was valuable enough though.
Imagine if you had a spouse who was sick with some terminal disease. No family to lend you money, no insurance to cover it, and you can't get a job to earn enough to pay for treatment. You only have $1,000, and need $100,000. What do you do? At that point it may make sense to spend all your money on lottery tickets, or at the casino, betting on the unlikely chance you win big, not because the ROI is there, but because the value of winning big is so important to you, the life of your spouse. There's an equivalent story to be told about Musk and SpaceX.
So whether Musk is a cynic who's using Mars as a false justification for increased enthusiasm, or whether he's a true ideologue that cares about getting humans to Mars more than any financial calculation would suggest, is up for debate. Either way I think as far as this goes, he deserves some charity when assessing his intentions, as he's been remarkably consistent in his actions, stated goals, and work ethic for multiple decades.
If a politician pivots from being opposed to supporting gay marriage as soon as the the underlying culture shifts (*cough* Biden in 2000's), it's fair to think that he's more of a practical person playing for personal power rather than a true ideologue for Gay Marriage. If a politician was supporting gay marriage before it was cool (Bernie in 1980s), we should extend more plausibility to their claim when they say they actually mean them. The analogy is, I think Musk is closer to Bernie than Biden when it comes to getting humans to Mars.
> I'm also pretty dissatisfied with how getting to Mars is treated like this all-justifying, obvious public good... but what are you going to do there?
I've extolled on the subject of Effective Awesome before, and I think this is one of those cases where Effective Awesome provides the best justification. Going to Mars would just be really cool, and doing really cool things is a sufficient terminal goal for me.
I'm all for cool things, but I'd like for the Awesome to actually be Effective. We can work on safe superintelligence, quantum computing, and figuring out dark matter (plus maybe some less awesome but still quite neat things like healthcare) before a Mars mission is competitive on a cost/awesome ratio.
> We can work on safe superintelligence, quantum computing, and figuring out dark matter (plus maybe some less awesome but still quite neat things like healthcare) before a Mars mission is competitive on a cost/awesome ratio.
We are working on all those things, too, researcher creativity and effort is not zero sum.
And like **mecko** alluded to but didn't quite say outright - working on the Mars mission has literally made putting a kg into orbit more than 40x cheaper, so ANYTHING in space is now 40x more possible. And we already have things like Starlink because of it - imagine what else we're going to get on the road there.
It opens up much bigger / better space based telescopes, puts us on the road to asteroid mining, gets us needed practice and expertise at doing space stuff and engineering and building more complex things up there, etc.
> We are working on all those things, too, researcher creativity and effort is not zero sum.
I mean... isn't it zero sum? Only so many researchers, only so much time between them.
I think I get your meaning, researcher creativity and effort limited but not *scarce*, so we don't need to triage it, we don't need to ensure that every bit of it is actually doing something we know is effective.
But if we're pretending to Effective Awesomeness, then let's run down the list of awesome things in order of feasibility (which I would argue puts a Mars colony very, very low on the list).
And if we're justifying this based on utilitarian calculus... I'm having difficulty expressing this part without being ungenerous, but building better telescopes and getting to asteroid mining faster doesn't justify massively misleading the public about the actual feasibility or requirements of a Mars mission. The idea that this kind of dishonesty is necessary to get to those things doesn't sit well with me.
> I mean... isn't it zero sum? Only so many researchers, only so much time between them.
But researchers specialize, right? Smart people working at Space X doesn't generally take smart people OUT of quantum computing etc. And ultimately it will give smart astrophysicists another place to work too, so they can study dark matter at Space X.
I agree that in the future it creates an incentive gradient where a given smart person in the future could decide to study aerospace instead of quantum mechanics, but if you think *that's* a loss, I don't want to tell you about the FAANGS and finance (which have been hoovering up all the best minds of our generation for the last 20 years, directly out of research, and into being wasted on financial derivatives and toiling in the Eyeball Mines instead of actually driving human capability forward).
