It is not in any way a religious apologia, I don't consider the version of what I believe toxic enough that I feel I need to give a trigger warning. People on this forum believe some rare things, I don't see why this particular rare thing requires cones and tape and a security detail. I am arguing for UBI - if you think you have enough tech-adjacent liberals to get a plurality for UBI, go for it, I suspect you will need some pro-lifers in the Ross Douthat/Leah Libresco Seargent mould, my UBI defence is for them.
Fair. I have previously posted about the UBI project itself so this was a follow-up, in the end what is or isn't political is itself political, being on here I have to accept most people aren't theists and I don't freak out, so I don't quite get why I have to specify WARNING: THEIST so as atheists don't freak out but it is what it is. I appreciate you
So. The USA are, ostensibly, going to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. One of their goals was to open the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war. Who can make sense of it?
There's "Markets Keep Functioning, Prices Skyrocket"... and then there's "Unavailable at any price." The latter inflicts damage that the former does not. Oil is one thing, but covid has proven the world can tank reasonable disruptions to energy use. Fertilizer... that's a different story. People will riot (see Sri Lanka) if not fed.
Mission Creep implies this wasn't the plan from the get-go. Trump's been pretty clear about going after China (deserved, after the shenanigans they pulled during covid).
From the plan of "Kick China Where It Hurts" -- Venezuela and Iran are part of the same operation, oil denial to China (or an increase in prices that China can ill afford).
Plans for resource wars have been on the American table for years. I suspect the demise of Pax Americana accelerated the timetable.
China has not responded officially or unofficially yet. But President Trump’s visit to China is back on the calendar, rescheduled for May 14–15. Originally planned for the end of March, the trip was postponed due to the ongoing US military operations against Iran. This caused Xi to lose face domestically and internationally. At the two big Party meetings in March, he had promised his opponents in the CCP that he'd be moving forward on the international relations front — to make up for purging senior PLA generals without getting buy-in from the other players in the CCP (some of whom were also patrons of these generals).
No, China wants cash from Russia. And a director of the Russian Central Bank complained that Russia is running short on Renminbi to pay its bills to China. Xi is totally a quid pro quo sort of guy.
LOL! Fox Business host Larry Kudlow claimed that once the conflict is resolved, prices will go even lower than before the war, adding, “This country is not beholden to the blockade in the Hormuz.” So everyone just chill and go with the plan! Us whiny libs just need to STFU. ;-)
Reminds me of the cover of the Economist print edition two issues ago (the one dated April 4th), which I think you can view here without being a subscriber:
To stop Iran from controlling it at will. I don't know anything that isn't on the news, but as for the current crisis, everything Hormuz began with Iran closing it. So the US pushes to control it instead.
I mean, look at a map. Ukraine has cleared the Black Sea without a navy, and the distances in the Strait of Hormuz are much shorter. Iran are going to control it, at least to the point of denying access.
>but as for the current crisis, everything Hormuz began with Iran closing it.
Pretty sure the current crisis began with a US sneak attack on Iran's leadership and military.
Oh, I'm not arguing that (and I never said Iran started the current crisis). I'm saying the US is doing things re: Hormuz because Iran is. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but the US didn't strike Hormuz first. I'm also not saying there's necessarily much sense to what US is doing. But it sure seems to me that US began doing stuff with Hormuz as soon as Iran started to. Yes Iran did so because US struck first, but that's besides my claim.
Hormuz was the Obvious Response to any major escalation in the conflict. This is like attacking Egypt and being shocked that they "shut down the Suez first - without our slightest provocation."
The blockade was clearly advertised as included in the package US decided to purchase, and so they should have been ready for it.
I can believe that we can get to a point where both Iran and the US hold a checkpoint on the strait. E.g. "Iran doesn't control it at will". How do you think the downstream effects of this benefit the US?
IMO it seems like it will either (if the US halts more shipments) just further worsen the global supply of petroleum products, further driving up costs for the American consumer or (if the US does nothing) have no effect.
If costs for the American consumer are a significant concern/pain point for the administration, then this seems counter-productive or pointless, and our time and effort would be better served doing something else.
There's the possibility that this hurts every other country more than the US. Given that US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia control a sizable portion of the world's crude oil production, and countries like China rely on Iranian oil, this might give the oil-rich countries more leverage, or at least leave them better off than their competition.
It doesn't help the party's political prospects, granted, but they might be able to find ways around public opinion.
If Iran blockades the straight, the rest of the world is pressured to give in to its requirements to remove the blockade. That might involve the EU, China, India, etc. pressuring the US to stop the war.
If Iran and the US block the straight (assuming Trump's blockade is credible, which it probably isn't), then the rest of the world now is pressured by the US as well. It's kind of ridiculous, since if Iran agreed to stop the blockade there's no credible commitment mechanism making sure the US would continue the blockade, so the bottleneck is still on Iran, but with Trump's wild acts there might be some pressure as a result of his declaration.
It's like, what is the most effective way to prevent your enemies taking hostages? Shoot any and all hostages. By committing to an act that takes the value away from taking hostages in the first place, you nullify the incentive to take hostages in the first place. In this case Trump is "shooting the hostage" by saying he's going to blockade the straight that Iran was blockading already.
Of course a threat isn't a threat unless it's credible, and in this case there's no commitment mechanism for Trump, and it's completely irrational to blockade the straight once Iran stops, so this isn't a real threat. Only the "Trump uncertainty factor" gives it a bit of value as a threat, in that there's some expectation that Trump will behave irrationally later on, so the world leaders must factor it into their decision making a little bit. In this case it can be said that there may be *some* strategic value in Trump's erratic behavior.
Trump's erratic behavior, to the extent that it is performative, is strategically useful in managing the stock market. And yes, that does have worldwide implications. Adjust your analysis accordingly.
Yes, blowing up Iranian vessels is apparently "very good for morale."
(Other people are speaking more in terms of "Iran to China" trade, in terms of "Iranian Vessels" -- vessels moving oil that gets Iran money to operate).
Iran wants ships to pay large sums per crossing. There's a reasonable belief that this money would go to fund its war effort, fall into "its old ways" rather than into the shape US wants it to be, so by closing the strait, US is ensuring that Iran doesn't profit.
Trump's truth social post on the topic (sigh) also covers that they'd sic the navy after any ship that pays to cross.
Trumps flailing around trying to do something. He wants a hammer to hit Iran with, but can't (won't) use the big hammer. This whole war thing is a total mess, was there any type of war gaming? I expect congress will be looking into it.
Having reviewed the link, the first one (2012 simulated war) seemed worthless, for it had no useful content unless I clicked further, which I didn't do. The 2002 challenge may not have been realistic, from reading the Wikipedia article, and in any case, things have changed a lot since then. For example, drones, even if they existed, weren't viable weapons. I think an actual conflict would have little in common with the simulated one.
I read/saw we are sending an aircraft carrier around the African horn, (supposedly because we are afraid to send it through the Red sea... drones and the Houthis.) I just wanna say, we should make peace with all these people. Though that is totally a pipe dream at this point.
The Trump admin had some (obviously irrational) expectations regarding the effectiveness of their threats, and how closing the strait just makes "everyone angry" at Iran. (Where everyone is mostly China, as Russia obviously is happy to see oil prices go up.)
And we can assume the Trump throne thought that keeping oil flowing is more important for Iran than the military benefits of the blockade.
Of course in their infinite wisdom they somehow did not realize that Iran can apply this pressure selectively. (Though usually pundits say that the Pentagon has good planners, so we probably need to modify this claim to something like as usual they did not listen to the experts, or willfully decided to ignore them, or keep them out of the loop, etc.)
So they want to deny Iran the money from the tolls, maybe "to level the playing field".
Yes, the problem with this fucking Iran war is that Trump et al. (like so many others before them) believed that "strategic bombing works" (and they wanted the full Schrödinger's cake menu too by not disturbing the global economy, but starting a quick war at the global economy's few remaining chokepoints), and as a result many civilians died - so far for nothing - and of course if Iran runs out of gas many more will.
Many civilians are going to die anyway because of ongoing warcrimes. Please, look at the bigger picture. I don't want to hear "if Iran runs out of gas" when Iran is already planning to evacuate their capital, Tehran because of ongoing warcrimes (water wars).
I'm taking it you don't know much about the global economy and what a chokepoint actually is? (There's one in North Carolina, for god's sake!)
If Iran runs out of gas, they stop paying their security troops. Then it's applejacks, and I don't think you want to claim that most of these people are homicidal maniacs (I can discuss Taliban paying their troops in rapine plunder, so... there's precedent for some weird payment structures, but I don't think most people use bullets to kill civilians when there's significant doubt the guys on top will pay you... ever.)
Opening the Strait of Hormuz was not a goal of the war. It is a goal *within* the war, which we want to continue into the postwar world. Rather like stopping the Holocaust was not the goal of World War II, and there wasn't even a genocide going on before the War, but once the Allies were fighting Germany for other reasons, yeah, we should take care of that too.
And a Strait isn't "open" if it's only open to some, or only open at a price. A regime where Iranian and Iranian-aligned ships can travel freely but everyone else has to cough up a couple megabucks per ship of protection money, is not an open Strait. But it is a situation quite favorable to Iran, and one they will require a great deal of encouragement or coercion to change. If Iranian and Iranian-allied ships are barred passage, that's still not "open", or if you want to quantify it then it is "less open", but it's also much less favorable to Iran so at least in principle it should make it easier to convince Iran to allow an actually-open Strait of Hormuz.
It's also illegal without a declaration of war or the equivalent, and it will cause still more damage to the economy of a world already fed up with this sort of nonsense from America, so maybe not a prudent strategy, but it's not a *silly* strategy, there is a direct and plausible path to the desired outcome.
And really, is any of this so hard to understand? Or were you just looking for a cheap dunk against Trump or America? Trump arguably deserves it, but this isn't the place for cheap dunks even against deserving targets.
Don't call me Napoleon just yet, but I'd suggest that Iran closing the Strait was a lot more predictable than the Holocaust. Given the situation, I'd also suggest that ceasing hostilities has a lot higher chance of opening the Strait than closing it, partially or not, justifiably or not.
> there is a direct and plausible path to the desired outcome.
If the Black Sea 2026 is any indication, then, given the more favourable geography of the Strait, that's quite optimistic. How would you suggest opening the strait militarily, while preventing a ship toll regime or whatever else Iran feels like doing? Invade and occupy the entire coastal strip, and get a Ukraine-style line of contact for which the US is unprepared on every level? Invade and occupy all of Iran? Nuke the place? At some point and rather sooner than later, the USA need to cut their losses and get out before they make everything worse still. Maybe even try real diplomacy for a change, for what it's still worth at this point.
But yes, I find it hard to talk about Trump, even rationally, without ending with a dunk, so I understand your suspicion.
Bottom line: the strait is currently mined (to what extent? fog of war, including Dead Iranians -- so even if Iran wanted to be 100% clean, they might not know)
Real Bottom Line: Only America can demine it (everyone else lacks the capability).
The real question is: does the doubleblockade interfere with demining? If not, then everyone can get "real patient real quick," because the double blockade isn't really impeding traffic.
The Mines Are.
And to the extent that America can convince everyone that "There are Mines, and they might explode ships, and exxon valdez in the strait, possibly on fire? Bad news, really, really bad news..."
This is factually incorrect. The UK (Hunt-class and Sandown-class MCMVs), France, and to a lesser degree the Netherlands and Belgium have serious mine countermeasures capability. I don't know enough about the Netherlands and Belgium to be able to assess their capabilities demining in a region like Hormuz.
I personally doubt that they would be willing unless there was some substantial shift in US-Iranian relations as a part of a ceasefire or deescalation, so while I do agree with the assessment that (as a part of the current status quo) only the US can demine it, it is factually untrue as a matter of capability.
Technically China has the capability as well but lacks the capability (by matter of practicality, lack of supportive infrastructure, and range) to be able to get MCM hulls into the straight of hormuz.
Edit: additional context for UK vessels - they lack the capability to sudden or immediate use, but could absolutely substantively contribute to demining within a timespan of 6-8 weeks.
Iran dropped mines that it lacks the capability to pick back up again (which, this is/was war -- I'm not complaining about them "doing something unfair.").
We tried ceasing hostilities, Israel said "nuh uh, we're still going to bomb Lebanon", and Iran responded with "OK, then, the strait remains closed".
The United States controls what the United States Navy does, it does not control what Israel does(*). So solutions that involve "ceasing hostilities" are not something just the United States can do on, and the appeal of solutions where we might (probably won't, but might) get what we want by tasking the United States Navy with a particular sort of hostility should be obvious.
If any part of this is still confusing to you, I'm not sure what to say..
* Outside of certain conspiracy theories, and I think these days the conspiracy theorists are maybe 80/20 on Israel controlling what the US does rather than vice versa.
If the US wanted this war to end, could they not attempt to convince Israel to stop and, failing that, put pressure on Israel?
I've always assumed that Israel needs the US a whole lot more than vice versa and that Israel at least listens to and takes the US seriously in these matters.
Presumably Netanyahu can always decide to just keep going on, relatively no matter what the US says or does.
But the US could try again for a deal that Israel agrees and sticks to. Perhaps it's already happening behind the scenes. If not, it does seem worth a try. Mostly because the other options don't look great either.
In the realm of international relations, the phrase "put pressure on" mostly just means "do nothing of substance, and change nothing, but piously insist that the bad thing is now That Other Guy's Fault".
On rare occasions, actually useful "pressure" can be applied with significant results, e.g. the Suez Crisis. But, A: usually not and B: you need to be much more specific than "put pressure on" if you want to accomplish anything.
Yes, if we want, we can say the "pressure" thing that makes it Officially Israel's Fault. That almost certainly won't change anything.
I understand that that is how the phrase is often used.
That said, presumably it is actually possible to do something that would make it more costly for Israel to continue their current course of actions. That should give them some leverage. I had also filed that under "put pressure". If you want to use a different term for "going beyond empty words" that is fine by me, but I don't know that term
The US could coerce Israel fairly trivially, the same way the US is coercing the rest of the free world, without any conspiracy theories. Tariffs, withholding military aid, threats of war. The US hold "all the cards" in terms that Trump understands. They may quibble about details like bombing Iranian oil infrastructure without coordination, but in the broad picture the US are not coercing Israel because they're aligned.
Israel gets plenty coerced by this administration. Last administration was practically headless, so Israel got "kid gloves" and much stupidity.
Broad, localized picture: yes, Israel and USA are attacking Iran, and they agree this is a good thing. USA wants peace, now, but Israel wanted to fire a "parting shot." (This last is my interpretation, based on my own model of Israel).
If the US were "coercing" the free world, there would be British, French, Canadian, etc destroyers and frigates patrolling Hormuz right now. I mean, Trump wasn't at all subtle about that bit of attempted coercion.
I'm not sure what mental model of US diplomacy and politics you are running, but it seems to be based on a mix of conspiracy theory and perverse wishful thinking, and it's very definitely at odds with reality.
Are you absolutely sure you're not intentionally misunderstanding me? Because I'm not. When I say "coercion" and "coercing", I mean past or ongoing such acts. I don't mean their successful completion (i.e. Trump got something out of the act), although those do exist. If that level of dictionary disagreement is sufficient to label me a conspiracy theorist with a disconnect from reality, then I guess nice dunk, you got me.
Israel and the United States function like Iran and China. One is patron, one is ... "aircraft carrier."
USA can stop Israel, and Israel can stop USA ... but these things are not exactly instantaneous, and if Israel feels like they're running out of wartime, well, bombing Lebanon and using their current intel is what happens.
Americans are talking with China around now... (presumably trying to backchannel some deals).
Also, one just needs to look at Black Sea 2022-2026 what a state can do in constrained waters nowadays without a navy of its own, or even traditional air support.
That one featured bike messengers going faster than the speed of light. But apparently Iran decided, looking at that wargame, that speedboats really could sink 3/4 of the American Navy's boats**.
Cheesing the Rules of a Wargame (so badly that they put the "winners" in the penalty box and went on with the "real wargame") does not actually work in real life.
**Nobody was trying to Bad Idea Dog Iran, they were just goofing around.
I don't recall seeing a single remotely credible take prior to 2026 on any potential US-Iranian war that *didn't* very clearly predict that Iran would close the strait and the US would have to figure out a way to reopen it. That was as conventional as wisdom gets, right up there with the Sun rising in the East.
Paper straws are the best! Paper Straws are not allowed to be discussed in a humorous or negative light.
Oh, look, there's a Trump. He's saying the Paper Straws are nekkid too (ala the little boy who saw the emperor).
I could actually get into the psychology here, of why "doing something that is obviously stupid and unworkable" is good for instilling learned helplessness, but I'm not sure you'd be interested.
The previous status was that Iran was getting away with blockading it for everyone but themselves. Trump announced that if they're going to do that then we're going to blockade them for Iran bound vessels. This is the obviously reasonable thing we should have done since the start, they can't actually handle the straits being shut down for an extended period (whether or not we can depends on political will, but if Iran's shutting them down no matter what we do there's no drawback in keeping them closed for us).
A question arises: "does america sweep for mines while the double blockade is ongoing?" If not, then there's still lag after the blockades drop (which they must, at some point, right?). If America sweeps for mines for weeks, with a double blockade on, they're not actually "causing problems" for Western allies -- in that nobody wants to go through with mines "god knows where"**.
**not actually trying to blame probably dead iranians for being unable to say where they put the mines.
With what minesweepers? Most of the ones we had in the Gulf were decomissioned late last year, and the rest were pulled back to IIRC Malaysia before the start of the current conflict. I have seen no reports that they have made it back to the Gulf yet; that's a voyage I would expect to take several weeks.
Modern minehunting (it isn't really "sweeping" any more) is indeed done by robots, more formally "Unmanned Underwater Vehicles" (UUVs). But you can't just dump them in the water and say "go hunt mines"; they need specialized support equipment and trained operators. Those are on the dedicated minehunting and minesweeping ships.
In theory, we could try to kitbash that onto a destroyer, and maybe someone has done that. But we've also e.g. put Sidewinder missiles on modified airliners; that doesn't make them fighters, it just gives them a *very* limited self-defense capability.
This is further complicated by the part where the USN's minehunting ships are now mostly "Littoral Combat Ships", theoretically a sort of highly flexible multimission vessel. But really some of them have the minehunting equipment permanently installed, and the rest will never hunt a mine. The minehunting versions, are the ones that were pulled back to Malaysia before the start of the conflict and are now AFIK Whereabouts Unknown.
But there is a drawback. Iran's purpose for closing the strait is decreasing the supply of oil, which being a globally traded commodity, increases the price everywhere. This is why this move affects the US even if they're a net exporter of oil and most of the oil through the strait goes somewhere else. To the extent they were letting some ships through (they announced they were doing it, unclear if it actually happened) it was probably in response to diplomatic pressure from India and China, and only reluctantly as they know as well as we do that doing so exerts downward pressure on the price of oil. This denies funds to Iran, so it's not pointless, but it has a drawback. Personally I think the situation is not much changed, Iran's tolerance for pain in this war is much higher than the US, they will bet on outlasting the US's political will.
Iran's already stopped its petrochemical plants. at some point, they run out of storage, and have to stop drilling (and that degrades their oil producing capacity, because those drills aren't designed to stop...)
Within 2-3 weeks, Iran is DOA -- they pay their security forces in oil too.
Do you really think Trump can't holdout for a month?
... Europe is pissed because this strategy could actually work
The Taliban paid their troops in rapine plunder. They also had opium fields, and then they BURNT the opium fields (after a historic harvest), so that they'd be the only people with money.
This is Quite Different from Iran (also: Iran isn't a nation of goatherders who have trouble doing jumping jacks...).
I'd suggest marking GrimMoar's words here so we can mock him for them a month from now, but from past experience he'll probably be posting under a different name by then and deny the whole thing.
1. Soldiers can go without pay for several months before it becomes an issue. Once it becomes an issue you can use force to keep the machinery going for longer, I recall Washington "quelling" some soldier rebellions caused by lack of pay, this is common.
2. Iran's economy is something like 30% oil. Losing all that would hurt, but it's not the worse thing that has happened to an economy while conducting a war, it is manageable.
3. I expect Russia and China to send weapons, money and targeting data to Iran. I expect they're doing it already. I've heard reports of Russia sending weapons despite being obviously otherwise preoccupied, and I'm sure China would love sending some spare change for the cause (of harming the US).
All that (at least) is why one month is way too optimistic.
Iran has been charging significant fees on ships passing through, so it is rational to deny them those resources. It is also a desperate face saving measure. If the global economy is F'd we might as well do it on our own terms. I think that is the logic.
I would describe the US goals as more like "We want regime change in Iran, and we can tolerate a few weeks of Strait closure." Then we didn't get regime change, and now our position is "we can't tolerate Iran charging tolls in perpetuity or a permanent ban of US/Saudi aligned vessels".
A lot of popular commentary annoys me because it assumes that the strait is a binary open/closed, but there's more possible situations: open to Iran-allied ships but not US-allied ships, US-allied but not Iran-allied, "open" but Iran is charging tolls, or both sides declare it "open" but ship owners are still scared to send ships through.
The US is blockading a country they are at war with. A blockade exerts pressure on the target and makes them more likely to agree to the terms that the US demands (as the alternative is to be blockaded). While it is true that a blockade hurts the US (as it will raise oil prices), it's believed that it will hurt Iran more so the the US will gain an advantage in future negotiations.
To America opening the strait is important. But what's much much more important is ensuring that Iran doesn't control the strait.
Iran has established a perception (I would argue it was never a fact) that there was nothing the USA can do to stop it chucking drones at ships in the strait and so it will end the war as the de-facto owner and profit mightily for it.
What America has done is take that off the table. Instead of it becoming a question of whether its cheaper to fight Iran for the strait or accept their rule and pay them. Its now a question of who can live without the strait longer. The USA or Iran.
And I would argue the USA. Because for Trump himself the maximum cost is a bad midterms, and that's the last election he ever has to worry about. For the USA's allies, Saudi and the UAE, they have huge cash reserves, and Iran controlling the strait is much worse than the cost of waiting. Meanwhile for Iran, the potential cost is total economic collapse. It was on the brink before the war. The war started indirectly because of economic chaos in Iran.
(Incidentally that bit about Saudi and the UAE is why I think it was always a myth. If the USA wouldn't fight to open the Strait they'd do something themselves. Like build big pipelines West, Saudi already has one, or bomb Iran themselves. Rumours are that the UAE already has bombed)
Abraham accords are planning for pipelines west anyway. This accelerates American Diplomatic Objectives, which include tying Israel into the Middle East, so they no longer sit as "A Colonial Occupier."
Iran had not fully closed the strait prior to this point, instead letting some ships through in exchange for payment, and presumably other ships that were carrying Iranian oil for sale. The motivation for fully blockading the strait is that it will starve Iran of income in addition to the gulf states who have a large amount of their capacity blocked. A game of chicken for who will blink first.
Here in the real world, less than 15% of China's oil comes from Iran. The majority comes from Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the other non-Iran Gulf States.
Comment copied from below (response to GrimMoar) just because it does apply to the initial posting:
My position is somewhere along these lines. I am not 100% certain on this, but it is my working basis. It is critical of Trump and his actions, but also doesn't rely on "Trump is an idiot that doesn't actually listen to the military strategists"
The charitable term I would use to explain the action within a cohesive model would be reactive-but-ideologically-consistent. The people in this administration have stable priors of two kinds: about adversaries (anti-China, anti-Iran, anti-Maduro) and about method (prefer unilateral action, skeptical of institutional constraints — the track record on Paris, JCPOA, INF, WHO, NATO burden-sharing, WTO-bypassing tariffs is pretty clear on this).
Those priors shape which responses look attractive, and the method priors shape what form the response takes — sanctions, military posturing, bilateral pressure rather than coalition-building or UN resolutions. The resulting pattern looks coordinated in retrospect because the same worldview is generating each decision rather than Venezuela-Iran-Cuba as a unified oil-denial campaign in advance. I agree it's almost definitely a factor, but I don't think the goal of each of these was to hurt China "from the get-go" as you say. I think that this confuses contingency and factor consideration with grand strategy and causation. In other words, the priors are stable and the triggers are contingent. Stable priors explain why the direction is consistent. Contingent triggers explain why specific moves happen.
I have a second part to my understanding, which I imagine you will disagree with.
I think that Trump has an unstable temperament which is sometimes performative and sometimes just reactive. Temperament explains why the magnitude of any given response is unpredictable — sometimes a measured sanction, sometimes wildly disproportionate escalation. I imagine your counterargument would be along the lines of Nixon's madman theory. My counter to this would be that this requires the madness to be performed over a coherent private process, targeted at specific adversaries for specific concessions, and calibrated enough to actually extract them. What we have instead is indiscriminate volatility, staff memoirs describing management-around rather than scripting, and bluffs that produce escalation rather than capitulation. Nixon's tapes show a sane planning process generating mad signals. I do think that Trump is at times performative, so I'm not saying there is nothing here. However, the substantive majority of evidence points (IMO, I know I haven't adequately proven this) to genuine erraticism or madman theory implemented poorly.
I would like to emphasize one final point: this argument does not collapse into "Trump's an idiot" — an erratic reactor with consistent priors knows what he wants and has clear positions, he's just unreliable about how and when he pursues it. Under this model,
Here is one final thing, which does reflect my biases as a historian (professional) and skeptic of authority (personal). I have a huge issue with grand-strategy readings generally. Administrations, historically, rarely execute clean multi-front strategies even when there's a real ideological project driving things. I don't want to move away from the argument here too much so I hesitate to bring this up, but I would point Iraq is the instructive case: there genuinely was a long-running neocon project with named advocates, published manifestos, and people in position to push it* Yet, the war still turned out to be executed messily, with the occupation improvised after the invasion. Again, ideolically consistent response, but not a cohesive grand strategy.
Ideologically consistent but reactive.
*The advocacy predated Bush by years — PNAC's 1998 letter to Clinton explicitly urged Saddam's removal, and "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (2000) laid out the broader framework before anyone knew 9/11 was coming. That's the paper trail establishing it as a preexisting project rather than a post-9/11 invention. But "project" shouldn't be read as "unified bloc". Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Feith had overlapping but distinct agendas and fought each other on specifics throughout. And the execution itself is the clearest evidence against preplanning: Rumsfeld overruling Army force-level estimates, the disbanding of the Iraqi army by CPA order with no apparent plan for what the disbanded soldiers would do next, no serious occupation blueprint, the scramble to stand up the CPA itself. If the invasion had been the execution of a fully worked-out plan, those aren't the failure modes you'd expect. Instead, they're the failure modes of people who won the argument to invade and then improvised everything after.
>I have a huge issue with grand-strategy readings generally.
I mean, nobody but his most ardent supporters seems to suspect Trump of having much strategy, grand or otherwise. Granted, strategy might be really hard and no war ever goes as planned, but what are we talking about here? Isn't this the modern equivalent of "Don't invade Russia in winter", some truism that every armchair general, like me, would get right?
>Administrations, historically, rarely execute clean multi-front strategies even when there's a real ideological project driving things.
"Even when"? Do you mean to argue that ideology motivates the actors to develop a strategy, or even that ideology is necessary for good strategy? Because intuitively I would say that when you have a firm ideology, you risk believing it so much that you expect good outcomes to manifest by themselves, or that at least it makes you not look too hard into what could go wrong. As in "We remove non-Democracy from that country, people will greet us as liberators, their every suppressed American will pop out, and all will live happily ever after in our image, Mission Accomplished."
Trump's announced that he's going to make Golden Dome, a bigger version of Iron Dome. That's a strategic goal/milestone, what have you. As he dances on the geopolitical stage, if he makes moves that further that goal, do you suspect he does have a strategy?
Or is Trump, somehow, the one president who is so full of hot air, that even expressed "here's what I'm going to do" agenda items do not represent strategic priorities? Even when his expressed tactics are in furtherance of the strategic objective?
The above lays out a rather simple strategy, involved in a full-scale retractment of American forces from outside the American sphere of influence. This may be intended as a backstop, in case larger maneuvers fail (with the end of Pax Americana).
If this has any ideology at all, it's not the "Grand Ideology" that the neoconservatives had. (In fact, it rather looks a lot like the Russian Playbook during the Cold War...)
I think one needs to have at least some ideology, but it needn't be the "pie in the sky" stupidity of the neoconservatives. "Make plans, have backups. Assume the other guy will punch you in the face, and act accordingly." That's a "nuts and bolts" ideology that assumes "eating your spinach is good for you."
I don't think that we necessarily need to have a strategy, but that "not" having a strategy increases reaction time, because you have to put ALL the options on the table, and you don't even have a screen of "This would benefit USA" or "This is good for China" or "This will destroy Europe!" Each of those quotes are a simple expression of simple strategies:
1) Maximal benefit to USA, regardless of cost/benefit to rest of world.
2) Denial of benefit to China, regarding everything as zero or negative sum.
3) Regarding companies as zerosum, and wanting to take all of Europe's.
Of course there are goals. The goals has always been the same.
1. Find big shiny thing to put name on
2. Get adulations
Every process, every decision, every declaration, is in support of one or both of these. See iron dome? Want bigger shinier "golden dome"! See prize? Want prize! People who praise are good, people who criticize or stand in the way of these are bad and the enemy.
I see no reason to go beyond this when questioning "why this?" for _anything_ he does. Someone has convinced him he will look good and get praise, or he thinks he will himself.
People who are so externally motivated are nearly never the level of risk taker* that we currently have in office. I wonder if you're projecting.
"See Iron Dome"? Do I need to sit around and discuss the usefulness of Israel as a weapons-testing platform for weapons that America isn't allowed to test (or wasn't, as of when Iron Dome was being worked on...)?
I mean, you're acting like Trump is a grubby/grabby two-year-old and not simply saying "Okay, our prototype worked. Now let's roll it out to protect america, which was probably the goal from the get-go."
I think this level of "self-servingness" functions better as a model for Richard Nixon, personally (and he did an awful lot of good for the country while selfishly seeking things that would burnish his own resume). And I don't think he was very externally-motivated.
*Brinksmanship that leads to a significant chance of The World is Gone... well, I guess you can say "If this fails, nobody gets to complain, because We're All Dead, Fellas" But I'm pretty sure that an externally motivated chap doesn't come up with that in the first place.**
**Actually, I take it back. Trump may be externally motivated by getting people to rage (that's a particular strain of sadism, not calling him evil just noting what we're talking about psychologically speaking). That's more in tune with what he's done, worldwide, than trying to obtain praise (which has both been "few and far between" and ideas like tariffs -- he's not that stupid, nobody would have said "he's going to get praise for flouting the conventional wisdom THAT hard." A model where this chap wants praise completely falls over when you consider how much of what he does makes liberals rage.)***
***I have heard it said that Trump could have been "softened" like Arnold Schwartz-Kennedy, if the Democrats/Press had decided to praise every step he took towards them. So, actually, he might have some tendencies to seek praise. But at this point? Everyone's already calling him Hitler, and he has no reason not to put pedal to metal.
Let me (try to) be the first to ask: why do you think Orban lost the elections the way he did? I was rereading the "Dictator Book Club" entry about him, and Scott's piece made him look almost unmoveable.
My very naive take is that he might have realized that, to win the elections he might have to seriously destabilize the country, using his and his allies' powers against opposition leaders, but unlike in the past, there would be a serious risk of Russian or European (NATO?) intervention, since the overall political situation is at its shakiest in years.
Or maybe painting him as a dictator was just a smear job by Western media, and he really is just a ruthless politician, but a real believer in democratic-ish power-sharing norms? That doesn't align with Scott's piece, but it is in turn based on (naturally biased) books, and just two to boot
Disagree re: paragraph two. At least in my country the media has not used the word dictator. To portray him as a potential dictator is far from calling him one.
he used all the usual tools in the autocratic toolbox that was available for him. from false flag operations to sending (at least one group in one of the civilian) secret services after political targets, selective tax audits, funding football hooligan groups and using them to harass civilians, total capture of the state media, harassment and capture of private media outlets, and so on.
this is clear and obvious subversion of democracy.
is it North Korean-style absolute totalitarian despotic dynastic dictatorship? no. is it Soviet-style first secretary of the party dictatorship? (which Hungary had between 1956-1989?) yes, except without the backing of Soviet tanks, but coupled with the relative decrease in standard of living.
how close was it to the late Soviet times? well, the media frenzy was definitely worse, but it was easier to leave the country (thank to the EU).
...
one very visible inflection point was last year's Budapest Pride, which happened despite being legally banned, but no one got arrested in the end. (which is quite similar to how the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 at the border during the Pan-European picnic.)
> this is clear and obvious subversion of democracy.
Maybe but the question was - was he a dictator. Since he relinquished power through the democratic process then that’s easy to answer. He wasn’t. Netanyahu, a nastier man, is also not a dictator.
Given there are quite a few dictatorships in the world the concentration on Orban was always odd. I get Europeans worrying about Europe but most Americans probably couldn’t find Hungary on a map, and yet it lives rent free in the minds of America’s left.
Here’s a quote from Biden during a foreign policy speech early in his presidency
> We must demonstrate that democracy can still deliver… This is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies… Look at Belarus, Poland, Hungary…”
Two of them are now not “dictatorships” anymore as the dictators left office. Unlike the 60 or so actual dictatorships
It just seems like the kind of thing some intern got upset about, and Biden said what he is told.
(Saudi Arabia did get a mention later on in the speech, which makes it a bit less hypocritical, not that that changed much in actual policy).
Granted, before he left, he *also* sounded out the military about resisting that election and got shut down, so he really only left power quasi voluntarily (at best). But he still is a pretty well-cited example of "a dictator" and nevertheless permitted an election and left after losing the vote.
I don't put Orban in the same category as Pinochet, though, to be clear.
It strikes me that many military dictatorships do eventually cede power to civilians. Greece, South Korea, many places in Africa.
I'm a lot happier if people discuss "military dictatorship" as different from other forms of dictatorship, as it seems to adequately capture a significant power base (one could use fascist dictatorship if there's an alliance between military and industrial powers, I suppose).
Bolsonaro also flirted with using the military (as he was an officer for quite some time), and while the legislature was deliberating his proposed changes to election laws there was an unusual military parade.
There are a lot of precise (but jargon-y) descriptions of these soft dictatorships but they obviously did not became common colloquially so that we adopt a new word for their usual wannabe dictator. (Or did we?)
By that measure, is Xi Jinping a dictator? Currently, he's in a power struggle with two other factions in the CCP, and even if he weren't in the middle of a power struggle, he doesn't have absolute power. Xi decapitated the leadership of the PLA by purging Generals Zhang Youxia (CMC Vice Chairman) and Liu Zhenli (Joint Staff Department Chief). The Old Guard are pissed off about this. And unlike previous purges, Zhang and Liu have not been formally removed from their party posts (even though they're likely dead). Xi is holed up in Beijing, and he hasn't made the usual tour of the country after the two big annual Party pow-wows in March (except a quick trip to visit a school in Xiong'an New Area (Xi's new high-tech, "sustainable" metropolis) about 100km from Beijing (by train, and not by motorcade).
Y-y-yees? He can (and did) get people disappeared, seems to be completely set to rule for life, used the rule of law against his opponents, etc.
Just as Stalin and Mao he also put his own interpretation of "Marxism-Leninism" into some super important official document, and so on.
Dictator doesn't mean unopposed and undefeatable.
I mentioned in a comment somewhere that Ali Khamenei was also supreme absolute hyper leader, but obviously as a fragile old dude he was very much dependent on the IRCG (and the the various upper levels of the whole power structure).
You really need to spend more time studying Chinese politics. Xi does not have absolute power like, say, Kim Jong Un. The PLA hasn't been following his orders, and Xi hasn't left Beijing for over six months now. Former prime minister Wen Jiabao, one of the leaders of the faction opposing Xi, made a conspicuous public appearance a few weeks ago, visiting the Institute of Geographic Sciences in Beijing. Retired party officials are supposed to stay out of the limelight, but his visit was carefully scripted, with a crowd outside clapping and cheering him. Team Xi didn't dare stop him.
And BTW, the misconception that Khamenei was a supreme and absolute dictator was the miscalculation that got us into the mess. Trump's brain trust believed that removing Khamenei would collapse the regime. It hasn't. In fact, from the Iranian political perspective, the mullahs may be stronger now than they were before we attacked them.
