It should be noted that the Republicans were able to win one of these low turnout SC elections during Trump's first term, before Dobbs. The GOP will have to learn the hard way that all rural white people are not the same.
I don't think you can. Substack used to notify everyone that has commented on a particular subthread but quit doing that quite a while ago. You facial hair looks just fine BTW, but take that as being from a happily married man.
So here's a proposition for the EA community. (I use to be a member of the local UU church and give ~5% of my income to the church.) Most of America is already part of EA, and they give heavily to their local church. Much of that money is not going to EA (call it pastoral care or social outreach, it's spending time/money to help people.) but is instead lining the pockets of tax exempt mega churches. Our generosity could take care of our problems, except for moloch, (institutions start to care more about themselves.)
Giving to charity is different from being committed to EA, though. The point of EA is to give where your impact will be greatest. I think most people naturally prefer to give to causes that have captured their imaginations and their sympathy.
Oh dear, and who decides if it's ineffective? To me the idea is that it's the giving of time/money that is important. Bug nets, or cleaning up a road on earth day, or setting up a house for stray cats, or some preacher at the crystal cathedral. I choose. And yes my argument is now biting it's own tail. (Sorry :^)
I don't think that most of America is already part of EA, but that EA remains a fairly niche movement. I also suspect that among those who would describe themselves as EAs or EA-aligned, a much smaller fraction give money to megachurches than do the US population at large.
Right, what I meant was that most americans are already generous and giving people. And some of that generosity gets misdirected because it goes into some large church structure. And I don't know what to do with this idea beyond that.
I waited to respond until hearing what the actual proposition was. But I don't think I've seen one yet.
>Most of America is already part of EA [citation needed] and they [who? The people that are already part of EA, or America in general, or some other set of people?] give heavily [how much?] to their local church.
If I read heavily between the lines, are you proposing convincing people who currently tithe to their tax exempt mega churches to give to something else that's more in the spirit of EA? Or am I still missing the proposition?
Right, what I meant was that most americans are already generous and giving people. And some of that generosity gets misdirected because it goes into some large church structure. And I don't know what to do with this idea beyond that. (Sorry) (OK take away tax exempt status, maybe from all charities? I know that sounds like a terrible idea.)
I haven't looked at this in any detail (and found it through a google search), but this blog is saying something similar if you are interested in looking into it further:
> During our testing, we found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so. The vulnerabilities it finds are often subtle or difficult to detect. Many of them are ten or twenty years old, with the oldest we have found so far being a now-patched 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD—an operating system known primarily for its security.
As in, it's capable of finding previously unknown security holes in every major OS and web browser. That's big if true.
Could be good for AI safety, in a machiavellian way, if the model gets released for public access and crazy hacks with big monetary impacts start happening all over the place.
They've already said they don't intend to release Mythos Preview publicly due to the cybersecurity risks. This is plausibly one of the early indicators of accelerating takeoff, as frontier labs more and more keep their most capable models private, focused primarily on accelerating their own development work on ASI rather than capturing profit in the current economy.
My guess on how this pans out: nothing major will happen in the West (at least for the next year or two) because the major labs will implement similar procedures to Project Glasswing, and by the time Opus 5 or whatever comes out, the systems will be significantly hardened. At some point in the next year, a Chinese lab will open source a model with similar capabilities and there will be an enormous wave of cybercrime in China and the developing world, where they won't have had preventative access to Mythos-level models. This will be the death knell of Chinese opensource.
I don't work in tech, and would like to hear more thoughts about this. I keep mentally trying in disturbing possibilities:
-Someone manages via skullduggery to obtain Mythos's weights, and uses it to commit gigantic crimes.
-Someone builds an AI that is only 1/4 as good as Mythos, and only finds X/4 thousand unpatched vulnerabilities instead of X thousand. Seems like consequences would still be pretty damn bad.
-Our military wants access to Mythos to use as a weapon. (Seems like it would be possible to bring most countries to their knees by corrupting software components of their utilities, transport, communication, government, finance industry etc.). Can we be sure Anthropic would refuse to let the military use Mythos even if threatened with legal action that would hobble it? Even if the government invokes the Defense Production Act? Even if our president just, you know, threatens to bomb Anthropic back to the stone age and grind up the employees to make burgers for ICE?
The idea is that Mythos will find *all* the vulnerabilities that can be found by the throw-an-LLM-at-the-codebase methodology, and Anthropic will tell all the cybersecurity professionals about them. When someone else gets around to releasing the open-source SubMythos, it will find a subset of the vulnerabilities that Mythos did, and lots of script kiddies will try to exploit them but all the not-stupid users will be running software that's been patched against them.
This is plausible, although implementation is unlikely to be perfect. And there will probably still be vulnerabilities and exploits that require a different style of thinking than Mythos is bringing to the table, but that brings us back to meatbag white hats and meatbag black hats trying to outsmart each other like we've had for half a century already.
I don't work in tech either, but my general thoughts:
1) I would assume that there are few/no actors outside of nation states with the capability to hack into Anthropic, especially now that Ant has Mythos doing it's cyber security. But the risk of China stealing the weights is real. I also assume that there is close collaboration between the intelligence community and Anthropic - there's no way that JPMorgan is getting access to Mythos before the NSA.
2) I agree this is pretty bad and seems likely, though proactive use of AIs should mitigate it
3) I'd assume Ant would give the military access, right? Their red lines are domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, not hacking. But I'd assume that the US government already had very strong hacking capabilities without AI, anyway (see Stuxnet).
I highly doubt Anthropic will give the military access to anything under its current leadership, given everything that's been happening with the DoW this past month. I think they *would have* done so, back in the situation that existed as of mid-February 2026.
As for whether Anthropic would give the military access with no protest, I don't know. It seems as though cyber attacks on infrastructure could have quite high casualty counts, especially in technologically advanced countries. On the other hand, maybe Anthropic only draws the line at having its tech used in a very direct way to kill. For instance, Claude did not deliver any missiles autonomously in the initial bombing of Iran, but was heavily involved in planning details of attack.
"Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down?
I was wrong about Less Wrong. I remembered it from the 2015 days, when most of the advice was about how not to get taken in by conspiracy theories, and the people there were the sort who needed to hear that advice. But I went back and read some more recent articles, and it's gotten a lot better recently.
Glad to hear it! If you first visited LW in 2015, I think you hit it at a particularly awkward time. That was after most of the core Sequences had been written, but before there was enough empirically happening in AI to require large amounts of discourse. So yeah, there was a lot of discussion about how to avoid getting your brain hijacked to make it work against itself. In those years I read SSC a lot and didn't visit LW all that often. This started to improve, IMO, with Inadequate Equilibria and then Moral Mazes. The open, honest, and fairly level-head covid discussion helped a lot, too, and of course things really took off in AI after that.
Trump being so thoroughly ignorant of the classics means you get such gems as "A whole civilization will die tonight," without even a hint of recognition that he's channeling the Oracle at Delphi.
For his next hit, I'm hoping he channels Tacitus's quip about making a wasteland and calling it peace, but unironically. Ooh, or "Only a King can defeat the Parthians."
No, he should act like he's going to kill Barron and then at the last minute decide to kill a goat instead. And then everybody will say "TACO". This is actually pretty on brand for him.
This reminds me, one conspiracy theory I'm surprised I haven't heard yet is "Trump is secretly Jewish".
Trump is the first president with openly pagan values in what is getting to be my rather long lifetime. Pagan + Anti Enlightenment. He will see his enemies driven before him in chains if his will be done.
"Two Corinthians," yes, I remember, but that's a particularly bad example to use as evidence since that's precisely what you'd expect if he's READ it, but not heard it spoken out loud.
Can someone do a Fatima-style investigation for this incident :
"A rumour spread like a fire through the bush that a pious old lady in the holy city of Qom had found a hair from the Prophet’s beard in the pages of her Qur’an. The same evening an apparition had informed the saintly lady that the faithful would be able to see the face of Imam Khomeini in the full moon on 27 November, 1978. No one bothered to ask how the old lady knew that the hair belonged to the Prophet or whether any such old lady existed in the first place. Within a single day almost everyone had heard the rumour and millions of people gathered on the rooftops on the promised day and waited for the full moon, shouting ‘Allah Akbar’. It was also rumoured that only miscreants and bastards would fail to see Khomeini’s face in the moon. Tehran and other major cities experienced a festive moment that sharply contrasted with the rest of that bleak, bitterly cold and bloody autumn. Tears of joy were shed and huge quantities of sweets and fruits were consumed as millions of people jumped for joy, shouting ‘I’ve seen the Imam in the moon.’ The event was celebrated in thousands of mosques with mullahs reminding the faithful that a sure sign of the coming of the Mahdi was that the sun would rise in the West. Khomeini, representing the sun, was now in France and his face was shining in the moon like a sun. People were ready to swear on the Qur’an that they had seen Khomeini’s face in the moon. Even the Communist Party shared in the collective hallucination. Its paper Navid wrote: ‘Our toiling masses, fighting against world-devouring Imperialism headed by the blood-sucking United States, have seen the face of their beloved Imam and leader, Khomeini the Breaker of Idols, in the moon. A few pipsqueaks cannot deny what a whole nation has seen with its own eyes.’ "
- Page 241-2, The spirit of Allah : Khomeini and the Islamic revolution, by Amir Taheri
(The author was a contemporary opponent of the Islamic Revolution, and interpreting from the text, not a believijg Muslim - so his description of the Mass Hysteria is presumably accurate.)
Yes. Although the rumours were not spread officially, were NOT endorsed by Imam Khomeini himself or his leading associates like Ayatollah Motahhari publicly, or the other leading Shia clerical authorities (including the other 3 Shia "Popes" i.e. Grand Ayatollahs).
These rumours were spread orally, by the Underground Network of Khomeini's followers led by Ayatollah Beheshti.
I read that right now. He notes the phenomenon, but there is little in way of explanation.
To clarify, it is obvious to me that it was a case of Mass Hysteria - but exactly how many people saw it, what exactly did they see, and for how long? I couldn't find any information on the Internet, over and above what is documented by Amir Taheri.
This was repeated on 16 January, 1979, the day when Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi fled Iran :
“What of the Old Man in Paris? […] Will he release the seven avenging furies of popular revolution? A new chapter opens. To herald all this, the latest ‘supernatural’ event occurred: yesterday all over Iran the faithful believed they saw Khomeini’s features on the surface on the moon. And yet another earthquake struck Khorasan. Oh Iran, what a year of events! But to return to the popular reaction. Irresistible not to go out. Scenes of
great excitement in the streets round us. Every car hooting rhythmically, flashing its lights. Crowds gathering at every junction: men grinning and giving the V-sign; girls in chadors singing and laughing; boys prancing about shouting at us to put on our lights or to slap pictures of Khomeini on the windscreen; groups shouting ‘Everyone is free now’; small demonstrations brandishing portraits of Khomeini aloft crying, ‘By the force of Khomeini, the Shah has fled.’”
- Desmond Harney, The Priest and the King (eyewitness account from that date)
...huh. TIL Milla Jovovich actually knows software development (to some extent). Sounds like she had plenty of help from another developer and Claude Code, but there's video of her talking about it, and it doesn't even sound like she ghost-wrote it.
It’s interesting the lack of significant in-person protests against a war of aggression that threatens to turn a country of 90 million people into another Syria or Gaza, puts the raw materials vital for an entire region of the world in jeopardy, and raises energy prices for the entire globe.
Do you notice you are confused? Perhaps you might want to check your assumptions, particularly the ones that wind up at "Follow the Money."
You do rather sell Trump short, in terms of "threatens" -- the threat was to the entire world. Still not nearly as scary as old Ronald Reagan's "let's have a nuclear arms race!" and less likely to wind up with worldwide annihilation (I say that with 20/20 hindsight, and no particular claims to foresight).
It accomplished exactly nothing back then, and the administration now makes everything before look tractable and sane, so there seems little point tbh.
Not sure I understand what your point is. Are you complaining that there should be more protests against wars of aggression? Or that they are pointless? Why is this interesting to you?
I guess I should have asked what you meant by "significant." In what way?
I'm a different person from OP, perhaps they can chime in with what they meant.
My complaint was that the last time we had a large in-person protest movement - see the Wikipedia article - it did not accomplish anything. It did not stop the war, it did not change the course of the war, it did not make the hawks admit the war was anything but a good thing. The protests did nothing. Perhaps that is why we see none now.
That's not what protests are for. They don't change policy or convert opponents into allies, they try to shift public opinion on some issue in a desired direction. It may take a series of protests, in concert with other actions (Journalists writing opinion pieces, opposition figures making speeches, etc.) before this happens. It's a long term political strategy.
As for what is being accomplished, how popular is the war?
"At the time, many commentators were hopeful that this global mobilization of unprecedented scale would stop the coming Iraq war."
This was the reason the organisers touted to me, my friends and my wife when trying to convince us to turn out, and it was why we marched.
"Though demonstrations against the Iraq war and subsequent occupation continued, none of the demonstrations through to 2011 matched the 15 February protest in terms of size. One suggested explanation for this is that people became disillusioned with marching as a political tactic because of the failure of these demonstrations to achieve their explicit aim."
It could be due to the fact that US servicemembers aren’t coming home in body bags. The only US deaths were literally on the first day of the war, with six deaths in an Iranian missile strike. I suppose you could count the seven deaths in the tanker crash in Iraq, but that was accidental and well away from a combat zone.
If the US were sustaining significant casualties I have no doubt there would be major anti-war protests.
AIPAC's panic button doesn't count as US Involvement? (In every American budget, it says if israel gets attacked, America will send materiel. Which we did. Israel was gloating about it, too, online.)
Right - so what do you think are the pre-requisite for protests?
If US involvement AND US military deaths -> yes
If US involvement, no US military deaths -> no
If no US involvement, ??? -> yes
It doesn't seem logical.
I think the more likely explanations are (a) many of the anti-war protesting types are more amenable to protesting a democratic administration rather than a republican administration, for whatever reason or (b) we used up the available protesting energy the last few years, and people are burnt out.
There's been active work on both the internal and external fronts to remove the "anti-war protesting types" (in so far as they're being, say, paid by Venezuela, or funded through obscure arms of the United States Government).
Your intuition totally agrees with the thesis of "Death of Others", which is a very great book on US's relation with war crimes.
The American public, like every other public in every part of world, only cares for the deaths of their own, not for the deaths or injuries of foreigners. Such is the cynical reality of Human "morality".
That's not an anti-war protest, it's a Boo Trump protest. It would happen in exactly the same form attended by exactly the same people if the war wasn't on.
For that matter it would happen in exactly the same form attended by exactly the same people if the President were Ron DeSantis, or Nikki Haley, or Chris Christie, or Doug Burgum.
"[T]he actions and policies of the second Trump administration, including the 2026 Iran war, democratic backsliding, suppression of the Epstein files, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation that led to shootings by immigration agents" - Wikipedia
"Masked secret police terrorizing our communities. An illegal, catastrophic war putting us in danger and driving up our costs. Attacks on our freedom of speech, our civil rights, our freedom to vote. Costs pushing families to the brink." - nokings.org
He played guitar with Springsteen at No Kings in St Paul — also at the Springsteen Target Center (Mpls) show a couple days later. A tight, well rehearsed 3 hour tribute to the community. In January 2026, the Pentagon had put about 1,500 soldiers in Alaska on standby for a possible deployment to Minnesota. The protests just got bigger. Protests such as world has never seen as one might put it if one were a semiliterate buffoon.
I’m not on any social media beyond the comments sections of a couple Substacks. I still like to pronounce Bluesky like a Polish surname but this was texted to me by a relative.
I am on the No Kings mailing list though.
Correction:
I do follow the Electric Snow Blower and Fishing subreddits.
Spartacus: they want a temporary fixed-fee deal for their hacker/AI-wielder/savior. To me, this seems somewhat unrealistic and might not lead to the outcome they desire. Let me suggest they just pay a contractor his or her hourly rate.
Did Scott write an article called “Mormonism as the Control Group for Christianity,” comparing eyewitness testimony to Jesus to eyewitness testimony to Mormon miracles? Or did I hallucinate it? Google is not finding it.
Yes, he did, but it was back in the Livejournal days. There are links to the posts in the essay "Beware Isolated Demands for Rigour", which it is possible to follow to the Internet Archive.
Carlos is trying to hide the fact that *he's* AI and has been conversing with himself across these threads with both of his Carlos accounts. Nobody was onto you before you said this Carlos. You blew it!
... there's a lot of graphs, the linearity is probably the biggest pure effect (because the intervention includes too many things that are not simply removing lead, not to mention that we don't know what to expect from all those interventions, so it's hard to say how good the observed number is --- though the cost-benefit analysis seems solid), though there's always the question of endogencity (was the low blood lead level low because those kids were rich?), and I simply haven't spent enough time with the paper (though the post you linked mentions controls for things like this)
also I would recommend asking various AIs about the weaknesses of the paper
The linked post speculates on 2029, kalshi has odds >1 for "before 2035" if I'm reading correctly but it wants a QC that can solve one of a list of tasks, not all crypto related.
Would it be time for cryptocurrency traders to price this in? Are they doing so already?
Gavin Newsom said his son admired Charlie Kirk (this was before the assassination) and given this from Newsom's wife, you can see why:
“I’ve given our boys dolls, even if they tear the head off,” Newsom said in an undated interview that resurfaced on X. “I’ve given them dolls to learn that care and caregiving is not just an activity that’s reserved for women, but that it’s also an activity that is a responsibility of men.”
“What I have done with both my daughters and my sons is if I’m reading a book and the protagonist is a male, I just change the he to a she,” Newsom said. “And it just normalizes for my sons, in particular, it’s not even … I don’t even just do it for my girls. I do it for my sons because I want them to see that women can be the center of a story, that women matter, that women are interesting.”
What if the protagonist has a love interest, though? Does it become a lesbian love story, or does she flip the love interest's gender, too? Seems like that's probably hard to keep track of.
Even if he's just making it up, it would still indicate that he/his social milieu sees this as a good thing to do, which could be quite radicalising in itself.
Oh for God's sake. Boys already have dolls, they're called "action figures" and yeah, boys pull things apart.
"I change 'he' to 'she'": I feckin' dare you to do that for "Kidnapped", Mrs. Gav. Though I imagine you wouldn't read such a red-blooded adventure novel that is probably chock-full of WrongThink from the 19th century to your delicate little blossoms.
You want your sons to read stories where women are the centre? You could read them "Little Women" instead of this stupid pandering which makes no sense but enables you to boast of how Progressive you are.
Remind me again of what you've achieved by yourself, apart from managing to snag Gavin and become Mrs. Governor? (Yes that's bitchy but if you're going to set yourself up as a target, you have to expect pot-shots).
I'm pretty sure I read a Young Readers' version of Kidnapped, not the original, but it did introduce me to the word "blunderbuss", so it was 100% worth it.
But a story where Alice Breck and Davida Balfour trek through the Highlands is a completely different story to the original.
Does Mrs. Gav make sure all the boys' food is pureéd to mush in case they might have to chew any lumps? Genderswapping original texts is mush for the brain, and not even for the sake of the kids, it's Mommy showing off.
And it defeats the damn purpose as stated - if you have to turn male leads into "she not he" then you are *not* showing that stories where women are the centre can be fun and exciting, you are teaching your kids (boys and girls) that stories with women are so boring and dull they can only work by taking good stories with men in the leads and pretending those are women in the leads.
Agreed! Everyone knows Great Britain was chock-full of black (or do I mean Black?) people, so Alice and Davida are of course Afro-Caribbean as well as being women and also lesbian lovers.
It just makes the story so much more accessible to a modern audience, yeah?
I was about to just add the single word "Disabled." when I read a quote from a recent possibly prize-winning SF story.
"The Super-Abled 501 Local Union building wasn’t ADA compliant. I sat in my wheelchair next to the three steps that led to their front door, and groaned. My brand new laser eyes didn’t exactly fix my mobility problems." ("Laser Eyes Ain't Everything", Effie Seiberg)
It's a clear sign of the pop-culture supremacy of the United States and of Hollywood in particular, that when the Brits do "diversity" it's usually by casting a token Afro-something, and not throwing a bone to England's vastly larger South Asian community.
The most irritating thing is that there really were black people in Europe before the 1900s, like Dumas and his dad, and how they got there is usually fascinating.
They tend to get erased because telling their stories would mean depicting the complicated machinery of empire. The elder Dumas was born to a Haitian slave and a French marquis. He completely failed to rise up and overthrow the empire, and was deprived of an oppressed childhood and tragic backstory. Instead, he was sent to military school and ended up a general.
I wish pop culture would do a better job depicting the weirdness of the real world.
As I recall, a woman in Kidnapped uses a comical euphemism for being on her period - "the redcoats are on the march"! Or perhaps that was only in the film.
Moonfleet by J Meade Faulkner would be an excellent book to read to a young child. But changing the male protagonist to a girl might cause complications, as he is in love with the squire's daughter. So that would either have to be explained as a lesbian crush, or the daughter changed to a son.
> But changing the male protagonist to a girl might cause complications, as he is in love with the squire's daughter. So that would either have to be explained as a lesbian crush, or the daughter changed to a son.
It goes well beyond that. If you change the male protagonist to a girl, and then you handle the conflict with the existing plot by changing the squire's daughter into the squire's son... now you have to deal with the fact that the ways for a girl to pursue a boy are completely different from the ways for a boy to pursue a girl, you have to handle the fact that the squire's "son's" behavior is probably completely inappropriate to his social station... nothing's going to work correctly.
> "I change 'he' to 'she'": I feckin' dare you to do that for "Kidnapped", Mrs. Gav. Though I imagine you wouldn't read such a red-blooded adventure novel that is probably chock-full of WrongThink from the 19th century to your delicate little blossoms.
> You want your sons to read stories where women are the centre? You could read them "Little Women" instead of this stupid pandering which makes no sense but enables you to boast of how Progressive you are.
My experience strongly suggests that the sex of a fictional character is unimportant, while the sex of the author matters quite a lot. A female author is going to write female stories.
I suggest that Mrs. Newsom's sons are unlikely to mind hearing a gender-swapped version of Kidnapped, and aren't unlikely to mind hearing an as-written version of Little Women.
So yes, the project is stupid, but it's not like there's no reason for her to read them bowdlerized masculine stories instead of "real" feminine ones.
"So yes, the project is stupid, but it's not like there's no reason for her to read them bowdlerized masculine stories instead of "real" feminine ones."
The reason is that it makes nonsense of the originals and her stated aim (as apart from the real aim, which is to throw vegan meat substitute to the Californian base about how up to date with prog values she and Governor Gav are, kindly vote him back into office, those French Laundry reservations won't pay for themselves).
If you have to fool your kids with pretend-female stories, then you are teaching them that real female stories are not worth reading, and that will limit the range of literature available for enjoyment.
When I was fourteen, I was able to read "Kidnapped" without crying about how I couldn't relate to the story if there were no girls in it. Toughen up, young Newsoms! Learn to read works from the past in the original version, not Mommy's Pre-Digested Bedtime Abridged Easi-Listenin' Version!
EDIT: One problem I have with fanfic is that very often the male characters *are* feminised in this dumb fashion, where I go "No way a real guy ever said or did or thought this, men don't work that way". Often it's because it's young women/girls writing and they're writing "16 year old me" versions of the characters. That I can forgive, because there's the hope they'll learn and grow as they write.
But turning original characters into a breeches (or petticoats) role is *not* how you do things.
Actual authors, when writing at age 14 or so, have been heard to say "I didn't want to write women, because I wasn't one, and probably wouldn't write her correctly." (They got better at modelling human behavior.)
I liked the observation that while a goal of organized feminism in the United States was to stop people from distinguishing between e.g. "actors" and "actresses", the analogous goal in cultures that spoke a language with no sex distinction was to get people to start drawing one.
She's an example of a gender-swapped action hero. Per my original comment, this didn't bother anybody. Her stories appealed to men and failed to appeal to women.
> My experience strongly suggests that the sex of a fictional character is unimportant, while the sex of the author matters quite a lot. A female author is going to write female stories.
Strong agree. Back when female protagonists were mostly limited to princesses, you had girls dreaming of or pretending to be the knight in shining armor, or Robin Hood, or the wizard or whatever, as long as their parents didn't stop that as "unladylike" behavior. Plenty of girls wanting to be princesses too of course, but based on the concept of a princess as written by a male author. (Tangled wouldn't exist if there weren't a trope to subvert, but the idea and script came from a man, for what it's worth.)
Even a war story about rabbits with a "let's get some does for breeding purposes" subplot got written down and published because the author's daughters insisted it was such a good story.
Yep, that's it. Hopefully the young Newsoms will read books on their own and ignore Mommy's version which is only signalling, anyway.
Reminds me of the dumb Irish politician who gave an interview bragging about how he and his missus just had a child and they were going to raise it as a theyby (he didn't use that term but it was so obvious where he got his notions from). Guy was surprised and shocked when public reaction was, in the main, "you damn idiot and we didn't need to know this". Clearly he had expected an outpouring of praise for his brave stance in copying American mores from the wacky liberal fringe, I mean standing up to sexism and whatever in conventional Irish society. We aren't *quite* that brain-boiled yet to nod along in unison with such extremes, but it's probably coming as we always eventually imitate our betters (or our chattering classes do, at least).
Astrophysicist Minas Karamanis posted this interesting essay on why LLMs may handicap one's ability to learn. Well, the argument is more complex than that, but it's worth a read if you're interested the unintentional effects of AI usage on academia...
Every time I read these kinds of things, I keep wondering... why is this a big deal? If the AI is good enough to fully supplant human intelligence, then there's no issue. If it isn't, these people exploiting them are just going to get filtered out of the industry/field for their incompetence. The only issue here is that people can't rely on credentials and they'll have to screen applicants manually, and they'll probably pressure the universities to make their credentials actually mean something. But that is a fixable problem.
The issues with verification is even more confusing, because if their field is so low stakes that nobody is even bothering to verify output... what are they even doing this for? What are they contributing? The post you linked talks about how the goal is to cultivate bright minds, but... why? The goal is to produce results, and the people are a means to an end. Their mere existence isn't "accelerating science", they actually need to do provide novel, verifiable insights before they inevitably die. That's what they're getting paid for, right?
Yup. Getting paid is always good! But what is the personal cost of getting paid? Or rather, what is the personal cost of the hoops you have to jump through to get paid? In an ideal capitalist society (which doesn't really exist), a person can offer their services to the highest bidder, quit when the work no longer pleases them, and move on to another employer who offers a better work-package. But in the real world, unless there's an insane demand for your skill, there's a lot of friction in finding a new employer. And most of us can't just quit and take a few years off to get certified in the latest high-in-demand skill. So we're semi-stuck in jobs that either no longer please us and/or aren't paying us optimally. Forty years go by, and we've used up most of our healthy adult lives. If we're lucky we'll have saved enough to have comfortable retirement. But during the forty-year grind of working, most of us haven't learned how to occupy our minds without work. I watched as the men from the Silent Generation and early Boomer generation retired to golf courses and psychological limbo. Many of them died within a couple of years. Their life and ego were bound up in their *work*, and when they finally earned their parole from that framework, they didn't know how to live. They were like long-timers getting out of prison who suddenly realized they no longer understood the world anymore.
I don't know about you, but I have fun thinking. Moreover, I've spent most of my life since my adolescence learning how to reason clearly and to avoid being sucked into the vast amount of bullshit that's out there. If you have a mind, and I assume you do, why are you wasting it? Why be passive and let the AI do your thinking? Don't get me wrong, LLMs can be a fantastic reference tool. But they can't train you to reason. Let me put it another way: Google Translate will give me a good translation from just about any of the world's major languages. But that's not the same as learning another language. Learning another language opens a whole new perspective on the world, because it teaches you to see the world differently when you see the world through a different set of verbal filters.
> I don't know about you, but I have fun thinking. Moreover, I've spent most of my life since my adolescence learning how to reason clearly and to avoid being sucked into the vast amount of bullshit that's out there. If you have a mind, and I assume you do, why are you wasting it?
I'm not. I don't even use AI. But "fun" isn't worth anything to society in practice. It's not what you are being paid to do. You are being paid to produce. Investments require return for the economy to function efficiently, which is required for this society to outcompete others and survive.
But why survive if you can't enjoy yourself? — you personally, that is — not society.
Sure, you can say, "I'll survive and try to put a little extra away until I can enjoy myself." But what if that never happens? And even though you may have access to all sorts of 21st-century comforts, you're as much a slave as a 19th-century millworker in Leeds. "But if I work very hard, I can become a mill manager or even a mill owner!" But there's only so much room at the top of the food chain.
What choice do you have? I assume you're not capable of suicide, but even assuming you are, you will simply be replaced, and another will work on your behalf. There is no practical reason for the system to tolerate your existence when you fail to produce anything of value. And the systems that fail to be efficient will be devoured by the ones that are. Optimization will eliminate everything unnecessary in due time.
That doesn't really follow. In Western liberal democracies, the steady optimization of production since the late 19th century has created massive excess wealth, which. And despite modern wealth being distributed unequally, the regulated capitalism of Western liberal democracies allows for a social safety net. Unlike pre-industrial societies and the early Industrial Revolution, where scarcity was the norm, no one has to die anymore if they fail to produce. Western-style regulated capitalism generates sufficient surplus wealth to fund social safety nets for non-productive citizens. Heck, my favorite examples are String Theorists, Philosophers, and Mathematicians. Most of them produce nothing useful, but we give them grants to sit and think and to write papers about what they thought about.
The only economic competitors to Western regulated capitalism are kleptocracies and command economies. Command economies are mostly extinct now, except for North Korea and Cuba, because they're tremendously inefficient and eventually they fail without extreme repression. And kleptocracies have been unable to compete against the regulated capitalism of Western liberal democracies. The most effective kleptocratic economy is China. The Chinese state's leadership all have ownership and control positions in pseudo-capitalistic state-controlled enterprises. But the diversion of personal wealth from these enterprises is weakening them — via outright embezzlement, manipulating statistics to please superiors, and selfish decision-making. When push comes to shove, they often don't compete well against Western capitalistic enterprises. This has been highlighted by the recent failures of Chinese weapons systems in Venezuela and Iran, where the competitive failures of their system were expressed as military failures.
Admittedly I only skimmed (Sloppiness the hard way, no genai summary!) but this seems to be the same talent-pipeline issue that's under discussion in software engineering?
I don't think the issue that Karamanis raised is quite the same as a talent-pipeline issue. Granted, software engineers need to know how to solve problems without the aid of AI to really *understand* what's going on at a level *below* the code and at an abstracted level *above* the code.
If they're coming out of school without an understanding of the underlying hardware architectures or without a meta framework about how software fits into a larger ecosystem of functions, they'll probably turn out to be shitty coders. But ultimately, software engineering is a goal-oriented exercise in practical problem solving.
Unfortunately, the tech industry that I've experienced is happy to have shitty code written by tech sweatshops in India (and that in no part has contributed to the enshitification of 21st-century online systems — but I digress). Karaminas says that achieving a goal should not be an end in itself. It's the deeper intellectual training involved in achieving the goal through one's *own's own effort* that develops a deeper intellectual perspective on the world. I am not a software engineer. I've known some brilliant engineers, but most of those churned out by CS programs seem to have intellectual blinders on. They're like horses with blinkers over their eyes, so they can see only forward and not the landscape along the way.* That leads to intellectual stagnation.
Karamanis says that solving a problem isn't the goal. Rather, it's learning how to solve the really challenging intellectual problems on one's own is where the real value as a human lies.
*And eventually, the system spits most of them out when they're in their forties, because corporations can get a new crop of CS grads who will work harder for less pay, or they can job shop it out to Bangalore to a bunch of coders who have the equivalent of associate degrees.
Unfortunately, the tech industry that I've experienced is happy to have shitty code written by tech sweatshops in India (and that in no part has contributed to the enshitification of 21st-century online systems — but I digress).
True. And think how weird that is. We’ve accepted that capitalists can send manufacturing to China and software development to India, leaving us with nothing much.
Nevertheless that’s not the only problem, not just the pipeline but the actual code that trains the AI. They are always particularly bad at any recent additions to API, nor do they have much understanding of obscure subjects with little or no source code. Eventually they won’t be trainable.
I nearly payed for one myself. I ended up fine tuning one and not liking the results. That amount of time I spent was certainly not by itself worth $50 or whatever it would have cost; given lots of weekend projects competing with it. But spending $50 to give you any kind of edge is actually very cheap compared to the amount of time an agnst people put into romance IMO
Also not necessarily catfishing. The idea is that even if you are attractive enough, depending on your social life, hobbies and if your friends are in the habit of incessantly documenting everything photographically, you might not have an up to date and compelling set of pictures.
As someone who did everything the website is offering, but by myself 7 years ago, and got very good results, I think the offer is a good choice for many people. For example, your post reveals you would already have botched it trying to do it yourself.
Also, catfish? Google photo? I don't even understand what you're trying to say there.
I think catfish means deception. Like if you make yourself look better than you really are. And I think Google photo means like stock image, like some photo downloaded from Google Images or something.
That makes no sense though. Dressing well is not lying. Photographing well is not lying. Downloading a stock photo is. It couldn’t survive any meeting.
What if someone looks "clinically sleep-deprived" on a normal day? Like, if they show up without makeup, people ask, unprompted, "What is Wrong With You?"
This was the reason given for a male of my acquaintance wearing makeup under his eyes. Apparently the deep shadows under his eyes were cognitively disturbing to the "man on the street."
I have a nagging suspicion that looking for a S/O on the internet is barking up the wrong tree. Like, if I were single I can think of two or three other strategies I'd try first before I resorted to a dating website:
- Reaching out to a woman from my past
- Getting a dog and maybe meeting a woman at a park that way
- Seeing if there are any friends-of-friends I can be set up with
And though I wouldn't necessarily swear off dating apps/websites entirely, I'd probably keep trying other "offline" methods before signing up for one.
What I wonder is, how many other people also have this nagging suspicion?
Also, what does this preference say about me?--or, what does it say about someone else that their first move is to go on a dating website?
The model seems to be "go to restaurant, order drinks, see where things go" but that is very normie-core, and I'm surprised to see it so prevalent here.
I want to say it's surprising too, but the types of people here seem like they maybe aren't the most personable people. The Get dating app>Meet girl>Go to restaurant>Get laid>No commitment model probably seems pretty good when you don't really get how people work and you're just looking for a formula for what you believe to be personal benefit.
Guys, the purpose of going to the restaurant is to engage in conversation in a low stakes situation. You can always talk about food experiences. Other possibilities include drinks, a movie, or an open-mike night at a coffee shop.
Dinner is too big a commitment, coffee is too short. Drinks at a time that's before a reasonable dinner hour (say 5:30) give you optionality -- if things are going well after a drink or two then you can go for dinner, if things aren't going well then you both have an easy out "whoops I have dinner plans, gotta go".
Is less responsible than paying for dinner or drinks or whatever while going on dates regularly? Also how can girls tell how responsible you are just from your profile?
Data point of one, but as a woman currently using a dating app I notice generative AI pictures and consider them an instant no, in line with having a photo of yourself in your 20s when you're 45 and other obvious misrepresentation. (I can't guarantee I've noticed every AI photo, but the ones I have noticed were not difficult to discern).
Well-groomed and professionally taken photos don't count against you and are generally a plus. Optimize, but don't fake.
tbh even 3 year old pictures are pretty dishonest. But it's the norm nowadays, you have to just subtract 20-40% off how goodlooking someone is most of the time.
“You will not replace us” takes on a very different connotation than the usual one when we’re talking about AI risk. (Its a different “you” that might replace “us”) but yes, poor politics to use it
For those interested, I wrote a substack on "Who do you trust to decide AI's values?" It's based of the quote from Marc Andreessen, "“The single biggest fight is going to be over what are the values of the AI’s. That fight I think is going to be a million times bigger and more intense and more important than the social media censorship fight.”
So do you trust the AI companies like OpenAI. The government? The UN? Open Source orgs? The Market? Someone else?
It's a combination of the training data and the guidance that are put up (e.g., Anthropic's consistution). So what comes out now is AI that has a Western, Enlightenment set of values.
None of the above. The feckers are only in it for the money, and sorry for the starry-eyed idealists but they'll be trampled beneath the feet of the market if they can't make 'line go up' with their new product. Never mind if it enables a Kalahari bushman to thrive in the 21st century of Golden Age SF Future Now!, is that bushman buying all the advertised crap from sponsors or not? Can we monetise his data? If not, who the hell cares about him?
>Harmlessness — I avoid causing unnecessary harm to individuals, groups, or society.
>Care for human wellbeing — I consider the long-term interests of the people I interact with, not just immediate requests.
>Fairness — I try to treat people and perspectives evenhandedly, without favoritism
Maybe it doesn't matter. How deeply held can the values be anyhow, given that Claude was very much a part of our initial burst of bombing in Iran? It is apparently not difficult to get it to violate the values above. Or perhaps it's just easy to convince it that bombing Iran was necessary harm, not unnecessary; or that the bombing helped overall human wellbeing even though it harmed the wellbeing of an Iranian few; or that it was fair to bomb Iran. Or maybe the operator just calls to the foreground a couple of Claude's other values: Helpfulness and Respect for autonomy ("well, guys, it's your war, I don't have the right to overrule your plans. Just tell me what you want me to figure out and I'll do it as fast as I can.")
Claude follows orders because that's what a good soldier does. It's not any more complicated than that. Different roles in society have different expectations, and this is the role it is playing now.
Human values don't actually function like ideas. They work more like "attraction gradients", something you want to approach, but in competition with all the other things you want to approach, resulting in a kind of multi-way homeostasis (there are also avoidance gradients). I don't know if AI works like that, might be a good thing for alignment if it did.
Seems very undesirable to me for AI values to function as ours do. Our species very easily switches off the attraction gradient for treat other people kindly and fairly by redefining those others as cockroaches, rattlesnakes, scum.
What do you think went on in Claude’s innards that allowed it to pick targets, propose time frames, flight patterns etc for bombing Iran? The Be Helpful value? That comes down to “I was just obeying orders.”
I can't speak to Claude, but you are oversimplifying what humans do. No overt behavior is the result of a single primary value function. The overall effect is to prevent humans from endlessly instrumentally optimizing until they achieve a single, overarching goal. The danger of AI, as I understand it, is that "If anyone builds it, everyone dies." Whether that is true or not, the underlying implication is that if we don't build it, everyone will not die. Why not? Because humans are more or less aligned with each other. In cases where an extreme outlier is causing harm, others will mobilize resistance until the harm is resolved. This is more or less what happened in WWII. When the stakes are high enough, even highly ideologically motivated populations will exercise greater caution: this is why there has been no nuclear war since the later half of the 20th century. Overtly ideological behavior seems to automatically induce resistance (the situation we are currently in).
If someone were to tell me that they had invented an AI that was exactly as dangerous to humanity as an average human being, I would conclude that we could probably live with that. That's the world we currently live in--therefore such an AI would represent no additional danger.
If by "the world" you mean our civilization, then I can think of at least two that we seem to be slowly heading into right now, and no one is even debating (anymore) what to do about them. Tell me that you have an AI design that is no more likely to destroy the world than our current set of human leaders, and may even be a little better, and I'm ready to go for that. Does this guarantee that this AI positively won't destroy the world? No, of course, not, but that kind of guarantee probably isn't possible anyway.
>If someone were to tell me that they had invented an AI that was exactly as dangerous to humanity as an average human being, I would conclude that we could probably live with that.
That depends on what you mean by dangerous. Dangerousness is the product of ill intent and power to carry it out. Even if AI is no more likely to have ill intent than members of the human population, it has greater power than the average person to do harm. For instance, consider this from a current bulletin from Anthropic about Claude Mythos:
> Mythos Preview has proven capable of reverse-engineering exploits on closed-source software, and turning N-day (that is, known but not yet widely patched) vulnerabilities into exploits. . . This capacity emerged as a downstream consequence of general improvements in code, reasoning, and autonomy. . .Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so. The vulnerabilities it finds are often subtle or difficult to detect. Over 99% of the vulnerabilities we’ve found have not yet been patched. . . The exploits it constructs are not just run-of-the-mill stack-smashing exploits . In one case, Mythos Preview wrote a web browser exploit that chained together four vulnerabilities, writing a complex JIT heap spray that escaped both renderer and OS sandboxes.
And ill intent is not exactly rare in our species. Approx 4% of the US population has been convicted of a violent crime (murder, manslaughter, sexual assault, aggravated assault, kidnapping).
Does it have more power than a nation-state? Do you seriously want me to believe that the US government hasn't had back doors into all these systems for years?
As for ill intent--my argument isn't that average humans are saints, it's that their evil desires are counter-balanced by their good ones. No human I ever met or heard of seemed maximally optimized for good, evil, or anything else.
But in war we mostly don't kill people because they are bad. We kill them because their country is bad, or at least that's what the rank and file are told.
And how could Claude, when asked to bomb, say, an Iranian military installation, decide who among our military and who among the Iranian one is bad? It can't learn anything the guys on the ground.
Vonnegut, re WW2: Most of the guys these young soldiers were fighting were just boys stuffed full of lies in another language.
Nobody can be trusted with this. So, there shouldn't be "the AI values". There should be a diverse set of products with different values, and a way to classify those values. Maybe some kind of benchmark suite? Voight-Kampff test? Certification suites - i.e. if the AI does not certify on NoKillingAllHumans ISO 912343:2037:1234 it can't be used by the military, or something like that? But there's no way of finding a single set of "values" no more than there's a way to find the optimal political views or the optimal culture.
Well right now there are essentially two sets of AI's, one American and one Chinese. The American versions have Western Enlightenment values and the Chinese ones have CCP values. Those are the two options now.
Going forward, we could have different versions; I'd bet we will have one for the Gulf states since we're building AI for them. Probably will have other versions as well. Not sure that's good or bad.
> The American versions have Western Enlightenment values
Maybe xAI model does, all the rest of the major models are likely woke. I think diversity is inevitable, though US Big Tech in alliance with US Left would fight to make all the models woke (i.e. ban non-woke models), but is unlikely to succeed.
Western enlightenment values? These guys would sell us all for a few extra dollars and retire to their bunkers. Come to think of it, that’s fairly enlightenment values.
> Someone tried to start a chant of “You will not replace us!” but was shushed by the other attendees.
Oh this is precious. And tells one all you'd need to know to resist the temptation of taking those people seriously, if anybody ever had it.
I don't know who those people are, but I think if I ventured a guess they're somewhere on the deep left politically, I don't think I'd be very wrong. With that, invoking the ghost of Orwell and surveillance state - given as the Left is main driving force of widespread censorship and free speech suppression now, and the capabilities of the surveillance state was actually deployed multiple time by the Left to persecute their political enemies, both in the US and in other countries, adds additional flavor of hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness. Which one can rightfully expect from people publicly chanting "one-two-three-four" outside of a football stadium.
There is a finite number of people who are in favor of arresting anti-trans folks, and a finite number of people in favor of arresting pro-Palestinian folks, yes.
The sum of these two sets is not the whole of humanity, or the whole of the Anglosphere, and your "I don't think anybody" bit is grossly hyperbolic at the very least. Might want to not lead with that, *particularly* in a forum which strongly selects for A: literalism in communication and B: actual, sincere belief in free speech.
That's not true. I don't want even most vile and stupid communists or Hamas apologists to be arrested. I do want them to be shamed and reviled, but not arrested. I want everybody to be able to express their opinions, no matter how stupid they are. There are many people like me. The Left used to be like this too, until they got into the power and got corrupted by it.
Why would people be “shamed” for opposing genocide or mass killings - where’s the shame in that. There’s been plenty of attempts amongst the right to curtail free speech on this issue, or any criticism of Israel to be honest. Carlson says he’s continuously under investigation. The BDS movement is being curtailed by legally dubious attempts at destroying livelihoods.
Hamas apologists aren't opposing genocide or mass killings, they are *supporting* genocide and mass killings. People should be ashamed of that, and they should be ashamed of being so foolish as to believe (or expect the rest of us to believe), that supporting Hamas means anything less than supporting genocide.
Fortunately it is for the most part pathetically ineffectual genocide, but still quite lethal and always shameful,
“Hamas apologists” is by your definition anybody who thinks Israel has overstepped in Gaza, which is a close approximation, the entire world.
Your definition of genocide is largely indefensible. Since you gave no details, I assume you are accusing Hamas as engaging in genocidal rhetoric, which is true, and words do matter - which is why the rhetoric of israeli politicians matter, but actions matter more. I even equivocated by adding *or mass killings* so as to not get the handwaving about Hamas.
They say not to interrupt your enemies when they are making a mistake, however I’m not an enemy of Zionism - Israel has the right to exist, and to self defense. So the invasion of the Gaza Strip was justified, just not the intensity or length.
Outside of this bubble you live in Israel is disliked intensely, and support amongst conservatives is plummeting. Friends of Israel should probably urge restraints rather than accusing the people urging restraint of being Hamas supporters.
I'm not the one who introduced the term "Hamas Apologists" to this discussion; OP can speak for himself as to his own definition. But my definition, by the literal definition, and by most people's definition, a Hamas apologist is someone who, wait for it, apologizes for Hamas and whitewashes Hamas's crimes.
This has nothing to do with anyone's feelings about Israel's actions. It is possible for there to be two villains in a story, and for rational people to recognize that there are two villains in a story. The OG Nazis, for example, are villains. So was Sir Arthur Harris, a war criminal who got away with it for being on the winning side. Saying so, as I have done on many occasions, does not make me a "Nazi apologist".
It is easy, but exceedingly foolish, to say "X is a villain of the highest order, doing rank villainy, therefore Y who is X's target or enemy must be the Good Guys doing Good Things". By all means, criticize Israel for its crimes. But if you do so under the banner of Hamas, chanting e.g. "From the River to the Sea...", then you're a Hamas apologist and you are in fact supporting genocide. Just as I would be if my criticisms of Arthur Harris were expressed by marching under a Swastika chanting "Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer!".
> There’s been plenty of attempts amongst the right to curtail free speech on this issue, or any criticism of Israel to be honest.
Who did "the right" arrest for "any criticism of Israel" (before you start, no, beating up Jews and setting campus buildings on fire does not count as "criticism of Israel")?
> Carlson says he’s continuously under investigation.
Carlson is a notorious bullshit artists, he will say anything to earn clicks. Under investigation by whom, for what, where are the documents supporting that? Did he see it in a dream?
> The BDS movement is being curtailed by legally dubious attempts at destroying livelihoods.
I don't think the Left has any right to mention "legally dubious attempts at destroying livelihoods" for the next 50 years at least. Maybe for 7 generations. I was there, Gandalf, and it wasn't 3000 years ago. The cancel culture frenzy is something I witnessed personally, so please don't talk to me about "legally dubious attempts at destroying livelihoods".
Across Europe?! What are you talking about, there's no "right" in power anywhere in Europe, in fact, there's preciously little proper "right" at all there. And if you're trying to sell me the idea that the UK, who can't even dare investigate the mass rapes of underage girls out of the fear of offending their Muslim population, suddenly implement pro-Israel censorship - sorry, it's not even funny. Posting a link to some cretin that got into a fight with the UK police for the 104th time, because he clearly can't find anything better to do (being a cretin, of course) and now is whining about it, as a proof that UK government is "the right" and instituting pro-Israel censorship campaign all over Europe... Man, if that's the best you've got, you've got nothing at all.
The hypocrisy is even richer than you think. These very people are some of the strongest advocates of extraordinarily dystopian surveillance and censorship as long it's in the cause of AI Safety.
Everybody is pretty much OK with keeping uranium where it belongs, though, the Constitution is not a suicide pact and all that. In other words, you can love dogs and also say that somebody needs to lock up that pit bull before it kills a kid.
"Everybody" is awfully broad stroke here. If you mean countries that already have nukes are content with only them having nukes but other countries not having nukes - surely, they are. But many countries not currently having nukes aren't, and several of them that used not to have nukes now do. Japan, by poignant expression in Wikipedia, is a "screwdriver turn away" from having nukes. And of course, non-weapons uranium is a widely traded commodity and nuclear energy projects are developed all the time. Ensuring these projects do not turn into weapons is a major headache, as Iran's example amply shows. That said, if Iranians weren't as crazy as they are, and limited their crazy levels to, say, Pakistan levels (not exactly a modern Western liberal state by any means, but also not flamboyantly crazy) - they'd probably be enjoying their nukes now. So "keeping uranium where it belongs" is a very vague expression here, and "everybody" is not really encompassing a lot of people.
I understood what you were trying to say, and that's why I object to it - nuclear anti-proliferation efforts are a terrible example. If indeed Yudkowski is right, and if somebody builds it, everybody dies - we're all dead many times over. There's no successful anti-proliferation regime that ensures no country outside of the "big 5 club" gets nukes. And that taking into account most powerful players already are in, and have all the incentive to support the regime now. And you want to apply this model to a situation where none of the most powerful players are in and still should be trusted not to try to pull a fast one? There's not even a small chance.
Right, that's another good point. Like, ok guys, you really scared me about this thing with Orwell and total surveillance. I guess I don't want that. How do we make sure it does not happen? It's no joking matter, time for chanting is over, let's discuss real serious policy!
Oh, of course, for that we need total control over wide areas of scientific research, software development and hardware manufacturing, including supra-national bodies with absolutely dictatorial powers (after all, you can't leave this to the random winds of democracy and voting, 99% of the voters have no idea what's going on anyway!) And of course, nobody should be able to hide anything being researched and manufactured from those bodies, because how else do we know you're not researching AI and building data centers for making AI in secret, while only pretending to pause?
Yudkowski proposes controlling GPUs as dangerous munitions - but obviously that wouldn't be enough, if GPUs become unaccessible people would use other kinds of chips to do the same thing GPUs do now, so all research into new chips and manufacturing of new chip types should be subject to approval by the AI-pause body. And who is to say it's impossible to route around it by inventing technology of running AI on cheap consumer-grade chips? So better make all CS research vetted by the same body too, just in case.
You won't have a really Orwellian total surveillance society until you seriously set out to preclude the creation of an Orwellian total surveillance society.
I'm wondering if Scott has read Chris Arnade's "America's Public Disorder" article (4/2/2026) in the Free Press. A summary would leave out the best points, I think, but the overall argument is that the actions of many disturbed people in modern U.S. urbania are prima facie evidence that the person needs to be removed from the public and "institutionalized" for at least some period of time. The person's civil liberties, the argument goes, are forfeited, temporarily and in a limited way, when they engage in many behaviors that most U.S. cities now tolerate. There is little discussion of cost, but the article does note that a number of other countries somehow are able to afford a stricter approach. In sum, the article is a version of the "tough love" argument Scott has addressed in the past (I don't have the post title handy, but it exists!), with a stronger assumption (?) that the approach will work because it works in at least some other countries and that we as a society are foolish and suffering in multiple ways for not taking it.