And where do you see a massive lie? I think he probably genuinely wants to improve humanity's spaceflight and space technology capacity to the point we could do a Mars colony. He's done a lot of costly things that back that view. The road is almost certainly longer than he says it is, but so what? It's his money, Space X is profitable, and selling space nerds on Mars isn't necessarily going to take those space nerds away from any other more valuable work, they would have just been wasting their lives at NASA doing NOTHING to push human capability forward.
To your other points, you're correct about specialization, though it's not clear to me the options are so narrow as SpaceX or do nothing at NASA. Surely, there must be some other interesting development for a young aerospace engineer to get involved in?
And rest assured, I'm quire familiar with the failures of FAANG/finance. Elsewhere in the thread I note how my partner, who was recruited out of a CS program into a finance firm, now works as an analyst at a company whose tech stack tops out at Excel spreadsheets. Her activities to date involve a disproportionate amount of resizing pie charts and ctrl-Fing through paperwork. A waste of what she can do, but the money is too good to pass up.
>
I'll step back for a moment and make the same apology I made to mecko elsewhere in the thread: I came into this topic with a great deal of frustration coming out of family arguments over Christmas around this and related topics. It's made the quality of my discussion lower as a result, and I shouldn't have brought that in here.
This is my frustration: the fact that SpaceX has achieved some impressive things (massively reducing orbit costs, Starlink) gives undue credence to accelerated timelines of Mars colonization (eg humans on mars by 2029, million-person Martian city by 2050).
Belief in these fantastic figures in turn justifies and gives credence to Musk's other (more highly-valued) businesses, mainly Tesla. I started my substack mainly to write about robotics, and why humanoid robotics are massively overhyped. The biggest misinformation in this space, around robotics and the related topic of self-driving, comes out of Tesla (namely, massively overstated timelines to household robotics, lies about the current state of robot capacity, and the continued claims for the last decade that full self-driving already worked or was just a year away).
And in the past, when I've pointed out that these were intentional falsehoods, the most common reaction (from friends and family, as well as one early Tesla and SpaceX investor) was dismissal, specifically because Musk is taking humanity to Mars, such that his other ventures can't be judged according to common sense or that their malfeasance can be justified based on that.
And more recently, that has expanded outside the realm of tech companies and into politics and government. The same people (some of them my own kith and kin, normally intelligent and capable people!) think that DOGE is going to save the US government. Because they earnestly believe Musk is a unique genius who can create a city on Mars, and that if he can't fix the budget, nobody can.
I find this level of credulity extremely worrying, and that emotional reaction is what's driving me here.
Quantum computing isn't real? In what sense is getting to Mars and engineering problem, but making lots of low-noise qubits not an engineering problem?
Engineering that is still relying on technology that does not yet exist to make the whole thing anything but an insanely expensive expedition with no material gain in sight.
To the possibility of a 2029 Mars Mission: I think those who believe this will happen with a high probability don’t really know what would required to make it happen. However the main point here is that (and sorry for the cliché) “SpaceX consistently turns the impossible into the merely late”. SpaceX announces 2029 as a possible launch date and pushes hard for it and maybe instead launch a single starship to Mars, full of cargo or no it’s still a huge achievement. And from there maybe something manned happens the early 2030s. And people see that all things considered this is both the quickest and the most likely to succeed chance for them to see boots on Mars in their lifetime.
Motivations aside I do have to agree with your assessment of current work. There seems to be no in depth work being done on the actual Mars hardware, again though this is nothing new. SpaceX has repeatedly stated they are most interested in supplying people with a way to get to Mars not a fully fleshed out Mission architecture.
In the end though this is a moving target, the cheaper starship launches are the more mass you can bring. Therefore the less stringent the requirements for your mission are and the easier it is to just bring more consumables rather than doing any new engineering work. So it’s really hard to get anyone in the private industry to work on this with so much unknowns meanwhile at NASA the glacial pace of decision making means it probably won’t figure out what it wants to do for years.