Factions of the same party are completely different from actually rival parties. Stalin came to power to crushing rival factions of the Communist Party, but it was a dictatorship going all the way back to Lenin.
Dictator doesn't have a fixed technical definition, it's not like the speed of light.
Strongman doesn't have that kind of ring to it, and people are lazy, so the meaning of words shift. (With the Overton window, I guess).
Wikipedia already mentions the modern usage, also doesn't use absolute power, but instead says "extraordinary amount of personal power".
After all absolute power itself is a spectrum. Ali Khamenei was the supreme leader who had absolute power, but ... at the same time not really, as a 86 year old dude with only one hand he was more of a figurehead and the IRGC holds the keys to the theocracy.
The African dictators are also very much constrained by the realities of their power structure. (And I imagine the same goes for whatever Kim is currently the de jure God of North Korea.)
That said using the dictator label for Orban was always stupid, it just did not fit, but maybe that's why people wanted to anyway? ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hl83Jpd_OI )
Communist Hungary forced all legal parties into a "People's Front", with opposition parties banned. So, no, Orban was not like Communist Hungary in that respect.
Orban's current regime went through the same collapse as he Communist party (~1970-1989), there are obvious differences (USSR as a background vs EU as a background), but the similarities are not lost on Hungarians (also there were already opposition parties in the late 80s).
> [...] in sixteen (twenty) years, Viktor Orbán had built the most textbook, most precise electoral autocracy in Hungary. For his own circle of power – it is much more accurate to talk about Orbán’s circle of power, as Fidesz as a party has long existed only in his name – he had accumulated resources that were perhaps the last to be available to the MSZMP [the Communist Party of Hungary] in 1988; he had tailored the public law system to himself, appointed his own confidants to the heads of almost all institutions important for the exercise of power, which were in principle independent of the government and party, controlled most of the press, and owned at least a quarter of the national economy in some way.
It shows the importance of institutions. If Orbán had illegally tried to stay in power, the EU almost certainly would have suspended aid and possibly expelled Hungary. Something similar happened in the nineties with Jörg Haider in Austria.
It would be more appropriate to call Orbán a strong man. He never attained absolute power, but he was slowly creating frictions in the system that would inhibit his removal by democratic processes (by changing the constitution and by court appointments come immediately to mind). Whether losing to a slim majority could have persuaded him to concede the election is anyone's guess. But with a 79% voter turnout and the opposition winning greater than two-thirds of the seats in their parliament, it would be hard to use any post-electoral shenanigans to maintain a hold on power. And his followers probably saw the writing on the wall as well.
Also, "dictator" does not imply "ruler-for-life". Wikipedia: "The word originated as the title of a Roman dictator elected by the Roman Senate to rule the republic in times of emergency. Like the terms "tyrant" and "autocrat", dictator came to be used almost exclusively as a non-titular term for oppressive rule. In modern usage, the term dictator is generally used to describe a leader who holds or abuses an extraordinary amount of personal power." Orban did hold "an extraordinary amount of personal power" - compared say to the German chancellor (not a weak head of gov.!), but as we see now: not about election outcomes - unlike Stalin (or s.o.): "it does not matter who has most votes but who controls the vote counting" (or so).
German media seldom called Orban "dictator" but usu. still tried to make him appear as one. And it depends more on one's definition of "dictator" if he was one than on the extraordinary powers he got himself. We will see if the new guy will really reduce those powers, now that he has them.
Big respect to Orban that he did let the votes be counted fairly and that (unlike a certain guy in the USofA) he conceded early. I plead: Bonfire, not hell.
I have been amazed at the way people talk about how leaders of eg Hungary and the US are just a few inches away from being a dictator. It is like some weird conspiracy theory that completely discounts how many thousands and thousands of people with no incentive to cooperate and with excellent reasons not to cooperate would nonetheless gladly get stuck in. The debasement of language where people are either dictators potential dictators and in other areas too is incredibly annoying.
At what P(dictator) would you like to see people start raising the alarm?
You could argue that someone who writes an article about someone being 'close to becoming a dictator' when their P(dictator) is only 49% is 'inaccurate'.
But that judgement criterion is going to get you a lot of dictators.
Personally, I'm fine with different people having different thresholds depending on how mainstream and respected they are, with lots of lone voices raising the alarm at very low thresholds, and major outlets holding the line for longer. Which I think is what we have.
I'd rather we reserve dictator for situations where it's really in play. Otherwise, people fail to think through why Russia has elections (they are very useful to Russia)...
You could, to use the Western Definition, call both Xi and Putin "dictators" -- but Xi is sitting at the top of a single hierarchy (which everyone wants to get to the top of), and Putin is... "more a pawn for the oligarchs" than anything else (Russians would far rather be oligarchs than "the next Putin").
If you wanted to restrict "dictator" to referring to "the level of fascism" involved in China, or higher, then you'd actually be creating some sort of semantic zone of meaning
I do. He puts crazy bastards below him, for just that reason -- to deter crazy West from assassinating him. Because why bother, if Russia is going to go more crazy? Putin is an ex-spy, he knows how the assassination game works.
Well empirically a higher percentage of oligarchs have been assassinated than the percentage of Putins. Hard to extrapolate with confidence but it's at least weak evidence.
Only in singular form -- he's more powerful than any one of the oligarchs. And, given the whole "Russia WISHES they could pull off half the assassinations that are ascribed to them" I'd be wary about any kills that Putin himself (or Russian "officialish" Media*) don't directly attribute to him (particularly if it involves poison).
*as opposed to underground "Navalny was killed by Putin" credulous media.
That's a strong an uncharitable claim, and one I don't see much evidence for.
Every politician in the world is on the opposite side from a huge number of writers and pundits. But only like 2-3 of those politicians are getting massive, constant 'possible dictator' warnings at any level above tweets, and I think they're plausibly the ones with the highest P(dictator).
I think most people actually mean and believe the things they say most of the time. Sure I agree that you will find *a reason* to attack the other side just because you see yourself as in a war with them, but I do think that people *choose which attacks* to use based on evidence and plausibility where possible.
The ones with the highest P(dictator) would plausibly include Presidents assuming power without getting elected, would they not? Given Joe Biden's mental health for four years of running the country, I'd assign Kamala Harris with significant P(dictator) mojo. Jill Biden as well (citing Wilson's wife).
Have you considered the possibility that all those writers and pundits are comfortable with dictators who back policies those writers and pundits agree with? To the point of not calling them out as dictators?
Someone who acts like an aspiring dictator is, by definition, not on "my side".
Saying that people, as a whole, are indifferent to bad behavior, as long as someone claims to be on "their team", whatever that means, is just lazy and undifferentiated equivocating.
P(-1) actually, as I consider the threat of juntas and oligarchs much wider and more pervasive than "actual dictators." Of course, if one did actually raise that spectre, one might have to critique "The Golden Democracies"
in Hungary since 2010 the constitution was changed about 5-6 times, and in the last ~6 years there was a permanent emergency (because COVID, then the Russian invasion)
was it absolute totalitarian North Korean? no, fortunately no.
was it absolute like absolutist monarchy? quite close, but decide for yourself, Joseph II was like a reverse Orban
What's your point with the number of changes to the constitution? Sweden's constitution has changed twice as many in that time frame, and Malta's has changed twice as many times as Sweden's.
Trying to explain (and provide some evidence) the lengths his regime went to shape the country to their needs using the power initially granted to them.
Of course without knowing the changes it's a bit meaningless, sorry, Wikipedia has more about the sham process of democratic consultations, and in general that the changes served to exert power and gain populist points (by further demonizing LGBTQ folks for example), and eventually to restrict freedom of assembly too.
I think it's more of a flaw with the electorate, considering that they kept electing Fidesz while these changes were being made. Sure, a system like Sweden's – where the electorate is given a chance to stop a constitutional change before it takes effect – is probably a good idea, but it doesn't seem to me like it would have had much of an effect here.
Preventing rise of dictators is only as successful as the checks in place. In the US, there is a tangible reduction in how much power rule of law holds. It's not a country meant to be run through EOs (that weakens democracy), nor one that's meant to ignore the supreme court ruling (see el salvador planes). The government did threaten to retaliate against media institutions, the president openly called for public figures who criticized him to be fired.
... I don't even want to go through the EOs to figure out one to pull for Biden, surely you can find something objectionable?
The government did threaten to retaliate against media institutions in the Biden era as well (and we're not just talking the SNL thing, which was funny and not relevant to this discussion).
How many checks needed to be thrown out for a demented man to assume the highest office?
I don't tend to think like that personally. The current state is that things are getting worse over there, and pointing fingers and going "they did it first" or "they're both guilty" doesn't really make things better.
I'm instead going to call out that the current state that's been reached is pretty concerning, which is what I'm doing above.
Really? For decades both sides have been rescinding people's green cards for writing op eds? Or threatening to yank broadcast licenses? Or rescinding security clearances for representing people they don't like? Or refusing to ok mergers for parent companies of newspapers who don't toe the line? Or excluding reporters from Pentagon briefings if they don't agree to be neutered? Give me a break.
1) Just *moving into the direction* of autocracy and dictatorship, in my mind, has to be called out and guarded against, no matter how small the steps are.
2) I think we might all underestimate how thin the lines between functional democracy and illiberal democracy and autocracy/dictatorshop really are. Famously, Adolf Hitler dismantled the democratic institutions from within, using the designated democratic processes for change (elections, parliamentary votes). Now look at the current state of the US institutions, how they work, what their intentions are and how the separation of powers is currently working out. It's a quick, short jump from democracy to autocracy, with no clear line delineating one from the other.
Perhaps not so famously, Adolf Hitler didn't need to pass laws about the jews. Those were Emergency Health Decrees, and perfectly within his Executive Authority.
Something that was brought up when Trump/Biden started using "Emergency Health Orders"...
Supreme Court is putting separation of powers back on the table, both by throwing Roe V Wade back to the states (separating states from federal), and by curtailing the "generous reading" of the Executive Branch's purview to make rules.
I disagree, let me explain. Let's talk about the most textbook dictator example: Hitler. He was elected. Also, there were Bundestag elections, several ones, and each and every time, the members fully legally voted infinite power to Hitler, and then proceeded to do nothing as they had no real job left. This was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 several times extended. It looked entirely legal on paper.
The "trick" was that every candidate who was known not to vote for this act was discouraged from running by having a very ugly talk with the Gestapo. Or more than talk. Which was clearly a crime, a very hidden crime. It was not done in the open.
So let's make a list:
1) one person gets extreme power
2) legally, on the surface
3) but supported by hidden crimes.
This is not so far from Orbán, who also had an enabling act allowing him as the executive to legislate, who put his guys everywhere so he could control everything from the supreme court to much of the press and much of the economy. That is close to the first point. Also, it was entirely legal on the surface. Third, massive crimes happened, thankfully not the violent kind, no one was tortured or incarcerated, rather the crime was that they stole money and ran a propaganda machine for it.
Clearly, Orbán was not Hitler, far far far less bad, but positive on all three indicators.
> Or maybe painting him as a dictator was just a smear job by Western media […]
I haven't really seen Orban being called a "dictator" in reputable Western media, and he obviously isn't one. Not yet at least. Him not being a dictator doesn't preclude him working to become one. And him peacefully handing over power doesn't mean he believes in democratic ideals, it only means that his hold on power isn't nearly as firm as would be required to ignore the election results.
Orban was able to use underhanded methods to keep power for decades. His control over state media basically gave him a self-reinforcing mechanism. His political position allowed him to control the media which allowed him to keep his political position. That's a sort of crooked democracy, but there were still elections, and there haven't been any substantial examples of actual subversion of democracy (forceful intimidation of voters, stuffing of ballot boxes, etc.).
He was never really a dictator. His power still required an electoral victory. The army and the whole government followed him because he was their elected leader. Calling him a dictator for all this time really diminishes the value of the word dictator.
Lack of a clear dividing line between functioning democracy and dictatorship with show elections does not mean you can't approximate where people fall on the spectrum. Putin is far on the end of dictatorship, Orban is on the end towards democracy. Corrupt democracy perhaps, but certainly not dictatorship.
And where does "puppet king" Biden fall? (don't welch and say "Exactly where Wilson did.")
I'm out of patience with people who won't say "we had a problem with unelected leadership" in the last Administration. I mean, really, did you PLAN to elect a neoconservative government starring Vicky Nuland?
I mean, Biden stepped down and Kamala lost the election, then there was a smooth transition of power, so far toward the side of democracy? We do this successfully every 4-8 years so I don't think you can call the Biden admin a dictatorship.
FBI has the papers, of "mailed-in" election ballots that weren't even folded in Georgia (active case). Smooth transitions of power do not generally involve Acts of War on our Allies or military plans to put tanks on State Legislature's lawns -- or maybe I've been reading this all wrong, are we supposed to have mythical water leaks as a matter of smooth transitions? And pipe bombs in the DNC/RNC (that were very conveniently not investigated by Congress during their Jan 6th hearings)?
I care more about the result than the sanctity of the process. If whatever change you implement makes it more likely that right guy takes office, I'd support it. And vice versa. (Of course, there's a far bigger problem that the guy who campaigns on the right policies changes course after winning, and doesn't implement what he promised, but that's a deeper problem with "representative democracy," not fixable with minor tweaks to election systems.)
> I care more about the result than the sanctity of the process.
...the wrong guy also has followers that think this way. How confident are you, really, that the right side is better at subverting the system than the wrong side? Wouldn't it be better if the right-minded people had a fair chance, rather than leaving the whole thing to a dice roll of who's got the trickier trickster on their side?
I care about the sanctity of the process /because/ I care about the result.
This turns pretty critically on who the right guy is and how you decide that. If the majority of people in your country want Mr Smith to be president but Mr Smith is a drooling idiot who will lead the country to ruin, is Mr Smith the right guy?
psst! I'm okay with calling Putin a dictator! Really, I am!** The guy I was responding to seemed to be having difficulties finding "anyone who counts" as a dictator.
**well, okay, if you want to get technical, Putin is a strongman supported by an oligarchy, but his elections are certainly not "free and democratic," even if he is genuinely popular.
Boris Yeltsin would probably disagree with that. He won what seems to have been a fair and contested election to the Presidency of the Russian Republic, technically a subordinate position at the time, but it rapidly became clear to all concerned that Russia was going to be ruled by the Russian Republic going forward, not the Soviet Union, and the Soviet leadership transferred power accordingly.
Yeah, but he resigned from the Communist party and won a contested election as a not-Communist who was actually going to run Russia without just being a mouthpiece for the Party. That's a real transfer of power, as was the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union
"Electoral autocracy" is just a confusion of ideology and regime type. I said at the time these people were going to be embarrassed when these regimes were just voted out of office and quietly went. First in Poland, now Hungary. It almost happened in Turkey and will eventually. My prediction was wrong only in that they're not embarrassed and have adapted the language of overthrowing a dictatorship to winning an election.
Exactly. The way they talk it's like they overthrew Orban in some kind of colour revolution. As far as I can see what happened is that Orban became unpopular, the opposition broke the habit of a lifetime and got their act together and he lost the election. That just seems standard stuff in a democracy. From what I can gather Orban was indeed quite corrupt but his main claim to be a dictator seems to come from not doing what the EU told him he should.
Perhaps they are talking like that because that's what they did? Democracies are relatively easy to... ratfuck I think is the word. People who aren't dictators (including Trump, despite the plans to put tanks on the Pa Legislature's lawn) simply step down.
You lose a lot of worldwide respect if you need to ratfuck your own elections, though. Biden couldn't even get Saudi Arabia to pick up the phone when he called, jaysus ceerist.
he became unpopular, lost in 2002, then he moved from a center-right ideology to a nationalist populist "Christian" one, and riding the wave of the 2008 recession he got absolute majority, *then* he started to prepare for the long haul (media capture, good old clientelism, any and all public works became ridiculously expensive and certain well positioned companies became very profitable overnight, and so on), then changed the system with the absolute majority, to remain in power.
and then it happened 3 more times.
sure, it's Eastern Europe after all, so quite standard stuff yes, but it's definitely not what we (and I assume most people) want to standardize as democracy.
Authoritarian sounds a lot more neutral than dictator (or for god's sake, fascist). People make authoritarian arguments, people have authoritarian personalities. If we could all just call "Those who are leaning on the Order part of Law and Order" authoritarian, I'd be happy.
It's a relatively negative word, but it's a useful term that has broad applicability.
Orban set up the system so rural votes counted more, but he didn't count on competent opposition which campaigned in rural areas, nor on having pissed off everyone with his level of corruption.
As for whether he was a dictator, I guess dictator/not dictator isn't a simple distinction.
Yes, the word "dictator" does seem OTT for Orban, but might I point out that Lucius Cornelius Sulla [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulla ] handed over power and retired (although I'm not sure if that was the result of an election). Mind you, after that he did ensure he had ten thousand military veterans watching his back!
ISTM that having too much power concentrated in the hands of the boss is a bad thing, but that it is far less bad when elections are reasonably fair and the boss actually loses power when the vote goes against him.
Roman Dictators were the equivalent of American "commander in chief" -- they were elected for a specific purpose, and were supposed to retire afterwards. It was a big 'social convention' that they would, and there were a lot of them that did so.
Dictator, in the Roman sense, has next to nothing to do with any idea of retaining power at all. In that sense, dictator has drifted so far outside of its semantic remit that it might as well be a new word.
Should I assume that everyone who is complaining about this is also upset with 150 years of America Electoral Policy? We only got "one person one vote" in the 1960s for god's sake!
oh, you sweet son-of-a-bitch, I could kiss you. : - ) Seriously, there's actually someone around here who's upset at the Supreme Court for "One Person One vote"?! Care to explain what your complaints are?
SCOTUS simply made up the claim that everything in our constitutional system leads toward that. On the contrary, the ONE part of the Constitution prohibited from amendment is the equal representation of the states, which goes AGAINST "one man, one vote".
When what brings you down is opposition who campaigns well in rural areas and the public finding out about your corruption, I think the word "dictator" just doesn't fit.
1) Orbán was an autocrat who did every underhanded thing he though he could get away with to cement his power.
2) He was not willing to do away with democracy in the narrow sense of peaceful transfer of power by means of elections. (Whether that's out of genuinely held beliefs or pragmatism and sense of self-preservation is not an easily resolved question. Nor is the question of what exactly made the choice pragmatic - it can just as well be outside pressure due to Hungary's immersion in EU institutions, or inside pressure of Hungary's population that would make his rule unsustainable without popular backing.)
3) Western(-aligned) Media are inherently dishonest and use "democratic" and "on our (globalist-liberal) team" (as well as "dictator" and "not on our team") interchangeably, to the point where the terms lose all their literal meaning.
tl;dr: It was a smear job, and also (purely incidentally) true, and also (purely incidentally) overblown.
One general complaint I have about most media coverage of foreign right-wing leaders is that they're *all* the second coming of Hitler. Like, it doesn't seem to matter whether the guy's actual policies involve slightly tightening up immigration enforcement or invading Poland for liebenstraum, the panicky tone of the coverage is the same. And yet, it's seems clear that Meloni != LePen != Orban != Modi != Ergodan.
The left seems remarkably loath to rewrite their propaganda, even when the other side insists on behaving "not like the second coming of Hitler." (See Jan 6th).
Then again, Build Back Better wound up on about three different plates (Aussies, Brits, America) -- and one of those isn't a commonwealth country, and would "on general principle" use different language (or vice versa).
The Left gets a script for "Bad RightWing Man" and then rolls it out to everyone they want to tar with the "Bad Man" script. Disagreement with The Powers That Be is enough to be called a dictator now (one need not be Gaddafi, who was perfectly fine up until he threatened the world financial order)
What kind of broken conceptual apparatus would make you call "Powers That Be" "The Left"?
I mean, if you get to this point, how can you even complain about others "rolling the script out"? Feels like the pot calling the kettle [racial slur].
The guys who want you eating bugs (without pets, god how they hate pets) and unable to travel outside your "little bughive" without permission(god forbid you want to live in the suburbs!**), and are willing to try and destroy the gasoline-based car market in order to accomplish their goals? The ones making buck on the whole "Global Warming" stuff? ("Green" your company by putting money into our NGOs?) You've noticed that "environmental attacks" on Famous Paintings result in absolutely no consequences to the Museum Directors? They literally turn a blind eye (compare with the Napoleonic Jewel Heist, where significant leadership roles resigned in disgrace).
Okay, I could go on from this point, but I'm just going to ask -- how many quotes from Davos do I need to give you?
[You want to be on the Left and disclaim all of these people, say you want better media in place to make sure 4 years of Good Old Joe never happened? Join the club.]
Does "the right" have scripts? Yes, but the Right is playing Captain Chaos Cards from the "What will Trump do next". Scripts aren't the problem -- the lack of ability to roll out more than one at a time represents a significant weakness on The Left that Trump is exploiting (Sue Harvard! Why not? It's all government money anyway. USAID! Get rid of the penny! Steal Venezuela's Dictator!) -- and there's a separate problem with "refusal to rewrite scripts after your predictions fail" (e.g. covid19 was supposed to kill a lot more Americans, so the immigrants were supposed to backfill all the jobs that we Didn't Have People To Do -- you can see rhyming propaganda being pushed by the leader of Spain, PM Sanchez, in the past day or two)
**I'm a proud urban non-car-owner. Complaining about the "enforcers" is still kosher, though.
Ireland is calling in the army* to remove farmers protesting fuel prices, because apparently their green energy commitments are more important than actually letting farmers grow crops and raise animals. (This follows some dumping of horse manure in Brussels, and appears to be an ongoing thing in Europe, where literal farmers are being run out of business because they're somehow "not green enough"). Shall I mention Sri Lanka, where the country's government decided to go organic, and then, the farmers burnt government buildings down in a riot (due to massive crop failures)? --- All of this points to a distinct lack of power in the military/national security apparatus to put the kibosh on governmental actions that are not in the interest of National Security (and it's at about that point that I start talking "The Powers That Be").
*Is this martial law?
I'm actually feeling a little bad about ranting about this as if it's all "Green Green Green" -- immigration, diversity, "gay rights" are all part of this "Leftist" Powers That Be**.
**If you want to say that they're simply cloaking a nefarious agenda in "Leftist Colors" I'd say that's extremely accurate, and probably more accurate than me carelessly referring to them as "Left."
"Ireland is calling in the army* to remove farmers protesting fuel prices, because apparently their green energy commitments are more important than actually letting farmers grow crops and raise animals. "
Sigh. It's not like that. Farmers, yes, but also hauliers and others (the school bus drivers are getting in on the act too, so I have been informed). Husband of a work colleague went to one of the protests because he's a lorry driver for a large manufacturer locally.
What happened was that the government rapidly gave in and gave a 10c excise deduction, but since before they folded, people had been panic-buying fuel, petrol stations ran out of supplies and - due to the blockades - couldn't get refills. That's why the army was called in - blockading the oil refinery in Cork isn't going to help ease the problem of high fuel prices.
Which our government can't really control much, anyway, because if there's no damn fuel supply because Iran can't get its oil to market, then they can't magic more oil out of thin air. It's not about pushing green energy, it's about we're a small island on the periphery and depending on importing fuel and if there's no fuel to be got, it's too damn bad.
The police were the main force involved, and asked for the help of the Defence Forces, so if anyone is visualising American-style National Guard interventions, that's not what happened:
"If you are just joining us, here are the latest developments on the fifth day of the protests over fuel prices:
- Defence Forces units are at the Whitegate oil refinery in east Cork.
- The Garda Public Order Unit has deployed pepper spray and pushed back protesters to enter the Whitegate facility.
- A meeting between Government ministers and representatives of farmers and hauliers is under way.
- The meeting aims to finalise a new Government package of fuel supports.
- It has emerged that the package will include a temporary Fuel Support Scheme aimed at the haulage, agri and contractor sectors.
- Around 600 filling stations across the country are out of petrol and diesel.
- Road closures remain in place in parts of the country due to blockades."
"Fuel trucks have regained access to an oil refinery that had been subjected to a days-long blockade after gardaí cleared protesters from the entrance.
In a major operation involving scores of gardaí, large tractors that had been blocking the entrance to the Whitegate oil refinery in Co Cork were moved and fuel tankers were once again able to access the site.
The operation to secure the site took approximately an hour and saw some physical clashes between the Public Order Unit and protesters, including instances where pepper spray was used.
Members of the Defence Forces were also at the scene as An Garda Síochána, had requested the availability of a military heavy-lift recovery truck if it needed to tow any of the large tractors or trucks involved in the blockade.
Gardaí escorted the fuel trucks to the premises."
There was some public criticism of the protests and blockades since it meant people were not able to get to hospitals for appointments, particularly the major hospitals in Dublin (if you're down the country and seriously ill, you'll probably get referred to a Dublin hospital for testing and treatment, and trying to get to Dublin when the roads are blocked off is very difficult).
Though the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, is facing the prospect of a heave by his own party in the wake of all this:
While looking into this, I learned about the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party which was the fourth most popular party in the 2022 election and got 3.27% of the vote and six seats in Parliament.
> The party platform promised eternal life, world peace, a one-day workweek, two sunsets a day (in assorted colours), lower gravity, free beer, and low taxes.[9][better source needed] Other electoral pledges have included building a mountain on the Great Hungarian Plain. Party election posters were mostly in Szeged and featuring the candidate István Nagy, who is a two-tailed dog, with slogans such as "He's so cute, surely he isn't going to steal"
Sadly they only got 0.87% of the vote this time around. Also interesting in the electoral results are the huge number of parties promising "National Self-Government of..." various groups from other nearby countries, starting with "...Germans" who got 24,630 votes and finishing with Bulgarians who got just 157. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Self-Government_of_Germans_in_Hungary
(To which I'm tempted to say that if you want national self-government of Germans then you should probably just move to Germany, but I'm not sure they have that there any more either.)
He's not a dictator, but much of the world exists in a blurry middleground between the binary that 'dictatorship' and 'democracy' implies. There's a lot you can do to subvert democracy without abolishing it, and Orban wasn't above any of it really.
Ultimately, he lost masively, he's surrounded by countries who want him to lose massively and who knew he lost massively, and the atreets are full of people who again want and know his loss. If he tries to subvert an outcome like that, it would very likely fail. And the cost of failure would no longer be 'investigations into corruption' but rather 'firing squads'.
Yeah, democracy exists on a scale, it is not a "yes or no" question.
The central examples are that in democracy you can always change the government in fair elections, and in dictatorship the only way to change the government is a military coup.
Then there is the gray zone where for example the current ruler owns all the TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers; and uses a combination of legal and extralegal tools to destroy all competition. There are technically elections every few years, but it is extremely difficult for the population to coordinate on an alternative, because most people probably haven't even heard of an alternative or a reason why they might want to vote for it. So the only way you could lose is if too many people hate you too much, despite all the media convincing them that everything bad is actually caused by your enemies. Plus you can manipulate the votes, such as changing the law so that the votes of people in big cities practically don't count, and you also collect votes from people living abroad in a way that your opposition cannot verify. -- And yes, you *can* still lose, but it requires a "once in a few decades" type of situation. So not exactly a dictatorship, but not much of democracy either.
Democracy exists on some kind of scale, but also most people talk about "democracy" when they mean something more like "modern 21st century Western liberal democracy with a generous welfare state and substantial civil liberties." But ISTM that the load-bearing part of democracy is that the public can vote the bastards out and vote new bastards in. That's the thing that is required, to make the people in power care what happens to the people of the country. Democracy has little to do with whether your country treats gays well or which decisions are made by judges vs legislators vs the executive. It only has a little to do with even really fundamental rights (from an American perspective, anyway) like freedom of speech or religion--many EU counties have substantial restrictions on speech that includes pretty explicitly political speech, but still seem democratic. The UK arrests people for mean tweets, many countries have fined politicians for speeches they gave, but those countries are still places where elections ultimately decide who has power.
I think focusing in on only the existance of elections is a little too narrow. Is it still a democracy if you can freely vote but:
1. It's illegal to criticize the government in the media?
2. The main opposition candidate was conveniently found guilty of some ill-defined "corruption" charges a month before the elections?
3. Voting laws systematically exclude those who might be sceptical of the government from voting?
In general, if you want to go from on-paper democracy to de-facto democracy, you rather inevitably end up with some institutional requirements like "independent judiciary" and "freedom of speech". Rotting away at those institutions is how you end up on the road towards dictatorships, and while Hungary was moving in that direction they obviously were nowhere near as far gone as something like Russia.
I think this is right, though I also think it's too easy to give a pass to your own society's restrictions on democracy. I mean, in the US, we routinely have judges just flat throw out laws passed by elected legislators and signed by elected governors/presidents. That often leads to good results, but it doesn't seem like it has much to do with democracy. For that matter, the whole way our presidential elections work is pretty undemocratic (winner take all within a state so no Democrat in Texas or Republican in California ever has a voice in who the president is), most states let the politicians draw the voting districts to maximize their number of seats, some states have set-aside minority-majority districts to ensure some seats for the minority group, etc. I'd say we're still a more-or-less democratic society.
I think the core question is whether the public can get rid of the people in power. The more the state / politicians can put a thumb on the scales (suppress the opposition party, draw the voting districts to shut out some voices, annul sufficiently unpleasant election results), the less that feedback works, but as long as "enough" of it works (for some hard-to-define version of "enough") the public still gets a say, and so the powerful people still have to care what the voters think about what's going on.
I think the most obviously undemocratic thing about the US is how difficult it is to change their federal constitution (which I suppose is part of the reason why they let judges make up new constitutional law instead). They haven't changed it in 34 years, and that change took over two centuries to get ratified.
If you mean why he did not get the popular vote, it was a series of well-timed scandals, likely with the help of Western intelligence services, for example phone calls with Lavrov telling him he is doing a good job making Europe unhappy. Corruption, general dysfunction and pro-Russia stances were the three biggest thing the voters did not want. They are okay with a conservative government, the next government will be conservative too, in fact there are now only conservatives and far-righters in Parliament and zero liberals, but they want the efficient, uncorrupted and pro-Western kind of conservatism.
If you mean why he conceded fast, well, there were very clear signs the military and the police is not on his side. If you want to talk about dictators, although he was not one, not having the military and the police on the dictator's side is basically EPIC FAIL.
It is a classic dictator EPIC FAIL to cut the pay of soldiers, and their equipment, and piss them off in general. Surely that handbook says that?
I mean look at the French Revolution. King Louis managed to piss off the senior military staff by kicking their friends into pension as a way to cut costs, the middle officer staff by banning the promotion of those with too young nobility, and the common soldiers through draconical discipline. He had to send the troops out from Paris, because they were unreliable. The rest what happened is obvious? There was no one around to defend the Bastille. So that is really an autocrat EPIC FAIL. Keep the soldiers happy and you can get away with a lot of things.
I signed up with a throwaway email account, but have not tried participating in any topics yet (none piqued my interest). A couple of notes:
* I chose a fairly weak password when creating the account, but the site did not warn me about this.
* The welcome message says "no real money required", but all the debates have scoring metrics that look like "$20/$80", and my account appears to have "$100" in credit. It would be good to explain more explicitly that you're talking about play money, or perhaps use a symbol other than "$".
Played around a bit. So far, it feels like the first stage of a generative adversarial network: Essentially, we are trying to figure out your current AI judge's reward function and find inputs that maximize that. Fun, but too disparate from truth-seeking to feel rewarding.
I played an opponent in showdown whose pacing and phrasing seemed like an AI (perhaps taking the second step of this GAN). They got great scores simply telling a personal anecdote and describing how the emotional thrust of that anecdote supported their case. I don't know if this is optimal for this judge, or optimal for your RLHF of that judge, or optimal for the arguments you'd like the site to produce. As far as I can tell, there's no way of answering the latter questions from the site (and no way of answering the first except by playing).
Ultimately I think what's needed here is more judging of judge: If you laid your principles of what a good argument is in a clear "constitution", each judgment could be criticized by some aligned community as not optimally following that constitution. Over time, better judges could then be created.
On practice mode, I found that nearly all my feedback asked for more, more more: more evidence, more counterarguments, etc. Putting in made-up quotes or scientific studies increased my score by 5-10 points each. Not going back to correct typos also increased my score, if it let me get one more sentence in under the time limit.
On quick match, my two opponents both put in perfectly spelled, multi-paragraph answers with multiple named, dated sources. I assume they were using AI.
Yeah, I didn’t sign up for a speed-typing contest against an AI. If that’s what it does, you should at least make those matches not count towards the user’s ELO.
While we’re on the topic of fake points that feel bad to lose, it would be nice if quick match users could decline a topic if they know nothing about it.
Can I understand why I’ve been hearing so much about Christianity in connection with rationalism and EA recently? In my current worldview, religion is still the same problematic institution denounced by Richard Dawkins years ago, and anyone who holds religious beliefs is, de facto, irrational (again, just stating my world model without presuming it is correct).
Are there good sources for understanding the “rational Christian” viewpoint, so that I might update my model?
Right now, my intuition is that Christianity is mainly used as a shelling point to organize community activities and coordinate moral behavior. Is that all it is, or is there something more in terms of the underlying ontology they actually hold?
My, admittedly cynical, take: there are still way more Christians (especially in the USA) than Rationalists/EA types, and so getting the nicer ones (more liberal in views, less doctrinaire, more intelligent and willing to move with the times) of us Bible-bashing rabble on-board means infiltrating the institutions and engaging in entryism to take over enough influence, at least, to shift churches towards EA-type goals. All that charitable donation and community organisation turned away from worship of God towards worship of the machine. Ready made network of established status and connections to steer towards the better goals as defined by Utilitarianism: greatest happiness of the greatest number in saecula saeculorum, amen!
Agreed; indeed, from the Rationalist perspective, hijacking Christian community networks is a perfectly rational course of action. After all, we're saving the world from imminent doom here, right ? What nobler goal is there ?
Some Christians believe their religion literally, but many are there simply because their parents were there, they were raised as religious from childhood, and there is a social pressure to remain... and they rationalize it to themselves either as "it's better to be safe, just in case the afterlife really exists", or "it's probably all just fairy tales, but if religion tells people to be nice, then it is a noble lie and should be supported".
To the latter, you can say "well, you can also be nice by helping other people, and there are more efficient ways than giving the money to your church authorities".
I know your take is cynical, but it reminded me of a Chesterton's Fence scenario I experienced.
Decades ago, I was a rationalist agnostic dating a girl who worked in youth programs at a church. It was perhaps an odd pairing, but she was hot and nice and I ended up being a regular church goer as a result.
A few people in the congregation's leadership got enthusiastic about sending aid to Africa. So they made a big pitch for a years-long commitment to tithes for aid. These leaders naively assumed that congregants would donate to Africa in addition to their normal tithe to the general operating fund. Instead, people tithed to the Africa fund instead of the general fund. (What great EAs!)
The general fund at most churches pays for building expenses, utilities, and salaries. Within six months, the budget was in enough of a hole that the church let several employees go, including my wife. The childrens' programs suffered greatly as a result. A good childrens' program is a huge draw for a church, and weekly attendance declined with the youth program.
With the decrease in attendance, tithes dropped. The leaders saw the writing on the wall and saw they couldn't afford the Africa program. So now zero dollars are being allocated for overseas aid (they still do a great deal of classic church charity work in the local area, like running a food pantry).
That's the thing, people talk about (as in comments here) money going to church facilities instead of charity, and I think often they have in mind the kind of American (which has spread to the Global South) Prosperity Gospel type of ministers who buy their own jets and the like.
But even EA projects have administrative overhead that *some* proportion of donations go towards, and church administration is the same - paying the wages of secretaries, programmes for members, printing the bulletins, heat and light, etc. It's not all "megachurch pastor shilling on TV for his second luxury car".
The more rational Christians are the ones who take the religion less literally, every Christian is to some degree irrational, maybe encouraging more of the less irrational version of Christianity can be good, but I think ultimately we want the whole thing gone
That's my feeling too, which is why I think attempts to do "Christianity and..." as in "Christianity and Effective Altruism" are suicide attempts.
To quote from "The Screwtape Letters":
"On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice."
"The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call "Christianity And". You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing."
I think he was saying that ultimately, he wants the "whole thing" of Christianity gone, which I know you would disagree with. That's a pretty timely quote though.
I think "Christianity and something" is better than "Christianity", and is useful to get people with religious tendencies to be more reasonable. Christianity can be seen as a useful fiction, but I think there can be just as useful fictions that are less likely to result in bigotry.