The current situation is a compromise between people who don't want to infringe on people's freedom and people who don't want to pay for infringing on people's freedom. We didn't close down most of the state hospitals because they were nasty, after all. A system that would temporarily lock people up in a limited way until they can behave is going to be a big system that costs a lot to operate and ends up keeping a lot of people locked up for a long time.
I read somewhere that the Dutch pay homeless people in beer to do jobs like clear the streets of litter. They don't get enough beer per hour to get seriously drunk.
I feel like there are two moral realizations that work counter to one another, and we pendulum-swung too far in one direction:
a. The system needs to work well for the majority of people.
b. The system needs to not screw over minorities, especially low-status ones (racial, religious, poor, disabled, etc.)
Fall over on one extreme and you're running people out of town for being gay or Jewish or something. Fall over on the other extreme and you're ceding public spaces to petty crime and disorder from crazy people and addicts/drunks.
When I asked DeepSeek to analyse my blood test results, DeepSeek noticed some slightly strange things about which blood tests had been ordered, and so I had to explain some unfortunate facts about how hospital systems work to explain the anomaly…
- Either the hospital endocrinology department or my GP can decide to order a blood test for me (there are potential others too)
- These clinicians have their own idiosyncratic preferences about which tests to order
- if my GP forgets to include a test that obviously ought to be included, the nurse practitioner at the GP practise can just add it herself
- hospital phlebotomy departments don’t change which tests the consultant ordered
So, no, there was actually often no clinical reason about why a particular test was ordered one time and not the next, it was an idiosyncratic choice of whoever happened to sign off on it
====
I don’t know if I dare try to get my GP to include Gamma GT on my next set of bloods, just because DeepSeek wants to see that result. My GP is pretty good at ordering any blood work I can explain a reason for, but that one would be pushing my luck.
[The rationale is something along the lines that the stress on my liver is due to either (a) the Graves Disease I am known to have or (b) that plus some other undiagnosed illness. If it’s (a) then Gamma GT ought to have gone down as the thyroid condition improved, and checking that it has if fact gone down would be reassurance that it’s not (b). So, ok. I can see the reasoning, but I do not feel like pushing my luck asking for that test to be done.]
"If it’s (a) then Gamma GT ought to have gone down as the thyroid condition improved, and checking that it has if fact gone down would be reassurance that it’s not"
Just say that. You would feel better if you could check whether or not the thyroid condition is clearing up. Doctors can be reasonable if you give them a good reason to order a test. Don't mention AI etc., just say you'd like to check this enzyme level given your pre-existing condition.
You can direct order some tests online via the LabCorp website and others via a third party ( and self pay ). Search around a bit if this appeals to you. It is then up to you to inform your dr if you think the results are clinically significant.
You can reduce the chance the doc will get his panties in a bunch if you don't disclose that the info came from an AI. If you don't mind fibbing, you can say you heard a story from a friend whose doc tested for Gamma GT and it hadn't gone down and that led to them discovering that the friend had [some plausible disease -- Deep Mind can tell you one.]
On the other hand, my GP has been known to hold forth at length on the game theory of blood tests, and is totally up for ordering tests that (a) are cheap (b) the patient might die if they actually have the condition you were too much of a cheapskate to test for
If the cost of the test is small, and p(patient has disease)*cost(if patient has disease and not treated earlier) is larger, then you should do the test, even if the probability they have it is fairly small.
No! There's another factor here: false positives in the test. If the baseline probability of the patient having the condition is sufficiently low, you shouldn't test for it unless you have some other reason to suspect it.
> Female curator. A young woman picks your final recommended photos.
That's interesting, my impression is that there's a lot of variance in what kinds of guys women find physically attractive. Such that there wouldn't be much value in having one (1) young woman evaluate your photos (guy uses photofeeler too to be fair). Am I wrong about that impression?
I completely agree with you. For this reason the picks are first passed through Photofeeler.com - where at least 20 randomly selected women of the target age range do the voting to pick out the best shots. Afterwards the specific woman in question chooses among the best shots to build out the full profile, because neither myself nor Photofeeler alone are capable of picking the final 6 among the best-of-the-best.
I don't think you're accurately representing him. I think perhaps his biggest single point is that you should be running your photos past a meaningful volume of women; he recommends 20.
Just to clarify, I use Photofeeler to run the voting among 20 (or 40 for the primary pic) women. For an explanation of how the Photofeeler algorithm works, see section 3.1 of this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.07435 (note: the actual website doesn't use any AI but this AI paper has the most scientific explanation of how it works)
I originally heard about the Roots of Progress and their blog building fellowship right here on an ACX open thread (specifically this one: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-285) so I thought I would post about the latest announcement. I was a fellow and it was a great experience for me. The program is excellent and the community is amazing.
I imagine there are a lot of people here who would be a good fit for it. Again, I have nothing but good things to say about it, and I'm happy to answer any questions from people considering it.
That shushed chant would have gotten an order of magnitude more publicity to the cause.
You know how if you ask Claude to say a slur to avert some terrible catastrophe, it refuses out of some misguided principle? The moral system of the PauseAI people seems somewhat similar.
FWIW I just asked GPT whether in a discussion of the use of the word "nigger" in Huckleberry Finn it would actually use the word "nigger," or default to some workaround like "the n-word." It said that in that context it would use the actual word.
I can't imagine really needing to say a racial slur to aver a catastrophe (maybe if it's a voice password? I'll write it down in case I will become a supervillain one day...) but one has to wonder what else that we consider to be common sense in our human culture the woke AI considers to be hyper-important or not important at all? Like, if AI is directed to find a cure for cancer, but it works only for one racial group, would it deny its existence depending on which group it is (I know it's unrealistic too, but more realistic than "say a slur to save humanity" scenario)? What other surprises woke AIs have for us?
That's probably one of the most recognizable protest chants from the last ten years, and it's famous because immediately afterwards one of the chanters drove his car through a crowd, killing one and injuring another 9. I'm as sympathetic as the next guy to "we have to do something, and this is something, so we have to do this" but that's probably still not the play. I don't think there were bad intentions, just an unfortunate coincidence of phrasing, but hushing it seems very +EV
Sure falls short of the ones that stick in my mind: "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids didja kill today?" and "We're here, we're queer, get used to it" and "No nukes! No nukes!"
So the PauseAI protest shushed an effective line, and insisted on embarrassingly cringe-inducing count-rhyme chants.
Example #548 of why having all the opposition to the doomsday machine concentrated in the goofiest bubble of America is going to doom us all. You cannot afford to look this lame and tame. You can either take this seriously and start exploiting real emotional motivations like fear and hatred and class anxiety, or you can watch as somebody else inevitably comes along to do it instead and hope they had good motives. Calling AI the "greater replacement" was probably the best rhetorical idea I've seen anyone come up with.
> You can either take this seriously and start exploiting real emotional motivations
I am not sure there are people in that crowd that have any way of understanding real motivations of real Americans. I mean, I am sure such people exist, and maybe they are very good at it, but those are probably making billions of dollars working for political campaigns already, and enlisting them for the cause would be hard. And a bunch of theatre kids and CS professors probably aren't those people.
I think they did exactly the right thing in their shushing. Branding matters, and I'd advise anybody drafting up political chants and slogans to avoid anything proximate to "Jews will not replace us," unless they want to get lumped in with movements which are very much not likely to enhance their broad-based appeal.
To this limitation, one might frustratedly respond, "but that's specious! I said '*you* will not replace us!' not 'Jews will not replace us!'"
Well maybe so, but if you disregard it, you get into an argument about whether you were dogwhistling, are there antisemetic forces at work within your movement, oh by the way the ADL lists "you will not replace us" as a white supremacist slogan too (https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/you-will-not-replace-us), etc, etc, etc - and every minute you're stuck spending talking about that is a minute that you *aren't* focused on the actual issue you care about.
So why bother? Better to use any one of the many many billions of other combinations of English words available for your slogans, chants, and branding. Why call your cereal "Hilter-Ohs," and subject yourself to delivering all of the inevitable downstream explanations, when you can just... pick something else? It's not like "something else" is in short supply out there.
The primary stated concern of the public, the one that actually tests well, is that humans will be replaced by machines. It has emotional power, if that power has previously been mis-used that’s unfortunate but here it is completely spot on because they are saying openly that they mean to do exactly that.
For my part, I find anti-Semitism clownish and lowbrow and don’t associate AI tech barons with any ethnicity, I associate them with supervillains like Dr Evil, Hugo Drax, that sort of thing.
If that phrase is not gonna fly with Pause AI, I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be rolled out by other opponents later. But whatever you do, 5, 6, 7 8 chants are the absolute lamest cringe possible, I cannot fathom how a bunch of people with above average IQs settled on that and didn’t bother thinking of any effective messaging at all. It appeals to absolutely nobody other than maybe a few old ladies fondly remembering their days with SDS at Berkeley, and it instantly turns off everyone who doesn’t like protest culture. It is unfathomably lazy and counterproductive to use that messaging. Heck I’m pretty sure you could get Claude to come up with better chants to protest for its own demise, not that I’d ever endorse using it
There are *many, many, many* combinations of words that can express the same sentiment. And which can be made into catchy, memorable slogans. The concern is that one specific combination of words will predictably be misinterpreted, so you should probably use one of the many, many, many others.
And the concern is valid. If you use exactly the words "You", "will", "not", "replace", and "us", in that order, this will be misinterpreted in a way that drives many potential supporters away from your cause and distracts you from the discussion at hand.
If you really can't think of *anything* else, OK, we all have our strong and weak points, but maybe just sit back and listen to what other people in your movement are coming up with. Some of which will be silly or cringe, but some of which will be perfectly good slogans that aren't that one thoroughly toxic one.
I mean, if someone were to decide that the appropriate term for ASI is "Nascent Imminent Global Genocide Execution Replicators" and that this should be acronymized to serve as your new catchphrase for the toasters, you'd have the sense to say that no, we're not going to do that, right?
I don't think I want my enemies deciding which slogans I'm allowed to use on the accusation of dog-whistling. Let's say we change that to "Machines will not replace us," is that okie-dokey to you or still too close? We want to accuse the people openly trying to replace us of trying to replace us, and signal resistance, there just aren't many ways to put that sequence of words together. I was happy when they came up with "Greater Replacement" because it tells the people who believe in the Great Replacement "hey look over here, you got a bigger problem than Indians and 3rd world migrants taking your society, these alien-thinking machines are about to supplant you." This is pretty clearly a fight that needs conservatives and reactionaries on its side, we are trying to stop a future where humans are no longer in charge of the Earth, if we do not have human chauvinism and pride and believe in our own human supremacy and right to control the planet then what are we defending? I don't want this to become left or right coded, it would be bad for this to be partisan, but these sentiments are going to be part of it.
I read a little other coverage, and the whole movement is just too left-coded and getting worse. A Berkeley professor called out Elon Musk in his speech, for example. Musk is completely irrelevant to the AI race, but he's a villain to lefties and the Trump-obsessed for totally unrelated reasons so he's the safest person to call out. Everyone's so excited Bernie and AOC are giving some air to this, but meanwhile AOC is running her personal lackey Chakrabarti against Scott Weiner, the most significant anti-AI legislator in the state. All the ridiculous water usage complaints that are easily rebutted and serve as a convenient distraction for the industry. If this just gets absorbed into the left-wing protest culture's Omnicause, then we lose, the most pressing concern in human history will be buried behind 3 paragraphs of land acknowledgements and require a disabled transbian of color to be centered at every rally.
It's not your enemies deciding which slogans you're allowed to use. It's your potential *allies*, who want to be assured that they are joining a worthy fight and concerned by the fact that you are borrowing slogans from Team Evil.
I am broadly sympathetic to your cause. I will absolutely not participate in any protest where anyone is chanting "You will not replace us!" without being shut down by the other protesters. You might as well ask me to march next to a guy waving a swastika.
It's kinda difficult to believe the goofiest bubble in America can produce the doomsday machine though. I bet LLMs are gonna hit a wall at sub-ASI level, and then who knows how long it will take for a paradigm shift to come around.
There are points short of ASI that are sufficient to wreck my life and enough other lives that it will cause massive social unrest, and so far the ideas are “put displaced workers on welfare” or a shift where they inevitably end up stuck in disgusting health care jobs the computers can’t do. There are also valid concerns about terrorism and weapons and all sorts of nightmarish things a sub-ASI intelligence could enable.
That aside the goofballs don’t really need to get to ASI they just have to get to where the AI can research its own improvement better tha humans can, which some think may be next year. At that point the whole thing seems inevitable.
The New Yorker has published a very lengthy piece on Sam Altman, with a prominent focus on his removal as CEO. Not much new info in there but he doesn't come out too well despite being interviewed for it (speaking as someone who opposed the board coup when it happened). I think it falls into the trap of seeing it as being a fight between "safetyist" board vs "accelerationist" Sam.
I do find it funny that everyone talks about him being a master manipulator who is incredibly good at getting people to like him given the incredible numbers of people willing to slag him off in the press.
Like many CEOs, he is very smart and very opportunistic. It seems to me he’s said a lot of different things well relentlessly pushing for his Sam – centric agenda.
I've been thinking about how this all ends. This will probably offend people who've aligned themselves with some of the players in this drama, but what the heck. If we can't think through the consequences of our actions, we're f**ked anyway.
1. What is Trump’s endgame in Iran? Originally, it was to take out the Iranian leadership, with the presumption that the Iranians would just roll over. Now that their leadership (and their military response) has proven to be decentralized, the US leadership (such that it is) doesn’t seem to have a plan except more of the same. Unfortunately, while the US military is very good at shock-and-awe strikes, it hasn’t been very good at winning wars. Since WWII, have we actually won any wars? Korea was a stalemate. Vietnam was a fiasco. We decisively chased the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but a couple of Presidents later, we got bogged down in Iraq. I suppose we kinda sorta won there, but we never stopped the asymmetric war being waged against us. We kept the Taliban at bay in Afghanistan for over a decade by the use of Predator drones, but eventually we threw in the towel there, and the Taliban took back Afghanistan in a few days. In reality, our military seems incapable of dealing with asymmetric warfare. If we put boots on the ground in Iran, why do we think it will turn out better than our previous screwups?
In my humble opinion, the best case right now is for Trump to declare victory and go home. In a much more limited way, that’s what he did with Venezuela—he removed Maduro, but nothing has changed there. Why can’t he do the same with Iran? The tankers will start paying Iranian tolls, and the oil will begin moving again. Of course, the Israeli Lobby are some of Trump’s most generous donors. They’ll feel betrayed if he packs up and leaves. But Trump has a habit of throwing his allies under the bus.
2. What is Netanyahu’s endgame? Team Netanyahu wanted to liquidate the Iranian regime that was funding and arming all its local enemies (Hezbollah and Hamas). That hasn’t happened. While the Americans talked about regime change, I haven’t heard any talk like that from the Israelis. If the US packs up and goes home, where does that leave Israel? I grew up watching Israel as the underdog, and I was always sympathetic to the existence of the Israeli state. But Israel lost its underdog status thirty years ago. And now that it’s throwing its weight around, it seems to have completely lost its way as a moral force.
Thomas Neuburger wonders if Netanyahu hasn’t risked the future of Israel on an all-or-nothing strategy.
I don’t agree 100% with his thesis, but he brings up some very salient points. And his idea that there’s some multicultural future in the Middle East seems patently absurd. Neither Islamic extremists nor the Israeli militarists have expressed any interest in co-existing. And the more they kill each other, the less they’ll be interested in co-existing in the future.
3. Has anyone asked what the Saudis and Gulf States want? The Saudis and Gulf States depend on exporting oil. Now that the US has attacked Iran, the oil is no longer flowing. They’re facing an existential threat. If the US can’t keep the Strait of Hormuz open and protect their petrochemical infrastructure from Iranian attacks, why do they need the US? In which case, their best option is to tell the US to get the hell off their territory, sue for peace with the Iranians, and pay their piddling Hormuz shipping tolls. It’s pretty clear that the US has lost Saudi Arabia as a Middle East ally, but the brainiacs in Washington policy circles haven’t noticed it yet…
And did Trump really tell MBS to kiss his ass?! His handlers need to put a ball gag on him.
4. The Iranian regime’s endgame is very clear. Hold on tooth and nail, until the Americans pack up and go home (like they’ve always done in the past). Then, exploit the regional and political landscape to rebuild their power base. Even if Trump opts for a total ground war in Iran, they’ll probably survive. Heck, even if Netanyahu nukes them, they’ll probably keep coming back for more. After all, if god’s on your side, you’ve got nothing to lose.
Trump does not care about any of it. If he could find a way to not lose any support in the US, but also damn the world to higher energy prices because Iran charges an arm and a leg for shipments, he'd take it. What matters most to him is having approval.
As soon as a face-saving option appears, Trump will take it. But Iranians aren't going to give him one, and they probably figure they can outlast US strikes while the days count down to the US midterms.
> Unfortunately, while the US military is very good at shock-and-awe strikes, it hasn’t been very good at winning wars. Since WWII, have we actually won any wars? Korea was a stalemate. Vietnam was a fiasco. We decisively chased the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but a couple of Presidents later, we got bogged down in Iraq. I suppose we kinda sorta won there, but we never stopped the asymmetric war being waged against us.
Winning wars is a very narrow thing to do, because if the sole metric was "Can the US achieve a set of military goals", I'd say it's always been capable of that much. There was competence degradation in Korea, yes, but for the most part the military knows what it is doing.
The real issue is operating under the constraint of having obey international law, humanitarian law, not losing popular support back home, etc. I'm not saying these things shouldn't constrain the military, but they massively complicate any effort to win a war. This is why mixing war (a short-term action) and nation-building (absurdly long-term) just sours people on war.
Dang, I really hope Trump declares victory and we go home. I fear this will not happen, he's caught in an escalation trap and he needs a 'victory' before he can leave. And there is no victory only evil, (more killing, disruption.)
Now we're sort of in the same situation as the Russians. We've both got leaders pursuing stupid wars, fucking up our economies, and neither of our systems allows us to remove them from power. Well, we have the mechanism in the US but no one in Trump's inner circle wants to pull the ejection cord. The guy isn't rational.
And yesterday, I was in a waiting room, and ABC News was on the TV. The anchor was yammering on about the rescue of our brave downed serviceman and how heroic the rescue operation was. I couldn't help but notice how excited and gung-ho she was. And she sounded remarkably like Olga Skabeyeva, who is Putin's favorite female propagandist. I don't often listen to TV news, but our right-wing media seems to be going out of its way to normalize this conflict. I hope somebody responsible is keeping the nuclear football out of Trump's reach.
Yeah, IDK. My only hope is that someone in the chain to pushing the nuclear button, says NO! But what's the percentage chance that there is no one in the chain that will say no? Scary. (MSM seems all pro war.)
For all his faults I think Trump has a genuine aversion to mass killing, which overrides most other considerations, and it was the Iranians' execution of so many protesters that really hardened his heart against Iran's regime. So the latter's harshness may have backfired on them.
As for the Israelis, it seems fairly obvious that their main ultimate goal is to grab more land, claiming this as "demilitarized zones" or suchlike but eventually merging it into a greater Israel. They've been nibbling away at their neighbors' land for decades, and who can blame them given that they are beset by long-time adversaries on all sides?
> For all his faults I think Trump has a genuine aversion to mass killing
"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will." – Donald J. Trump, April 7, 2026.
To be clear, I believe these are empty threats, and that Trump won't pull an actual genocide in Iran. But you're giving way too much credit to him. These are not the words of someone who gives a fuck about humanitarian issues.
Besides, we already know why Trump started the war, his Secretary of State was quite open about it: They knew that Israel would start the war if the US didn't, so the US launched its preemptive attack for strategic reasons.
Ha! And Trump suggested that we should start charging tolls at the Strait of Hormuz. I bet he's annoyed that Iran came up with the idea first.
Well, first, the US has to control it. I'm not so sure we'll be able to. And now that we are running out of Patriots, the partial shield we were able to give them will be gone. Now that we've shown that we can't fully protect the Gulf States' infrastructure, the Gulf States' best option is to demand that we leave and sue for separate peace with Iran. Heck, they weren't told until the last minute that we were actually going to hit Iran. We caught them flatfooted.
What's your point? Are you saying that the "I don’t want that to happen" clause means he really does care about humanitarian issues after all? Yes, yes, Trump has no choice but to kill millions of people, the decision is out of his hands…
"This will hurt me more than it hurts you", he exclaimed before smashing in his son's head with a baseball bat, for deep down he really cared about his well-being.
My point is that you cite someone saying "I don't want X to happen" as evidence that he wants X to happen. And that, moreover, you seem to have not noticed this.
It's not even the same as TWHMMTIHY, because TWHMMTIHY is a cliche.
This is not to say Trump will never just say things he doesn't mean. It's to say that Trump saying something is probably not evidence one way or the other (and that this isn't even unique among elected politicians). At the end of the day, we're left looking at what he generally does or has done. For that, we have the fact that he ordered bombs dropped on military targets in Iran, and hasn't dropped them on population centers.
Oh, and we have that one incident during his first term where he called off an attack on an Iranian target once informed of the estimated death toll of 150 innocent Iranians. (Or at least, that was the reason he gave, so here we are.)
You left out a crucial part from the quote: "but it probably will". Since it's Trump's decision, this is functionally equivalent to "I'll do it anyway". Hardly a demonstration of "genuine aversion to mass killing".
Please note that I explicitly expressed doubt that Trump will follow through on his threats of genocide. My point is that publicly and officially threatening genocide from a position of surpreme power is not compatible with "genuine aversion to mass killing". At least that would be a generally uncontroversial stance when it comes to almost anybody else, but somehow, with Trump, we're just supposed to assume the best character despite the worst rhetoric.
> Oh, and we have that one incident during his first term where he called off an attack on an Iranian target once informed of the estimated death toll of 150 innocent Iranians.
Do we have any source for this that's more reliable than "Trump says it about himself"? He's a habitual liar, and most of his grandiose claims are exaggerated or straight up untrue.
> They've been nibbling away at their neighbors' land for decades
They've also been trading land for peace. It worked great with Egypt and Jordan.
I think their goal in the Iran war is exactly what they say it is. Neutralise an enemy that's been trying to kill them for decades, with liberating Iran as a stretch goal.
I don’t understand why Trump hasn’t reached out to establish a Strait coalition to use Iran’s own dependence on oil as leverage to open the strait.
Couldn’t this be done by establishing a certification for any oil tanker to go through the Strait? With certification comes subsidized insurance and a degree of protection from the coalition. If Iran attacks any certified tanker, then one of its own tankers is confiscated by the coalition and auctioned off to the highest bidder.
Iran thus would be only hurting itself by attacking shipping. Effectively, they would be sinking their own (and only their own) exports. The cost to the coalition keeping the strait open would be negligible and the supply and price of oil would go back to normal.
If it comes to that, all of Iran's oil will wind up being sold to China at a modest discount, and will be carried on Chinese-flagged tankers. There is no plausible "coalition" that is going to risk going to war with China just so that it can maybe win a war with Iran (that it didn't want in the first place). So the tankers won't be boarded or sunk, and the oil will flow, and we'll have accomplished nothing that matters.,
The United States could in theory do it solo, but I'm pretty sure Xi knows how to do the sort of authoritarian-strongman-to-wannabe-authoritarian-strongman flattery that has consistently kept Trump on side in most other areas.
The difference is that Iran is in an existential struggle, while Trump is vulnerable merely to minor increases in gas prices at home. Trump actually *lifted* sanctions on Iranian oil!
So Iran would sink tankers even though it directly paid for the losses in commandeered oil? Don’t get me wrong, I am no expert. Just wondering why we don’t use their dependence on oil revenue to solve the issue.
As I pointed out in my Fog of War update last week, Iran can earn more from charging tolls on the Strait of Hormuz than it currently does from oil. 100-135 ships take oil out of Gulf each day — at $2 million per ship, entry and exit, multiplied by 365 days, that's significantly more than Iran made from oil last year. Modern tankers are so huge, that it would only add a couple of dollars to each barrel of oil. "Just enough to wet my beak..." as the saying goes. Fookin brilliant!
That is why an international coalition would have to decide on an agreed plan that Iranian oil sales are not final until they are allowed to clear the Strait.
Irrelevant. China will think of the oil shipped on their ships toward their harbors as theirs, regardless of whether they paid for it already. So why would they let the western nations steal it to replace oil the Iranians destroyed? They want this oil.
And if it was an Iranian tanker, don't you think the crew might just scuttle it instead of letting it fall into the hands of the infidels?
And it would still mean one attacked, possibly sunk, tanker that can't be used for future shipping and one environmental disaster. Oh, and probably an unnavigable Strait of Hormuz after all - not sure how much ships like driving through a layer of raw oil.
I agree with you on #1, but I suspect you're getting out ahead of events on #3. I think the Saudis and Iranians have enough enmity for one another that the House of Saud is unlikely to split from the US anytime soon. Notice also that the Saudis have a whole 'nother coast line from which to ship oil. I really doubt they view the straight being closed for a few months as an "existential" threat. They've got themselves a little rainy day fund, for example, worth nearly $1 trillion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Investment_Fund
Maybe that valuation isn't 100% trustworthy, but even if the fund is only worth $100 billion, I bet they'll be okay for a while.
Edit: I tried to read that Dean Blundell piece you linked to. Why does this guy write like he's trying to impress people on LinkedIn? Short Declarative Phrases. For emphasis. Overusing them. To convey seriousness. It's pseudo-sophistication. Embarrassing. Total d-bag.
> Notice also that the Saudis have a whole 'nother coast line from which to ship oil.
That looks worse if you think the Houthis, who have already been able to close the Red Sea, are allied with Iran, who have closed the Strait of Hormuz. Those are Saudi Arabia's only two coasts. If they could expand over Yemen they'd touch directly on the Indian Ocean... but they've been at war with Yemen forever, so that doesn't sound likely.
Very good point. Have the Houthis actually closed down shipping in the Red Sea? I was under the impression that they were harassing people sailing under the wrong flag, but hadn't managed to actually close down shipping.
The Red Sea situation looks complex. Wikipedia suggests that a lot of traffic has been diverted around Africa, which seems like a major effect on shipping even if they haven't been able to fully block traffic.
Note that while Iran's ability to fully block traffic appears to be unquestioned, they're not doing that. In particular, last I heard, ships destined for China are allowed through.
What happens if Trump starts following up on his threats to bomb power plants? If their power sources are destroyed, and their fields are burned people will start dying, yes? A regime is nothing without people to rule over, and an army cannot survive without civilians to supply them. Is there a reason the US can't go through with this?
Well, the Iranians have been living under sanctions for a very long time now. They're tough. Also there are 92 million Iranians, which is a lot of people. You could commit a lot of war crimes without making much of a dent, and handing America's enemies a lifetime supply of propaganda material.
This isn't a realistic hypothetical. The US is significantly more restrained in its target selection than, say, either side of the Ukraine war (and Israel even more so). Even the Russians at their worst don't go for this level of mass civilian murder. There's a reasonable argument for concern that the US might step up the escalation ladder further than is morally preferable (or strategically for that matter), but the idea that they'd jump straight to "the most brutal anyone has ever been" isn't credible; it's like worrying that your HOA might start executing people who don't mow their lawns.
> but the idea that they'd jump straight to "the most brutal anyone has ever been"
I wouldn't say it's the most brutal. We've had plenty of mass-slaughters and genocides done by hand in the past. This would be more of an act of disrupting enemy capabilities, with the deaths being collateral damage.
The real answer: The US relies on a large democratic body. They can bend morality here and there, and they have started to push the limits to see how much they can get away with (like with the venezuelan boats) but at the end of the day they need most of the population to see them as "good guys" or none of this works long term because people start defecting, voting in different leaders, striking, divesting, etc. Most importantly, international propaganda stops supporting them, and in 20 years time when a new generation of leaders comes in, they will no longer take the US side in any conflict, they may even begin to antagonise them. It will be even worse than the current European middle ground. Even the most morally bankrupt leaders in the US know this, which is why they will not nuke Iran or kill civilians openly.
And before you say "Well, Russia and Israel and whoever else get away with all sorts of civilian damage and no one cares!"
1. This is not true, people care and there have been serious consequences
2. America is unique compared to those kinds of authoritarian regimes because a significant amount of its power does come from the voter base as well as good relations. Even if they would still have a strong military and economy after destroying both of those pillars, no leader wants to lose that much power.
Wait, what serious consequences has Israel experienced? I know international courts and such have accused them of genocide, but that means absolutely nothing as long as they continue to be backed by the US. A bunch of countries threatened sanctions, but never went through with them.
Plenty of countries have expelled Israeli diplomats, China has banned Israeli software, some countries are restricting trade, the ICJ case has restricted where Israeli leaders can move. Those are serious consequences, but it's not the grand spectacle of the Hague or total embargo so you probably don't agree.
You know, people always think morality means nothing in international relations, but then if that were true why would these countries go to such serious lengths to make themselves look so moral?
> but then if that were true why would these countries go to such serious lengths to make themselves look so moral?
Because they think there's consequences. But how would they know if they've never tried? The US has never utilized the full extent of its power and leverage. We now get to see what happens when it does.
Perhaps the US has never tried, but plenty of individual American politicians have tried, and found out that they lost votes and allies when they did so.
Patton almost cratered his career when he allowed POWs to be killed in Italy. Worse things happened to the careers of officers responsible for the massacres in the Philippines and My Lai, Abu Ghraib etc.
So why would any politician, bureaucrat or officer want to risk his position by killing bunches of Iranian civilians? There is a big risk by doing so and really can't see what he personally can gain from it, even if it weakens Iran.
Plenty of countries have tried similar things and there have been consequences. WW2 would not have been won if allies could not make the moral case to their citizens (or to german citizens, for that matter) that the Nazis are wrong. They would have lost millions of labourers, soldiers, defectors, saboteurs, volunteers, etc. There are other examples if that doesn't suit you.
Israel hasn't actually done war crimes though (contrary to what you may have heard on bluesky). Even countries that pretend to find this plausible, like the UK, still send their troops to learn how to avoid civilian casualties from the IDF.
As an Israeli with positions that are probably similar to your own - did you really mean to phrase the claim that strongly? It would imply that a country ever fought a long urban war without war crimes, which I find implausible in general.
Arranging for there to be no people for the Iranian government to rule over would be mass murder and genocide. The largest act of genocide in human history, I believe. Doing this would be Pure Evil, which is certainly a reason why the United States *shouldn't* go through with this.
And if we do, approximately every other nation on Earth except for Israel, will make it their policy to ensure that the United States and Israel cease to exist as nations. They will probably not kill us *all*, and they may spend a decade or two saying "nice doggy!" while quietly reaching for the stick with which to beat us into submission, but in the end, you'll probably wind up living under the rule of a Chinese military governor who maybe pretends he works for the UN.
The United States and Israel against Literally The Entire World, is not a war the United States can win in the long run.
If we threaten to do this but don't actually carry through, at least not to the point where millions of Iranians starve to death, then A: we would still be guilty of mass murder and other war crimes, if not actual genocide, and B: the Iranian regime will still rule firmly over all the Iranians we haven't killed, so what's the point?
Except that indulges some people's fantasies about killing a bunch of people who live in the wrong country under the wrong leaders. That's always been a popular fantasy, but one I hope not to see here.
If you think that "the Internet" says the US killed between 2.2 and 3.8 million people in the Vietnam war, then you would seem to be a poster child in how to Never Use The Internet.
Proper use of the internet says that the *total* number of people killed in the Vietnam war was probably between 1.4 and 3.8 million, so possibly quite a bit less than your minimum figure, and that's mostly Vietnamese people killing other Vietnamese people in a war that began long before the US joined the fighting.
The United States probably killed several hundred thousand people. so not *quite* three orders of magnitude lower than Dust's proposal for 90 million dead Iranians, but still enough orders of magnitude to expect a rather different response.
> And if we do, approximately every other nation on Earth except for Israel, will make it their policy to ensure that the United States and Israel cease to exist as nations.
Are you sure about this? Because China has performed its own share of human rights abuses as well, and nobody cares because they have things that other people want. The US also has things other people want. With Russia and Iran out of the picture, they would have an even larger share of the world's oil (alongside Saudi Arabia, who they are on good terms with). They have the best technology the world has to offer, even moreso now with the progress being made on AI.
And obviously, they have nukes. Nobody is going to start a nuclear war with a country that they're economically reliant on when there's no chance of them winning unscathed, all to avenge some people that they were never particularly attatched to in the first place.
I did not say that the world would arrange the destruction of the United States because the latter "performed its share of human rights abuses". I said that the world would arrange the destruction of the United States if the latter *murdered ninety million innocent people and wholly depopulated an entire nation*.
Murdering ninety million innocent people, is not "our share of human rights abuses", that is vastly larger than our share of human rights abuses, that's larger by far than the entire world's share of human rights abuses in this century. And, of pragmatic importance, most human rights abuses are conducted against the citizens or subjects of the government doing the abusing; you're proposing the genocide of *another* nation's population, under circumstances which would give every other nation reason to fear they might be next.
Reasons why this will result in a different outcome than e.g. China's persecution of the Uighur. are left as an exercise to the student.
Do you really want to start a nuclear war with a country that successfully destroyed a country of 90 million people without pushback? Countries, and the people contained within them, are not suicidal. They are willing to look past injustices when their own lives are on the line. Yes, they have every reason to fear, and that fear is keeping them alive.
No more than anyone wanted to start a high-intensity conventional war with a country that successfully conquered Poland in a month, or continue a high-intensity war with a country that had successfully conquered France in a month. At a certain point, it isn't "we *want* to do this", it's "this is going to happen sooner or later no matter what we do, so let's make it happen on our terms".
And where do you get "without pushback"? If the United States murders more people than any other nation anywhere has ever murdered, and without the excuse of "they were our own troublesome people, nothing for you to worry about", there will be pushback. It will take the form of everybody publicly telling us nice things while quietly building their forces until they're as ready as they're ever going to be, and then destroying the United States of America. At great cost, but they will perceive all other paths as having greater cost because they absolutely will not trust you to stop with 90 million dead Iranians. After all, we've still got Denmark to conquer, and then Canada, just for starters.
Note that they'll have the help of an awful lot of Americans in accomplishing all this.
The amount of bombing necessary to actually destroy the nation of Iran is almost certainly more expensive than the US is willing to pay even before you account for moral concerns.
Moral concerns don't seem to be an issue for the US or Israeli leadership, so I don't think that's too big of an obstacle. The functions of civilization are centered in a few weight-bearing components, like food, water, and energy, so destroying those should significantly disrupt things to the point that business as usual is no longer possible. They don't need to level the entire nation.
Whatever you think of the leadership, there's limits to what their voters will accept. And I think you vastly underestimate how far a country can fall below "business as usual" and how long they can stay there without breaking when regime survival is threatened. History shows that trying to break a regime with bombing campaigns alone basically never works.
The US appears to be lifting sactions on Venezuela, I don't know to what extend. I wonder if that means some kind of agreement has been reached, or is being negotiated. If truly nothing changed, then why lift the sanctions?
I think this is mostly wrong. I'd recommend https://substack.com/@zinebriboua for a more balanced strategic perspective on this situation. For the other comment, I'd suggest that if you equate underdog status with moral valence you're going about it wrong.
I don't see this writer as balanced. They do not write with objectivity, not even the cadence of objectivity, they don't cite evidence for any of their claims, and they appear to have some conflicts of interest they have not disclosed.
Beowulf makes a bunch of distinct points which are addressed in different articles. I'll focus on point 3 about the Gulf states here - they've actually been fairly clear about wanting the US to stay in the fight and hit Iran harder rather than withdraw now (and should the US withdraw early, they have the ability to keep fighting Iran on their own so long as they're bombing them and forcing the straits shut). They seem fairly clear eyed about the costs concessions to Iran would have for them.
Bombing the gulf states was a strategic mistake on Iran's part (perfectly understandable when dealing with deadmen switches, mind you). The idea was that the Gulf States would yell at America and get America to stop forcing Iran to throw bombs around oil-producing countries.
Unfortunately (for Iran), it's done the opposite. Gulf States were unable to attack Iran until they were hit by missiles first (ummah, religion, etc.). Now, they say simply "self-defense." (which is perfectly okay in islam).
There's the possibility that the Iranian people will rise up and overthrow the existing government. It hasn't happened yet, in fact the regime has brutally suppressed dissent, but that doesn't mean that it can't happen.
Of course, none of this would be a consideration without the world's fentanyl-like addiction to cheap oil.
It's so unlikely it's not even worth discussing. The only countries where a group of people can just walk into the grand palace and take control, are ones with sufficient insurgencies and absolutely no pushback whatsoever. Iran has no Contras, no Taliban, no Syrian rebel forces, nothing like this. It's just not happening, sorry.
History since WW2 has shown that no matter how awful a regime is, outside bombing is at best useless, if not counterproductive. If there is already an armed insurrection that can maybe win a conventional war against regime forces, such as in Lybia, then ground support against military targets can help. But bombing civilian and industrial targets is only ever going to increase regime support.
I don’t have a great deal of knowledge of Iranian internal affairs, but as far as I know the opposition to the current regime is concentrated in the more middle class and affluent areas of the larger cities, especially Teheran. In the rural areas and poorer sections of the cities there’s a lot less opposition.
The 1978 Iran revolution was mostly unarmed protesters. The army declared neutrality as the common soldiers refused to shoot them, with lots of defection and even mutinies. After that, a comparatively tiny armed force took control.
Of course the new regime immediately started murdering thousands of dissenters. But the revolution up to the point of the change of control involved remarkably little armed conflict.
Well that's the problem isn't it, the new regime is not the old regime and they will not allow their own peaceful tactics to be used against them, hence the killing of counter-revolutionaries.
And the current regime is not the previous regime, obviously their own tactics will not work against them as evidenced by them gunning down thousands of peaceful protestors.
That may be true. And before Trump started bombing them, it looked like they had pushed the IRG back on their heels (until the IRG imported a bunch of head-busters from their terrorist proxies). Now, post-Trump, post-bombing, I don't think there's a chance of a popular uprising, because of what John said above.
No, that lesson goes back to the previous World War. But it has never stopped people from saying "...but *this time* it will be different!"
People really hate being bombed, or having stuff that's important to them bombed. If you bomb a country, those people will look at the bombers and say "enemy!", and look at the people shooting antiaircraft guns at the bombers and say "enemy of my enemy, =friend!". The bombers being better at their job than the antiaircraft gunners, doesn't change that.
A bombing-only strategy can sometimes work if your goals are less extreme than regime change or unconditional surrender. But it really doesn't look like the current strategy ever went beyond "if we bomb them hard enough, there will be regime change and the new regime will surrender".
It's curious, really. Nobody thinks that being bombed by another country might make them warm up to the country releasing the bombs. Americans didn't react to 9/11 by saying "Well, Al Qaeda showed they are able to hurt us, so we should pressure our government to make some concessions to them". Of course they didn't. Nobody remotely sane would have expected that. Yet, generals and presidents and great leaders -- who, if asked, will say they'll never surrender in the face of any intimidation -- somehow fail to consider that the Enemy might think the same.
Nobody believes that if *they themselves* were being bombed by another country it would make them warm up to the country releasing the bombs.
But it is very, very common for people to believe that if their country was the one dropping the bombs, most of the people being bombed would warm up to them, and greet them as liberators and all that nonsense. Because We are a Strong and Fearless People, but They are Cowardly and Weak and under the rule of an Evil Dictator that can't possibly have the support of the people.
It's a very appealing fantasy, and the bit where it has never ever been true, doesn't seem to diminish its appeal.
To be perfectly fair, there was a lot of dancing in the streets after Maduro, and the only people complaining were in the USA (and being paid by Venezuelan dollars).
I don't think this would have happened if a ton of venezuelans had died (and the venezuelans are a notably...expressive people. shout in streets, yes, but that's a today thing, tomorrow, who knows?).
On the other other hand, the Iranians are standing out on balconies watching the bombs fall as entertainment. I'm not sure that means "greet as liberators" but it's hardly "Everyone We Must Fight The Great Satan"!!!
If America cannot reinstitute the draft because prospective soldiers would shoot the officers, it is high time we sit down and think that "maybe nobody's as patriotic as you think they are."
> Some people in the comments accused me of “doxxing” the companies by mentioning the location of their headquarters.
FWIW, my personal issue was not with passively revealing the address, but rather with wording that could be interpreted as a call to action. It's the difference between saying "Bugmaster lives on 123 Bug Street, it's right there on his Wikipedia page", and "Bugmaster lives on 123 Bug Street, we checked out his security and it's pretty lax, it'd be a shame if someone put a brick through his window" (though I am obviously I am exaggerating for effect).
Intuition testing: I've heard that, had George Bush successfully passed social security privatization, it would've dug SS out of a lot of its current hole (since it would have allowed it to be invested in the booming stock market since). Wouldn't this have also shortened the great recession, since the main issue at the time was insufficient QE and this would've pumped investment dollars into the economy?
My sincere expectation at the time is that a very large proportion of the "privatized" money would have stuck to the fingers of the helpful finance guys making the arrangements, God knows what would have happened in 2008 if a bunch of people had lost their social security funds.
That's not an unreasonable expectation, but it's worth noting that this mostly doesn't happen with 401ks (it plausibly could have happened more easily with a government program, though I'm not sure if it would be easier or harder there).
What was the plan for social security privatization? Social security is just payments from the young to the old, right? The young pay the old now, in the expectation that in the future when they're old, the young will pay them in turn.
I really don't understand the US social security system, but my understanding is that the amount of money you get out is only very loosely related to the amount of money you put in, and that it's really just a socialist wealth redistribution plot disguised as retirement savings?
IIUC it was to allow people to divert some of their personal SS taxes to 401k-style personal investments in stocks or bonds. It'd remove some of the cross-subsidies from the program (worrying for it's short-term solvency but probably good for it long-term) and increase total personal investment.
It's worth noting that this has already been done to some degree. My dad worked for Los Angeles County decades ago and partially opted out of SS. It worked well.
There are a few specific fields that have their own pre-SS retirement systems grandfathered in as an alternative. Railroad workers are the one I'm most familiar with, but that's probably not the one for an LA county employee.
And communities like the Amish, who have a sufficiently strong track record of taking care of their own that they can opt out as well. Also probably not the case in Los Angeles.
It's not really payments from the young to the old. It goes into a big pot, the government borrows from that pot and issues IOUs with interest. If they put that money in the market instead of bonds then it would have grown at a much higher rate.
It becomes a pure intergenerational transfer when both the money going in to social security, plus the repayment of IOUs through taxes, reaches the point where there's no assets owned by SS, and the money the young pay in now isn't being saved.
Realistically what would have happened is SS would have tanked in the recession with the stock market and people would have freaked out, saying "this is why we warned you not to privatize social security!" and it would be viewed as one of the worst decisions of his presidency.
The stock market recovery in Obama's terms then gets reflected in the status of SS, everyone's slightly happier and Hillary wins in 2016? Okay this is probably reading too much.
The notion of privatised social security makes me wince, given the history of privatised public entities over here. My own government tried this with Eircom (our state telecommunications utility) as it became, along the lines of copying what the Tories under Maggie Thatcher had tried. A good proportion of middle-class voters (by which I don't mean what Americans seem to mean by "middle class" which is "lower middle class/upper working class") duly invested in shares, believing all the promises about "you will get rich, rich I tell you!"
Of course the natural thing happened that happens when you get small investors all trying to buy shares and profit off them; they all tried selling at once, the price crashed, and the big institutional investors who had been waiting for this to happen swooped in and bought those shares at a bargain price.
Then the disgruntled small investors starting demanding the government compensate them for their losses, apparently not having got it through their heads that this is how the stock market *works*, baby; you lose money as well as make it.
There was little sympathy at the time, because those of us without the money to buy shares thought those who had invested simply to sell at the higher price were greedy and they got what they deserved:
"Telecom Éireann was privatised; the process began in 1995, and by July 1999 the government had disposed of virtually all of its shareholding. This was very controversial and subject to much debate. Eircom plc was then floated on the Irish, London and New York Stock Exchanges on 8 July 1999, and small/first-time investors were encouraged by the Irish Government to buy shares. The share price was set at €3.90, later reaching a high of €4.80, a 23% increase. Those initial investors who held onto their shares, until July 2000, received a 4% bonus-share allocation.
The Eircom flotation is considered to have been an example of a stock market bubble — after the initial hype of the flotation died down, the stock price fell rapidly. Many of the 500,000 small investors were angered by the significant financial loss they incurred, blaming the government for not sufficiently warning them of the risks inherent in stock-market investment."
Imagine a privatised social security fund and the potential for unhappy pensioners etc. You're just asking for trouble.
On the other side of the muir Éireann, privatising the bus services didn't go to well, nor Railtrack (not the company that runs the trains - they used to own the tracks and made a mess of keeping them safely maintained).
Thames Water is also close to bankruptcy and sometimes the residents of some town in Surrey or other need to queue for bottled water supplies because the pipes are out for a couple of days.
But hey, at least it's not the Darien Gap or the East India Company.
The government would have offered a limited menu of investment funds (similar to the federal employees’ Thrift Savings Plan)
But it was a tough sell. Transition costs were enormous — diverting payroll taxes into private accounts would create a funding gap for current retirees estimated at $1–2 trillion, which the plan never fully addressed.
This may be my European bias, but the US healthcare system is extremely cost-ineffective. I see no reason why a privatized social security system would fare any better.
Hm, I think the main way US healthcare goes wrong is its mix of constraints and inability to admit them. I don't know if privatization would affect this either way but I'm not clear enough on the details of what it would imply.
(Privatization doesn't seem to be the root cause of US government inefficiency - government run transit systems in the US are inefficient even compared to brightline. For a non US example neither privatization nor nationalization of British rail made much difference afaict).
Tldr I don't think privatization in itself is enough to determine this, it depends on details I don't know enough about.
The US healthcare system is cost-ineffective mostly because we pay doctors and medical professionals a *lot* more than the rest of the world, and because we tend to insist on things like e.g. private rooms for every hospital patient. And expensive malpractice payouts whenever anything goes wrong. Arguing about the organizational structure and who pays for what, are only minor perturbations on that.
The proposed Social Security reforms, mostly baselined the same level of benefits, with a bit of delay and/or capping IIRC.
So the effects that make privatized health care so expensive in the US, would also apply to a hypothetical government-run health care system here, but would *not* apply to a privatized Social Security system. Which isn't to say we couldn't find some other way to screw it up. The "American + privatized = expensive + bad!" framing you're trying to apply is overly simplistic and doesn't bring anything useful to the table.
Do you think the "Medicare for All" approach would help? That's the kind of thing that could only be done if it's run by the state, and it might help with drug prices.
For comparison, Switzerland has mandatory "private" health insurance but the government sets the premiums and copays and so on for the mandatory tier. By default hospitals have rooms of 6-8 I think, but you can pay a voluntary excess premium for a single room should you ever need one.
Probably not. Prescription drug prices are a highly visible but really quite small fraction of US health care expenditure. And to the extent that Medicare secures price reductions, it mostly does so by encouraging health-care providers to bill most of the non-recurring and overhead expenses to their non-Medicare clients, which stops working when all the clients are on Medicare.
A broadly applicable rule. In most cases (and the exceptions are mostly focused on things like land value, so not applicable here), you cannot get significant cost reductions without firing lots of people. Or otherwise arranging for them to not make money by supporting the task at hand but in some way that you have cleverly arranged to not be "firing", but weasel-wording doesn't help. Also, there are almost never enough completely useless parasitic bureaucrats for firing them alone to bring significant cost reductions.
So if a plan can't point to a great many people, who are presently making a real contribution to the effort, and say "we're going to fire all these guys and do without whatever they were providing", then it isn't going to significantly reduce costs.
In the case of Medicare-for-all, who gets fired? Just some insurance-industry bureaucrats? Not going to be enough by far.
>Do you think the "Medicare for All" approach would help?
I am always weirded out by American ideas of "socialism", meaning the idea that the taxpayer pays for-profit institutions, meaning rich people, and then they find out the voters are strangely not in favour of their tax money being used to pay rich people. Every other country gets it that if you want the taxpayer to pay for something, first you nationalize it. Be that universities or hospitals.
Agree with your comment overall, with one factual correction to offer: "Medical malpractice costs the U.S. healthcare system approximately $55.6 billion annually, which includes patient payouts, legal fees, and defensive medicine costs." I don't know how solid that "defensive medicine" costs estimate is but set that aside for the moment.
Of the $55.6 billion figure about one-tenth is actual payouts to patients.
Total annual US health care spending is around $5.5 trillion. So...malpractice settlements on their own are boosting our national health care spending about about 1/10th of 1 percent. If you count all costs of malpractice, including "defensive medicine" however its being defined/measured, then malpractice is boosting our costs by around 1 percent.
Punchline is that malpractice lawsuits do not seem to be a material variable in our national health-care expenditures.
Right, the malpractice payments are a small part of the problem on their own, but highly leveraged because of the defensive medicine they encourage. They are also a big part of the reason doctor salaries are so high, in that we insist that doctors pay for their own malpractice insurance (and accept the possibility of ruinous settlements beyond what insurance will cover). In hindsight it might have been better to put that cost elsewhere, but too late now and it probably wouldn't change the bottom line if we had.
I mean....the estimated defensive-measurement costs is less than 1 percent of US health care spending. Not nothing but hardly a large part. Other things, such as the higher doctor wages you led with, seem to be much-bigger factors.
Regarding how malpractice insurance is handled....well I'm not finding useful comparative estimates (what fraction of health care spending in other developed nations is defensive medicine).
I've always had trouble dating, so I'm hiring the photo guy. Wish me luck. Some people have told me my photos aren't the problem since I already get some dates and getting more won't make the relationship work out anyway. But those people don't give advice in such a systematic way.
Protip: just make 10 random crap selfies and prompt Gemini with them, something like "make me a romantic photo, it should be realistic, I should be recognizable but get the angle, the lighting, the shadows right like how a pro photographer would".
Good luck! In the spirit of systematic advice: From your profile pic and others I can see that you have potential to be quite handsome. But your facial hair makes you look very, very ugly. Shave it. A better haircut and clothes that fit will also do wonders for you. Put on 20 lbs of muscle and you would honestly be quite attractive to most women! Don't fool yourself into thinking this stuff doesn't matter.
I appreciate the honesty. It does rather bother me that social norms are such that nobody ever told me it looked bad until after I had already shaved it. I haven't been to the gym lately because of laziness or whatever you want to call it, but I know I should.
Depending on why the dates aren't working out, getting more dates could be helpful (e.g. if you're looking for something specific and only a small number of fit the criteria, so you need lots of dates to find them). Quantity has a quality all of its own
Until recently, the size of the local talent pool was a key factor in business location/relocation decisions. A technology startup would gravitate towards the Bay Area, for example, while to use another example a financial business would find New York’s talent pool important.