I would amend that to 'SpaceX makes the impossible merely late, unless it was impossible to begin with and it was always just a big stunt'. I keep coming back to the Hyperloop, which Musk hyped to high heaven back in the day. We can look back on it now and say that obviously it was never going to work (as some did back then) but don't forget how it was promoted so credulously in media. A lot of people believed in it just because of his word. Every big, audacious claim has to be graded against that standard: is this actually possible, or are we as confident in this as Hyperloop fans were a decade ago despite its obvious flaws?
> SpaceX has repeatedly stated they are most interested in supplying people with a way to get to Mars not a fully fleshed out Mission architecture.
I also can't help but see this as a motte-and-bailey. I don't doubt SpaceX has said that at some point, but that's clearly not the message being pushed when Musk talks about SpaceX (not a big coalition of companies and governments, SpaceX specifically as a private actor) putting boots on Mars by ~~2021~~ ~~2024~~ 2029. One of these claims makes it around the world and influences public opinion and Musk's personal reputation, the other sits in the motte.
Musk said his companies wouldn't be making the Hyperloop from day one, and he was correct. It's not an example of a failed promise from SpaceX/Musk.
He released the original white paper, I think, mostly in response to the high price of the proposed California high-speed rail. He was saying one could make something much better for cheaper, and that he hoped someone else might make the hyperloop.
He did say that. He also continued to promote the idea via the Boring Company (https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop) and associate it with the SpaceX brand via the student competition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop_pod_competition).
Are either of these serious? Did he put substantial capital into either? No. But what they both served to do was draw headlines, make the idea seem credible in the eyes of the public, without risking much capital.
That's the point. This was never a credible project, but it gets reported on as if it was to millions, which in turn builds an image of Musk as a genius inventor, which in turn feeds the credibility of Musk's other promises. After all, the guy who invented a new mode of transportation can totally build a self-driving car that's already safer than humans (in 2015).
And the idea that it could be made for cheaper than high-speed rail (even at the absurd prices California imposes) was ridiculous from the beginning. It's high speed rail in a vacuum tube. It was techno-hype from the beginning, never an actual possibility, and I can only view that with a cynical motive.
Yeah, they promoted it. If you take them at their word, they did so because they were hoping someone else would develop the hyperloop tech.
As for having an alternate motive of building an image of Musk as a genius inventor, I don't see it. Suggesting what most people see as impossible generates criticism and makes you look like an idiot... at least until you can prove everyone wrong. Musk may have lent credibility to the hyperloop idea, but the idea lent no credibility to Musk.
You were arguing that "SpaceX makes the impossible merely late, unless it was impossible to begin with and it was always just a big stunt", using the hyperloop as the example of something that was truly impossible and not just late. But high-speed rail in a low pressure tube wasn't obviously more impossible than lowering the cost of rocket launches by 10x-100x. It's not clear that SpaceX couldn't have turned to impossible hyperloop into the merely late hyperloop. They didn't even have a failed attempt. I don't necessarily think they could have done it, but the lack of attempt gives us no data either way.
I think Musk really did think it could work and really did hope someone else would make it. It seems like you're annoyed at the media for the hype and you're projecting a lot of disdain onto SpaceX just for open sourcing their white paper and helping a bit with hyperloop R&D.
As to the Motte-and-Bailey I think that understanding how unclear and undecided everything is at this point has large part in confusing even the most interested space nerds.
I think the best way to determine what’s going on is to merely look at what SpaceX is demonstrably working on. At this point for the starship program that is full reusability and refueling, any life support systems or additional “colonization” infrastructure equipment seems to be limited to whatever is required for the HLS contract. Elon Musk as CEO and as the Futurist Internet Personality is always going to hyping ideas that maybe don’t turn out as original advertised but SpaceX is more than just him. (Also try to tune out the fan-boys they don’t know what they are talking about half the time).
I think I get stuck on the latter point, mainly because my family are fan-boys of that sort and I'm banging my head against the wall telling them that no, for the love of God, just because Musk says so doesn't mean we're going to be going to Mars in a few years. In retrospect, I probably brought that frustration into this thread, for which I must apologize.