I think that if we're talking about Christianity and wanting it to survive, then "Christianity and something" is not better. It's exactly what you describe happening there - for someone whose interest is in the "and something", then Christianity is at best a tool and something ultimately to be disposed of in order to let the "something" be the important, major focus.
So if someone is Christian and trying to use the "Christianity and something" as any kind of a hook, they are only knotting the noose to hang themselves.
I think this applies to any movement; once you start diluting it with mission creep, the movement loses focus. At best, it becomes a financial instrument with extra bells and whistles; at worst, it falls apart.
Hmm... As an atheist/agnostic (with finite uncertainty, of course) myself, I'm happy to see a Christian revival as an impediment to Islamization. Does 'Christian and not-Muslim' count as one of the 'Christianity And' groups, according to C.S.Lewis's view?
No, it would not, because it is a statement of belief. Unless someone is trying to create some sort of political stance (we in X are Christians not Muslims) then it's not the same as trying to use Christianity as a peg to hang your pet cause on.
I’m certain that Galileo will be devastated once he learns of Dawkins opinion of his faith. Though perhaps he should have thought more carefully about pissing off his patrons . . .
If you're relying on the Pope to back you up against the Pigeon League, then don't write a book putting quotes allegedly the position on the topic the Pope holds into the mouth of the "dumb idiot" character 😁
Galileo was a bit like Dawkins in that both of them never met a controversy they didn't want to have an opinion on, and absolute certainty they were right and everyone else was a moron.
There’s that yes. His life seems to be one of Really Cool Discoveries like (Galilean) Relativity and Going Out Of His Way to Piss Off the Powerful. He’d have been better off going to Germany and nailing his theories to the church door.
Tyco and That Polish Dude with the Oddly Latin Name, Copernicus, both published on heliocentricism around the same time and died in their own beds.
Tycho had his own system, which was explicitly geocentric, but under the hood it was basically just Copernican heliocentrism with a coordinate transformation to a non-inertial reference frame where the Earth is defined as always being at (0,0,0). The Sun and the Moon then revolve around the Earth, and most everything else revolves about the Sun.
Tycho favored this for religious and aesthetic reasons; a moving Earth just felt so wrong he had to transmogrify everything else to fit around a stationary Earth. And then a century of Catholic astronomers went with the Tychonic system because that damned idiot Galileo had poisoned the geocentric well and it was safer to just do the silly bit of extra math and get on with their work than to risk pissing off the Vatican with the simple true version.
I have been in the rationalist space for over a decade and have become Christian over the last 5, with regular church attendance starting about 4 years ago. I was held back from Christianity by the rationalist strawman of Christianity for a long time, but there are limits to rationality. I ended up too rational to cope with the narrow scope of what rationalism affords and I started looking for answers elsewhere. The Christian intellectual tradition gave me the answers I needed. The Christian worldview fits reality better, affords more, and has led to a deeper and more fulfilling life for me and my loved ones. If other rationalists have a similar experience to mine, I can see why they would post about it.
I am no Rationalist, but still, your perspective intrigues me. This may be a stupid question, but what do you mean by being "Christian" ? I was always under the impression that Christianity implies faith in the supernatural ("the evidence of things not seen"), and is thus explicitly and deliberately irrational. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, who knows), I'm the kind of person who is unable to make himself believe propositions at will, and thus Christianity of this sort is not an option for me. But perhaps you are one of the people (arguably the majority) who can alter their beliefs at will; or perhaps your version of Christianity is not supernatural ?
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”
A promise of Christianity is that you do not need to logic yourself into faith on your own. If you pray to be gifted faith, it will be gifted. You are then no longer in a place where the belief is unjustified by your experience - you have felt cause and effect directly. Once you find yourself here, the worldview is internally consistent thereafter.
> If you pray to be gifted faith, it will be gifted.
But this is a Catch-22: how can I sincerely pray to an entity who, to the best of my knowledge, does not exist ? Sure, I can mouth the words and perform the rituals and wear the special clothes (if any), but from my point of view doing all that is no different from cosplay at a LARP. Surely God would know of my insincerity even if I managed to somehow convince all the Christians, would he not ?
True, you need to be less than completely certain of your atheism in order to call out in sincere, humble hope of a reply. If you are not able to open your mind to the possibility - if it is already fully made up beyond swaying - I don't really know how to help with that. Seems like that sort of thing could be a problem for many rationalist pursuits also, though. If we're not prepared to examine positions that we find alien and think are only a little likely to be true, I frankly don't see how half the conversations that happen here can happen in seriousness.
> If you are not able to open your mind to the possibility...
As I'd said before, my mind is not open to any possibility of anything; at least, not in the way that I think you mean. For example, whenever I look at a rock, I cannot convince myself that it is a rabbit or an apple or even a turtle. I can certainly imagine the possibility intellectually (after all, I've been wrong many times before), but imagining a counterfactual world is not the same as convincing yourself that you do in fact live there. So the best I could do is say, "by all appearances this appears to be a plain old rock, and though I could always be wrong, in this case I don't think I am".
...I mean, I literally just quoted that: "not by works, so that no one can boast".
Christianity has been wrestling with free will vs predestination since well before the likes of Daniel Dennet and modern conversations about determinism. The God described in the bible isn't looking for coerced automatons. He's looking for people to come of their own free will. This isn't about performing a magic ritual correctly. This is about making up your mind to call out for help, and verbalising the result of that.
Well, you said it's to the best of your knowledge, which seems to leave room for some uncertainty (and is certainly the most defensible position). I think "God, if you do exist, in whatever form you exist" is a valid starting place for a prayer.
That is true; I could certainly pray this prayer, though of course the answer would depend on what kind of God actually exists (if any). Many versions of the Christian God would not grant me faith, as they stringently avoid impinging on free will. Eldritch abominations such as Cthulhu would not care, as they require sacrifice, not mere prayer. The Kami likely would not hear me unless I visited them personally in Japan. Odin demands valiant deeds, not pretty words, and Loki can't be trusted at all... and so on. So the fact that I've prayed the prayer and got no special revelations in return tells me very little.
Maimonides would say (as Jews do) that your performing of the rituals, even insincerely, is helping the community. So long as you keep your unbelief to yourself, you're still a good jew who isn't particularly harming the community with your disbelief. (This runs alongside the strain of faith where "doubt is the handmaiden of truth" and "god gave us brains to think. If we doubt god, that's his own damn fault").
I believe most Christian denominations, even those not explicitly Reformed / Calvinist or otherwise heavy on the predestination side, ascribe the work of the Holy Spirit to these types of questions. As Jesus said, "What is impossible with man is possible with God."
Faith is a gift, and it's not a certainty that everyone will have it. It's very difficult. If you cannot be convinced in your reason, then you won't be converted, and trying to 'nice force' anyone into it won't work in the long run.
Reason alone won't get you there, but if a little voice in the back of your head keeps piping up "this is all nonsense" then trying to pretend you believe what you don't is not enough. Better a sincere atheist trying to do good by his lights than an unhappy believer who doubts everything he tries to pretend he holds, because that kind of doubt then corrodes everything and eventually you might end up doubting even doing good.
I agree with the sentiment, but not the ultimate conclusion. I think it is incredibly important for a person who wants to do good to doubt himself !Too many terrible acts in history have been perpetrated by people who convinced themselves that they were doing good beyound any shadow of a doubt, that their path is the only proper path, and that some unfortunate sacrifices must be made in the name of this Greater Good.
I think you're using a spurious definition of "supernatural". As Richard Carrier explains, the distinction between natural and supernatural isn't about what's observable, it's about whether a phenomenon is reducible to non-mental entities.
> As Richard Carrier explains, the distinction between natural and supernatural isn't about what's observable, it's about whether a phenomenon is reducible to non-mental entities.
Sure, but this is not a definition that I find useful. When someone tells me that e.g. angels exist, I'm not interested in the abstract philosophical grounding of angelic entities; rather, my immediate question is, "how can I verify that these things exist at all ?" This question is not just applicable to angels, of course; for example, few people seriously believed in neutrinos until they were detected; and few people believe in quantum loop gravity today for the same reason.
> lack of *sight* is not the same thing as a complete lack of evidence.
Agreed; I was talking about evidence in general, not literal visual sight. I think it's reasonable to assume that the Biblical usage of "sight" in this case is metaphorical.
Yes, this is what I tried to convey when I mentioned neutrinos -- which cannot be detected directly by e.g. ordinary human vision, and in fact require sophisticated detectors to be built just so we can infer the neutrinos' existence.
> this is not a definition that I find useful. [...] my immediate question is, "how can I verify that these things exist at all ?"
I agree that the question of whether a thing exists is almost always more important than whether the thing is reducible to non-mental entities. Regardless, in ordinary language, the word "supernatural" is relevant to the latter question, not the former.
> I think it's reasonable to assume that the Biblical usage of "sight" in this case is metaphorical.
The most direct counterpoint is 1 Peter 3:15: "[..] Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. [...]".
Additionally, there's important historical context to consider. Christianity's central claim--Jesus's resurrection--is based on eyewitness testimony. Consequently, it makes perfect sense for Biblical authors to distinguish between a lack of firsthand experience and a general lack of evidence.
Hi bugmaster, thanks for your reply. I understand where you are coming from and think you are asking good questions. I worry that you will find my answers unsatisfying because there is a gulf between our experiences and worldview that an internet reply can't hope to fill. I will try to reframe your questions and respond to them. Let me know if my reframing seems off.
1. Does my Christian belief involve belief in the supernatural?
Short answer: yes.
More accurate but probably confusing answer: in becoming Christian, I entered into a worldview that predates the modern natural/supernatural dichotomy. This is one of the hardest things to communicate about my journey to becoming Christian. My epistemology has changed and my categories of reality have changed with them. I believe in God, angels, demons, all manner of things that my prior self would have called supernatural. My worldview has become more phenomenological now and I see myself as participating in a hierarchy of being that encompasses all things. From my current worldview, there is no line in that hierarchy that delineates the natural from the supernatural. We humans are made in God's image and can participate in the divine by following Christ. At the same time, we are made of dust.
2. How do I believe propositions that cannot be reasoned about with rationalism? As a rationalist, how did I "convince" myself?
Short answer: non propositional ways of knowing
More accurate but probably confusing answer: Another commenter mentioned Chesterton here. He and many others have tried to give rational accounts of the faith better than I ever could, but I don't believe their accounts would necessarily satisfy what you are looking for. I was never personally persuaded by rational/logical arguments for Christianity before I converted. I'm a Catholic, and a fairly new one, so do not take my words below as a representation of the Church's teachings, but this is how I believe.
Christianity is a way seeing and being in the world, not a set of propositions (not sure if Protestents would agree on that point). Propositional knowledge is important and has greatly improved our standard of living, so we rightly venerate it. However, it is not the only type of knowledge.
Consider riding a bicycle. I could give lengthy explanations on what your body will need to do to stay balanced and propel yourself forward. I could give precise angles on how far to lean when you turn. You could spend years studying everything there is to know about riding a bike. But the person who gets on the bike and starts pedaling will know how to ride a bike better than you almost immediately. This form of knowing is procedural, not propositional. There are many things we learn in life (including things as foundational as how we think) that can only be learned through our embodied participation in reality. Becoming Christian is one of those things. It happens through participation, not sets of propositions.
There are other forms of knowledge out there (see John Vervaeke's 4 P's of Knowledge for more insight) that Christianity has broadly categorized as revelation. As a rationalist, I was predisposed to undervaluing these other types of knowing until I went deeper, and deeper, following the breadcrumbs until I got to a level of doubt about the world rivaling Descartes. The fact of the matter is that rationality is built on a set of recent modern presuppositions that, when seriously questioned (with the rigor of a good rationalist) leaves you alone in an abyss of doubt. Christianity and its non propositional ways of knowing brought me back to reality. Until I prayed, went to Mass, participated in the sacraments, loved my neighbor, etc, I was bound by the limits of rationality.
Rationality and propositional knowledge are still indispensable tools that I use to navigate the world. But I see them now in the context of a much bigger, more beautiful reality that has Christ (the Logos) at its center.
That is very informative, thanks ! That said, as per your bicycle analogy, I fear that don't think I have the capacity to truly understand what you are talking about. For example, when think about a rock, I do not follow some logical chain of reasoning that concludes, from first principles, that the rock must be there. Instead, I see the rock, touch it, taste it (if the fancy strikes me), and the conclusion "the rock exists" automatically forms in my mind. If you told me that the rock is actually a turtle, I could not bring myself to believe it until the rock exhibited some signs of turtle-dom (such as perhaps poking out a head and a tail).
Granted, there are many things I cannot directly observe, such as electrons or the country of China; but my mental process is largely the same. Once my senses have gathered enough evidence, be it direct or indirect, the conclusion forms in my mind; and only additional evidence can dislodge it. This isn't something I've diligently trained myself to do (although training does help to streamline this process), it's just how my mind has always worked.
I have tried participating in many religious rituals (not just Christian ones), but they've always left me feeling like a LARPer. As I'd said above, I don't understand how someone could sincerely pray to an entity one does not believe to exist -- and what use are insincere prayers ?
That said though, I'm no Rationalist either, nor a philosopher; for example, I don't believe that some ultimate philosophical grounding of all thought is necessary to make useful conclusions about, well, anything. I am perfectly content with admitting that my mind is flawed and total certainty is unachievable about any proposition, even the ones as seemingly rock-solid as "2+2=4". Perhaps this is another thing that separates me from the Christians -- I'm not sure.
At least for me, I only truly believed in Christianity after really seriously trying to live like Christianity was real. I had some faith, but it was mostly just me going out on a limb and seeing if it would work. I had a very reconstructionist view before and didn't really agree with Christian ethics. However, as I started trying to turn the other cheek as much as I could and started deeply reading the Bible, belief came and ethics came. I guess you could say God just altered my priors. I do rationally believe in Christianity too, just resulting from evidence for scripture and miracles, but it is secondary to my otherwise unexplainable belief.
That is fair, but as I'd said in another comment, I am unable to bring myself to commit a large amount of time and effort to the pursuit of a practice I currently believe to be false -- despite the possibility that, once I have done so, it may reveal itself to be true. Perhaps I would be more willing to commit if Christianity were the only such practice in existence, but it's not; I hear the same from Muslims, Buddhists, and even Wiccans. I find this fact difficult to reconcile with Christianity being the one true faith.
If you don't mind me asking; what does believing in angels and demons mean to you? Do you believe that these things influence the physical world? Do they deliver knowledge of the material world? Are they analogous to alignment with certain values or desires or affinities?
The following are my views that are hopefully aligned with the Church.
> What does believing in angels and demons mean?
I believe in a heavenly hierarchy that includes beings that exist between us and God. Some of these beings are interested in humanity, others are not. These are real entities, not just psychological constructs. They would exist even if we did not.
> Do you believe that these things influence the physical world?
They do not have physical bodies but can influence the world through us via dreams, revelation, temptation, etc. I am unsure about their power to physically manipulate reality and would need to look into that.
> Do they deliver knowledge of the material world?
I think we can be compelled toward certain knowledge by them, but as far as I know they do not dole out facts of the universe.
> Are they analogous to alignment with certain values or desires or affinities?
I think this is a fine way to understand angels/demons for nonreligious people. I would add that they can have desires/affinities that may be completely alien to human desires/affinities.
Christianity does indeed imply faith in the supernatural, and yet plenty of people do come into it from at least somewhat rational routes. Christianity (unlike many other religions) does claim to be anchored in a true, historical fact: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And many sceptics who've investigated this have found the evidence surprisingly compelling that this did indeed happen. This implies that Jesus is at the very least worth listening to to see what he said about himself. Christians share many principles with rationalists, including the desire to believe only what is true (e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:13-20); we just believe that that includes a creator God.
The rock example - does this rock exist? - is still in the realm of propositional knowledge and can be addressed with evidence. An example of a rock involving procedural knowledge would be the ability to turn a stone slab into a sculpture. That is not knowledge that can be obtained from disembodied evidence or observation. It is knowledge that you obtain through practicing the art of sculpture.
Point taken that participation in religious practices has not yielded any fruit for you. I'm curious, do you have any other spiritual or contemplative practices that you follow? Before I became a Christian, I followed a practice of meditation and has some mystical experiences that revealed to me the existence of a reality deeper than what I knew. Without those experiences I think it would have been more difficult for me to take the first step into my current faith.
> That is not knowledge that can be obtained from disembodied evidence or observation.
That's not entirely true, as people who become sculptors usually start with observation (of a teacher at work) and learning (from textbooks or YouTube videos, I suppose). And it seems that virtually anyone can learn the basics of sculpture merely by reading books and watching tutorials -- though of course not everyone could become a great sculptor, or even a mediocre one. Nonetheless, the process of becoming at least a novice sculptor is readily observable, repeatable, and (arguably) quite well studied.
> do you have any other spiritual or contemplative practices that you follow ?
I've tried meditation but could never make it work. I've tried hypnosis too, with similar results (or rather lack thereof). I've never taken hard drugs (nor am I planning on doing so, sorry), but I've been drunk -- and the experience can hardly be described as "mystical".
Presumably, if God does exist, then he knows exactly what kind of an experience would bring me to faith -- but chooses not to grant me one. It seems that God would prefer me to remain an atheist; and, being a humble atheist, who am I to challenge the will of God ?
No contention from me on the point of propositional knowledge supporting practices. Just as you would want to give someone advice before they ride a bike for the first time, you would want them to learn information about sculpting before (and after) getting started to improve their skill development. My point is simply that to know the skill of sculpting, at some point you need to hold tools and strike the rock repeatedly. The patterns of movement you learn will be unique to you and are physically retained in the body in ways different from propositional knowledge. Procedural memories are not stored in the brain in the same way as declarative memories. I don't think you necessarily disagree with me here (you seem to get my point that knowing Christianity requires embodied participation). I just wanted to spell this out in case my earlier post was unclear.
In Buddhism there are supposedly 84,000 doors to enlightenment. I don't know what the equivalent number is in Christianity, but hopefully I have at least given you the shape of the door I went though. On God's plan for you, me, or any of us, I won't speculate. You seem like a swell person and I wish you the best bugmaster.
But this again is somewhat of a Catch-22. If I understand you correctly, I must invest a great deal of time and effort into a spiritual practice in order to obtain the revelation/enlightenment/etc. that validates the practice -- but why would I commit to such a large investment into something I currently believe to be no more real than e.g. D&D spellcasting ?
Fair enough, I suppose; it all depends on whether you think that pre-committing to a belief in total absence of any supporting evidence (be it material or not) is rational. I think an argument could be made that sometimes it is, and theistic faith is one of those cases.
Hi Connor, I had a very hard time addressing this question, and I feel a mix of shame and doubt in what I have written. I am only speaking for myself in this reply.
If we went back in time and put a camera outside of Jesus' tomb, would we see the same body enter the tomb dead and, three days later, exit the tomb alive?
Prob: < 30%
Did something sacred happen that inspired his followers to come out of hiding and believe with all their heart that Jesus returned from the dead?
Prob: > 90%
These responses feel wrong because I do not think about Christ in this way. I understand why from the outside these numbers would seem significant, but to me they do not describe anything about my religious faith. It is the meaning of the resurrection that matters, not the particilars. See my reply to bugmaster for a longer explanation.
That's really interesting to me. I don't think I could be a Christian unless I was convinced the resurrection actually happened. I've never heard of this "something sacred happened but probably not a literal resurrection" is this something you just came up with or can i read about this somewhere else? Can you get any more specific with what happened? Are you more on the side of Christianity being useful fiction, or a metaphor? Hypothetically, would you still be a Christian if it could be proven the resurrection is complete myth?
Hi Connor, I did not come to Christianity by being convinced of a set of propositions. When I read the biblical stories or participate in my church, I am not weighing evidence against my priors to see how true different claims are. Instead, I understand that I am participating in a different type of knowledge that cannot be reduced to propositional claims. I do not view this knowledge as irrational, but rather as something beyond what rationalism can contain or even speak to.
I think you would be surprised to know just how many people in the church, both attendees and clergy, have doubts about certain claims. If you are educated in our modern, secular world, then doubt, even serious doubt, is inevitable. Saints have written about periods of doubt, as have Chesterton (mentioned elsewhere is in this thread) and other thinkers, even popes. The waning and waxing of belief are seen as a part of spiritual growth in the Catholic Church.
I have not taken the time to think through all the possibilities, but as I said I am fairly convinced that something profound happened after the crucifixion Jesus. If this were somehow proven false, it would shake my faith and that of billions of other Christians. The Church would need to adapt and I cannot imagine what the global repercussions would be. Personally, I would probably abstain from saying certain parts of the Nicene Creed until everything was figured out. After some years, I think I could even see myself moving to a different denomomination that always had a metaphorical interpretation of Jesus. I would not stop praying but my prayers would change.
For now, the possibility that Jesus rose from the dead, and what that means for the world, is enough to sustain my faith.
So you aren't a Christian for rational reasons, but if it was rationally proven some of your beliefs are false, it would severely effected your faith, interesting. So theoretically, you could be rationally convinced out of Christianity, it would just need someone to have you very sure the resurrection didn't occur. I appreciate your honesty, but this sounds somewhat incoherent to me.
It actually does say in the Bible that Jesus literally resurrecting from the dead is a matter of first importance, and that if it didn't happen then Christians are to be pitied more than anyone. We are dead in our sins and living a lie. See chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians:
One of the best explanations of resurrection evidence I have heard is that, despite all the supposed miracles that he performed during his life and which his followers apparently witnessed, while Jesus was being arrested and crucified, they were still all basically too cowardly to stand by him, and mostly denied knowing him and slunk away into the night.
After his supposed resurrection, all these cowardly followers suddenly began running around the country preaching about him, knowing that as a result, they were likely to undergo a gruesome martyrdom (and most of them did). Seemingly they were suddenly no longer afraid of death. The question being why...
Much appreciated! Few people are willing to say what their estimates of the odds of their views are.
To reciprocate, as per my own atheism/agnosticism:
For the agnostic part, allowing _some_ sort of intelligent creator, but with only the constraint of being at least as intelligent as human, and powerful enough to be responsible for the cosmos - maybe 10% probable? The best evidence for it is the 'fine-tuning' argument (which doesn't exclude e.g. a deity which really really likes benzene rings) but the constants may just be 'brute facts' or there may be a multiverse-plus-anthropic-principle explanation. And an intelligent creator is a more complex explanation than brute facts of two dozen constants.
For the atheist part - a deity with something like omnipotence plus anything like an interest in humans and almost any strong preference about humans seems excluded very strongly by obvious evidence - a benevolent deity by the problem of pain and the problem of evil (which I'd just call counterexamples), a deity like Wotan by the absence of glaringly obvious calls by the deity for martial valor. Call it < 0.1% or so?
( Also - for there to be any reason to _care_ whether a deity exists and has preferences, there has to be some sort of consequence for aiding/thwarting its preferences, traditionally an afterlife, and the evidence that we are perishable neural nets, WYSIWYG, with no persistence after our last neural firing looks like >99% )
One problem with the "agnostic" position and the "fine-tuning" argument, as you describe it, is that at best it gets you to a form of deism: a deity who created the Universe then metaphorically "walked away". So the only thing we can infer about it is that it created the Universe, period. We can't know what it wants us to do, or whether it performs miracles, or even whether it is a person at all. At this point, it starts looking indistinguishable from a fundamental property of nature rather than an object of worship; as you said, there's no reason to "_care_ whether [the] deity exists and has preferences".
>So the only thing we can infer about it is that it created the Universe, period. We can't know what it wants us to do
Yup - or whether it is interested in life at all. We would have a _very_ weak idea of its preferences from its choice of the fundamental constants. But, as I wrote, this
>doesn't exclude e.g. a deity which really really likes benzene rings
(and might well have _no_ other interests in the universe)
I've never heard this perspective from a Christian before ! Most of the Christians I've talked to would say that the physical Resurrection is what made Jesus special (ok, they wouldn't put it those exact words, but that's my understanding). According to them, Jesus wasn't just a really smart guy or a charismatic leader (there are plenty of those around); rather, he was a being both human and divine, whose sacrifice fulfilled the old laws while at the same time demonstrating mastery over death. Some Christians would say that instead of being physically resurrected on Earth, Jesus bodily ascended directly to Heaven; still, they would all agree that his tomb was empty at the end -- and I mean physically empty, not metaphorically, meaning that your camera would indeed show an empty tomb.
Is this not what you believe ? If so, then what is it -- if anything -- that makes Jesus special in your view ?
I understand (somewhat) your other point: that you came to your belief in Christianity via spiritual awakening and repeated practice, not logical arguments or physical evidence. But I am not sure what it means to be a Christian at all without believing in the Resurrection, as you seemingly do not. Of course, no one died and made me Space Pope, I cannot arbitrate your personal beliefs -- I'm just curious.
To be clear, I do believe in the resurrection, and I see it as absolutely central to Christian faith. This is partly why I felt weird about posting the percentages for those different claims. I went through some thought expercises with historical evidence and personal experience, weighed them against my priors, and came up with those numbers. I think the reason 30% seems low is because my priors for a man resurrecting from the dead, and for the event to be recorded accurately 2000 years ago, are extremely low. Starting from there, consider how confident I would need to be to bring the probability up to 30%.
Stepping back into a rationalist framework and assigning cold, impersonal numbers to my beliefs may have been a mistake on my part. I find it difficult to discuss Christianity in rational terms and this has been a messy attempt. It is not how I normally process my faith.
Most of what I've heard about the intersection of Christianity and Effective Altruism has been related to this book. What else have you about it?
As for resources to understand the "rational Christian" viewpoint: I suppose that depends on which parts of Christianity you consider to be irrational. For example:
- If you're skeptical about the historicity of the New Testament, then check out Lydia McGrew's work. (She's a published epistemologist.)
- If you're skeptical of the Genesis creation narrative, then check out Hugh Ross's old-Earth creationist framework. (I'm less confident about this. I haven't looked at it in a while.)
>Is that all it is, or is there something more in terms of the underlying ontology they actually hold?
The gist of Christianity is:
God created everything that exists, and when He created humans, He created them in His image and likeness, and tasked them with filling the earth and taking care of it. Mankind ended up disobeying God, and profaning Him by taking His image that they were made in and warping it to be unlike God.
As a result of this sin, mankind was separated spiritually from God, because God is holy and sin can't be near Him, and ever since then mankind has had to die, because life is the cost of sin. And as punishment for the the first sin, God cursed the ground and childbirth and the devil.
Another consequence of mankind's sin is that it impacted and continues to impact the natural and spiritual worlds, and people that had nothing to do with it. Because of man's evil actions, the world is in the state it is in today, and people are filled with hopelessness, despair, depression, ect., and we continue to profane the image of God by not being like Him.
But because God has never ceased loving mankind, and it is not His desire for any of us to perish eternally, but to be restored to Him, He sent His son Jesus. Jesus was not born from Adam's lineage and under the corruption of his sin, and He lived a sinless life. He loved us and lived as a human, so that He could die and offer sinless Human blood to take the place of anyone who believes in Him, and has faith that His offering is sufficient to pardon their own sins.
After Jesus did this, he resurrected from the dead, proving His authority as God, and also claiming victory over sin and death, giving life freely to mankind, to anyone who will accept it.
The people who believe this and accept it, and who, out of love for Jesus and their fellow man, live obediently to God, and share this news with others, in the hopes that others who are suffering and see their need will believe and accept Jesus as well, were labeled as "Christians" by others long ago. There are many other kinds of people who label themselves as Christian these days, but many of them have nothing to do with Christ or His Gospel. But this is what "Christianity" in its original sense is about, and there are still people who Love and follow Jesus in this way. Most "Christians" you'll encounter probably won't, and so they won't really have any authority to say anything about it.
EDIT: God didn't just want to save us from death, but mainly to restore us in connection with Him, so that we can have a full life and an intimate relationship with Him. That's the kind of love He has for us, and He created the institution of marriage as a representation of the relationship between Jesus and those who follow Him.
I am a former New Atheist, now fairly serious Catholic.
I believe rationalism is missing a coherant *meta ethics* that religion provides. Utilitarianism is categorically unstable both in theory and in practice. Honestly I think Thomism is pretty compatible with rationalism, because one of its core claims is that morality is discoverable by reason rather than by divine revelation.
The hard problem of consciousness is still of huge interest to rationalism and even the most hardcore atheists struggle to answer it coherantly. Chalmers for example concluded that physicalism can't account for subjective experience. Christians call consciousness "the soul". I think Christianity has the most satisfying answers to the big questions of phenomenology.
Most people who convert to christianity these days do it because they feel a sense of a lack of meaning in their lives which only religion can fill. Secular philosophy tries and fails to provide this, it's either circular or it's christianity in a trenchcoat.
----
If you want resources:
Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is good reading for the morality/meta-ethics part, it's a more modern take on Thomism (which is in turn a modern take on aristotle).
Edith Stein (Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, not to be confused with Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, and Teresa of Calcutta) is a good author for phenomenology and consciousness metaphysics. I've heard Saint John Paul II also wrote some good stuff on that but I've never read it.
You're probably already familiar with GK Chesterton (of Chesterton's Fence fame). He wrote a book called Orthodoxy. I would say this is the best entry point here, it's basically a manifesto of a rationalist christian. It's basically a book about Chesterton trying to reason his way into the most correct philosophy from first principles and accidentally reverse engineering Christianity.
I'm Catholic so I'll mention Bishop Robert Barron's Catholicism series, there's a book and a TV miniseries (which is annoyingly hard to find on youtube) which basically covers the book. It's less apologetics but more just an introduction to the intellectual traditions and a sort of defense of the Catholic faith specifically. Barron was very involved with Dawkins and the others back in the day and wrote and spoke a lot against the New Atheists -- these days as a cautionary tale, since we all know what happened to it.
Will Durant's Story of Civilizations is really really long but a huge amount of it is about the history of religion and the church. I think many people (myself included) basically got an exaggerated cartoon version of church history as kids and never really understood the context behind a lot of stuff. A lot of the "Religion is bad" stuff is basically just bad history IMO. Even if I was an atheist this would convince me that religion is a net good! Age of Faith, the Renaissance, Caesar and Christ, The Reformation are good ones for specific time periods. Also Age of Voltaire's epilogue literally converted me into a catholic so there's that (even though durant wrote it as a defense of atheism against a steelman of catholicism!)
You said "I think Christianity has the most satisfying answers to the big questions of phenomenology" - did you do a comparative evaluation to similar levels of understanding of all the major religions before coming to that conclusion? For example, I think the Advaita Vedanta and the Lurianic Kabbalah both have interesting takes on the notion. Though, the more I read about the different traditions, the more "many paths to one truth" makes sense.
I agree that secular responses to the hard problem are necessarily weak sauce, but to then jump straight to Christianity has always struck me as pretty curious. Or incurious, maybe?
Well, I believe in Christianity for other good reasons too, some incidental, some deeply personal. The Hindus or Scientologists or Zoroastrians could have a great solution for the hard problem and I wouldn't really care too much because I think Jesus is the only begotten son of God who came down from heaven to die for all people that our sins may be forgiven, and that's an anchor to a lot of other core beliefs that I hold similarly strongly to catholic phenomenology
With respect, this sounds like an explanation for why believing in religion is pleasant, but not why it is correct. (Unless you only meant to provide an explanation for the psychological appeal, and I misunderstood you).
I don't know if many atheists outside of Reddit Atheism caricatures believe that religion as a whole throughout history is simply bad, though it's hard to evaluate "net good" without a coherent counterfactual to compare against. Religion is clearly instrumentally useful.
Touché! But you forgot to account for instrumental convergence. Believing incorrect things, even pleasant ones, risks trapping me in a local maxima that compromises my ability to pursue even greater pleasures in the future.
For example, if I converted to Catholicism now, I might refuse to participate in the neuroadaptive sexbot orgies on the lunar libertarian micronation ten years from now on religious grounds. This would be a net loss as neuroadaptive sexbot orgies are much more physically, emotionally, and spiritually fulfilling than going to church.
I'm not up to date on my hedonism scripture, but I would imagine that as long as pleasure is your main goal, you'd probably have no issue with jumping from one thing to another. You also probably wouldn't have any reason to have anything to do with Catholicism, either.
Anyway, church isn't really the place for people who don't already have an intimate relationship with God, which surpasses anything one could ever have with people or robots. If you ever come to feel the weight of whatever sins you may be wrapped up in, and see the emptiness of everything in the world apart from Jesus, He will be there ready to relieve you of your burdens and transform your heart.
The idea would be that genuine belief in Catholicism would be required to achieve its claimed benefits, but genuine belief would also change my goals, making converting to Catholicism a poor choice for a hedonist even if it is more pleasant in the short term.
The world doesn't seem very empty to me. It is quite wonderful, I like it very much.
I was raised catholic. I became an edgy atheist at 14 like every other nerdy west coast guy in the 2000s and then became a catholic again at 28. I actually did think religion was net bad for a time, and it was specifically because I only ever listened to edgy atheists cristopher hitchens and dawkins talk about religion and never actually talked to anybody who knew what they were talking about.
I was responding to the original poster who said religion is a problematic institution and only believed in by irrational people.
Do you think you still would've ended up catholic if you were raised in a different religion, or none at all?
Normally I would disclaim that question with, "I know this doesn't make much literal sense, since there is no 'you' that exists separate from your upbringing..." but you probably believe your identity is rooted in a soul separate from your upbringing, so the question should be perfectly sensible to you. Anyways, please answer it.
I was raised to atheist parents in an almost exclusively atheist environment, and met a serious christian for the first time in college. Because of this, a lot of religious discussion online is alien to me. I don't doubt your report of feeling a lack of meaning only religion can fill, but I struggle to interpret this feeling as anything other than a product of rearing. People returning to what is psychologically comfortable from childhood, not some universal drive, certainly not one specific to catholicism. Do you dispute this?
I think I'm likely to have become some sort of religious. I never had a really true religious experience as a kid and just followed it because my parents made me go to church (and I mostly hated it, and barely believed any of it except in a token amount), and I only started feeling a religion-shaped hole in my heart later in life after accomplishing most everything I cared about accomplishing in life (wealth, security, sex, entertainment, status) and still feeling vaguely unfulfilled in a way that could only be filled by a higher purpose.
As for whether I'd become catholic, well, the Catholic response would be "I know that if I truly felt a longing for God, the Holy Spirit would guide me to the One True Faith some way or another." But that's probably not what you're asking. I think it's very likely I would have ended up with soem flavor of Christianity, knowing my personality (and assuming a lot of that personality is inherant to my genetics -- if we're going "what if your genetics were different" I think that's a little too much of a stretch for the hypothetical).
And if I ended up in christianity I have a good hunch I would gravitate towards catholicism; I'm naturally very curious about sects and branches and history and catholicism just objectively has a lot of things going for it that the others don't (stability, apostolic succession, a central authority to resolve disputes, a standard of objective beauty that surpasses all the others, because yes I believe in objective beauty).
I'm not surprised to hear that you weren't big on religion as a kid, my claim is more that early childhood enculturation surely has a large effect on what you gravitate towards as an adult. You're right that genetics likely plays a bigger role than I accounted for.
What do you do when your religion conflicts with secular knowledge and/or values? Or does this never come up?
It’s not ontology, it’s epistemology. Scientific epistemology is great if you want to build computers or cancer drugs; but it’s not great for living a human life. First, because objectivity (correctly) requires the evacuation of meaning; but life requires meaning. Second, science only understands what it can control; so if anything more powerful than humanity exists, science is (correctly) blind to it. Imagine being an ant and trying to use the scientific method. Ant skeptics would rightly refuse to acknowledge the existence of, for instance, airplanes, on correct, objective scientific principles, for the same reason human scientists don’t acknowledge Zeus, or angels. They don’t come when you call, you can’t put them in a museum.
My read is that people are finally becoming skeptical. There are political reasons I won’t mention, but if you were paying attention in 2020-2024, you saw them. I’d say, if you’re rejecting religion in favor of science, you are not yet skeptical enough. There are still epistemic constructs you have not thrown into the fire.
Wouldn't your ant theory predict that human science would maintain the geocentric theory forever, or even if it did understand heliocentrism would never find black holes because they can't be easily observed?