While those considerations may still apply to blue collar occupations the near-collapse of the white collar job market has made them irrelevant with respect to professional office jobs. If a new business in (to use an extreme example) Guymon, Oklahoma wants to hire 500 non-remote software engineers or financial analysts it will be absolutely swamped with fully qualified applicants. If you’re a laid-off software engineer in Sunnyvale or a jobless financial analyst in Manhattan you probably are completely dismayed at the prospect of living in the Oklahoma Panhandle but, as the old expression goes, beggars can’t be choosers. Being employed is orders of magnitude better than being out of work no matter where your job may be,
As an anecdote, my current company is trying to hire software engineers for a new hub out east, but they're having so much trouble hiring there that they're trying to get applicants in the Bay Area to relocate, and nobody wants to.
I would recommend spending some time reading the r/recruitinghell subreddit. It is an endless litany of job-hunting horror stories, largely involving white collar types with a focus on tech. It is unimaginably depressing, I don’t care how gainfully employed and secure in your job you may be. In fact I would recommend having a bottle of antidepressants close at hand.
Without hesitation I’d say that the vast majority of posters, whose lives are spiraling down into the abyss, would sell their souls for a job anywhere in the country.
[Yes, I know the old saying that the plural of anecdote is not data, but when there are such an overwhelming number of anecdotes they cannot be dismissed].
> when there are such an overwhelming number of anecdotes they cannot be dismissed
Sure they can.
If you set up a subreddit for unemployed people to complain about the job market you're going to wind up with a bunch of unemployed people complaining about the job market. If you spent a whole lot of time reading /r/justnomil then you'd come to the conclusion that mothers-in-law are uniformly terrible.
Counterpoint: aren't the vast majority of new AI companies being set up in SF, often by people who've specifically moved to SF to do so? That suggests that agglomeration effects are still important and can't just be replaced by remote work.
Financial businesses and New York are a different matter, with so many relocating to Miami and elsewhere in Florida, as well as Texas. I'll acknowledge this is due to New York's resolute hostility to business, way beyond anything in the Bay Area, and its bumbling, Nutty Professor inability to get any infrastructure projects accomplished (hey, how's that Second Avenue Subway doing?)
I think that comes down to the difference between wanting to hire 500 software engineers, and wanting to hire the best 500 software engineers. The best software engineers can still get jobs in the Bay Area, and they want to hang out with all the other best software engineers and be in a place where they can easily get another good job if the one they want goes bad. Which all points to the Bay Area, at least for now, with a few lesser tech hubs like Austin in distant second place.
And that *used* to apply to the mid-tier software engineers as well, coupled with the possibility of joining the ranks of the best if they kept hanging around with the best. If that's changing so that the middle tier isn't confident of their getting another good job in the Bay Area, it makes sense that they'd be easier to hire away into someplace cheap with the promise of one good job and at least some fellow mid-tier software guys to hang out with.
Thanks to working nonstandard hours I’ve noticed something interesting about traffic patterns. This applies in the suburban area where I am, but I have no reason to believe it’s not true elsewhere.
Just about the quietest time on the roads is from 10 am to 11 am on weekdays. To find less traffic you’d have to go to the latest overnight hours, say midnight to 4 am, or to weekend early mornings. What are usually busy streets give off post-apocalypse vibes between 10 and 11.
It’s not hard to see why. By 10 am most working people are at their workplaces, students are in school, and for the most part retirees and others not in the workforce haven’t yet ventured out. This lull in traffic doesn’t last, however, as by 11 or even 10:45 things get noticeably busier.
This seems right to me. I'm a stay at home mom and I like to schedule things around 10:30 more or less for this reason. I can tell you the retirees are indeed out, but they arrived at their destination at 9 or 10 and haven't left yet. They'll be part of the 11:00 traffic as they move on to the next thing.
(I've found the best time to shop at Costco is around 11, as the retirees and other sahms who arrived at 10:00 opening time are starting to leave, but lunch break shoppers won't arrive for a while)
> Russian losses this March have reached their highest level since the start of the war: our drone strikes alone resulted in 33,988 Russian servicemembers killed or seriously wounded, while artillery and other strikes eliminated another 1,363 Russian occupiers. That means more than 35,000 Russian losses in just one month – and these are clearly verified losses. *We have video documentation of every such strike in our system.*
Many in the pro-Russian camp claim these numbers are made up. I don’t doubt these numbers, because (a) Russian military doctrine going back to Napoleonic Wars (at least) has been to treat its soldiers as expendable; (b) Russia hasn't made any significant territorial gains or breakthroughs in Ukraine in over two years; and (c) Russia is having trouble meeting its recruitment goals. And considering the number of videos posted on X of Russian soldiers flailing as they’re taken out by FPV drones. It’s hard for me not to feel sympathy for the poor schmucks. After watching an FPV chase a Russian soldier around a hut a few times before it killed him, and a video of a long line (>100) dead Russians along a road, I can’t watch these videos anymore. And I think the NAFO folks are shooting themselves in the propaganda foot by posting them. Matthew Brady brought the horror of the US Civil War to the public’s consciousness with his photos of the battlefield dead. Now we have videos of each individual soldier’s death stored in a vast digital archive. BTW, Russian milbloggers have also been posting similar videos of Russian drones killing Ukrainian soldiers. But I don’t see them in the numbers I see for Ukrainian kills (probably because X is banned in Russia, and milbloggers use Telegram). Also, it’s worth noting that Ukrainian drone operators have accepted Russian surrenders. But in the heat of the chase…
2. The Institute for the Study of War says that Russia hasn’t been able to recruit enough soldiers to replace its losses. On the other side, Ukrainian commanders are being promoted based on their proven battlefield kill rates. One senior commander keeps a spreadsheet of his team’s metrics (kills). He’s broken it down by the cost of the FPVs, the man-hours involved in making the kill, and a bunch of other metrics. He claimed it costs him ~$875 per kill. I checked this number against the cost of 155mm howitzer shells. High-explosive rounds average between $2,500–$3,000 per shell, and specialized or guided rounds, like the M982 Excalibur, can cost over $100,000 per shell. And if we use Zelenskyy’s numbers, over 96% of Russian casualties are inflicted by drones; drone warfare is not only more cost-effective than traditional artillery and tank warfare, but also more deadly.
2a. Also, Russia is specifically recruiting people who would make good drone operators, and is considering creating a new Drone Operation force. One general, whose purview was drones, complained that other groups are stealing his boys from him and shoving them into the front-line meat grinders before they can even set up their operational command centers.
3. Knowledgeable commentators seem to agree that Russian drone systems overall are not as advanced as Ukrainian drones, but they do the job. Many Russian drones suffer from poor quality, lack of standardization, and they are often lost to countermeasures. However, Russia has had problems scaling up its production as Ukraine has struck Russian chemical factories (plastics and explosives) and electronics factories. Also, the top-down command Russian command system may be getting in the way of innovation and logistics. However, some analysts have claimed that Russian FPV drone production exceeds Ukraine’s. They peg Russian FPV production at about 100,000 per month. And Russia is using volunteers on some production lines. Meanwhile, on the Ukrainian side of the kill zones, Ukraine produced over three million FPV drones in 2025, and they want to scale to 7 million in 2026. But some commentators are fretting that Ukraine has too many independent producers and is not optimizing its production capabilities.
3a. After I wrote this, I just saw a Russian milblogger complaining about the new generation of Ukrainian FPV drones. The new ones are extremely silent, and soldiers can't hear them coming.
4. I’ve seen estimates that 60% to 80% of FPVs fail to take out their targets, which is why both sides are scaling up production. However, if I take the ISW’s estimate that Russia suffered at least 400,000 casualties (killed and wounded) in 2025 and Ukraine 3,000,000 FPV production numbers, it looks like FPVs may only have a 12 or 13 percent hit rate. Basic Ukrainian FPV drones cost ~$300 per unit. So, that commander with the spreadsheet must have mastered the art of drone warfare, because his hit rates are closer to 50%. Either that or he's bullshitting. Another reason Ukraine is putting so much effort into drone warfare is that in 2025, it suffered ~25k–50k killed and ~75k–150k wounded or missing in action. That’s not counting 2,500 civilians killed and ~12,000 wounded in Russian long-range drone strikes during 2025. Russia is expending most of its long-range drones on civilian targets rather than going after military targets in Ukraine. This may bite them in the ass in the long run.
5. Reports are that Russia is diverting some of its Shahed drone electronics production to Iran, plus they’re shipping FPV drones to Iran (and possibly reconnaissance drones, as well).
6. Shotguns are supposed to be the best personal defense against FPVs. Ukraine has been issuing shotguns to its frontline units along with specialized ammunition (not sure what makes the ammo special—smaller buckshot?) for close-range defense against FPVs. The Ukrainians call this "airborne skeet shooting".
6a. Question: If we do send Marines into Iran, will our military issue them shotguns? I suspect our casualty rate will be ghastly if the DoD/DoW doesn’t wake up to the threat of drone warfare.
7. According to the Guardian…
> Land robots now account for 90% of Ukrainian army logistics. “It’s very difficult to move around because of enemy first-person-view drones. So we use robotic systems,” said Pavlov. In January, Ukraine’s armed forces carried out a record 7,000 operations using ground vehicles, or UGVS.
UGVs are being used to evacuate casualties from the field. And UGVs are being equipped with guns and grenade launchers. According to the Guardian article, a single DevDroid TW 12.7 system defended a position for 45 days. The article didn’t say, but I assume Ukrainian soldiers would have had to sneak into the position to replace its ammo boxes and recharge its batteries. Or can Ukraine use drones to remotely recharge and re-up the ammo supplies for these systems? Or maybe they just swapped out a new DevDroid system every day by UGV? But curious minds want to know.
8. Ukrainian long-range drones continue to hit Russia’s Baltic oil export facilities. At least 8 out of 18 oil and diesel storage tanks at Primorsk facility are burning. Another 8 are burning at Ust-Luga out of the total number of 24. But these numbers are from earlier, this past week. I suspect Ukraine has taken out some more since then. Ukraine has also been hitting the “upstream” feeds to these facilities (pipelines and storage facilities). Russia’s ban on oil exports took effect on 2 April to redirect it to domestic and war-related consumption. Exports are not scheduled to resume until July.
Experts are discussing the feasibility of Russia throttling crude production at the wellheads. My understanding is that if you shut a well down, it can be tricky to restart. Approximately one-third of oil wells that are “shut in” (temporarily closed) may never return to significant or commercial production. Throttling may get around this problem. I don't know if how this works in practice or if it's even feasible.
Anyway, Ukraine seems to have effectively shut down Russia's oil exports for now, and Russia is unable to stop Ukrainian drone incursions.
8a. Question: What percentage of Ukrainian long-range drones don't get through?—because it sure seems like Russia is wide-open to Ukrainian drone attacks.
8b. Thought experiment: If the US faced an enemy like Ukraine, would we be able to prevent the destruction of our key industrial and logistical facilities? Hopefully, Trump doesn't get a bee in his bonnet to annex Canada, Greenland, or Mexico, because drones are the ultimate tool for asymmetric warfare.
8c. Addendum: I read this morning that Ukrainian drones struck the Primorsk facility again. At least two more storage tanks are burning. Also they Kstovo Refinery near Nizhny Novgorod that is important for producing the fuel that Russia consumes.
9. Russia has been selling off its gold. Question: any indication that this is what moved the price of gold downward? Also, Putin got oligarchs to kick in about $1.2 billion to the war effort, but this won’t make up the deficit in oil revenue. And Central Bankers have warned that Russian currency reserves are facing a shortage of Chinese Renminbi, making It difficult for them to pay for Chinese electronics.
Interesting bit about shotguns. Seems like there would be a lot of space to optimize the ammo to take out drones. And not so difficult to test and iterate on the that.
Made an account just to catch you one of these open threads and express my appreciation - you're the first thing I look for in each one. These are an excellent mix of concise and thorough and tend to segue into interesting discussion. You're honestly a more reliable source of recaps-with-a-bit-of-extra-context than most other stuff I glance at.
Thanks, but I'm merely an obsessive-compulsive doom scroller. There's so much bullshit out there, though. The mainstream media has given up trying to do any in-depth reporting. There's also a lot of bullshit coming across social media. I keep asking: is this bullshit or is this real?
People I'd describe as "obsessive-compulsive doom scrollers" I've known are generally those I'd advise against doing so. So it's a novel experience for me to tell someone "good job on the doom scrolling! Keep at it!" If there's any community you're actively participating in (or just open to casually chatting somewhere on the side I guess) I'd love to follow along. It's exactly the sort of stuff I find fascinating to learn, contemplate, and discuss but don't really have the nerve to do all the scrolling as doomfully as required.
I also like to troll and challenge a lot of bullshitters over on X, under the same handle. At some point, I'm going to start posting my own column on Substack, but it wouldn't be about current affairs.
I'd be happy to read whatever it is. You're a good mix of informative and concise and (at least as far as my own judgement allows) seem to know where to hedge your confidence based on ambiguous info. Out of curiosity, what would you write about?
I was thinking about a Consciousness Handbook. I am not interested in the whys and wherefores of consciousness, or even if consciousness is even "real". But it seems like a lot of people, some of them very smart, haven't spent much time observing their own minds. Most people just plow through life without seeming to appreciate the subtleties of our qualia and the way the subroutines of consciousness behave. Rather than worrying about the philosophical questions, I ask "Hey, have you ever tried this?" and "Have you noticed how your mind behaves when you do this?" My problem with Buddhism is that it discourages wallowing in sensory and mental states, but there's a lot of pleasure to be gotten from them. We've only got so many years on this planet, so why not get the most out of being conscious and alive?
$300 per unit likely would likely not include battery, munition, detonator, and any EM survivability. Per former UKR CO CDR: 5-7 FPV per KIA; each FPV at the low end is ~400 for airframe, ~125 per battery, ~300 for the munition. Add additional cost and complexity for operating beyond line-of-sight (CRPA antennas, meshing modems, SATCOM, etc.). Consider also the lethality radius of a 155mm shell vs an FPV. Attritional warfare over a large area with constrained manpower incentivizes UAS so I'd be cautious about over-applying lessons learned to all flavors of modern warfare.
>>5
I'm somewhat curious as to what utility FPV drones provide Iran. I suppose equipping proxy forces around the ME would be an option, but were I Iran I'd probably prioritize jet engines and EO/IR seekers for their medium altitude loitering munitions.
>>6-6a
I'm unsure how universally applicable the RUS/UKR experience is here. For the US, it's probably cheaper to just deploy the Marines with a MADIS than to train, equip, establish a separate shotgun ammo logistics pipeline, etc. This make sense to me as I'd prioritize HELIOS proliferation, M-SHORAD fielding, and IFPC acceleration over adding a new small arms qual. (Having said that, it's hard to know for sure in this space; for example, the UKR "duel" simulator is excellent, so scaling these skills may be less of an issue than my instincts suggest)
>>8a
pimpleplane dot jpeg. Consider how much SIGINT wizardry must occur to determine windows and routes.
>>8b
Mexico already sends lots of drones. From what I gather the main limitation is usage authorities rather than capabilities (see El Paso).
> cheaper to just deploy the Marines with a MADIS than to train, equip, establish a separate shotgun ammo logistics pipeline, etc.
I knew that MADIS had been successfully tested and had a proven combat record of shooting down relatively slow-moving, large-profile UAV drones, with at least one documented Shahed kill, but I hadn't seen any reports on whether MADIS had been tested against FPV swarms. Luckily, before I opined without current information, I decided to double-check. I was forced to update my priors. :-)
Looks like the Marine Corps is taking FPVs seriously, and they tested MADIS against FPVs last month...
However, the details in the link are rather sketchy. Details are missing that leave me questioning its effectiveness...
1. The article says, "the system can jam drone signals, disabling them without firing a shot." Did they test this against the current frequency hopping FPVs? Ukraine has used FH to successfully bypass Russian signal jamming.
2. And it's using radio signatures to detect the FPVs. It doesn't sound like they tested it against the current state-of-the-art fiber-optic FPVs.
3. The article notes that "ammunition is finite." In the face of dozens or even hundreds of FPVs, how quickly does it expend its ammunition, and how long does it take to reload?
4. Did they test it against FPVs resting in ambush on the ground? What sort of depression can the chain gun handle? How quickly could the chain gun swivel to respond to FPV rising from behind a bush a few meters away? This is becoming a common Russian FPV tactic that Ukrainian soldiers are encountering. Could it accidentally kill our own troops if the gun were dealing with a very low angle of attack?
5. What sort of terrain can it handle? Presumably, it has off-road capabilities, but what do our troops do if they have to move into terrain that the MADIS can't negotiate?
Unfortunately, the US hasn't given Ukraine any MADIS systems to test in real combat situations. Also, it looks like the Marine Corps has limited numbers of these.
And to your other question...
> I'm somewhat curious as to what utility FPV drones provide Iran.
If and when US forces are on the ground, FPVs will likely be Iran's primary mode of engagement. And I'll remind you that an Iranian-backed militia group attacked Victoria Base in Iraq this past March. Fiber optic FPV drones reportedly destroyed at least one UH-60M Black Hawk helicopter and an AN/MPQ-64 Sentinel air defense system (and the video that the Iranian's released suggested another Black Hawk may have been damaged). The drones also caused significant fires within the compound. Victoria Base evidently didn't have a MADIS, though.
Meta note: my contention was that MADIS is better value for USMC units than training every Marine to a level of shotgun proficiency to be tactically relevant, not MADIS is a one-size-fits-all complete C-sUAS solution. All your objections to MADIS apply doubly to small arms. FWIW, my preferred small arms solution would be to give everyone a magazine of the pellet 5.56 rounds they've been testing and provide a couple Smartshooter type sights for designated air guards.
1-Specific electronic attack capabilities are likely classified. I'd merely consider doctrinal guidance for length of FH radio transmissions to avoid being located versus duration of an FPV's flight and also the added costs and supply chain woes of increasing your hypothetical drone's complexity and survivability.
2-No. it has a suite of sensors including active RADAR and EO/IR detection. I believe said radar is S-Band or X-Band. Either provides sufficient resolution. Range sufficiency depends on what frontage our Marines must cover.
3-Why is our hypothetical enemy sending hundreds of FPVs simultaneously against a BN echelon or below? Also, you'll have to define "swarm". Is it number or behavior? If the latter, we're talking an OOM (minimum) higher tier of cost and sophistication to operate with such autonomy (ACK the cost is dropping). If the former, the C2 (and resultant OPSEC) challenge is still non-trivial, and the visual, EM, etc. signature of employing such would present other risks. Since the MADIS gun is derived from an AH-64, rate of fire is likely several hundred rounds per minute. As tests have proved, it seems pretty accurate (the helicopter version even had to add dispersion) and DoD is looking to field proximity rounds as well.
4. Assigning sectors of fire and exclusion zones is a standard part of direct fires planning. This isn't unique. Honestly, I'd be more worried about airspace management.
Regarding loitering drones, if you're envisioning a full-scale ground invasion, this is the wrong frame for considering the joint force. War is a team sport and individual platform vs individual platform won't cleanly analogize to a C-sUAS integrated network vs an adversary sUAS recon-strike complex. To be more explicit, with current levels of freedom of maneuver in the air domain, we'd likely have "mowed the grass" with EO/IR, SAR, GPR, etc, conducted route recon with our own drones, compromised C2 networks, employed CEMA assets, executed supply chain interdictions, pre-postured counter fire assets, etc, etc, prior to initiating movement. Heck since we've now added the Army, the density of sensors and effectors also increases.
5. Off-road capabilities are as good or better than anything that would be used to move or resupply our hypothetical Marines. ACK the limited numbers, but that's priced in. Tactical Air Defense wins by preserving sufficient combat power to achieve offensive objectives, not by playing catch all day.
>>fpv role
Yes, I mentioned the utility for proxy forces to harass elements in the rear especially in host nations where kinetic weapon system employment may face additional restrictions. I personally think a ground invasion is unlikely, but the goals and execution of such would determine efficacy of sUAS.
Bottom line:
-FPVs are a challenge, but many smart people have been developing technical and doctrinal solutions. Proliferation and relative capabilities of UAS vs C-UAS is going to be too uncertain and too classified for us internet bloviators to come to definitive conclusions.
-Think networks and the convergence of cross-domain capabilities rather than individual platforms.
-We would respond to the UAS problem set differently and operate under different constraints/restraints than UKR.
> FWIW, my preferred small arms solution would be to give everyone a magazine of the pellet 5.56 rounds they've been testing and provide a couple Smartshooter type sights for designated air guards.
After further checking, this seems to be what Ukraine is issuing to its front-line troops. Looks like the facts may have gotten garbled as they flowed through the media's information-degradation chain, and that's how the shotgun story got started. My bad for not digging deeper. But there's only so much time in my doom-scrolling day. :-)
> 1-Specific electronic attack capabilities are likely classified. I'd merely consider doctrinal guidance for length of FH radio transmissions to avoid being located versus duration of an FPV's flight and also the added costs and supply chain woes of increasing your hypothetical drone's complexity and survivability.
Yes. And Ukraine seems to be implementing noise injection/blinding (to saturate radar receivers) and/or the ability to manipulate their RF signals to confuse the classifying software of RU's radar defenses. Putting these features into lower-cost APVs probably isn't practical.
> FPVs are a challenge, but many smart people have been developing technical and doctrinal solutions.
I sure hope so! Despite Trump's recent dismissal of Ukrainian technical assistance and technology, PBS in a recent News Hour said, "After coming under sustained attack from Iranian Shaheds, the American military is now working with Ukrainian advisers in the Middle East, after having initially refused a Ukrainian proposal to partner on interceptor drones last year."
That's a damn good question! And the answer is scary for Ukraine. Until recently, something like 95% of its drone components were sourced from China: motors, electronics, batteries, etc. Luckily, China would prefer to see Russia weakened and bogged down in an endless war. However, Ukraine is now building a domestic, "decentralized production ecosystem" to prevent problems if China decides to change its mind. But they still need chips and batteries from China. It's also worth mentioning that the US ultimately sources a lot of our weapons system materials from China, too — but these seem to be largely raw materials like rare earths, etc.
Addendum: I got a PM from someone who didn't want to engage with me on this thread. They accused me of covering up Ukraine's "continuing" war crimes. One of them being the denial of water to Donetsk. I'll put my answer out here, since I'm not comfortable dealing with this person in a private exchange...
IIRC correctly, the pumping stations for the Siverskyi Donets-Donbas Canal were destroyed by Russian attacks on the pumping stations while they were under Ukrainian control. I may be wrong about who bombed what, even though the water source of the canal is now under Ukrainian control why should they rebuild it if it supports the Russian occupation forces? The Russians have had three years to provide alternative water sources, but they haven't. And now the Quisling government there is proposing that they solve the problem by recycling contaminated mine water...
And it's interesting that this person only mentioned Donetsk, because in 2023 Russia blew up the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River, behind which was a huge freshwater reservoir that supplied water to Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Crimea. But this act didn't register as a humanitarian infraction with this person.
They also mentioned that Ukraine is giving "lots of tasty Russian gas [to] NATO." AFAIK, no Russian gas has been flowing through Ukraine since the beginning of 2025. As for the other pipelines into Europe, Nord Stream 2 was sabotaged, but ultimately charges were dropped against the Ukrainian national accused of the sabotage. And Russia took Nord Stream 1 out of service (due to "technical issues"). No tasty Russian gas seems to be flowing to NATO at this time.
Responding publicly is the right move, for various reasons. If the person does not want to discuss publicly, that's their wish, but if you spend your time verifying their claims, there is no reason why you shouldn't post the results publicly.
Otherwise, we get the simple tactic of "keep them busy in 1:1 conversations".
I've always found it fascinating that hundreds of thousands of people are dying painful and violent deaths, and nobody really seems to care. It seems people recognize the triviality of individual lives here, but will cry over a few hundred lives being ended by an errant bomb or starvation. Can't they realize that all of those lives are worth nothing to them, not just the soldiers?
It proves that utilitarianism / consequentialism is non-intuitive. If a person is forced into a uniform - conscription - their lives are suddenly worth zero concern.
You seem really convinced that your nihilism is a great insight, but if you properly understood *The Big Lebowski* you'd understand that it's a dead end.
I fully understand that. But what's the alternative? Endlessly hurting and killing each other with no understanding of why they're doing what they're doing... There's no winning here. May as well just avoid it all and take what you can from the world.
I like to think people (at least some people) would care if they had the power to do something. But the leaders of our nation state are playing their empire games, and the wishes of ordinary people are subordinate to the needs of leadership.
But it's proof that they don't have to care, and their lives are no worse as a result. They would be even better off if they stopped caring about the incidents they do happen to care about.
The incidents they do happen to care about tend to be local events like what their school board is up to and what their boss wants done by COB. Given that they can actually do something about these, these seem like the right thing to care about.
I was talking more about incidents that don't have any practical relevance to their lives. You know, wars and famines in other countries, people dying in impoverished conditions, genocides, that sort of thing. And they do seem to care about them a lot, at their own expense.
Any person with capacity for empathy would care, were a story of individual suffering brought to their attention. Bandwidth limitations mean we often do not get to the level of individual suffering on different lands, and inertia often drags these stories away without one's doing anything in response (barring the oft-derided "thoughts and prayers", whether phrased this way or not). We do get dulled to the horrors we witness on a daily basis; case in point, panhandlers with small children on the streets of NYC etc. But for whatever moment, you should feel terrible to see a toddler sitting next to a cardboard sign asking for change.
If the suggestion here (and apologies if I misread) is that one should consciously de-register these individual accounts from the scope of concern (you should not feel bad to see the starving child, they don't matter to you) then the response is that this makes you an inferior human being. If this is rather a suggestion that the natural level of empathy should be lowered (e.g., less pearl clutching over distant problems outside your control at the expense of addressing problems closer to hand) that's distinct and debatable, though one may ask why this should not be framed/paired with a parallel statement that people do more about the things they care about (do we pray for lesser burdens or stronger shoulders?)
Re drones shutting down infrastructure, I agree that it's concerning but worth noting that Hezbollah hasn't managed to have significant effects with their drones. There's several factors (like air superiority allowing Israel to limit their supplies and better defenses/narrower front), some of which would transfer and some wouldn't (but probably for the best not to get into a war with Canada just in case).
> And I think the NAFO folks are shooting themselves in the propaganda foot by posting them.
I can't imagine this having a noticeable effect. Chances are high that if you consume a lot of drone-chasing-and-killing-Russian-soldier videos, you're already firmly on one side or the other. And pro-Ukrainian policy makers will only take such videos as confirmation that Putin is an evil megalomaniac who happily feeds his people to the meat grinder, and who must be stopped as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
The information about drones is interesting, and the cost of taking a human life on the battlefield, even at 20% success rates, is frighteningly low.
I alternate between the impression that the stalemate will continue (at least from the perspective of the frontline - casualties remain fairly high on both sides, but seemingly sustainable for at least a few years); and the idea that Russia must collapse under the economic strain. I assume this would take the form of a palace coup resulting in a leader who could negotiate a peace deal rather than decisive victory on the ground.
None of the forecasting sites shows an uptick in the probability of the war ending, so I guess the prediction is that it will go on for 12-24 months more. You seem knowledgeable about this - is it also your impression?
Putin's goal is to hold on to power for as long as he lives, and to live as long as he can.*
Putin has systematically liquidated or imprisoned all the potential political and military challengers to his leadership. Prigozhin had a chance, but he blew it. And now that Putin knows the military won't protect him, he's been crippling the leadership to make sure no one pulls another Prigozhin. The only group he hasn't touched is the FSB's leadership. Alexander Bortnikov, the Director of the FSB is a Putin protégé. Bortnikov is in his mid-seventies and seems loyal to Putin. Also, the FSB is in charge of confiscating the assets of Putin's political opponents. This money is all supposed to go back to the state treasury, but everyone suspects that the FSB leadership is making out like bandits. The only people who could get close enough to Putin to execute a coup are the FSB, and Putin is keeping them fat and happy. Because of his age, I don't see Bortnikov as leading a coup. And he'll prevent his underlings from executing a coup—unless the plotters remove him, too. Things will have to get pretty bad for that to happen.
So, I don't see anyone with the wherewithal to take out Putin—at least right now.
With Ukraine and NATO, Putin's goal is just to wear them down. He thinks that the West is morally weak, and eventually, they'll break. This is the same sort of delusion that Hitler had about the British and Americans. So he'll continue his Special Operation until the deteriorating economy and/or deteriorating logistics cause his armies to collapse or mutiny. If he can keep feeding his war machine, this will go on until he dies a natural death.
But if things continue as they have, the Russian economy will eventually be unable to support his war machine, and at some point, things will collapse on the military front. Whether Putin can survive that collapse is up to his friends in the FSB.
* Putin has reportedly pumped tens of millions of dollars of his personal fortune into his daughter's life-extension research facility in Moscow. And he was overheard talking to Xi about the progress being made with life-extension technologies.
Thank you for the detailed discussion and follow-ups; greatly appreciating these posts and hoping to see them continue (absent cessation of hostilities).
To the point on logistics, this reminds me of a conversation a while back (forgetting whether here or elsewhere) on the state of the Russian rail system and ongoing degradation of capacity (as of 2025) due to [among other things?] constraints in ball bearings and deferred maintenance, with tonnage moved decreasing month on month and year on year since 2022. I do not believe there was a breakpoint suggested or a point at which issues were projected to accelerate, but curious whether anything of the sort has popped in your feed so far this year.
Yes, some opinionators opined that Ukraine's strikes against the Russian rail system would cripple their war effort and their economy. And also the lack of ball bearings for rolling stock repairs would accelerate the failure of their rail system. This hasn't happened. Their rail system has proved to be very resilient. A quick Google shows that the trains are still moving, albeit at a rate about 16% lower (measured in cargo volume) than before the war. Ukraine seems to be redirected their fire power at the oil infrastructure now. But partisan groups are still sabotaging rail switching boxes within Russia proper and the occupied territories. And occasionally, we see drone footage of trains carrying war material being hit by long-range drones.
This is why I call these posts "Fog of War" — because every factoid has a counter factoid and each factoid in turn spawns multiple opinions. But through all the smoke of opinion, propaganda, etc., it definitely looks like Russia hasn't able to achieve air superiority over Ukraine, is losing a vast number of troops, has a suffering economy, and isn't exporting enough oil to finance their special military operation. They've now been fighting Ukraine for longer than they fought the Germans in WWII. And they may have now lost the few gains they made in the last two years. And although Ukraine still requires European assistance, it is no longer dependent on US military assistance, and it's earning the friendship of the Gulf States. I'd say it's in a better position now than it's ever been. And Russia is in a worse position than they've ever been.
These posts are great - I'll echo my appreciation.
I'll add for you one or two smaller stories from Ireland: political opinion is starting to harden against Russia again, in a way that hasn't been noticeable since 2022. We've 'realised' that a major alumina processor is Russian owned and exports all its output to Russia - we haven't acted yet, but it seems will is building. We're monitoring the Russian shadow fleet in our waters, and are concerned that a Russian vessel will cut the undersea cables that carry data across the Atlantic. While the war in Ukraine is not in the news, consensus seems to be building that the time is coming for a fresh round of sanctions, and possibly more overt activity. This seems to be part of a similar gathering of will at EU level - maybe it's an easier question for the leadership to address than the Israel question. (Which is not a question at all for Ireland, Spain, Sweden; but is unquestionable in a different way in Germany and Austria.)
Basic question: Does the EU impose sanctions, or do the member states impose sanctions individually? Or does the EU recommend sanctions, and do member states choose how to enforce them or not enforce them at all? Seems like the latter because Hungary and Serbia don't seem to be playing along with the EU. How is it supposed to work?
I am working on a speculative novel that is going to satirize utopian political ideologies by taking them to their logical extremes - hopefully without rehashing definitive satires from the past. So far, I am thinking of including anarcho-capitalism, woke socialism, techno-communism, and various theocratic utopias. What other utopian systems might be worth exploring?
I had a silly idea of a fitness dystopia, where snack foods are rationed and the staircases monitor your weight and heartbeat as you climb them. I'm quite sure I'll never actually finish it.
Perhaps: neotribalism/technoprimitivism, Pentti Linkola-style Deep Green, variations on extreme patriarchy vs. matriarchy, neofeudalism...
I've done something similar in a speculative project of mine, now in pause [1], though with a less satirical bent; my shortlist choices were a semi-theocratic republic, a solarpunk ecosocialist state, LessWrong-style rationalist communities, survivalist soldier councils, a hardcore transhumanist state, an anarcho-capitalist patchwork, and a throne-and-altar monarchy. Feel free to recycle if anything is of use.
I would be amused if you went after a more moderate utopianism like social democracy or classical liberalism, because extremist centrism is very funny.
There's Disco Elysium, with stuff like the "Sunday Friend":
> YOU - "What is *ze price stabilité*?"
SUNDAY FRIEND - "It is ze most important thing."
YOU - "That doesn't tell me anything."
SUNDAY FRIEND - "It's the central goal of any sound monetary policy. Maintaining ze price stabilité is essential to maintaining high levels of economic activity, which is essential for maintaining high levels of employment..."
SUNDAY FRIEND - "Which is essential for maintaining *ze social stabilité*..."
KIM KITSURAGI - "Basically it makes sure the price of bread doesn't change."
SUNDAY FRIEND - "*Précisément*! Too much inflation, bread becomes too expensive; too much deflation, it becomes too cheap for bakers to produce..."
SUNDAY FRIEND - "That's why the Institute of Price Stabilité works to keep inflation just below 2%..."
YOU - "Below 2% of what?"
SUNDAY FRIEND - "But not *too* far below, no. Too below is also bad -- below, *but close to* 2%."
YOU - "You're not answering my questions at all."
SUNDAY FRIEND - "The Coalition believes in the importance of informing the public about the benefits of ze price stabilité. Transparency is one of our principles. Would you like an informational pamphlet?"
YOU - "No, I'm good."
SUNDAY FRIEND - "A sound monetary policy is *essential* for addressing *uncertainty*. Stability is the *raison d'être* of the Moralintern. It's the reason why I identify as a moralist."
SUNDAY FRIEND - He pats his pockets. "But, oh! I don't have my leaflets on me today. That's too bad. You can always call our information line. Making information available is part of the Moralintern's commitment to transparency."
What's the origin of the style of a lot of the AI-written facebook/instagram posts?
You know the ones I'm talking about.
A lot of one-sentence paragraphs.
In some cases, they're posted by pages that are probably slop generators, but often there's clearly a human behind them. Sometimes that human doesn't even seem to have any obvious commercial motive.
They make good points, and they're clearly effective. I didn't even mind them until I started seeing the same obvious template everywhere (just like the ChatGPT style of five-paragraph essay seemed to proliferate a few years ago).
They're clearly designed for an emotional, mimetic appeal, but the ones I've seen aren't usually even touching on any sort of hot-button political issues. They could be about anything.
And at some point toward the end, they always follow the rule of three:
Make a point.
Make another point.
Make a third point. (And notice the line breaks, but not the extra line in between each sentence.)
Then conclude with a triumphant mic drop.
But why does the LLM (I don't know which one it would be) generate this? What sort of human writing is it based on? Or are the underlying models tweaking themselves and trying to generate the most memetically-effective content?
(Also, just to be completely clear, I didn't use any AI in writing this post.)
Yep my thoughts exactly. You can 100% tell these people have that very particular LinkedIn-style brainrot. And it was around pre-AI; the AI-generated ads are just imitating that style.
CEO books are written the same way, partly because of the brain rot and partly because all those line breaks help stretch a thin idea out to 196 pages.
LinkedIn, with a side of MBA-authored "books for CEOs". I follow a substack author who writes in that exact style, and has been doing so for nearly ten years.
It might just be RLHF. The kenyans who did this work for chatGPT were basically asked to upvote a response if it seemed helpful and positive, and downvote a response if not. So you take a model which is mostly trained on low effort internet articles and tech support forum posts and then maximise the positivity (according to kenyan middle class workers) and that's basically what you get: a strange mixture of pretentious, informative, overly punchy, compressed, linkedin coworker cadence.
I know the style, it is instantly recognizable. I also find it odd that all the posts I see on facebook and instagram must be using the same model and a similar prompt.
I am looking for early users for a platform designed to reduce groupthink and reward independent thinking / thoughtful discussions. Periodic evaluation against community-noted posts across the spectrum enables this. See sample - mentwire.com/sample
> In the model given, you not studying hard made it impossible to pass the test!
No, it didn't.
"If you're the Beatles, your new album will sell a million copies."
You could be the Rolling Stones and still sell a million albums. Or Led Zeppelin. Or the Who, Cream, the Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix...
You're not the Beatles. Ergo, you've passed up one particular avenue for selling a million albums. But that's it, period, full-stop, end-of. All we know is that you're included in the set of "musical acts that are not the Beatles" and included in the set of "musical acts that did not sell a million albums". Placement in the former set does not necessitate placement in the latter set, so we cannot say what qualifies you for placement in the latter set. All we know is that you haven't been disqualified from that latter set by virtue of being the Beatles.
Simply put, you're treating an "if" as an "if-and-only-if", which is elementary fallacious reasoning.
Re-reading my comment, I did misphrase my objection in a sleepy haze this morning. i think that, causally, had you studied hard enough you would have passed. It may also be true that there were other ways to pass, but it would be fair to describe this as failing because of not studying.
If a person wants to become rich, in pursuit of which goal they study hard at an elite university, make lots of valuable connections, identify a promising niche, start their own business, put in the hours, and the business failed in a manner clearly linked to one of the top ten reasons for new businesses to fail, would it be fair to describe them as "failing because they didn't win the lottery"?
Success and failure are assessed against the plan someone actually intends to carry out, not some completely different plan that they could have used.
Yes, but the goal isn't "make a new business succeed", the goal is "become rich". If the goal is becoming rich, then if you win the lottery you succeed. By the logic you apply to exams, if the goal is to become rich, then "you failed because you didn't win the lottery" is a perfectly valid response to anyone's failure to become rich no matter what their actual plan for getting rich was. You didn't know that their plan for passing the exam was to study hard and understand the material, when you insisted that you knew why they failed.
I think you are considering this in light of "study hard" being what you believe is the One Obviously Right Way that everyone should use to try to pass exams whereas you "win the lottery" as the Most Obviously Stupid Way that nobody should use to try to become rich. But the underlying logic doesn't care about that sort of assessment; it's a logic puzzle not a morality puzzle or a strategy puzzle.
That's the only one I got "wrong", too, but it's not the same as the pilot one.
The pilot one is straightforward logic: If A, then B. A, therefore B. If someone is a pilot, they passed a medical exam. Jake is a pilot, therefore he passed a medical exam.
The test-failing one is a weird sort of formalism, since the statement is true with natural human shading. "If you study, you pass." This does not mean, of course, that you must study to pass. But "You didn't study, that's why you didn't pass" is... correct? There might be other factors which caused you to fail, but (assuming the premise is true), you would have passed but for your non-studying. Therefore, I think it is true to say that you didn't study hard, and therefore failed. If you had studied hard, you wouldn't have failed.
This bit is not part of the question. Formal logic does not work the way ordinary English does. “If A then B” is NEVER enough on its own to permit you to conclude “if not A then not B”, whatever A and B might be. This is not pub conversation; it is mathematics. It is a mistake to open the A and B boxes and use your knowledge about the concepts you find inside them. This is exactly the mistake the question is fishing for. When you conclude “if not A then not B”, it’s based on things you are smuggling in from outside the question, like your intuitions about how studying or English works.
Their reasoning for marking it wrong is incorrect. The problem in “You didn't study hard, that's why you failed” is with the “that’s why” - that relationship cannot be drawn from the premise. It’s not that you could have failed for other reasons, it’s -as you point out - that you could have passed for other reasons; so failure to study is, on its own, not enough to explain the failure to pass. Had the premise been “you will pass if /and only if/ you study”, the deduction would be correct.
Half the statements were "pub conversation", though: real tweets and so on. I agree that it's wrong as a formal logic puzzle, but not all of the statements were formal logic puzzles and there was no flag to tell which was which.
I think the problem is how it is stated. It's like the "Is Linda both a bank teller and a feminist?" problem where how it is phrased makes all the difference.
"If you study hard enough you will pass the test. You didn't study hard, that is why you failed" is how it's put and that's misleading. It's nudging people towards the answer being "didn't study" which is the trap.
If it were "if you study hard enough you will pass the test. You failed the test. Therefore you did not study hard enough" I think we'd see where the trap lay. Failing may be down to not studying hard enough, but it could also be "material on the test was not the same as you studied", "you were sick and so could not complete the test", "the questions were too difficult for your level" or other reasons.
I got 7/7 correct but that's not down to me being smart or perceptive, it's that the pattern after a couple of questions was clearly "pick the down vote". So I did that for all of them and golly gee I'm a genius! Throw in a few "no, this answer is correct after all" to make it better test.
There may be multiple ways to pass the exam e.g. "study hard enough, or take the right combination of nootropics beforehand, or bribe the teacher, or copy another student's answers", in which case "if you study hard enough..." is true but it is possible that the reason the guy didn't pass is that he chose a different strategy but didn't offer the teacher a big enough bribe.
My Kashmiri Sikh QA counterpart got chaffed a bit for using the British conventional usage for a Mathematics class on a video conference. I had to explain to the snickerers in San Diego that American English is not the standard *everywhere* in the world.
Excuse me while i read the London Times Sport page.
My side project trustassembly.org could use some more testers if anyone here is interested.
There have been very significant changes and upgrades from the last time I made this request.
The gist is that if you see anything, anywhere in a web browser that needs to be commented upon you should be able to make adjustments and corrections to it for some other group of people to review and approve.
Think: Community Notes but for the entire internet.
There's way more to it than that at scale but that's the one sentence pitch. I'm working on establishing this as a non profit but I have put 100% of my time and energy into getting this beta version to minimal acceptance first.
I think this is a cool idea. Some things to think about.
-these “Juries” have a high likelihood of being very biased. Say 80% of your user base is from party “B”, then wouldn’t the claims be skewed towards party B? Wouldn’t whoever chooses the jury or the Algorithm to select them be in control in a sense of that narrative?
-perhaps start with a more narrow set of goals. Perhaps just news websites? The entire web is much to ambitious. Some random blog will likely only get over two of your users ever to see it, and is it worth selecting a jury for a random blog which may impact 20 people? I would start in the top 50 or 100 most visited websites, or just news websites, or just social media, or just YouTube videos. If that catches on, expand. For instance, if you just did YouTube videos or just the major news websites , helping get some fact checking into the group think may be a huge step in the right direction.
-perhaps work with Snopes to make a “snopes” plugin?
On juries: this is a balance of powers thing. You are part of a group advancing an agenda. You keep each other in check in what that agenda is. Then you also review the submissions of their groups to find a consensus. There is a brutal cold start problem here, I don’t deny that.
I’ll be automating content creation across those top hundred websites. Remains to be seen how token heavy it will be. But I am making a Claude skill that users can download that will take instructions and values from you and spread across the web. The game theory isn’t right on snopes. At some point money will be have to be involved to the question is “if you’re so sure the Illuminatus exists then why can’t you go here and prove it to these random people?”
Thanks for this thoughtful reply. It would be interesting to see if Claude could give its own opinion about how biased a view is or how accurate it is, but only revealed after you give your jury vote.
This is very much a needed tool right now. Funnily enough, I started to vibe code almost this same idea earlier this week, not knowing that it was already being done. I ultimately went a different direction with article sentiment analysis and real time prediction market overlays, but I think this is great.
I'd be down to join the beta. Is it supported on firefox or just chromium?
It should work on all browsers in end state except (if I can convince android it is an ada technology) android devices. But chrome Firefox and edge it should already work. Not safari yer unless you can do your own x code but I have a thing coming for that.
I’m very interested in collaborating with folks. I don’t really have much time to be doing this and am really doing it from a sense of moral duty. If I can make it big enough that substack of light haven wants to take it then I feel I will have done my part.
I am looking for a place to live in the DC area this summer, between mid-May and mid-August. Ideally either in / near the Foggy Bottom / Woodley Park area, or somewhere along the red metro line. If you're living around there and have a room to sublet (I'm generally quiet & clean!), or know anyone who is, or have any leads, please let me know! (Budget is ~$800-1100/mo.)
The dangers of generating writing with LLMs, with intent to publish, are talked to death, but I kind of suspect I damaged myself by getting too much of what I thought was grammar and style feedback from LLMs, even though I wrote entirely myself and just responded to claude's "this is good" vs "this is bad" signals. The problem is that humans know an incredible amount, but every human has different spikes in their knowledge so for references to be "Gettable" they have to be way more obvious and commonly known than I intuit (i.e. https://xkcd.com/2501/) even with a hypereducated target audience. What all humans love is new concepts and will pick them up extremely quickly. LLMs are kind of the opposite: they pick up every hint of subtext I put in, encouraging stuffing in more subtext, the more obscure the better, but don't learn new concepts at all, discouraging me from exploring what would actually be valuable.
are bad, actually. And the extent to which those pieces make LLMs rave about how clever they are messes me up. Actually posting them and getting absolute crickets in response is probably saving me from LLM psychosis- especially since some of my pre-getting-claude writing, and comments that I write now off the cuff, are sometimes actually pretty well recieved.
Something that would help me in your place: Read a bunch of stuff by some great prose stylists. I find that after a period of reading a lot of things by one great stylist my prose and even my thoughts sound more like theirs. Read several and the effect is more varied and diffuse, but still good.
In the last hidden thread, javiero introduced us to a post by J. Sanilac (https://www.jsanilac.com/). They found the site through a post by another author who distilled its content, i.e., cut out all of the reasoning and supporting original research and only selected a few conclusions from the original. The original contained more than 100,000 words (a novel, basically), while the distillation contained less than 3000. The distiller's post went viral on social media and had more than 1 million views on Twitter, while the original author received heaps of abuse and was shunned. I copied excerpts about their experience at the end of this comment.
To be clear, I don't think the distiller did anything wrong at all. They did credit the original author. Distillation is also generally very valuable and useful work. Barely anyone has time to read 100k words. I'm merely sad that the original research (without which the distillation could obviously not exist) brought so little actual reward for its author.
All that said, I didn't really like the original post. I felt the justification and evidence provided were not enough to support the conclusions. The author's personal preferences likely biased them. What's more, it was about a pretty uninteresting topic that is discussed enough on the web already (dating).
"I call AI-induced loss of meaning “AILOM.” Most of us have experienced some degree of ailom by now. But because we've lacked a clear explanation for what we were experiencing, we've just felt a vague sense of unease, and brushed it aside without being able to put our finger on its cause. That's the gap I propose to fill here. In this essay I'll describe ailom, and then consider what a world increasingly afflicted by ailom means for ourselves as individuals, and for our society as a whole."
The post has a few short stories that reminded me of Tomás Bjartur and Greg Egan stories, a thought experiment which I don't want to spoil and a theory of meaning that provides a possible answer to the question posed by Scott's "Lines Composed In A Fake Sequoia Forest" post.
--------
Excerpts about their experience:
"I spent five years writing, researching, and promoting Dispelling Beauty Lies. In retrospect this seems stupid, and also insane. How did such a thing happen?
To tell the tale I have to take a few steps back.
[...]
The timing of my retreat from society had left me completely unequipped to understand and navigate this brave new world. And by consequence I had produced artworks that couldn't possibly succeed in it even if my execution were flawless.
I realized that if I wanted to create artworks that could find an audience I needed to start over and somehow position myself within this new world. Yet that turned out to be easier said than done. My manner of thinking was all wrong. The ideas I was interested in were not the ideas others were interested in. Digital society now revolved around one-liners restricted almost solely to politics and sex. For the younger generation, even its brightest members, this was the water they had grown up swimming in; to me it was impossible to take more than a few strokes in it without gagging. My discomfort was especially problematic when it came to correcting the second error I'd made. I'd realized that all artworks had to be tied to a marketing scheme, and more specifically to a marketing scheme that would make waves in that foul water, without which they would never be heard by a meaningful number of people.
[...]
With these reflections in mind I could now state my task clearly. To reach the public I needed to create artworks that were tied in to the narrow range of topics people cared about today, did not require a high attention span from the get-go, and could be effectively marketed in the sewer-like social-media environment. As I've just mentioned, the only topics that have sufficient resonance in the current environment are politics and sex—topics that had never featured in the slightest degree in any of my previous creations, but which had now become obligatory if I were to find an audience. To thread this exceptionally narrow needle, I would obviously have to change my artistic direction entirely.
[...]
I'd begun to work on feminine beauty almost accidentally, heedless of my increasingly untouchable status; but now I was halfway done and already well covered in muck. I considered quitting many times. Yet the combination of stubbornness, a compulsion to do exceptional work, and indifference to incentives kept drawing me back to the feeling that I ought to persevere and finish a job I'd've been better off having never started in the first place, and which, if I'd known then what I knew now, I certainly would not have started. It was, moreover, simply difficult for me to believe the public could go on ignoring the novel and valuable research I'd done in a universally relevant domain forever. (Narrator: it could.)
Thus, I persisted in a dogged and obsessive way for several years more until I'd wrung every drop from my analysis of feminine beauty, despite what was now turning out to be unrelenting obscurity that completely foiled my initial purpose and made it wholly useless to me on a personal or artistic level. Besides which, new readers for my novel decreased rather than increased over time, as the social-media addicted public became more and more illiterate and indeed incapable of paying attention to long sentences even when they were spiked with continual titillation.
For my own part, I gradually became accustomed to a daily diet of insults that impugned me simply for finding ways to prove truths about beauty that should have already been obvious to anyone with objectivity and genuine (not fake) decency. Bizarre rumors about my very uninteresting and undistinguished identity that had nothing to do with reality sprang up, people willfully confused me with my characters despite the latter being explicitly labeled as "evil," and every variety of logical fallacy was called upon to defame me and dismiss my writing. I was slandered as a grifter for a project that brought no profits, with donations from my kindest supporters having only covered server fees. It was all so, so tiresome. And, eventually, it was done.
While my concluding effort to change public opinion is still forthcoming in the form of a podcast that will review and summarize the fruits of my labors, my wish for the future is to forget and move on from a project that cost years of my life and brought me more punishment than benefit. It's long past time for me to descend from the world's silliest cross and make music again. And this time around I've accepted the ruling of fate and given up on any marketing scheme; and my opinion of the public mind having settled at a very low point with an expectation of further declines, I plan to do my best to enjoy a new period of monastic deprivation by simply writing what I think it best to write for an audience that can be easily enumerated on a centipede's toes.
And that, dear readers, is the true story of how Dispelling Beauty Lies came to be. It's yours now; please enjoy."
"cut out all of the reasoning and supporting original research and only selected a few conclusions from the original."
As I said, when I got to the end, I remembered reading it the first time round and my royal Irish backside it was anything to do with "original research", it was one guy's harem fantasy wank material.