Reusable rockets are awesome. Great advancements in tech. But I don't live in the aerospace world, I live in the world where Musk's social and political views (and his other businesses' continuous promises and lack of delivery) are explicitly justified and granted credence because 'he is taking humanity to Mars'. It's worthwhile to me to be a pedant about these things, because this hype has large consequences outside of itself.
>is this actually possible, or are we as confident in this as Hyperloop fans were a decade ago despite its obvious flaws?
The distinction here is that most people (including I) do not think sending starship to Mars is impossible from a physics or engineering standpoint but rather an economic/political one. And SpaceX has shown itself capable of pushing through many other difficult engineering projects in the past, and having the esprit de corps to follow up on stated objectives. So in this case I personally would consider a starship mission (note: w/o people at this point manned certification would be hard obtain at such an early stage) much more doable than whatever the hyper-loop was intending to be.
I would reply that the Hyperloop is also not impossible from a physics or engineering standpoint: it's a maglev in a vacuum tube, nothing unbelievable about it. Hell, I don't expect it would even require inventing dramatically new technologies.
It just happens to be a terrible, terrible application of effort and resources, taking existing technology and placing it under incredibly expensive, difficult to maintain, and dangerous conditions in order to squeeze out improvements to transit speed that are only possible at long distances and just... aren't worth it.
I'd say a (manned) Mars mission is in the same boat: forget the cost of developing and fielding the rocket, forget *certifications*, there's every other problem with a human presence on Mars, namely that you have to keep people alive in an extremely hostile environment for at least three years with only the materials they brought with them on a rocket or that you dropped previously.
As for the unmanned mission... we already send rovers to Mars. The promise of a Starship mission might be that it would be cost effective since you're reusing the rocket (but given that you also have to take the whole mass of the rocket both ways, I wouldn't expect that to materialize) or as a proof of concept/prelude of a manned mission, which brings us back to the point above.
To your points:
On Reentry, I think many in the space or engineering/tech adjacent found it insightful was that it tried to get behind the Musk curtain (at least more so than other deep dives) and talk to the workers who actually made it happen and dig into specifics of what they do day to day. To me it makes sense that this would appeal to similar type of person, who would wish to have a similar opportunity.
As what you would do on a mission to Mars-there have been tomes written on it so I’ll avoid doing that here. Instead I’ll mention that I think most people when talking about going to Mars really don’t mean that as an end goal. Rather there is a recognition that by establishing a base there and repeatedly having to manage a logistical connection between there and earth it makes it far easier to expand and do other ‘space things’ in interplanetary space. I feel like most people just agree to Mars as a target because they understand this and also realize that there needs to be some consensus and just to go along with it. (The Moon would probably work similarly hence why that debate is still on-going).
>"The Moon would probably work similarly hence why that debate is still on-going"
I think the debate is driven by the degree to which this is true. Going to the Moon doesn't leave the Earth-Moon orbit of the Sun, and in many cases doesn't even leave the Earth's magnetosphere; there are a lot of prerequisites to interplanetary capabilities that are not needed for Lunar travel.
That is true, my sense of the debate is that people have different opinions on what is do-able. And that people are pushing for the mission that maximizes what gets done but also won’t fail or be delayed too long.
I've been following SpaceX since the word "Falcon" was followed by the number '1', and I've been a solid proponent of space development and settlement since Elon Musk was in middle school. I also have a Ph.D. in Astronautical Engineering and decades of experience in the field.
Elon may be "serious" in his intent to settle Mars; I'm skeptical that this has really persisted through his recent turn to Terrestrial sociopolitical interests but I'm not a mind reader so who knows. But I do know that Elon does not have a credible plan to settle Mars.
He has a very capable and surprisingly affordable space launch capability, which seems likely to expand. And he has a notion of how to turn that launch capability into an inefficient kludge of a "Mars Colonial Transporter". But let's assume he's solved the transportation problem.