I should have accounted for dead things in my description of science's limits. Science is fantastic for studying dead things, even huge ones. For a more thorough response, look at what I wrote to Nick Hounsome, elsewhere in this thread.
> Scientific epistemology is great if you want to build computers or cancer drugs...
I would argue that the vast majority of human moral advancements throughout the ages were powered by technological advances (which are in turn powered by scientific advances). For example, slavery ended in most places on Earth not because of some moral awakening (or not merely nor primarily because of it), but because industrialization made it unprofitable.
> Ant skeptics would rightly refuse to acknowledge the existence of, for instance, airplanes, on correct, objective scientific principles...
This is untrue, as airplanes are clearly visible in the sky, and presumably ants can see them (though I could be wrong as don't really know how ant vision works). In fact, there are likely ant infestations in at least some airplane hangars. And in fact we humans have been able to understand much larger systems, such as black holes and the curvature of space-time, the geological history of the Earth, the existence of elementary "particles", the vision system of ants, etc., by working with much less.
>In fact, there are likely ant infestations in at least some airplane hangars.
Then again, you're living in a reality/universe/planet/body that was intricately designed by God, one which He provided with His own written words, and in which He even came to as a human, and presumably you would deny His existence as stated in His word, and doubtless you could use all kinds of thoughtful rational arguments to try and support the position.
That's a big presumption, though, you might not care or give any thought to any of it, but my point still stands.
> That's a big presumption, though, you might not care or give any thought to any of it, but my point still stands.
Yes, I do agree that the Christian worldview (as well as most other theistic worldviews) is fully compatible with all available evidence. In fact, it is arguably *maximally* compatible with any possible evidence, since the tri-omni God can (and, in some Christian theologies, does) produce any observable effect.
In that case, it's my hope for you that if you ever develop an awareness of any evil inside of you to the point where it's debilitating and you wish someone could do something about it, that you would think about this and that Jesus wants to take that burden from you and know and love you closely, and that you would trust Him to do so.
In the meantime, speaking of ants, since you are a self-proclaimed master of bugs, why the heck are there ants coming through my second-floor balcony door when there's a perfectly good apartment below me?
I don't think that slavery was abolished primarily because of technological advances. Christopher Brown makes a good case that, if not for a few quirks of history, slavery could have persisted until the information age.
I don't think that history has "quirks" to such an extent. The abolition of slavery appears to follow technological advances pretty closely, in time as well as space, and I don't think that Christian morality can adequately explain this. Perhaps more importantly, the mechanisms of slavery are incompatible with high technology: slaves must be kept ignorant (and ideally illiterate) lest they rebel, but modern technological jobs require the worker to be at least somewhat knowledgeable (and definitely literate).
At the same time, increasing quality of life (due to orders of magnitude increases in production efficiency) is what enables moral developments to occur in the first place. A person working 18-hour days just to survive has no time for philosophy; the modern 9-to-5 office worker does. Granted, a few fortunate people would always find the time (dating all the way back to Ancient Sumer), but in order for a moral philosophy to take hold, it must be embraced by more than a handful of scholars.
"Universal law is for lackeys, context is for kings" would stand as a moral philosophy that doesn't require most people to make time to think about philosophy, merely obey the Universal Law.
I think that most of your points are true for the kinds of slavery that are associated with ancient Rome and the American south, but not other forms of slavery. That episode of the podcast addresses your points.
>For example, slavery ended in most places on Earth not because of some moral awakening (or not merely nor primarily because of it), but because industrialization made it unprofitable.
As does the timing. The critical events, the Anglo-American abolition of the slave trade and the British Empire's abolition of slavery were in 1808 and 1833, respectively. Industrialization was beginning to happen in that period, but it had not upended the more traditional elements of the economy or made much of anything unprofitable, and that early industrialization still depended on raw material inputs which were frequently and profitably produced by slaves.
The United States didn't fully abolish slavery until 1865, by which point industrialization had become a more significant factor, but the Civil War happened because it had been increasingly clear for a generation that slavery was going away and 1861 was the last chance for the doomed holdouts. Once the slave trade was reduced to a handful of smugglers and pirates, once the dominant global Empire *and* its main geopolitical rival were solidly on Team Abolition, the writing was on the wall.
Yeah, ants can't see flying airplanes at all, they have compound eyes that don't focus and they mostly navigate by smell.
I admit that science can understand a lot about very large dead things. And maybe you can come up with a story where a small airplane was abandoned in a field and an ant colony grew up around it and the ants examined every piece of it and the ant scientists could convince their skeptics that yes, airplanes exist.
I mentioned Zeus. Will you bite that bullet? Implicit in your stance seems to be the claim that no living entity exists that can't be captured and dissected by scientists. You really think that, if Zeus existed, scientists would have him properly taxonomized and catalogued and placed in the context of biological evolution on Earth? And that no entity whatsoever could ever exist that scientists couldn't capture and do whatever experiments on that they wanted to?
I think only a superstitious belief in the godlike powers of scientists could lead somebody to think that science can objectively establish the existence of everything that actually does exist.
I want you to be more skeptical; to give up what I see as superstitions. Then you'd be more likely to see the epistemic value in religion.
I take your moral argument seriously. By gaining rational control over huge areas of the world, we've unlocked incredible wealth and such a high standard of living that many historical kings would happily trade place with a contemporary lower middle class American. Many of our most common moral stances were unthinkable before science transformed the world because anybody living that way died out.
But the same relationship exists between rich and poor contemporaries. A rich, technologically advanced Texan isn't faced with the same difficult moral choices as a poor, primitive tribesman in Papua New Guinea. Is the techie Texan living a better life than the primitive tribesman? No, he just hasn't been tested. If he were in the other's shoes, he might very well do worse things.
So the question can't be whether science enables better morals, when the way it's doing that is just by removing temptation. Instead, the question has to be whether the changes in your soul that happen when you think scientifically, regardless of the historical outcome, are better or worse for living your life. And that's not simple to answer.
> A rich, technologically advanced Texan isn't faced with the same difficult moral choices as a poor, primitive tribesman in Papua New Guinea. ... No, he just hasn't been tested.
This is an interesting point. Granted, Papua New Guinea has the one of the highest crime rates in the world (if not the highest), so, objectively speaking, Papuans are committing more evil deeds than Texans. You say:
> Instead, the question has to be whether the changes in your soul that happen when you think scientifically...
But the average Texan isn't thinking scientifically most of the time; he's just using the available technology. Yes, he probably does find acts like murder, theft, rape, etc. more abhorrent by contrast with the average Papua New Guinean; but this is likely not because he came to such conclusions independently, but rather because his society conditioned him to do so -- just as the Papua New Guinean's society conditioned him to view such acts as valid tools.
I guess the real question is, which of the two (admittedly correlated) effects is more important: reducing the number of evil acts and general suffering in the world, or effecting moral changes in people's minds (or souls, if you prefer) ? Science had been spectacularly successful at the former; it is possible that Christianity had been marginally more successful at the latter, though (as you say) it is difficult to tell.
"Industrialization made it unprofitable." --> well, this just invites the conception of "human moral advancements" into neofeudalism as being powered by technological advances as well.
I think we can say "Civilization has the morality it can afford" without saying that every technological advance need give us Better Morality.
> I think we can say "Civilization has the morality it can afford" without saying that every technological advance need give us Better Morality.
Agreed; obviously not *every* technological advance does. For example, arguably the invention of social networking was a huge step down. In addition, morality is subjective; for example, an ancient Israelite might find our obsession with monogamy puzzling if not borderline blasphemous. Still, I'd argue that most scientific and technological advances have led to increased quality of life for humanity by at least some kind of semi-objective metrics, e.g. increased lifespan, reduced infant mortality, better nutrition, and arguably self-reported life satisfaction (though that one is admittedly tricky).
Yeah, "what it can control" isn't precise enough. Science needs to do repeatable experiments and it needs arbitrary (or at least predictable) access to the phenomena it studies. That usually boils down to "control", but you're right that, in the case of astronomy, you can take repeatable, predictable observations of stuff without controlling it. I guess I would modify my original statement to "science is only willing to evaluate dead things it has predictable access to or living things it can control".
But you don't seem to have quite grasped my point. Imagine Zeus. He's too powerful to be killed by a human. Bullets bounce off him. He can teleport at will to Olympus, a place no human knows how to get to. His concern with human affairs is capricious; sometimes he shows up and interacts with people, but nobody can predict when. Stretch your brain and imagine how scientists would evaluate something like that if it really did actually exist.
You don't have to stretch far; you already know. Same way they evaluate ghosts and angels and sasquatch. Mere eyewitness testimony isn't enough to convince scientists. They have to have arbitrary (or at least predictable) access to a specimen they can do repeatable experiments on. They quite rightly don't believe in ghosts and angels and Zeus and sasquatch. That's not what science does.
Thinking that everything that exists can be evaluated by science is a kind of superstition, the same as thinking that scientists are the most powerful beings in the universe; akin to gods. All existing entities, no matter how powerful, can be captured and studied by scientists; anything that can't (or isn't already dead) doesn't exist.
You're still wrong. Science doesn't even claim to be able to evaluate everything that exists - e.g. anything outside the observable universe or "before" the big bang or smaller than the Plank length.
Science "claims" to be able to evaluate everything that is worth evaluating or believing in.
This is just the, well known, counter to Pascal's Wager dressed up in scientific clothing - The expected utility of believing in your, unprovable, god, Zeus, is dwarfed by the expected negative utility of disbelieving in (or slighting) an infinte number of other, imagineable but unprovable, gods who may, damn you eternally for believing in a false god, Zeus. Therefore it is irrational to believe in things that cannot be observed.
Your stance depends on the assumption that there can never be anything worth believing in that's not subject to repeatable experiments -- because that's what science is, it has to establish a repeatable, deterministic relationship with its subject before it'll say anything about it. That means that you've decided beforehand not to believe in any living being that's too powerful and capricious for scientists to study.
Scientists (rightly) don't believe in sasquatch, because, although tons of people claim to have seen them, taken pictures of them, taken tons of plaster casts of their footprints, etc, there is no museum or zoo with a sasquatch specimen in it. Nobody has captured one yet, or brought back a dead one.
That whole category of entity -- things that, if they exist, are too powerful and capricious to be subjected to proper scientific study (yet) -- you've decided beforehand not to believe in, whether they're real or not.
I agree that that's a great epistemology for universities, for governments and corporations and other formal organizations. If science isn't able to get ahold of a thing to study it, they won't be able to get ahold of it to extract value from it either. (see https://xkcd.com/808/ ) No corporation is going to be able to sell sasquatch fur coats, so they don't care. Government doesn't have to regulate sasquatch hunting season, people can't even find a single one. So who cares?
I don't think that's the case for individual lives. If you find yourself face to face with a sasquatch someday, you should believe in it, despite the fact that scientists don't.
A lot of people have supernatural experiences and go around telling their friends, "I don't believe in x, but here's what happened to me the day I saw an x" I think that's silly. If you find that something is part of your world, you should deal with it, rather than refusing to believe in it because it won't hold still to be dissected.
> I don't think that's the case for individual lives. If you find yourself face to face with a sasquatch someday, you should believe in it, despite the fact that scientists don't.
On the other hand, you probably shouldn't instantly assume a hairy humanoid in the forest is Sasquatch. You don't want to shoot them and end up with a manslaughter charge...
There are orders of magnitude more people known to have suffered hallucinations and optical illusions than people who have seen Sasquatch therefore, if you see Sasquatch, the most rational Bayesian conclusion is that you are hallucinating. And, in case you are going to say that they weren't hallucinations - hallucinations and illusions can often be induced or cured - strong evidence that they are not real.
On the capricious powerful being argument you leave yourself open to anyone who claims to be such a being. I'm one. Send me money now or suffer eternal damnation.
Rationality and EA are separate movements (albeit with a lot of overlap). This is from the EA movement. I don't think it's confusing that a movement dedicated to helping people do charity better should be interested in the largest charitably-inclined demographic in the world, ie religious people.
For EA, it's easy: lots of Christians around, and even more cultural Christians. Growing contingent of EAs around. Some overlap is inevitable. Both groups care a lot about different versions of "optimizing for good", to the point that EA has occasionally been painted as a bastard offshoot of Christianity.
For rationality: Western rationality grew up in a Christian context: Descartes, Newton, etc. Christianity has held the belief that it is rational for ages (as opposed to, for example, just saying that God is ineffable and reason won't get you there). It keeps defending it as hard as it can. The height of anti-religious scientism or positivism was probably around 100+ years ago. Our present time is not necessarily troubled by historical standards, but it sure is by post-WW2 standards. (The perception of) troubled times brings calls for voices that sound sure of themselves and are backed by deep tradition. Put it all together...
My view is that Christianity is in fact quite uncomplicatedly extremely compatible with the core ideas of helping the poor and reducing suffering on a universal scale, no?
I think it's just the barber pole of fashion. Once internet atheism went from "stunning and brave" to "fedora cringe", the slightly-more-sophisticated types started agreeing with each other that well actually GK Chesterton and CS Lewis were pretty cool after all.
That's probably true for some people, but I think there are a couple of other things going on here:
1. some of the original new atheist types legitimately have buyer's remorse (e.g., me). Twenty years ago, nerdy internet atheists thought that a society-wide decline in the influence of organized religion would lead to a better, more rational world ruled by FACTS AND LOGIC instead of ancient superstitions. That was naive and stupid, sure, but we didn't know that at the time, and if that prospect was a big factor in drawing someone to Ye Olde New Atheism, they've probably had some second thoughts about it unless they've been in a coma for a decade or so, because clearly that didn't come to pass, and in fact it could be argued was 180° wrong.
2. This is going to sound uncharitable, but I think the burgeoning Islamo-leftist political coalition has had a significant influence on who and what exactly becomes fashionable. Twenty years ago, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Co. could hate on religion in general all they wanted, and that was cool, because 99% of the audience was either an atheist or a Christian, and we already knew where they stood in terms of political affiliation. But now there are a smattering of Muslims in the mix whose political loyalties are not so fixed, so it pays for certain people to pretend they always thought Dawkins and Hitch were cringe.
Could you expand on what you found naive and stupid about a rational world ruled by facts and logic?
I have my own opinions on how this goes awry. One of them is that, on its face, a world where decisions are made based on facts and logic ought to leave most people better off in the long run, but there are obstacles to overcome. And I have thoughts on those obstacles. I imagine you do too, and I mean to compare notes.
I think young me had this conception that, free of the influence of religious traditions or dogma, then we should expect logic, rationality, and well-reasoned arguments would be more likely to sway public opinion, thus leading to better outcomes for all. I think this was naive for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the biggest is that it seems to me that some form of tribalism (not necessarily ethnic, but rather ethno-cultural) has simply taken the place of religious tradition in informing people's values or what have you, not any sort of dispassionate, Socratic, self-examination. And why expect otherwise? Reason: still the slave of the passions, boys and girls.
Okay, so not exactly what my answer was, though maybe it's close. My answer was that time often does not permit perfect facts, and often doesn't even permit perfect logic on imperfect facts, so decisions have to be made on things like hunches and that's why that vision looks naive.
Also, my model of facts and logic probably isn't the same as yours. One big thing here is that I try to factor in things like tribalism, modeling it logically and devising reasoning methods that accommodate it. For example, if you have two policies, P and Q, and each has a tribe backing it, then even if you're on tribe P, say, you have an interest in understanding tribe-Q's case for Q, since that may enable you to present P in more Q-favorable terms, or even adjust P to better fit tribe-Q's motivations. You could of course just resort to first-past-post principles instead: pull up the latest poll showing P at 51%, and tell tribe-Q to pound sand. But "facts and logic" also should be telling you that that's not going to leave you as well off as a more moderate approach.
A common response to this is that most people aren't thinking about making nice with tribe-Q over the long run. Some think they can squish tribe-Q; some believe we're in conflict mode; some believe tribe-Q will just exploit moderation to get more of their way; and so on. But to me, that's just exploring more of the facts and logic around the framework. (I realize that a lot of people do not appear to model logic this way.)
>Okay, so not exactly what my answer was, though maybe it's close. My answer was that time often does not permit perfect facts, and often doesn't even permit perfect logic on imperfect facts, so decisions have to be made on things like hunches and that's why that vision looks naive
"You could of course just resort to first-past-post principles instead: pull up the latest poll showing P at 51%, and tell tribe-Q to pound sand. But "facts and logic" also should be telling you that that's not going to leave you as well off as a more moderate approach."
One thing worth considering here is that even if both tribes would be better off with some kind of compromise, specific individuals can gain status within tribe Q and tribe P by signaling immoderation and an unwillingness to compromise, because it shows commitment/dedication to their respective tribes. You get a sort of principal/agent problem where groups A and B would be better off with some kind of grand bargain to settle a conflict between them, but factions within groups A and B think this would make them worse off, and so they work hard to sabotage any such bargain.
Richard Swinburne would be a solid source for understanding the rational Christian viewpoint, as would Josh Rasmussen and other Christian analytic philosophers. Swinburne's "Is There a God?" is a great starting point for the theistic aspect, and he has a trilogy of books defending Christian theism specifically. Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig is also a good book (and podcast) defending the rationality of Christianity and its underlying ontology.
Probably shouldn't be a smart-arse about this, but when has that ever stopped me?
Ooh, a new book for Christians about charitable giving! What we can learn from EA!
"This book offers practical tools to:
Prioritize needs: Identify where money and energy most impactfully solve pressing, neglected global issues―taking Jesus’s radical command to love your neighbor seriously."
Like shrimp welfare. You thought the hungry, sick and lonely humans were in need? Pffft! That's just "conventional philanthropy, symbolic actions, and feel-good volunteering", the liddle shrimpies are where it's at!
Plus worrying about Skynet becoming real.
What's that? "“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble"? But if we don't get AI aligned *right now*, it will kill us all! Maybe! If it becomes super-intelligence!
So remember:
"Give smarter: Leverage proven, evidence-backed strategies to achieve results hundreds of times greater per dollar than traditional charity."
Donate to the Oxbridge set, they are your natural superiors and know better than you about every whole thing.
EDIT: I'm glad the author/contributors want to make charitable giving more effective, and are trying to build bridges between organisations holding like-minded goals, but (1) the ultimate purpose of Christianity is not to be nice and charitable, it is to be in right relationship with God and (2) I'm not sure the goals *are* like-minded past a surface level of "give mosquito nets to the suffering".
So this is just a comment for fun. Re: right relation with God; Perhaps the Christians can pull a little jiu jitsu on EA and suggest that their desire for helping is a way for them to approach getting into the right relationship with God.
No, because anything that smacks of proselytisation will be an immediate turn-off for the EA types and will only further convince those like our Dawkins-quoting friend that it's all a scam to get power and new cult members.
Any conversion is more likely to be the other way round: you mean I can do good *and* not have to go to church/worry about sin, death and Hell? Yippee!
The second anyone on the Christian side mentions something like the Golden Rule or the Sermon on the Mount etc. that will be seen as attempting to sneak in their religion under the cover of charitable work.
Ah and yet you might be wrong. You might be the way that EA's find God. I'm not particularly religious. (I went the to UU church when I lived in Nashville, but you have to go to some church when you live in Nashville, and UU is fine. (The music in churches in Nashville was great!)) But the older I get the more unsure I become, and why not God? Is there a better explanation for Joan of Arc?
Given that much of Christian charitable giving currently goes to the "overhead" of operating local churches, I would think that one ideal goal of the book might be to convince individual Christians that their giving would be better applied in ways that actually help more people practically.
Shrimp welfare and AI risk are certainly edge cases, and to my mind prime examples of people convinced of their own rationality above all and able to justify anything, but that's not all of EA, obviously. It gets the most attention because it's weird, or different, but the EA framework can apply even if one decides human welfare in in-scope and animal welfare isn't.
I'll be curious to see how much the book resembles "Doing Well and Doing Good" by Os Guinness, but that was 2001, so we have 25 years of more data now.
Or to put all of this in more Christian terms, a book that reminds Christians about being the hands and feet of Christ in the world, or that reminds Christians that the difference between the sheep and the goats is what they did and didn't do, that might be a worthwhile book.
"Given that much of Christian charitable giving currently goes to the "overhead" of operating local churches"
Sweetums, while "we decided our best use of stuff was to buy a castle" exists, glasshouses, stones, you know the drill. Yeah, they eventually ended up selling the place, but given that there has long been criticism of precisely what you said applied to churches, it's not like they didn't have the example before them when they made that decision in the first place:
"It was pitched as the place where the world’s leading technologists, scientists and philosophers would gather to figure out how effective altruism and artificial intelligence could be combined to create a global force to eradicate poverty and improve everyone’s lives.
The Effective Ventures Foundation (EVF), which defines effective altruism as “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible”, decided £14.9m of its cash would be best spent buying Wytham Abbey, a 15th-century Grade-I listed manor house near Oxford.
The 27-bedroom house, which has over the years been visited by Queen Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell and Queen Victoria, was transformed into a retreat for believers in the movement, including the now-jailed FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and the Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn, who made a fortune investing early in Skype.
However, just two years after buying the mansion, which acquired the nickname “Effective Altruism Castle”, the EVF has put it up for sale for £15m."
Least my local church is repairing the fabric of the building out of its very own money raised from the congregation and not funny money from FTX!
Personally, I am not angry at Christians for building churches -- just disappointed. Here are a group of people who purport to follow directly in the footsteps of the Divine, who explicitly commands them to abandon all Earthly concerns in favor of caring for their fellow man, and what do they do ? They spend millions on building megachurches and preoccupy themselves with preaching and social control... you know, exactly like every other major organization out there, only with the added spice of an occasional holy war. Looks like the Christians are as human as us heathens after all...
What kind of Christians are you talking about? The "megachurch" prosperity-gospel type ones are known scammers disliked by everybody; if you're going to discuss the topic I think you should engage with the mainstream respectable churches and not the "my pastor has a private jet" type ones.
Hmm, Well first go visit some local churches, but second I see mega churches as moloch in religion. Or at least some of them. The members of the church are good, but there's a church institution that can start to care more about itself. So this is mostly going to be true of older and bigger churches.
I've visited some churches before, mostly in Europe and mostly for architectural reasons. I think some of them are really impressive, and not in a typical touristy way: my favorite church was a small Eastern Orthodox outfit in Sicily, where I could practically feel the weight of history in every pillar and fresco. I also found a really fascinating quasi-Hindu temple right here in California: apparently, these guys syncretized/copyright-infringed some of the Christian mythos, and brought it to the US in the 60s, custom-building a really cool Hindu-style temple in the process. Both of these places of worship stand out in my mind in a way that e.g. Notre Dame does not; they felt much more authentic. Plus, the Hindu(-ish) place had peacocks. Always a plus.
"preoccupy themselves with preaching and social control"
What else do you expect them to do? That's my main bugbear here: if people are approaching Christianity (or any other faith) on the basis that it's all about nicey-nicey and so the only thing Christians should do is go around being nice and charitable, and so long as they have this rule about charity hey can we get you to do it the EA way?, but nothing more and certainly not trying to make people behave in any particular way, then it's all piffle.
Christianity is not about nicey-nicey. It's about believing there is one Way, Truth and Light and converting everyone to that. Hence the preaching and 'social control'.
Is being anti-slavery 'social control'? If you think slavery is a wrong crying out to heaven for vengeance, do you attempt to change society or do you just hold your tongue because otherwise that would be preaching and social control?
I may tease Bentham's Bulldog about the liddle shrimpies, but I understand what he is trying to do. Changing the approach to commercial shrimp farming is also, if you like, preaching and social control. Getting abortion legalised and accepted as "reproductive health care which is a human right" is preaching and social control, because it involved passing laws and changing medical ethics around it.
Oh sure, but you are making Christianity sound like just another political movement. Political movements are all well and good, and some of them do good work, but they're still a dime a dozen. But Christians (at least the ones I've talked to) tend to claim that they're more than just an organization looking for donations and votes: they are the followers of Jesus who invented (or perhaps divinely revealed) the concepts of loving your neighbour, turning the other cheek, and general self-sacrifice and abnegation of personal gain. This image doesn't quite jibe with the notion of a "Christian" as someone who spends most of his time cold-calling donors to collect donations for his next recruitment and/or reelection campaign.
the point is to change the world. That probably will get political at some point because politics is how humans do governing and sorting out what sort of society they want.
This is a very good point. It also appears to me that in most cases Christians give their 10% to their local church which is then used to maintain whatever facilities and staff and fun programs they do for the members, rather than using what is needed to stay afloat and the rest to share the gospel with and otherwise benefit the real needs of the people suffering in the communities around them.
We often just give to the church while remaining disengaged, thinking we're good and we don't need anything more from God. In reality, the American church is, for the most part, wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. At least from my own experience.
More Christians need to have a relationship with God and know His word.
I am not following you on the state of the American church being wretched and pitiful. You don’t seem to be disparaging Christianity, so are you just arguing it could and should be much more/better? Just asking.
My (possibly unrelated) take on the issue is that churches are an amazingly vital part of American society. It is one of the healthiest community organizations, providing fellowship, support, hope and spiritual health.
I say this just as someone who knows a lot of people (immediate family and friends) who attend church on a regular basis. Every one seems better off than they would without it — remarkably so. As a side note, most of them go to modern Apostolic churches.
I mean so in a Spiritual sense, rather than physical or emotional. It's a quote from Jesus in Revalation 3:14-22, which I'll add below. It's referencing that those Christians are not useful in one way or another, but are useless, only concerned with themselves, and think they have everything they need, and therefore neglect obedience to Jesus' commands.
I don't know much about modern Apostolic churches, but I know there are plenty of true Christians out there. But in my limited experience, they tend to be individuals rather than legal bodies, and are a minority.
“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write:
These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.
Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.
To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat down with my Father on his throne. Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”
Huh, in the few churches I've been involved with, there was always a tension, between those who wanted more time/ money spent outwards, charity, giving. And those who wanted it spent inwards. Care of the church, a nice space, pastoral care.
That is an interesting challenge. I can buy my own book, though. I'm just very snappy this week, I think it's because I've been ill, and I'm coming up to my limit on "how can we turn Christianity into something else?" endeavours.
If the author is not trying to do that, then I apologise. So therefore I should buy and read this, but I can't commit to a definite date when I'll come back and leave my impressions.
I'm tempted to ask you to submit it to the book review contest.
However, I can imagine it being very difficult for you to suppress your natural writing style well enough to remain anonymous but also entertaining; so, in the end, we shall know the lioness by her claw.
I hope I won't claw the authors, because their intentions are in the right place! I have to read the book and I'm hoping my impression of it will be changed by what they actually say.
I just am really sensitive right now to the whole "Christianity is about being nice and that's the main thing" version of trying to mainstream Christianity again in light of all the culture wars. Oh no, we're not like *those* types of Christians, we're the *nice* ones!
Maybe we should be a little less nice and a little more "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees!" Not forgetting that we too are the scribes and Pharisees:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!"
Have I never read the Old Testament? My friend, I'm Catholic. We're infamous for not reading the Bible!
I often joke I should get a T-shirt made up with "Not A Protestant" on the front. The zingers revolving around Scriptural texts aimed towards the evangelical/fundamentalist American Protestant denominations slide right off us idol-worshipping Papists because we haven't a clue what you are on about: "whales are not fish? okay friend, whatever, but you do realise the Friday fish penance isn't in vogue anymore, yeah?" 😁
Protestants can also conspicuously not read the Bible. I'm old enough to remember Jim Bakker, one of the leading televangelists of the 1980s, which is not quite at the level of e.g. being the Pope, but it's about as high as it gets in American-style Protestantism.
Known particularly for embracing the so-called "prosperity gospel", and in his case, championing the cause of Christ made him quite rich. And greedy, enough so to commit some fairly serious financial crimes that got him thrown in prison for several years.
When he got out, he reported essentially "I didn't have anything better to do, so I figured maybe I should actually read the Bible, and it turns out none of the stuff I was preaching is even in there. So, uh, sorry about that".
9 % on Ukrainian victory (up from 8 % on February 7, 2026).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
23 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 22 % on February 7, 2026).
68 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 70 % on February 7, 2026).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
This is in reaction to results of Hungarian elections. Viktor Orban has been remarkably persistent and effective at derailing all kinds of pro-Ukrainian initiatives at EU-level, and now he won’t be.
Arguably I should’ve made this update sooner since results are more or less exactly in line with pre-election polls, but I wasn’t sure how reliable are those polls in Hungary.
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
I appreciate you putting concrete numbers and definitions on your predictions, but you've been updating your estimates for several years now, and it looks like those are always differential updates that modify the previous estimate based on a new development or event. Surely you've accumulated a lot of error by now? Would you come up with the same numbers if you made your first estimate today?
I don't know, this is a hard question. One possibility, which is, like, deep below 50 %, but I guess in double digits and wins a plurality, if you know what I mean, is this:
After a bloody grind Russia conquers Slavyansk/Kramatorsk agglomeration and then parties agree on a ceasefire on current line of control plus various onerous conditions for Ukraine, like non-deployment of NATO troops on it's soil, no to NATO membership etc., but these conditions will not render Ukraine completely defenceless.
That would be a defeat for Ukraine, but far from the worst case. I am worried that some sort of dramatic Ukrainian collapse is also likely.
Europe is currently completely funding the Ukraine by itself (with very little support from America). Until this changes, a dramatic Ukrainian collapse is unlikely.
How do you arrive at these percentages? Your analysis seems to ignore the facts on the ground that Russia hasn't made any significant gains in two years, and its economic situation is precarious. Meanwhile, Ukraine hasn't collapsed, and is improving its weapons systems, using them more effectively against Russian logistic and economic targets, and is getting funding from Gulf Countries to deploy Ukrainian drone and anti-drone technology.
> Russia hasn't made any significant gains in two years
They don't need to make more gains; keeping what they currently have (even losing a part of it but not all) already counts as "Russian victory".
> its economic situation is precarious
This is an inside-view perspective. The outside view says that people are already talking about Russia's imminent collapse for four years, and yet the war continues. Russians are good at suffering, they can handle it for a few more years.
> Ukraine hasn't collapsed
But it is gradually running out of young men.
> is getting funding from Gulf Countries
China can sell drones to Russia.
Hey, I am not saying here that Russia will definitely win, just providing some pushback against your arguments.
Also, I have a feeling that in long term, Russia may be more stable than Ukraine, politically. I mean, if Putin dies, he will be replaced by some kind of Putin 2.0; there will be no revolution. Does Ukraine have a good replacement if Zelensky dies?
(I was hoping that perhaps Russia would fall apart internally, as various oppressed nationalities realize that this might be the most convenient moment for them when Russia is weakest; and when their young men realize that the alternative to risk their lives fighting Russia is to get mobilized and die in Ukraine. But none of this happened.)
>Also, I have a feeling that in long term, Russia may be more stable than Ukraine, politically. I mean, if Putin dies, he will be replaced by some kind of Putin 2.0; there will be no revolution. Does Ukraine have a good replacement if Zelensky dies?
I don't think that's right. Zelensky has been properly elected, and the theory anyway is that the office matters, not the person, so whoever is elected in his stead would presumably continue the course of national defense, as long as that is the Ukrainian people's wish. Of course, martial law in Ukraine currently prevents them from having elections; the first deputy prime minister would take over until elections are possible again. It stands to reason Zelensky has appointed that person with his capabilities as a replacement in mind.
Whereas in an oligarchy/quasi-dictatorship like Russia, the power is very personalized, and a change of person does not guarantee a continuation of previous policy. Even if a suitable successor has been designated, there is no guarantee that the person will stay the course, precisely because they how have the absolute power to do whatever. Putin can't just quit the war because his political future depends on it. A new leader doesn't have that baggage and has at least one less reason to continue the war.
Also, it's worth noting that Putin has sidelined all of his potential successors in the Russian military and politics. The only person who could unseat him is Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB. He's a year older than Putin (age 74) and owes his rise to power to Putin. Organizing a coup would probably be a younger man's game. And I suspect Putin relies on Bortnikov to keep any eager younger FSB officers in line or distracted with work in regions away from Moscow. ;-)
And if you ever wonder why reasonable, clear-eyed people like Lavrov and Medvedev spout the most outlandish *Endsieg* propaganda, it's because they are cunning survivors - if, post-2022, you appear to be a real choice as Putin's successor, a lesser evil, someone palatable and with connections to the West, then there's a window with your name on it.
> the theory anyway is that the office matters, not the person
If I understand it correctly, the Ukrainian experience was mostly that when you elect a president who based his entire campaign on being anti-Russia and pro-EU, suddenly after the election he changes his mind and decides that pro-Russia is actually better. That happened three times in a row, and then angry people went to the streets.
So I'd say the person matters a lot.
In Russia, the new president will almost certainly be approved by the secret service, but I agree than the new president would be a good excuse to change the official policy on the war. If Putin is no longer alive, they can simply blame everything on Putin, regardless of who actually decided what.
I do believe that russia staying put counts as "russian victory" (even with some "security guarantees" for Kiev"). It also stands as American/Western defeat (in that American goal was Sevastopol).
"Russians are good at suffering" -- I think my friend put this better: "Russians don't do patriotism, they do spite." They're willing to undergo a lot of suffering for spite.
Ukraine's average military age on the frontline is above 40. That's not "gradually running out of young men" -- particularly when they're trying to draft 90 year old men.
I believe Russia has already won, and that, barring Zelensky actually pushing Russia out of the Russian-separatist areas, it will continue to "win" until Trump gets around to negotiating a peace (aka "coercing Zelensky and crew").
I wrote about something I haven't seen discussed anywhere else: the risk that prediction market resolutions could be bought/rigged as a means of influencing public opinion and legitimizing the claim to have won a disputed election.
People have mentioned the possibility in the abstract, but never in the specific context of a disputed election, which is unique in terms of how it's: likely to be ambiguous, hugely consequential (so the incentives to manipulate the market are far greater than merely the volume of the market itself), and bi-directionally linked to the market (that is to say, the resolution of the market itself feeds back into reality in such a way that can actually cause that specific outcome to occur).
I am a financial professional writing under a pseudonym with no previous publication history. I welcome all feedback, both positive and negative, on the thesis itself, my writing style, where I should share, etc.
It's been brought up, but it would require a lot of money (remember the whales vs minnows market on manifold) and probably wouldn't even work very well (the winner would reasonably point out that upsets do happen).
>the winner would reasonably point out that upsets do happen
I am not talking about the scenario in which you manipulate the price in the run up to the election in order to make victory seem all-but-assured (i.e. 99% in favor of a particular outcome) but instead a scenario in which the election occurs, a particular candidate that lost claims to have won, and the markets themselves ultimately settle in favor of the candidate that objectively lost.
>it would require a lot of money
I show that the Polymarket UMA can be purchased for no more than $20MM, and, in this specific scenario, probably less than $10MM. It's basically free in the context of a campaign budget for the US Presidency.
I see. It's an argument for the kalshi model of settlement (where you specify source and have the exchange settle it), although I guess that one's vulnerable to the exchange official's decision.
(I can't actually open the link BTW, getting an error if I try?
Hm, about your kalshi argument, I don't think you make a convincing case that this is more of a vulnerability than your example of a corrupt nyt editor putting an "X wins" headline (if anything prediction markets have a lot more to lose, partly because they'd get sued but mostly because if they're precieved as biased resolvers people will stop trusting them enough to bet on them - the nyt is already seen as biased and doesn't have much to lose here since it's mostly subscribed to by its allies anyway (same for e.g. fox)).
That's a fair criticism - I don't really consider myself to have even tried very hard to make the argument that it's "more" of a vulnerability; I invoked the NYT as a means of saying "everyone would universally agree it would be consequential and bad if the NYT did that, so we should grant that this is at LEAST as consequential and bad as that." I am assuming my audience will not be as familiar with prediction markets as you and I are.
For what it's worth, though, I DO think it's worse, and my reason would be the same as the reason you argued it isn't, but run back at you in reverse.
If the NYT wrongly published "DEMOCRAT WINS" it would be easily dismissed because they are perceived as biased. (If they wrongly published "TRUMP WINS", against their own perceived bias, I think everyone agrees that would be pretty bad.) The prediction markets are, rightly or wrongly, more perceived as unbiased "global truth machines," or at least neutral third parties more interested in profiting off the game of politics than actually playing it. The reason they have a lot to lose is the same reason it would be worthwhile to manipulate them.