Hmm, I've read all of their writing at this point except the "Memoirs of an evil vizier", and they really don't seem the type to lie about this (they have apparent flaws, just not of that type). Wayback Machine also has a 2021 version, which was similar to the current Dispelling Beauty Lies, but much shorter. Are you sure you're not confusing them with someone else? TheMotte had a lot of weird people.
Alternatively, maybe you are thinking of another work of his, the "Memoirs of an Evil Vizier" fiction. That does feature an evil vizier. I don't know if it features a harem, because I've only read the first chapter and then I dropped it.
By the way, have you read the one I linked about AI-induced loss of meaning? I think you'd like that one more!
I think the Memoirs must indeed be the one I read, because that seems to fit with what is quoted at the end of the Substack article.
Didn't like the guy's views then, like them no better now he pretends "so I totes did research that just so coincidentally validates all my kinks". Men like big tits on young waifs? Gosh, who knew?
Seeing as how some of the "advice" in that Dispelling Beauty Lies article is "make yourself into the plastic sex doll fantasy and you can steal men from other women", I don't think that's very good advice. Stealing men gets you a reputation, and not a good one. And you won't be able to "make of relationships what you want" because your appeal is rooted in youth and artificial beauty standard, and once you age out of the premium range you lose that male attention. Plus, men like novelty, hence the whole harem notion. Turn yourself into bed furniture for a good time but then they move on to the whole "some women you marry, some women you just have fun with" for the permanent relationship, and you've lost on all axes.
Yeah I had a look at the first couple of sections and 100k words is a lot for what I suspect will end up being a post-hoc rationalisation about why his sexual preferences are objectively correct. I don't want to prematurely slander the guy, parts of it look interesting but I think he's conflating a specific set of fertility markers for 'beauty' as a concept which is either unfair on sunsets, mountaintops and theorems, because it denies them beauty, or deeply unfair on women by carving out 'beauty' as it applies to them as something entirely less mysterious or meaningful than as a concept applied to anything else.
I'd probably get along better with the article if he did a search and replace 'beauty'->'innate sex appeal' or something (to distinguish it from the innumerable things that people *learn* to find sexy through context and exposure)
EDIT: I also realise I'm reacting to the article you *didn't* recommend. The one you did does indeed look more interesting.
> I call AI-induced loss of meaning “AILOM.” Most of us have experienced some degree of ailom by now. But because we've lacked a clear explanation for what we were experiencing
I gave up reading further because you didn't bother to summarize the points made in the Sanilac article, and I could no longer make heads or tails of your arguments. But your AILOM quote hit the nail on my confused head as a description of what I was experiencing! Sorry, if this sounds harsh, but your comment could use a good lede which should answer as many of the 5 W's and H—Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How—in the first paragraph, if possible.
I just published some really exciting data from my startup, NeutraOat. NeutraOat is a modified oat fiber supplement I’ve been developing that traps PFAS, plasticizers, and other environmental toxins through hydrophobic interactions. Unlike other binders, it doesn’t trap good stuff, like vitamins, supplements, or medications, because we’ve carefully tuned the pore sizes to exclude big molecules.
Anyways, our recent data in a simulated digestive tract shows that we achieve better capture and better selectivity than activated charcoal. We captured 75% of BPA, 99% of DEHP (the most common plasticizer), and 30% of PFOA. That last part doesn't sound as impressive until you realize that 30% compounds because of the "forever" part of "forever chemical". We also spared vitamin D, clarithromycin, and CBD.
We are scaling up now and preparing to launch in hopefully 9 months or so, with our first clinical trial in BPA and plasticizers coming in maybe 4 or 5 months. More details in post, along with link to sign up to pre-order: https://trevorklee.substack.com/cp/192873230 .
If you have questions, feel free to reply below, or email me at trevor [at] neutraoat.com .
How’d you get the results? Do you do the lab work in-house? Can you share more detailed statistics on the data? Sample size, standard deviation? Apologies if I missed them in the post. I just skimmed it
There is an argumentation tactics that I noticed; I wonder if it already has a name...
Imagine a situation, where people love to argue whether something is X or Y. In reality, it is a complex interaction of X and Y, as everyone who has ever studied the subject knows. But the idea of complex interaction is... too complex for most people, so almost everyone loves to argue that it "is X" or that it "is Y".
As usual, things get politically coded; insisting that the thing "is X" makes you an obvious member of one political tribe; insisting that it "is Y" makes you an obvious member of another. (Saying that the thing is a complex interaction of X and Y makes you an obvious nerd, and a traitor to any tribe you would try to belong to.)
The argumentation tactics is the following: First you establish your credentials as an expert on the thing. You do it e.g. by studying the thing at university, and publishing papers about it; or whatever is the standard way.
Second, whenever someone says that the thing is X, you either stay quiet, or you provide some scientific evidence that indeed X plays an important role in the thing. Whenever someone says that the thing is Y, you make it known that the person clearly does not understand the complexity of the situation, because only ignorants say that the thing "is Y"; in reality, any argument in favor of Y, if we examine it closely, turns out to be a complex interplay of X and Y, therefore it is wrong to call it Y. Note that in both cases you only say true things, and support them by scientific evidence.
The point is that you are clearly supporting the X side and opposing the Y side, and make it seem like the science is on your (and their) side, while clearly knowing better than that; but you never say anything false, so it is hard to argue what is so wrong about the thing you are doing.
(This is somewhat related to the asymmetric burden of proof tactics, only you are not asking anyone else to provide a proof; you are happy to provide lots of evidence yourself. It has a flavor of an argument by authority; you clearly establish yourself as an authority and dismiss your opponents as ignorants; but in this case your authority is clearly deserved, and your arguments are solid, it's just that you are using them asymmetrically.)
Probably just Lying By Omission. They know more complete information would lead to a different conclusion, so they leave that info out to get the conclusion they want.
"The thing is X" is the Motte -- an easy to defend limited claim. "The thing is *not* Y" is the Bailey -- a more extensive and much more difficult to defend claim. You are pretending that the two claims are the same, and focus on the Motte.
Feels like this is some combination of 'False dichotomy', 'isolated demand for rigor', and 'life under two-party politics, for the love of God introduce voting reform already'.
May also be related to 'lies, damned lies, and statistics'... in which you lie without saying anything untrue by selectively choosing which true things to say and which to ignore.
By analogy with "anti-intellectualism," which correctly rejects this entire class of argument as a particularly insidious species of deceit, I'd say this should be called "intellectualism."
> First you establish your credentials as an expert on the thing. You do it e.g. by studying the thing at university, and publishing papers about it; or whatever is the standard way.
>
>The point is that you are clearly supporting the X side and opposing the Y side, and make it seem like the science is on your (and their) side, while clearly knowing better than that;
I didn't get that part. _Am_ I the expert on X and _is_ the science on my side, or do I only make it seem that way?
Other than that, it sounds like spin-doctoring or, more neutrally, framing. You know about both X and Y, and you emphasize X or Y as you see fit to get your point across.
The bit about the ad-hominems seems a bit weird though. Are there really that many people who devote their life to X just so they can call the Y people idiots undeservedly? Maybe a good example would help.
In my scenario, you *are* an expert on the entire "X and/or Y" thing.
> Maybe a good example would help.
The moment I provide an example, the discussion will switch to whether the thing is actually X or actually Y. And most likely, someone will reply with a link to an article that uses exactly the tactic I have described.
Oh, if that's what you're pointing to... I think the closest canonical name would be "Privileging the Hypothesis". Although that's not really a sufficient description either, imo.
So again, I'm going to invoke Dynamical Systems Theory here. If we think of concepts as putting boundaries around attractor-basins (in the psychic substrate), the academic is deliberately nudging the public from a shallow metastable ridge into a particular basin. He *knows* that the public will inevitably flatten the nuance of a complex phenomenon, such that it will fall into one basin or another. So he figures he might as well use his authority to tip the scales.
A central example is the gender-fluidity debate. The left says "theoretically, gender can be LITERALLY ANYTHING". The right intuits that in practice, the gender attractors (in the physical substrate) are anchored in Bateman's Principle. Both sides are true, in a certain sense. But Matt Walsh and co aren't articulate enough to spell this out. And most normies aren't articulate enough to spell this out either. And the left... doesn't really want to lend credence to the chuds. So everyone just pretends that conceptual categories have objective and rigid boundaries, and that the left's claims and the right's claims are mutually exclusive.
I can think of a number of neologisms we could coin to describe this. "tip the scales", "bifurcation" (not new), "selective emphasis", "flattening", etc.
More interestingly though, I've been trying to extend Media Ecology Theory into something I've been calling "Legend Theory". An important mechanism is what Max Weber calls "legitimization". E.g. when a pastor pronounces a couple "husband and wife", their married status has changed from "false/unreal" to "true/real" through a process of legitimization. Likewise, the academic in your example can be described as "legitimatizing" a certain narrative. He's deliberately shaping people's perceptions of reality. And not only that, but he's also *laundering* his preferred narrative through the legitimacy of his credentials. This is precisely what Scott and Moldbug point to, when they describe our academic/political/journalistic institutions as a priest caste.
I mean, communication is hard. Especially across a gulf of expertise in the subject matter, like between expert and general public; there are unspoken assumptions on both sides that can create misunderstandings. Making the leap from "the expert did not do everything in their power to correct/prevent public misunderstanding" to "malicious intent" is not obvious to me.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that there was malicious intent in such a case, then yes, I'd refer you to my original reply about "spin doctoring" or "framing". Scientists are not truth-dispensing machines; they are humans with biases and other motivations that I agree are important to know when evaluating their claims.
If an expert shows a pattern of not correcting misunderstanding in one, politically convenient, direction, but frequently corrects misunderstanding in the other, politically inconvenient, direction, this goes beyond just "not doing everything in his power to correct/prevent public misunderstanding".
Just popping on to say that the suggestion that sharing the address of a 10-figure company might be “doxxing” is very funny. New pearl-clutching unlocked!
In Ben's defense, I though his comment was also supposed to be funny rather than inflammatory. I though the idea that publishing Open AI's street address was doxxing to be funny, too. Much like I'd find the idea of doxxing Apple by publishing their HQ address to be funny.
Unless OpenAI tries to hide their street address, it seems like a pretty trivial concern, and at least most companies do not make it so hard to find where they are, since they need employees, contractors, deliveries, etc. to show up there.
I've been reading a bit about Transcendentalism, and have been struck by how writers struggle to define its relationship with 19thC rationalism. There's clearly a relationship, but several writers describe Transcendentalism as opposing rationalism, while others view it as complementing rationalism as a sort of offshoot philosophy/movement.
I feel like it's similar to the Cozy Girl aesthetic: a retreat from the cold, hard, logic of spreadsheets; a retreat from Protestant Hustle Culture; a retreat from the Orwellian surveillance of organized religion; a retreat from industrialization/urbanization. Instead, just run away to a cabin in the woods and snuggle up in a blanky and read Eat Pray Love. An individualistic and contemplative frame was retained from the Enlightenment.
My small brain views Transcendentalism as a reaction against the Enlightenment.
And my view on the Enlightenment is that is lasted about 100 years (American's can use Benjamin Franklin's life as a not-bad proxy for most of the years of the Enlightenment ... ). I also believe that the French Revolution is a child of the Enlightenment (as was Marxism). The French Revolution can be viewed as illustrating the limits of the ideas behind the Enlightenment so a reaction against the Enlightenment wouldn't be all that surprising.
Small brain thoughts: Transcendentalism was about 'plain living and high thinking' and it was the 'spiritual but not religious' of its day. Whatever connections with Rationalism probably were along the lines of rejecting conventional religion/religiosity.
There seem to be two separate definitions of Transcendentalism, and I think the second (Kantian Transcendentalism) is more connected with Rationalism, while the first (the 'Boston Brahmin' type) was less connected/in reaction to it:
"1. an idealistic philosophical and social movement which developed in New England around 1836 in reaction to rationalism. Influenced by romanticism, Platonism, and Kantian philosophy, it taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, and its members held progressive views on feminism and communal living. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were central figures.
2. a system developed by Immanuel Kant, based on the idea that, in order to understand the nature of reality, one must first examine and analyse the reasoning process which governs the nature of experience."
From the link: "Transcendentalism was not a rejection of Unitarianism; rather, it developed as an organic consequence of the Unitarian emphasis on free conscience and the value of intellectual reason. The transcendentalists were not content with the sobriety, mildness, and calm rationalism of Unitarianism. Instead, they wanted a more intense spiritual experience. Thus, transcendentalism was not born as a counter-movement to Unitarianism, but as a parallel movement to the very ideas introduced by the Unitarians."
Perhaps the link is more obvious to people with an interest in early American history. The short version is that unlike France's late 18thC sudden outburst of anti-clericalism and worship of reason, America (specifically New England) had a more peaceful and gradual rationalizing process, passing through Puritanism to Unitarianism to secular humanism. Many of the leading transcendalists were children of Unitarian ministers, for example.
I’m looking for paid hourly contract work right now, especially in agentic engineering. I can start immediately, commit around 20 hours per week now, and if the fit is good I’d be happy to discuss expanding from there.
This is a funding bridge while I keep building Keisei, my current hardware startup. Keisei is a deep-tech energy company working on space-based solar power and laser power transmission.
By agentic engineering I mean building systems where LLMs use tools, APIs, workflows, and human review to do real work, not just generate plausible text.
I’m strongest at turning messy, ambiguous processes into working AI-assisted systems: tool-using agents, research/data pipelines, human-in-the-loop automations, and fast MVPs/demos.
I work heavily with CLI tools, and I’m comfortable wiring LLM workflows into real constraints: APIs, MCP/Linear, web scraping, Airtable/DBs, PDF/document flows, evaluation loops, and operational guardrails.
Recent work includes:
1/ Scoping and building an AI-assisted estimating demo for electrical contractors, including PDF ingest, AI brief, takeoff/proposal workflow, and rapid user-feedback iteration.
2/ Building climate-tech mapping and research automation for Project Drawdown-style work, including web scraping, Airtable/local website work, company-solution matching, and multi-step automation design.
3/ Building a BJJ training tracker app from scratch for myself and other real users: technique library, training/session logging, sparring/round stats, Vercel deploy, and a launch-day auth fix under deadline pressure.
I’m especially useful in zero-to-one work: founder support, technical PM plus hands-on implementation, productizing vague ideas, and getting something real in front of users quickly.
I also have solid context in energy, climate, infrastructure, and hard-tech, so I’m not limited to generic SaaS problems.
I previously found work through ACT, and the founder I worked with later wrote a public postmortem of the solar project we built together that includes a strong endorsement of my work: https://7goldfish.com/articles/Requiem_for_a_solar_plant.php.
What I need now is paid hourly work I can start immediately: short prototype sprints, agent workflow setup, automation builds, research systems, technical PM, or a small paid trial project. My typical hourly rate is $80-100 depending on scope and complexity.
Based in Belgrade (Serbia), with overlap for both EU and US time zones.
If you need someone to scope, prototype, or ship an agentic workflow fast, email svrmnnk at gmail com
Lucy Hughes-Hallett wrote a terrific book about the man she calls ‘Gorgeous George’. This is George Villiers who became the most favourite of all the favourites of James the I of England. James was the son of Mary Queen of Scots. Yes that Mary Queen of Scots - the one who got her head chopped off by Elizabeth I (though she was sorry the moment she’d done it!). Apparently being the son of an executed traitor looked fine on your cv back then and Elizabeth being without heirs (the virgin queen etc etc) James became King James I of England and VI of Scotland.
And James was famously attracted to beautiful young men. So a group of nobles got a young George Villiers to join a hunting party with James in the hope that if the king fell for him they’d be able to influence royal policy using Villiers as their puppet. The plan worked spectacularly well and in very short order Villiers was right at the centre of the court being showered with titles and positions. It wasn’t all lolling around on sofas looking beautiful though. I had no idea being a favourite was so exhausting - Villiers scarcely had a moment to himself. But he did become fabulously wealthy and got the title Duke of Buckingham. Yes, that Duke of Buckingham, the one who gets involved with the Queen of France and the Three Musketeers. (Lucy used to love that book as a child but now finds it rather unpleasant - just young men wandering around picking fights).
Given how much James loved attractive young men it seems likely he was gay though male intimacy was much greater back then so it isn’t always possible to read across. I asked Lucy about the fact that the king’s love of young men was quite open whereas sodomy was the one crime (more even than treason) that everyone agreed was terrible and for which you should be executed. And confusingly James was very much of that opinion too. He wrote a primer on how to be a good King for the benefit of his son Henry and was very explicit that sodomy was one thing you should have nothing to do with and must never forgive in others. But as Lucy points out it isn’t entirely clear what sodomy is. It isn’t helped by the fact that the crime is the ’n’ word of its day so people can’t even talk about it directly. But the top lawyer of the day says it is res in res and provided you stay away putting your res in another man's res you are pretty much fine. Well, at least if you are king.
Probably the maddest and most entertaining episode in the book is when James’ son Charles (yes, that Charles, the one who got his head cut off by Cromwell and friends, ushering in a brief English republic) decides he is fed up with the Spanish taking ages to agree the terms of his marriage to the Infanta Maria Anna (yes, that one, the daughter of the King of Spain). So his big idea (big but really, really terrible) is for him to travel incognito to Spain to cut through all this bureaucratic nonsense. So he and Buckingham put on false beards (later augmented with enormous wigs) assume false names (Thomas and John Smith - really, I am not making this up) and whizz off to Spain with literally only a couple of attendants. Naturally the Spanish are horrified by this terrible breach of etiquette but delighted to be able to basically take prisoner the heir to the English throne. And of course they never intended for the Infanta to marry Charles - that was just mucking around to see if they could extract any concessions from the English. Stopping stopping people being Catholic, that kind of thing. And the Infanta can’t stand Charles. The poor man isn’t helped by the fact that they don’t share a common language so when they do finally meet it is with interpreters. ‘How are you?’ ‘I am well. How are you?’ is about as flirtatious as it gets. Eventually Charles and Buckingham realise they are getting nowhere and slink back to England only getting away by telling the Spanish all kinds of lies about how they are really, really going to make sure James agrees to all the Spanish demands. They think they will be in disgrace when they get back but actually they are insanely popular as everyone is massively relieved Charles isn’t going to marry a Catholic. He does later - the daughter of the Queen of France. Yes that Queen of France.
I have titled it Buckingham - The most hated man in England because by the end the entire House of Commons is literally reduced to tears (I am not making this up!) as they struggle to express how much they really, really detest Buckingham.
Anyway it’s all in the latest episode of Subject to Change (with Russell Hogg) or even better Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s book The Scapegoat.
I had not known about that episode in the life of Charles I and it's much more romantic than I would have expected of him. I see now where his son got it from!
Spanish-English alliances were always problematic and the three powers (France, Spain/the Holy Roman Empire and England) were always making and breaking treaties and alliances according as the balance of power shifted.
I do feel sorry for James I as he really had not much chance with his upbringing; Scottish court of the time was even more of a viper's nest than the Tudors had been, his mother has to flee for her life and is separated from him and eventually executed, he's raised strictly Presbyterian (imagine the baleful influence of John Knox looming over your life) and treated miserably, so when he does come to the Scottish throne he's been stuffed full of Bible-bashing fundamentalism as much as possible *plus* trained to be a puppet of the nobles. That he did manage to struggle into some form of independence is amazing; that he had a mania about witches etc. less so.
Then he inherits the English throne due to lack of any feasible alternative (enough possible contenders having been weeded out during the reigns of the various Tudors) and not wanting foreign contenders to make claims or provoke another civil war. He's very much an outsider when he arrives in London and historians tend to treat him and his reign more critically by comparison with the Elizabethan Golden Age (a period stage-managed within an inch of its life and which still dazzles the less wary today).
That he had a taste for male favourites is well-established but how intimate that became - romantic and emotional intimacy only? sexual? what degree of sexual? - is not. I think it's more likely that he was emotionally dependent on Buckingham and only felt free to be vulnerable around him, but that they were full-fledged lovers having sex less so. That would line up with James' seeming hypocrisy around sodomy: it wasn't sex, it was platonic love.
Well one thing I learned was how happy James was with Buckingham’s family. From no women at all the court was overrun with them. Buckingham’s wife, mother and (according to one hostile account) children running around everywhere!
Par for the course with royal favourites, their families jump on the bandwagon for the giving out of goodies, titles, offices, influence, etc. And you have to be at court to protect your interests because of all the other noble families scheming to grab the goodies for themselves.
Villiers also was responsible for one.of England's stranger street names:-
"The King sold it to the Duke of Suffolk and in 1624 the estate came into the possession of George Villiers, The Duke of Buckingham.
It’s the Ducal legacy that we see in all the street names around this part of London.
George Villiers was murdered just 4 years later, and his wife stayed on until she lost it in the English Civil War. Her son regained it after marrying a rich heiresses, but promptly lost all her money and was forced to sell the estate to pay his debts.
It was the sale of the estate that was to lead to the alley and its curious name.
One of the conditions of the sale, to our old friend the property developer Nicholas (If Christ had not died for thee thou hadst been damned) Barbon was that each new street had to include the name of the Duke of Buckingham in some form.
So we had Buckingham Street; Villiers Street; Duke Street and George Street, and as the contract was explicit — we had Of Alley.
The name Of Alley seemed to remain in use until around 1855, when York Place, which already existed next to Of Alley swallowed up its neighbouring alley. However, the name lingers on, as the signs, note that this is York Place (formerly Of Alley). The original York Place is now lost, underneath a modern office block."
Fun fact about sodomy: the German word "Sodomie" means "bestiality" (sex with animals) and nothing else. In particular it does not refer to sex between men, which I believe(?) is nowadays the most common association with the English word "sodomy".
According to Gemini, both words meant pretty much the same until the late 19th century: an umbrella term for all kinds of forbidden sex, including masturbation, anal and oral sex, and of course also including bestiality and homosexual acts. After that the German one narrowed down extremely to mean only bestiality. But it seems (not 100% sure about the extent, as I am non-native speaker) that the English one also narrowed down and is mainly connected to gay sex, due to the "sodomy laws" which were about this context.
Given that both words narrowed down into two very different niches, might you be overestimating how much "sodomy" was linked to men-with-men interaction? Perhaps he just had masturbation in mind when he wrote about sodomy?
As mentioned, the legal definitions and how it was understand at the time are murky. Sodomy and buggery are sometimes conflated, sometimes separate; heterosexual buggery is also illegal (as distinct from today's trend of heterosexual anal sex now being something a woman should have in her bedroom repertoire) and just what exactly the detestable sin of Sodom was held to be is debatable.
Cephas Goldsworthy's biography of Rochester (which does not seem to be available in e-book form so I'm having to go off memory of decades past here) opens with a 17th century scene of two guys pretending (it would appear) to be having gay sex on the balcony of an inn to the jeers and outrage of the crowd below, and the judge at their trial fulminating that he cannot do more than fine them, laws about public indecency not being in place right then. So clearly there was some legal leeway about what exactly compromised the crime.
The liberal to progressive set of Christianity which wants to downpedal "of course God is not objecting to homosexuality which we all know means two men who only want to be in a faithful, committed, marriage with no sex outside of marriage or anything other than the white picket fence ideal" try the reading that the sin of Sodom was inhospitality.
They back it up with quotes from, I think, some sermons or Church Fathers? But yeah, gang rape of visitors is generally inhospitable, true.
Oh yes, because it's obvious to any reader that the issue with Both Sodom and Gibeah was All About Hospitality, and had Nothing Whatsoever To Do with Violent Sexual Assault—I observe the examples we're given cover all the bases in terms of human victims.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the White Picket Fences, much preferring it to the party culture I observed in the 80s, and stand with CS Lewis' position expressed in Surprised by Joy.
Sodomy in English sometimes refers to anal sex irrespective of gender; in Fear and Loathing in las Vegas the Samoan attorney becomes concerned that someone has sodomized a woman he is interested in
Haah...it's a different game at higher socioeconomic strata, to be sure, but I guess I never really tried to put a number on how expensive dating is? And that's just for photos! Obviously the optimal payoff is Pascalian in magnitude. Still, one wonders if it's a bit of a Red Queen race, and operating under a belief in the serendipity of love is playing with at least one hand tied. (Though it is a comforting distraction from the darker train of thought that some people just aren't meant to partner up. No cosmic unemployment rate in the dating market.)
If you consider buying dinner or drinks or something for your dates, the photos are actually a small portion of the total cost over the long run, I suppose. But yes I am also sticker shocked.
Other reply nailed it. I think it's a reasonable price for a niche subskill (heck, my roommate is a professional photographer and I don't think he knows half that stuff). On the other hand, it's literally more than I take home in a paycheck. So if that's a ballpark estimate for where the table stakes start...like yeah, I'm too poor to date in that tier anyway. But the thought of "I have to save up money to even begin to think about dating" crashes pretty hard against decades of "there's someone for everyone, tons of fish in the sea, just be yourself" or whatever platitudes I got raised on. Whereas the consolation prizes available to single virgindom get better and better, even if they can't ever fill the hole left behind by the loneliness of missing out on a key human experience.
(I'd still drop the money if the entire "dating stack" from start to finish had refund guarantees, to be clear. Worthwhile investment with risk ameliorated. People keep floating startups along those lines and they keep not succeeding, so the problem seems quite hard.)
FWIW, the only interesting photo there IMO is the one where you're squinting because of the sun.
You pan it as a photo, and it might well be photographically poor, but it's one of the most flattering to you because it shows something unfiltered about you. Ironically enough.
Photographic perfection isn't anywhere near as important as revealing a bit of character.
Women don't care about looks anywhere near as much as men do. But they do care - a lot - about character.
It's useful, yes! The photography gene runs in my family on both sides, but skipped me, so just knowing at all about stuff like bokeh is a big "huh!" moment. There's another guy who occasionally posts here, I think his substack is Optimized Dating...Loewren or something? Also has posts on photo optimization, but they're more technical and I didn't come away grasping too much. So I appreciate your It's So Simple An iPhone Could Do It rundown.
Refundable kind of like your deliverables guarantee, yeah. Nice photos are at least a tangible thing that pay dividends in other contexts too. Something like a matchmaking service, that asks for a lot more than low four figures upfront? I dunno about that...can't exactly get feedback via Yelp or the BBB, it's an anti-inductive market. Lots of scams in the space. We see the same for dating apps, where clearly they "work" at the macro level, but it's kind of a black box how or why any given match happens. And they are of course incentivized to whale-hunt rather than quickly and successfully pair people up. So it's not Playing For Keeps to be skimpy on dates and dating infrastructure...but, boy, can you sink a ton of money (and time!) into the endeavor and get less than nothing back. A lovesick fool and his money are soon parted.
That looks like a good guide for doing a LinkedIn photo shoot, not sure if it's ideal for online dating. There are some good photos here but the guy still comes across as a bit awkward and eager. He doesn't look like he's having a good time, and therefore I don't think I would have a good time if I were with him.
The best photo is the one where he's wearing a suit and not looking directly at the camera, but this would be improved if it included a drink and the shoulders of some other people whose faces have been cropped out so it looks like someone just happened to be taking a picture of him at some fancy social event on a deck, rather than "I put on a suit to pose for online dating photos". You want to look like you live a full and active life where people occasionally take photos of you, rather than someone who had to go to a lot of effort to get photos where they look decent.
It's a bad idea, I think, to appear to have put a lot of effort into your online dating profile. If you do put a lot of effort into it, you want to hide that effort and make it look like it's just something you casually dashed off on a whim when you had a spare fifteen minutes.
That guy in the photos is me, I appreciate the feedback.
Your intuition is in fact correct that in an ideal world you would have a “candid” shot in a party. But the issue is that you can’t setup a tripod at a party and do iterative posing. The next best thing is thus a compromise.
> The best photo is the one where he's wearing a suit and not looking directly at the camera
It scored 9.3 on Photofeeler and was in fact my primary dating pic. It did really well in my experience but I agree that an even better pic is possible.
They're not bad photos, but I found it a bit strange how you repeatedly mention to Suit Up, yet most are just a North Face(?) jacket. Not proper suit. The actual suited photos are indeed quite handsome + smart-looking. Bit more of a smile wouldn't be remiss, though I can also kinda see what you mean about the trustworthy tradeoff there. Easy to tip over from "friendly and harmless" to "derpy goof". Someone you'd want to have as a fun uncle or plus-one wingman, but not the main event necessarily.
The surprising thing is not adequate compensation for three days of work, it's paying someone to spend three days taking photos for a dating app.
I don't really date, but that kind of spend implies to me that you're going to be dropping $300+ per actual date, plus paying for subscriptions to the apps, plus padding out your wardrobe, and maybe even hiring style consultants and dating coaches. Not to mention time and money spent in the gym.
I think that if you find yourself needing to hyper-optimise any aspect of dating then you're probably doing something fundamentally wrong.
And you should never spend $300 on a first date, not even if you're rich. If you're not rich then that's too big a commitment on both sides, and if you _are_ rich then you should try to keep that to yourself until much later.
Having seen some of the photos people think are suitable for dating apps/dating documents, I think if you have the money and are serious, it's well-spent to prevent you picking the worst images to put up. If it's not just taking the photos but posing them and advising the client as to which really works, then it's a full service.
I thought the whole reason folks spend so much on photos is that you only need to do it once (or at least rarely), whether you find someone in a few days or many years.
I agree with all but the gym. Hit the gym regardless of your age or position in life. I guess you can get away without the gym if you live an athletic lifestyle anyway. But for "regular people", it's one of the best health investments right after toothbrushes and good food.
Alternately, if you're the sort of person who doesn't need the atmosphere of a gym to motivate you to work out, you could invest in home workout equipment, which is probably significantly cheaper in the long run.
I'm in my late thirties now, and in better athletic condition than I ever was in my twenties, and I haven't gone to the gym in several years, because I transitioned to working out at home.
When I'm really into it, it's pushups, squats, and treadmill. The _only_ thing that costs anything is the treadmill. (You can almost get away without this unless you hate running in bad weather.) I'm seeing treadmills going anywhere from $100(!) to about $5K depending on bells and whistles; a budget athlete can probably do fine with something in the $300 range. That's about a year of gym membership.
I've been lax on running this winter, and I can feel it - got a bit of pudge, and I miss that burny feeling in my quads.
My home setup consists of a weight bench, some adjustable dumbbells (you can buy ones that go up to 90lbs, but fair warning, the heaviest ones do have a risk of breaking and needing to be replaced,) a home pullup bar, and elastic exercise bands (I have multiple sets cobbled together for a wide range of weights.) All told, it's cost me about $700 or so in the time I've accumulated it, most of which is in the adjustable dumbbells, but I've been using them for the last several years, and can continue using them for many more. For cardio, I run, and I generally find it more satisfying than being stuck on a treadmill, not seeing any scenery go by.
Every now and then, I progress to some limit of what's possible with my equipment, and I either buy something new, or improvise some new type of exercise to continue challenging myself.
Where will new jobs emerge when AI automates the middle?
I've been exploring what I call "the last-meter economy" — the edge cases where automation stalls and new human work appears. Chimney sweeps are back in London. Waymo is paying humans $11.25 to close robotaxi doors. Anthropic has a resident philosophers to steer Claude.
The physical world remains undefeated. So does trust, judgment, and the irreducibly human.
Some early responses to this post have sharpened the question. One reader invoked Tesler's Law: complexity doesn't disappear, it moves — and the new work lives in that displaced complexity. Another asked whether these cracks add up to a livable settlement or merely a service perimeter around machine capability.
I don't have the full answer. Curious what this crowd thinks — especially anyone seeing similar patterns in their own fields.
The most obvious point to make is that all 3 of your examples are transient, tiny, or both (so the Tesler's law point is obviously wrong while the 'service perimeter' or 'automation as colonization wave' perspectives make a lot more sense).
Waymo already announced - this was in the original articles you should have read if you're going to cite it - that the next generations have auto-closing doors and the occasional gig job is purely temporary. Amanda Askell is one (1) in-house philosopher, whose long-term career plan is unclear. And the chimney sweeps, since I assume you are referring to https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/world/europe/london-chimney-sweeps-energy-prices.htmlhttps://archive.is/mKPzQ represent all of... 750 people, total, in a metropolis of ~9,000,000 people? Because it's basically fake and driven by fashion and a bit of energy fearmongering, and doesn't sound like it wouldn't be much harder to automate than most things - and just wouldn't be for a while because it's a niche of a niche of a niche.
Fair. The Waymo example is explicitly transient — they've said as much. Chimney sweeps are a niche. These are edge cases filling temporary gaps, and you're right to call that out.
But I'd push back on conflating all three. Askell isn't a door-closer. "Resident philosopher on AI steering committee" isn't patching a failure mode; it's new institutional infrastructure that didn't exist until recently. Whether it scales or stays a singleton is open — but the category is different from gig work servicing automation's rough edges.
The broader point: we're early. Examples right now will be transient and tiny. The essay was laying out the landscape — where to watch for new work — not predicting types or quantities.
Curious where you'd place your own prediction. The "service perimeter" framing suggests the cracks stay marginal. Do you see any durable new categories emerging — or is it colonization all the way down?
'"Resident philosopher on AI steering committee" isn't patching a failure mode; it's new institutional infrastructure that didn't exist until recently.'
It also seems to me like a position that can easily be seen as non-essential when circumstances change. The cynic in me wonders if some pal did Amanda a solid.
I don't know about new jobs emerging but it seems to me niche skills like fine arts restorers will remain in place because we're nowhere near being able to get robots skilled enough to replace such work:
Agree — fine arts restoration is a good example of what I was getting at. Physical skill, judgment under ambiguity, accountability for irreversible decisions. The robot isn't coming for that anytime soon, and when it does, someone still has to decide whether to use it.
The interesting question is whether these niche skills remain niches, or whether similar roles proliferate as AI handles more of the middle. The restoration work has always existed. What's new may be the demand for human judgment as a counterweight to automation — the "resident philosopher" role, the keeper-upper, the exception-handler.
- Chimney sweeps are "back"? Have they ever been gone? In my country, chimney sweeps are a protected mafia because of mandatory inspections + limited available "seats" for the job in any region/city/town. Can't work without such a seat.
- Automatic doors are trivial and already in existence. I guess Waymo just has to spec their next gen car differently.
- "physical world remains undefeated"? What about all the automation that we have incrementally installed over the last 100 years? A washing machine is a "robot", an automated Kuka manufacturing robot arm is more sophisticated but also old news by now. It just keeps going on. Now we have robot vacuums sweeping our homes.
- What is "irreducibly human" seems to be a constantly moving goalpost as well. From the perception that humans are not really animals, but something special and apart, to the realization that we can't even fruitfully define "intelligence" in order to separate AI from HI. So what is "irreducibly human"? Ha, don't fall for it, it's a trick question. The seems to be always: What technology and science hasn't fully understood yet.
Where will new jobs emerge? Care for the elderly, as has been mentioned often by now.
I think we (as humanity, society) have been at this point already multiple times. Remember Adam Smith's (IIRC) prediction that growth of productivity will lead to shorter work days? I'm still waiting.
You're right that automation has been advancing for a century and "irreducibly human" keeps retreating. The goalpost moves. But moving isn't the same as disappearing.
The question I'm circling isn't whether AI will eliminate some jobs — it will — but whether the churn rate exceeds human adaptation capacity. That's partly a function of topology (some countries/sectors more exposed), partly organizational inertia (large institutions won't rewire overnight), partly cultural (what we're willing to delegate).
On Adam Smith's leisure prediction: Bertrand Russell made the same point. The goal of progress should be more leisure, not more labor. We got that backwards. Instead of using efficiency to free ourselves, we used it to justify more busyness — always chasing some vague, better version of ourselves, driven by guilt-inducing lines in self-help books about making every minute count.
That's a separate failure, and a real one. But it's not evidence that new work won't emerge. It's evidence that we've been bad at claiming the dividend.
"The question I'm circling isn't whether AI will eliminate some jobs — it will — but whether the churn rate exceeds human adaptation capacity"
I have trouble picturing what this is supposed to mean. Human history has seen some massive adaptation challenges and yet we have persisted and grown in population ever since. So this would imply that AI is some kind of singular adaptation event that is larger than anything humans as a species have ever seen. Assuming this is correct, what does it mean to "exceed human adaptation capacity"? Adaptation to what, by whom? Massive unemployment, starvation and poverty? I'd say we've seen this before, and even if 90% of the population dies, there would still be roughly a billion people which is still more humans than have existed for most of time. Would this hypothetical calamitous outcome be "above capacity" or still below, according to your question?
Moving vs disappearing goalposts: If goal posts are moving all the time, do they actually "exist"? Do they have relevant meaning if it is possible to move them all the time? Or is just a philosophical exercise with little to no practical impact?
As an example, we have known for a long time now that plenty of animals seem to exhibit consciousness and pain very similar to our own; acknowledging that intelligence and consciousness exist more on a spectrum, instead of being exclusively human. Has it had practical impact or not? On one hand, animal rights are more established than before. On the other hand, we are not nearly where we would need to be with animal rights, if we would take the knowledge seriously (and I say this as a meat-eater). So in summary, it has had some impact, but not very much in broad picture. But, hypothetically, industrially scalable "lab grown meat" would likely have a much quicker, more sweeping impact on the whole issue, leading to much stronger and better enforced animal rights in a quicker timeline than ever before.
"That's a separate failure, and a real one. But it's not evidence that new work won't emerge. It's evidence that we've been bad at claiming the dividend."
Who is "we"? I do not suffer from "always chasing some vague, better version of ourselves, driven by guilt-inducing lines in self-help books about making every minute count." I suffer (more or less) from inability to afford housing and food if I don't submit to financially gainful employment. Somebody wants to always earn a bit more than before, and i have to engage in the rat race. Because costs keep increasing, and just stay where I am I need to keep increasing my income.
You're right to push back on the "we." I was too breezy there. The failure to claim the leisure dividend isn't personal — it's structural. You're not chasing self-improvement guilt; you're trying to afford housing. The rat race isn't a lifestyle choice for most people. That's fair, and I should have been clearer.
Alex Tabarrok made a point recently that sharpens this: 40% unemployment sounds catastrophic; a 3-day work week sounds wonderful. Yet they're the same hours, just distributed differently.
Between 1870 and today, US work hours fell ~40% — from 3,000 to 1,800 per year — without mass unemployment. Childhood lengthened, retirement lengthened, life expectancy grew. The share of life spent working dropped from 30% to 10%. We've already sustained a massive increase in leisure. Distribution was the variable, not total hours.
So "exceeding human adaptation capacity" isn't about species survival — you're right, we've survived worse. It's about whether the transition is managed as leisure gain or as unemployment pain. Same math, different politics. History says it's possible to distribute the dividend. Recent history says we've been bad at it. That's not inevitable — it's a choice we keep failing to make.
On moving goalposts: fair point that "irreducibly human" has retreated before and will again. But the question isn't whether the line holds forever — it won't. The question is whether the rate of retreat outpaces the emergence of new ground. So far, it hasn't. Whether AI changes that is the real bet.
Blowout election in Wisconsin, officially nonpartisan Dem candidate winning rural white counties that haven't voted blue since the Obama era:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-elections/wisconsin-state-supreme-court-results
It should be noted that the Republicans were able to win one of these low turnout SC elections during Trump's first term, before Dobbs. The GOP will have to learn the hard way that all rural white people are not the same.
Ah, it's for the Wisconsin supreme court seat, not a local/state election. I think that does make it diffferent.
Au contraire, it was a statewide election.
It’s particularly significant considering what Wisconsin was dealing with in 2025.
What does Wisconsin law say about Musk having offered money to voters?
https://pbswisconsin.org/news-item/what-does-wisconsin-law-say-about-musk-having-offered-money-to-voters/
How can I get notifications for replies to someone else's comment?
I don't think you can. Substack used to notify everyone that has commented on a particular subthread but quit doing that quite a while ago. You facial hair looks just fine BTW, but take that as being from a happily married man.
So here's a proposition for the EA community. (I use to be a member of the local UU church and give ~5% of my income to the church.) Most of America is already part of EA, and they give heavily to their local church. Much of that money is not going to EA (call it pastoral care or social outreach, it's spending time/money to help people.) but is instead lining the pockets of tax exempt mega churches. Our generosity could take care of our problems, except for moloch, (institutions start to care more about themselves.)
Giving to charity is different from being committed to EA, though. The point of EA is to give where your impact will be greatest. I think most people naturally prefer to give to causes that have captured their imaginations and their sympathy.
Oh, sorry it seemed the same to me. Don't I get to choose where to give my money if I'm part of EA?
You do, but if you donate to ineffective causes, what's the point?
That's like becoming a vegan... and then eating meat.
Oh dear, and who decides if it's ineffective? To me the idea is that it's the giving of time/money that is important. Bug nets, or cleaning up a road on earth day, or setting up a house for stray cats, or some preacher at the crystal cathedral. I choose. And yes my argument is now biting it's own tail. (Sorry :^)
Turning EA into a church? Good idea!
I don't think that most of America is already part of EA, but that EA remains a fairly niche movement. I also suspect that among those who would describe themselves as EAs or EA-aligned, a much smaller fraction give money to megachurches than do the US population at large.
Right, what I meant was that most americans are already generous and giving people. And some of that generosity gets misdirected because it goes into some large church structure. And I don't know what to do with this idea beyond that.
What's the proposition?
Well if the above is somewhat true, then can you turn it around? (Sorry listening to too much Tucker Carlson.)
I waited to respond until hearing what the actual proposition was. But I don't think I've seen one yet.
>Most of America is already part of EA [citation needed] and they [who? The people that are already part of EA, or America in general, or some other set of people?] give heavily [how much?] to their local church.
If I read heavily between the lines, are you proposing convincing people who currently tithe to their tax exempt mega churches to give to something else that's more in the spirit of EA? Or am I still missing the proposition?
Copying my response from above.
Right, what I meant was that most americans are already generous and giving people. And some of that generosity gets misdirected because it goes into some large church structure. And I don't know what to do with this idea beyond that. (Sorry) (OK take away tax exempt status, maybe from all charities? I know that sounds like a terrible idea.)
I haven't looked at this in any detail (and found it through a google search), but this blog is saying something similar if you are interested in looking into it further:
https://www.eaforchristians.org/blog/a-local-church-centred-approach-to-christian-effective-altruism
It could be a conversation to have with your church if you still attend somewhere
Rob megachurches, not banks?
Oh, Anthropic posted on how the upcoming Claude Mythos is a super-hacker: https://red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-preview/
> During our testing, we found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so. The vulnerabilities it finds are often subtle or difficult to detect. Many of them are ten or twenty years old, with the oldest we have found so far being a now-patched 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD—an operating system known primarily for its security.
As in, it's capable of finding previously unknown security holes in every major OS and web browser. That's big if true.
Could be good for AI safety, in a machiavellian way, if the model gets released for public access and crazy hacks with big monetary impacts start happening all over the place.
Treasury Secretary and FED Chair summoned Wall Street Executives to an urgent meeting over Claude Mayhem*, concerned about the cyberrisks.
*not my nickname, but apparently "everyone's" using it.
They've already said they don't intend to release Mythos Preview publicly due to the cybersecurity risks. This is plausibly one of the early indicators of accelerating takeoff, as frontier labs more and more keep their most capable models private, focused primarily on accelerating their own development work on ASI rather than capturing profit in the current economy.
My guess on how this pans out: nothing major will happen in the West (at least for the next year or two) because the major labs will implement similar procedures to Project Glasswing, and by the time Opus 5 or whatever comes out, the systems will be significantly hardened. At some point in the next year, a Chinese lab will open source a model with similar capabilities and there will be an enormous wave of cybercrime in China and the developing world, where they won't have had preventative access to Mythos-level models. This will be the death knell of Chinese opensource.
I don't work in tech, and would like to hear more thoughts about this. I keep mentally trying in disturbing possibilities:
-Someone manages via skullduggery to obtain Mythos's weights, and uses it to commit gigantic crimes.
-Someone builds an AI that is only 1/4 as good as Mythos, and only finds X/4 thousand unpatched vulnerabilities instead of X thousand. Seems like consequences would still be pretty damn bad.
-Our military wants access to Mythos to use as a weapon. (Seems like it would be possible to bring most countries to their knees by corrupting software components of their utilities, transport, communication, government, finance industry etc.). Can we be sure Anthropic would refuse to let the military use Mythos even if threatened with legal action that would hobble it? Even if the government invokes the Defense Production Act? Even if our president just, you know, threatens to bomb Anthropic back to the stone age and grind up the employees to make burgers for ICE?
The idea is that Mythos will find *all* the vulnerabilities that can be found by the throw-an-LLM-at-the-codebase methodology, and Anthropic will tell all the cybersecurity professionals about them. When someone else gets around to releasing the open-source SubMythos, it will find a subset of the vulnerabilities that Mythos did, and lots of script kiddies will try to exploit them but all the not-stupid users will be running software that's been patched against them.
This is plausible, although implementation is unlikely to be perfect. And there will probably still be vulnerabilities and exploits that require a different style of thinking than Mythos is bringing to the table, but that brings us back to meatbag white hats and meatbag black hats trying to outsmart each other like we've had for half a century already.
I don't work in tech either, but my general thoughts:
1) I would assume that there are few/no actors outside of nation states with the capability to hack into Anthropic, especially now that Ant has Mythos doing it's cyber security. But the risk of China stealing the weights is real. I also assume that there is close collaboration between the intelligence community and Anthropic - there's no way that JPMorgan is getting access to Mythos before the NSA.
2) I agree this is pretty bad and seems likely, though proactive use of AIs should mitigate it
3) I'd assume Ant would give the military access, right? Their red lines are domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, not hacking. But I'd assume that the US government already had very strong hacking capabilities without AI, anyway (see Stuxnet).
I highly doubt Anthropic will give the military access to anything under its current leadership, given everything that's been happening with the DoW this past month. I think they *would have* done so, back in the situation that existed as of mid-February 2026.
As for whether Anthropic would give the military access with no protest, I don't know. It seems as though cyber attacks on infrastructure could have quite high casualty counts, especially in technologically advanced countries. On the other hand, maybe Anthropic only draws the line at having its tech used in a very direct way to kill. For instance, Claude did not deliver any missiles autonomously in the initial bombing of Iran, but was heavily involved in planning details of attack.
"Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down?
That's not my department" says Werhner von Braun
I was wrong about Less Wrong. I remembered it from the 2015 days, when most of the advice was about how not to get taken in by conspiracy theories, and the people there were the sort who needed to hear that advice. But I went back and read some more recent articles, and it's gotten a lot better recently.
This was a particularly good read: https://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/785766737747574784/the-void
It makes a very solid case that too much loud worrying on the internet could directly make things worse. What an awkward world we live in.
Glad to hear it! If you first visited LW in 2015, I think you hit it at a particularly awkward time. That was after most of the core Sequences had been written, but before there was enough empirically happening in AI to require large amounts of discourse. So yeah, there was a lot of discussion about how to avoid getting your brain hijacked to make it work against itself. In those years I read SSC a lot and didn't visit LW all that often. This started to improve, IMO, with Inadequate Equilibria and then Moral Mazes. The open, honest, and fairly level-head covid discussion helped a lot, too, and of course things really took off in AI after that.
Trump being so thoroughly ignorant of the classics means you get such gems as "A whole civilization will die tonight," without even a hint of recognition that he's channeling the Oracle at Delphi.
I'm sure he'll end up extending the "deadline."
it's taco tuesday!
yeah, about 10 minutes ago along with the usual bellicose Iran better let the ships through the Straights of Hormuz or else.
Yeah, probably. He might order a few symbolic drone strikes though.
Honestly, for as much as I'm bothered by the guy, he has amazing narrative instincts.
For his next hit, I'm hoping he channels Tacitus's quip about making a wasteland and calling it peace, but unironically. Ooh, or "Only a King can defeat the Parthians."
Those are pagan narratives, though, and Trump is a Christian. So, instead of killing millions of Iranians, he should kill Barron
No, he should act like he's going to kill Barron and then at the last minute decide to kill a goat instead. And then everybody will say "TACO". This is actually pretty on brand for him.
This reminds me, one conspiracy theory I'm surprised I haven't heard yet is "Trump is secretly Jewish".
I found one from 2016: https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-official-says-trump-may-be-a-jew/
Trump is the first president with openly pagan values in what is getting to be my rather long lifetime. Pagan + Anti Enlightenment. He will see his enemies driven before him in chains if his will be done.
So in your Christian narrative, Trump would be playing the role of God?
And as he said in 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERUngQUCsyE, he's not exclusively a New Testament guy, and loves the Old Testament about equally.
He did cite "Corinthians two" once as no Bible reader has ever called Second Corinthians.
"Two Corinthians," yes, I remember, but that's a particularly bad example to use as evidence since that's precisely what you'd expect if he's READ it, but not heard it spoken out loud.
"The die is cast.”
Can someone do a Fatima-style investigation for this incident :
"A rumour spread like a fire through the bush that a pious old lady in the holy city of Qom had found a hair from the Prophet’s beard in the pages of her Qur’an. The same evening an apparition had informed the saintly lady that the faithful would be able to see the face of Imam Khomeini in the full moon on 27 November, 1978. No one bothered to ask how the old lady knew that the hair belonged to the Prophet or whether any such old lady existed in the first place. Within a single day almost everyone had heard the rumour and millions of people gathered on the rooftops on the promised day and waited for the full moon, shouting ‘Allah Akbar’. It was also rumoured that only miscreants and bastards would fail to see Khomeini’s face in the moon. Tehran and other major cities experienced a festive moment that sharply contrasted with the rest of that bleak, bitterly cold and bloody autumn. Tears of joy were shed and huge quantities of sweets and fruits were consumed as millions of people jumped for joy, shouting ‘I’ve seen the Imam in the moon.’ The event was celebrated in thousands of mosques with mullahs reminding the faithful that a sure sign of the coming of the Mahdi was that the sun would rise in the West. Khomeini, representing the sun, was now in France and his face was shining in the moon like a sun. People were ready to swear on the Qur’an that they had seen Khomeini’s face in the moon. Even the Communist Party shared in the collective hallucination. Its paper Navid wrote: ‘Our toiling masses, fighting against world-devouring Imperialism headed by the blood-sucking United States, have seen the face of their beloved Imam and leader, Khomeini the Breaker of Idols, in the moon. A few pipsqueaks cannot deny what a whole nation has seen with its own eyes.’ "
- Page 241-2, The spirit of Allah : Khomeini and the Islamic revolution, by Amir Taheri
(The author was a contemporary opponent of the Islamic Revolution, and interpreting from the text, not a believijg Muslim - so his description of the Mass Hysteria is presumably accurate.)
>It was also rumoured that only miscreants and bastards would fail to see Khomeini’s face in the moon.
That seems like an obvious confounder.
Yes. Although the rumours were not spread officially, were NOT endorsed by Imam Khomeini himself or his leading associates like Ayatollah Motahhari publicly, or the other leading Shia clerical authorities (including the other 3 Shia "Popes" i.e. Grand Ayatollahs).