That is *one* of the *many* problems that need to be solved to settle Mars. It is probably the biggest of those problems, but it's still a minority of the total effort required. And Elon has done very little to solve all the *other* problems. He doesn't even know how to keep a crew alive and healthy through the trip.
The most charitable assumption is that he thinks all those other problems are so easy that he'll be able to solve them in a year or two when he has time to focus on them, but from someone who has been studying them (and the transportation problem) for many years, Oh Hell No. And no, he's not just off by a factor of two on this like he is on rockets. If he'd put his Twitter money into ISRU and long-duration ECLSS and active radiation protection and surface power and rover design and a few dozen other things, he'd at least have laid the groundwork, but he had other priorities.
If the human race settles Mars in this generation, SpaceX's rockets will probably play a major role. But if *all* we have is Elon and SpaceX, then no, we aren't going anywhere. So where do you see everything else coming from?
I cannot comprehend how Mars being a backup hard-drive for humanity is taken seriously by anyone. There is nothing we can do to make Earth as inhospitable as Mars and we might never be able to, even if we tried. (The same goes for any natural catastrophes short of extremely absurd fringe events.)
The only way I could think of would be an Ai unleashing grey goo on us (if such a thing is possible), but what's preventing the Ai from sending a couple of grey goo filled rockets to Mars?
Then let me ask: when you read that Musk predicts the first humans landing on Mars by 2029, or a city of a million on Mars by 2050, do you take these claims seriously? Do you think this is an honest, if ambitious, assessment of the technology, or do you think it's hype?
That's what we're talking about here. Not the possibility of multiplanetary humanity in the far-future, not futurist speculation about O'Neill cylinders, the explicit claim that human habitation of Mars *will occur* within the decade, and that mass habitation will occur in less than fifty years. Those are the claims that make headlines and shape public perception of Musk/SpaceX.
If you agree that these timelines are totally impractical, but that Martian colonization is possible on a much longer timescale than claimed, then our positions are much closer than you might think. The difference is that I don't tolerate hype, and I consider this kind of rampant overpromising to be a form of dishonesty that we should openly condemn.
To comment on this:
"The difference is that I don't tolerate hype, and I consider this kind of rampant overpromising to be a form of dishonesty that we should openly condemn."
Elon's Time is a well-known term in the SpaceX fan community, most of which doesn't treat his claims as gospel.
Nevertheless, I would read those claims less literally. They rather mean something like "as soon as we can do it, but we are really trying".
For the opposite, see all the ancient promises by the American government to get back to the Moon. These were usually given a long-ish term, something like "in 15 or 20 years", which everybody understood as "we might like to, but we aren't really trying and a distant enough term gives us plausible deniability".
I don't agree with you, but I admire that you're putting this in very straightforward terms.
If you'd like to make a proper bet, message me directly, as I'd like to take the other side of that wager. We can discuss terms and make sure everything is up to mutual satisfaction. You may also check out my first substack post, which detailed the process and characteristics of a similar bet about humanoid robots out to 2034.
Does anyone mean Dead Internet Theory literally?
That is, do some people really believe that a substantial fraction of the accounts they interact with are AI? Or is it just an exaggerated way of saying that maybe 0.1% of people you see, mostly the ones deep in the Twitter replies shilling crypto, are bots and you're mad about it? Why would anyone exaggerate things that much?
Dead Internet Theory predates LLMs, I don't believe the point was ever that accounts "you interact with" are bots. (Pre-LLM bots were, obviously, incapable of interaction.) It was that the majority of the accessible content is unorganic. This is a qualitatively different claim - that organic, useful, meanibgful content is being flooded out by spam - and, to be honest, obviously true. (Again, even pre-LLMs, though they certainly didn't help.)
The comments on Marginal Revolution, which have always been bad, are now both bad and mostly AI. This is probably just people trolling Tyler Cowen and not part of a large-scale operation or anything. More to your question, a significant fraction of the stuff posted on facebook seems to be AI.