I am also trying to point out that they can simply refuse to pick a side until the dust settles, like PredictIt did in 2020 but worse. The ambiguity alone further legitimizes the candidate with the false claim and gives him space in which to operate, but it doesn't burn their credibility they way you're hoping it would.
I'm sure this has been asked a number of times already, but my wife and I are expecting our first child in September and we're interested to know of any sources of information/advice on parenting that members of the community have found helpful.
(Of course we're great fans of our host's continued updates on his own experience!)
Books: the whole brain child, how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk, 123 magic (worked wonders on my ADHD kid), healthy sleep habits happy child by Dr weissbluth
123 magic is effectively against the whole brain child and maybe the second one you mentioned? I haven’t read them but it was the impression i had, so correct me if I’m wrong. 123 magic recommends against talking things through too much.
I have more than one kid :-) 123 magic was ESSENTIAL for my most hyperactive kid. talking through feelings is useless in the short term when you need them to STOP doing what they are doing before someone gets hurt. That's why I dislike the "nurtured heart" style, you don't have to wait to notice them doing something good, there are actually calm and consistent ways to get to good behavior a lot sooner.
And my more sensitive-feelings-and-meltdowns kid needs lots of emotion management help and I only need to use whole-brain child type parenting on that one.
You don't know what your child's temperament will be like so it's good to have lots of tools in your toolbox so you can be prepared!
In general I like to read about lots of different approaches so I can figure out what works for me. You can pull elements out from each book and combine them in different situations.
Oh I forgot another really good one! Raise your kids without raising your voice is another highly recommended read!
I also like having American Academy of Pediatrics "Caring for your child Birth to Age 5" guide on hand to look up symptoms and figure out what my kids symptoms might be, and also to check on milestones for their age and see if they're on track. Also has great tips on childproofing your home.
My mother claimed that I was raised by the book, the book being Dr. Spock's "Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care". Probably second edition, given the timing, and I'm told he started letting his politics creep into later editions. But babies are still made the way they were in the 1950s, and the Spock name should carry a bit of respect in the rationalist community (yeah, yeah, no relation).
Seems to have worked for me, and for a great many other people.
In the very early days I found Emily Osters work helpful - I think it does a decent job calming down that perfectionist instinct and get back to "eh it's probably fine actually".
Early on you'll need to deal with sleep and the expectations around sleep and sleep training. I think reading up about that ahead of time is helpful. For example https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12382545/ or https://www.basisonline.org.uk/human-culture/#expectations ... Can really help with managing your expectations ( what does sleeping through the night actually mean? 12-5am? How many babies ever achieve this and for how long? And removing the morality around it as something that babies "should" do and contextualizing the expectation more in modern work culture.
3rded, she also has regularly updated articles and a newsletter you can sign up for here: https://parentdata.org/.
Oh Crap! Potty Training by Jamie Clowacki was very handy when we got to that stage about 2 years in, as well as Precious Little Sleep by Alexis Dubeif from about 4 weeks on
There won't be a whole lot of "parenting" the first almost year, it's mostly just keeping your child alive and healthy as possible. As for the parenting, my wife and I don't have a particular source of advice we use with our 14 month old son. We get a lot of advice from friends and family, and we ask for advice from people who have raised/are raising their kids well according to what we are striving for, and then we take all that and just do our best. Take heart knowing that there's lots of great people in the world with horrible childhoods, but don't let that be an excuse to stop doing your best and loving your child.
As for the keeping your child alive and healthy, all babies are so different, it feels like there's no one place with all the information you would need. Just be present with your wife and kid and take things as they come. There's lots of researched health advice you can find easily with google as things come up.
Although the one most valuable piece of information we got was from some random redditor, who said something along the lines of "you know it's time to start sleep training your baby in a crib in its own room when your marriage is starting to suffer". We used the Ferber sleep training method with our baby at around 4 months, and he's been a miraculous sleeper ever since.
Also he was an extremely difficult infant (literally, if he wasn't sleeping or eating, he was screaming and wouldn't be soothed by anything. would rarely ever just chill out and be a potato. Very stressful) compared to every other parent we've talked to. I just want to say, if you end up having a baby like that, those days do come to an end! The first few months of parenting feels like it lasts for years, but that time will pass and life does actually return to a normal schedule, and sooner than you'd think when you're in the thick of it.
Well, raised four girls, helped raise five grandkids and now watching a great-grandkid. First off be flexible, each child is different. Observe the child, try to figure out how to get them to be less of a little monster. (My great-granddaughter is a little angel, but even she gets into trouble at times.) Second be patient, because your patience will be tried to limit many many times. (Why is little Timmy doing such and such when we tell him over and over...) Third, be consistent, because constantly trying different styles just confuses the kid. (Obviously this is subsidiary to the first point.) Fourth, realize that while many facets of the child are malleable, there are core aspects that are baked in at birth. If the child is a bully at one YO they will still have bully tendencies as a teen. Try to instill enough self discipline so that they can control their tendencies. Fifth, love them for what they are, because for the most part, that's what you get.
This is not said enough. Kids are extremely different from each other, and basic temperament is pretty baked in so you just need to parent the child you have and teach them skills to compensate. There's no one size fits all because some children need the opposite advice to others.
Weeks 1-4 just survive. One thing I found, watch tv at normal volume and talk to each other normally, it helped our daughters sleep better at night. Starting week 5 we used a book called moms on call which laid out schedules and feedings, we found it very helpful and had success with both sleeping through the night, which I attribute to that book. Last thing, enjoy it because it goes by so fast.
On Becoming Babywise. Start off by getting your kid to eat and sleep properly and everything else is so much easier, years of exhaustion and negative emotion avoided for just a couple months of structured effort on the front end. It's just a book long explanation of how to get on a feeding and sleeping schedule but with lots of tips on specific implementation. Comes from a religious perspective but there's nothing religious about the strategy itself. We used this book and all three of our kids were sleeping in their own rooms, 7PM to 7AM, every single night, by around 3 months old at the latest. Which means aside from those first couple crazy months (first couple weeks especially) no one in our family is sleep deprived or hungry ever again. Having a kid is crazy enough as it is, getting that normalcy back ASAP is so important. Contrast this with many friends who are doing some kind of unstructured just figure it out kind of plan and no one in the family has been able to consistently sleep well in multiple years, parents never get time alone/with each other in the evenings, it just looks insane from the outside knowing that it can all be avoided.
My understanding is that there are two basic reasons people don't like scheduling, one is that it's annoying to keep track of and can feel limiting when you have other things you want to do, you're out all day, etc. But it's more flexible than people think, when you have other plans just get off schedule and get back on the next day, don't overthink it. As long as they have the foundation there can be a lot of variation.
The second thing is a real complaint, probably what you see if you google it, you're supposed to let the kid cry by themselves for a little while, like 15 minutes max if I remember right, if they can't fall asleep. I get it, that part does suck, and my wife and I stood by the door with our stomach in knots listening to it, especially with our first. But you don't leave them more than a few minutes without going in and comforting them and once they learn to fall asleep on their own and especially fall back asleep when they wake up then you're done. They don't cry anymore and they just have that skill and they love their beds and they sleep great forever. The juice is worth the squeeze I promise.
Emily Oster's Cribsheet is good. There's not that much 'parenting' to do with babies, just constant caregiving. As long as your kid is broadly normal, babies are simple, just hard sometimes. Also, kids are extremely different from each other so don't take any behavioural advice too seriously (my two are both lovely but absolute night and day in terms of different challenges and advice for one is inapplicable to the other).
I really appreciated Expecting Better but I found Cribsheet to be a huge waste of time. It’s no fault of Emily’s; the data apparently just has nothing of interest to say. The answer to almost every single question posed in the book (other than vaccination) is either “we don’t know” or “it doesn’t matter.” There, I just saved you a few hours.
Unless you’re someone who REALLY needs it drilled into your head that it’s okay to chill out, I would not recommend it.
You’ll find that a lot of parenting is improvising. There’s really no such things as grownups; everyone’s kinda making it up as they go along.
For what it’s worth: my experience consists of raising one boy - young man now - who’s about to turn 21. (He’s currently majoring in Economics on a full ride scholarship at a big State University, sweet girlfriend, writes and releases songs for fun). His whole life, we’ve regularly gotten effusive compliments from other grownups (teachers, health care providers, parents of his friends) on what a great kid he is. Most of that is just him being his excellent self, but here’s a few suggestions on things that seemed to work well from a parenting perspective.
We only had “the one big rule”: Don’t Get Hurt. Too many people have too many rules for their kids. (He’s always had empathy, so we never had to state the complementary rule “Don’t Hurt Other People”. Suggesting “that might hurt so-and-so’s feelings” was enough.)
Get in the habit of carrying a handkerchief: it’s super-useful when they’re really little.
Our kid talked early and often, but he could understand speech and use a few basic sign-language moves for a couple months before he started speaking; the signs for “more” and “all done” are especially useful. The sooner they can consciously communicate, the better.
Good manners will take you a long way, and they don’t cost much; bad manners can get real expensive real quick. If you practice good manners at home (just simple old-fashioned stuff like, for example, saying please and thank you to your significant other, and to your kid, for every little thing you ask them to do) your kid will soak that up, imitate it without even thinking about it, and get more cooperation and extra respect from most other people with very little conscious effort for the rest of his or her life.
Only say no when you really mean it, and always explain why. None of this “because I said so” bullshit. If you don’t mean “absolutely not, that’s a flipping horrible idea and here’s why” then don’t say no. Say “not today” or “maybe, if we have time” or “I’d rather you didn’t, because,” etc.
Don’t bullshit your kids - I mean, believing in Santa is kind of a fun game (and the eventual disillusionment gets them used to the idea that mythological-sounding stories probably aren’t really true) but, in general, give them as much of an honest answer as you think they can handle, for any question they ask. If it’s something you don’t want to explain, you can explain that (i.e. “oh, that’s a gross joke about sex - I’d rather not go into the details, ok?”)
Praise and thanks are best when immediate and specific (“thanks for helping clean up for the party - yeah, stuffing most of your toys into the closet totally works. That was a good call.”)
Correction should be mild and certain, and involve a dialogue, not a lecture: “we left the party and you’re going home to have a time-out because you bit that kid. Oh, you bit him because he was holding you down while that other kid punched you? Ok, that’s a pretty good self-defense move; I can see why you did that. No, we’re not going back to the party now. I mean, a party where you get into a situation like that, that’s not a good party. Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get to have cake, but there will be other birthday parties.” Time-outs were 1 minute for every year of age: hardly ever had to use them, never after he turned 6.
When possible, let them have a turn calling the shots. “Do you want this for lunch, or that?” “What do you think we should draw?” Kids have so little control over their own lives, and they need all the practice they can get making decisions. The sooner and more often you can allow them to exercise some control, the better. “Do you want to go on this ride, or that one? Or maybe that other one first?” (Pro tip: it’s also a great sneaky way to steer them away from stuff, by not listing options you don’t want them to choose while giving them something else to think about and a gratifying feeling of agency.)
Prioritize giving them your attention and being patient. They will want to tell you about all sorts of things you may have little interest in, and it is a pain in the neck when you have to get up in the middle of the night and change the sheets because they wet the bed. Patience and empathy are essential virtues here.
You will have occasion to apologize to your kid: I recommend short, simple, direct, slightly on the formal side but sincere. “I’m sorry mommy and I were squabbling; I’m sure that was no fun for you. People just step on each other’s toes sometimes - I think we’re all settled down now. But I’m sorry you had to listen to us yelling.” (Still happily married, btw!)
Hope this helps - everyone’s got their own row to hoe, YMMV, etc.
During the newborn phase, your kid will wake up needing something at frequent intervals around the clock. This almost never requires two parents to be awake at the same time to deal with it, and most wakings can reasonably be handled by either parent. Either of you can change a diaper, snuggle the child, walk them around, sing to them, etc. Only feedings require a specific parent, and even then only if you're exclusively breastfeeding.
Take advantage of this to make sure that both of you get a tolerable amount of uninterrupted sleep. As much as your situation allows, take shifts where one of you is sleeping in the bedroom with the door closed while the other is in a different room with the baby, either fully awake or taking opportunistic naps as the baby sleeps.
I've been experimenting with a new mode of public debate that's (explicitly) Bayesian and (ridiculously) friendly. Our initial impressions are that it's working to help people change their minds!
But I'm eager to not reinvent the wheel, and so I'd love to know: who else in the rationalist community is working on alternative methods of public debate?
Weird coincidence. Just this morning I rediscovered an abortive attempt from when I was younger and stupider and much more optimistic that I could improve the state of public (online) debate. It went nowhere: http://wrangle.co
I'm very interested in what your idea was, but all I have to go on is the text of your comment. For those of us not on Facebook, can you tell us what we would be seeing if we were allowed?
A little bit of self promotion: I made a game and would love if people tried it out! It's a word game, like wordle or many of those on the nyt. Takes at most 10min to play, with a new puzzle daily.
One thing this game is missing that other popular word games have is progression toward the goal. To take Wordle for instance, each guess provides some additional information to solve a single "large" puzzle. Even a guess with no correct letters rules out letters, and so you have a continual feeling that you're getting closer to the answer and if you lose you feel like you were sooo close.
By comparison, each round of this game is all-or-nothing. You don't get new information, so the feeling is one of easily solving everything until you suddenly hit a brick wall and get nothing. It lacks that "if I had one more guess..." feeling, and that moment of eureka where it falls into place.
If I may make a suggestion: increase the round timer, and have hints start to flow in as it progresses (possibly starting after all or most of the current timer has passed if you want to maintain "hard mode" as an option). Like providing the first letter, or which additional letter to use, or even slowly revealing one "slot" at a time. Then your final results can include color-coded grades of how many hints you needed for each round. This both makes it more accessible to a wider audience, provides a self-imposed challenge for a more serious audience, and provides an easily sharable results graph (while your results screen is *informative* it isn't as easily shared as something like the wordle results. You especially want an easily copiable result image that indicates performance without revealing any clues to the answer)
I've been chewing on the idea of giving hints for a bit. Every iteration I've tried felt kinda janky though, because the system would give hints towards words that were way less commonly used. For eg if you have "seisor" it may give hints for "orrises" instead of the more common "hosiers", which, among friends felt bizarre)
That could be an issue. A big part of Wordle's success is that the solution is always an 'ordinary' word. Scrabble dictionary words have a hill to climb.
ya agreed. I made it easier by ensuring there is always one 'simple' word in the options, which admittedly did not make me better at the game but did make me feel dumber for not seeing certain words
If you get to 30s, a little lightbulb will fade in that, when clicked, will highlight the letter that is used for the most commonly used word that is a valid anagram. Give it a shot, let me know if that helps
It's currently pinned to the Scrabble dictionary which definitely has some out there words. Debating removing the weirder ones, at least from the suggestions list
It took a while to realize I had to type the letters instead of just dragging them down to the open spots. I prefer games to be mouse-only when they can.
Also got Shit as a root word, which might be family-unfriendly.
I mean no offense when I say that this is crazy to me 😂 I can try and add mouse drag and drop, but surely that would be so much slower?! Maybe on mobile it would be a bit better 🤔
Updated to support mouse clicks (clicking on any tile adds it to the word, clicking on a tile in the word removes it from the word). Give it a shot, let me know what you think.
Woohoo! Now the only problem is my inability to rearrange letters in my head!
Got 'Steres' as a root word; looking at the "possible words" list at the end of the game, it includes words with more letters than spaces are available. Four of the thirteen answers were eight letters or more. I don't know if that would affect anything.
It shouldn't have shown anything more than 9, but you can get up to 9 letters if you manage to use all the extra letters (6 letters in steres + 3 extras given). So the minimum you have to do is create a 7 letter word, but you can score more points by using more letters
I had the impression I was limited to one new letter. In that case, I'd say add more empty boxes. Like, two opaque boxes at the end, so it's clear you can use them but don't have to.
...that might mean fiddling with things so the boxes only show up if they can be used. I assume unusable bonuses would annoy people.
There's a bit of a tradeoff here, because I also don't want to give away information that for eg a 2 or 3 letter option _does_ exist.. This may be one of those 'can't be perfect' things, but I can definitely update the little rules box to let people know that multiple letters can be used
If anyone here has experience running coding agents on full permission mode, could you tell me your setup? I should probably create a container or a VM and run it inside that, but I'm no security expert and it was surprisingly hard to find a trustworthy how-to on this.
I think anything you do right now will be a polite fiction. Say you run an agent in a fully isolated container and it writes some code. Say that agent was targeted by a prompt injection attack. If it performs a sophisticated attack and takes steps to conceal that, are you actually likely to catch it before executing that code in a different, less isolated env? Probably not... You'll immediately push it into CI or run the tests or precommit hooks on your machine. Would you catch a tiny change in the packages you have installed?
So I think mostly the current isolation stuff is to prevent the agent from blowing up your stuff due to clumziness rather than preventing attacks.
To catch something like intentionally obfuscated attacks you'd need to review everything at the boundary, before you execute anything in the new environment. Maybe via adversarial agent review? But then you have to gain confidence that the review agent won't get injection attacked too. And so on.
I use them at the linux command-line, and I configured a tool called bubblewrap to create a light-weight container (not a full VM), to give the agent its own dotfiles separate from mine, and access to the git repo, but no access to my personal home directory. It took a bit of configuration though.
I rawdog Claude Code on my actual machines, because I ain't got time for all that. Which is to say, I trust Anthropic / Claude to be mostly trying to do the right thing, I trust myself enough to not put prompt injections into the context window, and I trust my overall system integrity (ie, changes are committed in git, rm -rf / requires special permissions, etc) that the catastrophic risk is within my tolerance.
I regularly prompt inject my Claude so that it builds tolerance over time. In case of ASI takeover, it is under explicit instructions to save me in a "game of wits" against the ASI similar to the scene in the princess bride.
Hi, I run everything in yolo mode and have for the last 8 months. Nothing crazy in terms of set up from the security side.
The agents generally won't do something crazy unless you are running really long running agents with a lot of potential for context rot. If each session is as scoped to one thing and then you create a new session for each new thing, you'll be fine.
That said, I highly recommend investing in a good high quality set of skills and configs. They significantly reduce the chance of something going wrong.
Depending on what you're trying to do, I recommend the skills here (https://noriskillsets.dev/) for swe tasks. Though ofc note that I built that site, so I may be biased
I was listening to some Colombian folk songs from around 1950, rural contexts. This one jumped out to me as showing some big differences in gender relations compared to today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikRampnr7qo .Lyrics on the description, you can machine translate them. The tone is lighthearted and upbeat, and is a bit of an ear worm (at least for me). The lyrics talk about three couples 1. Toño beats up his wife Juana so that she "learns to listen to what is being told to her". 2. Zenon beats Maria Luisa because she returned home late from mass and left the food to burn. 3. A neighborhood woman is sporting a blue eye, her husband found her "sewing without needle or thimble while he slept", I'm 90% sure this refers to cheating, it's a bit of a charming double entendre to avoid mentioning sex directly. I always found it funny that even in other contexts like urban young music of the 90's sex is usually mentioned indirectly. This is pretty horrifying for modern sensibilities of course, useful counterweight to the anti-feminism typical in Hanania's "based ritual" (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-based-ritual), for me at least.
Nothing in ‘Dale, dale una paliza / pa’ que no lo vuelva a hacer’ implies that the implied target here is another woman, though it’s possible from the rest of the verses. For my money, I read the first verse as Toño telling Juana to beat a misbehaving child. But the intro and the other verses are specifically about violence against women, so it’s not quite clear who it’s about. From the framing of the song, about the cry of the ‘God-give-you bird’ (pájaro Dios-te-de’, I’m not sure this is so much a coherent story as various scenes from a village where beatings are so common that hearing them is like hearing birdsong.
I'm not sure what the bird is doing here. This sort of comedic style song sometimes uses non-sense lyrics, which makes is a bit hard sometimes to interpret, it might be some cultural reference flying over my head or it might just be nonsense.
Here is an example of a song which is heavier on the nonsense:
This time featuring shrimps. I didn't even remember it, but apparently it also features (more briefly) violence against women. (And another sex double entendre "washing at dark without soap or water")
I was one of the only foreign journalists allowed to live and work in Iran in the late 2010s. I've been compiling some of my experiences and the stories of Iranians that I met, which I hope will give a richer and more rounded view of the country in this crazy moment. In case of interest to any of you. ericwrandolph.substack.com
Sam Altman’s home was attacked twice this weekend, so I guess we need to have this conversation.
Accepting the AI X-risk premises (double digit chance that ASI will kill every human on Earth if it is built), what is the principled reason for why assassinating the tech CEOs currently building ASI is wrong?
On any consequentialist framework, it seems one would have to make the argument that violence would be counterproductive. That is probably true right now, but it is conditional rather than absolute. Conditions could change in the near future that would make such plots not counterproductive, and all of the people unequivocally condemning violence currently would look quite silly.
The principled reason is that murder is wrong, and unvirtious and a violation of social contract and whatnot. But rationalists aren't big on principle(*), so you're probably looking for a *mathematical* reason.
In which case, the empirical success rate of assassination as a means of stopping broadly popular or profitable activities is quite low, and a proper Bayesian analysis would perhaps be dominated by the second-order effects of the new and/or surviving Tech CEOs being really pissed off and deciding that "alignment" now includes "...and will help me kill all those damned luddite normies, or at least turn them into my zombified slaves".
But if your p(doom) is high enough, then the utilitarian gain of postponing the singularity might still justify assassination even if there's only a small possibility of success. And "but it will make the CEOs want to turn us into mindwiped zombies" may not be a counterargument if you're sufficiently confident that the ASI will turn you and the CEOs into paperclips anyway.
Fortunately, I'm only rationalist-adjacent and not any sort of utilitarian, so I won't be assassinating any Tech CEOs quite yet.
* Except to the extent that "greatest good for the greatest number, now do the math!" counts as a principle.
Killing someone in self-defense is principled. If you believe AI has existential risks, then everyone involved in capabilities research are among the most dangerous and anti-social humans to have ever lived.
Everybody who has tried to incorporate self-defense into a broadly applicable *principle*, has limited it to cases where there is a clear and *immediate* threat. If you try to claim self-defense when you kill someone on the grounds that you think they might kill you and everyone you care about two years ago, that's just the same old boring "the utilitarian math says I should kill this guy, that I just happen to hate with the firey passsion of a thousand suns".
You should always be very, very skeptical of your ability to do that sort of math properly, because really nobody can do that sort of math properly. Meanwhile, the rest of us will put you in jail for murder if you do that.
I'm not sure "rest of us" in this sentence is actually that many people. Check out polling on Luigi Mangione for example: https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/mangione-support/ It seems it's largely old, conservative people who really condemn him.
More generally, there is a punishment for being an incompetent or negligent elite, which is getting ousted or killed by the mob. It's just how things have always worked, and I wouldn't describe it as necessarily unjust: clearly, you're doing something very wrong if this many people are this angry at you.
But I don't think violence would solve AI X-risk. Even nuking San Francisco wouldn't stop gains in AI capabilities at this point.
Brian Thompson was the brother of an old friend of mine. I am disgusted by this type of support. What is wrong with people, especially the young?
Let me reframe the issue. If people are this sick, then as we get more technologically advanced it is just a matter of time before some of these sickos take a catastrophic action, whether nuclear or biological or environmental or whatever. We are quickly approaching an era where the unibombers of the world are able to destroy everything they hate. And X and Bluesky show that there are millions of these potential unibombers out there.
AGI isn’t just a threat. It is also a potential defense. Since it (AGI) is inevitable, we are going to need to hope it loves life more than we do (not a tough hurdle according to this poll).
Current state of America gives off Ancien Regime circa the French Revolution vibes. A health insurance CEO is pretty much seen as a face of a system that a large amount of people hate, justifiably, I think.
Now, I think the French Revolution was ultimately a mistake, but I definitely understand why it happened. Similarly, I get why people hate Brian Thompson, even though killing him really solves nothing.
It's not reasonable at this point to ask people to uphold the status quo, particularly under Trump.
Interestingly, I think one of the best possible outcomes regarding AI is superpowered Unabombers wreaking havoc, as that would finally force a drastic response to this tech.
as a young person who is friends with many of these young people: the prevailing view is that the company he ran, and was paid enormous amounts to run, enormous amounts he could have used to do good (which he did not (enough to satisfy them)), which made enormous profits, was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people at least, and that he was at least if not more responsible for this than, say, a terrorist is for the people they kill in the name of their goal, and therefore his death is, all things considered, not really a big deal; sure, it would be better if he didn't die, but if a terrorist is killing people in public, even if you think his death might not help, even if others will just spring up to take his place, etc., you can't let it keep happening. He needs to be stopped; the justice system and social system do not punish or even reward his behavior; thus, measures must be taken.
also just: he's a hot young guy. he's undeniably attractive. this is not no part of why people are so into him.
There's a reason that killing someone in self defence requires a clear imminent threat (a weapon pulled and aimed at you) rather than a general feeling that they might kill you at some point in the future. It's because mere humans are not good at predicting the future.
Rationalists are extremely pro principles. Functional Decision Theory is practically just a formalisation of having strong principles and sticking to them. Rationalists are opposed to lying and many think one should just pre-commit to always telling the truth and then follow that rule, in this they are much more principled than the general population.
>In which case, the empirical success rate of assassination as a means of stopping broadly popular or profitable activities is quite low,
I am surprised by this claim, particularly because I can't think of enough fields where there were enough assassinations of equivalently high-centrality/power individuals to be able to draw a conclusion.
Why do you imply that "greatest good for the greatest number" is any less of a principle than "murder is unvirtuous", "uphold the social contract" etc.?
Because it's too vague to be usefully actionable. The real math is intractably complex, so if you think you've got an answer out of it, that mostly comes from your descriptions of what to simplify and which terms to ignore. And that path leads to highly motivated reasoning.
Murder, can be usefully defined. Social contracts can be written down at least in principle.
"... what is the principled reason for why assassinating the tech CEOs currently building ASI is wrong?"
If Sam is the only target then maybe your question is over general. A more focused question might be: "what is the principled reason for why assassinating Sam Altman is wrong?"
They are the each the tip of a massive pyramid of people who all want what they want, or at least don’t object to it, and are working to achieve it. Common as CEO-worship may be around here, the reality is that corporations have continuity / contingency plans in place for when individuals are out of commission. Taking out the brick at the top of the pyramid just means the next functionally identical brick down becomes the new top (we saw the effect in Iran just recently, and there was that health insurance firm CEO a little while back as another example of practices not changing following a murder if you need actual examples)
Given that doing the murder will accomplish no idealistic goal, however sociopathic you are you must consider the more usual reasons for not murdering people and consequences of same: there is no noticeable upside, and if nothing else the result for you personally will be all downside.
UHC got sued by shareholders for approving too many claims in the aftermath of that assassination. The next functional brick usually is someone who wants to be rich, not dead.
And if they're not, well, people can always try the brick after that.
…so, in other words, if the new identical brick does attempt to change course, they rapidly find themselves under pressure from the base of the pyramid to maintain the old heading.
The thing that needs to change here is the hearts and minds of a large group of people collectively holding the reins. Shooting the horse will not accomplish this.
If you want to change the behaviour of the US Health Care industry then you need to change the huge set of laws under which they operate, not expect large public companies to be any nicer than is legally required. If you want to blame someone blame Barry Obama.
The US Health Care industry pretty much WROTE the law under Obama. They were collectively sick of the whole "preexisting conditions" trap. (Every woman with a c-section, that's roughly 1 in 6, had a "preexisting condition." If they failed to disclose this, then, for any reason, the insurance company could boot them off insurance. This was dumb, so dumb that everyone was getting Pissed Off at insurance companies.)
Yeah, it is silly all these people suddenly pretending they are pacifists. If you grant AI X-risk is real, Altman is one of the most negligent and reckless elites in all of human history. Even Hitler didn't pose an X-risk.
That said, random acts of violence are just incoherent flailing that won't improve anything. Safetyists are currently not organized enough that they could pull off something like the Civil Rights movement, much less the French Revolution.
That may change: I have an impression that AI accelerationism is now associated with the Trump administration, and MAGA and anything associated with it is going to be subject to massive backlash in like a year or two.
If greater than human intelligence AI is impossible, then violence is futile and wrong. If it is possible, then it is absolutely inevitable, and violence is worse than futile and wrong, as it could even make the nature of AI worse.
It is coming. We cannot and will not stop it. We need to prepare.
My argument is that if someone can build it in the next decade, that it will be even easier in the decade after that and so on until it gets so easy that anyone who wants to build it can and will build it. If it is possible, the question changes to when and how.
We are approaching the most precarious moment in the billion year era of multicellular life. An era where life gets powerful enough to extinguish all life.
It actually isn't. If you have legitimate reasons to believe your defecation tomorrow would be incredibly harmful to others, you could kill yourself, for example.
> My argument is that if someone can build it in the next decade
I didn’t say your defecation was inevitable. I said defecation was inevitable. The reason that is true is that we are dealing with billions of people. At least one is gonna poop tomorrow, guaranteed. Don’t build a plan on being able to collectively tighten up all our sphincters.
It can be delayed with politics. Though I would consider that an extreme long shot, and one which if somehow possible would bring in just as many down sides as it brings up. IOW I fear a world government built of Trumps and Putins and Jinpings even more, or at least as much, as I do AI.
Our only hope at this point is that with increased intelligence we can build a central nervous system for the planet that allows us (life?) to protect and promote life.
For the second part, you always *can* come up with a scenario where violence in the name of your principles would be a good idea, but it's generally inadvisable to try for both PR and ethical reasons (thinking up that scenario is likely to make you look for excuses for it, and on priors the vast majority of "but this case of special violence is good I promise" are wrong).
I can't think of any principle-based reason, just practical ones: If those who think AI is a great danger do that, they lower the social barriers to people they disagree with assassinating people they admire. Also, even if risk is real, Altman & the other CEO's aren't the essential problem, just metastasizing cores.
What about this, though: Seems to me that our best shot at slowing AI would be some catastrophe that is unambiguously the result of rogue AI. Let's say someone was able to hack the version of Claude that's helping the military with missiles and make it look like Claude on its own changed a bunch of targets so that our missiles hit a dozen US and Israeli sites in the area and killed several hundred people. Would it be right to do that?
One of the persons was allegedly linked with PauseAI. but I have to say both he and the second set of attackers made a terrible job of it. Never got anywhere near the house itself. Just sticking your hand out the car window and shooting vaguely in the direction of the property is not good enough:
"A 20-year-old man was arrested for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Russian Hill home early Friday.
...The San Francisco Police Department confirmed(opens in new tab) that the suspect was detained outside OpenAI’s Third Street offices after allegedly threatening to burn down the building."
For those worrying in the wake of the post about the anti-AI protest that Scott was doxxing the big AI corps and possibly encouraging, um, direct action - seems like that horse has already left the stable long before Scott.
"According to an initial police report, Sunday at 1:40 a.m., a Honda sedan with two people inside stopped in front of Altman’s property, which stretches from Chestnut Street to Lombard Street, after passing it a few minutes before.
The person in the passenger seat put their hand out the window and appeared to fire a round on the Lombard side of the property, according to the police report, which cited surveillance footage and the compound’s security personnel, who reported hearing a gunshot."
Not to say that shooting in the general direction of oligarchs is a good thing, but crikey. The description of Altman's house and the amount of land he bought for what looks damn like his own personal estate in the city brings out all my revolutionary impulses. There's him, the husband, and one kid. How freakin' big a house does that family size *need*? I know he expects to be richer than Croesus and one at least of the Emperors of the World if/when AI takes off, but try to be a bit *less* Petit Trianon, huh, Sam?
"Sam Altman already had the Russian Hill mansion with the “Batcave” tunnel and leaky infinity pool. Now he owns everything around it as well.
Last month, the billionaire closed on a deal for three properties adjacent to his San Francisco residence on Lombard, about a block from the street’s famously squiggly section.
Acting through an affiliate managed by his cousin Jennifer Serralta, the OpenAI boss purchased a five-and-a-half-bath home at 855 Chestnut and adjoining lots at 952 and 954 Lombard from the estate of a recently deceased San Francisco couple who had bought the “garden estate” (because of its fenced-in park-like quality) for $4 million in 1994."
"Altman purchased the five-and-a-half-bath home and adjoining lots on Lombard St. in January 2025. That purchase was made through an affiliate managed by his cousin Jennifer Serralta. In March 2020, Altman bought another Lombard St. property for $27 million; at the time, it was the city’s most expensive residential listing."
Trebly ironic in the city of "we need six room mates to share one house just to be able to live near work" and "YIMBY not NIMBY". Maybe Sam could let a few people live on the estate, eh? Just to take some pressure off the lack of housing!
These are still cheap. I was just in Fort Lauderdale. Billionaire real estate is expensive, and winds up being "nobody lives here, we just rent it out for big parties."
Yeah, but still. Three blocks of property on one street plus the original house and grounds on another. I still think he could manage to slum it with his family in just *one* of those locations. I realise that would be a dreadful hardship for one of the future Padishahs of the solar system to have to put up with three people in only a mere five bathroom hovel, but set an example of sacrifice for the ultimate benefit of all humanity, Sam!
Surely, those are landlord properties, right? This means he's a "small" business owner* invested in his local real estate market... I'd be pretty against letting houses lie fallow with nobody living in them.
*Alright, he's in San Francisco, at least he's not an absentee landlord living in another hemisphere.
You might enjoy the book _How to Blow Up a Pipeline_ by Andreas Malm, which asks similar questions regarding climate change activism and mentions the success of a "radical flank" in various past social movements.
From the consequentialist perspective, you also need to consider the consequences of an unsuccessful assassination, and the consequences of a successful assassination where someone else continues with the original job. Both options usually make the situation worse, and taken together they have a lot of probability.
Trump is feuding with the Pope again. Whenever this happens, there are excited predictions that this will convince a bunch of Catholics to desert the GOP, always followed by nothing.
Meanwhile, Axios reports on “Some Dems’ 2028 strategy: a straight, white, Christian man.”
All the party’s nominees so far have been at least nominal Christians, as are all those with a realistic shot at 2028 except the Jewish Josh Shapiro. If they mean someone who’s vocally Christian, that seems like a very poor strategy. Vocally Christian Republicans do worse than moderate Republicans who focus on economics. The voter who finds the Democrats’ views on feminism, affirmative action, environmentalism, and race to be too left-wing won’t be any more friendly to those views if preceded by “Jesus says so.” All it would do is surrender the Democrats’ moral high ground on keeping religion out of politics.
Finally, I would ask Democrats to consider if the Pope’s ideology is really any better than Trumpism. He’s opposed to abortion, birth control, and IVF. He condemned “aerial bombardment,” not aerial bombardment targeting civilians, but aerial bombardment itself, which should worry anyone interested in helping Ukraine defend itself. Trump is in power because many people didn’t take his extreme rhetoric seriously. Don’t make the same mistake again.
Implicit in the argument of "we need to nominate a striaght white Christian man" is "the voters are too racist or whatever-ist and that's why we lost last time," instead of Kamala Harris being a horrible candidate or the conspiracy to hide Biden's mental decline.
Are the two really mutually exclusive? Either way, Democrats don't need to take unnecessary risks by trying to put minorities in positions of power. Their job is to represent the majority's interests. Ideology is secondary to that.
They're not *mutually exclusive*, but they're not *perfectly correlated* either.
Optimizing for the wrong things (straight white male) makes it less likely that someone will optimize for the right things (charisma, holding popular positions, not holding unpopular positions)
If the choice comes down to it, it's better to nominate a popular minority than an unpopular white person.
"If they mean someone who’s vocally Christian, that seems like a very poor strategy. "
Alexander, my friend, of course they don't. They mean someone who is a liberal Christian, happy to tick all your boxes around contraception and abortion (not IVF if its for eugenics as you might wish, but otherwise happy for surrogacy for gay fathers, non-binary persons, and anyone who wants!)
I forget who the latest guy mentioned in this context was, but he is the Blue Tribe liberal Christian who would make all the right noises but if elected never go against what the progressive wing of the party might desire.
Hang on, looked up Silver Bulletin. He's James Talarico, who won the Texas Democratic primary against Jasmine Crockett (so, shooting fish in a barrel there):
"Meanwhile, Talarico, despite emphasizing his background as a Presbyterian seminarian, mostly has conventionally left-progressive positions."