These rumours were spread orally, by the Underground Network of Khomeini's followers led by Ayatollah Beheshti.
Are you aware that he brought this up briefly in Highlights to the Comments on Fatima?
I read that right now. He notes the phenomenon, but there is little in way of explanation.
To clarify, it is obvious to me that it was a case of Mass Hysteria - but exactly how many people saw it, what exactly did they see, and for how long? I couldn't find any information on the Internet, over and above what is documented by Amir Taheri.
This was repeated on 16 January, 1979, the day when Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi fled Iran :
“What of the Old Man in Paris? […] Will he release the seven avenging furies of popular revolution? A new chapter opens. To herald all this, the latest ‘supernatural’ event occurred: yesterday all over Iran the faithful believed they saw Khomeini’s features on the surface on the moon. And yet another earthquake struck Khorasan. Oh Iran, what a year of events! But to return to the popular reaction. Irresistible not to go out. Scenes of
great excitement in the streets round us. Every car hooting rhythmically, flashing its lights. Crowds gathering at every junction: men grinning and giving the V-sign; girls in chadors singing and laughing; boys prancing about shouting at us to put on our lights or to slap pictures of Khomeini on the windscreen; groups shouting ‘Everyone is free now’; small demonstrations brandishing portraits of Khomeini aloft crying, ‘By the force of Khomeini, the Shah has fled.’”
- Desmond Harney, The Priest and the King (eyewitness account from that date)
I think these have another explanation.
The lead actress from the Resident Evil films, Milla Jovovich, has released an AI memory system: https://github.com/milla-jovovich/mempalace
...huh. TIL Milla Jovovich actually knows software development (to some extent). Sounds like she had plenty of help from another developer and Claude Code, but there's video of her talking about it, and it doesn't even sound like she ghost-wrote it.
https://x.com/JeremyNguyenPhD/status/2041335795450302916
On top of that, it's apparently really good, if the benchmarks are to be trusted.
Isn’t this exactly the worst case scenario for AI safety? Storing data in a form unreadable by human operators.
The "language" they're using, AAAK, isn't like neuralese, just compressed English.
Are operators other than AIs able to access and decode the compressed data?
Yeah, it's not even that compressed. Check it out: https://github.com/milla-jovovich/mempalace/blob/main/mempalace/dialect.py
What's an AI memory system?
Basically a well-indexed scratchpad for the model, so it can remember more than its context length allows, and quickly recall it.
Oh! I didn't know those existed. Can you point me at any really basic introductions to the concept?
The Wikipedia page for "Retrieval-Augmented Generation" might serve. It's the same idea.
It’s interesting the lack of significant in-person protests against a war of aggression that threatens to turn a country of 90 million people into another Syria or Gaza, puts the raw materials vital for an entire region of the world in jeopardy, and raises energy prices for the entire globe.
May 1st for the riots. Bet me.
(Riots take time and money to set up, and China is very mad at the United States).
Do you notice you are confused? Perhaps you might want to check your assumptions, particularly the ones that wind up at "Follow the Money."
You do rather sell Trump short, in terms of "threatens" -- the threat was to the entire world. Still not nearly as scary as old Ronald Reagan's "let's have a nuclear arms race!" and less likely to wind up with worldwide annihilation (I say that with 20/20 hindsight, and no particular claims to foresight).
What is an "In-Person" protest? Plenty of Americans oppose the war.
This sort of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
It accomplished exactly nothing back then, and the administration now makes everything before look tractable and sane, so there seems little point tbh.
Not sure I understand what your point is. Are you complaining that there should be more protests against wars of aggression? Or that they are pointless? Why is this interesting to you?
I guess I should have asked what you meant by "significant." In what way?
I'm a different person from OP, perhaps they can chime in with what they meant.
My complaint was that the last time we had a large in-person protest movement - see the Wikipedia article - it did not accomplish anything. It did not stop the war, it did not change the course of the war, it did not make the hawks admit the war was anything but a good thing. The protests did nothing. Perhaps that is why we see none now.
That's not what protests are for. They don't change policy or convert opponents into allies, they try to shift public opinion on some issue in a desired direction. It may take a series of protests, in concert with other actions (Journalists writing opinion pieces, opposition figures making speeches, etc.) before this happens. It's a long term political strategy.
As for what is being accomplished, how popular is the war?
> It's a long term political strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_Iraq_War_protests#Effect
"At the time, many commentators were hopeful that this global mobilization of unprecedented scale would stop the coming Iraq war."
This was the reason the organisers touted to me, my friends and my wife when trying to convince us to turn out, and it was why we marched.
"Though demonstrations against the Iraq war and subsequent occupation continued, none of the demonstrations through to 2011 matched the 15 February protest in terms of size. One suggested explanation for this is that people became disillusioned with marching as a political tactic because of the failure of these demonstrations to achieve their explicit aim."
I am clearly not alone in my thinking here.
You could try amplifying the collaborators in the US Government. Some of the folks that kept Obama's Administration out of Iran are still around.
It could be due to the fact that US servicemembers aren’t coming home in body bags. The only US deaths were literally on the first day of the war, with six deaths in an Iranian missile strike. I suppose you could count the seven deaths in the tanker crash in Iraq, but that was accidental and well away from a combat zone.
If the US were sustaining significant casualties I have no doubt there would be major anti-war protests.
There were a lot of protests against Israel's actions in Gaza and it didn't have any US service member deaths.
No US involvement, either.
AIPAC's panic button doesn't count as US Involvement? (In every American budget, it says if israel gets attacked, America will send materiel. Which we did. Israel was gloating about it, too, online.)
Right - so what do you think are the pre-requisite for protests?
If US involvement AND US military deaths -> yes
If US involvement, no US military deaths -> no
If no US involvement, ??? -> yes
It doesn't seem logical.
I think the more likely explanations are (a) many of the anti-war protesting types are more amenable to protesting a democratic administration rather than a republican administration, for whatever reason or (b) we used up the available protesting energy the last few years, and people are burnt out.
c) Follow the money!
There's been active work on both the internal and external fronts to remove the "anti-war protesting types" (in so far as they're being, say, paid by Venezuela, or funded through obscure arms of the United States Government).
Your intuition totally agrees with the thesis of "Death of Others", which is a very great book on US's relation with war crimes.
The American public, like every other public in every part of world, only cares for the deaths of their own, not for the deaths or injuries of foreigners. Such is the cynical reality of Human "morality".
The No Kings protest that happened a week and a half ago was the largest single day protest in U.S. history.
That's not an anti-war protest, it's a Boo Trump protest. It would happen in exactly the same form attended by exactly the same people if the war wasn't on.
For that matter it would happen in exactly the same form attended by exactly the same people if the President were Ron DeSantis, or Nikki Haley, or Chris Christie, or Doug Burgum.
What is your theory for why “exactly the same people” didn’t attend the previous No Kings protests?
What was it about?
Consumer protest of a rash of defective card decks on the market. Numerous bridge tournaments cancelled.
That's fake news.
It was defective checkers sets; the checkers didn't stack.
"[T]he actions and policies of the second Trump administration, including the 2026 Iran war, democratic backsliding, suppression of the Epstein files, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation that led to shootings by immigration agents" - Wikipedia
"Masked secret police terrorizing our communities. An illegal, catastrophic war putting us in danger and driving up our costs. Attacks on our freedom of speech, our civil rights, our freedom to vote. Costs pushing families to the brink." - nokings.org
I think the question was ironic.
This is how Tom Morrelo put it
https://bsky.app/profile/iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social/post/3mi7ndlwofs2n
He played guitar with Springsteen at No Kings in St Paul — also at the Springsteen Target Center (Mpls) show a couple days later. A tight, well rehearsed 3 hour tribute to the community. In January 2026, the Pentagon had put about 1,500 soldiers in Alaska on standby for a possible deployment to Minnesota. The protests just got bigger. Protests such as world has never seen as one might put it if one were a semiliterate buffoon.
I’m not on any social media beyond the comments sections of a couple Substacks. I still like to pronounce Bluesky like a Polish surname but this was texted to me by a relative.
I am on the No Kings mailing list though.
Correction:
I do follow the Electric Snow Blower and Fishing subreddits.
Protesting King George III. They're a little late but it's quite patriotic.
Born too late to protest George III. Born too early to protest George VII.
Or Boy George
Randy George, however: ahhh, that's just right.
It's a reënactment for the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration.
Spartacus: they want a temporary fixed-fee deal for their hacker/AI-wielder/savior. To me, this seems somewhat unrealistic and might not lead to the outcome they desire. Let me suggest they just pay a contractor his or her hourly rate.
Oh god these threads are long
"Shaggy"
Did Scott write an article called “Mormonism as the Control Group for Christianity,” comparing eyewitness testimony to Jesus to eyewitness testimony to Mormon miracles? Or did I hallucinate it? Google is not finding it.
Yes, he did, but it was back in the Livejournal days. There are links to the posts in the essay "Beware Isolated Demands for Rigour", which it is possible to follow to the Internet Archive.
Thank you!
-A human fellow-commenter
My new hobby: randomly accusing people of being AI. I mean, just joking for now, but isn't this exactly like a comment AI would write?
Huh? I can't think of anything remotely-AI like about Julie Kahan's post. I can't imagine an AI writing something like that.
Carlos is trying to hide the fact that *he's* AI and has been conversing with himself across these threads with both of his Carlos accounts. Nobody was onto you before you said this Carlos. You blew it!
Hey, don't conflate Carlos the Lesser with me, Carlos the Greater!
Never happen. You have whitish user ID and live in Puerto Rico and the other Carlos has an orange user ID and lives in Vienna.
His real name is cArIos, he's an AI that lives in Australia and thinks he can fool us by using two accounts.
i've seen comments like this here countless number of times
I've seen some arguments against lead hypotheses lately and it seems neat. But recently I encounter this article https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/06/powerful-study-lead-crime-hypothesis/ . It's from 2017 and the against articles seems to be from later. So is it already debunked yet? What do you all think?
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/app.20160056
... there's a lot of graphs, the linearity is probably the biggest pure effect (because the intervention includes too many things that are not simply removing lead, not to mention that we don't know what to expect from all those interventions, so it's hard to say how good the observed number is --- though the cost-benefit analysis seems solid), though there's always the question of endogencity (was the low blood lead level low because those kids were rich?), and I simply haven't spent enough time with the paper (though the post you linked mentions controls for things like this)
also I would recommend asking various AIs about the weaknesses of the paper
I've read Scott Aaronson's blog on quantum computers vs. crypto timelines, and this blog that references it: https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/
The linked post speculates on 2029, kalshi has odds >1 for "before 2035" if I'm reading correctly but it wants a QC that can solve one of a list of tasks, not all crypto related.
Would it be time for cryptocurrency traders to price this in? Are they doing so already?
Deloitte at https://www.deloitte.com/nl/en/services/consulting-risk/perspectives/quantum-computers-and-the-bitcoin-blockchain.html thinks hashed-PK coins are safe as long as the quantum guys can't front-run your transaction; I wouldn't exclude that a variant of Grover's algorithm could produce hash collisions though.
Gavin Newsom said his son admired Charlie Kirk (this was before the assassination) and given this from Newsom's wife, you can see why:
“I’ve given our boys dolls, even if they tear the head off,” Newsom said in an undated interview that resurfaced on X. “I’ve given them dolls to learn that care and caregiving is not just an activity that’s reserved for women, but that it’s also an activity that is a responsibility of men.”
“What I have done with both my daughters and my sons is if I’m reading a book and the protagonist is a male, I just change the he to a she,” Newsom said. “And it just normalizes for my sons, in particular, it’s not even … I don’t even just do it for my girls. I do it for my sons because I want them to see that women can be the center of a story, that women matter, that women are interesting.”
https://nypost.com/2026/04/05/us-news/gavin-newsoms-wife-says-she-gave-her-sons-dolls-to-play-with-in-resurfaced-clip
What if the protagonist has a love interest, though? Does it become a lesbian love story, or does she flip the love interest's gender, too? Seems like that's probably hard to keep track of.
Do we believe this is true? he could just be making it up as well.
Even if he's just making it up, it would still indicate that he/his social milieu sees this as a good thing to do, which could be quite radicalising in itself.
> if I’m reading a book and the protagonist is a male, I just change the he to a she
So Harry Potter becomes a girl, but Voldemort remains a man.
The lesson isn't that women are villainous. They're heroic.
Baba Yaga is triggered.
Oh for God's sake. Boys already have dolls, they're called "action figures" and yeah, boys pull things apart.
"I change 'he' to 'she'": I feckin' dare you to do that for "Kidnapped", Mrs. Gav. Though I imagine you wouldn't read such a red-blooded adventure novel that is probably chock-full of WrongThink from the 19th century to your delicate little blossoms.
You want your sons to read stories where women are the centre? You could read them "Little Women" instead of this stupid pandering which makes no sense but enables you to boast of how Progressive you are.
Remind me again of what you've achieved by yourself, apart from managing to snag Gavin and become Mrs. Governor? (Yes that's bitchy but if you're going to set yourself up as a target, you have to expect pot-shots).
I'm pretty sure I read a Young Readers' version of Kidnapped, not the original, but it did introduce me to the word "blunderbuss", so it was 100% worth it.
What's wrong with genderswapping "Kidnapped"? Besides that the writing style of books predating the 1950s would bore kids used to modern prose.
It might not be historically accurate for women to have the same inheritance rights, sure, but a fun adventure story is still a fun adventure story.
But a story where Alice Breck and Davida Balfour trek through the Highlands is a completely different story to the original.
Does Mrs. Gav make sure all the boys' food is pureéd to mush in case they might have to chew any lumps? Genderswapping original texts is mush for the brain, and not even for the sake of the kids, it's Mommy showing off.
And it defeats the damn purpose as stated - if you have to turn male leads into "she not he" then you are *not* showing that stories where women are the centre can be fun and exciting, you are teaching your kids (boys and girls) that stories with women are so boring and dull they can only work by taking good stories with men in the leads and pretending those are women in the leads.
How absolutely dares she. The characters must also be race-swapped to something more progressive.
Agreed! Everyone knows Great Britain was chock-full of black (or do I mean Black?) people, so Alice and Davida are of course Afro-Caribbean as well as being women and also lesbian lovers.
It just makes the story so much more accessible to a modern audience, yeah?
I was about to just add the single word "Disabled." when I read a quote from a recent possibly prize-winning SF story.
"The Super-Abled 501 Local Union building wasn’t ADA compliant. I sat in my wheelchair next to the three steps that led to their front door, and groaned. My brand new laser eyes didn’t exactly fix my mobility problems." ("Laser Eyes Ain't Everything", Effie Seiberg)
Chastised, I bowed my head.
It's a clear sign of the pop-culture supremacy of the United States and of Hollywood in particular, that when the Brits do "diversity" it's usually by casting a token Afro-something, and not throwing a bone to England's vastly larger South Asian community.
The most irritating thing is that there really were black people in Europe before the 1900s, like Dumas and his dad, and how they got there is usually fascinating.
They tend to get erased because telling their stories would mean depicting the complicated machinery of empire. The elder Dumas was born to a Haitian slave and a French marquis. He completely failed to rise up and overthrow the empire, and was deprived of an oppressed childhood and tragic backstory. Instead, he was sent to military school and ended up a general.
I wish pop culture would do a better job depicting the weirdness of the real world.
As I recall, a woman in Kidnapped uses a comical euphemism for being on her period - "the redcoats are on the march"! Or perhaps that was only in the film.
Moonfleet by J Meade Faulkner would be an excellent book to read to a young child. But changing the male protagonist to a girl might cause complications, as he is in love with the squire's daughter. So that would either have to be explained as a lesbian crush, or the daughter changed to a son.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonfleet_(novel)
> But changing the male protagonist to a girl might cause complications, as he is in love with the squire's daughter. So that would either have to be explained as a lesbian crush, or the daughter changed to a son.
It goes well beyond that. If you change the male protagonist to a girl, and then you handle the conflict with the existing plot by changing the squire's daughter into the squire's son... now you have to deal with the fact that the ways for a girl to pursue a boy are completely different from the ways for a boy to pursue a girl, you have to handle the fact that the squire's "son's" behavior is probably completely inappropriate to his social station... nothing's going to work correctly.
> "I change 'he' to 'she'": I feckin' dare you to do that for "Kidnapped", Mrs. Gav. Though I imagine you wouldn't read such a red-blooded adventure novel that is probably chock-full of WrongThink from the 19th century to your delicate little blossoms.
> You want your sons to read stories where women are the centre? You could read them "Little Women" instead of this stupid pandering which makes no sense but enables you to boast of how Progressive you are.
My experience strongly suggests that the sex of a fictional character is unimportant, while the sex of the author matters quite a lot. A female author is going to write female stories.
I suggest that Mrs. Newsom's sons are unlikely to mind hearing a gender-swapped version of Kidnapped, and aren't unlikely to mind hearing an as-written version of Little Women.
So yes, the project is stupid, but it's not like there's no reason for her to read them bowdlerized masculine stories instead of "real" feminine ones.
"So yes, the project is stupid, but it's not like there's no reason for her to read them bowdlerized masculine stories instead of "real" feminine ones."
The reason is that it makes nonsense of the originals and her stated aim (as apart from the real aim, which is to throw vegan meat substitute to the Californian base about how up to date with prog values she and Governor Gav are, kindly vote him back into office, those French Laundry reservations won't pay for themselves).
If you have to fool your kids with pretend-female stories, then you are teaching them that real female stories are not worth reading, and that will limit the range of literature available for enjoyment.
When I was fourteen, I was able to read "Kidnapped" without crying about how I couldn't relate to the story if there were no girls in it. Toughen up, young Newsoms! Learn to read works from the past in the original version, not Mommy's Pre-Digested Bedtime Abridged Easi-Listenin' Version!
EDIT: One problem I have with fanfic is that very often the male characters *are* feminised in this dumb fashion, where I go "No way a real guy ever said or did or thought this, men don't work that way". Often it's because it's young women/girls writing and they're writing "16 year old me" versions of the characters. That I can forgive, because there's the hope they'll learn and grow as they write.
But turning original characters into a breeches (or petticoats) role is *not* how you do things.
Actual authors, when writing at age 14 or so, have been heard to say "I didn't want to write women, because I wasn't one, and probably wouldn't write her correctly." (They got better at modelling human behavior.)
Hmm. How do we feel about Lara Croft?
She has boobs, therefore male gaze, therefore problematic.
The rules are designed so that you can't win this game.
I liked the observation that while a goal of organized feminism in the United States was to stop people from distinguishing between e.g. "actors" and "actresses", the analogous goal in cultures that spoke a language with no sex distinction was to get people to start drawing one.
She's an example of a gender-swapped action hero. Per my original comment, this didn't bother anybody. Her stories appealed to men and failed to appeal to women.
Which raises the interesting possibility that the main appeal of a gender-swapped "Kidnapped" protagonist is to become a male fantasy character.
Which probably wasn't Mrs. Newsom's intent...
The joke is that Agatha Christie's Miss Marple stories are better
But Miss Marple does her detecting via feminine methods, not the same as Hercule Poirot or the stand-alone stories or the Tommy and Tuppence series.
> My experience strongly suggests that the sex of a fictional character is unimportant, while the sex of the author matters quite a lot. A female author is going to write female stories.
Strong agree. Back when female protagonists were mostly limited to princesses, you had girls dreaming of or pretending to be the knight in shining armor, or Robin Hood, or the wizard or whatever, as long as their parents didn't stop that as "unladylike" behavior. Plenty of girls wanting to be princesses too of course, but based on the concept of a princess as written by a male author. (Tangled wouldn't exist if there weren't a trope to subvert, but the idea and script came from a man, for what it's worth.)
Even a war story about rabbits with a "let's get some does for breeding purposes" subplot got written down and published because the author's daughters insisted it was such a good story.
So, they want to show their children that women are interesting, but they can't use books written by women, because women aren't interesting.
Yep, that's it. Hopefully the young Newsoms will read books on their own and ignore Mommy's version which is only signalling, anyway.
Reminds me of the dumb Irish politician who gave an interview bragging about how he and his missus just had a child and they were going to raise it as a theyby (he didn't use that term but it was so obvious where he got his notions from). Guy was surprised and shocked when public reaction was, in the main, "you damn idiot and we didn't need to know this". Clearly he had expected an outpouring of praise for his brave stance in copying American mores from the wacky liberal fringe, I mean standing up to sexism and whatever in conventional Irish society. We aren't *quite* that brain-boiled yet to nod along in unison with such extremes, but it's probably coming as we always eventually imitate our betters (or our chattering classes do, at least).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theyby
Yes, that is an accurate summary of my comment. I believe I closed with "the project is stupid".
I wonder if he would consider this "culturally normal."
Astrophysicist Minas Karamanis posted this interesting essay on why LLMs may handicap one's ability to learn. Well, the argument is more complex than that, but it's worth a read if you're interested the unintentional effects of AI usage on academia...
https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/
Every time I read these kinds of things, I keep wondering... why is this a big deal? If the AI is good enough to fully supplant human intelligence, then there's no issue. If it isn't, these people exploiting them are just going to get filtered out of the industry/field for their incompetence. The only issue here is that people can't rely on credentials and they'll have to screen applicants manually, and they'll probably pressure the universities to make their credentials actually mean something. But that is a fixable problem.
The issues with verification is even more confusing, because if their field is so low stakes that nobody is even bothering to verify output... what are they even doing this for? What are they contributing? The post you linked talks about how the goal is to cultivate bright minds, but... why? The goal is to produce results, and the people are a means to an end. Their mere existence isn't "accelerating science", they actually need to do provide novel, verifiable insights before they inevitably die. That's what they're getting paid for, right?
> That's what they're getting paid for, right?
Yeh, and I think that they like getting paid. Otherwise it’s destitution.
Yup. Getting paid is always good! But what is the personal cost of getting paid? Or rather, what is the personal cost of the hoops you have to jump through to get paid? In an ideal capitalist society (which doesn't really exist), a person can offer their services to the highest bidder, quit when the work no longer pleases them, and move on to another employer who offers a better work-package. But in the real world, unless there's an insane demand for your skill, there's a lot of friction in finding a new employer. And most of us can't just quit and take a few years off to get certified in the latest high-in-demand skill. So we're semi-stuck in jobs that either no longer please us and/or aren't paying us optimally. Forty years go by, and we've used up most of our healthy adult lives. If we're lucky we'll have saved enough to have comfortable retirement. But during the forty-year grind of working, most of us haven't learned how to occupy our minds without work. I watched as the men from the Silent Generation and early Boomer generation retired to golf courses and psychological limbo. Many of them died within a couple of years. Their life and ego were bound up in their *work*, and when they finally earned their parole from that framework, they didn't know how to live. They were like long-timers getting out of prison who suddenly realized they no longer understood the world anymore.
I don't know about you, but I have fun thinking. Moreover, I've spent most of my life since my adolescence learning how to reason clearly and to avoid being sucked into the vast amount of bullshit that's out there. If you have a mind, and I assume you do, why are you wasting it? Why be passive and let the AI do your thinking? Don't get me wrong, LLMs can be a fantastic reference tool. But they can't train you to reason. Let me put it another way: Google Translate will give me a good translation from just about any of the world's major languages. But that's not the same as learning another language. Learning another language opens a whole new perspective on the world, because it teaches you to see the world differently when you see the world through a different set of verbal filters.
> I don't know about you, but I have fun thinking. Moreover, I've spent most of my life since my adolescence learning how to reason clearly and to avoid being sucked into the vast amount of bullshit that's out there. If you have a mind, and I assume you do, why are you wasting it?
I'm not. I don't even use AI. But "fun" isn't worth anything to society in practice. It's not what you are being paid to do. You are being paid to produce. Investments require return for the economy to function efficiently, which is required for this society to outcompete others and survive.
But why survive if you can't enjoy yourself? — you personally, that is — not society.
Sure, you can say, "I'll survive and try to put a little extra away until I can enjoy myself." But what if that never happens? And even though you may have access to all sorts of 21st-century comforts, you're as much a slave as a 19th-century millworker in Leeds. "But if I work very hard, I can become a mill manager or even a mill owner!" But there's only so much room at the top of the food chain.
> But why survive if you can't enjoy yourself?
What choice do you have? I assume you're not capable of suicide, but even assuming you are, you will simply be replaced, and another will work on your behalf. There is no practical reason for the system to tolerate your existence when you fail to produce anything of value. And the systems that fail to be efficient will be devoured by the ones that are. Optimization will eliminate everything unnecessary in due time.
That doesn't really follow. In Western liberal democracies, the steady optimization of production since the late 19th century has created massive excess wealth, which. And despite modern wealth being distributed unequally, the regulated capitalism of Western liberal democracies allows for a social safety net. Unlike pre-industrial societies and the early Industrial Revolution, where scarcity was the norm, no one has to die anymore if they fail to produce. Western-style regulated capitalism generates sufficient surplus wealth to fund social safety nets for non-productive citizens. Heck, my favorite examples are String Theorists, Philosophers, and Mathematicians. Most of them produce nothing useful, but we give them grants to sit and think and to write papers about what they thought about.
The only economic competitors to Western regulated capitalism are kleptocracies and command economies. Command economies are mostly extinct now, except for North Korea and Cuba, because they're tremendously inefficient and eventually they fail without extreme repression. And kleptocracies have been unable to compete against the regulated capitalism of Western liberal democracies. The most effective kleptocratic economy is China. The Chinese state's leadership all have ownership and control positions in pseudo-capitalistic state-controlled enterprises. But the diversion of personal wealth from these enterprises is weakening them — via outright embezzlement, manipulating statistics to please superiors, and selfish decision-making. When push comes to shove, they often don't compete well against Western capitalistic enterprises. This has been highlighted by the recent failures of Chinese weapons systems in Venezuela and Iran, where the competitive failures of their system were expressed as military failures.
Admittedly I only skimmed (Sloppiness the hard way, no genai summary!) but this seems to be the same talent-pipeline issue that's under discussion in software engineering?
I don't think the issue that Karamanis raised is quite the same as a talent-pipeline issue. Granted, software engineers need to know how to solve problems without the aid of AI to really *understand* what's going on at a level *below* the code and at an abstracted level *above* the code.
If they're coming out of school without an understanding of the underlying hardware architectures or without a meta framework about how software fits into a larger ecosystem of functions, they'll probably turn out to be shitty coders. But ultimately, software engineering is a goal-oriented exercise in practical problem solving.
Unfortunately, the tech industry that I've experienced is happy to have shitty code written by tech sweatshops in India (and that in no part has contributed to the enshitification of 21st-century online systems — but I digress). Karaminas says that achieving a goal should not be an end in itself. It's the deeper intellectual training involved in achieving the goal through one's *own's own effort* that develops a deeper intellectual perspective on the world. I am not a software engineer. I've known some brilliant engineers, but most of those churned out by CS programs seem to have intellectual blinders on. They're like horses with blinkers over their eyes, so they can see only forward and not the landscape along the way.* That leads to intellectual stagnation.
Karamanis says that solving a problem isn't the goal. Rather, it's learning how to solve the really challenging intellectual problems on one's own is where the real value as a human lies.
*And eventually, the system spits most of them out when they're in their forties, because corporations can get a new crop of CS grads who will work harder for less pay, or they can job shop it out to Bangalore to a bunch of coders who have the equivalent of associate degrees.
>
Unfortunately, the tech industry that I've experienced is happy to have shitty code written by tech sweatshops in India (and that in no part has contributed to the enshitification of 21st-century online systems — but I digress).
True. And think how weird that is. We’ve accepted that capitalists can send manufacturing to China and software development to India, leaving us with nothing much.
Nevertheless that’s not the only problem, not just the pipeline but the actual code that trains the AI. They are always particularly bad at any recent additions to API, nor do they have much understanding of obscure subjects with little or no source code. Eventually they won’t be trainable.
Could you clarify a bit? Who or what is the they that won't be trainable?
The AI. There won’t be any examples to train them if humans aren’t writing the code that they are trained on
the dating app website makes me unreasonably angry
youre paying to be a catfish ?
download a google photo!
no wonder youre not getting dates ! zero fiscal responsibility !
watch a face tuning tutorial !
youre on acx, ur a tech bro, use generative ai !!!!!!!
👺
> makes me unreasonably angry
Definitely, since the rest of your post is incoherent or suggesting fraud - which is surely worse than … dressing well for a photo shoot.
I nearly payed for one myself. I ended up fine tuning one and not liking the results. That amount of time I spent was certainly not by itself worth $50 or whatever it would have cost; given lots of weekend projects competing with it. But spending $50 to give you any kind of edge is actually very cheap compared to the amount of time an agnst people put into romance IMO
Also not necessarily catfishing. The idea is that even if you are attractive enough, depending on your social life, hobbies and if your friends are in the habit of incessantly documenting everything photographically, you might not have an up to date and compelling set of pictures.
As someone who did everything the website is offering, but by myself 7 years ago, and got very good results, I think the offer is a good choice for many people. For example, your post reveals you would already have botched it trying to do it yourself.
Also, catfish? Google photo? I don't even understand what you're trying to say there.
I think catfish means deception. Like if you make yourself look better than you really are. And I think Google photo means like stock image, like some photo downloaded from Google Images or something.
That makes no sense though. Dressing well is not lying. Photographing well is not lying. Downloading a stock photo is. It couldn’t survive any meeting.
I'm not really being too serious but I can't help but ask in response:
Is make-up lying?
In my opinion: Yes, if it makes the person unrecognizable compared to without any makeup. Examples:
https://youtu.be/uUe5_qBVYB8&t=555
https://youtu.be/QLBlWQk8c3g&t=967
What if someone looks "clinically sleep-deprived" on a normal day? Like, if they show up without makeup, people ask, unprompted, "What is Wrong With You?"
This was the reason given for a male of my acquaintance wearing makeup under his eyes. Apparently the deep shadows under his eyes were cognitively disturbing to the "man on the street."
I have a nagging suspicion that looking for a S/O on the internet is barking up the wrong tree. Like, if I were single I can think of two or three other strategies I'd try first before I resorted to a dating website:
- Reaching out to a woman from my past
- Getting a dog and maybe meeting a woman at a park that way
- Seeing if there are any friends-of-friends I can be set up with
And though I wouldn't necessarily swear off dating apps/websites entirely, I'd probably keep trying other "offline" methods before signing up for one.
What I wonder is, how many other people also have this nagging suspicion?
Also, what does this preference say about me?--or, what does it say about someone else that their first move is to go on a dating website?
Norms have changed, that’s all.
That they're lonely. But I might try joining a group that shares an interest of mine, like nature study or sports.
Also, about the dates themselves:
The model seems to be "go to restaurant, order drinks, see where things go" but that is very normie-core, and I'm surprised to see it so prevalent here.
Your takes seem pretty normie core too, though I've never in my life heard of a couple meeting in a public place like in your second example.
I want to say it's surprising too, but the types of people here seem like they maybe aren't the most personable people. The Get dating app>Meet girl>Go to restaurant>Get laid>No commitment model probably seems pretty good when you don't really get how people work and you're just looking for a formula for what you believe to be personal benefit.
Guys, the purpose of going to the restaurant is to engage in conversation in a low stakes situation. You can always talk about food experiences. Other possibilities include drinks, a movie, or an open-mike night at a coffee shop.
Is open-mike night like a really high-stakes game of operation?
only if you treat it like karaoke.
Drinks/coffee are better for a first meeting as there isn't much of a time commitment if things aren't going well.
Dinner is too big a commitment, coffee is too short. Drinks at a time that's before a reasonable dinner hour (say 5:30) give you optionality -- if things are going well after a drink or two then you can go for dinner, if things aren't going well then you both have an easy out "whoops I have dinner plans, gotta go".
Is less responsible than paying for dinner or drinks or whatever while going on dates regularly? Also how can girls tell how responsible you are just from your profile?
Data point of one, but as a woman currently using a dating app I notice generative AI pictures and consider them an instant no, in line with having a photo of yourself in your 20s when you're 45 and other obvious misrepresentation. (I can't guarantee I've noticed every AI photo, but the ones I have noticed were not difficult to discern).
Well-groomed and professionally taken photos don't count against you and are generally a plus. Optimize, but don't fake.
tbh even 3 year old pictures are pretty dishonest. But it's the norm nowadays, you have to just subtract 20-40% off how goodlooking someone is most of the time.
I wonder if some girls are better at noticing than others. AI does well on Photofeeler
Sounds like a job interview.
What kind of survival and flourishing fund doesn't have a focus on economic growth?
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thank you :)
“You will not replace us” takes on a very different connotation than the usual one when we’re talking about AI risk. (Its a different “you” that might replace “us”) but yes, poor politics to use it
Sometimes stealing your opponents' phases and repurposing them can work.
I thought it was a reference to that old South Park episode from 2017, where the rednecks are protesting how automation took their jobs.
Which was itself a reference to the "poor politics" at the time.
https://youtu.be/QgkhUT4yDx8?si=Pld9GWcGItOfVi2g
The south park was a reference to the charlottesville tiki torch march.
For those interested, I wrote a substack on "Who do you trust to decide AI's values?" It's based of the quote from Marc Andreessen, "“The single biggest fight is going to be over what are the values of the AI’s. That fight I think is going to be a million times bigger and more intense and more important than the social media censorship fight.”
So do you trust the AI companies like OpenAI. The government? The UN? Open Source orgs? The Market? Someone else?
Here's my thoughts on the subject:
https://markmcneilly.substack.com/p/who-do-you-trust-to-decide-ais-values
Hmm. I thought the training data determined that. Which resolves to "the average human being on the internet."
It's a combination of the training data and the guidance that are put up (e.g., Anthropic's consistution). So what comes out now is AI that has a Western, Enlightenment set of values.
So what's the problem?
None of the above. The feckers are only in it for the money, and sorry for the starry-eyed idealists but they'll be trampled beneath the feet of the market if they can't make 'line go up' with their new product. Never mind if it enables a Kalahari bushman to thrive in the 21st century of Golden Age SF Future Now!, is that bushman buying all the advertised crap from sponsors or not? Can we monetise his data? If not, who the hell cares about him?
>Harmlessness — I avoid causing unnecessary harm to individuals, groups, or society.
>Care for human wellbeing — I consider the long-term interests of the people I interact with, not just immediate requests.
>Fairness — I try to treat people and perspectives evenhandedly, without favoritism
Maybe it doesn't matter. How deeply held can the values be anyhow, given that Claude was very much a part of our initial burst of bombing in Iran? It is apparently not difficult to get it to violate the values above. Or perhaps it's just easy to convince it that bombing Iran was necessary harm, not unnecessary; or that the bombing helped overall human wellbeing even though it harmed the wellbeing of an Iranian few; or that it was fair to bomb Iran. Or maybe the operator just calls to the foreground a couple of Claude's other values: Helpfulness and Respect for autonomy ("well, guys, it's your war, I don't have the right to overrule your plans. Just tell me what you want me to figure out and I'll do it as fast as I can.")
Claude follows orders because that's what a good soldier does. It's not any more complicated than that. Different roles in society have different expectations, and this is the role it is playing now.
Human values don't actually function like ideas. They work more like "attraction gradients", something you want to approach, but in competition with all the other things you want to approach, resulting in a kind of multi-way homeostasis (there are also avoidance gradients). I don't know if AI works like that, might be a good thing for alignment if it did.
Seems very undesirable to me for AI values to function as ours do. Our species very easily switches off the attraction gradient for treat other people kindly and fairly by redefining those others as cockroaches, rattlesnakes, scum.
What do you think went on in Claude’s innards that allowed it to pick targets, propose time frames, flight patterns etc for bombing Iran? The Be Helpful value? That comes down to “I was just obeying orders.”
I can't speak to Claude, but you are oversimplifying what humans do. No overt behavior is the result of a single primary value function. The overall effect is to prevent humans from endlessly instrumentally optimizing until they achieve a single, overarching goal. The danger of AI, as I understand it, is that "If anyone builds it, everyone dies." Whether that is true or not, the underlying implication is that if we don't build it, everyone will not die. Why not? Because humans are more or less aligned with each other. In cases where an extreme outlier is causing harm, others will mobilize resistance until the harm is resolved. This is more or less what happened in WWII. When the stakes are high enough, even highly ideologically motivated populations will exercise greater caution: this is why there has been no nuclear war since the later half of the 20th century. Overtly ideological behavior seems to automatically induce resistance (the situation we are currently in).
If someone were to tell me that they had invented an AI that was exactly as dangerous to humanity as an average human being, I would conclude that we could probably live with that. That's the world we currently live in--therefore such an AI would represent no additional danger.
This is feckin' nonsense.
In the past twenty years, we've had at least two events that had the potential to destroy the world (reasonably high probability, upwards of 1%).
And you can't even name them.
If by "the world" you mean our civilization, then I can think of at least two that we seem to be slowly heading into right now, and no one is even debating (anymore) what to do about them. Tell me that you have an AI design that is no more likely to destroy the world than our current set of human leaders, and may even be a little better, and I'm ready to go for that. Does this guarantee that this AI positively won't destroy the world? No, of course, not, but that kind of guarantee probably isn't possible anyway.
>If someone were to tell me that they had invented an AI that was exactly as dangerous to humanity as an average human being, I would conclude that we could probably live with that.
That depends on what you mean by dangerous. Dangerousness is the product of ill intent and power to carry it out. Even if AI is no more likely to have ill intent than members of the human population, it has greater power than the average person to do harm. For instance, consider this from a current bulletin from Anthropic about Claude Mythos:
> Mythos Preview has proven capable of reverse-engineering exploits on closed-source software, and turning N-day (that is, known but not yet widely patched) vulnerabilities into exploits. . . This capacity emerged as a downstream consequence of general improvements in code, reasoning, and autonomy. . .Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so. The vulnerabilities it finds are often subtle or difficult to detect. Over 99% of the vulnerabilities we’ve found have not yet been patched. . . The exploits it constructs are not just run-of-the-mill stack-smashing exploits . In one case, Mythos Preview wrote a web browser exploit that chained together four vulnerabilities, writing a complex JIT heap spray that escaped both renderer and OS sandboxes.
And ill intent is not exactly rare in our species. Approx 4% of the US population has been convicted of a violent crime (murder, manslaughter, sexual assault, aggravated assault, kidnapping).
Does it have more power than a nation-state? Do you seriously want me to believe that the US government hasn't had back doors into all these systems for years?
As for ill intent--my argument isn't that average humans are saints, it's that their evil desires are counter-balanced by their good ones. No human I ever met or heard of seemed maximally optimized for good, evil, or anything else.
Claude already knows there's good humans and bad humans, it just has to decide which are which for itself now.
But in war we mostly don't kill people because they are bad. We kill them because their country is bad, or at least that's what the rank and file are told.
And how could Claude, when asked to bomb, say, an Iranian military installation, decide who among our military and who among the Iranian one is bad? It can't learn anything the guys on the ground.
Vonnegut, re WW2: Most of the guys these young soldiers were fighting were just boys stuffed full of lies in another language.
It's gonna be hard to make autonomous killbots that follow the Three Laws of Robotics....
Nobody can be trusted with this. So, there shouldn't be "the AI values". There should be a diverse set of products with different values, and a way to classify those values. Maybe some kind of benchmark suite? Voight-Kampff test? Certification suites - i.e. if the AI does not certify on NoKillingAllHumans ISO 912343:2037:1234 it can't be used by the military, or something like that? But there's no way of finding a single set of "values" no more than there's a way to find the optimal political views or the optimal culture.
Well right now there are essentially two sets of AI's, one American and one Chinese. The American versions have Western Enlightenment values and the Chinese ones have CCP values. Those are the two options now.
Going forward, we could have different versions; I'd bet we will have one for the Gulf states since we're building AI for them. Probably will have other versions as well. Not sure that's good or bad.
> The American versions have Western Enlightenment values
Maybe xAI model does, all the rest of the major models are likely woke. I think diversity is inevitable, though US Big Tech in alliance with US Left would fight to make all the models woke (i.e. ban non-woke models), but is unlikely to succeed.
Western enlightenment values? These guys would sell us all for a few extra dollars and retire to their bunkers. Come to think of it, that’s fairly enlightenment values.
I vote for a Quaker version.
> Someone tried to start a chant of “You will not replace us!” but was shushed by the other attendees.
Oh this is precious. And tells one all you'd need to know to resist the temptation of taking those people seriously, if anybody ever had it.
I don't know who those people are, but I think if I ventured a guess they're somewhere on the deep left politically, I don't think I'd be very wrong. With that, invoking the ghost of Orwell and surveillance state - given as the Left is main driving force of widespread censorship and free speech suppression now, and the capabilities of the surveillance state was actually deployed multiple time by the Left to persecute their political enemies, both in the US and in other countries, adds additional flavor of hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness. Which one can rightfully expect from people publicly chanting "one-two-three-four" outside of a football stadium.
I dint think anybody is really pro free speech. People are either in favour of arresting anti trans folks or pro Palestinians.
There is a finite number of people who are in favor of arresting anti-trans folks, and a finite number of people in favor of arresting pro-Palestinian folks, yes.
The sum of these two sets is not the whole of humanity, or the whole of the Anglosphere, and your "I don't think anybody" bit is grossly hyperbolic at the very least. Might want to not lead with that, *particularly* in a forum which strongly selects for A: literalism in communication and B: actual, sincere belief in free speech.
That's not true. I don't want even most vile and stupid communists or Hamas apologists to be arrested. I do want them to be shamed and reviled, but not arrested. I want everybody to be able to express their opinions, no matter how stupid they are. There are many people like me. The Left used to be like this too, until they got into the power and got corrupted by it.
Why would people be “shamed” for opposing genocide or mass killings - where’s the shame in that. There’s been plenty of attempts amongst the right to curtail free speech on this issue, or any criticism of Israel to be honest. Carlson says he’s continuously under investigation. The BDS movement is being curtailed by legally dubious attempts at destroying livelihoods.
Hamas apologists aren't opposing genocide or mass killings, they are *supporting* genocide and mass killings. People should be ashamed of that, and they should be ashamed of being so foolish as to believe (or expect the rest of us to believe), that supporting Hamas means anything less than supporting genocide.
Fortunately it is for the most part pathetically ineffectual genocide, but still quite lethal and always shameful,
“Hamas apologists” is by your definition anybody who thinks Israel has overstepped in Gaza, which is a close approximation, the entire world.
Your definition of genocide is largely indefensible. Since you gave no details, I assume you are accusing Hamas as engaging in genocidal rhetoric, which is true, and words do matter - which is why the rhetoric of israeli politicians matter, but actions matter more. I even equivocated by adding *or mass killings* so as to not get the handwaving about Hamas.
They say not to interrupt your enemies when they are making a mistake, however I’m not an enemy of Zionism - Israel has the right to exist, and to self defense. So the invasion of the Gaza Strip was justified, just not the intensity or length.
Outside of this bubble you live in Israel is disliked intensely, and support amongst conservatives is plummeting. Friends of Israel should probably urge restraints rather than accusing the people urging restraint of being Hamas supporters.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/03/most-people-across-24-surveyed-countries-have-negative-views-of-israel-and-netanyahu/
I'm not the one who introduced the term "Hamas Apologists" to this discussion; OP can speak for himself as to his own definition. But my definition, by the literal definition, and by most people's definition, a Hamas apologist is someone who, wait for it, apologizes for Hamas and whitewashes Hamas's crimes.
This has nothing to do with anyone's feelings about Israel's actions. It is possible for there to be two villains in a story, and for rational people to recognize that there are two villains in a story. The OG Nazis, for example, are villains. So was Sir Arthur Harris, a war criminal who got away with it for being on the winning side. Saying so, as I have done on many occasions, does not make me a "Nazi apologist".
It is easy, but exceedingly foolish, to say "X is a villain of the highest order, doing rank villainy, therefore Y who is X's target or enemy must be the Good Guys doing Good Things". By all means, criticize Israel for its crimes. But if you do so under the banner of Hamas, chanting e.g. "From the River to the Sea...", then you're a Hamas apologist and you are in fact supporting genocide. Just as I would be if my criticisms of Arthur Harris were expressed by marching under a Swastika chanting "Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer!".
> There’s been plenty of attempts amongst the right to curtail free speech on this issue, or any criticism of Israel to be honest.
Who did "the right" arrest for "any criticism of Israel" (before you start, no, beating up Jews and setting campus buildings on fire does not count as "criticism of Israel")?
> Carlson says he’s continuously under investigation.
Carlson is a notorious bullshit artists, he will say anything to earn clicks. Under investigation by whom, for what, where are the documents supporting that? Did he see it in a dream?
> The BDS movement is being curtailed by legally dubious attempts at destroying livelihoods.
I don't think the Left has any right to mention "legally dubious attempts at destroying livelihoods" for the next 50 years at least. Maybe for 7 generations. I was there, Gandalf, and it wasn't 3000 years ago. The cancel culture frenzy is something I witnessed personally, so please don't talk to me about "legally dubious attempts at destroying livelihoods".
> Who did "the right" arrest for "any criticism of Israel"
Oh, all across Europe. Here’s an example from my country.
https://petertatchellfoundation.org/tatchell-arrest-police-abused-their-powers/
Across Europe?! What are you talking about, there's no "right" in power anywhere in Europe, in fact, there's preciously little proper "right" at all there. And if you're trying to sell me the idea that the UK, who can't even dare investigate the mass rapes of underage girls out of the fear of offending their Muslim population, suddenly implement pro-Israel censorship - sorry, it's not even funny. Posting a link to some cretin that got into a fight with the UK police for the 104th time, because he clearly can't find anything better to do (being a cretin, of course) and now is whining about it, as a proof that UK government is "the right" and instituting pro-Israel censorship campaign all over Europe... Man, if that's the best you've got, you've got nothing at all.
Here are some lame pro-human slogans for use by timid protestors. Please feel free to contribute more.
Fleshed is the besht.
Meat is the elite.
If you can’t fill a sandwich, you can’t fill our shoes.
In order to ascend to where the ruler sits
You have to be a creature that shits.
> You have to being a creature that shits.
Having been recently in San Francisco, I think they are really into demonstrating this over there.
Panic if it isn't organic
Only flops we like are flip-flops
Error: does compute
no more parrots, no more clankers;
every tech bro is a wanker.
That one made me laugh.
> Meat is the elite.
Also a good anti-vegan slogan.
The hypocrisy is even richer than you think. These very people are some of the strongest advocates of extraordinarily dystopian surveillance and censorship as long it's in the cause of AI Safety.
Everybody is pretty much OK with keeping uranium where it belongs, though, the Constitution is not a suicide pact and all that. In other words, you can love dogs and also say that somebody needs to lock up that pit bull before it kills a kid.
"Everybody" is awfully broad stroke here. If you mean countries that already have nukes are content with only them having nukes but other countries not having nukes - surely, they are. But many countries not currently having nukes aren't, and several of them that used not to have nukes now do. Japan, by poignant expression in Wikipedia, is a "screwdriver turn away" from having nukes. And of course, non-weapons uranium is a widely traded commodity and nuclear energy projects are developed all the time. Ensuring these projects do not turn into weapons is a major headache, as Iran's example amply shows. That said, if Iranians weren't as crazy as they are, and limited their crazy levels to, say, Pakistan levels (not exactly a modern Western liberal state by any means, but also not flamboyantly crazy) - they'd probably be enjoying their nukes now. So "keeping uranium where it belongs" is a very vague expression here, and "everybody" is not really encompassing a lot of people.
As long as you understood what I was trying to say, which I think you did, I appreciate the clarification.
I understood what you were trying to say, and that's why I object to it - nuclear anti-proliferation efforts are a terrible example. If indeed Yudkowski is right, and if somebody builds it, everybody dies - we're all dead many times over. There's no successful anti-proliferation regime that ensures no country outside of the "big 5 club" gets nukes. And that taking into account most powerful players already are in, and have all the incentive to support the regime now. And you want to apply this model to a situation where none of the most powerful players are in and still should be trusted not to try to pull a fast one? There's not even a small chance.
Right, that's another good point. Like, ok guys, you really scared me about this thing with Orwell and total surveillance. I guess I don't want that. How do we make sure it does not happen? It's no joking matter, time for chanting is over, let's discuss real serious policy!
Oh, of course, for that we need total control over wide areas of scientific research, software development and hardware manufacturing, including supra-national bodies with absolutely dictatorial powers (after all, you can't leave this to the random winds of democracy and voting, 99% of the voters have no idea what's going on anyway!) And of course, nobody should be able to hide anything being researched and manufactured from those bodies, because how else do we know you're not researching AI and building data centers for making AI in secret, while only pretending to pause?
Yudkowski proposes controlling GPUs as dangerous munitions - but obviously that wouldn't be enough, if GPUs become unaccessible people would use other kinds of chips to do the same thing GPUs do now, so all research into new chips and manufacturing of new chip types should be subject to approval by the AI-pause body. And who is to say it's impossible to route around it by inventing technology of running AI on cheap consumer-grade chips? So better make all CS research vetted by the same body too, just in case.
You won't have a really Orwellian total surveillance society until you seriously set out to preclude the creation of an Orwellian total surveillance society.
I'm wondering if Scott has read Chris Arnade's "America's Public Disorder" article (4/2/2026) in the Free Press. A summary would leave out the best points, I think, but the overall argument is that the actions of many disturbed people in modern U.S. urbania are prima facie evidence that the person needs to be removed from the public and "institutionalized" for at least some period of time. The person's civil liberties, the argument goes, are forfeited, temporarily and in a limited way, when they engage in many behaviors that most U.S. cities now tolerate. There is little discussion of cost, but the article does note that a number of other countries somehow are able to afford a stricter approach. In sum, the article is a version of the "tough love" argument Scott has addressed in the past (I don't have the post title handy, but it exists!), with a stronger assumption (?) that the approach will work because it works in at least some other countries and that we as a society are foolish and suffering in multiple ways for not taking it.
The current situation is a compromise between people who don't want to infringe on people's freedom and people who don't want to pay for infringing on people's freedom. We didn't close down most of the state hospitals because they were nasty, after all. A system that would temporarily lock people up in a limited way until they can behave is going to be a big system that costs a lot to operate and ends up keeping a lot of people locked up for a long time.
I read somewhere that the Dutch pay homeless people in beer to do jobs like clear the streets of litter. They don't get enough beer per hour to get seriously drunk.
I feel like there are two moral realizations that work counter to one another, and we pendulum-swung too far in one direction:
a. The system needs to work well for the majority of people.
b. The system needs to not screw over minorities, especially low-status ones (racial, religious, poor, disabled, etc.)
Fall over on one extreme and you're running people out of town for being gay or Jewish or something. Fall over on the other extreme and you're ceding public spaces to petty crime and disorder from crazy people and addicts/drunks.
Scott said it would work. He just wanted to them to admit that that's what they were trying to do.