I am certain things are going that way. Certainly on Facebook you can see it happening. I am prepping for it by being me - I post here under my real name both because it makes me slightly less obnoxious, and because I am trying to establish a serious track record as a meat person. You can generally spot AI these days because it is so dumb and useless, but for how much longer?
I want to see an internet-inspired update of Blade Runner where Decker's job is to determine which online accounts are LLMs only to discover that he's one himself. Plus, of course, that hot chick with a picture of Sean Young as her avatar.
Do you mean "anyone" as in literally anyone, or only notable/serious/trustworthy etc. people? The former would be a trivial "yes", if only because of the Lizardman's Constant.
Personally, I don't think we are there yet, but the trend is definitely going that way. I believe it will be Enshittification that does large platforms in and, one incentive after rational incentive, bring about the death of the internet, or at least of the WWW. It will be a cycle of platforms being created, peaking among real people, and eventually facing real-people exodus, as they always have. As the AI technology matures, at least some of these platforms will try to hang on as long as possible with bots. The real people will continue to join new platforms and the cycle continues, but the bots that are left behind will outgrow humans and thus steadily increase their share of the total users. At some point (which is not clearly definable) human activity will have such a low share of the total that the internet can indeed be declared dead.
As proof that I'm not fully hallucinating, take this example: Meta has made AI accounts an official feature of their platforms, even though after backlash they have, for now, deleted their known AI accounts:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/03/business/meta-ai-accounts-instagram-facebook/index.html
I don't think it's really necessary for a platform to get big for the bots to arrive. The great majority of the comments submitted to my tiny obscure blog are bot spam, mostly with no obvious agenda, and it's even more unclear what they're hoping to achieve there. It does have a standardized interface that makes it easier for bots to use than a whole new social media site, since it's based on the Wordpress software, but finding the comment or sign up forms for an unfamiliar platform doesn't seem like it should be beyond the wit of LLM, especially in the future.
Yes, automated spam comments on small blogs, forums etc. has been a long-standing problem and will certainly not get better with AI roaming around; as you mentioned, the internet's tendency towards monoculture is a problem at any scale. Additionally, creating whole blogs including content through AI, not just comment spam bots, is going to be part of the future as well. So it will be mostly bots, creating content for mostly other bots. The humans can't really win this fight - they either stop caring about the bots surrounding them, or they quit participating in the Web entirely, or they move on to greener pastures where it's predominantly still humans. In the latter case, the half-life until AI takeover is going to trend down as well.
Many months ago, I made a post in the subreddit of my favorite budgeting app asking a question. It got a few good responses and some discussion and then it went dormant.
A few months later, at 11:59pm, the post suddenly got three new responses. All three were basically the same, but worded differently - obviously an LLM. They weren't shilling anything, they were just useless comments about my post. I checked the comment history of each user. Each had made a few posts and comments in random subreddits dating back a few months. These weren't shilling anything either - just idle chatter about the threaded topic. Were I responding to them on these other posts, and lacking the context of these three identical posts, I might not have realized that these accounts were bot accounts.
Once this happened, I realized that the cost of verifying genuine reddit posts and comments had increased. What was the point of these posts? Was it to build up a good-enough comment history to pass the sniff test? Once a bot has spent enough time in the wild creating a social media trail, what do you do with it? Shill crypto? Leave a glowing review on a new film? Spread nasty rumors about Blake Lively?
I know the internet isn't actually dead, but it does feel like, if it's not dying, that there's a zombie outbreak that makes the internet more annoying and less useful. This upsets me, so I will joke about dead internet theory, to friends but mostly to normies, because it's an opportunity to complain that the quantity and quality of bullshit on the internet is growing and you shouldn't repeat anything without verifying it.
TL:DR; I exaggerate the problem to spread awareness
I honestly don’t find human Reddit commenters to be any better in terms of judging the quality of a particular product or forming an opinion about a particular celebrity, so nothing of value lost there.
The best product reviews are on YouTube these days or in smaller blogs that are very hard to fake.
Where are these “blogroll recommendations” located?