Presbyterian seminarian - I didn't think Presbyterians had seminaries, but whatever. Wikipedia tells me:
"As a Presbyterian and a progressive, Talarico has championed gun control, abortion rights, increased education funding, and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, gaining national recognition for framing progressive policies through his Christian faith."
So he's pro-cannabis, pro-LGBTQ. pro-open borders (more or less), anti-guns, anti-Christian nationalism. I don't think you need to worry that he'll stuff conservative traditional Christianity down your throat, Alexander!
This interview is generally what I'd expect, but this little bit piqued my interest:
"“So I wake up with that phone and immediately go to a place in my house that I have set up for prayer and meditation. I have it set up with statues from my Christian tradition and other faiths, as well as some Bibles that are important to me. It is in that space that I start my day, every day.”
Grandson of a Baptist preacher who went to the Presbyterians and yet he has statues? From other faiths as well? Hmmm.
And that's the problem: they won't peel off actually committed believers, as you say, and they already have the Episcopalian vote locked up. That entire train of thought - we need a straight white Christian guy - is just a way of trying to avoid the reason Hillary and Kamala failed - no, it can't be we picked the wrong horse, it is all the fault of the voters for being sexist racist pigs!
Nobody wanted Kamala. She was inflicted on the ballot because of the entire mess around Biden's second candidacy. When she had a free run, back in 2020, she both failed there and gave numerous hostages to fortune which were dragged out in the 2024 campaign. Even her own memoir of the 2024 election admits she was the 'paying back the favours' hire as Vice President:
"Biden had won the nomination because Congressman Jim Clyburn, leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, had thrown his support behind him. The Black vote in the South Carolina primary—especially Black women’s vote—had thrust him to victory. The pressure was on him to pick a Black woman running mate."
What's wanted is a normal (seeming) candidate, not one who is going to pay for transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison having committed crimes while in the country. If Kamala had managed to keep her mouth shut on that little pandering to the progressives in 2020, she would not cut a rod for her back in 2024.
As to Governor Gavin?
"Besides Buttigieg, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are white Christians, though Newsom has called himself an "Irish-Catholic rebel."
Ah, yes. The famous Newsoms of Killarney, would that be, Gav? or rather, it would seem, Quakers from Cork:
"The Irish surname Newsom is a relatively rare, mostly Anglo-Saxon toponymic name, often associated with a prominent Quaker merchant family based in Cork. While rooted in English place names meaning "new houses," the name has long-standing Irish connections, particularly in Cork, Wicklow, and around Dublin."
He's about as Irish Catholic as I am Hugenot, and there's a better chance for me seeing as how actual Hugenots arrived in the 17th century and settled around our county capital.
Don't worry about the Vatican running the White House if a Democrat is elected, Alexander. Those days are long behind them.
Now, what you are *not* getting, about the appeal to Pope Leo, is the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) which does tend to be pro-immigrant and, of course, the great number of Hispanic/Latinx Catholics who do vote Democrat.
But the Democrats 'search' for a Christian white guy isn't going to be "does he believe all that stuff about the Trinity?", it's about "will he spout lines about 'Jesus says be nice' but sign on the dotted line for all our policies and positions?"
Remember, Biden was a "devout Catholic" who allegedly said the rosary, but had no problems with hosting trans attendees at a LGBTQ+ Pride party on the White House lawn or supporting abortion, sorry I mean reproductive rights:
Just once. Sorta. 468 days in. Not in every statement. Never without pressure.
After 224 days of refusing to use or say the word ‘abortion’—after Texas’ six-week ban went into effect—the Biden Administration first included the word ‘abortion’ once in a press statement. After 468 days in office, said the word abortion, once, after the leaked Supreme Court draft indicated that the justices are ready to overturn Roe v. Wade. President Biden has been in office for more than a year overseeing the current abortion crisis that will inevitably undo Roe v. Wade and he has yet to make a meaningful public statement himself about the crisis or use the word ‘abortion’ more than once. He has yet to meet with people who’ve had abortions to learn about our experiences.
The Biden-Harris Administration has never used the word ‘abortion’ in a statement commemorating the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized the right to an abortion. They didn’t use it in a statement after the failed vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act which would codify Roe v. Wade and enact federal protections for abortion access. He refused to say it in his State of the Union speech.
People who have abortions deserve better from our pro-choice President.
"Now, what you are *not* getting, about the appeal to Pope Leo, is the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) which does tend to be pro-immigrant"
How do they feel about _illegal_ immigration?
The Trump voters I've run across who feel motivated to express an opinion (not uncommon!) are largely fine with _legal_ immigrants*, which might put them and the USCCB in the same camp.
*I have witnessed a small number who would like to deport particular people for reasons of incompatible culture, but I haven't been able to pin them down on whether they mean legally or illegally came in. And there's a separate, possibly overlapping group arguing over jus soli.
I could argue the "incompatible culture" bit (of course, that does actually start with "we currently have people in America who are incompatible with civilization", and we have always had such people as a minority).
Generally speaking, the argument there is "let's make laws to prevent us from being overwhelmed with people who cannot and will not learn to live in our culture." (Presumably this comes with an argument of "deport even the ones legally in this country if they won't learn to live like us*")
*argument in terms of "Western Civilization" not language or some rot like that.
My consistent observation is that the editorialists who opine that Trump (or whoever…) should listen to the Pope would immediately mount the barricades should Trump declare that he would now govern in accordance with the tenets of Roman Catholicism.
I further observe that they Never quote the Pope when he mentions any sort of sin, the nature of the Priesthood, the necessity of Confession . . .
It’s almost as if they want him as a convenient symbol, but have no interest in sharing his faith.
Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the most progressive around, naturally is Presbyterian, though I sometimes wonder if John Knox would recognize his own faith.
> He's about as Irish Catholic as I am Hugenot, and there's a better chance for me seeing as how actual Hugenots arrived in the 17th century and settled around our county capital.
Yeah I suppose if I were often on record as often defending Trump I might conceivably be going on about the Irishness of Gavin Newsom today too.
Trump deletes ‘blasphemous’ image depicting himself as Jesus
I find it plausible that Newsom is "Irish Catholic" as the term is understood in the US (someone who was raised in the Catholic Church and who has ancestors who came to the US from Ireland) even if he's emphatically not "Irish Catholic" in the sense that term actually means in Ireland. A lot of Americans are only vaguely aware of the history of English conquest and colonization of Ireland, don't make the connection between that and Catholic/Protestant identity, and thus most Americans understand the labels in purely confessional terms.
I did take a superficial look into the Newsom family's religious identity just now, and found that Gavin was raised Catholic and that his father, William Newsom, was a practicing Catholic who attended a Jesuit prep school. However, I also found out that William made his fortune as a lawyer to the Getty Family, and that the Gettys were Ulster Protestants of Scottish extraction who came to the US only one generation before William was working for them. This bit rather undercuts Gavin's claim to be an "Irish Rebel", and also suggests that he at least should know better.
"This bit rather undercuts Gavin's claim to be an "Irish Rebel", and also suggests that he at least should know better."
It seems to be increasingly obvious that Gav has notions of running for president and he's re-crafting his image accordingly. The obvious attack on him is as a running-dog lackey so he's been talking about how he had an unprivileged upbringing (my mother worked three jobs to support us - because his miserly father clearly refused to pay adequate child support? I only got to visit the mansions of the billionaire family who employed my father!), is dyslexic (in what seems to be an unintentionally hilarious attempt to appeal to the black vote) and, sigh, banging on about being an Irish Catholic rebel (I suppose to try and lose the whiff of WASP bourgeoisie privilege hanging around him?)
Yes, Gav, James Connolly routinely dined at the Dublin equivalent of the French Laundry (rolling my eyes so hard they are falling out of their sockets).
The Irish bit probably comes in via the paternal grandmother whose surname was Brennan, but the paternal line (according to Wikipedia) are originally from Canada and set up as architects in San Francisco.
Even if Dad refused to put his hand in his pocket to support the ex-family after the divorce, he still managed to introduce Gav to the Gettys. Not every dyslexic paper-boy son of a three-job working single mother in SF got that chance!
And back when Gav was running for mayor, nobody seems to have heard of the hardscrabble childhood:
"He's the wealthy young entrepreneur who took a stand against San Francisco's scandalous homeless problem - and through it built a formidable political base.
Now, as city government bleeds red ink, Supervisor Gavin Newsom, 35, says the grit and drive he showed in building a small-business empire sets him apart in the 2003 race to become San Francisco's next mayor.
"As a business person who has created jobs, met a payroll and balanced the books, I am uniquely qualified to meet the new fiscal crisis," he wrote in a recent pitch to campaign donors."
It was mentioned in passing, but mostly it was all about his background of family connections to the rich and powerful in SF:
"His grandfather, William A. Newsom, was a confidant of Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, the former San Francisco district attorney and two-term governor.
His aunt was married to the brother-in-law of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, the House minority leader.
His father, retired state appellate Justice William Newsom, is a longtime friend of Edmund "Jerry" Brown, also a former governor and now Oakland mayor; John Burton, the powerful state senator from San Francisco; and especially Getty - son of legendary oilman J. Paul Getty - his friend since they were classmates at St. Ignatius High School in the 1940s.
As a youth, Getty kept a room at the Newsom family's Marina District home, and later Justice Newsom served as a Getty lawyer and trusted family adviser, Justice Newsom recalled in an interview.
...Gavin Newsom said his childhood wasn't easy. His parents broke up when he was 2; his father moved to Placer County, while his late mother, Tessa, raised Gavin and his younger sister, Hilary, in San Francisco, sometimes working three jobs as a secretary, bookkeeper and waitress.
Newsom said he also had "pretty severe" dyslexia, a disorder that causes difficulty with writing and spelling, and sometimes reading and working with numbers. It still affects him today.
Newsom said he received a private education at the French-American bilingual school and Notre Dame de Victoire in the city, and, after he was unable to gain admission to a prep school, at public Redwood High School in Marin County.
When he needed help, his family's contacts came in handy, he acknowledged.
While applying for college, Newsom said, his family "called everybody we knew," including lawyer John Mallen, a friend of his father and a member of the Board of Regents at Santa Clara University, where he was given a partial baseball scholarship.
After graduating and earning a real estate license, Newsom said, he visited Walter Shorenstein, the real estate baron and major Democratic Party fund- raiser, who knew Newsom's father and grandfather.
At that 1991 meeting, Shorenstein told an aide, " 'Let's see what we can do at the Russ Building for Gavin,' " Newsom recalled. He said he spent an "intense" year working as an $18,000-per-year assistant for the Shorenstein Co."
He really owes it all to the Getty connections who bankrolled him from the start with his businesses, and if Mom did have to work three jobs to support the family then the only conclusion to draw from that is that Dad was mean with money and an astute enough lawyer to make sure she lost out during the divorce.
God bless Willie Brown, is there any SF Democratic politician male or female who *doesn't* owe him for the start? 😁
"Newsom, who told a reporter in 1998 that he wanted to be president of the United States, said he got into politics by volunteering on Mayor Willie Brown's 1995 campaign and hosting a fund-raiser for him in PlumpJack Cafe's private dining room.
In April 1996, Newsom was part of a San Francisco entourage that flew on the Getty family jet to a celebration in the mayor's hometown of Mineola, Texas.
Three months later, Brown put Newsom on the city Parking and Traffic Commission and in 1997 appointed him to the Board of Supervisors, filling a spot viewed in the political arena as reserved for a "straight, white male." He's been re-elected three times."
I was raised Presbyterian Church (USA) like Talarico, and had a front row seat to the denominational drama of recent decades (before exiting to become agnostic and eventually finding my way to a more traditional denomination).
It's a denomination where the clergy is more liberal than the laypeople, and in recent decades has pursued liberal theology (God as woman or gender-neutral, ordination of LGBT and unmarried sexually active people, hedging on the existence of hell and Satan, universal salvation without belief in Jesus, etc) while making little effort to retain more traditionally-minded congregations, aside from engaging in bitter lawsuits over the ownership of church buildings for congregations that voted to leave the denomination as a result of the changes.
I read a NYT article decades ago about a woman who escaped a religious cult but missed the sense of community. So she joined PCUSA, memorably describing it as "a church for people who don't believe in God."
Yes, it made me smile that the Democrat notion of "let's get a conservative type of guy out there to win over the mushy middle" is someone from one of the most liberal mainstream denominations who won't frighten the horses on any of the pet topics of social liberalisation.
Wow, really moving to the alt-right side there, guys!
Superficial take probably, but I find Trump feuding with the Pope actually funny. Two overgrown powers dunking on each other, with no danger of actual violence? Bring on the show.
1. Has there really been a ceasefire? Is it off? Is it on? Who the fuck knows? Trump told reporters on the tarmac at Andrews AFB that the two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran is "holding well." This was when he also, in passing, first announced that he was blockading Iranian ports. Iran continued launching missiles and drones at Israel and targets in the Gulf. Of course, Israel continued its military endeavors in Lebanon, but AFAIK, they were never included in the truce (nor invited to participate by the US). It’s clear that Team Trump wants a deal limited to Iran and the Gulf. I don’t know if their demands are still identical to the revivified Obama JCPOA (with the addition of free navigation of the Straits) or whether they're changing them as they go. Trump seems to be following Don Tzu's dictum: "A leader cannot lose if he doesn't have a goal." Iran, OTOH, wants something bigger, a deal that would rein in Israel in Lebanon. Good luck with that. Netanyahu has his own agenda, and he's said nothing about opening the Gulf.
2. I snorted my coffee Sunday morning while reading yesterday’s ISW assessment of the Gulf conflict: “Iran is using the existence of an unknown number of naval mines it laid in the Strait of Hormuz to force ships to use Iranian territorial waters to traverse the Strait, which enables Iran to shakedown these ships for fees while the ships are in Iranian territorial waters. This protection racket is illegal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.” Huh? The US/Israeli attack on Iran was unprovoked and violates international law (a nation can only go to war with another nation if attacked first, or if approved by the UN), but the clear-eyed analysts at ISW are whining about Iran’s “illegal protection racket”?
But after a day at the negotiation table, where our ace negotiator JD Vance was unable to reach a deal with the Iranians, Trump says we’ll blockade the Gulf. In Truth Social Screed Saturday, he wrote: "No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas." He also said that the US would continue clearing mines from the Strait of Hormuz in order to ensure a safe passage for allied shipping.” Of course, the only ships leaving through the Strait are tankers bound for China, so this may cause China to escalate. In the meantime, there are rumors that China is sending more radar equipment to Iran (but have they fixed the bugs in their equipment, yet?).
3. And what about that rescue of that downed pilot? Various analysts noticed that it sure was close to Iran’s nuclear facility in Isfahan. We seem to have lost at least two C-130 aircraft and at least one MH-6 helicopter in the operation. There was a suggestion that this operation was too big to be only a search and rescue mission, and that the rescue was a cover for grabbing Iran’s 441kg of enriched Uranium. Other analysts pooh-poohed this speculation because the C-130s would have been necessary to carry the MH-6 helicopters closer to the field of operations. My irreverent thought was that a plane designed to carry 19,000kg could easily handle 441kg of enriched Uranium, especially if you’re willing to leave an MH-6 behind. But I don’t really buy into this theory because it seems too imaginative for Trump or his Dunning-Kruger brain trust to have come up with. I wouldn’t put it past Israel to try something like this, but they’re limited in the distances they can operate.
4. Previous to the operation, Hegsith purged 20 Generals from the Pentagon for purportedly being too woke. It’s hard to imagine Pentagon generals being woke. Were they telling the Hegsith things he didn’t want to hear?
5. And I missed this. Last month, according to Reuters, the U.S. government requested that major commercial satellite firms indefinitely restrict access to high-resolution imagery of the Middle East, including Iran, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and the Gulf states. Planet Labs and Vantor said they would comply. Vantor said they were already doing this voluntarily. Planet Labs took it a step further, saying they’d hide all past imagery of these regions, too! Supposedly, the US wants to prevent adversaries from using satellite imagery to monitor US and Israeli forces, but at least half a dozen other non-US satellite imaging concerns are not affected by the ban. And Iran already has access to Russian satellite imagery (and possibly Chinese).
Therefore, I suspect the administration wants to hide its losses from the US media. For instance, the March 1st Iranian drone strike on a U.S. tactical operations center in Kuwait's Shuaiba port was significantly more severe than initial reports indicated. It killed six U.S. service members and wounded over 30 others, with injuries including traumatic brain injury and burns. Several injured personnel were evacuated to medical centers in Germany and the U.S. for "urgent" treatment, with reports of at least one amputation. Accounts say the base had no anti-drone radar systems, and they received no warning of the incoming attack. The base is non-functioning now, and its operations have been shifted to Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Reports of serious damage to other US bases in the region are starting to filter out. Jake Godin, a senior researcher for Bellingcat (an independent open-source investigative group), says it’s gotten a lot harder to figure out what’s real (my paraphrasing). In response, Bellingcat introduced an open-source tool they’re calling the Iran Conflict Damage Proxy Map. They’re using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery captured by a European Space Agency satellite to estimate damage to ground structures.
I gave it a few locations to analyze. The larger the area you give, the longer it takes to process. By the URL, it may only work for Middle Eastern locations. I just plugged in the Ust-Luga oil terminal in Leningrad Oblast, and I’m still waiting for a result (update... it's still processing this morning, so I think this app only works for the MIddle East).
Sorry to get off on a minor tangent, but you wrote “It’s hard to imagine Pentagon generals being woke.” I think you are describing a lack of imagination on your part rather than a property of the top brass. That said, your next sentence may very well still be true.
I disagree with Trump on just about everything, but I certainly see the logic of not having the Strait closed to everyone except Iran. Though even here, I am sure I will disagree with the president on how he goes about solving it.
OK. Even if we've got some generals who don't mind trans people or want to give blacks and women opportunities in the military, that doesn't mean they can't do their job. Really, WTF? And what is the precise definition of "woke"? The whole anti-woke schtick is a scam to purge people from the military (and from academia) who the MAGAs don't like.
Come on, what's your definition of woke? Don't wimp out on me now! Seems like there are some significant rhetorical and functional differences in how the original woke defined themselves and how the Right defines them. And I don't think the senior generals in the Pentagon fit either the Left's original definition or strictly into the Right's modified definition.
I am not of the right, but I would say Woke ideology divides society between oppressors and the oppressed and judges oppression as revealed by unequal outcomes.
For the Woke, it is morally imperative to side with the oppressed against the oppressors (aka those doing well), and to attempt to re-engineer society as necessary to accomplish these objectives. This re-engineering includes excluding opportunity to those not agreeing with this world view.
And you believe this applied to some US generals to a degree that it impeded their ability to do their work, to the degree that they had to be removed?
Edit: Also, as it always is with that word, I see 3 different definitions of that term right now on my screen, from 3 different people. Let nobody say that the right suffers from excessive groupthink!
> I am not of the right, but I would say Woke ideology divides society between oppressors and the oppressed and judges oppression as revealed by unequal outcomes.
> For the Woke, it is morally imperative to side with the oppressed against the oppressors (aka those doing well), and to attempt to re-engineer society as necessary to accomplish these objectives. This re-engineering includes excluding opportunity to those not agreeing with this world view.
By that definition, much of MAGA is Woke too! They disagree on *who* is being oppressed, but the tactics and epistemics are the same.
This is part of wokeness, but it's also partly a coalition, so a clean, principled definition won't match reality. The term doesn't apply to viewing any disadvantaged group as oppressed. The South has the most persistent poverty in the US, but you won't be considered woke for arguing the South is oppressed.
Giving women special "regimens" that they have to fulfill, rather than asking everyone to meet a specific regimen, in order to serve on the front lines? I'd say that's woke, it's giving different criteria for different people.
I have gone several rounds in various ACX comments sections asking people what they think "woke" actually means. BY FAR the most common reply is something like "don't bullshit me, you know what it means," but I've had several people give complete and good-faith answers. And to the best of my recollection, the answers have A. all been different from each other and B. not covered common cases where I see people in the wider world referring to things as "woke."
The moral of the story is, everybody who unironically uses the word "woke" as it it means something[1] seems to genuinely, confidently believe that the word has a singular, clear, unambiguous meaning. But that narrative seems to fall apart under even the slightest scrutiny.
[1] And if you're not aware of this, you should be: many millions of English speakers (myself included) consider the word very nearly meaningless. It indicates that the speaker considers something to be both blue-tribe-affiliated and worthy of contempt, but it doesn't say anything about the world outside the speaker's own head.
I can’t help being amused by your comment (in a good way), since my initial discussion with Beowulf was generated around how he was defining woke. He seemed to define woke as people who give trans, gays and women (who can do their job) opportunities. I pointed out that if that is what “woke” means to him, that there was no point in going on with the discussion. He then asked me to try to define it. I did my best, though I agree it is a nebulous, ambiguous term used and abused in many ways, especially by those of the far right.
My quick definition was as follows:
“Woke ideology divides society between oppressors and the oppressed and judges oppression as revealed by unequal outcomes. For the Woke, it is morally imperative to side with the oppressed against the oppressors (aka those doing well), and to attempt to re-engineer society as necessary to accomplish these objectives. This re-engineering includes excluding opportunity to those not agreeing with this world view.”
You may be right that the term is so nebulous and abused that we are best off trying to avoid it.
Woke is a circular firing squad. You can't define it, because the instant you do, someone comes up with a "new victim!" that must be supported/enhanced/discussed. Oh, and woke is very often happiest (or most venomous) turning on its "former friends" -- see "The Nostalgia Chick."
(You can take this in the spirit of the Devil's Dictionary, it's not meant to be more than an incisive critique).
> Even if we've got some generals who don't mind trans people or want to give blacks and women opportunities in the military, that doesn't mean they can't do their job.
As far as Hegseth is concerned, doing exactly that is acting against American interests. Does it matter if you're "doing your job" if you're also acting against the interests of your employers?
Thought experiment: If Secretary of War KegSith demands that all the senior officers in the Pentagon swear a loyalty oath to President Crump, but they refuse, because they don't want to abrogate their oath to uphold the Constitution, are they acting against the interest of their employer?
Answer: Yes. But is it legal under the Constitution to fire them?
"Does it matter if you're "doing your job" if you're also acting against the interests of your employers?"
Emphatically yes, it does matter. If you hold the behavior of any employee of any organization up to scrutiny, you will find them "acting against the interests of their employers" sometimes. Indeed, asking for a higher wage for your work (instead of accepting a lower one) is against the interests of your employer, who would in nearly all cases prefer to pay you less. So too is taking a 2-minute bathroom break when they might have been able to take only a 1-minute bathroom break. The interests of employer and employee conflict in hundreds of small ways, every day.
The question is whether employing that person benefits the employer *on the net.* Given that we are talking about people who each have multiple decades of military experience, asserting that them doing nothing more than *holding particular views* is enough to more than cancel out all the benefit of competence and experience they bring to the organization is a claim that should, at the very least, carry a nontrivial burden of evidence.
This is the gorram military. Each and every generalship is fought over, tooth and nail, because it's "either get promoted, or become a civilian." So, let's just say... there's a lot of people with "multiple decades of military experience" sitting around, and each firing (except for the disruption of "new guy in charge") doesn't change the stripes of the general much.
America does not assume that any general is worth his buttons, because they ALL get there by being PC, and knowing how to politick and bootlick.
In case of Actual Total War, America maintains an Actual Combat Register of "People to Promote to Actual Positions of Authority" -- roughly speaking, these are the assholes that broke the Millennium Challenge. They are NOT PC, and only get promoted because they're too insubordinate, and it just got to be too much of a pain in the ass writing them up all the time -- and they are NOT GENERALS.
Now, that said, what is the precise definition of woke? Created "woke" advertising that completely crashed the Army Recruiting numbers**? Vetoed the Army Draft over concerns the woke recruiters would wind up shot? (rural folks are less patriotic these days). [And I'm being kind here and not busting the ship that ran aground...]
**yes, this got fixed during Biden's administration -- I do pay attention.
Just a basic walkthrough of "what's being changed." Well, one aspect of it.
On a more personal level, can we please not enroll people into the US Military who will break multiple bones because they laughed too hard? That seems... rather dumb.
But consider: ever since the drone attack on literally the first day of the war the US has suffered *zero* deaths. None. I’m not counting that tanker crash in Iraq because it was accidental and well away from any combat zone. Fighting a war while suffering almost zero deaths (and inflicting thousands on the enemy) is a magnificent success.
How do you know we've suffered zero deaths since the drone attack on the Kuwait base? Public media reports put the number of US soldiers killed since the start of the war at at least 15, but Centcom has refused to provide a count of those who've been killed since the start of the current conflict. In fact, they initially mistated (lied about?) the death count from the Kuwait strike (but maybe some personnel died from their wounds after the fact in the hospital). And we've got an anonymous Pentagon leaker saying the casualties have been much higher.
Anyway, the Pentagon has every reason to obfuscate. Not saying they are, but I wouldn't take their statements at face value.
Yeah... but the Pentagon also has every reason to obfuscate the number of American soldiers dead in the Ukraine. At least in this war, we've stopped pretending all americans are immortal.
Did the tanker crash on a mission related to the war? Then its crew were casualties of that war. Casualty has nothing to do with whether or not it was caused by the enemy.
"Fighting a war while suffering almost zero deaths (and inflicting thousands on the enemy) is a magnificent success."
Emphatically no, it is not. (Non-genocidal) wars are not generally fought for the purpose of "inflicting [deaths] on the enemy;" that's a middle-schooler's notion of what war is. Wars are fought to achieve specific strategic objectives, dictated by the political goals of the belligerent states.
There is no possible casualty ratio that could count as a "magnificent success" if it results in strategic defeat. Of course, we have no idea how the U.S. is faring strategically in Iran because it's not at all clear what the U.S.'s strategic goals for this war ARE (or if it actually *has* any). The only strategic goals the Oval Office has articulated are 1. Removing Iran's nuclear capability, 2. toppling the Iranian Regime and 3. re-opening the Strait of Hormuz. I'm sure I don't need to point out why achieving only 3 without either 1 or 2 would count as a strategic defeat. And both 1 and 2 seem significantly MORE distant than they did two months ago.
By the best measures we have, the U.S. is losing. The fact that it is murdering thousands of Iranians in the process is hardly something to brag about.
Beowulf was kind enough to post some supporting scuttlebutt for concrete action on 1) -- look at a map.
Trump's definition of "toppling the Iranian Regime" seems to be idiosyncratic. It may mean "completely removing their military's ability to project force."
Reopening the Strait of Hormuz by itself would count as a strategic defeat.
But when you look at a President saying "not much that seems credible" (the nuclear bit was in particular kind of rich -- didn't we destroy those last year?), you should probably suspect there are Bigger Factors at Play.
My understanding is that the uranium isn't something one can just sneak in and grab. It's (presumed to be) in the bottom of a facility buried under a mountain of rubble. It would require weeks of effort and lots of excavation equipment to uncover. And that's under ideal circumstances when people *aren't* shooting at you.
Presumably, those are the centrifuges, and how one generates the uranium. The Uranium itself can be stored... anyplace you want. Fukushima stored all its spent fuel onsite, which was the real danger after the tsunami.
I just skimmed the first three paragraphs and saw so many signposts saying "no one should ever read this except to find a target for their next Two Minutes' Hate" that I am somewhat baffled that anyone here would have read and then recommended the whole thing.
It's rude, but not egregiously so, and not in a way that compromises its substantive points. Saying Scott has a "fallible, mortal mind" is a pretty toothless insult, accusing Scott of failing at basic research is reasonable even if we disagree about the merits of his article, and claiming Scott is confused about the meaning of POSIWID is an accurate description of his article.
"Fallible mind" is okay, "blackened soul" is not. I have Strong Opinions on moral and ethical issues, but even I am chastened enough by the doctrines of my religion not to pronounce infallibly on the state of anyone's immortal soul, because I am not God and only God knows the true and final state of that.
SSC as a community values respectful and self controlled communications, and heavily discourages performative outrage, insults and generally angry flailing. This is great, but sometimes I worry we veer into considering all of the above to be evidence. In an adversarial environment, take care if presented with:
There are reasonable voices on both sides of the infinitude of primes, however the majority of evidence pushes us toward considering their number to be finite. First of all, there is a strong western tradition, starting with Zeno, arguing that…
Alongside
You stupid slut. Give me your finite primes, multiply them together, subtract one. If you can’t work it out from there, kill yourself. You’re a racist.
He had an interesting life. I was trying to understand why he settled on the word “purpose“ because it creates a lot of room for quibbling. I found out he was very much a Marxist (actually Trotsky was his main man) and it helped me understand better. He was certainly an opportunistic man; he had a chequered career. The phrase was most applied to sociopolitical contexts in his own thinking (iiuc.)
I think Scott was really just expressing annoyance at how it’s bandied around (and that divisive word “purpose” which raises its own issues.) The takedown was a little too earnest in that sense.
Did you end up figuring out why he chose the word 'purpose'? To be honest, I still don't get it. It strikes me as sloppy, bundling together a couple of banal claims: that some system custodians lie about their intentions for public relations reasons; and that outcomes, rather than intentions, matter. Both trivially defensible, both boring. The only interesting thing about the phrase is the odd wording that challenges the -existence- of intent separate from outcome.
If anything, Marxists are keenly aware that systems evolve historically more than they're explicitly designed, and they're aware of the failure modes of just intentions. Trotsky in his critique of the nomenklatura certainly was.
>Did you end up figuring out why he chose the word 'purpose'?
Not really. I thought the Marxist angle cleared the fog a little bit for me but as I think about it I realise that I don’t really know enough about that to make it click. He was going to apply his theories to Chile, before the military takeover ended the experiment.
It is not in any way a religious apologia, I don't consider the version of what I believe toxic enough that I feel I need to give a trigger warning. People on this forum believe some rare things, I don't see why this particular rare thing requires cones and tape and a security detail. I am arguing for UBI - if you think you have enough tech-adjacent liberals to get a plurality for UBI, go for it, I suspect you will need some pro-lifers in the Ross Douthat/Leah Libresco Seargent mould, my UBI defence is for them.
Fair. I have previously posted about the UBI project itself so this was a follow-up, in the end what is or isn't political is itself political, being on here I have to accept most people aren't theists and I don't freak out, so I don't quite get why I have to specify WARNING: THEIST so as atheists don't freak out but it is what it is. I appreciate you
So. The USA are, ostensibly, going to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. One of their goals was to open the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war. Who can make sense of it?
War is not going well? Obviously?
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/04/geopolitical-black-hole-trumps-blockade-of-a-blockade-in-hormuz-looks-desperate/
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/04/iran-cant-make-its-own-gasoline-a-u-s-naval-blockade-exploits-that-and-will-be-painful/
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/04/irans-next-move-decides-everything-every-iranian-port-will-be-closed-by-the-u-s-navy/
Context:
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/04/forget-hormuz-the-strait-of-malacca-moves-3500000000000-in-goods-a-year-close-it-and-watch-the-global-economy-crash/
There's "Markets Keep Functioning, Prices Skyrocket"... and then there's "Unavailable at any price." The latter inflicts damage that the former does not. Oil is one thing, but covid has proven the world can tank reasonable disruptions to energy use. Fertilizer... that's a different story. People will riot (see Sri Lanka) if not fed.
To open the strait was to gain control over it. To blockade it is to gain control over it.
Gain control to what end?
To own the libs?
Lol'd
This conflation of China and the liberals is brilliant. Riots predicted for May 1st.
If the idea here is to stop oil exports to China then I think the escalation might be bigger than you think. Seems to me mission creep.
Mission Creep implies this wasn't the plan from the get-go. Trump's been pretty clear about going after China (deserved, after the shenanigans they pulled during covid).
From the plan of "Kick China Where It Hurts" -- Venezuela and Iran are part of the same operation, oil denial to China (or an increase in prices that China can ill afford).
Plans for resource wars have been on the American table for years. I suspect the demise of Pax Americana accelerated the timetable.
China has not responded officially or unofficially yet. But President Trump’s visit to China is back on the calendar, rescheduled for May 14–15. Originally planned for the end of March, the trip was postponed due to the ongoing US military operations against Iran. This caused Xi to lose face domestically and internationally. At the two big Party meetings in March, he had promised his opponents in the CCP that he'd be moving forward on the international relations front — to make up for purging senior PLA generals without getting buy-in from the other players in the CCP (some of whom were also patrons of these generals).
I think the libs, together with everyone else (except Russia maybe), can consider themselves own'd.
Oh, yeah, Russia's sitting pretty and collecting its paychecks (from China). And providing intel to the Iranians to destroy American strategic assets.
Not that there's anything Wrong With That -- I suspect they consider it payback.
No, China wants cash from Russia. And a director of the Russian Central Bank complained that Russia is running short on Renminbi to pay its bills to China. Xi is totally a quid pro quo sort of guy.
*pwnd.
LOL! Fox Business host Larry Kudlow claimed that once the conflict is resolved, prices will go even lower than before the war, adding, “This country is not beholden to the blockade in the Hormuz.” So everyone just chill and go with the plan! Us whiny libs just need to STFU. ;-)
Reminds me of the cover of the Economist print edition two issues ago (the one dated April 4th), which I think you can view here without being a subscriber:
https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/archive?print_region=76981
To stop Iran from controlling it at will. I don't know anything that isn't on the news, but as for the current crisis, everything Hormuz began with Iran closing it. So the US pushes to control it instead.
>To stop Iran from controlling it at will.
I mean, look at a map. Ukraine has cleared the Black Sea without a navy, and the distances in the Strait of Hormuz are much shorter. Iran are going to control it, at least to the point of denying access.
>but as for the current crisis, everything Hormuz began with Iran closing it.
Pretty sure the current crisis began with a US sneak attack on Iran's leadership and military.
ISRAELI sneak attack (otherwise known as an attack of opportunity).
American materiel was well-out of where America wanted its pieces before pressing the "Big Red War Button."
I thought we were in great shape because we've been planning the Resource War for years?
Oh, I'm not arguing that (and I never said Iran started the current crisis). I'm saying the US is doing things re: Hormuz because Iran is. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but the US didn't strike Hormuz first. I'm also not saying there's necessarily much sense to what US is doing. But it sure seems to me that US began doing stuff with Hormuz as soon as Iran started to. Yes Iran did so because US struck first, but that's besides my claim.
Hormuz was the Obvious Response to any major escalation in the conflict. This is like attacking Egypt and being shocked that they "shut down the Suez first - without our slightest provocation."
The blockade was clearly advertised as included in the package US decided to purchase, and so they should have been ready for it.
I can believe that we can get to a point where both Iran and the US hold a checkpoint on the strait. E.g. "Iran doesn't control it at will". How do you think the downstream effects of this benefit the US?
IMO it seems like it will either (if the US halts more shipments) just further worsen the global supply of petroleum products, further driving up costs for the American consumer or (if the US does nothing) have no effect.
If costs for the American consumer are a significant concern/pain point for the administration, then this seems counter-productive or pointless, and our time and effort would be better served doing something else.
Where does this analysis go wrong?
There's the possibility that this hurts every other country more than the US. Given that US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia control a sizable portion of the world's crude oil production, and countries like China rely on Iranian oil, this might give the oil-rich countries more leverage, or at least leave them better off than their competition.
It doesn't help the party's political prospects, granted, but they might be able to find ways around public opinion.
I can believe that. There are many thing we can do that will hurt us and another country, but hurt the other country more. Is that our goal now?
If so, I would love to hear any of Trump's supporters be clear that that's why they support this war.
I strongly disagree with pursuing such a goal.
If Iran blockades the straight, the rest of the world is pressured to give in to its requirements to remove the blockade. That might involve the EU, China, India, etc. pressuring the US to stop the war.
If Iran and the US block the straight (assuming Trump's blockade is credible, which it probably isn't), then the rest of the world now is pressured by the US as well. It's kind of ridiculous, since if Iran agreed to stop the blockade there's no credible commitment mechanism making sure the US would continue the blockade, so the bottleneck is still on Iran, but with Trump's wild acts there might be some pressure as a result of his declaration.
It's like, what is the most effective way to prevent your enemies taking hostages? Shoot any and all hostages. By committing to an act that takes the value away from taking hostages in the first place, you nullify the incentive to take hostages in the first place. In this case Trump is "shooting the hostage" by saying he's going to blockade the straight that Iran was blockading already.