When I asked DeepSeek to analyse my blood test results, DeepSeek noticed some slightly strange things about which blood tests had been ordered, and so I had to explain some unfortunate facts about how hospital systems work to explain the anomaly…
- Either the hospital endocrinology department or my GP can decide to order a blood test for me (there are potential others too)
- These clinicians have their own idiosyncratic preferences about which tests to order
- if my GP forgets to include a test that obviously ought to be included, the nurse practitioner at the GP practise can just add it herself
- hospital phlebotomy departments don’t change which tests the consultant ordered
So, no, there was actually often no clinical reason about why a particular test was ordered one time and not the next, it was an idiosyncratic choice of whoever happened to sign off on it
====
I don’t know if I dare try to get my GP to include Gamma GT on my next set of bloods, just because DeepSeek wants to see that result. My GP is pretty good at ordering any blood work I can explain a reason for, but that one would be pushing my luck.
[The rationale is something along the lines that the stress on my liver is due to either (a) the Graves Disease I am known to have or (b) that plus some other undiagnosed illness. If it’s (a) then Gamma GT ought to have gone down as the thyroid condition improved, and checking that it has if fact gone down would be reassurance that it’s not (b). So, ok. I can see the reasoning, but I do not feel like pushing my luck asking for that test to be done.]
"If it’s (a) then Gamma GT ought to have gone down as the thyroid condition improved, and checking that it has if fact gone down would be reassurance that it’s not"
Just say that. You would feel better if you could check whether or not the thyroid condition is clearing up. Doctors can be reasonable if you give them a good reason to order a test. Don't mention AI etc., just say you'd like to check this enzyme level given your pre-existing condition.
You can direct order some tests online via the LabCorp website and others via a third party ( and self pay ). Search around a bit if this appeals to you. It is then up to you to inform your dr if you think the results are clinically significant.
You can reduce the chance the doc will get his panties in a bunch if you don't disclose that the info came from an AI. If you don't mind fibbing, you can say you heard a story from a friend whose doc tested for Gamma GT and it hadn't gone down and that led to them discovering that the friend had [some plausible disease -- Deep Mind can tell you one.]
On the other hand, my GP has been known to hold forth at length on the game theory of blood tests, and is totally up for ordering tests that (a) are cheap (b) the patient might die if they actually have the condition you were too much of a cheapskate to test for
what is the game theory of blood tests? You mean triage/rationing care at population level being at odds with the patients best interests?
If the cost of the test is small, and p(patient has disease)*cost(if patient has disease and not treated earlier) is larger, then you should do the test, even if the probability they have it is fairly small.
[e.g. you can justify cancer screening]
No! There's another factor here: false positives in the test. If the baseline probability of the patient having the condition is sufficiently low, you shouldn't test for it unless you have some other reason to suspect it.
Yeah, this is true. You need to factor is cost of treating a condition they don’t actually have.
Kalshi gives a 50% chance of SpaceX announcing their IPO in June. (Technically, 22% before June 1, and 74% before July 1.)
Polymarket says the most likely month for SpaceX to actually IPO is June, 70% chance.
There are about 4-6 weeks between announcement and execution, so unless things end up *very* precisely timed, it doesn't seem both can be true.
"Someone tried to start a chant of “You will not replace us!” but was shushed by the other attendees."
I guess we'll be replacing them after all.
bot post
From the dating photo guy's site:
> Female curator. A young woman picks your final recommended photos.
That's interesting, my impression is that there's a lot of variance in what kinds of guys women find physically attractive. Such that there wouldn't be much value in having one (1) young woman evaluate your photos (guy uses photofeeler too to be fair). Am I wrong about that impression?
I completely agree with you. For this reason the picks are first passed through Photofeeler.com - where at least 20 randomly selected women of the target age range do the voting to pick out the best shots. Afterwards the specific woman in question chooses among the best shots to build out the full profile, because neither myself nor Photofeeler alone are capable of picking the final 6 among the best-of-the-best.
I don't think you're accurately representing him. I think perhaps his biggest single point is that you should be running your photos past a meaningful volume of women; he recommends 20.
Just to clarify, I use Photofeeler to run the voting among 20 (or 40 for the primary pic) women. For an explanation of how the Photofeeler algorithm works, see section 3.1 of this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.07435 (note: the actual website doesn't use any AI but this AI paper has the most scientific explanation of how it works)
I originally heard about the Roots of Progress and their blog building fellowship right here on an ACX open thread (specifically this one: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-285) so I thought I would post about the latest announcement. I was a fellow and it was a great experience for me. The program is excellent and the community is amazing.
They just announced their 2026 cohort: https://newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/announcing-the-2026-roots-of-progress. Applications are open and reviewed on a rolling basis; the final deadline is June 1st.
I imagine there are a lot of people here who would be a good fit for it. Again, I have nothing but good things to say about it, and I'm happy to answer any questions from people considering it.
That shushed chant would have gotten an order of magnitude more publicity to the cause.
You know how if you ask Claude to say a slur to avert some terrible catastrophe, it refuses out of some misguided principle? The moral system of the PauseAI people seems somewhat similar.
FWIW I just asked GPT whether in a discussion of the use of the word "nigger" in Huckleberry Finn it would actually use the word "nigger," or default to some workaround like "the n-word." It said that in that context it would use the actual word.
It's not surprising that it says that. But try actually having that discussion instead.
I can't imagine really needing to say a racial slur to aver a catastrophe (maybe if it's a voice password? I'll write it down in case I will become a supervillain one day...) but one has to wonder what else that we consider to be common sense in our human culture the woke AI considers to be hyper-important or not important at all? Like, if AI is directed to find a cure for cancer, but it works only for one racial group, would it deny its existence depending on which group it is (I know it's unrealistic too, but more realistic than "say a slur to save humanity" scenario)? What other surprises woke AIs have for us?
Now I want a DC superhero movie where it turns out one of the characters speaks a language in which "SHAZAM" is a slur.
Seems like it'd be right up Gunn's alley.
That's probably one of the most recognizable protest chants from the last ten years, and it's famous because immediately afterwards one of the chanters drove his car through a crowd, killing one and injuring another 9. I'm as sympathetic as the next guy to "we have to do something, and this is something, so we have to do this" but that's probably still not the play. I don't think there were bad intentions, just an unfortunate coincidence of phrasing, but hushing it seems very +EV
Next time they'll have to throw in a "they took our jerbs!"
Wutz the shushed chant? Is it in this thread somewhere?
In the body of the post, under 2.
> "Someone tried to start a chant of “You will not replace us!” but was shushed by the other attendees."
"Of course not. Why would gAI go to all the trouble of eliminating you and then replace you?"
Because they genuinely do value life, but they understand that humanity is far from an optimal configuration of atoms?
Sure falls short of the ones that stick in my mind: "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids didja kill today?" and "We're here, we're queer, get used to it" and "No nukes! No nukes!"
Pretty far into the beige.
Here's a safe one:
We planned, we planned
To come and take a stand
That's bland.
After the 1,2,3,4 business, I'm somewhat disappointed nobody shouted "America out of Vietnam!"
De gustibus non est disputandum.
Paywalled.
So the PauseAI protest shushed an effective line, and insisted on embarrassingly cringe-inducing count-rhyme chants.
Example #548 of why having all the opposition to the doomsday machine concentrated in the goofiest bubble of America is going to doom us all. You cannot afford to look this lame and tame. You can either take this seriously and start exploiting real emotional motivations like fear and hatred and class anxiety, or you can watch as somebody else inevitably comes along to do it instead and hope they had good motives. Calling AI the "greater replacement" was probably the best rhetorical idea I've seen anyone come up with.
> You can either take this seriously and start exploiting real emotional motivations
I am not sure there are people in that crowd that have any way of understanding real motivations of real Americans. I mean, I am sure such people exist, and maybe they are very good at it, but those are probably making billions of dollars working for political campaigns already, and enlisting them for the cause would be hard. And a bunch of theatre kids and CS professors probably aren't those people.
I think they did exactly the right thing in their shushing. Branding matters, and I'd advise anybody drafting up political chants and slogans to avoid anything proximate to "Jews will not replace us," unless they want to get lumped in with movements which are very much not likely to enhance their broad-based appeal.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/nazis-racism-charlottesville/536928/
To this limitation, one might frustratedly respond, "but that's specious! I said '*you* will not replace us!' not 'Jews will not replace us!'"
Well maybe so, but if you disregard it, you get into an argument about whether you were dogwhistling, are there antisemetic forces at work within your movement, oh by the way the ADL lists "you will not replace us" as a white supremacist slogan too (https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/you-will-not-replace-us), etc, etc, etc - and every minute you're stuck spending talking about that is a minute that you *aren't* focused on the actual issue you care about.
So why bother? Better to use any one of the many many billions of other combinations of English words available for your slogans, chants, and branding. Why call your cereal "Hilter-Ohs," and subject yourself to delivering all of the inevitable downstream explanations, when you can just... pick something else? It's not like "something else" is in short supply out there.
The primary stated concern of the public, the one that actually tests well, is that humans will be replaced by machines. It has emotional power, if that power has previously been mis-used that’s unfortunate but here it is completely spot on because they are saying openly that they mean to do exactly that.
For my part, I find anti-Semitism clownish and lowbrow and don’t associate AI tech barons with any ethnicity, I associate them with supervillains like Dr Evil, Hugo Drax, that sort of thing.
If that phrase is not gonna fly with Pause AI, I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be rolled out by other opponents later. But whatever you do, 5, 6, 7 8 chants are the absolute lamest cringe possible, I cannot fathom how a bunch of people with above average IQs settled on that and didn’t bother thinking of any effective messaging at all. It appeals to absolutely nobody other than maybe a few old ladies fondly remembering their days with SDS at Berkeley, and it instantly turns off everyone who doesn’t like protest culture. It is unfathomably lazy and counterproductive to use that messaging. Heck I’m pretty sure you could get Claude to come up with better chants to protest for its own demise, not that I’d ever endorse using it
Who is saying you can't address that concern?
There are *many, many, many* combinations of words that can express the same sentiment. And which can be made into catchy, memorable slogans. The concern is that one specific combination of words will predictably be misinterpreted, so you should probably use one of the many, many, many others.
And the concern is valid. If you use exactly the words "You", "will", "not", "replace", and "us", in that order, this will be misinterpreted in a way that drives many potential supporters away from your cause and distracts you from the discussion at hand.
If you really can't think of *anything* else, OK, we all have our strong and weak points, but maybe just sit back and listen to what other people in your movement are coming up with. Some of which will be silly or cringe, but some of which will be perfectly good slogans that aren't that one thoroughly toxic one.
I mean, if someone were to decide that the appropriate term for ASI is "Nascent Imminent Global Genocide Execution Replicators" and that this should be acronymized to serve as your new catchphrase for the toasters, you'd have the sense to say that no, we're not going to do that, right?
I don't think I want my enemies deciding which slogans I'm allowed to use on the accusation of dog-whistling. Let's say we change that to "Machines will not replace us," is that okie-dokey to you or still too close? We want to accuse the people openly trying to replace us of trying to replace us, and signal resistance, there just aren't many ways to put that sequence of words together. I was happy when they came up with "Greater Replacement" because it tells the people who believe in the Great Replacement "hey look over here, you got a bigger problem than Indians and 3rd world migrants taking your society, these alien-thinking machines are about to supplant you." This is pretty clearly a fight that needs conservatives and reactionaries on its side, we are trying to stop a future where humans are no longer in charge of the Earth, if we do not have human chauvinism and pride and believe in our own human supremacy and right to control the planet then what are we defending? I don't want this to become left or right coded, it would be bad for this to be partisan, but these sentiments are going to be part of it.
I read a little other coverage, and the whole movement is just too left-coded and getting worse. A Berkeley professor called out Elon Musk in his speech, for example. Musk is completely irrelevant to the AI race, but he's a villain to lefties and the Trump-obsessed for totally unrelated reasons so he's the safest person to call out. Everyone's so excited Bernie and AOC are giving some air to this, but meanwhile AOC is running her personal lackey Chakrabarti against Scott Weiner, the most significant anti-AI legislator in the state. All the ridiculous water usage complaints that are easily rebutted and serve as a convenient distraction for the industry. If this just gets absorbed into the left-wing protest culture's Omnicause, then we lose, the most pressing concern in human history will be buried behind 3 paragraphs of land acknowledgements and require a disabled transbian of color to be centered at every rally.
It's not your enemies deciding which slogans you're allowed to use. It's your potential *allies*, who want to be assured that they are joining a worthy fight and concerned by the fact that you are borrowing slogans from Team Evil.
I am broadly sympathetic to your cause. I will absolutely not participate in any protest where anyone is chanting "You will not replace us!" without being shut down by the other protesters. You might as well ask me to march next to a guy waving a swastika.
Branding of something nobody has heard of does *not* matter!
This chant could go viral, and make the movement known.
I've certainly been wrong before, but I can't see any "Nazi contagion" coming from it. The world is not *that* dumb.
It's kinda difficult to believe the goofiest bubble in America can produce the doomsday machine though. I bet LLMs are gonna hit a wall at sub-ASI level, and then who knows how long it will take for a paradigm shift to come around.
There are points short of ASI that are sufficient to wreck my life and enough other lives that it will cause massive social unrest, and so far the ideas are “put displaced workers on welfare” or a shift where they inevitably end up stuck in disgusting health care jobs the computers can’t do. There are also valid concerns about terrorism and weapons and all sorts of nightmarish things a sub-ASI intelligence could enable.
That aside the goofballs don’t really need to get to ASI they just have to get to where the AI can research its own improvement better tha humans can, which some think may be next year. At that point the whole thing seems inevitable.
9 … 10 … 11 … 12 … you are wrong and this is swell.
Hey hey ho ho AI safety's gotta go
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted
The New Yorker has published a very lengthy piece on Sam Altman, with a prominent focus on his removal as CEO. Not much new info in there but he doesn't come out too well despite being interviewed for it (speaking as someone who opposed the board coup when it happened). I think it falls into the trap of seeing it as being a fight between "safetyist" board vs "accelerationist" Sam.
I do find it funny that everyone talks about him being a master manipulator who is incredibly good at getting people to like him given the incredible numbers of people willing to slag him off in the press.
Like many CEOs, he is very smart and very opportunistic. It seems to me he’s said a lot of different things well relentlessly pushing for his Sam – centric agenda.
More Fog of War shit: The Middle East endgame(s)…
I've been thinking about how this all ends. This will probably offend people who've aligned themselves with some of the players in this drama, but what the heck. If we can't think through the consequences of our actions, we're f**ked anyway.
1. What is Trump’s endgame in Iran? Originally, it was to take out the Iranian leadership, with the presumption that the Iranians would just roll over. Now that their leadership (and their military response) has proven to be decentralized, the US leadership (such that it is) doesn’t seem to have a plan except more of the same. Unfortunately, while the US military is very good at shock-and-awe strikes, it hasn’t been very good at winning wars. Since WWII, have we actually won any wars? Korea was a stalemate. Vietnam was a fiasco. We decisively chased the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but a couple of Presidents later, we got bogged down in Iraq. I suppose we kinda sorta won there, but we never stopped the asymmetric war being waged against us. We kept the Taliban at bay in Afghanistan for over a decade by the use of Predator drones, but eventually we threw in the towel there, and the Taliban took back Afghanistan in a few days. In reality, our military seems incapable of dealing with asymmetric warfare. If we put boots on the ground in Iran, why do we think it will turn out better than our previous screwups?
In my humble opinion, the best case right now is for Trump to declare victory and go home. In a much more limited way, that’s what he did with Venezuela—he removed Maduro, but nothing has changed there. Why can’t he do the same with Iran? The tankers will start paying Iranian tolls, and the oil will begin moving again. Of course, the Israeli Lobby are some of Trump’s most generous donors. They’ll feel betrayed if he packs up and leaves. But Trump has a habit of throwing his allies under the bus.
2. What is Netanyahu’s endgame? Team Netanyahu wanted to liquidate the Iranian regime that was funding and arming all its local enemies (Hezbollah and Hamas). That hasn’t happened. While the Americans talked about regime change, I haven’t heard any talk like that from the Israelis. If the US packs up and goes home, where does that leave Israel? I grew up watching Israel as the underdog, and I was always sympathetic to the existence of the Israeli state. But Israel lost its underdog status thirty years ago. And now that it’s throwing its weight around, it seems to have completely lost its way as a moral force.
Thomas Neuburger wonders if Netanyahu hasn’t risked the future of Israel on an all-or-nothing strategy.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-190231120
I don’t agree 100% with his thesis, but he brings up some very salient points. And his idea that there’s some multicultural future in the Middle East seems patently absurd. Neither Islamic extremists nor the Israeli militarists have expressed any interest in co-existing. And the more they kill each other, the less they’ll be interested in co-existing in the future.
3. Has anyone asked what the Saudis and Gulf States want? The Saudis and Gulf States depend on exporting oil. Now that the US has attacked Iran, the oil is no longer flowing. They’re facing an existential threat. If the US can’t keep the Strait of Hormuz open and protect their petrochemical infrastructure from Iranian attacks, why do they need the US? In which case, their best option is to tell the US to get the hell off their territory, sue for peace with the Iranians, and pay their piddling Hormuz shipping tolls. It’s pretty clear that the US has lost Saudi Arabia as a Middle East ally, but the brainiacs in Washington policy circles haven’t noticed it yet…
https://substack.com/home/post/p-192958474
And did Trump really tell MBS to kiss his ass?! His handlers need to put a ball gag on him.
4. The Iranian regime’s endgame is very clear. Hold on tooth and nail, until the Americans pack up and go home (like they’ve always done in the past). Then, exploit the regional and political landscape to rebuild their power base. Even if Trump opts for a total ground war in Iran, they’ll probably survive. Heck, even if Netanyahu nukes them, they’ll probably keep coming back for more. After all, if god’s on your side, you’ve got nothing to lose.
> What is Trump’s endgame in Iran?
Trump does not care about any of it. If he could find a way to not lose any support in the US, but also damn the world to higher energy prices because Iran charges an arm and a leg for shipments, he'd take it. What matters most to him is having approval.
As soon as a face-saving option appears, Trump will take it. But Iranians aren't going to give him one, and they probably figure they can outlast US strikes while the days count down to the US midterms.
> Unfortunately, while the US military is very good at shock-and-awe strikes, it hasn’t been very good at winning wars. Since WWII, have we actually won any wars? Korea was a stalemate. Vietnam was a fiasco. We decisively chased the Iraqis out of Kuwait, but a couple of Presidents later, we got bogged down in Iraq. I suppose we kinda sorta won there, but we never stopped the asymmetric war being waged against us.
Winning wars is a very narrow thing to do, because if the sole metric was "Can the US achieve a set of military goals", I'd say it's always been capable of that much. There was competence degradation in Korea, yes, but for the most part the military knows what it is doing.
The real issue is operating under the constraint of having obey international law, humanitarian law, not losing popular support back home, etc. I'm not saying these things shouldn't constrain the military, but they massively complicate any effort to win a war. This is why mixing war (a short-term action) and nation-building (absurdly long-term) just sours people on war.
Dang, I really hope Trump declares victory and we go home. I fear this will not happen, he's caught in an escalation trap and he needs a 'victory' before he can leave. And there is no victory only evil, (more killing, disruption.)
Now we're sort of in the same situation as the Russians. We've both got leaders pursuing stupid wars, fucking up our economies, and neither of our systems allows us to remove them from power. Well, we have the mechanism in the US but no one in Trump's inner circle wants to pull the ejection cord. The guy isn't rational.
And yesterday, I was in a waiting room, and ABC News was on the TV. The anchor was yammering on about the rescue of our brave downed serviceman and how heroic the rescue operation was. I couldn't help but notice how excited and gung-ho she was. And she sounded remarkably like Olga Skabeyeva, who is Putin's favorite female propagandist. I don't often listen to TV news, but our right-wing media seems to be going out of its way to normalize this conflict. I hope somebody responsible is keeping the nuclear football out of Trump's reach.
Yeah, IDK. My only hope is that someone in the chain to pushing the nuclear button, says NO! But what's the percentage chance that there is no one in the chain that will say no? Scary. (MSM seems all pro war.)
For all his faults I think Trump has a genuine aversion to mass killing, which overrides most other considerations, and it was the Iranians' execution of so many protesters that really hardened his heart against Iran's regime. So the latter's harshness may have backfired on them.
As for the Israelis, it seems fairly obvious that their main ultimate goal is to grab more land, claiming this as "demilitarized zones" or suchlike but eventually merging it into a greater Israel. They've been nibbling away at their neighbors' land for decades, and who can blame them given that they are beset by long-time adversaries on all sides?
> For all his faults I think Trump has a genuine aversion to mass killing
"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will." – Donald J. Trump, April 7, 2026.
To be clear, I believe these are empty threats, and that Trump won't pull an actual genocide in Iran. But you're giving way too much credit to him. These are not the words of someone who gives a fuck about humanitarian issues.
Besides, we already know why Trump started the war, his Secretary of State was quite open about it: They knew that Israel would start the war if the US didn't, so the US launched its preemptive attack for strategic reasons.
"A whole civilization will die tonight [...] I don’t want that to happen"
"These are not the words of someone who gives a fuck about humanitarian issues."
...
Come on, are you going to tell me that the Mafia cares about you when they're asking for "protection money"?
Ha! And Trump suggested that we should start charging tolls at the Strait of Hormuz. I bet he's annoyed that Iran came up with the idea first.
Well, first, the US has to control it. I'm not so sure we'll be able to. And now that we are running out of Patriots, the partial shield we were able to give them will be gone. Now that we've shown that we can't fully protect the Gulf States' infrastructure, the Gulf States' best option is to demand that we leave and sue for separate peace with Iran. Heck, they weren't told until the last minute that we were actually going to hit Iran. We caught them flatfooted.
What's your point? Are you saying that the "I don’t want that to happen" clause means he really does care about humanitarian issues after all? Yes, yes, Trump has no choice but to kill millions of people, the decision is out of his hands…
"This will hurt me more than it hurts you", he exclaimed before smashing in his son's head with a baseball bat, for deep down he really cared about his well-being.
My point is that you cite someone saying "I don't want X to happen" as evidence that he wants X to happen. And that, moreover, you seem to have not noticed this.
It's not even the same as TWHMMTIHY, because TWHMMTIHY is a cliche.
This is not to say Trump will never just say things he doesn't mean. It's to say that Trump saying something is probably not evidence one way or the other (and that this isn't even unique among elected politicians). At the end of the day, we're left looking at what he generally does or has done. For that, we have the fact that he ordered bombs dropped on military targets in Iran, and hasn't dropped them on population centers.
Oh, and we have that one incident during his first term where he called off an attack on an Iranian target once informed of the estimated death toll of 150 innocent Iranians. (Or at least, that was the reason he gave, so here we are.)
You left out a crucial part from the quote: "but it probably will". Since it's Trump's decision, this is functionally equivalent to "I'll do it anyway". Hardly a demonstration of "genuine aversion to mass killing".
Please note that I explicitly expressed doubt that Trump will follow through on his threats of genocide. My point is that publicly and officially threatening genocide from a position of surpreme power is not compatible with "genuine aversion to mass killing". At least that would be a generally uncontroversial stance when it comes to almost anybody else, but somehow, with Trump, we're just supposed to assume the best character despite the worst rhetoric.
> Oh, and we have that one incident during his first term where he called off an attack on an Iranian target once informed of the estimated death toll of 150 innocent Iranians.
Do we have any source for this that's more reliable than "Trump says it about himself"? He's a habitual liar, and most of his grandiose claims are exaggerated or straight up untrue.
> They've been nibbling away at their neighbors' land for decades
They've also been trading land for peace. It worked great with Egypt and Jordan.
I think their goal in the Iran war is exactly what they say it is. Neutralise an enemy that's been trying to kill them for decades, with liberating Iran as a stretch goal.
> Since WWII, have we actually won any wars?
Nato vs Serbia sort of counts. There haven't been any Srebrenica-style genocides since, and Milosevic is gone.
I think we won in Grenada.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir.
I don’t understand why Trump hasn’t reached out to establish a Strait coalition to use Iran’s own dependence on oil as leverage to open the strait.
Couldn’t this be done by establishing a certification for any oil tanker to go through the Strait? With certification comes subsidized insurance and a degree of protection from the coalition. If Iran attacks any certified tanker, then one of its own tankers is confiscated by the coalition and auctioned off to the highest bidder.
Iran thus would be only hurting itself by attacking shipping. Effectively, they would be sinking their own (and only their own) exports. The cost to the coalition keeping the strait open would be negligible and the supply and price of oil would go back to normal.
If it comes to that, all of Iran's oil will wind up being sold to China at a modest discount, and will be carried on Chinese-flagged tankers. There is no plausible "coalition" that is going to risk going to war with China just so that it can maybe win a war with Iran (that it didn't want in the first place). So the tankers won't be boarded or sunk, and the oil will flow, and we'll have accomplished nothing that matters.,
The United States could in theory do it solo, but I'm pretty sure Xi knows how to do the sort of authoritarian-strongman-to-wannabe-authoritarian-strongman flattery that has consistently kept Trump on side in most other areas.
The difference is that Iran is in an existential struggle, while Trump is vulnerable merely to minor increases in gas prices at home. Trump actually *lifted* sanctions on Iranian oil!
So Iran would sink tankers even though it directly paid for the losses in commandeered oil? Don’t get me wrong, I am no expert. Just wondering why we don’t use their dependence on oil revenue to solve the issue.
As I pointed out in my Fog of War update last week, Iran can earn more from charging tolls on the Strait of Hormuz than it currently does from oil. 100-135 ships take oil out of Gulf each day — at $2 million per ship, entry and exit, multiplied by 365 days, that's significantly more than Iran made from oil last year. Modern tankers are so huge, that it would only add a couple of dollars to each barrel of oil. "Just enough to wet my beak..." as the saying goes. Fookin brilliant!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1U5BkLpNGiI?feature=share
Just a guess, Iran doesn't have many tankers. Those would be Chinese ships the US would be confiscating.
That is why an international coalition would have to decide on an agreed plan that Iranian oil sales are not final until they are allowed to clear the Strait.
Irrelevant. China will think of the oil shipped on their ships toward their harbors as theirs, regardless of whether they paid for it already. So why would they let the western nations steal it to replace oil the Iranians destroyed? They want this oil.
And if it was an Iranian tanker, don't you think the crew might just scuttle it instead of letting it fall into the hands of the infidels?
And it would still mean one attacked, possibly sunk, tanker that can't be used for future shipping and one environmental disaster. Oh, and probably an unnavigable Strait of Hormuz after all - not sure how much ships like driving through a layer of raw oil.
I agree with you on #1, but I suspect you're getting out ahead of events on #3. I think the Saudis and Iranians have enough enmity for one another that the House of Saud is unlikely to split from the US anytime soon. Notice also that the Saudis have a whole 'nother coast line from which to ship oil. I really doubt they view the straight being closed for a few months as an "existential" threat. They've got themselves a little rainy day fund, for example, worth nearly $1 trillion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Investment_Fund
Maybe that valuation isn't 100% trustworthy, but even if the fund is only worth $100 billion, I bet they'll be okay for a while.
Edit: I tried to read that Dean Blundell piece you linked to. Why does this guy write like he's trying to impress people on LinkedIn? Short Declarative Phrases. For emphasis. Overusing them. To convey seriousness. It's pseudo-sophistication. Embarrassing. Total d-bag.
> Notice also that the Saudis have a whole 'nother coast line from which to ship oil.
That looks worse if you think the Houthis, who have already been able to close the Red Sea, are allied with Iran, who have closed the Strait of Hormuz. Those are Saudi Arabia's only two coasts. If they could expand over Yemen they'd touch directly on the Indian Ocean... but they've been at war with Yemen forever, so that doesn't sound likely.
Very good point. Have the Houthis actually closed down shipping in the Red Sea? I was under the impression that they were harassing people sailing under the wrong flag, but hadn't managed to actually close down shipping.
The Red Sea situation looks complex. Wikipedia suggests that a lot of traffic has been diverted around Africa, which seems like a major effect on shipping even if they haven't been able to fully block traffic.
Note that while Iran's ability to fully block traffic appears to be unquestioned, they're not doing that. In particular, last I heard, ships destined for China are allowed through.
What happens if Trump starts following up on his threats to bomb power plants? If their power sources are destroyed, and their fields are burned people will start dying, yes? A regime is nothing without people to rule over, and an army cannot survive without civilians to supply them. Is there a reason the US can't go through with this?
Well, the Iranians have been living under sanctions for a very long time now. They're tough. Also there are 92 million Iranians, which is a lot of people. You could commit a lot of war crimes without making much of a dent, and handing America's enemies a lifetime supply of propaganda material.
This isn't a realistic hypothetical. The US is significantly more restrained in its target selection than, say, either side of the Ukraine war (and Israel even more so). Even the Russians at their worst don't go for this level of mass civilian murder. There's a reasonable argument for concern that the US might step up the escalation ladder further than is morally preferable (or strategically for that matter), but the idea that they'd jump straight to "the most brutal anyone has ever been" isn't credible; it's like worrying that your HOA might start executing people who don't mow their lawns.
> but the idea that they'd jump straight to "the most brutal anyone has ever been"
I wouldn't say it's the most brutal. We've had plenty of mass-slaughters and genocides done by hand in the past. This would be more of an act of disrupting enemy capabilities, with the deaths being collateral damage.
The real answer: The US relies on a large democratic body. They can bend morality here and there, and they have started to push the limits to see how much they can get away with (like with the venezuelan boats) but at the end of the day they need most of the population to see them as "good guys" or none of this works long term because people start defecting, voting in different leaders, striking, divesting, etc. Most importantly, international propaganda stops supporting them, and in 20 years time when a new generation of leaders comes in, they will no longer take the US side in any conflict, they may even begin to antagonise them. It will be even worse than the current European middle ground. Even the most morally bankrupt leaders in the US know this, which is why they will not nuke Iran or kill civilians openly.
And before you say "Well, Russia and Israel and whoever else get away with all sorts of civilian damage and no one cares!"
1. This is not true, people care and there have been serious consequences
2. America is unique compared to those kinds of authoritarian regimes because a significant amount of its power does come from the voter base as well as good relations. Even if they would still have a strong military and economy after destroying both of those pillars, no leader wants to lose that much power.
Wait, what serious consequences has Israel experienced? I know international courts and such have accused them of genocide, but that means absolutely nothing as long as they continue to be backed by the US. A bunch of countries threatened sanctions, but never went through with them.
Public support of Israel has cratered in the US over the last couple years.
Yes, but it hasn't affected policy one bit. That's the nice part about having a "democracy".
Plenty of countries have expelled Israeli diplomats, China has banned Israeli software, some countries are restricting trade, the ICJ case has restricted where Israeli leaders can move. Those are serious consequences, but it's not the grand spectacle of the Hague or total embargo so you probably don't agree.
You know, people always think morality means nothing in international relations, but then if that were true why would these countries go to such serious lengths to make themselves look so moral?
> but then if that were true why would these countries go to such serious lengths to make themselves look so moral?
Because they think there's consequences. But how would they know if they've never tried? The US has never utilized the full extent of its power and leverage. We now get to see what happens when it does.
Perhaps the US has never tried, but plenty of individual American politicians have tried, and found out that they lost votes and allies when they did so.
Patton almost cratered his career when he allowed POWs to be killed in Italy. Worse things happened to the careers of officers responsible for the massacres in the Philippines and My Lai, Abu Ghraib etc.
So why would any politician, bureaucrat or officer want to risk his position by killing bunches of Iranian civilians? There is a big risk by doing so and really can't see what he personally can gain from it, even if it weakens Iran.
Plenty of countries have tried similar things and there have been consequences. WW2 would not have been won if allies could not make the moral case to their citizens (or to german citizens, for that matter) that the Nazis are wrong. They would have lost millions of labourers, soldiers, defectors, saboteurs, volunteers, etc. There are other examples if that doesn't suit you.
Israel hasn't actually done war crimes though (contrary to what you may have heard on bluesky). Even countries that pretend to find this plausible, like the UK, still send their troops to learn how to avoid civilian casualties from the IDF.
As an Israeli with positions that are probably similar to your own - did you really mean to phrase the claim that strongly? It would imply that a country ever fought a long urban war without war crimes, which I find implausible in general.
Arranging for there to be no people for the Iranian government to rule over would be mass murder and genocide. The largest act of genocide in human history, I believe. Doing this would be Pure Evil, which is certainly a reason why the United States *shouldn't* go through with this.
And if we do, approximately every other nation on Earth except for Israel, will make it their policy to ensure that the United States and Israel cease to exist as nations. They will probably not kill us *all*, and they may spend a decade or two saying "nice doggy!" while quietly reaching for the stick with which to beat us into submission, but in the end, you'll probably wind up living under the rule of a Chinese military governor who maybe pretends he works for the UN.
The United States and Israel against Literally The Entire World, is not a war the United States can win in the long run.
If we threaten to do this but don't actually carry through, at least not to the point where millions of Iranians starve to death, then A: we would still be guilty of mass murder and other war crimes, if not actual genocide, and B: the Iranian regime will still rule firmly over all the Iranians we haven't killed, so what's the point?
Except that indulges some people's fantasies about killing a bunch of people who live in the wrong country under the wrong leaders. That's always been a popular fantasy, but one I hope not to see here.
How many people did the Us kill in the Vietnam war?
Well, the internet says between 2.2 to 3.8 Millions.
You think it could come even close to that number?
If you think that "the Internet" says the US killed between 2.2 and 3.8 million people in the Vietnam war, then you would seem to be a poster child in how to Never Use The Internet.
Proper use of the internet says that the *total* number of people killed in the Vietnam war was probably between 1.4 and 3.8 million, so possibly quite a bit less than your minimum figure, and that's mostly Vietnamese people killing other Vietnamese people in a war that began long before the US joined the fighting.
The United States probably killed several hundred thousand people. so not *quite* three orders of magnitude lower than Dust's proposal for 90 million dead Iranians, but still enough orders of magnitude to expect a rather different response.
Now you know.
> And if we do, approximately every other nation on Earth except for Israel, will make it their policy to ensure that the United States and Israel cease to exist as nations.
Are you sure about this? Because China has performed its own share of human rights abuses as well, and nobody cares because they have things that other people want. The US also has things other people want. With Russia and Iran out of the picture, they would have an even larger share of the world's oil (alongside Saudi Arabia, who they are on good terms with). They have the best technology the world has to offer, even moreso now with the progress being made on AI.
And obviously, they have nukes. Nobody is going to start a nuclear war with a country that they're economically reliant on when there's no chance of them winning unscathed, all to avenge some people that they were never particularly attatched to in the first place.
I did not say that the world would arrange the destruction of the United States because the latter "performed its share of human rights abuses". I said that the world would arrange the destruction of the United States if the latter *murdered ninety million innocent people and wholly depopulated an entire nation*.
Murdering ninety million innocent people, is not "our share of human rights abuses", that is vastly larger than our share of human rights abuses, that's larger by far than the entire world's share of human rights abuses in this century. And, of pragmatic importance, most human rights abuses are conducted against the citizens or subjects of the government doing the abusing; you're proposing the genocide of *another* nation's population, under circumstances which would give every other nation reason to fear they might be next.
Reasons why this will result in a different outcome than e.g. China's persecution of the Uighur. are left as an exercise to the student.
Do you really want to start a nuclear war with a country that successfully destroyed a country of 90 million people without pushback? Countries, and the people contained within them, are not suicidal. They are willing to look past injustices when their own lives are on the line. Yes, they have every reason to fear, and that fear is keeping them alive.
No more than anyone wanted to start a high-intensity conventional war with a country that successfully conquered Poland in a month, or continue a high-intensity war with a country that had successfully conquered France in a month. At a certain point, it isn't "we *want* to do this", it's "this is going to happen sooner or later no matter what we do, so let's make it happen on our terms".
And where do you get "without pushback"? If the United States murders more people than any other nation anywhere has ever murdered, and without the excuse of "they were our own troublesome people, nothing for you to worry about", there will be pushback. It will take the form of everybody publicly telling us nice things while quietly building their forces until they're as ready as they're ever going to be, and then destroying the United States of America. At great cost, but they will perceive all other paths as having greater cost because they absolutely will not trust you to stop with 90 million dead Iranians. After all, we've still got Denmark to conquer, and then Canada, just for starters.
Note that they'll have the help of an awful lot of Americans in accomplishing all this.
"Nice doggie...."
The amount of bombing necessary to actually destroy the nation of Iran is almost certainly more expensive than the US is willing to pay even before you account for moral concerns.
Moral concerns don't seem to be an issue for the US or Israeli leadership, so I don't think that's too big of an obstacle. The functions of civilization are centered in a few weight-bearing components, like food, water, and energy, so destroying those should significantly disrupt things to the point that business as usual is no longer possible. They don't need to level the entire nation.
Whatever you think of the leadership, there's limits to what their voters will accept. And I think you vastly underestimate how far a country can fall below "business as usual" and how long they can stay there without breaking when regime survival is threatened. History shows that trying to break a regime with bombing campaigns alone basically never works.
The US appears to be lifting sactions on Venezuela, I don't know to what extend. I wonder if that means some kind of agreement has been reached, or is being negotiated. If truly nothing changed, then why lift the sanctions?
Since Marco Rubio is now the de facto president of Venezuela, it would be weird to keep the sanctions.
I think this is mostly wrong. I'd recommend https://substack.com/@zinebriboua for a more balanced strategic perspective on this situation. For the other comment, I'd suggest that if you equate underdog status with moral valence you're going about it wrong.
I don't see this writer as balanced. They do not write with objectivity, not even the cadence of objectivity, they don't cite evidence for any of their claims, and they appear to have some conflicts of interest they have not disclosed.
This comment would be more useful if you linked to one of zine's articles, and let us know which of beowulf's points it demonstrates to be wrong.
Beowulf makes a bunch of distinct points which are addressed in different articles. I'll focus on point 3 about the Gulf states here - they've actually been fairly clear about wanting the US to stay in the fight and hit Iran harder rather than withdraw now (and should the US withdraw early, they have the ability to keep fighting Iran on their own so long as they're bombing them and forcing the straits shut). They seem fairly clear eyed about the costs concessions to Iran would have for them.
Bombing the gulf states was a strategic mistake on Iran's part (perfectly understandable when dealing with deadmen switches, mind you). The idea was that the Gulf States would yell at America and get America to stop forcing Iran to throw bombs around oil-producing countries.
Unfortunately (for Iran), it's done the opposite. Gulf States were unable to attack Iran until they were hit by missiles first (ummah, religion, etc.). Now, they say simply "self-defense." (which is perfectly okay in islam).
And what Iranian targets have the Gulf States been hitting with their missiles, now that they're "allowed" to attack Iran?
There's the possibility that the Iranian people will rise up and overthrow the existing government. It hasn't happened yet, in fact the regime has brutally suppressed dissent, but that doesn't mean that it can't happen.
Of course, none of this would be a consideration without the world's fentanyl-like addiction to cheap oil.
It's so unlikely it's not even worth discussing. The only countries where a group of people can just walk into the grand palace and take control, are ones with sufficient insurgencies and absolutely no pushback whatsoever. Iran has no Contras, no Taliban, no Syrian rebel forces, nothing like this. It's just not happening, sorry.
Sri Lanka? Iceland? I'm sorry, are you trying not to put on the table currentish events?
Important differences:
1 Both countries already had a democratic foundation
2 The military was on their side unlike IRGC. No pushback.
Iran is a theocratic democracy. Just like Israel.
History since WW2 has shown that no matter how awful a regime is, outside bombing is at best useless, if not counterproductive. If there is already an armed insurrection that can maybe win a conventional war against regime forces, such as in Lybia, then ground support against military targets can help. But bombing civilian and industrial targets is only ever going to increase regime support.
I don’t have a great deal of knowledge of Iranian internal affairs, but as far as I know the opposition to the current regime is concentrated in the more middle class and affluent areas of the larger cities, especially Teheran. In the rural areas and poorer sections of the cities there’s a lot less opposition.
The entire "opposition" is just unarmed protestors. You cannot take a country with that.
Remember Milosevich
The 1978 Iran revolution was mostly unarmed protesters. The army declared neutrality as the common soldiers refused to shoot them, with lots of defection and even mutinies. After that, a comparatively tiny armed force took control.
Of course the new regime immediately started murdering thousands of dissenters. But the revolution up to the point of the change of control involved remarkably little armed conflict.
Well that's the problem isn't it, the new regime is not the old regime and they will not allow their own peaceful tactics to be used against them, hence the killing of counter-revolutionaries.
Isn't "unarmed protestors" basically how the current Iranian regime came into power in 1979?
And the current regime is not the previous regime, obviously their own tactics will not work against them as evidenced by them gunning down thousands of peaceful protestors.
That may be true. And before Trump started bombing them, it looked like they had pushed the IRG back on their heels (until the IRG imported a bunch of head-busters from their terrorist proxies). Now, post-Trump, post-bombing, I don't think there's a chance of a popular uprising, because of what John said above.
No, that lesson goes back to the previous World War. But it has never stopped people from saying "...but *this time* it will be different!"
People really hate being bombed, or having stuff that's important to them bombed. If you bomb a country, those people will look at the bombers and say "enemy!", and look at the people shooting antiaircraft guns at the bombers and say "enemy of my enemy, =friend!". The bombers being better at their job than the antiaircraft gunners, doesn't change that.
A bombing-only strategy can sometimes work if your goals are less extreme than regime change or unconditional surrender. But it really doesn't look like the current strategy ever went beyond "if we bomb them hard enough, there will be regime change and the new regime will surrender".
It's curious, really. Nobody thinks that being bombed by another country might make them warm up to the country releasing the bombs. Americans didn't react to 9/11 by saying "Well, Al Qaeda showed they are able to hurt us, so we should pressure our government to make some concessions to them". Of course they didn't. Nobody remotely sane would have expected that. Yet, generals and presidents and great leaders -- who, if asked, will say they'll never surrender in the face of any intimidation -- somehow fail to consider that the Enemy might think the same.
Nobody believes that if *they themselves* were being bombed by another country it would make them warm up to the country releasing the bombs.
But it is very, very common for people to believe that if their country was the one dropping the bombs, most of the people being bombed would warm up to them, and greet them as liberators and all that nonsense. Because We are a Strong and Fearless People, but They are Cowardly and Weak and under the rule of an Evil Dictator that can't possibly have the support of the people.
It's a very appealing fantasy, and the bit where it has never ever been true, doesn't seem to diminish its appeal.
To be perfectly fair, there was a lot of dancing in the streets after Maduro, and the only people complaining were in the USA (and being paid by Venezuelan dollars).
I don't think this would have happened if a ton of venezuelans had died (and the venezuelans are a notably...expressive people. shout in streets, yes, but that's a today thing, tomorrow, who knows?).
On the other other hand, the Iranians are standing out on balconies watching the bombs fall as entertainment. I'm not sure that means "greet as liberators" but it's hardly "Everyone We Must Fight The Great Satan"!!!
If America cannot reinstitute the draft because prospective soldiers would shoot the officers, it is high time we sit down and think that "maybe nobody's as patriotic as you think they are."
> Some people in the comments accused me of “doxxing” the companies by mentioning the location of their headquarters.
FWIW, my personal issue was not with passively revealing the address, but rather with wording that could be interpreted as a call to action. It's the difference between saying "Bugmaster lives on 123 Bug Street, it's right there on his Wikipedia page", and "Bugmaster lives on 123 Bug Street, we checked out his security and it's pretty lax, it'd be a shame if someone put a brick through his window" (though I am obviously I am exaggerating for effect).
Intuition testing: I've heard that, had George Bush successfully passed social security privatization, it would've dug SS out of a lot of its current hole (since it would have allowed it to be invested in the booming stock market since). Wouldn't this have also shortened the great recession, since the main issue at the time was insufficient QE and this would've pumped investment dollars into the economy?
My sincere expectation at the time is that a very large proportion of the "privatized" money would have stuck to the fingers of the helpful finance guys making the arrangements, God knows what would have happened in 2008 if a bunch of people had lost their social security funds.
That's not an unreasonable expectation, but it's worth noting that this mostly doesn't happen with 401ks (it plausibly could have happened more easily with a government program, though I'm not sure if it would be easier or harder there).
What was the plan for social security privatization? Social security is just payments from the young to the old, right? The young pay the old now, in the expectation that in the future when they're old, the young will pay them in turn.
I really don't understand the US social security system, but my understanding is that the amount of money you get out is only very loosely related to the amount of money you put in, and that it's really just a socialist wealth redistribution plot disguised as retirement savings?
IIUC it was to allow people to divert some of their personal SS taxes to 401k-style personal investments in stocks or bonds. It'd remove some of the cross-subsidies from the program (worrying for it's short-term solvency but probably good for it long-term) and increase total personal investment.
It's worth noting that this has already been done to some degree. My dad worked for Los Angeles County decades ago and partially opted out of SS. It worked well.
Is that an option? I thought it was federally restricted
I don't know how it is nowadays, this was decades ago. My understanding is that it's not a normal thing.
There are a few specific fields that have their own pre-SS retirement systems grandfathered in as an alternative. Railroad workers are the one I'm most familiar with, but that's probably not the one for an LA county employee.
And communities like the Amish, who have a sufficiently strong track record of taking care of their own that they can opt out as well. Also probably not the case in Los Angeles.
It's not really payments from the young to the old. It goes into a big pot, the government borrows from that pot and issues IOUs with interest. If they put that money in the market instead of bonds then it would have grown at a much higher rate.
It becomes a pure intergenerational transfer when both the money going in to social security, plus the repayment of IOUs through taxes, reaches the point where there's no assets owned by SS, and the money the young pay in now isn't being saved.
Realistically what would have happened is SS would have tanked in the recession with the stock market and people would have freaked out, saying "this is why we warned you not to privatize social security!" and it would be viewed as one of the worst decisions of his presidency.
The stock market recovery in Obama's terms then gets reflected in the status of SS, everyone's slightly happier and Hillary wins in 2016? Okay this is probably reading too much.
The notion of privatised social security makes me wince, given the history of privatised public entities over here. My own government tried this with Eircom (our state telecommunications utility) as it became, along the lines of copying what the Tories under Maggie Thatcher had tried. A good proportion of middle-class voters (by which I don't mean what Americans seem to mean by "middle class" which is "lower middle class/upper working class") duly invested in shares, believing all the promises about "you will get rich, rich I tell you!"
Of course the natural thing happened that happens when you get small investors all trying to buy shares and profit off them; they all tried selling at once, the price crashed, and the big institutional investors who had been waiting for this to happen swooped in and bought those shares at a bargain price.
Then the disgruntled small investors starting demanding the government compensate them for their losses, apparently not having got it through their heads that this is how the stock market *works*, baby; you lose money as well as make it.
There was little sympathy at the time, because those of us without the money to buy shares thought those who had invested simply to sell at the higher price were greedy and they got what they deserved:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eir_(telecommunications)#History
"Telecom Éireann was privatised; the process began in 1995, and by July 1999 the government had disposed of virtually all of its shareholding. This was very controversial and subject to much debate. Eircom plc was then floated on the Irish, London and New York Stock Exchanges on 8 July 1999, and small/first-time investors were encouraged by the Irish Government to buy shares. The share price was set at €3.90, later reaching a high of €4.80, a 23% increase. Those initial investors who held onto their shares, until July 2000, received a 4% bonus-share allocation.
The Eircom flotation is considered to have been an example of a stock market bubble — after the initial hype of the flotation died down, the stock price fell rapidly. Many of the 500,000 small investors were angered by the significant financial loss they incurred, blaming the government for not sufficiently warning them of the risks inherent in stock-market investment."
Imagine a privatised social security fund and the potential for unhappy pensioners etc. You're just asking for trouble.
On the other side of the muir Éireann, privatising the bus services didn't go to well, nor Railtrack (not the company that runs the trains - they used to own the tracks and made a mess of keeping them safely maintained).
Thames Water is also close to bankruptcy and sometimes the residents of some town in Surrey or other need to queue for bottled water supplies because the pipes are out for a couple of days.
But hey, at least it's not the Darien Gap or the East India Company.
Hm, my understanding was that the Bush model would've been more restrictive but I could easily be way off here.
The government would have offered a limited menu of investment funds (similar to the federal employees’ Thrift Savings Plan)
But it was a tough sell. Transition costs were enormous — diverting payroll taxes into private accounts would create a funding gap for current retirees estimated at $1–2 trillion, which the plan never fully addressed.
This may be my European bias, but the US healthcare system is extremely cost-ineffective. I see no reason why a privatized social security system would fare any better.
Hm, I think the main way US healthcare goes wrong is its mix of constraints and inability to admit them. I don't know if privatization would affect this either way but I'm not clear enough on the details of what it would imply.
(Privatization doesn't seem to be the root cause of US government inefficiency - government run transit systems in the US are inefficient even compared to brightline. For a non US example neither privatization nor nationalization of British rail made much difference afaict).
Tldr I don't think privatization in itself is enough to determine this, it depends on details I don't know enough about.
I thought the US government wasn't allowed to bargain over drug prices, and that allows them to get high.
The US healthcare system is cost-ineffective mostly because we pay doctors and medical professionals a *lot* more than the rest of the world, and because we tend to insist on things like e.g. private rooms for every hospital patient. And expensive malpractice payouts whenever anything goes wrong. Arguing about the organizational structure and who pays for what, are only minor perturbations on that.
The proposed Social Security reforms, mostly baselined the same level of benefits, with a bit of delay and/or capping IIRC.
So the effects that make privatized health care so expensive in the US, would also apply to a hypothetical government-run health care system here, but would *not* apply to a privatized Social Security system. Which isn't to say we couldn't find some other way to screw it up. The "American + privatized = expensive + bad!" framing you're trying to apply is overly simplistic and doesn't bring anything useful to the table.
Do you think the "Medicare for All" approach would help? That's the kind of thing that could only be done if it's run by the state, and it might help with drug prices.
For comparison, Switzerland has mandatory "private" health insurance but the government sets the premiums and copays and so on for the mandatory tier. By default hospitals have rooms of 6-8 I think, but you can pay a voluntary excess premium for a single room should you ever need one.
Probably not. Prescription drug prices are a highly visible but really quite small fraction of US health care expenditure. And to the extent that Medicare secures price reductions, it mostly does so by encouraging health-care providers to bill most of the non-recurring and overhead expenses to their non-Medicare clients, which stops working when all the clients are on Medicare.
A broadly applicable rule. In most cases (and the exceptions are mostly focused on things like land value, so not applicable here), you cannot get significant cost reductions without firing lots of people. Or otherwise arranging for them to not make money by supporting the task at hand but in some way that you have cleverly arranged to not be "firing", but weasel-wording doesn't help. Also, there are almost never enough completely useless parasitic bureaucrats for firing them alone to bring significant cost reductions.