Seeing JJ here has shaken my worldview a little for some reason.
What should I read if I want to really understand (in an ITT-passing way) how the CCP makes and justifies its decisions around censorship and civil liberties?
I found Scholar's Stage by way of Scott's old blogroll. Greer's dayjob is studying sinology and military history for a U.S. thinktank. Although he discusses other topics too. For censorship, you can try (https://scholars-stage.org/candlelight-vigils-and-hostile-forces/) for starters.
He's mirrored on substack now too. Which is ironic, since I remember him being rather bearish about it.
It's not specifically about illiberalism but anything by William Hinton (uncle to Geof Hinton btw) is a great insight into communist Chinese thought for English readers, at least pre-Deng political thought. I'm not sure anyone outside the Central Committee really knows who thinks what since Deng.
I assume Xi Jinping Thought.
I was interested to note that the Foreign Language Bookstore (actual name of the store) in Shanghai stocks a copy or two translated into English for the benefit of foreigners, but I didn't buy anything in that genre.
Oh yeah, this is a good suggestion.
I'd still love something that's like, written in plain and non-sensational language by a third party, but nonetheless presents the arguments in a way that Xi would read and think basically hits the mark.
Good morning, I have written a review of a really excellent old novel called The Luck of Barry Lyndon by Thackeray. I read Vanity Fair in college and enjoyed it, but Barry Lyndon was a real romp. Not as polished as the later novels perhaps, but great entertainment these winter evening. Very funny as well. Have any of you seen Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name? Just wondering if it still finds an audience. Here's the review: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/the-luck-barry-lyndon
I've only seen the Kubrick film rather than read the book. It's a good film, but might be overrated by contrarian Kubrick fans nowadays.
Interesting recommendation. Not read the book. Having quite enjoyed Vanity Fair but not so much that I am inclined to go back to it, it's possible I am played out on Thackeray.
But I love the film, which I would perhaps rate as being in my top three Kubrick films (with 2001 and Paths of Glory). This may well be a contrarian position but isn't intended to be so.
I have seen it. I have not seen it in a long time though, so I would be wary of saying whether it holds up or not. It is very beautiful. It is somewhat cold as typical with Kubrick. It has a lovely soundtrack.
There is a quite fantastic dueling scene.
Congestion pricing seems to be the modern iteration of enclosing the commons: the poor being deprived of their traditional rights of access in order to benefit the rich.
The measure also benefits the poor, who do not drive but do benefit from the tax revenue and from buses not being stuck in traffic as much. The losers are those rich enough to drive but whose time is not worth enough to offset the congestion charge.
Legal right of access means little if you physically cannot fit that many people/machines into a particular place. Geometry > law.
This is a relatively new problem. Until historically recently, the footprint of a human trying to get somewhere would be tiny. With cars in the picture, it grew an order of magnitude, while the public spaces in city centers, which were usually built before the mass automobilism era, cannot grow at all.
Charging a fee isn't a negation of a right. The poor have the same right to pay the congestion fee as anyone else. If they can't afford to then they can go another time.
Rights aren't absolute and they aren't granted by God. They only exist because society chooses to defend them and society only has an incentive to defend rights that unlock economic value. Making things easier for the wealthy is good for society because rich people's time is worth more than poor people's.
I disagree with your characterization of rights. A proper Right is a thing it takes a government to take away, not one it takes a government to secure.
So paying for something widely available could be a right (muddied if you are paying the govt) and yes its not being a negated.
Using something created by others without paying cant be a right, you couldnt have had that in the first place.
So I agee with the thrust of your post but take more seriously being endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights
>A proper Right is a thing it takes a government to take away
Really? You don't need a government to take away your right to life. Any old thug can do that.
Rights don't exist in a state of nature. The phrase "endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights" is just some snappy rhetoric. Objectively it's complete nonsense. Rights are nothing but a legal fiction and therefore require a legal framework in order to exist. Without some form of violence ready to enforce them they disappear in a puff of wishful thinking.