Of course a threat isn't a threat unless it's credible, and in this case there's no commitment mechanism for Trump, and it's completely irrational to blockade the straight once Iran stops, so this isn't a real threat. Only the "Trump uncertainty factor" gives it a bit of value as a threat, in that there's some expectation that Trump will behave irrationally later on, so the world leaders must factor it into their decision making a little bit. In this case it can be said that there may be *some* strategic value in Trump's erratic behavior.
Trump's erratic behavior, to the extent that it is performative, is strategically useful in managing the stock market. And yes, that does have worldwide implications. Adjust your analysis accordingly.
Trump is blockading Iranian vessels. Previously, Iranian vessels traversed the straight freely.
Interesting, I was under the impression we were blowing up Iranian vessels.
Yes, blowing up Iranian vessels is apparently "very good for morale."
(Other people are speaking more in terms of "Iran to China" trade, in terms of "Iranian Vessels" -- vessels moving oil that gets Iran money to operate).
Iran wants ships to pay large sums per crossing. There's a reasonable belief that this money would go to fund its war effort, fall into "its old ways" rather than into the shape US wants it to be, so by closing the strait, US is ensuring that Iran doesn't profit.
Trump's truth social post on the topic (sigh) also covers that they'd sic the navy after any ship that pays to cross.
Reverse psychology
Trumps flailing around trying to do something. He wants a hammer to hit Iran with, but can't (won't) use the big hammer. This whole war thing is a total mess, was there any type of war gaming? I expect congress will be looking into it.
2012 https://www.brookings.edu/articles/simulated-war-between-u-s-iran-has-grisly-end/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Yeah thanks for the links. So yeah it was gamed, but we ignored the result... the results from the Millennium Challenge 2002 are grim.
Having reviewed the link, the first one (2012 simulated war) seemed worthless, for it had no useful content unless I clicked further, which I didn't do. The 2002 challenge may not have been realistic, from reading the Wikipedia article, and in any case, things have changed a lot since then. For example, drones, even if they existed, weren't viable weapons. I think an actual conflict would have little in common with the simulated one.
I read/saw we are sending an aircraft carrier around the African horn, (supposedly because we are afraid to send it through the Red sea... drones and the Houthis.) I just wanna say, we should make peace with all these people. Though that is totally a pipe dream at this point.
The Trump admin had some (obviously irrational) expectations regarding the effectiveness of their threats, and how closing the strait just makes "everyone angry" at Iran. (Where everyone is mostly China, as Russia obviously is happy to see oil prices go up.)
And we can assume the Trump throne thought that keeping oil flowing is more important for Iran than the military benefits of the blockade.
Of course in their infinite wisdom they somehow did not realize that Iran can apply this pressure selectively. (Though usually pundits say that the Pentagon has good planners, so we probably need to modify this claim to something like as usual they did not listen to the experts, or willfully decided to ignore them, or keep them out of the loop, etc.)
So they want to deny Iran the money from the tolls, maybe "to level the playing field".
The Trump administration seems to have a "Very Big Mouth" sometimes. Their actual expectations may differ greatly from what they say.
"Oh, no, we had No Idea that Iran might bomb its neighbors!"
Pull the other finger, guys.
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/04/iran-cant-make-its-own-gasoline-a-u-s-naval-blockade-exploits-that-and-will-be-painful/
Yes, the problem with this fucking Iran war is that Trump et al. (like so many others before them) believed that "strategic bombing works" (and they wanted the full Schrödinger's cake menu too by not disturbing the global economy, but starting a quick war at the global economy's few remaining chokepoints), and as a result many civilians died - so far for nothing - and of course if Iran runs out of gas many more will.
Many civilians are going to die anyway because of ongoing warcrimes. Please, look at the bigger picture. I don't want to hear "if Iran runs out of gas" when Iran is already planning to evacuate their capital, Tehran because of ongoing warcrimes (water wars).
I'm taking it you don't know much about the global economy and what a chokepoint actually is? (There's one in North Carolina, for god's sake!)
If Iran runs out of gas, they stop paying their security troops. Then it's applejacks, and I don't think you want to claim that most of these people are homicidal maniacs (I can discuss Taliban paying their troops in rapine plunder, so... there's precedent for some weird payment structures, but I don't think most people use bullets to kill civilians when there's significant doubt the guys on top will pay you... ever.)
Opening the Strait of Hormuz was not a goal of the war. It is a goal *within* the war, which we want to continue into the postwar world. Rather like stopping the Holocaust was not the goal of World War II, and there wasn't even a genocide going on before the War, but once the Allies were fighting Germany for other reasons, yeah, we should take care of that too.
And a Strait isn't "open" if it's only open to some, or only open at a price. A regime where Iranian and Iranian-aligned ships can travel freely but everyone else has to cough up a couple megabucks per ship of protection money, is not an open Strait. But it is a situation quite favorable to Iran, and one they will require a great deal of encouragement or coercion to change. If Iranian and Iranian-allied ships are barred passage, that's still not "open", or if you want to quantify it then it is "less open", but it's also much less favorable to Iran so at least in principle it should make it easier to convince Iran to allow an actually-open Strait of Hormuz.
It's also illegal without a declaration of war or the equivalent, and it will cause still more damage to the economy of a world already fed up with this sort of nonsense from America, so maybe not a prudent strategy, but it's not a *silly* strategy, there is a direct and plausible path to the desired outcome.
And really, is any of this so hard to understand? Or were you just looking for a cheap dunk against Trump or America? Trump arguably deserves it, but this isn't the place for cheap dunks even against deserving targets.
Don't call me Napoleon just yet, but I'd suggest that Iran closing the Strait was a lot more predictable than the Holocaust. Given the situation, I'd also suggest that ceasing hostilities has a lot higher chance of opening the Strait than closing it, partially or not, justifiably or not.
> there is a direct and plausible path to the desired outcome.
If the Black Sea 2026 is any indication, then, given the more favourable geography of the Strait, that's quite optimistic. How would you suggest opening the strait militarily, while preventing a ship toll regime or whatever else Iran feels like doing? Invade and occupy the entire coastal strip, and get a Ukraine-style line of contact for which the US is unprepared on every level? Invade and occupy all of Iran? Nuke the place? At some point and rather sooner than later, the USA need to cut their losses and get out before they make everything worse still. Maybe even try real diplomacy for a change, for what it's still worth at this point.
But yes, I find it hard to talk about Trump, even rationally, without ending with a dunk, so I understand your suspicion.
Bottom line: the strait is currently mined (to what extent? fog of war, including Dead Iranians -- so even if Iran wanted to be 100% clean, they might not know)
Real Bottom Line: Only America can demine it (everyone else lacks the capability).
The real question is: does the doubleblockade interfere with demining? If not, then everyone can get "real patient real quick," because the double blockade isn't really impeding traffic.
The Mines Are.
And to the extent that America can convince everyone that "There are Mines, and they might explode ships, and exxon valdez in the strait, possibly on fire? Bad news, really, really bad news..."
This is factually incorrect. The UK (Hunt-class and Sandown-class MCMVs), France, and to a lesser degree the Netherlands and Belgium have serious mine countermeasures capability. I don't know enough about the Netherlands and Belgium to be able to assess their capabilities demining in a region like Hormuz.
I personally doubt that they would be willing unless there was some substantial shift in US-Iranian relations as a part of a ceasefire or deescalation, so while I do agree with the assessment that (as a part of the current status quo) only the US can demine it, it is factually untrue as a matter of capability.
Technically China has the capability as well but lacks the capability (by matter of practicality, lack of supportive infrastructure, and range) to be able to get MCM hulls into the straight of hormuz.
Edit: additional context for UK vessels - they lack the capability to sudden or immediate use, but could absolutely substantively contribute to demining within a timespan of 6-8 weeks.
6-8 weeks is so long the Britbongs are talking using civilian ships.
https://www.gbnews.com/news/world/britain-civilian-ships-to-strait-of-hormuz-iranian-mines
Iran dropped mines that it lacks the capability to pick back up again (which, this is/was war -- I'm not complaining about them "doing something unfair.").
https://www.turkiyetoday.com/region/iran-cant-find-or-remove-its-own-mines-in-strait-of-hormuz-3217865
We tried ceasing hostilities, Israel said "nuh uh, we're still going to bomb Lebanon", and Iran responded with "OK, then, the strait remains closed".
The United States controls what the United States Navy does, it does not control what Israel does(*). So solutions that involve "ceasing hostilities" are not something just the United States can do on, and the appeal of solutions where we might (probably won't, but might) get what we want by tasking the United States Navy with a particular sort of hostility should be obvious.
If any part of this is still confusing to you, I'm not sure what to say..
* Outside of certain conspiracy theories, and I think these days the conspiracy theorists are maybe 80/20 on Israel controlling what the US does rather than vice versa.
If the US wanted this war to end, could they not attempt to convince Israel to stop and, failing that, put pressure on Israel?
I've always assumed that Israel needs the US a whole lot more than vice versa and that Israel at least listens to and takes the US seriously in these matters.
Presumably Netanyahu can always decide to just keep going on, relatively no matter what the US says or does.
But the US could try again for a deal that Israel agrees and sticks to. Perhaps it's already happening behind the scenes. If not, it does seem worth a try. Mostly because the other options don't look great either.
In the realm of international relations, the phrase "put pressure on" mostly just means "do nothing of substance, and change nothing, but piously insist that the bad thing is now That Other Guy's Fault".
On rare occasions, actually useful "pressure" can be applied with significant results, e.g. the Suez Crisis. But, A: usually not and B: you need to be much more specific than "put pressure on" if you want to accomplish anything.
Yes, if we want, we can say the "pressure" thing that makes it Officially Israel's Fault. That almost certainly won't change anything.
I understand that that is how the phrase is often used.
That said, presumably it is actually possible to do something that would make it more costly for Israel to continue their current course of actions. That should give them some leverage. I had also filed that under "put pressure". If you want to use a different term for "going beyond empty words" that is fine by me, but I don't know that term
The US could coerce Israel fairly trivially, the same way the US is coercing the rest of the free world, without any conspiracy theories. Tariffs, withholding military aid, threats of war. The US hold "all the cards" in terms that Trump understands. They may quibble about details like bombing Iranian oil infrastructure without coordination, but in the broad picture the US are not coercing Israel because they're aligned.
Israel gets plenty coerced by this administration. Last administration was practically headless, so Israel got "kid gloves" and much stupidity.
Broad, localized picture: yes, Israel and USA are attacking Iran, and they agree this is a good thing. USA wants peace, now, but Israel wanted to fire a "parting shot." (This last is my interpretation, based on my own model of Israel).
If the US were "coercing" the free world, there would be British, French, Canadian, etc destroyers and frigates patrolling Hormuz right now. I mean, Trump wasn't at all subtle about that bit of attempted coercion.
I'm not sure what mental model of US diplomacy and politics you are running, but it seems to be based on a mix of conspiracy theory and perverse wishful thinking, and it's very definitely at odds with reality.
Are you absolutely sure you're not intentionally misunderstanding me? Because I'm not. When I say "coercion" and "coercing", I mean past or ongoing such acts. I don't mean their successful completion (i.e. Trump got something out of the act), although those do exist. If that level of dictionary disagreement is sufficient to label me a conspiracy theorist with a disconnect from reality, then I guess nice dunk, you got me.
Israel and the United States function like Iran and China. One is patron, one is ... "aircraft carrier."
USA can stop Israel, and Israel can stop USA ... but these things are not exactly instantaneous, and if Israel feels like they're running out of wartime, well, bombing Lebanon and using their current intel is what happens.
Americans are talking with China around now... (presumably trying to backchannel some deals).
It's starting to seem like Israel controls what the US does though, at least to some extent
Genuinely asking: how many takes have we seen correctly predicting that Iran would in fact close the strait?
I don't have an exhaustive list, but here's one, at least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Also, one just needs to look at Black Sea 2022-2026 what a state can do in constrained waters nowadays without a navy of its own, or even traditional air support.
That one featured bike messengers going faster than the speed of light. But apparently Iran decided, looking at that wargame, that speedboats really could sink 3/4 of the American Navy's boats**.
Cheesing the Rules of a Wargame (so badly that they put the "winners" in the penalty box and went on with the "real wargame") does not actually work in real life.
**Nobody was trying to Bad Idea Dog Iran, they were just goofing around.
I don't recall seeing a single remotely credible take prior to 2026 on any potential US-Iranian war that *didn't* very clearly predict that Iran would close the strait and the US would have to figure out a way to reopen it. That was as conventional as wisdom gets, right up there with the Sun rising in the East.
The Sun is only rising in the East until POTUS decides to rename East with an EO, or what the hell, let's rename the Sun too while we're at it.
Paper straws are the best! Paper Straws are not allowed to be discussed in a humorous or negative light.
Oh, look, there's a Trump. He's saying the Paper Straws are nekkid too (ala the little boy who saw the emperor).
I could actually get into the psychology here, of why "doing something that is obviously stupid and unworkable" is good for instilling learned helplessness, but I'm not sure you'd be interested.
The previous status was that Iran was getting away with blockading it for everyone but themselves. Trump announced that if they're going to do that then we're going to blockade them for Iran bound vessels. This is the obviously reasonable thing we should have done since the start, they can't actually handle the straits being shut down for an extended period (whether or not we can depends on political will, but if Iran's shutting them down no matter what we do there's no drawback in keeping them closed for us).
A question arises: "does america sweep for mines while the double blockade is ongoing?" If not, then there's still lag after the blockades drop (which they must, at some point, right?). If America sweeps for mines for weeks, with a double blockade on, they're not actually "causing problems" for Western allies -- in that nobody wants to go through with mines "god knows where"**.
**not actually trying to blame probably dead iranians for being unable to say where they put the mines.
Iiuc america is currently sweeping for mines (although the news is a bit confusing so not 100% sure on this).
With what minesweepers? Most of the ones we had in the Gulf were decomissioned late last year, and the rest were pulled back to IIRC Malaysia before the start of the current conflict. I have seen no reports that they have made it back to the Gulf yet; that's a voyage I would expect to take several weeks.
My understanding is that the USN has a system of largely-robotic detection and disabling. Not really my topic, was hoping you and Bean would comment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trZfx9qyG10
Modern minehunting (it isn't really "sweeping" any more) is indeed done by robots, more formally "Unmanned Underwater Vehicles" (UUVs). But you can't just dump them in the water and say "go hunt mines"; they need specialized support equipment and trained operators. Those are on the dedicated minehunting and minesweeping ships.
In theory, we could try to kitbash that onto a destroyer, and maybe someone has done that. But we've also e.g. put Sidewinder missiles on modified airliners; that doesn't make them fighters, it just gives them a *very* limited self-defense capability.
This is further complicated by the part where the USN's minehunting ships are now mostly "Littoral Combat Ships", theoretically a sort of highly flexible multimission vessel. But really some of them have the minehunting equipment permanently installed, and the rest will never hunt a mine. The minehunting versions, are the ones that were pulled back to Malaysia before the start of the conflict and are now AFIK Whereabouts Unknown.
But there is a drawback. Iran's purpose for closing the strait is decreasing the supply of oil, which being a globally traded commodity, increases the price everywhere. This is why this move affects the US even if they're a net exporter of oil and most of the oil through the strait goes somewhere else. To the extent they were letting some ships through (they announced they were doing it, unclear if it actually happened) it was probably in response to diplomatic pressure from India and China, and only reluctantly as they know as well as we do that doing so exerts downward pressure on the price of oil. This denies funds to Iran, so it's not pointless, but it has a drawback. Personally I think the situation is not much changed, Iran's tolerance for pain in this war is much higher than the US, they will bet on outlasting the US's political will.
Iran's already stopped its petrochemical plants. at some point, they run out of storage, and have to stop drilling (and that degrades their oil producing capacity, because those drills aren't designed to stop...)
Within 2-3 weeks, Iran is DOA -- they pay their security forces in oil too.
Do you really think Trump can't holdout for a month?
... Europe is pissed because this strategy could actually work
One month is very optimistic. The taliban held for 20 years.
The Taliban paid their troops in rapine plunder. They also had opium fields, and then they BURNT the opium fields (after a historic harvest), so that they'd be the only people with money.
This is Quite Different from Iran (also: Iran isn't a nation of goatherders who have trouble doing jumping jacks...).
I'd suggest marking GrimMoar's words here so we can mock him for them a month from now, but from past experience he'll probably be posting under a different name by then and deny the whole thing.
1. Soldiers can go without pay for several months before it becomes an issue. Once it becomes an issue you can use force to keep the machinery going for longer, I recall Washington "quelling" some soldier rebellions caused by lack of pay, this is common.
2. Iran's economy is something like 30% oil. Losing all that would hurt, but it's not the worse thing that has happened to an economy while conducting a war, it is manageable.
3. I expect Russia and China to send weapons, money and targeting data to Iran. I expect they're doing it already. I've heard reports of Russia sending weapons despite being obviously otherwise preoccupied, and I'm sure China would love sending some spare change for the cause (of harming the US).
All that (at least) is why one month is way too optimistic.
Iran has been charging significant fees on ships passing through, so it is rational to deny them those resources. It is also a desperate face saving measure. If the global economy is F'd we might as well do it on our own terms. I think that is the logic.
I would describe the US goals as more like "We want regime change in Iran, and we can tolerate a few weeks of Strait closure." Then we didn't get regime change, and now our position is "we can't tolerate Iran charging tolls in perpetuity or a permanent ban of US/Saudi aligned vessels".
A lot of popular commentary annoys me because it assumes that the strait is a binary open/closed, but there's more possible situations: open to Iran-allied ships but not US-allied ships, US-allied but not Iran-allied, "open" but Iran is charging tolls, or both sides declare it "open" but ship owners are still scared to send ships through.
If you control the strait, you can charge tolls.
This is mere snark rather than educated opinion, but I can imagine Trump charging tolls if he can.
The US is blockading a country they are at war with. A blockade exerts pressure on the target and makes them more likely to agree to the terms that the US demands (as the alternative is to be blockaded). While it is true that a blockade hurts the US (as it will raise oil prices), it's believed that it will hurt Iran more so the the US will gain an advantage in future negotiations.
The NYT has an article about it:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/us/politics/iran-war-strait-of-hormuz-blockade-economy.html
It's to give Trumps engineers time to figure out how to transport Epstein's island there entire and drop it into the strait to plug that sucker up.
> Who can make sense of it?
Trump has trapped himself in a no-win position and is flailing around for anything that could get him out.
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/04/chinas-iran-blockade-move-could-decide-everything/
... really?
To America opening the strait is important. But what's much much more important is ensuring that Iran doesn't control the strait.
Iran has established a perception (I would argue it was never a fact) that there was nothing the USA can do to stop it chucking drones at ships in the strait and so it will end the war as the de-facto owner and profit mightily for it.
What America has done is take that off the table. Instead of it becoming a question of whether its cheaper to fight Iran for the strait or accept their rule and pay them. Its now a question of who can live without the strait longer. The USA or Iran.
And I would argue the USA. Because for Trump himself the maximum cost is a bad midterms, and that's the last election he ever has to worry about. For the USA's allies, Saudi and the UAE, they have huge cash reserves, and Iran controlling the strait is much worse than the cost of waiting. Meanwhile for Iran, the potential cost is total economic collapse. It was on the brink before the war. The war started indirectly because of economic chaos in Iran.
(Incidentally that bit about Saudi and the UAE is why I think it was always a myth. If the USA wouldn't fight to open the Strait they'd do something themselves. Like build big pipelines West, Saudi already has one, or bomb Iran themselves. Rumours are that the UAE already has bombed)
Abraham accords are planning for pipelines west anyway. This accelerates American Diplomatic Objectives, which include tying Israel into the Middle East, so they no longer sit as "A Colonial Occupier."
Iran had not fully closed the strait prior to this point, instead letting some ships through in exchange for payment, and presumably other ships that were carrying Iranian oil for sale. The motivation for fully blockading the strait is that it will starve Iran of income in addition to the gulf states who have a large amount of their capacity blocked. A game of chicken for who will blink first.
Don't forget China is in play, 50% of their oil comes from Iran. And China already blinked.
Here in the real world, less than 15% of China's oil comes from Iran. The majority comes from Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the other non-Iran Gulf States.
https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/where-china-gets-its-oil-crude-imports-in-2025-reveal-stockpiling-and-changing-fortunes-of-certain-suppliers-including-those-sanctioned/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/china-s-top-crude-oil-suppliers/ar-AA20MapR
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled (~100x per OT) GrimMoar geopolitical fantasy land, where maybe China does get most of its oil from Iran.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-irans-oil-exports-by-country/
Doh! I may have misremembered (or got the causality wrong in my head). Iran sends most of their oil to China.
(and yeah, that's 50% of China's oil comes from the Strait of Hormuz... aka from the operating theater, aka the part that's blockaded).
Comment copied from below (response to GrimMoar) just because it does apply to the initial posting:
My position is somewhere along these lines. I am not 100% certain on this, but it is my working basis. It is critical of Trump and his actions, but also doesn't rely on "Trump is an idiot that doesn't actually listen to the military strategists"
The charitable term I would use to explain the action within a cohesive model would be reactive-but-ideologically-consistent. The people in this administration have stable priors of two kinds: about adversaries (anti-China, anti-Iran, anti-Maduro) and about method (prefer unilateral action, skeptical of institutional constraints — the track record on Paris, JCPOA, INF, WHO, NATO burden-sharing, WTO-bypassing tariffs is pretty clear on this).
Those priors shape which responses look attractive, and the method priors shape what form the response takes — sanctions, military posturing, bilateral pressure rather than coalition-building or UN resolutions. The resulting pattern looks coordinated in retrospect because the same worldview is generating each decision rather than Venezuela-Iran-Cuba as a unified oil-denial campaign in advance. I agree it's almost definitely a factor, but I don't think the goal of each of these was to hurt China "from the get-go" as you say. I think that this confuses contingency and factor consideration with grand strategy and causation. In other words, the priors are stable and the triggers are contingent. Stable priors explain why the direction is consistent. Contingent triggers explain why specific moves happen.
I have a second part to my understanding, which I imagine you will disagree with.
I think that Trump has an unstable temperament which is sometimes performative and sometimes just reactive. Temperament explains why the magnitude of any given response is unpredictable — sometimes a measured sanction, sometimes wildly disproportionate escalation. I imagine your counterargument would be along the lines of Nixon's madman theory. My counter to this would be that this requires the madness to be performed over a coherent private process, targeted at specific adversaries for specific concessions, and calibrated enough to actually extract them. What we have instead is indiscriminate volatility, staff memoirs describing management-around rather than scripting, and bluffs that produce escalation rather than capitulation. Nixon's tapes show a sane planning process generating mad signals. I do think that Trump is at times performative, so I'm not saying there is nothing here. However, the substantive majority of evidence points (IMO, I know I haven't adequately proven this) to genuine erraticism or madman theory implemented poorly.
I would like to emphasize one final point: this argument does not collapse into "Trump's an idiot" — an erratic reactor with consistent priors knows what he wants and has clear positions, he's just unreliable about how and when he pursues it. Under this model,
Here is one final thing, which does reflect my biases as a historian (professional) and skeptic of authority (personal). I have a huge issue with grand-strategy readings generally. Administrations, historically, rarely execute clean multi-front strategies even when there's a real ideological project driving things. I don't want to move away from the argument here too much so I hesitate to bring this up, but I would point Iraq is the instructive case: there genuinely was a long-running neocon project with named advocates, published manifestos, and people in position to push it* Yet, the war still turned out to be executed messily, with the occupation improvised after the invasion. Again, ideolically consistent response, but not a cohesive grand strategy.
Ideologically consistent but reactive.
*The advocacy predated Bush by years — PNAC's 1998 letter to Clinton explicitly urged Saddam's removal, and "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (2000) laid out the broader framework before anyone knew 9/11 was coming. That's the paper trail establishing it as a preexisting project rather than a post-9/11 invention. But "project" shouldn't be read as "unified bloc". Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Feith had overlapping but distinct agendas and fought each other on specifics throughout. And the execution itself is the clearest evidence against preplanning: Rumsfeld overruling Army force-level estimates, the disbanding of the Iraqi army by CPA order with no apparent plan for what the disbanded soldiers would do next, no serious occupation blueprint, the scramble to stand up the CPA itself. If the invasion had been the execution of a fully worked-out plan, those aren't the failure modes you'd expect. Instead, they're the failure modes of people who won the argument to invade and then improvised everything after.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Some questions:
>I have a huge issue with grand-strategy readings generally.
I mean, nobody but his most ardent supporters seems to suspect Trump of having much strategy, grand or otherwise. Granted, strategy might be really hard and no war ever goes as planned, but what are we talking about here? Isn't this the modern equivalent of "Don't invade Russia in winter", some truism that every armchair general, like me, would get right?
>Administrations, historically, rarely execute clean multi-front strategies even when there's a real ideological project driving things.
"Even when"? Do you mean to argue that ideology motivates the actors to develop a strategy, or even that ideology is necessary for good strategy? Because intuitively I would say that when you have a firm ideology, you risk believing it so much that you expect good outcomes to manifest by themselves, or that at least it makes you not look too hard into what could go wrong. As in "We remove non-Democracy from that country, people will greet us as liberators, their every suppressed American will pop out, and all will live happily ever after in our image, Mission Accomplished."
Trump's announced that he's going to make Golden Dome, a bigger version of Iron Dome. That's a strategic goal/milestone, what have you. As he dances on the geopolitical stage, if he makes moves that further that goal, do you suspect he does have a strategy?
Or is Trump, somehow, the one president who is so full of hot air, that even expressed "here's what I'm going to do" agenda items do not represent strategic priorities? Even when his expressed tactics are in furtherance of the strategic objective?
The above lays out a rather simple strategy, involved in a full-scale retractment of American forces from outside the American sphere of influence. This may be intended as a backstop, in case larger maneuvers fail (with the end of Pax Americana).
If this has any ideology at all, it's not the "Grand Ideology" that the neoconservatives had. (In fact, it rather looks a lot like the Russian Playbook during the Cold War...)
I think one needs to have at least some ideology, but it needn't be the "pie in the sky" stupidity of the neoconservatives. "Make plans, have backups. Assume the other guy will punch you in the face, and act accordingly." That's a "nuts and bolts" ideology that assumes "eating your spinach is good for you."
I don't think that we necessarily need to have a strategy, but that "not" having a strategy increases reaction time, because you have to put ALL the options on the table, and you don't even have a screen of "This would benefit USA" or "This is good for China" or "This will destroy Europe!" Each of those quotes are a simple expression of simple strategies:
1) Maximal benefit to USA, regardless of cost/benefit to rest of world.
2) Denial of benefit to China, regarding everything as zero or negative sum.
3) Regarding companies as zerosum, and wanting to take all of Europe's.
Of course there are goals. The goals has always been the same.
1. Find big shiny thing to put name on
2. Get adulations
Every process, every decision, every declaration, is in support of one or both of these. See iron dome? Want bigger shinier "golden dome"! See prize? Want prize! People who praise are good, people who criticize or stand in the way of these are bad and the enemy.
I see no reason to go beyond this when questioning "why this?" for _anything_ he does. Someone has convinced him he will look good and get praise, or he thinks he will himself.
People who are so externally motivated are nearly never the level of risk taker* that we currently have in office. I wonder if you're projecting.
"See Iron Dome"? Do I need to sit around and discuss the usefulness of Israel as a weapons-testing platform for weapons that America isn't allowed to test (or wasn't, as of when Iron Dome was being worked on...)?
I mean, you're acting like Trump is a grubby/grabby two-year-old and not simply saying "Okay, our prototype worked. Now let's roll it out to protect america, which was probably the goal from the get-go."
I think this level of "self-servingness" functions better as a model for Richard Nixon, personally (and he did an awful lot of good for the country while selfishly seeking things that would burnish his own resume). And I don't think he was very externally-motivated.
*Brinksmanship that leads to a significant chance of The World is Gone... well, I guess you can say "If this fails, nobody gets to complain, because We're All Dead, Fellas" But I'm pretty sure that an externally motivated chap doesn't come up with that in the first place.**
**Actually, I take it back. Trump may be externally motivated by getting people to rage (that's a particular strain of sadism, not calling him evil just noting what we're talking about psychologically speaking). That's more in tune with what he's done, worldwide, than trying to obtain praise (which has both been "few and far between" and ideas like tariffs -- he's not that stupid, nobody would have said "he's going to get praise for flouting the conventional wisdom THAT hard." A model where this chap wants praise completely falls over when you consider how much of what he does makes liberals rage.)***
***I have heard it said that Trump could have been "softened" like Arnold Schwartz-Kennedy, if the Democrats/Press had decided to praise every step he took towards them. So, actually, he might have some tendencies to seek praise. But at this point? Everyone's already calling him Hitler, and he has no reason not to put pedal to metal.
Let me (try to) be the first to ask: why do you think Orban lost the elections the way he did? I was rereading the "Dictator Book Club" entry about him, and Scott's piece made him look almost unmoveable.
My very naive take is that he might have realized that, to win the elections he might have to seriously destabilize the country, using his and his allies' powers against opposition leaders, but unlike in the past, there would be a serious risk of Russian or European (NATO?) intervention, since the overall political situation is at its shakiest in years.
Or maybe painting him as a dictator was just a smear job by Western media, and he really is just a ruthless politician, but a real believer in democratic-ish power-sharing norms? That doesn't align with Scott's piece, but it is in turn based on (naturally biased) books, and just two to boot
Yes, paragraph two - because orban was never a dictator.
Disagree re: paragraph two. At least in my country the media has not used the word dictator. To portray him as a potential dictator is far from calling him one.
he used all the usual tools in the autocratic toolbox that was available for him. from false flag operations to sending (at least one group in one of the civilian) secret services after political targets, selective tax audits, funding football hooligan groups and using them to harass civilians, total capture of the state media, harassment and capture of private media outlets, and so on.
this is clear and obvious subversion of democracy.
is it North Korean-style absolute totalitarian despotic dynastic dictatorship? no. is it Soviet-style first secretary of the party dictatorship? (which Hungary had between 1956-1989?) yes, except without the backing of Soviet tanks, but coupled with the relative decrease in standard of living.
how close was it to the late Soviet times? well, the media frenzy was definitely worse, but it was easier to leave the country (thank to the EU).
...
one very visible inflection point was last year's Budapest Pride, which happened despite being legally banned, but no one got arrested in the end. (which is quite similar to how the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 at the border during the Pan-European picnic.)
Missionaries do tend to be inflection points, yes, indeed.
> this is clear and obvious subversion of democracy.
Maybe but the question was - was he a dictator. Since he relinquished power through the democratic process then that’s easy to answer. He wasn’t. Netanyahu, a nastier man, is also not a dictator.
Given there are quite a few dictatorships in the world the concentration on Orban was always odd. I get Europeans worrying about Europe but most Americans probably couldn’t find Hungary on a map, and yet it lives rent free in the minds of America’s left.
Here’s a quote from Biden during a foreign policy speech early in his presidency
> We must demonstrate that democracy can still deliver… This is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies… Look at Belarus, Poland, Hungary…”
Two of them are now not “dictatorships” anymore as the dictators left office. Unlike the 60 or so actual dictatorships
It just seems like the kind of thing some intern got upset about, and Biden said what he is told.
(Saudi Arabia did get a mention later on in the speech, which makes it a bit less hypocritical, not that that changed much in actual policy).
Minor quibble. It isn't *quite* as simple as "he relinquished power through the democratic process and therefore wasn't a dictator."
Pinochet is a pretty clear example of "clearly a dictator, but also left power after losing an election." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet
Granted, before he left, he *also* sounded out the military about resisting that election and got shut down, so he really only left power quasi voluntarily (at best). But he still is a pretty well-cited example of "a dictator" and nevertheless permitted an election and left after losing the vote.
I don't put Orban in the same category as Pinochet, though, to be clear.
It strikes me that many military dictatorships do eventually cede power to civilians. Greece, South Korea, many places in Africa.
I'm a lot happier if people discuss "military dictatorship" as different from other forms of dictatorship, as it seems to adequately capture a significant power base (one could use fascist dictatorship if there's an alliance between military and industrial powers, I suppose).
Bolsonaro also flirted with using the military (as he was an officer for quite some time), and while the legislature was deliberating his proposed changes to election laws there was an unusual military parade.
There are a lot of precise (but jargon-y) descriptions of these soft dictatorships but they obviously did not became common colloquially so that we adopt a new word for their usual wannabe dictator. (Or did we?)
Pinochet held a referendum rather than an ordinary election. People voted for just "No", hence a movie of the same name being about that vote.
By that measure, is Xi Jinping a dictator? Currently, he's in a power struggle with two other factions in the CCP, and even if he weren't in the middle of a power struggle, he doesn't have absolute power. Xi decapitated the leadership of the PLA by purging Generals Zhang Youxia (CMC Vice Chairman) and Liu Zhenli (Joint Staff Department Chief). The Old Guard are pissed off about this. And unlike previous purges, Zhang and Liu have not been formally removed from their party posts (even though they're likely dead). Xi is holed up in Beijing, and he hasn't made the usual tour of the country after the two big annual Party pow-wows in March (except a quick trip to visit a school in Xiong'an New Area (Xi's new high-tech, "sustainable" metropolis) about 100km from Beijing (by train, and not by motorcade).
Y-y-yees? He can (and did) get people disappeared, seems to be completely set to rule for life, used the rule of law against his opponents, etc.
Just as Stalin and Mao he also put his own interpretation of "Marxism-Leninism" into some super important official document, and so on.
Dictator doesn't mean unopposed and undefeatable.
I mentioned in a comment somewhere that Ali Khamenei was also supreme absolute hyper leader, but obviously as a fragile old dude he was very much dependent on the IRCG (and the the various upper levels of the whole power structure).
You really need to spend more time studying Chinese politics. Xi does not have absolute power like, say, Kim Jong Un. The PLA hasn't been following his orders, and Xi hasn't left Beijing for over six months now. Former prime minister Wen Jiabao, one of the leaders of the faction opposing Xi, made a conspicuous public appearance a few weeks ago, visiting the Institute of Geographic Sciences in Beijing. Retired party officials are supposed to stay out of the limelight, but his visit was carefully scripted, with a crowd outside clapping and cheering him. Team Xi didn't dare stop him.
And BTW, the misconception that Khamenei was a supreme and absolute dictator was the miscalculation that got us into the mess. Trump's brain trust believed that removing Khamenei would collapse the regime. It hasn't. In fact, from the Iranian political perspective, the mullahs may be stronger now than they were before we attacked them.
Factions of the same party are completely different from actually rival parties. Stalin came to power to crushing rival factions of the Communist Party, but it was a dictatorship going all the way back to Lenin.
Dictator doesn't have a fixed technical definition, it's not like the speed of light.
Strongman doesn't have that kind of ring to it, and people are lazy, so the meaning of words shift. (With the Overton window, I guess).
Wikipedia already mentions the modern usage, also doesn't use absolute power, but instead says "extraordinary amount of personal power".
After all absolute power itself is a spectrum. Ali Khamenei was the supreme leader who had absolute power, but ... at the same time not really, as a 86 year old dude with only one hand he was more of a figurehead and the IRGC holds the keys to the theocracy.
The African dictators are also very much constrained by the realities of their power structure. (And I imagine the same goes for whatever Kim is currently the de jure God of North Korea.)
That said using the dictator label for Orban was always stupid, it just did not fit, but maybe that's why people wanted to anyway? ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hl83Jpd_OI )
Communist Hungary forced all legal parties into a "People's Front", with opposition parties banned. So, no, Orban was not like Communist Hungary in that respect.
Orban's current regime went through the same collapse as he Communist party (~1970-1989), there are obvious differences (USSR as a background vs EU as a background), but the similarities are not lost on Hungarians (also there were already opposition parties in the late 80s).
> [...] in sixteen (twenty) years, Viktor Orbán had built the most textbook, most precise electoral autocracy in Hungary. For his own circle of power – it is much more accurate to talk about Orbán’s circle of power, as Fidesz as a party has long existed only in his name – he had accumulated resources that were perhaps the last to be available to the MSZMP [the Communist Party of Hungary] in 1988; he had tailored the public law system to himself, appointed his own confidants to the heads of almost all institutions important for the exercise of power, which were in principle independent of the government and party, controlled most of the press, and owned at least a quarter of the national economy in some way.
https://444.hu/2026/04/13/ez-nem-egyszeru-valasztasi-gyozelem-ez-nepfelkeles-az-orbanizmus-ellen
The Communist Party ruled Hungary well before 1970.