So if a plan can't point to a great many people, who are presently making a real contribution to the effort, and say "we're going to fire all these guys and do without whatever they were providing", then it isn't going to significantly reduce costs.
In the case of Medicare-for-all, who gets fired? Just some insurance-industry bureaucrats? Not going to be enough by far.
>Do you think the "Medicare for All" approach would help?
I am always weirded out by American ideas of "socialism", meaning the idea that the taxpayer pays for-profit institutions, meaning rich people, and then they find out the voters are strangely not in favour of their tax money being used to pay rich people. Every other country gets it that if you want the taxpayer to pay for something, first you nationalize it. Be that universities or hospitals.
Agree with your comment overall, with one factual correction to offer: "Medical malpractice costs the U.S. healthcare system approximately $55.6 billion annually, which includes patient payouts, legal fees, and defensive medicine costs." I don't know how solid that "defensive medicine" costs estimate is but set that aside for the moment.
Of the $55.6 billion figure about one-tenth is actual payouts to patients.
Total annual US health care spending is around $5.5 trillion. So...malpractice settlements on their own are boosting our national health care spending about about 1/10th of 1 percent. If you count all costs of malpractice, including "defensive medicine" however its being defined/measured, then malpractice is boosting our costs by around 1 percent.
Punchline is that malpractice lawsuits do not seem to be a material variable in our national health-care expenditures.
Right, the malpractice payments are a small part of the problem on their own, but highly leveraged because of the defensive medicine they encourage. They are also a big part of the reason doctor salaries are so high, in that we insist that doctors pay for their own malpractice insurance (and accept the possibility of ruinous settlements beyond what insurance will cover). In hindsight it might have been better to put that cost elsewhere, but too late now and it probably wouldn't change the bottom line if we had.
I mean....the estimated defensive-measurement costs is less than 1 percent of US health care spending. Not nothing but hardly a large part. Other things, such as the higher doctor wages you led with, seem to be much-bigger factors.
Regarding how malpractice insurance is handled....well I'm not finding useful comparative estimates (what fraction of health care spending in other developed nations is defensive medicine).
I've always had trouble dating, so I'm hiring the photo guy. Wish me luck. Some people have told me my photos aren't the problem since I already get some dates and getting more won't make the relationship work out anyway. But those people don't give advice in such a systematic way.
Protip: just make 10 random crap selfies and prompt Gemini with them, something like "make me a romantic photo, it should be realistic, I should be recognizable but get the angle, the lighting, the shadows right like how a pro photographer would".
Would it be recognized as AI? Would it be ethical?
Good luck! In the spirit of systematic advice: From your profile pic and others I can see that you have potential to be quite handsome. But your facial hair makes you look very, very ugly. Shave it. A better haircut and clothes that fit will also do wonders for you. Put on 20 lbs of muscle and you would honestly be quite attractive to most women! Don't fool yourself into thinking this stuff doesn't matter.
Oh yeah, that meigeall* is doing him *no* favours at all. I like the Monkey D. Luffy vibe he has going on, but that may be minority appeal 😁
* https://www.teanglann.ie/en/fgb/meigeall
I appreciate the honesty. It does rather bother me that social norms are such that nobody ever told me it looked bad until after I had already shaved it. I haven't been to the gym lately because of laziness or whatever you want to call it, but I know I should.
Might be the best investment you'll ever make!
The photo guy?
Point 5 in Scott's post at the start of the open thread.
Depending on why the dates aren't working out, getting more dates could be helpful (e.g. if you're looking for something specific and only a small number of fit the criteria, so you need lots of dates to find them). Quantity has a quality all of its own
Until recently, the size of the local talent pool was a key factor in business location/relocation decisions. A technology startup would gravitate towards the Bay Area, for example, while to use another example a financial business would find New York’s talent pool important.
While those considerations may still apply to blue collar occupations the near-collapse of the white collar job market has made them irrelevant with respect to professional office jobs. If a new business in (to use an extreme example) Guymon, Oklahoma wants to hire 500 non-remote software engineers or financial analysts it will be absolutely swamped with fully qualified applicants. If you’re a laid-off software engineer in Sunnyvale or a jobless financial analyst in Manhattan you probably are completely dismayed at the prospect of living in the Oklahoma Panhandle but, as the old expression goes, beggars can’t be choosers. Being employed is orders of magnitude better than being out of work no matter where your job may be,
As an anecdote, my current company is trying to hire software engineers for a new hub out east, but they're having so much trouble hiring there that they're trying to get applicants in the Bay Area to relocate, and nobody wants to.
This is a pretty strong claim, do you have any actual evidence?
Why don’t you look it up yourself?
You're the one raising the topic, I think it's your responsibility to demonstrate that there's anything true enough here to be worth talking about.
I would recommend spending some time reading the r/recruitinghell subreddit. It is an endless litany of job-hunting horror stories, largely involving white collar types with a focus on tech. It is unimaginably depressing, I don’t care how gainfully employed and secure in your job you may be. In fact I would recommend having a bottle of antidepressants close at hand.
Without hesitation I’d say that the vast majority of posters, whose lives are spiraling down into the abyss, would sell their souls for a job anywhere in the country.
[Yes, I know the old saying that the plural of anecdote is not data, but when there are such an overwhelming number of anecdotes they cannot be dismissed].
> when there are such an overwhelming number of anecdotes they cannot be dismissed
Sure they can.
If you set up a subreddit for unemployed people to complain about the job market you're going to wind up with a bunch of unemployed people complaining about the job market. If you spent a whole lot of time reading /r/justnomil then you'd come to the conclusion that mothers-in-law are uniformly terrible.
Yeah, but isn't a subreddit like that one big exercise in adverse selection?
Counterpoint: aren't the vast majority of new AI companies being set up in SF, often by people who've specifically moved to SF to do so? That suggests that agglomeration effects are still important and can't just be replaced by remote work.
Financial businesses and New York are a different matter, with so many relocating to Miami and elsewhere in Florida, as well as Texas. I'll acknowledge this is due to New York's resolute hostility to business, way beyond anything in the Bay Area, and its bumbling, Nutty Professor inability to get any infrastructure projects accomplished (hey, how's that Second Avenue Subway doing?)
I think that comes down to the difference between wanting to hire 500 software engineers, and wanting to hire the best 500 software engineers. The best software engineers can still get jobs in the Bay Area, and they want to hang out with all the other best software engineers and be in a place where they can easily get another good job if the one they want goes bad. Which all points to the Bay Area, at least for now, with a few lesser tech hubs like Austin in distant second place.
And that *used* to apply to the mid-tier software engineers as well, coupled with the possibility of joining the ranks of the best if they kept hanging around with the best. If that's changing so that the middle tier isn't confident of their getting another good job in the Bay Area, it makes sense that they'd be easier to hire away into someplace cheap with the promise of one good job and at least some fellow mid-tier software guys to hang out with.
Thanks to working nonstandard hours I’ve noticed something interesting about traffic patterns. This applies in the suburban area where I am, but I have no reason to believe it’s not true elsewhere.
Just about the quietest time on the roads is from 10 am to 11 am on weekdays. To find less traffic you’d have to go to the latest overnight hours, say midnight to 4 am, or to weekend early mornings. What are usually busy streets give off post-apocalypse vibes between 10 and 11.
It’s not hard to see why. By 10 am most working people are at their workplaces, students are in school, and for the most part retirees and others not in the workforce haven’t yet ventured out. This lull in traffic doesn’t last, however, as by 11 or even 10:45 things get noticeably busier.
One thing I do miss about the lockdown was that when I knocked off work at 5, I could go run an errand right then without worrying about traffic.
Now, it's better to get it done by 3, and miss the noon hour
This seems right to me. I'm a stay at home mom and I like to schedule things around 10:30 more or less for this reason. I can tell you the retirees are indeed out, but they arrived at their destination at 9 or 10 and haven't left yet. They'll be part of the 11:00 traffic as they move on to the next thing.
(I've found the best time to shop at Costco is around 11, as the retirees and other sahms who arrived at 10:00 opening time are starting to leave, but lunch break shoppers won't arrive for a while)
Fog of War stuff — Ukraine and Russia:
1. According Volodymyr Zelenskyy:
> Russian losses this March have reached their highest level since the start of the war: our drone strikes alone resulted in 33,988 Russian servicemembers killed or seriously wounded, while artillery and other strikes eliminated another 1,363 Russian occupiers. That means more than 35,000 Russian losses in just one month – and these are clearly verified losses. *We have video documentation of every such strike in our system.*
Many in the pro-Russian camp claim these numbers are made up. I don’t doubt these numbers, because (a) Russian military doctrine going back to Napoleonic Wars (at least) has been to treat its soldiers as expendable; (b) Russia hasn't made any significant territorial gains or breakthroughs in Ukraine in over two years; and (c) Russia is having trouble meeting its recruitment goals. And considering the number of videos posted on X of Russian soldiers flailing as they’re taken out by FPV drones. It’s hard for me not to feel sympathy for the poor schmucks. After watching an FPV chase a Russian soldier around a hut a few times before it killed him, and a video of a long line (>100) dead Russians along a road, I can’t watch these videos anymore. And I think the NAFO folks are shooting themselves in the propaganda foot by posting them. Matthew Brady brought the horror of the US Civil War to the public’s consciousness with his photos of the battlefield dead. Now we have videos of each individual soldier’s death stored in a vast digital archive. BTW, Russian milbloggers have also been posting similar videos of Russian drones killing Ukrainian soldiers. But I don’t see them in the numbers I see for Ukrainian kills (probably because X is banned in Russia, and milbloggers use Telegram). Also, it’s worth noting that Ukrainian drone operators have accepted Russian surrenders. But in the heat of the chase…
2. The Institute for the Study of War says that Russia hasn’t been able to recruit enough soldiers to replace its losses. On the other side, Ukrainian commanders are being promoted based on their proven battlefield kill rates. One senior commander keeps a spreadsheet of his team’s metrics (kills). He’s broken it down by the cost of the FPVs, the man-hours involved in making the kill, and a bunch of other metrics. He claimed it costs him ~$875 per kill. I checked this number against the cost of 155mm howitzer shells. High-explosive rounds average between $2,500–$3,000 per shell, and specialized or guided rounds, like the M982 Excalibur, can cost over $100,000 per shell. And if we use Zelenskyy’s numbers, over 96% of Russian casualties are inflicted by drones; drone warfare is not only more cost-effective than traditional artillery and tank warfare, but also more deadly.
2a. Also, Russia is specifically recruiting people who would make good drone operators, and is considering creating a new Drone Operation force. One general, whose purview was drones, complained that other groups are stealing his boys from him and shoving them into the front-line meat grinders before they can even set up their operational command centers.
3. Knowledgeable commentators seem to agree that Russian drone systems overall are not as advanced as Ukrainian drones, but they do the job. Many Russian drones suffer from poor quality, lack of standardization, and they are often lost to countermeasures. However, Russia has had problems scaling up its production as Ukraine has struck Russian chemical factories (plastics and explosives) and electronics factories. Also, the top-down command Russian command system may be getting in the way of innovation and logistics. However, some analysts have claimed that Russian FPV drone production exceeds Ukraine’s. They peg Russian FPV production at about 100,000 per month. And Russia is using volunteers on some production lines. Meanwhile, on the Ukrainian side of the kill zones, Ukraine produced over three million FPV drones in 2025, and they want to scale to 7 million in 2026. But some commentators are fretting that Ukraine has too many independent producers and is not optimizing its production capabilities.
3a. After I wrote this, I just saw a Russian milblogger complaining about the new generation of Ukrainian FPV drones. The new ones are extremely silent, and soldiers can't hear them coming.
4. I’ve seen estimates that 60% to 80% of FPVs fail to take out their targets, which is why both sides are scaling up production. However, if I take the ISW’s estimate that Russia suffered at least 400,000 casualties (killed and wounded) in 2025 and Ukraine 3,000,000 FPV production numbers, it looks like FPVs may only have a 12 or 13 percent hit rate. Basic Ukrainian FPV drones cost ~$300 per unit. So, that commander with the spreadsheet must have mastered the art of drone warfare, because his hit rates are closer to 50%. Either that or he's bullshitting. Another reason Ukraine is putting so much effort into drone warfare is that in 2025, it suffered ~25k–50k killed and ~75k–150k wounded or missing in action. That’s not counting 2,500 civilians killed and ~12,000 wounded in Russian long-range drone strikes during 2025. Russia is expending most of its long-range drones on civilian targets rather than going after military targets in Ukraine. This may bite them in the ass in the long run.
5. Reports are that Russia is diverting some of its Shahed drone electronics production to Iran, plus they’re shipping FPV drones to Iran (and possibly reconnaissance drones, as well).
6. Shotguns are supposed to be the best personal defense against FPVs. Ukraine has been issuing shotguns to its frontline units along with specialized ammunition (not sure what makes the ammo special—smaller buckshot?) for close-range defense against FPVs. The Ukrainians call this "airborne skeet shooting".
6a. Question: If we do send Marines into Iran, will our military issue them shotguns? I suspect our casualty rate will be ghastly if the DoD/DoW doesn’t wake up to the threat of drone warfare.
7. According to the Guardian…
> Land robots now account for 90% of Ukrainian army logistics. “It’s very difficult to move around because of enemy first-person-view drones. So we use robotic systems,” said Pavlov. In January, Ukraine’s armed forces carried out a record 7,000 operations using ground vehicles, or UGVS.
UGVs are being used to evacuate casualties from the field. And UGVs are being equipped with guns and grenade launchers. According to the Guardian article, a single DevDroid TW 12.7 system defended a position for 45 days. The article didn’t say, but I assume Ukrainian soldiers would have had to sneak into the position to replace its ammo boxes and recharge its batteries. Or can Ukraine use drones to remotely recharge and re-up the ammo supplies for these systems? Or maybe they just swapped out a new DevDroid system every day by UGV? But curious minds want to know.
8. Ukrainian long-range drones continue to hit Russia’s Baltic oil export facilities. At least 8 out of 18 oil and diesel storage tanks at Primorsk facility are burning. Another 8 are burning at Ust-Luga out of the total number of 24. But these numbers are from earlier, this past week. I suspect Ukraine has taken out some more since then. Ukraine has also been hitting the “upstream” feeds to these facilities (pipelines and storage facilities). Russia’s ban on oil exports took effect on 2 April to redirect it to domestic and war-related consumption. Exports are not scheduled to resume until July.
Experts are discussing the feasibility of Russia throttling crude production at the wellheads. My understanding is that if you shut a well down, it can be tricky to restart. Approximately one-third of oil wells that are “shut in” (temporarily closed) may never return to significant or commercial production. Throttling may get around this problem. I don't know if how this works in practice or if it's even feasible.
Anyway, Ukraine seems to have effectively shut down Russia's oil exports for now, and Russia is unable to stop Ukrainian drone incursions.
8a. Question: What percentage of Ukrainian long-range drones don't get through?—because it sure seems like Russia is wide-open to Ukrainian drone attacks.
8b. Thought experiment: If the US faced an enemy like Ukraine, would we be able to prevent the destruction of our key industrial and logistical facilities? Hopefully, Trump doesn't get a bee in his bonnet to annex Canada, Greenland, or Mexico, because drones are the ultimate tool for asymmetric warfare.
8c. Addendum: I read this morning that Ukrainian drones struck the Primorsk facility again. At least two more storage tanks are burning. Also they Kstovo Refinery near Nizhny Novgorod that is important for producing the fuel that Russia consumes.
9. Russia has been selling off its gold. Question: any indication that this is what moved the price of gold downward? Also, Putin got oligarchs to kick in about $1.2 billion to the war effort, but this won’t make up the deficit in oil revenue. And Central Bankers have warned that Russian currency reserves are facing a shortage of Chinese Renminbi, making It difficult for them to pay for Chinese electronics.
Interesting bit about shotguns. Seems like there would be a lot of space to optimize the ammo to take out drones. And not so difficult to test and iterate on the that.
Made an account just to catch you one of these open threads and express my appreciation - you're the first thing I look for in each one. These are an excellent mix of concise and thorough and tend to segue into interesting discussion. You're honestly a more reliable source of recaps-with-a-bit-of-extra-context than most other stuff I glance at.
Thanks, but I'm merely an obsessive-compulsive doom scroller. There's so much bullshit out there, though. The mainstream media has given up trying to do any in-depth reporting. There's also a lot of bullshit coming across social media. I keep asking: is this bullshit or is this real?
People I'd describe as "obsessive-compulsive doom scrollers" I've known are generally those I'd advise against doing so. So it's a novel experience for me to tell someone "good job on the doom scrolling! Keep at it!" If there's any community you're actively participating in (or just open to casually chatting somewhere on the side I guess) I'd love to follow along. It's exactly the sort of stuff I find fascinating to learn, contemplate, and discuss but don't really have the nerve to do all the scrolling as doomfully as required.
I also like to troll and challenge a lot of bullshitters over on X, under the same handle. At some point, I'm going to start posting my own column on Substack, but it wouldn't be about current affairs.
I'd be happy to read whatever it is. You're a good mix of informative and concise and (at least as far as my own judgement allows) seem to know where to hedge your confidence based on ambiguous info. Out of curiosity, what would you write about?
I was thinking about a Consciousness Handbook. I am not interested in the whys and wherefores of consciousness, or even if consciousness is even "real". But it seems like a lot of people, some of them very smart, haven't spent much time observing their own minds. Most people just plow through life without seeming to appreciate the subtleties of our qualia and the way the subroutines of consciousness behave. Rather than worrying about the philosophical questions, I ask "Hey, have you ever tried this?" and "Have you noticed how your mind behaves when you do this?" My problem with Buddhism is that it discourages wallowing in sensory and mental states, but there's a lot of pleasure to be gotten from them. We've only got so many years on this planet, so why not get the most out of being conscious and alive?
Random notes:
>>2 & 4
$300 per unit likely would likely not include battery, munition, detonator, and any EM survivability. Per former UKR CO CDR: 5-7 FPV per KIA; each FPV at the low end is ~400 for airframe, ~125 per battery, ~300 for the munition. Add additional cost and complexity for operating beyond line-of-sight (CRPA antennas, meshing modems, SATCOM, etc.). Consider also the lethality radius of a 155mm shell vs an FPV. Attritional warfare over a large area with constrained manpower incentivizes UAS so I'd be cautious about over-applying lessons learned to all flavors of modern warfare.
>>5
I'm somewhat curious as to what utility FPV drones provide Iran. I suppose equipping proxy forces around the ME would be an option, but were I Iran I'd probably prioritize jet engines and EO/IR seekers for their medium altitude loitering munitions.
>>6-6a
I'm unsure how universally applicable the RUS/UKR experience is here. For the US, it's probably cheaper to just deploy the Marines with a MADIS than to train, equip, establish a separate shotgun ammo logistics pipeline, etc. This make sense to me as I'd prioritize HELIOS proliferation, M-SHORAD fielding, and IFPC acceleration over adding a new small arms qual. (Having said that, it's hard to know for sure in this space; for example, the UKR "duel" simulator is excellent, so scaling these skills may be less of an issue than my instincts suggest)
>>8a
pimpleplane dot jpeg. Consider how much SIGINT wizardry must occur to determine windows and routes.
>>8b
Mexico already sends lots of drones. From what I gather the main limitation is usage authorities rather than capabilities (see El Paso).
> cheaper to just deploy the Marines with a MADIS than to train, equip, establish a separate shotgun ammo logistics pipeline, etc.
I knew that MADIS had been successfully tested and had a proven combat record of shooting down relatively slow-moving, large-profile UAV drones, with at least one documented Shahed kill, but I hadn't seen any reports on whether MADIS had been tested against FPV swarms. Luckily, before I opined without current information, I decided to double-check. I was forced to update my priors. :-)
Looks like the Marine Corps is taking FPVs seriously, and they tested MADIS against FPVs last month...
https://modernmechanics24.com/post/us-marines-test-madis-system/
However, the details in the link are rather sketchy. Details are missing that leave me questioning its effectiveness...
1. The article says, "the system can jam drone signals, disabling them without firing a shot." Did they test this against the current frequency hopping FPVs? Ukraine has used FH to successfully bypass Russian signal jamming.
2. And it's using radio signatures to detect the FPVs. It doesn't sound like they tested it against the current state-of-the-art fiber-optic FPVs.
3. The article notes that "ammunition is finite." In the face of dozens or even hundreds of FPVs, how quickly does it expend its ammunition, and how long does it take to reload?
4. Did they test it against FPVs resting in ambush on the ground? What sort of depression can the chain gun handle? How quickly could the chain gun swivel to respond to FPV rising from behind a bush a few meters away? This is becoming a common Russian FPV tactic that Ukrainian soldiers are encountering. Could it accidentally kill our own troops if the gun were dealing with a very low angle of attack?
5. What sort of terrain can it handle? Presumably, it has off-road capabilities, but what do our troops do if they have to move into terrain that the MADIS can't negotiate?
Unfortunately, the US hasn't given Ukraine any MADIS systems to test in real combat situations. Also, it looks like the Marine Corps has limited numbers of these.
And to your other question...
> I'm somewhat curious as to what utility FPV drones provide Iran.
If and when US forces are on the ground, FPVs will likely be Iran's primary mode of engagement. And I'll remind you that an Iranian-backed militia group attacked Victoria Base in Iraq this past March. Fiber optic FPV drones reportedly destroyed at least one UH-60M Black Hawk helicopter and an AN/MPQ-64 Sentinel air defense system (and the video that the Iranian's released suggested another Black Hawk may have been damaged). The drones also caused significant fires within the compound. Victoria Base evidently didn't have a MADIS, though.
Meta note: my contention was that MADIS is better value for USMC units than training every Marine to a level of shotgun proficiency to be tactically relevant, not MADIS is a one-size-fits-all complete C-sUAS solution. All your objections to MADIS apply doubly to small arms. FWIW, my preferred small arms solution would be to give everyone a magazine of the pellet 5.56 rounds they've been testing and provide a couple Smartshooter type sights for designated air guards.
1-Specific electronic attack capabilities are likely classified. I'd merely consider doctrinal guidance for length of FH radio transmissions to avoid being located versus duration of an FPV's flight and also the added costs and supply chain woes of increasing your hypothetical drone's complexity and survivability.
2-No. it has a suite of sensors including active RADAR and EO/IR detection. I believe said radar is S-Band or X-Band. Either provides sufficient resolution. Range sufficiency depends on what frontage our Marines must cover.
3-Why is our hypothetical enemy sending hundreds of FPVs simultaneously against a BN echelon or below? Also, you'll have to define "swarm". Is it number or behavior? If the latter, we're talking an OOM (minimum) higher tier of cost and sophistication to operate with such autonomy (ACK the cost is dropping). If the former, the C2 (and resultant OPSEC) challenge is still non-trivial, and the visual, EM, etc. signature of employing such would present other risks. Since the MADIS gun is derived from an AH-64, rate of fire is likely several hundred rounds per minute. As tests have proved, it seems pretty accurate (the helicopter version even had to add dispersion) and DoD is looking to field proximity rounds as well.
4. Assigning sectors of fire and exclusion zones is a standard part of direct fires planning. This isn't unique. Honestly, I'd be more worried about airspace management.
Regarding loitering drones, if you're envisioning a full-scale ground invasion, this is the wrong frame for considering the joint force. War is a team sport and individual platform vs individual platform won't cleanly analogize to a C-sUAS integrated network vs an adversary sUAS recon-strike complex. To be more explicit, with current levels of freedom of maneuver in the air domain, we'd likely have "mowed the grass" with EO/IR, SAR, GPR, etc, conducted route recon with our own drones, compromised C2 networks, employed CEMA assets, executed supply chain interdictions, pre-postured counter fire assets, etc, etc, prior to initiating movement. Heck since we've now added the Army, the density of sensors and effectors also increases.
5. Off-road capabilities are as good or better than anything that would be used to move or resupply our hypothetical Marines. ACK the limited numbers, but that's priced in. Tactical Air Defense wins by preserving sufficient combat power to achieve offensive objectives, not by playing catch all day.
>>fpv role
Yes, I mentioned the utility for proxy forces to harass elements in the rear especially in host nations where kinetic weapon system employment may face additional restrictions. I personally think a ground invasion is unlikely, but the goals and execution of such would determine efficacy of sUAS.
Bottom line:
-FPVs are a challenge, but many smart people have been developing technical and doctrinal solutions. Proliferation and relative capabilities of UAS vs C-UAS is going to be too uncertain and too classified for us internet bloviators to come to definitive conclusions.
-Think networks and the convergence of cross-domain capabilities rather than individual platforms.
-We would respond to the UAS problem set differently and operate under different constraints/restraints than UKR.
You're right. The Ukrainians are using carbines to shoot down FPV drones. Pretty intense!
https://youtu.be/hE4ToouvKF4?t=447
> FWIW, my preferred small arms solution would be to give everyone a magazine of the pellet 5.56 rounds they've been testing and provide a couple Smartshooter type sights for designated air guards.
After further checking, this seems to be what Ukraine is issuing to its front-line troops. Looks like the facts may have gotten garbled as they flowed through the media's information-degradation chain, and that's how the shotgun story got started. My bad for not digging deeper. But there's only so much time in my doom-scrolling day. :-)
> 1-Specific electronic attack capabilities are likely classified. I'd merely consider doctrinal guidance for length of FH radio transmissions to avoid being located versus duration of an FPV's flight and also the added costs and supply chain woes of increasing your hypothetical drone's complexity and survivability.
Yes. And Ukraine seems to be implementing noise injection/blinding (to saturate radar receivers) and/or the ability to manipulate their RF signals to confuse the classifying software of RU's radar defenses. Putting these features into lower-cost APVs probably isn't practical.
> FPVs are a challenge, but many smart people have been developing technical and doctrinal solutions.
I sure hope so! Despite Trump's recent dismissal of Ukrainian technical assistance and technology, PBS in a recent News Hour said, "After coming under sustained attack from Iranian Shaheds, the American military is now working with Ukrainian advisers in the Middle East, after having initially refused a Ukrainian proposal to partner on interceptor drones last year."
What's the supply chain like for Ukraine's drone manufacturing? Is Europe producing most of the plastics and batteries needed?
That's a damn good question! And the answer is scary for Ukraine. Until recently, something like 95% of its drone components were sourced from China: motors, electronics, batteries, etc. Luckily, China would prefer to see Russia weakened and bogged down in an endless war. However, Ukraine is now building a domestic, "decentralized production ecosystem" to prevent problems if China decides to change its mind. But they still need chips and batteries from China. It's also worth mentioning that the US ultimately sources a lot of our weapons system materials from China, too — but these seem to be largely raw materials like rare earths, etc.
Addendum: I got a PM from someone who didn't want to engage with me on this thread. They accused me of covering up Ukraine's "continuing" war crimes. One of them being the denial of water to Donetsk. I'll put my answer out here, since I'm not comfortable dealing with this person in a private exchange...
IIRC correctly, the pumping stations for the Siverskyi Donets-Donbas Canal were destroyed by Russian attacks on the pumping stations while they were under Ukrainian control. I may be wrong about who bombed what, even though the water source of the canal is now under Ukrainian control why should they rebuild it if it supports the Russian occupation forces? The Russians have had three years to provide alternative water sources, but they haven't. And now the Quisling government there is proposing that they solve the problem by recycling contaminated mine water...
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/04/02/occupied-donetsks-drinking-water-crisis-is-so-bad-that-russia-is-now-proposing-heavy-metal-laced-mine-drainage-as-a-substitute/
And it's interesting that this person only mentioned Donetsk, because in 2023 Russia blew up the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River, behind which was a huge freshwater reservoir that supplied water to Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Crimea. But this act didn't register as a humanitarian infraction with this person.
They also mentioned that Ukraine is giving "lots of tasty Russian gas [to] NATO." AFAIK, no Russian gas has been flowing through Ukraine since the beginning of 2025. As for the other pipelines into Europe, Nord Stream 2 was sabotaged, but ultimately charges were dropped against the Ukrainian national accused of the sabotage. And Russia took Nord Stream 1 out of service (due to "technical issues"). No tasty Russian gas seems to be flowing to NATO at this time.
Responding publicly is the right move, for various reasons. If the person does not want to discuss publicly, that's their wish, but if you spend your time verifying their claims, there is no reason why you shouldn't post the results publicly.
Otherwise, we get the simple tactic of "keep them busy in 1:1 conversations".
Why are drones seen as asymmetric? They are just really dangerous. Ukraine is doing the damage because it is supported by greater industrial capacity.
I presume in the next big war the biggest powers will atrack with millions of drones, more than small powers cam manage.
I wonder how many FPVs S Korea has ready?
I've always found it fascinating that hundreds of thousands of people are dying painful and violent deaths, and nobody really seems to care. It seems people recognize the triviality of individual lives here, but will cry over a few hundred lives being ended by an errant bomb or starvation. Can't they realize that all of those lives are worth nothing to them, not just the soldiers?
It proves that utilitarianism / consequentialism is non-intuitive. If a person is forced into a uniform - conscription - their lives are suddenly worth zero concern.
You seem really convinced that your nihilism is a great insight, but if you properly understood *The Big Lebowski* you'd understand that it's a dead end.
I fully understand that. But what's the alternative? Endlessly hurting and killing each other with no understanding of why they're doing what they're doing... There's no winning here. May as well just avoid it all and take what you can from the world.
OK. I understand your view better now. Diogenes of Sinope would probably agree with you. No judgment intended.
I've always wondered why people like him who are arrogant but harmless are often well-liked by others. Is it because they remind them of children?
I like to think people (at least some people) would care if they had the power to do something. But the leaders of our nation state are playing their empire games, and the wishes of ordinary people are subordinate to the needs of leadership.
But it's proof that they don't have to care, and their lives are no worse as a result. They would be even better off if they stopped caring about the incidents they do happen to care about.
The incidents they do happen to care about tend to be local events like what their school board is up to and what their boss wants done by COB. Given that they can actually do something about these, these seem like the right thing to care about.
I was talking more about incidents that don't have any practical relevance to their lives. You know, wars and famines in other countries, people dying in impoverished conditions, genocides, that sort of thing. And they do seem to care about them a lot, at their own expense.
What are the mathematics of tears?
Any person with capacity for empathy would care, were a story of individual suffering brought to their attention. Bandwidth limitations mean we often do not get to the level of individual suffering on different lands, and inertia often drags these stories away without one's doing anything in response (barring the oft-derided "thoughts and prayers", whether phrased this way or not). We do get dulled to the horrors we witness on a daily basis; case in point, panhandlers with small children on the streets of NYC etc. But for whatever moment, you should feel terrible to see a toddler sitting next to a cardboard sign asking for change.
If the suggestion here (and apologies if I misread) is that one should consciously de-register these individual accounts from the scope of concern (you should not feel bad to see the starving child, they don't matter to you) then the response is that this makes you an inferior human being. If this is rather a suggestion that the natural level of empathy should be lowered (e.g., less pearl clutching over distant problems outside your control at the expense of addressing problems closer to hand) that's distinct and debatable, though one may ask why this should not be framed/paired with a parallel statement that people do more about the things they care about (do we pray for lesser burdens or stronger shoulders?)
These threads are fantastic. Thank you so much for posting them, your efforts are appreciated, and I hope you continue to do so.
I’ll jump in with my thanks too.
I've been appreciating them too.
Hear, hear. Amazing content nicely summarized.
Thanks!
Re drones shutting down infrastructure, I agree that it's concerning but worth noting that Hezbollah hasn't managed to have significant effects with their drones. There's several factors (like air superiority allowing Israel to limit their supplies and better defenses/narrower front), some of which would transfer and some wouldn't (but probably for the best not to get into a war with Canada just in case).
> And I think the NAFO folks are shooting themselves in the propaganda foot by posting them.
I can't imagine this having a noticeable effect. Chances are high that if you consume a lot of drone-chasing-and-killing-Russian-soldier videos, you're already firmly on one side or the other. And pro-Ukrainian policy makers will only take such videos as confirmation that Putin is an evil megalomaniac who happily feeds his people to the meat grinder, and who must be stopped as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
Yeah I'm a pretty heavy user of social media and I almost never see these videos. I don't think you see them unless you look for them.
The information about drones is interesting, and the cost of taking a human life on the battlefield, even at 20% success rates, is frighteningly low.
I alternate between the impression that the stalemate will continue (at least from the perspective of the frontline - casualties remain fairly high on both sides, but seemingly sustainable for at least a few years); and the idea that Russia must collapse under the economic strain. I assume this would take the form of a palace coup resulting in a leader who could negotiate a peace deal rather than decisive victory on the ground.
None of the forecasting sites shows an uptick in the probability of the war ending, so I guess the prediction is that it will go on for 12-24 months more. You seem knowledgeable about this - is it also your impression?
Putin's goal is to hold on to power for as long as he lives, and to live as long as he can.*
Putin has systematically liquidated or imprisoned all the potential political and military challengers to his leadership. Prigozhin had a chance, but he blew it. And now that Putin knows the military won't protect him, he's been crippling the leadership to make sure no one pulls another Prigozhin. The only group he hasn't touched is the FSB's leadership. Alexander Bortnikov, the Director of the FSB is a Putin protégé. Bortnikov is in his mid-seventies and seems loyal to Putin. Also, the FSB is in charge of confiscating the assets of Putin's political opponents. This money is all supposed to go back to the state treasury, but everyone suspects that the FSB leadership is making out like bandits. The only people who could get close enough to Putin to execute a coup are the FSB, and Putin is keeping them fat and happy. Because of his age, I don't see Bortnikov as leading a coup. And he'll prevent his underlings from executing a coup—unless the plotters remove him, too. Things will have to get pretty bad for that to happen.
So, I don't see anyone with the wherewithal to take out Putin—at least right now.
With Ukraine and NATO, Putin's goal is just to wear them down. He thinks that the West is morally weak, and eventually, they'll break. This is the same sort of delusion that Hitler had about the British and Americans. So he'll continue his Special Operation until the deteriorating economy and/or deteriorating logistics cause his armies to collapse or mutiny. If he can keep feeding his war machine, this will go on until he dies a natural death.
But if things continue as they have, the Russian economy will eventually be unable to support his war machine, and at some point, things will collapse on the military front. Whether Putin can survive that collapse is up to his friends in the FSB.
* Putin has reportedly pumped tens of millions of dollars of his personal fortune into his daughter's life-extension research facility in Moscow. And he was overheard talking to Xi about the progress being made with life-extension technologies.
Thank you for the detailed discussion and follow-ups; greatly appreciating these posts and hoping to see them continue (absent cessation of hostilities).
To the point on logistics, this reminds me of a conversation a while back (forgetting whether here or elsewhere) on the state of the Russian rail system and ongoing degradation of capacity (as of 2025) due to [among other things?] constraints in ball bearings and deferred maintenance, with tonnage moved decreasing month on month and year on year since 2022. I do not believe there was a breakpoint suggested or a point at which issues were projected to accelerate, but curious whether anything of the sort has popped in your feed so far this year.
Yes, some opinionators opined that Ukraine's strikes against the Russian rail system would cripple their war effort and their economy. And also the lack of ball bearings for rolling stock repairs would accelerate the failure of their rail system. This hasn't happened. Their rail system has proved to be very resilient. A quick Google shows that the trains are still moving, albeit at a rate about 16% lower (measured in cargo volume) than before the war. Ukraine seems to be redirected their fire power at the oil infrastructure now. But partisan groups are still sabotaging rail switching boxes within Russia proper and the occupied territories. And occasionally, we see drone footage of trains carrying war material being hit by long-range drones.
This is why I call these posts "Fog of War" — because every factoid has a counter factoid and each factoid in turn spawns multiple opinions. But through all the smoke of opinion, propaganda, etc., it definitely looks like Russia hasn't able to achieve air superiority over Ukraine, is losing a vast number of troops, has a suffering economy, and isn't exporting enough oil to finance their special military operation. They've now been fighting Ukraine for longer than they fought the Germans in WWII. And they may have now lost the few gains they made in the last two years. And although Ukraine still requires European assistance, it is no longer dependent on US military assistance, and it's earning the friendship of the Gulf States. I'd say it's in a better position now than it's ever been. And Russia is in a worse position than they've ever been.
These posts are great - I'll echo my appreciation.
I'll add for you one or two smaller stories from Ireland: political opinion is starting to harden against Russia again, in a way that hasn't been noticeable since 2022. We've 'realised' that a major alumina processor is Russian owned and exports all its output to Russia - we haven't acted yet, but it seems will is building. We're monitoring the Russian shadow fleet in our waters, and are concerned that a Russian vessel will cut the undersea cables that carry data across the Atlantic. While the war in Ukraine is not in the news, consensus seems to be building that the time is coming for a fresh round of sanctions, and possibly more overt activity. This seems to be part of a similar gathering of will at EU level - maybe it's an easier question for the leadership to address than the Israel question. (Which is not a question at all for Ireland, Spain, Sweden; but is unquestionable in a different way in Germany and Austria.)
Basic question: Does the EU impose sanctions, or do the member states impose sanctions individually? Or does the EU recommend sanctions, and do member states choose how to enforce them or not enforce them at all? Seems like the latter because Hungary and Serbia don't seem to be playing along with the EU. How is it supposed to work?
"Fog of War" struck me as a good and proper framing for the topic for as long as you used it, and for basically the same reason.
> And now that Putin knows the military won't protect him, he's been crippling the leadership to make sure no one pulls another Prigozhin.
The recent LTE blackout in central Moscow seemed to be limited to the districts around MoD/GenStaff HQs. Could've been a preemptive counter-coup.
I am working on a speculative novel that is going to satirize utopian political ideologies by taking them to their logical extremes - hopefully without rehashing definitive satires from the past. So far, I am thinking of including anarcho-capitalism, woke socialism, techno-communism, and various theocratic utopias. What other utopian systems might be worth exploring?
I did a post-scarcity capitalist utopia fueled by a light magical setting that encouraged lots of production once. People liked it.
I had a silly idea of a fitness dystopia, where snack foods are rationed and the staircases monitor your weight and heartbeat as you climb them. I'm quite sure I'll never actually finish it.
Georgism?
Perhaps: neotribalism/technoprimitivism, Pentti Linkola-style Deep Green, variations on extreme patriarchy vs. matriarchy, neofeudalism...
I've done something similar in a speculative project of mine, now in pause [1], though with a less satirical bent; my shortlist choices were a semi-theocratic republic, a solarpunk ecosocialist state, LessWrong-style rationalist communities, survivalist soldier councils, a hardcore transhumanist state, an anarcho-capitalist patchwork, and a throne-and-altar monarchy. Feel free to recycle if anything is of use.
[1] https://www.deviantart.com/concavenator/art/Ea-part-6-Civilization-768117273
Do Distributism or some trade union-centric ideology.
I would love to read what you come up with for anarcho-syndicalism.
I would be amused if you went after a more moderate utopianism like social democracy or classical liberalism, because extremist centrism is very funny.
That would be very funny if we didn’t see it all around us. Still, it’s a very interesting idea.
Are there any existing works which satirize extremist centrism?
There's Disco Elysium, with stuff like the "Sunday Friend":
> YOU - "What is *ze price stabilité*?"
SUNDAY FRIEND - "It is ze most important thing."
YOU - "That doesn't tell me anything."
SUNDAY FRIEND - "It's the central goal of any sound monetary policy. Maintaining ze price stabilité is essential to maintaining high levels of economic activity, which is essential for maintaining high levels of employment..."
SUNDAY FRIEND - "Which is essential for maintaining *ze social stabilité*..."
KIM KITSURAGI - "Basically it makes sure the price of bread doesn't change."
SUNDAY FRIEND - "*Précisément*! Too much inflation, bread becomes too expensive; too much deflation, it becomes too cheap for bakers to produce..."
SUNDAY FRIEND - "That's why the Institute of Price Stabilité works to keep inflation just below 2%..."
YOU - "Below 2% of what?"
SUNDAY FRIEND - "But not *too* far below, no. Too below is also bad -- below, *but close to* 2%."
YOU - "You're not answering my questions at all."
SUNDAY FRIEND - "The Coalition believes in the importance of informing the public about the benefits of ze price stabilité. Transparency is one of our principles. Would you like an informational pamphlet?"
YOU - "No, I'm good."
SUNDAY FRIEND - "A sound monetary policy is *essential* for addressing *uncertainty*. Stability is the *raison d'être* of the Moralintern. It's the reason why I identify as a moralist."
SUNDAY FRIEND - He pats his pockets. "But, oh! I don't have my leaflets on me today. That's too bad. You can always call our information line. Making information available is part of the Moralintern's commitment to transparency."
JREG's "Political Compass" video series has some of that, but it's very much in the "meme stuff" category
Mostly meme stuff, not taking actual centrist ideas to extremes but joking about middle aged dads who are absolutely obsessed with grilling.
In the same vein, Futurama's neutral planet.
What's the origin of the style of a lot of the AI-written facebook/instagram posts?
You know the ones I'm talking about.
A lot of one-sentence paragraphs.
In some cases, they're posted by pages that are probably slop generators, but often there's clearly a human behind them. Sometimes that human doesn't even seem to have any obvious commercial motive.
They make good points, and they're clearly effective. I didn't even mind them until I started seeing the same obvious template everywhere (just like the ChatGPT style of five-paragraph essay seemed to proliferate a few years ago).
They're clearly designed for an emotional, mimetic appeal, but the ones I've seen aren't usually even touching on any sort of hot-button political issues. They could be about anything.
And at some point toward the end, they always follow the rule of three:
Make a point.
Make another point.
Make a third point. (And notice the line breaks, but not the extra line in between each sentence.)
Then conclude with a triumphant mic drop.
But why does the LLM (I don't know which one it would be) generate this? What sort of human writing is it based on? Or are the underlying models tweaking themselves and trying to generate the most memetically-effective content?
(Also, just to be completely clear, I didn't use any AI in writing this post.)
My view is that this style is basically LinkedIn "thought leader" house style for the last decade, pre LLM.
Yep my thoughts exactly. You can 100% tell these people have that very particular LinkedIn-style brainrot. And it was around pre-AI; the AI-generated ads are just imitating that style.
CEO books are written the same way, partly because of the brain rot and partly because all those line breaks help stretch a thin idea out to 196 pages.
LinkedIn, with a side of MBA-authored "books for CEOs". I follow a substack author who writes in that exact style, and has been doing so for nearly ten years.
Isn't Substack only about five years old?
He had a blog before moving to Substack
It might just be RLHF. The kenyans who did this work for chatGPT were basically asked to upvote a response if it seemed helpful and positive, and downvote a response if not. So you take a model which is mostly trained on low effort internet articles and tech support forum posts and then maximise the positivity (according to kenyan middle class workers) and that's basically what you get: a strange mixture of pretentious, informative, overly punchy, compressed, linkedin coworker cadence.
Ok, i have to ask, what does lower case kenyan mean?
Oh, i meant Kenyans. Like people from Kenya.
The urban dictionary came up empty. I was guessing, maybe autocorrected Keynesians?
I know the style, it is instantly recognizable. I also find it odd that all the posts I see on facebook and instagram must be using the same model and a similar prompt.
I am looking for early users for a platform designed to reduce groupthink and reward independent thinking / thoughtful discussions. Periodic evaluation against community-noted posts across the spectrum enables this. See sample - mentwire.com/sample
If you have suggestions to scale this, I would love to hear. Eventually, could be gated across disciplines/topics similar to Paul Graham's intellectual captcha (https://x.com/paulg/status/1235949761359904768) and Balaji's proof-of-x concepts (https://x.com/balajis/status/1333362744536383488).
> In the model given, you not studying hard made it impossible to pass the test!
No, it didn't.
"If you're the Beatles, your new album will sell a million copies."
You could be the Rolling Stones and still sell a million albums. Or Led Zeppelin. Or the Who, Cream, the Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix...
You're not the Beatles. Ergo, you've passed up one particular avenue for selling a million albums. But that's it, period, full-stop, end-of. All we know is that you're included in the set of "musical acts that are not the Beatles" and included in the set of "musical acts that did not sell a million albums". Placement in the former set does not necessitate placement in the latter set, so we cannot say what qualifies you for placement in the latter set. All we know is that you haven't been disqualified from that latter set by virtue of being the Beatles.
Simply put, you're treating an "if" as an "if-and-only-if", which is elementary fallacious reasoning.
Re-reading my comment, I did misphrase my objection in a sleepy haze this morning. i think that, causally, had you studied hard enough you would have passed. It may also be true that there were other ways to pass, but it would be fair to describe this as failing because of not studying.
If a person wants to become rich, in pursuit of which goal they study hard at an elite university, make lots of valuable connections, identify a promising niche, start their own business, put in the hours, and the business failed in a manner clearly linked to one of the top ten reasons for new businesses to fail, would it be fair to describe them as "failing because they didn't win the lottery"?
Success and failure are assessed against the plan someone actually intends to carry out, not some completely different plan that they could have used.
I misread this initially, yeah that's a good point.
Yes, but the goal isn't "make a new business succeed", the goal is "become rich". If the goal is becoming rich, then if you win the lottery you succeed. By the logic you apply to exams, if the goal is to become rich, then "you failed because you didn't win the lottery" is a perfectly valid response to anyone's failure to become rich no matter what their actual plan for getting rich was. You didn't know that their plan for passing the exam was to study hard and understand the material, when you insisted that you knew why they failed.
I think you are considering this in light of "study hard" being what you believe is the One Obviously Right Way that everyone should use to try to pass exams whereas you "win the lottery" as the Most Obviously Stupid Way that nobody should use to try to become rich. But the underlying logic doesn't care about that sort of assessment; it's a logic puzzle not a morality puzzle or a strategy puzzle.
Not studying is sufficient. That it is not necessary does not undermine this.
That's the only one I got "wrong", too, but it's not the same as the pilot one.
The pilot one is straightforward logic: If A, then B. A, therefore B. If someone is a pilot, they passed a medical exam. Jake is a pilot, therefore he passed a medical exam.
The test-failing one is a weird sort of formalism, since the statement is true with natural human shading. "If you study, you pass." This does not mean, of course, that you must study to pass. But "You didn't study, that's why you didn't pass" is... correct? There might be other factors which caused you to fail, but (assuming the premise is true), you would have passed but for your non-studying. Therefore, I think it is true to say that you didn't study hard, and therefore failed. If you had studied hard, you wouldn't have failed.
> you would have passed but for your non-studying
This bit is not part of the question. Formal logic does not work the way ordinary English does. “If A then B” is NEVER enough on its own to permit you to conclude “if not A then not B”, whatever A and B might be. This is not pub conversation; it is mathematics. It is a mistake to open the A and B boxes and use your knowledge about the concepts you find inside them. This is exactly the mistake the question is fishing for. When you conclude “if not A then not B”, it’s based on things you are smuggling in from outside the question, like your intuitions about how studying or English works.
Their reasoning for marking it wrong is incorrect. The problem in “You didn't study hard, that's why you failed” is with the “that’s why” - that relationship cannot be drawn from the premise. It’s not that you could have failed for other reasons, it’s -as you point out - that you could have passed for other reasons; so failure to study is, on its own, not enough to explain the failure to pass. Had the premise been “you will pass if /and only if/ you study”, the deduction would be correct.
Half the statements were "pub conversation", though: real tweets and so on. I agree that it's wrong as a formal logic puzzle, but not all of the statements were formal logic puzzles and there was no flag to tell which was which.
I took the entire quiz as yet another “let’s use formal logic methods to solve pub conversations” attempt, but perhaps I’m misinterpreting I guess.
That's fair. Entirely possible that I'm just wrong.
I think the problem is how it is stated. It's like the "Is Linda both a bank teller and a feminist?" problem where how it is phrased makes all the difference.
"If you study hard enough you will pass the test. You didn't study hard, that is why you failed" is how it's put and that's misleading. It's nudging people towards the answer being "didn't study" which is the trap.
If it were "if you study hard enough you will pass the test. You failed the test. Therefore you did not study hard enough" I think we'd see where the trap lay. Failing may be down to not studying hard enough, but it could also be "material on the test was not the same as you studied", "you were sick and so could not complete the test", "the questions were too difficult for your level" or other reasons.
I got 7/7 correct but that's not down to me being smart or perceptive, it's that the pattern after a couple of questions was clearly "pick the down vote". So I did that for all of them and golly gee I'm a genius! Throw in a few "no, this answer is correct after all" to make it better test.
> Throw in a few
…I mean, they did? The pilot one. If you got 7/7 you must have upvoted it despite yourself :)
There may be multiple ways to pass the exam e.g. "study hard enough, or take the right combination of nootropics beforehand, or bribe the teacher, or copy another student's answers", in which case "if you study hard enough..." is true but it is possible that the reason the guy didn't pass is that he chose a different strategy but didn't offer the teacher a big enough bribe.
Or you studied really hard for the English test, but this is the Maths test and you are no good at Maths 😁
I are very good at Maths, but building is very confusing and after cramming all night on English, I no remember where classroom is.
My Kashmiri Sikh QA counterpart got chaffed a bit for using the British conventional usage for a Mathematics class on a video conference. I had to explain to the snickerers in San Diego that American English is not the standard *everywhere* in the world.
Excuse me while i read the London Times Sport page.
My side project trustassembly.org could use some more testers if anyone here is interested.
There have been very significant changes and upgrades from the last time I made this request.
The gist is that if you see anything, anywhere in a web browser that needs to be commented upon you should be able to make adjustments and corrections to it for some other group of people to review and approve.
Think: Community Notes but for the entire internet.
There's way more to it than that at scale but that's the one sentence pitch. I'm working on establishing this as a non profit but I have put 100% of my time and energy into getting this beta version to minimal acceptance first.
I think this is a cool idea. Some things to think about.
-these “Juries” have a high likelihood of being very biased. Say 80% of your user base is from party “B”, then wouldn’t the claims be skewed towards party B? Wouldn’t whoever chooses the jury or the Algorithm to select them be in control in a sense of that narrative?
-perhaps start with a more narrow set of goals. Perhaps just news websites? The entire web is much to ambitious. Some random blog will likely only get over two of your users ever to see it, and is it worth selecting a jury for a random blog which may impact 20 people? I would start in the top 50 or 100 most visited websites, or just news websites, or just social media, or just YouTube videos. If that catches on, expand. For instance, if you just did YouTube videos or just the major news websites , helping get some fact checking into the group think may be a huge step in the right direction.
-perhaps work with Snopes to make a “snopes” plugin?
On juries: this is a balance of powers thing. You are part of a group advancing an agenda. You keep each other in check in what that agenda is. Then you also review the submissions of their groups to find a consensus. There is a brutal cold start problem here, I don’t deny that.
I’ll be automating content creation across those top hundred websites. Remains to be seen how token heavy it will be. But I am making a Claude skill that users can download that will take instructions and values from you and spread across the web. The game theory isn’t right on snopes. At some point money will be have to be involved to the question is “if you’re so sure the Illuminatus exists then why can’t you go here and prove it to these random people?”