>take more seriously being endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights
If rights were truly inalienable then they wouldn't have to be written down, would they?
On an individual basis a thug can do that as can disease, but systematic denial of life requires a powerful external force, i.e a government. Its not actually difficult to distinguish between things others take away from me and things others give me. Theres an entire political philosophy built on that notion in fact
Rights don't have to be systemically denied to be violated.
This sounds like the famous "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread" line, but unironically.
It is true the ruling class is incentivized to extract all it can from those unable to resist. The Iron Law of Melos, that the strong do what they can while the weak endure what they must, is indeed the way of the world. I will not say this it is "good."
That's correct. That saying has always been absurd.
The ruling class doesn't extract wealth from the poor because the poor don't have any. They extract it from the rich, which is why they (the ruling class) should be incentivized to make them (the rich) as productive as possible. By charging congestion pricing for high-value traffic zones, for example.
> I will not say this it is "good."
It is what it is. That's just how life works on this planet and you'll do more harm by trying to deny that reality than by harnessing it. If you don't like it go somewhere else.
Alternatively, if traffic jams are an issue, we could build more roads. Or we could switch to using bikes, which take up a *lot* less space than cars do.
Not sure what the state of the art research in this area is, but I loosely understand that adding roads (or lanes to existing roads) tends to not be very good at reducing congestion due to "induced demand" (or possibly "latent demand").
True, but they do make everyone that uses them richer, by increasing their mobility.
Good luck finding space to build more roads in Manhattan (which is introducing the measure).
Bikes are great, but it would require major shifts before they can make a dent in urban traffic in any US city. Alternatively, though, one could use public transportation (and supposedly the money raised by congestion pricing in NYC is going to be used for maintaining and improving the subway system).
There aren't many effective ways to discourage the overuse of a public good/account for negative externalities without adding a tax to it. Otherwise you have to apportion it based on arbitrary criteria or rationing.
Driving in Manhattan is already a luxury not accessible to the poor anyways. Not only that, but there are a ton of carve-outs for people making under a certain amount, essentially making congestion pricing not apply to the poor.
When it comes to restricting the use of public goods that are consumed for conveniences sake, adding a tax and allowing people to self-select based on their income and preferences is a very effective policy. It's not really anything new that this is always less impactful on the rich. On the upside, the city benefits from the rich consuming a public good they don't currently pay for.
I've always thought this too. Note that one person who definitely doesn't have to pay the congestion surcharge, nor ride the subway instead, is the Mayor.
Enclosing the commons resulted in economic development for everyone.
Omelettes and eggs, eh?
Private property is genuinely more efficient most of the time.
I like the products of modern industry as much as the next person, but that doesn't mean I want a life entirely composed of them to the exclusion of all else. Sometimes I just want to spend a weekend off camping in the wilderness.
...which, of course, is inefficient, so that tracks I guess. Just be careful what you throw under the efficiency bus.
It's not inefficient. Productivity decreases with overwork. Creativity increases with leisure. Creative people tend to be paid more and so can afford to take more vacations which recharge their creativity. See how efficient that is?
I'm skeptical of those claims about "creativity".
My question is: if we are going to start enclosing previously public property behind a paywall then why not do it for foot traffic as well?
A $50 a day fee to be present in Manhattan wouldnt be a big deal for tourists, business travellers or commuters (who would probably have it paid by their employees). And the residents wouldn't mind as long as it displaced other racism but it would keep the homeless people off the island and make it more pleasant for everybody.
They do, it's called a subway.
In Chicago we have a "pedway" for walking instead of riding underground, but you don't pay to use it.
I've never been to Manhattan, so I don't know how much congestion there is from foot traffic. If there is, then I suppose that could be a good idea, if there was an efficient way to collect it.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Start with a flat fee then talk about extra fees for those driving cars costing more than $50k, sure.
But otherwise this is a distraction and results in a waste of the commons on traffic jams, which also hurts everyone who wants to use the bus as most streets lack a proper dedicated bus lane.
Source: spending lots of time in NYC.