Thanks for this thoughtful reply. It would be interesting to see if Claude could give its own opinion about how biased a view is or how accurate it is, but only revealed after you give your jury vote.
This is very much a needed tool right now. Funnily enough, I started to vibe code almost this same idea earlier this week, not knowing that it was already being done. I ultimately went a different direction with article sentiment analysis and real time prediction market overlays, but I think this is great.
I'd be down to join the beta. Is it supported on firefox or just chromium?
It should work on all browsers in end state except (if I can convince android it is an ada technology) android devices. But chrome Firefox and edge it should already work. Not safari yer unless you can do your own x code but I have a thing coming for that.
I’m very interested in collaborating with folks. I don’t really have much time to be doing this and am really doing it from a sense of moral duty. If I can make it big enough that substack of light haven wants to take it then I feel I will have done my part.
If we have a team then even better.
I am looking for a place to live in the DC area this summer, between mid-May and mid-August. Ideally either in / near the Foggy Bottom / Woodley Park area, or somewhere along the red metro line. If you're living around there and have a room to sublet (I'm generally quiet & clean!), or know anyone who is, or have any leads, please let me know! (Budget is ~$800-1100/mo.)
The dangers of generating writing with LLMs, with intent to publish, are talked to death, but I kind of suspect I damaged myself by getting too much of what I thought was grammar and style feedback from LLMs, even though I wrote entirely myself and just responded to claude's "this is good" vs "this is bad" signals. The problem is that humans know an incredible amount, but every human has different spikes in their knowledge so for references to be "Gettable" they have to be way more obvious and commonly known than I intuit (i.e. https://xkcd.com/2501/) even with a hypereducated target audience. What all humans love is new concepts and will pick them up extremely quickly. LLMs are kind of the opposite: they pick up every hint of subtext I put in, encouraging stuffing in more subtext, the more obscure the better, but don't learn new concepts at all, discouraging me from exploring what would actually be valuable.
E.g. https://www.hgreer.com/StaticSiteGenerator/ and https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8PAZ9Ac5wHnEsKxmA/the-ones-who-feed-their-children-1
are bad, actually. And the extent to which those pieces make LLMs rave about how clever they are messes me up. Actually posting them and getting absolute crickets in response is probably saving me from LLM psychosis- especially since some of my pre-getting-claude writing, and comments that I write now off the cuff, are sometimes actually pretty well recieved.
Something that would help me in your place: Read a bunch of stuff by some great prose stylists. I find that after a period of reading a lot of things by one great stylist my prose and even my thoughts sound more like theirs. Read several and the effect is more varied and diffuse, but still good.
In the last hidden thread, javiero introduced us to a post by J. Sanilac (https://www.jsanilac.com/). They found the site through a post by another author who distilled its content, i.e., cut out all of the reasoning and supporting original research and only selected a few conclusions from the original. The original contained more than 100,000 words (a novel, basically), while the distillation contained less than 3000. The distiller's post went viral on social media and had more than 1 million views on Twitter, while the original author received heaps of abuse and was shunned. I copied excerpts about their experience at the end of this comment.
To be clear, I don't think the distiller did anything wrong at all. They did credit the original author. Distillation is also generally very valuable and useful work. Barely anyone has time to read 100k words. I'm merely sad that the original research (without which the distillation could obviously not exist) brought so little actual reward for its author.
All that said, I didn't really like the original post. I felt the justification and evidence provided were not enough to support the conclusions. The author's personal preferences likely biased them. What's more, it was about a pretty uninteresting topic that is discussed enough on the web already (dating).
Therefore, I would like to recommend another post of theirs that I consider much better: https://www.jsanilac.com/ailom/
"I call AI-induced loss of meaning “AILOM.” Most of us have experienced some degree of ailom by now. But because we've lacked a clear explanation for what we were experiencing, we've just felt a vague sense of unease, and brushed it aside without being able to put our finger on its cause. That's the gap I propose to fill here. In this essay I'll describe ailom, and then consider what a world increasingly afflicted by ailom means for ourselves as individuals, and for our society as a whole."
The post has a few short stories that reminded me of Tomás Bjartur and Greg Egan stories, a thought experiment which I don't want to spoil and a theory of meaning that provides a possible answer to the question posed by Scott's "Lines Composed In A Fake Sequoia Forest" post.
--------
Excerpts about their experience:
"I spent five years writing, researching, and promoting Dispelling Beauty Lies. In retrospect this seems stupid, and also insane. How did such a thing happen?
To tell the tale I have to take a few steps back.
[...]
The timing of my retreat from society had left me completely unequipped to understand and navigate this brave new world. And by consequence I had produced artworks that couldn't possibly succeed in it even if my execution were flawless.
I realized that if I wanted to create artworks that could find an audience I needed to start over and somehow position myself within this new world. Yet that turned out to be easier said than done. My manner of thinking was all wrong. The ideas I was interested in were not the ideas others were interested in. Digital society now revolved around one-liners restricted almost solely to politics and sex. For the younger generation, even its brightest members, this was the water they had grown up swimming in; to me it was impossible to take more than a few strokes in it without gagging. My discomfort was especially problematic when it came to correcting the second error I'd made. I'd realized that all artworks had to be tied to a marketing scheme, and more specifically to a marketing scheme that would make waves in that foul water, without which they would never be heard by a meaningful number of people.
[...]
With these reflections in mind I could now state my task clearly. To reach the public I needed to create artworks that were tied in to the narrow range of topics people cared about today, did not require a high attention span from the get-go, and could be effectively marketed in the sewer-like social-media environment. As I've just mentioned, the only topics that have sufficient resonance in the current environment are politics and sex—topics that had never featured in the slightest degree in any of my previous creations, but which had now become obligatory if I were to find an audience. To thread this exceptionally narrow needle, I would obviously have to change my artistic direction entirely.
[...]
I'd begun to work on feminine beauty almost accidentally, heedless of my increasingly untouchable status; but now I was halfway done and already well covered in muck. I considered quitting many times. Yet the combination of stubbornness, a compulsion to do exceptional work, and indifference to incentives kept drawing me back to the feeling that I ought to persevere and finish a job I'd've been better off having never started in the first place, and which, if I'd known then what I knew now, I certainly would not have started. It was, moreover, simply difficult for me to believe the public could go on ignoring the novel and valuable research I'd done in a universally relevant domain forever. (Narrator: it could.)
Thus, I persisted in a dogged and obsessive way for several years more until I'd wrung every drop from my analysis of feminine beauty, despite what was now turning out to be unrelenting obscurity that completely foiled my initial purpose and made it wholly useless to me on a personal or artistic level. Besides which, new readers for my novel decreased rather than increased over time, as the social-media addicted public became more and more illiterate and indeed incapable of paying attention to long sentences even when they were spiked with continual titillation.
For my own part, I gradually became accustomed to a daily diet of insults that impugned me simply for finding ways to prove truths about beauty that should have already been obvious to anyone with objectivity and genuine (not fake) decency. Bizarre rumors about my very uninteresting and undistinguished identity that had nothing to do with reality sprang up, people willfully confused me with my characters despite the latter being explicitly labeled as "evil," and every variety of logical fallacy was called upon to defame me and dismiss my writing. I was slandered as a grifter for a project that brought no profits, with donations from my kindest supporters having only covered server fees. It was all so, so tiresome. And, eventually, it was done.
While my concluding effort to change public opinion is still forthcoming in the form of a podcast that will review and summarize the fruits of my labors, my wish for the future is to forget and move on from a project that cost years of my life and brought me more punishment than benefit. It's long past time for me to descend from the world's silliest cross and make music again. And this time around I've accepted the ruling of fate and given up on any marketing scheme; and my opinion of the public mind having settled at a very low point with an expectation of further declines, I plan to do my best to enjoy a new period of monastic deprivation by simply writing what I think it best to write for an audience that can be easily enumerated on a centipede's toes.
And that, dear readers, is the true story of how Dispelling Beauty Lies came to be. It's yours now; please enjoy."
"cut out all of the reasoning and supporting original research and only selected a few conclusions from the original."
As I said, when I got to the end, I remembered reading it the first time round and my royal Irish backside it was anything to do with "original research", it was one guy's harem fantasy wank material.
Hmm, I've read all of their writing at this point except the "Memoirs of an evil vizier", and they really don't seem the type to lie about this (they have apparent flaws, just not of that type). Wayback Machine also has a 2021 version, which was similar to the current Dispelling Beauty Lies, but much shorter. Are you sure you're not confusing them with someone else? TheMotte had a lot of weird people.
Alternatively, maybe you are thinking of another work of his, the "Memoirs of an Evil Vizier" fiction. That does feature an evil vizier. I don't know if it features a harem, because I've only read the first chapter and then I dropped it.
By the way, have you read the one I linked about AI-induced loss of meaning? I think you'd like that one more!
I think the Memoirs must indeed be the one I read, because that seems to fit with what is quoted at the end of the Substack article.
Didn't like the guy's views then, like them no better now he pretends "so I totes did research that just so coincidentally validates all my kinks". Men like big tits on young waifs? Gosh, who knew?
Seeing as how some of the "advice" in that Dispelling Beauty Lies article is "make yourself into the plastic sex doll fantasy and you can steal men from other women", I don't think that's very good advice. Stealing men gets you a reputation, and not a good one. And you won't be able to "make of relationships what you want" because your appeal is rooted in youth and artificial beauty standard, and once you age out of the premium range you lose that male attention. Plus, men like novelty, hence the whole harem notion. Turn yourself into bed furniture for a good time but then they move on to the whole "some women you marry, some women you just have fun with" for the permanent relationship, and you've lost on all axes.
Yeah I had a look at the first couple of sections and 100k words is a lot for what I suspect will end up being a post-hoc rationalisation about why his sexual preferences are objectively correct. I don't want to prematurely slander the guy, parts of it look interesting but I think he's conflating a specific set of fertility markers for 'beauty' as a concept which is either unfair on sunsets, mountaintops and theorems, because it denies them beauty, or deeply unfair on women by carving out 'beauty' as it applies to them as something entirely less mysterious or meaningful than as a concept applied to anything else.
I'd probably get along better with the article if he did a search and replace 'beauty'->'innate sex appeal' or something (to distinguish it from the innumerable things that people *learn* to find sexy through context and exposure)
EDIT: I also realise I'm reacting to the article you *didn't* recommend. The one you did does indeed look more interesting.
I got as far in your comment as this...
> I call AI-induced loss of meaning “AILOM.” Most of us have experienced some degree of ailom by now. But because we've lacked a clear explanation for what we were experiencing
I gave up reading further because you didn't bother to summarize the points made in the Sanilac article, and I could no longer make heads or tails of your arguments. But your AILOM quote hit the nail on my confused head as a description of what I was experiencing! Sorry, if this sounds harsh, but your comment could use a good lede which should answer as many of the 5 W's and H—Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How—in the first paragraph, if possible.
I just published some really exciting data from my startup, NeutraOat. NeutraOat is a modified oat fiber supplement I’ve been developing that traps PFAS, plasticizers, and other environmental toxins through hydrophobic interactions. Unlike other binders, it doesn’t trap good stuff, like vitamins, supplements, or medications, because we’ve carefully tuned the pore sizes to exclude big molecules.
Anyways, our recent data in a simulated digestive tract shows that we achieve better capture and better selectivity than activated charcoal. We captured 75% of BPA, 99% of DEHP (the most common plasticizer), and 30% of PFOA. That last part doesn't sound as impressive until you realize that 30% compounds because of the "forever" part of "forever chemical". We also spared vitamin D, clarithromycin, and CBD.
We are scaling up now and preparing to launch in hopefully 9 months or so, with our first clinical trial in BPA and plasticizers coming in maybe 4 or 5 months. More details in post, along with link to sign up to pre-order: https://trevorklee.substack.com/cp/192873230 .
If you have questions, feel free to reply below, or email me at trevor [at] neutraoat.com .
How’d you get the results? Do you do the lab work in-house? Can you share more detailed statistics on the data? Sample size, standard deviation? Apologies if I missed them in the post. I just skimmed it
We ran FASSIF studies at commercial labs. We didn't do the lab work in-house. 3 replicates for each condition.
We're not releasing detailed stats yet, but we will before launch.
There is an argumentation tactics that I noticed; I wonder if it already has a name...
Imagine a situation, where people love to argue whether something is X or Y. In reality, it is a complex interaction of X and Y, as everyone who has ever studied the subject knows. But the idea of complex interaction is... too complex for most people, so almost everyone loves to argue that it "is X" or that it "is Y".
As usual, things get politically coded; insisting that the thing "is X" makes you an obvious member of one political tribe; insisting that it "is Y" makes you an obvious member of another. (Saying that the thing is a complex interaction of X and Y makes you an obvious nerd, and a traitor to any tribe you would try to belong to.)
The argumentation tactics is the following: First you establish your credentials as an expert on the thing. You do it e.g. by studying the thing at university, and publishing papers about it; or whatever is the standard way.
Second, whenever someone says that the thing is X, you either stay quiet, or you provide some scientific evidence that indeed X plays an important role in the thing. Whenever someone says that the thing is Y, you make it known that the person clearly does not understand the complexity of the situation, because only ignorants say that the thing "is Y"; in reality, any argument in favor of Y, if we examine it closely, turns out to be a complex interplay of X and Y, therefore it is wrong to call it Y. Note that in both cases you only say true things, and support them by scientific evidence.
The point is that you are clearly supporting the X side and opposing the Y side, and make it seem like the science is on your (and their) side, while clearly knowing better than that; but you never say anything false, so it is hard to argue what is so wrong about the thing you are doing.
(This is somewhat related to the asymmetric burden of proof tactics, only you are not asking anyone else to provide a proof; you are happy to provide lots of evidence yourself. It has a flavor of an argument by authority; you clearly establish yourself as an authority and dismiss your opponents as ignorants; but in this case your authority is clearly deserved, and your arguments are solid, it's just that you are using them asymmetrically.)
Probably just Lying By Omission. They know more complete information would lead to a different conclusion, so they leave that info out to get the conclusion they want.
This comment is about my favorite culture war topic, and I am offended!
"Arguments as Soldiers"?
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/arguments-as-soldiers
Sounds like a variation on Motte and Bailey fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
"The thing is X" is the Motte -- an easy to defend limited claim. "The thing is *not* Y" is the Bailey -- a more extensive and much more difficult to defend claim. You are pretending that the two claims are the same, and focus on the Motte.
Do you have a concrete example of a subject (e.g. NFL QB success)? I'm not asking for the names of actual participants (e.g. Drew Brees).
Feels like this is some combination of 'False dichotomy', 'isolated demand for rigor', and 'life under two-party politics, for the love of God introduce voting reform already'.
May also be related to 'lies, damned lies, and statistics'... in which you lie without saying anything untrue by selectively choosing which true things to say and which to ignore.
By analogy with "anti-intellectualism," which correctly rejects this entire class of argument as a particularly insidious species of deceit, I'd say this should be called "intellectualism."
> First you establish your credentials as an expert on the thing. You do it e.g. by studying the thing at university, and publishing papers about it; or whatever is the standard way.
>
>The point is that you are clearly supporting the X side and opposing the Y side, and make it seem like the science is on your (and their) side, while clearly knowing better than that;
I didn't get that part. _Am_ I the expert on X and _is_ the science on my side, or do I only make it seem that way?
Other than that, it sounds like spin-doctoring or, more neutrally, framing. You know about both X and Y, and you emphasize X or Y as you see fit to get your point across.
The bit about the ad-hominems seems a bit weird though. Are there really that many people who devote their life to X just so they can call the Y people idiots undeservedly? Maybe a good example would help.
>Maybe a good example would help.
Tacos are legally defined both as sandwiches and not sandwiches, depending on where you live. https://www.theindianalawyer.com/articles/patrick-s-mccarney-a-taco-is-a-sandwich-the-legal-meaning-of-food-matters
In my scenario, you *are* an expert on the entire "X and/or Y" thing.
> Maybe a good example would help.
The moment I provide an example, the discussion will switch to whether the thing is actually X or actually Y. And most likely, someone will reply with a link to an article that uses exactly the tactic I have described.
Okay I am the expert, but is the science on my side or am I misrepresenting it and therefore abusing my credentials?
Selective reporting is a special way of misrepresenting by true facts.
True facts:
* the thing is related to X
* the thing is related to Y
* the thing is not X alone, there is always much Y involved
* the thing is not Y alone, there is always much X involved
Your public statements when people say "it is X":
* the thing is related to X
Your public statements when people say "it is Y":
* the thing is not Y alone, there is always much X involved
What most people will remember:
* the expert confirmed that it is X
* the expert debunked the idea that it is Y
The expert is perfectly aware that most people will make this conclusion and does nothing to prevent that.
Oh, if that's what you're pointing to... I think the closest canonical name would be "Privileging the Hypothesis". Although that's not really a sufficient description either, imo.
So again, I'm going to invoke Dynamical Systems Theory here. If we think of concepts as putting boundaries around attractor-basins (in the psychic substrate), the academic is deliberately nudging the public from a shallow metastable ridge into a particular basin. He *knows* that the public will inevitably flatten the nuance of a complex phenomenon, such that it will fall into one basin or another. So he figures he might as well use his authority to tip the scales.
A central example is the gender-fluidity debate. The left says "theoretically, gender can be LITERALLY ANYTHING". The right intuits that in practice, the gender attractors (in the physical substrate) are anchored in Bateman's Principle. Both sides are true, in a certain sense. But Matt Walsh and co aren't articulate enough to spell this out. And most normies aren't articulate enough to spell this out either. And the left... doesn't really want to lend credence to the chuds. So everyone just pretends that conceptual categories have objective and rigid boundaries, and that the left's claims and the right's claims are mutually exclusive.
I can think of a number of neologisms we could coin to describe this. "tip the scales", "bifurcation" (not new), "selective emphasis", "flattening", etc.
More interestingly though, I've been trying to extend Media Ecology Theory into something I've been calling "Legend Theory". An important mechanism is what Max Weber calls "legitimization". E.g. when a pastor pronounces a couple "husband and wife", their married status has changed from "false/unreal" to "true/real" through a process of legitimization. Likewise, the academic in your example can be described as "legitimatizing" a certain narrative. He's deliberately shaping people's perceptions of reality. And not only that, but he's also *laundering* his preferred narrative through the legitimacy of his credentials. This is precisely what Scott and Moldbug point to, when they describe our academic/political/journalistic institutions as a priest caste.
----
Maybe this gives you some ideas to pick from.
I mean, communication is hard. Especially across a gulf of expertise in the subject matter, like between expert and general public; there are unspoken assumptions on both sides that can create misunderstandings. Making the leap from "the expert did not do everything in their power to correct/prevent public misunderstanding" to "malicious intent" is not obvious to me.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that there was malicious intent in such a case, then yes, I'd refer you to my original reply about "spin doctoring" or "framing". Scientists are not truth-dispensing machines; they are humans with biases and other motivations that I agree are important to know when evaluating their claims.
If an expert shows a pattern of not correcting misunderstanding in one, politically convenient, direction, but frequently corrects misunderstanding in the other, politically inconvenient, direction, this goes beyond just "not doing everything in his power to correct/prevent public misunderstanding".
Just popping on to say that the suggestion that sharing the address of a 10-figure company might be “doxxing” is very funny. New pearl-clutching unlocked!
High-temperature, low-effort comment, please avoid in future.
He was defending you! Zeal is an effect of love Scott you won't stop it. But it's your blog.
Very fair, and sorry :)
Yikes. I also thought it was a joke.
agreed
I did too.
In Ben's defense, I though his comment was also supposed to be funny rather than inflammatory. I though the idea that publishing Open AI's street address was doxxing to be funny, too. Much like I'd find the idea of doxxing Apple by publishing their HQ address to be funny.
To be fair, there actually was a shooting at the Youtube office. It's not a trivial concern.
Unless OpenAI tries to hide their street address, it seems like a pretty trivial concern, and at least most companies do not make it so hard to find where they are, since they need employees, contractors, deliveries, etc. to show up there.
It took me less than 5 minutes to find their address in their Terms of Use on their website. It's really not hidden.
I also thought it was a joke.
I've been reading a bit about Transcendentalism, and have been struck by how writers struggle to define its relationship with 19thC rationalism. There's clearly a relationship, but several writers describe Transcendentalism as opposing rationalism, while others view it as complementing rationalism as a sort of offshoot philosophy/movement.
What do the big brains here think?
I feel like it's similar to the Cozy Girl aesthetic: a retreat from the cold, hard, logic of spreadsheets; a retreat from Protestant Hustle Culture; a retreat from the Orwellian surveillance of organized religion; a retreat from industrialization/urbanization. Instead, just run away to a cabin in the woods and snuggle up in a blanky and read Eat Pray Love. An individualistic and contemplative frame was retained from the Enlightenment.
"What do the big brains here think?"
My small brain views Transcendentalism as a reaction against the Enlightenment.
And my view on the Enlightenment is that is lasted about 100 years (American's can use Benjamin Franklin's life as a not-bad proxy for most of the years of the Enlightenment ... ). I also believe that the French Revolution is a child of the Enlightenment (as was Marxism). The French Revolution can be viewed as illustrating the limits of the ideas behind the Enlightenment so a reaction against the Enlightenment wouldn't be all that surprising.
I don't know how mainstream my take on this is.
Small brain thoughts: Transcendentalism was about 'plain living and high thinking' and it was the 'spiritual but not religious' of its day. Whatever connections with Rationalism probably were along the lines of rejecting conventional religion/religiosity.
There seem to be two separate definitions of Transcendentalism, and I think the second (Kantian Transcendentalism) is more connected with Rationalism, while the first (the 'Boston Brahmin' type) was less connected/in reaction to it:
"1. an idealistic philosophical and social movement which developed in New England around 1836 in reaction to rationalism. Influenced by romanticism, Platonism, and Kantian philosophy, it taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, and its members held progressive views on feminism and communal living. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were central figures.
2. a system developed by Immanuel Kant, based on the idea that, in order to understand the nature of reality, one must first examine and analyse the reasoning process which governs the nature of experience."
First thought: what?
Second thought: let's read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism
Third thought: I still don't see any connection.
From the link: "Transcendentalism was not a rejection of Unitarianism; rather, it developed as an organic consequence of the Unitarian emphasis on free conscience and the value of intellectual reason. The transcendentalists were not content with the sobriety, mildness, and calm rationalism of Unitarianism. Instead, they wanted a more intense spiritual experience. Thus, transcendentalism was not born as a counter-movement to Unitarianism, but as a parallel movement to the very ideas introduced by the Unitarians."
Perhaps the link is more obvious to people with an interest in early American history. The short version is that unlike France's late 18thC sudden outburst of anti-clericalism and worship of reason, America (specifically New England) had a more peaceful and gradual rationalizing process, passing through Puritanism to Unitarianism to secular humanism. Many of the leading transcendalists were children of Unitarian ministers, for example.
I never miss an opportunity to share one of my favorite SSC posts btw: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/12/puritan-spotting/
LOOKING FOR PAID HOURLY WORK
I’m looking for paid hourly contract work right now, especially in agentic engineering. I can start immediately, commit around 20 hours per week now, and if the fit is good I’d be happy to discuss expanding from there.
This is a funding bridge while I keep building Keisei, my current hardware startup. Keisei is a deep-tech energy company working on space-based solar power and laser power transmission.
By agentic engineering I mean building systems where LLMs use tools, APIs, workflows, and human review to do real work, not just generate plausible text.
I’m strongest at turning messy, ambiguous processes into working AI-assisted systems: tool-using agents, research/data pipelines, human-in-the-loop automations, and fast MVPs/demos.
I work heavily with CLI tools, and I’m comfortable wiring LLM workflows into real constraints: APIs, MCP/Linear, web scraping, Airtable/DBs, PDF/document flows, evaluation loops, and operational guardrails.
Recent work includes:
1/ Scoping and building an AI-assisted estimating demo for electrical contractors, including PDF ingest, AI brief, takeoff/proposal workflow, and rapid user-feedback iteration.
2/ Building climate-tech mapping and research automation for Project Drawdown-style work, including web scraping, Airtable/local website work, company-solution matching, and multi-step automation design.
3/ Building a BJJ training tracker app from scratch for myself and other real users: technique library, training/session logging, sparring/round stats, Vercel deploy, and a launch-day auth fix under deadline pressure.
I’m especially useful in zero-to-one work: founder support, technical PM plus hands-on implementation, productizing vague ideas, and getting something real in front of users quickly.
I also have solid context in energy, climate, infrastructure, and hard-tech, so I’m not limited to generic SaaS problems.
I previously found work through ACT, and the founder I worked with later wrote a public postmortem of the solar project we built together that includes a strong endorsement of my work: https://7goldfish.com/articles/Requiem_for_a_solar_plant.php.
What I need now is paid hourly work I can start immediately: short prototype sprints, agent workflow setup, automation builds, research systems, technical PM, or a small paid trial project. My typical hourly rate is $80-100 depending on scope and complexity.
Based in Belgrade (Serbia), with overlap for both EU and US time zones.
If you need someone to scope, prototype, or ship an agentic workflow fast, email svrmnnk at gmail com
Lucy Hughes-Hallett wrote a terrific book about the man she calls ‘Gorgeous George’. This is George Villiers who became the most favourite of all the favourites of James the I of England. James was the son of Mary Queen of Scots. Yes that Mary Queen of Scots - the one who got her head chopped off by Elizabeth I (though she was sorry the moment she’d done it!). Apparently being the son of an executed traitor looked fine on your cv back then and Elizabeth being without heirs (the virgin queen etc etc) James became King James I of England and VI of Scotland.
And James was famously attracted to beautiful young men. So a group of nobles got a young George Villiers to join a hunting party with James in the hope that if the king fell for him they’d be able to influence royal policy using Villiers as their puppet. The plan worked spectacularly well and in very short order Villiers was right at the centre of the court being showered with titles and positions. It wasn’t all lolling around on sofas looking beautiful though. I had no idea being a favourite was so exhausting - Villiers scarcely had a moment to himself. But he did become fabulously wealthy and got the title Duke of Buckingham. Yes, that Duke of Buckingham, the one who gets involved with the Queen of France and the Three Musketeers. (Lucy used to love that book as a child but now finds it rather unpleasant - just young men wandering around picking fights).
Given how much James loved attractive young men it seems likely he was gay though male intimacy was much greater back then so it isn’t always possible to read across. I asked Lucy about the fact that the king’s love of young men was quite open whereas sodomy was the one crime (more even than treason) that everyone agreed was terrible and for which you should be executed. And confusingly James was very much of that opinion too. He wrote a primer on how to be a good King for the benefit of his son Henry and was very explicit that sodomy was one thing you should have nothing to do with and must never forgive in others. But as Lucy points out it isn’t entirely clear what sodomy is. It isn’t helped by the fact that the crime is the ’n’ word of its day so people can’t even talk about it directly. But the top lawyer of the day says it is res in res and provided you stay away putting your res in another man's res you are pretty much fine. Well, at least if you are king.
Probably the maddest and most entertaining episode in the book is when James’ son Charles (yes, that Charles, the one who got his head cut off by Cromwell and friends, ushering in a brief English republic) decides he is fed up with the Spanish taking ages to agree the terms of his marriage to the Infanta Maria Anna (yes, that one, the daughter of the King of Spain). So his big idea (big but really, really terrible) is for him to travel incognito to Spain to cut through all this bureaucratic nonsense. So he and Buckingham put on false beards (later augmented with enormous wigs) assume false names (Thomas and John Smith - really, I am not making this up) and whizz off to Spain with literally only a couple of attendants. Naturally the Spanish are horrified by this terrible breach of etiquette but delighted to be able to basically take prisoner the heir to the English throne. And of course they never intended for the Infanta to marry Charles - that was just mucking around to see if they could extract any concessions from the English. Stopping stopping people being Catholic, that kind of thing. And the Infanta can’t stand Charles. The poor man isn’t helped by the fact that they don’t share a common language so when they do finally meet it is with interpreters. ‘How are you?’ ‘I am well. How are you?’ is about as flirtatious as it gets. Eventually Charles and Buckingham realise they are getting nowhere and slink back to England only getting away by telling the Spanish all kinds of lies about how they are really, really going to make sure James agrees to all the Spanish demands. They think they will be in disgrace when they get back but actually they are insanely popular as everyone is massively relieved Charles isn’t going to marry a Catholic. He does later - the daughter of the Queen of France. Yes that Queen of France.
I have titled it Buckingham - The most hated man in England because by the end the entire House of Commons is literally reduced to tears (I am not making this up!) as they struggle to express how much they really, really detest Buckingham.
Anyway it’s all in the latest episode of Subject to Change (with Russell Hogg) or even better Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s book The Scapegoat.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/subject-to-change/id1436447503?i=1000758368596
I had not known about that episode in the life of Charles I and it's much more romantic than I would have expected of him. I see now where his son got it from!
Spanish-English alliances were always problematic and the three powers (France, Spain/the Holy Roman Empire and England) were always making and breaking treaties and alliances according as the balance of power shifted.
I do feel sorry for James I as he really had not much chance with his upbringing; Scottish court of the time was even more of a viper's nest than the Tudors had been, his mother has to flee for her life and is separated from him and eventually executed, he's raised strictly Presbyterian (imagine the baleful influence of John Knox looming over your life) and treated miserably, so when he does come to the Scottish throne he's been stuffed full of Bible-bashing fundamentalism as much as possible *plus* trained to be a puppet of the nobles. That he did manage to struggle into some form of independence is amazing; that he had a mania about witches etc. less so.
Then he inherits the English throne due to lack of any feasible alternative (enough possible contenders having been weeded out during the reigns of the various Tudors) and not wanting foreign contenders to make claims or provoke another civil war. He's very much an outsider when he arrives in London and historians tend to treat him and his reign more critically by comparison with the Elizabethan Golden Age (a period stage-managed within an inch of its life and which still dazzles the less wary today).
That he had a taste for male favourites is well-established but how intimate that became - romantic and emotional intimacy only? sexual? what degree of sexual? - is not. I think it's more likely that he was emotionally dependent on Buckingham and only felt free to be vulnerable around him, but that they were full-fledged lovers having sex less so. That would line up with James' seeming hypocrisy around sodomy: it wasn't sex, it was platonic love.
Well one thing I learned was how happy James was with Buckingham’s family. From no women at all the court was overrun with them. Buckingham’s wife, mother and (according to one hostile account) children running around everywhere!
Par for the course with royal favourites, their families jump on the bandwagon for the giving out of goodies, titles, offices, influence, etc. And you have to be at court to protect your interests because of all the other noble families scheming to grab the goodies for themselves.
Villiers also was responsible for one.of England's stranger street names:-
"The King sold it to the Duke of Suffolk and in 1624 the estate came into the possession of George Villiers, The Duke of Buckingham.
It’s the Ducal legacy that we see in all the street names around this part of London.
George Villiers was murdered just 4 years later, and his wife stayed on until she lost it in the English Civil War. Her son regained it after marrying a rich heiresses, but promptly lost all her money and was forced to sell the estate to pay his debts.
It was the sale of the estate that was to lead to the alley and its curious name.
One of the conditions of the sale, to our old friend the property developer Nicholas (If Christ had not died for thee thou hadst been damned) Barbon was that each new street had to include the name of the Duke of Buckingham in some form.
So we had Buckingham Street; Villiers Street; Duke Street and George Street, and as the contract was explicit — we had Of Alley.
The name Of Alley seemed to remain in use until around 1855, when York Place, which already existed next to Of Alley swallowed up its neighbouring alley. However, the name lingers on, as the signs, note that this is York Place (formerly Of Alley). The original York Place is now lost, underneath a modern office block."
Brilliant. I had no idea!
Fun fact about sodomy: the German word "Sodomie" means "bestiality" (sex with animals) and nothing else. In particular it does not refer to sex between men, which I believe(?) is nowadays the most common association with the English word "sodomy".
According to Gemini, both words meant pretty much the same until the late 19th century: an umbrella term for all kinds of forbidden sex, including masturbation, anal and oral sex, and of course also including bestiality and homosexual acts. After that the German one narrowed down extremely to mean only bestiality. But it seems (not 100% sure about the extent, as I am non-native speaker) that the English one also narrowed down and is mainly connected to gay sex, due to the "sodomy laws" which were about this context.
Given that both words narrowed down into two very different niches, might you be overestimating how much "sodomy" was linked to men-with-men interaction? Perhaps he just had masturbation in mind when he wrote about sodomy?
I know one of the Big Three German thrash metal bands is named "Sodom" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_(band)
As mentioned, the legal definitions and how it was understand at the time are murky. Sodomy and buggery are sometimes conflated, sometimes separate; heterosexual buggery is also illegal (as distinct from today's trend of heterosexual anal sex now being something a woman should have in her bedroom repertoire) and just what exactly the detestable sin of Sodom was held to be is debatable.
Cephas Goldsworthy's biography of Rochester (which does not seem to be available in e-book form so I'm having to go off memory of decades past here) opens with a 17th century scene of two guys pretending (it would appear) to be having gay sex on the balcony of an inn to the jeers and outrage of the crowd below, and the judge at their trial fulminating that he cannot do more than fine them, laws about public indecency not being in place right then. So clearly there was some legal leeway about what exactly compromised the crime.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/feb/03/biography.historybooks
One thing I learned previously is that in the Royal Navy in Georgian times buggery would actually get you the death penalty and no reprieve. And without wanting to plug my podcast too much there was a bishop hanged in Dublin . . . https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/subject-to-change/id1436447503?i=1000657509119
"Threatening to gang rape a houseguest" comes up a few times in the OT, though I'm not sure I like Lot's proposed solution any better.
The liberal to progressive set of Christianity which wants to downpedal "of course God is not objecting to homosexuality which we all know means two men who only want to be in a faithful, committed, marriage with no sex outside of marriage or anything other than the white picket fence ideal" try the reading that the sin of Sodom was inhospitality.
They back it up with quotes from, I think, some sermons or Church Fathers? But yeah, gang rape of visitors is generally inhospitable, true.
Oh yes, because it's obvious to any reader that the issue with Both Sodom and Gibeah was All About Hospitality, and had Nothing Whatsoever To Do with Violent Sexual Assault—I observe the examples we're given cover all the bases in terms of human victims.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the White Picket Fences, much preferring it to the party culture I observed in the 80s, and stand with CS Lewis' position expressed in Surprised by Joy.
Sodomy in English sometimes refers to anal sex irrespective of gender; in Fear and Loathing in las Vegas the Samoan attorney becomes concerned that someone has sodomized a woman he is interested in
Haah...it's a different game at higher socioeconomic strata, to be sure, but I guess I never really tried to put a number on how expensive dating is? And that's just for photos! Obviously the optimal payoff is Pascalian in magnitude. Still, one wonders if it's a bit of a Red Queen race, and operating under a belief in the serendipity of love is playing with at least one hand tied. (Though it is a comforting distraction from the darker train of thought that some people just aren't meant to partner up. No cosmic unemployment rate in the dating market.)
It's only expensive if you're bad at it 😔
If you consider buying dinner or drinks or something for your dates, the photos are actually a small portion of the total cost over the long run, I suppose. But yes I am also sticker shocked.
Actually, I had the opposite reaction. $1500 for three days' work is very reasonable give his attention to detail and guarantee.
Other reply nailed it. I think it's a reasonable price for a niche subskill (heck, my roommate is a professional photographer and I don't think he knows half that stuff). On the other hand, it's literally more than I take home in a paycheck. So if that's a ballpark estimate for where the table stakes start...like yeah, I'm too poor to date in that tier anyway. But the thought of "I have to save up money to even begin to think about dating" crashes pretty hard against decades of "there's someone for everyone, tons of fish in the sea, just be yourself" or whatever platitudes I got raised on. Whereas the consolation prizes available to single virgindom get better and better, even if they can't ever fill the hole left behind by the loneliness of missing out on a key human experience.
(I'd still drop the money if the entire "dating stack" from start to finish had refund guarantees, to be clear. Worthwhile investment with risk ameliorated. People keep floating startups along those lines and they keep not succeeding, so the problem seems quite hard.)
I fully agree with you, which is why I publish my full methodology free of charge. If you own a phone and can invest $15 into a tripod, you can DIY everything within a few weeks of trial and error: https://nsokolsky.substack.com/p/how-to-take-a-perfect-dating-photo
> I'd still drop the money if the entire "dating stack" from start to finish had refund guarantees, to be clear
As in, a full refund unless you get married within X years? :-)
FWIW, the only interesting photo there IMO is the one where you're squinting because of the sun.
You pan it as a photo, and it might well be photographically poor, but it's one of the most flattering to you because it shows something unfiltered about you. Ironically enough.
Photographic perfection isn't anywhere near as important as revealing a bit of character.
Women don't care about looks anywhere near as much as men do. But they do care - a lot - about character.
My mom would agree with you. Unfortunately in practice that's not how this works. Source: incredible amounts of A/B testing.
And how much success in terms of real world results, precisely?
I don't doubt that your research is correct... but it's just not doing what you think it's doing.
You catch the fish you set the bait for.
This is something that many men (and to be fair, many women too) don't seem to understand, and it leads to a lot of heartbreak and confusion.
It's useful, yes! The photography gene runs in my family on both sides, but skipped me, so just knowing at all about stuff like bokeh is a big "huh!" moment. There's another guy who occasionally posts here, I think his substack is Optimized Dating...Loewren or something? Also has posts on photo optimization, but they're more technical and I didn't come away grasping too much. So I appreciate your It's So Simple An iPhone Could Do It rundown.
Refundable kind of like your deliverables guarantee, yeah. Nice photos are at least a tangible thing that pay dividends in other contexts too. Something like a matchmaking service, that asks for a lot more than low four figures upfront? I dunno about that...can't exactly get feedback via Yelp or the BBB, it's an anti-inductive market. Lots of scams in the space. We see the same for dating apps, where clearly they "work" at the macro level, but it's kind of a black box how or why any given match happens. And they are of course incentivized to whale-hunt rather than quickly and successfully pair people up. So it's not Playing For Keeps to be skimpy on dates and dating infrastructure...but, boy, can you sink a ton of money (and time!) into the endeavor and get less than nothing back. A lovesick fool and his money are soon parted.
That looks like a good guide for doing a LinkedIn photo shoot, not sure if it's ideal for online dating. There are some good photos here but the guy still comes across as a bit awkward and eager. He doesn't look like he's having a good time, and therefore I don't think I would have a good time if I were with him.
The best photo is the one where he's wearing a suit and not looking directly at the camera, but this would be improved if it included a drink and the shoulders of some other people whose faces have been cropped out so it looks like someone just happened to be taking a picture of him at some fancy social event on a deck, rather than "I put on a suit to pose for online dating photos". You want to look like you live a full and active life where people occasionally take photos of you, rather than someone who had to go to a lot of effort to get photos where they look decent.
It's a bad idea, I think, to appear to have put a lot of effort into your online dating profile. If you do put a lot of effort into it, you want to hide that effort and make it look like it's just something you casually dashed off on a whim when you had a spare fifteen minutes.
That guy in the photos is me, I appreciate the feedback.
Your intuition is in fact correct that in an ideal world you would have a “candid” shot in a party. But the issue is that you can’t setup a tripod at a party and do iterative posing. The next best thing is thus a compromise.
> The best photo is the one where he's wearing a suit and not looking directly at the camera
It scored 9.3 on Photofeeler and was in fact my primary dating pic. It did really well in my experience but I agree that an even better pic is possible.
They're not bad photos, but I found it a bit strange how you repeatedly mention to Suit Up, yet most are just a North Face(?) jacket. Not proper suit. The actual suited photos are indeed quite handsome + smart-looking. Bit more of a smile wouldn't be remiss, though I can also kinda see what you mean about the trustworthy tradeoff there. Easy to tip over from "friendly and harmless" to "derpy goof". Someone you'd want to have as a fun uncle or plus-one wingman, but not the main event necessarily.
The surprising thing is not adequate compensation for three days of work, it's paying someone to spend three days taking photos for a dating app.
I don't really date, but that kind of spend implies to me that you're going to be dropping $300+ per actual date, plus paying for subscriptions to the apps, plus padding out your wardrobe, and maybe even hiring style consultants and dating coaches. Not to mention time and money spent in the gym.
I think that if you find yourself needing to hyper-optimise any aspect of dating then you're probably doing something fundamentally wrong.
And you should never spend $300 on a first date, not even if you're rich. If you're not rich then that's too big a commitment on both sides, and if you _are_ rich then you should try to keep that to yourself until much later.
What would you suggest? Is it not better to get more matches, assuming the lack of matches is a limiting factor?
If you're using a dating app then good photos are basically make or break, nothing else matters much if people don't like the look of you.
Having seen some of the photos people think are suitable for dating apps/dating documents, I think if you have the money and are serious, it's well-spent to prevent you picking the worst images to put up. If it's not just taking the photos but posing them and advising the client as to which really works, then it's a full service.
I thought the whole reason folks spend so much on photos is that you only need to do it once (or at least rarely), whether you find someone in a few days or many years.
I agree with all but the gym. Hit the gym regardless of your age or position in life. I guess you can get away without the gym if you live an athletic lifestyle anyway. But for "regular people", it's one of the best health investments right after toothbrushes and good food.
And certainly it is not very expensive financially. Planet Fitness is $20-25 per month.
Alternately, if you're the sort of person who doesn't need the atmosphere of a gym to motivate you to work out, you could invest in home workout equipment, which is probably significantly cheaper in the long run.
I'm in my late thirties now, and in better athletic condition than I ever was in my twenties, and I haven't gone to the gym in several years, because I transitioned to working out at home.
When I'm really into it, it's pushups, squats, and treadmill. The _only_ thing that costs anything is the treadmill. (You can almost get away without this unless you hate running in bad weather.) I'm seeing treadmills going anywhere from $100(!) to about $5K depending on bells and whistles; a budget athlete can probably do fine with something in the $300 range. That's about a year of gym membership.
I've been lax on running this winter, and I can feel it - got a bit of pudge, and I miss that burny feeling in my quads.
My home setup consists of a weight bench, some adjustable dumbbells (you can buy ones that go up to 90lbs, but fair warning, the heaviest ones do have a risk of breaking and needing to be replaced,) a home pullup bar, and elastic exercise bands (I have multiple sets cobbled together for a wide range of weights.) All told, it's cost me about $700 or so in the time I've accumulated it, most of which is in the adjustable dumbbells, but I've been using them for the last several years, and can continue using them for many more. For cardio, I run, and I generally find it more satisfying than being stuck on a treadmill, not seeing any scenery go by.
Every now and then, I progress to some limit of what's possible with my equipment, and I either buy something new, or improvise some new type of exercise to continue challenging myself.
Where will new jobs emerge when AI automates the middle?
I've been exploring what I call "the last-meter economy" — the edge cases where automation stalls and new human work appears. Chimney sweeps are back in London. Waymo is paying humans $11.25 to close robotaxi doors. Anthropic has a resident philosophers to steer Claude.
The physical world remains undefeated. So does trust, judgment, and the irreducibly human.
Some early responses to this post have sharpened the question. One reader invoked Tesler's Law: complexity doesn't disappear, it moves — and the new work lives in that displaced complexity. Another asked whether these cracks add up to a livable settlement or merely a service perimeter around machine capability.
I don't have the full answer. Curious what this crowd thinks — especially anyone seeing similar patterns in their own fields.
https://rajeshachanta.substack.com/p/the-last-meter-economy
The most obvious point to make is that all 3 of your examples are transient, tiny, or both (so the Tesler's law point is obviously wrong while the 'service perimeter' or 'automation as colonization wave' perspectives make a lot more sense).
Waymo already announced - this was in the original articles you should have read if you're going to cite it - that the next generations have auto-closing doors and the occasional gig job is purely temporary. Amanda Askell is one (1) in-house philosopher, whose long-term career plan is unclear. And the chimney sweeps, since I assume you are referring to https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/18/world/europe/london-chimney-sweeps-energy-prices.htmlhttps://archive.is/mKPzQ represent all of... 750 people, total, in a metropolis of ~9,000,000 people? Because it's basically fake and driven by fashion and a bit of energy fearmongering, and doesn't sound like it wouldn't be much harder to automate than most things - and just wouldn't be for a while because it's a niche of a niche of a niche.
Fair. The Waymo example is explicitly transient — they've said as much. Chimney sweeps are a niche. These are edge cases filling temporary gaps, and you're right to call that out.
But I'd push back on conflating all three. Askell isn't a door-closer. "Resident philosopher on AI steering committee" isn't patching a failure mode; it's new institutional infrastructure that didn't exist until recently. Whether it scales or stays a singleton is open — but the category is different from gig work servicing automation's rough edges.
The broader point: we're early. Examples right now will be transient and tiny. The essay was laying out the landscape — where to watch for new work — not predicting types or quantities.
Curious where you'd place your own prediction. The "service perimeter" framing suggests the cracks stay marginal. Do you see any durable new categories emerging — or is it colonization all the way down?
'"Resident philosopher on AI steering committee" isn't patching a failure mode; it's new institutional infrastructure that didn't exist until recently.'
It also seems to me like a position that can easily be seen as non-essential when circumstances change. The cynic in me wonders if some pal did Amanda a solid.
I don't know about new jobs emerging but it seems to me niche skills like fine arts restorers will remain in place because we're nowhere near being able to get robots skilled enough to replace such work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHpbZ7HXP7Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCb6GqqYbOE (this is an entire series)
Agree — fine arts restoration is a good example of what I was getting at. Physical skill, judgment under ambiguity, accountability for irreversible decisions. The robot isn't coming for that anytime soon, and when it does, someone still has to decide whether to use it.
The interesting question is whether these niche skills remain niches, or whether similar roles proliferate as AI handles more of the middle. The restoration work has always existed. What's new may be the demand for human judgment as a counterweight to automation — the "resident philosopher" role, the keeper-upper, the exception-handler.
- Chimney sweeps are "back"? Have they ever been gone? In my country, chimney sweeps are a protected mafia because of mandatory inspections + limited available "seats" for the job in any region/city/town. Can't work without such a seat.
- Automatic doors are trivial and already in existence. I guess Waymo just has to spec their next gen car differently.
- "physical world remains undefeated"? What about all the automation that we have incrementally installed over the last 100 years? A washing machine is a "robot", an automated Kuka manufacturing robot arm is more sophisticated but also old news by now. It just keeps going on. Now we have robot vacuums sweeping our homes.
- What is "irreducibly human" seems to be a constantly moving goalpost as well. From the perception that humans are not really animals, but something special and apart, to the realization that we can't even fruitfully define "intelligence" in order to separate AI from HI. So what is "irreducibly human"? Ha, don't fall for it, it's a trick question. The seems to be always: What technology and science hasn't fully understood yet.
Where will new jobs emerge? Care for the elderly, as has been mentioned often by now.
I think we (as humanity, society) have been at this point already multiple times. Remember Adam Smith's (IIRC) prediction that growth of productivity will lead to shorter work days? I'm still waiting.
You're right that automation has been advancing for a century and "irreducibly human" keeps retreating. The goalpost moves. But moving isn't the same as disappearing.
The question I'm circling isn't whether AI will eliminate some jobs — it will — but whether the churn rate exceeds human adaptation capacity. That's partly a function of topology (some countries/sectors more exposed), partly organizational inertia (large institutions won't rewire overnight), partly cultural (what we're willing to delegate).
On Adam Smith's leisure prediction: Bertrand Russell made the same point. The goal of progress should be more leisure, not more labor. We got that backwards. Instead of using efficiency to free ourselves, we used it to justify more busyness — always chasing some vague, better version of ourselves, driven by guilt-inducing lines in self-help books about making every minute count.
That's a separate failure, and a real one. But it's not evidence that new work won't emerge. It's evidence that we've been bad at claiming the dividend.
"The question I'm circling isn't whether AI will eliminate some jobs — it will — but whether the churn rate exceeds human adaptation capacity"
I have trouble picturing what this is supposed to mean. Human history has seen some massive adaptation challenges and yet we have persisted and grown in population ever since. So this would imply that AI is some kind of singular adaptation event that is larger than anything humans as a species have ever seen. Assuming this is correct, what does it mean to "exceed human adaptation capacity"? Adaptation to what, by whom? Massive unemployment, starvation and poverty? I'd say we've seen this before, and even if 90% of the population dies, there would still be roughly a billion people which is still more humans than have existed for most of time. Would this hypothetical calamitous outcome be "above capacity" or still below, according to your question?
Moving vs disappearing goalposts: If goal posts are moving all the time, do they actually "exist"? Do they have relevant meaning if it is possible to move them all the time? Or is just a philosophical exercise with little to no practical impact?
As an example, we have known for a long time now that plenty of animals seem to exhibit consciousness and pain very similar to our own; acknowledging that intelligence and consciousness exist more on a spectrum, instead of being exclusively human. Has it had practical impact or not? On one hand, animal rights are more established than before. On the other hand, we are not nearly where we would need to be with animal rights, if we would take the knowledge seriously (and I say this as a meat-eater). So in summary, it has had some impact, but not very much in broad picture. But, hypothetically, industrially scalable "lab grown meat" would likely have a much quicker, more sweeping impact on the whole issue, leading to much stronger and better enforced animal rights in a quicker timeline than ever before.
"That's a separate failure, and a real one. But it's not evidence that new work won't emerge. It's evidence that we've been bad at claiming the dividend."
Who is "we"? I do not suffer from "always chasing some vague, better version of ourselves, driven by guilt-inducing lines in self-help books about making every minute count." I suffer (more or less) from inability to afford housing and food if I don't submit to financially gainful employment. Somebody wants to always earn a bit more than before, and i have to engage in the rat race. Because costs keep increasing, and just stay where I am I need to keep increasing my income.
You're right to push back on the "we." I was too breezy there. The failure to claim the leisure dividend isn't personal — it's structural. You're not chasing self-improvement guilt; you're trying to afford housing. The rat race isn't a lifestyle choice for most people. That's fair, and I should have been clearer.
Alex Tabarrok made a point recently that sharpens this: 40% unemployment sounds catastrophic; a 3-day work week sounds wonderful. Yet they're the same hours, just distributed differently.
Between 1870 and today, US work hours fell ~40% — from 3,000 to 1,800 per year — without mass unemployment. Childhood lengthened, retirement lengthened, life expectancy grew. The share of life spent working dropped from 30% to 10%. We've already sustained a massive increase in leisure. Distribution was the variable, not total hours.
So "exceeding human adaptation capacity" isn't about species survival — you're right, we've survived worse. It's about whether the transition is managed as leisure gain or as unemployment pain. Same math, different politics. History says it's possible to distribute the dividend. Recent history says we've been bad at it. That's not inevitable — it's a choice we keep failing to make.
On moving goalposts: fair point that "irreducibly human" has retreated before and will again. But the question isn't whether the line holds forever — it won't. The question is whether the rate of retreat outpaces the emergence of new ground. So far, it hasn't. Whether AI changes that is the real bet.