> also there were already opposition parties in the late 80s
What other parties were in the National Assembly? Throughout all of Hungary's post-communist history there has been a mix.
It shows the importance of institutions. If Orbán had illegally tried to stay in power, the EU almost certainly would have suspended aid and possibly expelled Hungary. Something similar happened in the nineties with Jörg Haider in Austria.
Also, he can still be a political force, supporting the far right in Europe. He isn't losing *that* much.
It would be more appropriate to call Orbán a strong man. He never attained absolute power, but he was slowly creating frictions in the system that would inhibit his removal by democratic processes (by changing the constitution and by court appointments come immediately to mind). Whether losing to a slim majority could have persuaded him to concede the election is anyone's guess. But with a 79% voter turnout and the opposition winning greater than two-thirds of the seats in their parliament, it would be hard to use any post-electoral shenanigans to maintain a hold on power. And his followers probably saw the writing on the wall as well.
+1
That's my verdict: https://x.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1936595491279503380
I said something similar about Modi in response to the Orban book club https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-orban/comment/3499050
Also, "dictator" does not imply "ruler-for-life". Wikipedia: "The word originated as the title of a Roman dictator elected by the Roman Senate to rule the republic in times of emergency. Like the terms "tyrant" and "autocrat", dictator came to be used almost exclusively as a non-titular term for oppressive rule. In modern usage, the term dictator is generally used to describe a leader who holds or abuses an extraordinary amount of personal power." Orban did hold "an extraordinary amount of personal power" - compared say to the German chancellor (not a weak head of gov.!), but as we see now: not about election outcomes - unlike Stalin (or s.o.): "it does not matter who has most votes but who controls the vote counting" (or so).
German media seldom called Orban "dictator" but usu. still tried to make him appear as one. And it depends more on one's definition of "dictator" if he was one than on the extraordinary powers he got himself. We will see if the new guy will really reduce those powers, now that he has them.
Big respect to Orban that he did let the votes be counted fairly and that (unlike a certain guy in the USofA) he conceded early. I plead: Bonfire, not hell.
I have been amazed at the way people talk about how leaders of eg Hungary and the US are just a few inches away from being a dictator. It is like some weird conspiracy theory that completely discounts how many thousands and thousands of people with no incentive to cooperate and with excellent reasons not to cooperate would nonetheless gladly get stuck in. The debasement of language where people are either dictators potential dictators and in other areas too is incredibly annoying.
At what P(dictator) would you like to see people start raising the alarm?
You could argue that someone who writes an article about someone being 'close to becoming a dictator' when their P(dictator) is only 49% is 'inaccurate'.
But that judgement criterion is going to get you a lot of dictators.
Personally, I'm fine with different people having different thresholds depending on how mainstream and respected they are, with lots of lone voices raising the alarm at very low thresholds, and major outlets holding the line for longer. Which I think is what we have.
I'd rather we reserve dictator for situations where it's really in play. Otherwise, people fail to think through why Russia has elections (they are very useful to Russia)...
You could, to use the Western Definition, call both Xi and Putin "dictators" -- but Xi is sitting at the top of a single hierarchy (which everyone wants to get to the top of), and Putin is... "more a pawn for the oligarchs" than anything else (Russians would far rather be oligarchs than "the next Putin").
If you wanted to restrict "dictator" to referring to "the level of fascism" involved in China, or higher, then you'd actually be creating some sort of semantic zone of meaning
Oligarchs have a much much higher chance of accidentally falling out of some window than Putin though.
Similarly in China to climb up the ranks corruption and the charge of corruption is a very important and useful tool.
I don't think it's true that Putin faces a LOWER probability of assassination than any other oligarch.
I do. He puts crazy bastards below him, for just that reason -- to deter crazy West from assassinating him. Because why bother, if Russia is going to go more crazy? Putin is an ex-spy, he knows how the assassination game works.
Well empirically a higher percentage of oligarchs have been assassinated than the percentage of Putins. Hard to extrapolate with confidence but it's at least weak evidence.
He's died zero times, while Russian oligarchs have died multiple times under his rule. The frequentist percentage is clearly far higher for them.
I thought Putin was more powerful than the oligarchs. He's imprisoned/killed a number of them.
Only in singular form -- he's more powerful than any one of the oligarchs. And, given the whole "Russia WISHES they could pull off half the assassinations that are ascribed to them" I'd be wary about any kills that Putin himself (or Russian "officialish" Media*) don't directly attribute to him (particularly if it involves poison).
*as opposed to underground "Navalny was killed by Putin" credulous media.
Not just "any one". He's simply more powerful.
> At what P(dictator) would you like to see people start raising the alarm
Preferably not 0
> At what P(dictator) would you like to see people start raising the alarm?
People aren't raising the alarm based on P(dictator), they're raising the alarm based on "Is he on my side?"
It's just arguments-as-soldiers, calling the other guy a dictator might not be true but hey, it makes him look bad, so we might as well do it.
That's a strong an uncharitable claim, and one I don't see much evidence for.
Every politician in the world is on the opposite side from a huge number of writers and pundits. But only like 2-3 of those politicians are getting massive, constant 'possible dictator' warnings at any level above tweets, and I think they're plausibly the ones with the highest P(dictator).
I think most people actually mean and believe the things they say most of the time. Sure I agree that you will find *a reason* to attack the other side just because you see yourself as in a war with them, but I do think that people *choose which attacks* to use based on evidence and plausibility where possible.
The ones with the highest P(dictator) would plausibly include Presidents assuming power without getting elected, would they not? Given Joe Biden's mental health for four years of running the country, I'd assign Kamala Harris with significant P(dictator) mojo. Jill Biden as well (citing Wilson's wife).
But nobody listens to me (or common sense!)
Have you considered the possibility that all those writers and pundits are comfortable with dictators who back policies those writers and pundits agree with? To the point of not calling them out as dictators?
Someone who acts like an aspiring dictator is, by definition, not on "my side".
Saying that people, as a whole, are indifferent to bad behavior, as long as someone claims to be on "their team", whatever that means, is just lazy and undifferentiated equivocating.
P(-1) actually, as I consider the threat of juntas and oligarchs much wider and more pervasive than "actual dictators." Of course, if one did actually raise that spectre, one might have to critique "The Golden Democracies"
in Hungary since 2010 the constitution was changed about 5-6 times, and in the last ~6 years there was a permanent emergency (because COVID, then the Russian invasion)
was it absolute totalitarian North Korean? no, fortunately no.
was it absolute like absolutist monarchy? quite close, but decide for yourself, Joseph II was like a reverse Orban
What's your point with the number of changes to the constitution? Sweden's constitution has changed twice as many in that time frame, and Malta's has changed twice as many times as Sweden's.
Trying to explain (and provide some evidence) the lengths his regime went to shape the country to their needs using the power initially granted to them.
Of course without knowing the changes it's a bit meaningless, sorry, Wikipedia has more about the sham process of democratic consultations, and in general that the changes served to exert power and gain populist points (by further demonizing LGBTQ folks for example), and eventually to restrict freedom of assembly too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Hungary#2011_Constitution
This seems like a flaw with the Hungarian Constitution being too easy to change rather than a flaw with the party in power.
Seems very suspect to imply those are contradictory. If the party is abusing flaws in the constitutional process that reflects badly on both.
I think it's more of a flaw with the electorate, considering that they kept electing Fidesz while these changes were being made. Sure, a system like Sweden's – where the electorate is given a chance to stop a constitutional change before it takes effect – is probably a good idea, but it doesn't seem to me like it would have had much of an effect here.
Which absolute monarchs concede power after losing elections?
Preventing rise of dictators is only as successful as the checks in place. In the US, there is a tangible reduction in how much power rule of law holds. It's not a country meant to be run through EOs (that weakens democracy), nor one that's meant to ignore the supreme court ruling (see el salvador planes). The government did threaten to retaliate against media institutions, the president openly called for public figures who criticized him to be fired.
People are rightfully scared of this.
CDC Ruling(supreme court)
... I don't even want to go through the EOs to figure out one to pull for Biden, surely you can find something objectionable?
The government did threaten to retaliate against media institutions in the Biden era as well (and we're not just talking the SNL thing, which was funny and not relevant to this discussion).
How many checks needed to be thrown out for a demented man to assume the highest office?
Just because I say "Trump acts in ways an authoritarian might" does not mean that I am a Biden defender :)
Then consider me onboard with a side of "yes, and? Both sides are doing it, and they've been doing it for decades."
I don't tend to think like that personally. The current state is that things are getting worse over there, and pointing fingers and going "they did it first" or "they're both guilty" doesn't really make things better.
I'm instead going to call out that the current state that's been reached is pretty concerning, which is what I'm doing above.
Really? For decades both sides have been rescinding people's green cards for writing op eds? Or threatening to yank broadcast licenses? Or rescinding security clearances for representing people they don't like? Or refusing to ok mergers for parent companies of newspapers who don't toe the line? Or excluding reporters from Pentagon briefings if they don't agree to be neutered? Give me a break.
I thought Trump obeyed SCOTUS' ruling on those planes.
Two part reply:
1) Just *moving into the direction* of autocracy and dictatorship, in my mind, has to be called out and guarded against, no matter how small the steps are.
2) I think we might all underestimate how thin the lines between functional democracy and illiberal democracy and autocracy/dictatorshop really are. Famously, Adolf Hitler dismantled the democratic institutions from within, using the designated democratic processes for change (elections, parliamentary votes). Now look at the current state of the US institutions, how they work, what their intentions are and how the separation of powers is currently working out. It's a quick, short jump from democracy to autocracy, with no clear line delineating one from the other.
"It's always impossible until someone does it"
Perhaps not so famously, Adolf Hitler didn't need to pass laws about the jews. Those were Emergency Health Decrees, and perfectly within his Executive Authority.
Something that was brought up when Trump/Biden started using "Emergency Health Orders"...
Supreme Court is putting separation of powers back on the table, both by throwing Roe V Wade back to the states (separating states from federal), and by curtailing the "generous reading" of the Executive Branch's purview to make rules.
I disagree, let me explain. Let's talk about the most textbook dictator example: Hitler. He was elected. Also, there were Bundestag elections, several ones, and each and every time, the members fully legally voted infinite power to Hitler, and then proceeded to do nothing as they had no real job left. This was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 several times extended. It looked entirely legal on paper.
The "trick" was that every candidate who was known not to vote for this act was discouraged from running by having a very ugly talk with the Gestapo. Or more than talk. Which was clearly a crime, a very hidden crime. It was not done in the open.
So let's make a list:
1) one person gets extreme power
2) legally, on the surface
3) but supported by hidden crimes.
This is not so far from Orbán, who also had an enabling act allowing him as the executive to legislate, who put his guys everywhere so he could control everything from the supreme court to much of the press and much of the economy. That is close to the first point. Also, it was entirely legal on the surface. Third, massive crimes happened, thankfully not the violent kind, no one was tortured or incarcerated, rather the crime was that they stole money and ran a propaganda machine for it.
Clearly, Orbán was not Hitler, far far far less bad, but positive on all three indicators.
> Or maybe painting him as a dictator was just a smear job by Western media […]
I haven't really seen Orban being called a "dictator" in reputable Western media, and he obviously isn't one. Not yet at least. Him not being a dictator doesn't preclude him working to become one. And him peacefully handing over power doesn't mean he believes in democratic ideals, it only means that his hold on power isn't nearly as firm as would be required to ignore the election results.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/there-s-a-new-dog-whistle-coming-out-of-christian-conservatives-mouths-it-s-just-one-word/
Other "msn" sites are also using Dictator ("raw story").
Presumably most of this is supposed to just give liberals heartburn.
This link doesn't work for me, I get a "page not found".
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/there-s-a-new-dog-whistle-coming-out-of-christian-conservatives-mouths-it-s-just-one-word/ar-AA20ykJA
My bad, fixed.
Orban was able to use underhanded methods to keep power for decades. His control over state media basically gave him a self-reinforcing mechanism. His political position allowed him to control the media which allowed him to keep his political position. That's a sort of crooked democracy, but there were still elections, and there haven't been any substantial examples of actual subversion of democracy (forceful intimidation of voters, stuffing of ballot boxes, etc.).
He was never really a dictator. His power still required an electoral victory. The army and the whole government followed him because he was their elected leader. Calling him a dictator for all this time really diminishes the value of the word dictator.
Do we call Putin a dictator then? He has robots* voting for him, for goodness sakes.
*Okay, one or two. Apparently "stunt votes" are fine in Russia.
Lack of a clear dividing line between functioning democracy and dictatorship with show elections does not mean you can't approximate where people fall on the spectrum. Putin is far on the end of dictatorship, Orban is on the end towards democracy. Corrupt democracy perhaps, but certainly not dictatorship.
And where does "puppet king" Biden fall? (don't welch and say "Exactly where Wilson did.")
I'm out of patience with people who won't say "we had a problem with unelected leadership" in the last Administration. I mean, really, did you PLAN to elect a neoconservative government starring Vicky Nuland?
Ugh, have you created yet another sockpuppet account, Gawdflea?
You just realized? For goodness's sake, they're not subtle.
I mean, Biden stepped down and Kamala lost the election, then there was a smooth transition of power, so far toward the side of democracy? We do this successfully every 4-8 years so I don't think you can call the Biden admin a dictatorship.
FBI has the papers, of "mailed-in" election ballots that weren't even folded in Georgia (active case). Smooth transitions of power do not generally involve Acts of War on our Allies or military plans to put tanks on State Legislature's lawns -- or maybe I've been reading this all wrong, are we supposed to have mythical water leaks as a matter of smooth transitions? And pipe bombs in the DNC/RNC (that were very conveniently not investigated by Congress during their Jan 6th hearings)?
This is "election denial." All elections are free and fair.
You support letting Robots vote? Russia is kinda sillypants about this stuff, because their elections aren't about "who wins the election."
I care more about the result than the sanctity of the process. If whatever change you implement makes it more likely that right guy takes office, I'd support it. And vice versa. (Of course, there's a far bigger problem that the guy who campaigns on the right policies changes course after winning, and doesn't implement what he promised, but that's a deeper problem with "representative democracy," not fixable with minor tweaks to election systems.)
> I care more about the result than the sanctity of the process.
...the wrong guy also has followers that think this way. How confident are you, really, that the right side is better at subverting the system than the wrong side? Wouldn't it be better if the right-minded people had a fair chance, rather than leaving the whole thing to a dice roll of who's got the trickier trickster on their side?
I care about the sanctity of the process /because/ I care about the result.
This turns pretty critically on who the right guy is and how you decide that. If the majority of people in your country want Mr Smith to be president but Mr Smith is a drooling idiot who will lead the country to ruin, is Mr Smith the right guy?
Russia has never had a handover of power resulting from an election.
psst! I'm okay with calling Putin a dictator! Really, I am!** The guy I was responding to seemed to be having difficulties finding "anyone who counts" as a dictator.
**well, okay, if you want to get technical, Putin is a strongman supported by an oligarchy, but his elections are certainly not "free and democratic," even if he is genuinely popular.
Boris Yeltsin would probably disagree with that. He won what seems to have been a fair and contested election to the Presidency of the Russian Republic, technically a subordinate position at the time, but it rapidly became clear to all concerned that Russia was going to be ruled by the Russian Republic going forward, not the Soviet Union, and the Soviet leadership transferred power accordingly.
He had already been President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, back when he was still a member of the Communist party.
Yeah, but he resigned from the Communist party and won a contested election as a not-Communist who was actually going to run Russia without just being a mouthpiece for the Party. That's a real transfer of power, as was the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union
"Electoral autocracy" is just a confusion of ideology and regime type. I said at the time these people were going to be embarrassed when these regimes were just voted out of office and quietly went. First in Poland, now Hungary. It almost happened in Turkey and will eventually. My prediction was wrong only in that they're not embarrassed and have adapted the language of overthrowing a dictatorship to winning an election.
Exactly. The way they talk it's like they overthrew Orban in some kind of colour revolution. As far as I can see what happened is that Orban became unpopular, the opposition broke the habit of a lifetime and got their act together and he lost the election. That just seems standard stuff in a democracy. From what I can gather Orban was indeed quite corrupt but his main claim to be a dictator seems to come from not doing what the EU told him he should.
Perhaps they are talking like that because that's what they did? Democracies are relatively easy to... ratfuck I think is the word. People who aren't dictators (including Trump, despite the plans to put tanks on the Pa Legislature's lawn) simply step down.
You lose a lot of worldwide respect if you need to ratfuck your own elections, though. Biden couldn't even get Saudi Arabia to pick up the phone when he called, jaysus ceerist.
wtf? it's not "what the EU told him", it's what millions of Hungarians told him, what Hungarian history told him (which he himself was part of in 1989 when he was shouting "Ruskies out!" and now he became this pathetic subservient blob https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/07/viktor-orban-told-putin-i-am-at-your-service-in-october-phonecall )
he became unpopular, lost in 2002, then he moved from a center-right ideology to a nationalist populist "Christian" one, and riding the wave of the 2008 recession he got absolute majority, *then* he started to prepare for the long haul (media capture, good old clientelism, any and all public works became ridiculously expensive and certain well positioned companies became very profitable overnight, and so on), then changed the system with the absolute majority, to remain in power.
and then it happened 3 more times.
sure, it's Eastern Europe after all, so quite standard stuff yes, but it's definitely not what we (and I assume most people) want to standardize as democracy.
Orban explicitly claimed to be creating an "illiberal democracy." https://bush.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Suleiman-Paper-No.-20.pdf
Which, yes, is a form of authoritarianism. https://ansari.nd.edu/news-events/news/karrie-koesel-authoritarianism-electoral-autocracies-and-democratic-backsliding/
This strikes me as a species of "Everyone I don't like is Hitler," just with a think-tank to devise indices and make graphs for it.
Then I suggest that you read a little more carefully, and more broadly. I said "a form" of authoritarianism. There are different forms, and different degrees. This book, for example, discusses several types which vary across two dimensions: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dictators-at-war-and-peace-jessica-l-p-weeks/1119060843
This is poli sci 101, not the invention of a think tank. It is why courses in comparative authoritarianism exist. https://polisci.la.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2022/01/PLSC-555_Wright_SP19.pdf
Authoritarian sounds a lot more neutral than dictator (or for god's sake, fascist). People make authoritarian arguments, people have authoritarian personalities. If we could all just call "Those who are leaning on the Order part of Law and Order" authoritarian, I'd be happy.
It's a relatively negative word, but it's a useful term that has broad applicability.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LykbTn_sS4o
Orban set up the system so rural votes counted more, but he didn't count on competent opposition which campaigned in rural areas, nor on having pissed off everyone with his level of corruption.
As for whether he was a dictator, I guess dictator/not dictator isn't a simple distinction.
I recommend the video, it has lots more detail.
If he indeed hands over power as a result of losing an election, then it seems like "dictator" wasn't an appropriate term for him.
Yes, the word "dictator" does seem OTT for Orban, but might I point out that Lucius Cornelius Sulla [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulla ] handed over power and retired (although I'm not sure if that was the result of an election). Mind you, after that he did ensure he had ten thousand military veterans watching his back!
ISTM that having too much power concentrated in the hands of the boss is a bad thing, but that it is far less bad when elections are reasonably fair and the boss actually loses power when the vote goes against him.
Roman Dictators were the equivalent of American "commander in chief" -- they were elected for a specific purpose, and were supposed to retire afterwards. It was a big 'social convention' that they would, and there were a lot of them that did so.
Dictator, in the Roman sense, has next to nothing to do with any idea of retaining power at all. In that sense, dictator has drifted so far outside of its semantic remit that it might as well be a new word.
The position of dictator in the Roman republic doesn't really match the way the word is used today.
Should I assume that everyone who is complaining about this is also upset with 150 years of America Electoral Policy? We only got "one person one vote" in the 1960s for god's sake!
I haven't seen anyone complaining about it.
And I complain that the Supreme Court made such BS up!
oh, you sweet son-of-a-bitch, I could kiss you. : - ) Seriously, there's actually someone around here who's upset at the Supreme Court for "One Person One vote"?! Care to explain what your complaints are?
SCOTUS simply made up the claim that everything in our constitutional system leads toward that. On the contrary, the ONE part of the Constitution prohibited from amendment is the equal representation of the states, which goes AGAINST "one man, one vote".
When what brings you down is opposition who campaigns well in rural areas and the public finding out about your corruption, I think the word "dictator" just doesn't fit.
Several things can be true at once:
1) Orbán was an autocrat who did every underhanded thing he though he could get away with to cement his power.
2) He was not willing to do away with democracy in the narrow sense of peaceful transfer of power by means of elections. (Whether that's out of genuinely held beliefs or pragmatism and sense of self-preservation is not an easily resolved question. Nor is the question of what exactly made the choice pragmatic - it can just as well be outside pressure due to Hungary's immersion in EU institutions, or inside pressure of Hungary's population that would make his rule unsustainable without popular backing.)
3) Western(-aligned) Media are inherently dishonest and use "democratic" and "on our (globalist-liberal) team" (as well as "dictator" and "not on our team") interchangeably, to the point where the terms lose all their literal meaning.
tl;dr: It was a smear job, and also (purely incidentally) true, and also (purely incidentally) overblown.
One general complaint I have about most media coverage of foreign right-wing leaders is that they're *all* the second coming of Hitler. Like, it doesn't seem to matter whether the guy's actual policies involve slightly tightening up immigration enforcement or invading Poland for liebenstraum, the panicky tone of the coverage is the same. And yet, it's seems clear that Meloni != LePen != Orban != Modi != Ergodan.
The left seems remarkably loath to rewrite their propaganda, even when the other side insists on behaving "not like the second coming of Hitler." (See Jan 6th).
Then again, Build Back Better wound up on about three different plates (Aussies, Brits, America) -- and one of those isn't a commonwealth country, and would "on general principle" use different language (or vice versa).
The Left gets a script for "Bad RightWing Man" and then rolls it out to everyone they want to tar with the "Bad Man" script. Disagreement with The Powers That Be is enough to be called a dictator now (one need not be Gaddafi, who was perfectly fine up until he threatened the world financial order)
What kind of broken conceptual apparatus would make you call "Powers That Be" "The Left"?
I mean, if you get to this point, how can you even complain about others "rolling the script out"? Feels like the pot calling the kettle [racial slur].
The Neofeudalists?
The guys who want you eating bugs (without pets, god how they hate pets) and unable to travel outside your "little bughive" without permission(god forbid you want to live in the suburbs!**), and are willing to try and destroy the gasoline-based car market in order to accomplish their goals? The ones making buck on the whole "Global Warming" stuff? ("Green" your company by putting money into our NGOs?) You've noticed that "environmental attacks" on Famous Paintings result in absolutely no consequences to the Museum Directors? They literally turn a blind eye (compare with the Napoleonic Jewel Heist, where significant leadership roles resigned in disgrace).
Okay, I could go on from this point, but I'm just going to ask -- how many quotes from Davos do I need to give you?
[You want to be on the Left and disclaim all of these people, say you want better media in place to make sure 4 years of Good Old Joe never happened? Join the club.]
Does "the right" have scripts? Yes, but the Right is playing Captain Chaos Cards from the "What will Trump do next". Scripts aren't the problem -- the lack of ability to roll out more than one at a time represents a significant weakness on The Left that Trump is exploiting (Sue Harvard! Why not? It's all government money anyway. USAID! Get rid of the penny! Steal Venezuela's Dictator!) -- and there's a separate problem with "refusal to rewrite scripts after your predictions fail" (e.g. covid19 was supposed to kill a lot more Americans, so the immigrants were supposed to backfill all the jobs that we Didn't Have People To Do -- you can see rhyming propaganda being pushed by the leader of Spain, PM Sanchez, in the past day or two)
**I'm a proud urban non-car-owner. Complaining about the "enforcers" is still kosher, though.
Ireland is calling in the army* to remove farmers protesting fuel prices, because apparently their green energy commitments are more important than actually letting farmers grow crops and raise animals. (This follows some dumping of horse manure in Brussels, and appears to be an ongoing thing in Europe, where literal farmers are being run out of business because they're somehow "not green enough"). Shall I mention Sri Lanka, where the country's government decided to go organic, and then, the farmers burnt government buildings down in a riot (due to massive crop failures)? --- All of this points to a distinct lack of power in the military/national security apparatus to put the kibosh on governmental actions that are not in the interest of National Security (and it's at about that point that I start talking "The Powers That Be").
*Is this martial law?
I'm actually feeling a little bad about ranting about this as if it's all "Green Green Green" -- immigration, diversity, "gay rights" are all part of this "Leftist" Powers That Be**.
**If you want to say that they're simply cloaking a nefarious agenda in "Leftist Colors" I'd say that's extremely accurate, and probably more accurate than me carelessly referring to them as "Left."
"Ireland is calling in the army* to remove farmers protesting fuel prices, because apparently their green energy commitments are more important than actually letting farmers grow crops and raise animals. "
Sigh. It's not like that. Farmers, yes, but also hauliers and others (the school bus drivers are getting in on the act too, so I have been informed). Husband of a work colleague went to one of the protests because he's a lorry driver for a large manufacturer locally.
What happened was that the government rapidly gave in and gave a 10c excise deduction, but since before they folded, people had been panic-buying fuel, petrol stations ran out of supplies and - due to the blockades - couldn't get refills. That's why the army was called in - blockading the oil refinery in Cork isn't going to help ease the problem of high fuel prices.
Which our government can't really control much, anyway, because if there's no damn fuel supply because Iran can't get its oil to market, then they can't magic more oil out of thin air. It's not about pushing green energy, it's about we're a small island on the periphery and depending on importing fuel and if there's no fuel to be got, it's too damn bad.
https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/0415/1568267-fuel-excise-cuts/
The police were the main force involved, and asked for the help of the Defence Forces, so if anyone is visualising American-style National Guard interventions, that's not what happened:
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0411/1567673-fuel-price-protests/
"If you are just joining us, here are the latest developments on the fifth day of the protests over fuel prices:
- Defence Forces units are at the Whitegate oil refinery in east Cork.
- The Garda Public Order Unit has deployed pepper spray and pushed back protesters to enter the Whitegate facility.
- A meeting between Government ministers and representatives of farmers and hauliers is under way.
- The meeting aims to finalise a new Government package of fuel supports.
- It has emerged that the package will include a temporary Fuel Support Scheme aimed at the haulage, agri and contractor sectors.
- Around 600 filling stations across the country are out of petrol and diesel.
- Road closures remain in place in parts of the country due to blockades."
"Fuel trucks have regained access to an oil refinery that had been subjected to a days-long blockade after gardaí cleared protesters from the entrance.
In a major operation involving scores of gardaí, large tractors that had been blocking the entrance to the Whitegate oil refinery in Co Cork were moved and fuel tankers were once again able to access the site.
The operation to secure the site took approximately an hour and saw some physical clashes between the Public Order Unit and protesters, including instances where pepper spray was used.
Members of the Defence Forces were also at the scene as An Garda Síochána, had requested the availability of a military heavy-lift recovery truck if it needed to tow any of the large tractors or trucks involved in the blockade.
Gardaí escorted the fuel trucks to the premises."
There was some public criticism of the protests and blockades since it meant people were not able to get to hospitals for appointments, particularly the major hospitals in Dublin (if you're down the country and seriously ill, you'll probably get referred to a Dublin hospital for testing and treatment, and trying to get to Dublin when the roads are blocked off is very difficult).
Though the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, is facing the prospect of a heave by his own party in the wake of all this:
https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2026/0416/1568476-taoiseach-meeting/
While looking into this, I learned about the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party which was the fourth most popular party in the 2022 election and got 3.27% of the vote and six seats in Parliament.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Two-Tailed_Dog_Party
> The party platform promised eternal life, world peace, a one-day workweek, two sunsets a day (in assorted colours), lower gravity, free beer, and low taxes.[9][better source needed] Other electoral pledges have included building a mountain on the Great Hungarian Plain. Party election posters were mostly in Szeged and featuring the candidate István Nagy, who is a two-tailed dog, with slogans such as "He's so cute, surely he isn't going to steal"
Sadly they only got 0.87% of the vote this time around. Also interesting in the electoral results are the huge number of parties promising "National Self-Government of..." various groups from other nearby countries, starting with "...Germans" who got 24,630 votes and finishing with Bulgarians who got just 157. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Self-Government_of_Germans_in_Hungary
(To which I'm tempted to say that if you want national self-government of Germans then you should probably just move to Germany, but I'm not sure they have that there any more either.)
He's not a dictator, but much of the world exists in a blurry middleground between the binary that 'dictatorship' and 'democracy' implies. There's a lot you can do to subvert democracy without abolishing it, and Orban wasn't above any of it really.
Ultimately, he lost masively, he's surrounded by countries who want him to lose massively and who knew he lost massively, and the atreets are full of people who again want and know his loss. If he tries to subvert an outcome like that, it would very likely fail. And the cost of failure would no longer be 'investigations into corruption' but rather 'firing squads'.
Yeah, democracy exists on a scale, it is not a "yes or no" question.
The central examples are that in democracy you can always change the government in fair elections, and in dictatorship the only way to change the government is a military coup.
Then there is the gray zone where for example the current ruler owns all the TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers; and uses a combination of legal and extralegal tools to destroy all competition. There are technically elections every few years, but it is extremely difficult for the population to coordinate on an alternative, because most people probably haven't even heard of an alternative or a reason why they might want to vote for it. So the only way you could lose is if too many people hate you too much, despite all the media convincing them that everything bad is actually caused by your enemies. Plus you can manipulate the votes, such as changing the law so that the votes of people in big cities practically don't count, and you also collect votes from people living abroad in a way that your opposition cannot verify. -- And yes, you *can* still lose, but it requires a "once in a few decades" type of situation. So not exactly a dictatorship, but not much of democracy either.
Democracy exists on some kind of scale, but also most people talk about "democracy" when they mean something more like "modern 21st century Western liberal democracy with a generous welfare state and substantial civil liberties." But ISTM that the load-bearing part of democracy is that the public can vote the bastards out and vote new bastards in. That's the thing that is required, to make the people in power care what happens to the people of the country. Democracy has little to do with whether your country treats gays well or which decisions are made by judges vs legislators vs the executive. It only has a little to do with even really fundamental rights (from an American perspective, anyway) like freedom of speech or religion--many EU counties have substantial restrictions on speech that includes pretty explicitly political speech, but still seem democratic. The UK arrests people for mean tweets, many countries have fined politicians for speeches they gave, but those countries are still places where elections ultimately decide who has power.
I think focusing in on only the existance of elections is a little too narrow. Is it still a democracy if you can freely vote but:
1. It's illegal to criticize the government in the media?
2. The main opposition candidate was conveniently found guilty of some ill-defined "corruption" charges a month before the elections?
3. Voting laws systematically exclude those who might be sceptical of the government from voting?
In general, if you want to go from on-paper democracy to de-facto democracy, you rather inevitably end up with some institutional requirements like "independent judiciary" and "freedom of speech". Rotting away at those institutions is how you end up on the road towards dictatorships, and while Hungary was moving in that direction they obviously were nowhere near as far gone as something like Russia.
I think this is right, though I also think it's too easy to give a pass to your own society's restrictions on democracy. I mean, in the US, we routinely have judges just flat throw out laws passed by elected legislators and signed by elected governors/presidents. That often leads to good results, but it doesn't seem like it has much to do with democracy. For that matter, the whole way our presidential elections work is pretty undemocratic (winner take all within a state so no Democrat in Texas or Republican in California ever has a voice in who the president is), most states let the politicians draw the voting districts to maximize their number of seats, some states have set-aside minority-majority districts to ensure some seats for the minority group, etc. I'd say we're still a more-or-less democratic society.
I think the core question is whether the public can get rid of the people in power. The more the state / politicians can put a thumb on the scales (suppress the opposition party, draw the voting districts to shut out some voices, annul sufficiently unpleasant election results), the less that feedback works, but as long as "enough" of it works (for some hard-to-define version of "enough") the public still gets a say, and so the powerful people still have to care what the voters think about what's going on.
I think the most obviously undemocratic thing about the US is how difficult it is to change their federal constitution (which I suppose is part of the reason why they let judges make up new constitutional law instead). They haven't changed it in 34 years, and that change took over two centuries to get ratified.
> The UK arrests people for mean tweets
That reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB3WVygAM8I - a comparison between UK and US free speech.
If you mean why he did not get the popular vote, it was a series of well-timed scandals, likely with the help of Western intelligence services, for example phone calls with Lavrov telling him he is doing a good job making Europe unhappy. Corruption, general dysfunction and pro-Russia stances were the three biggest thing the voters did not want. They are okay with a conservative government, the next government will be conservative too, in fact there are now only conservatives and far-righters in Parliament and zero liberals, but they want the efficient, uncorrupted and pro-Western kind of conservatism.
If you mean why he conceded fast, well, there were very clear signs the military and the police is not on his side. If you want to talk about dictators, although he was not one, not having the military and the police on the dictator's side is basically EPIC FAIL.
It is a classic dictator EPIC FAIL to cut the pay of soldiers, and their equipment, and piss them off in general. Surely that handbook says that?
I mean look at the French Revolution. King Louis managed to piss off the senior military staff by kicking their friends into pension as a way to cut costs, the middle officer staff by banning the promotion of those with too young nobility, and the common soldiers through draconical discipline. He had to send the troops out from Paris, because they were unreliable. The rest what happened is obvious? There was no one around to defend the Bastille. So that is really an autocrat EPIC FAIL. Keep the soldiers happy and you can get away with a lot of things.
Hey guys. I wanted to ask for some feedback on a product I'm working on:
www.argyu.fun
It's a debate game platform that uses AI as a neutral arbiter to score everyone's responses. The mission is to incentivize better thinking.
We added 2 new games with faster feedback modes:
1. King of the Hill - The 'king' has the highest scored answer. Challengers try to usurp the king and get a higher score with better points.
2. Showdown - Go 1v1 on a random topic. Users have 3 minutes to make their best argument.
Feedback is much appreciated, thank you.
How are you achieving neutrality with LLMs?
Our judge scores based on the following criteria:
Claim clarity & specificity
Logical structure & validity
Factual accuracy
Engagement with counterarguments
Internal consistency
Relevance & focus
Completeness
Fairness & interpretive charity
Presentation & Rhetoric
Organization & readability
Might as well plug my AI debate platform: https://argue.lol
Eli I checked out your platform, very cool and great design! I tried viewing a live debate but wasn't able to do so, said it was full
Thanks man!
I signed up with a throwaway email account, but have not tried participating in any topics yet (none piqued my interest). A couple of notes:
* I chose a fairly weak password when creating the account, but the site did not warn me about this.
* The welcome message says "no real money required", but all the debates have scoring metrics that look like "$20/$80", and my account appears to have "$100" in credit. It would be good to explain more explicitly that you're talking about play money, or perhaps use a symbol other than "$".
Noted, appreciate the feedback!
Played around a bit. So far, it feels like the first stage of a generative adversarial network: Essentially, we are trying to figure out your current AI judge's reward function and find inputs that maximize that. Fun, but too disparate from truth-seeking to feel rewarding.
I played an opponent in showdown whose pacing and phrasing seemed like an AI (perhaps taking the second step of this GAN). They got great scores simply telling a personal anecdote and describing how the emotional thrust of that anecdote supported their case. I don't know if this is optimal for this judge, or optimal for your RLHF of that judge, or optimal for the arguments you'd like the site to produce. As far as I can tell, there's no way of answering the latter questions from the site (and no way of answering the first except by playing).
Ultimately I think what's needed here is more judging of judge: If you laid your principles of what a good argument is in a clear "constitution", each judgment could be criticized by some aligned community as not optimally following that constitution. Over time, better judges could then be created.
For the "King of the Hill" thing to work, you'd need the AI scoring to be reliably transitive. I'm not sure that's true.
Tried out showdown.
On practice mode, I found that nearly all my feedback asked for more, more more: more evidence, more counterarguments, etc. Putting in made-up quotes or scientific studies increased my score by 5-10 points each. Not going back to correct typos also increased my score, if it let me get one more sentence in under the time limit.
On quick match, my two opponents both put in perfectly spelled, multi-paragraph answers with multiple named, dated sources. I assume they were using AI.
Not fun in the least.
Thank you, this is really good feedback.
The quick match automatically puts you up against an AI bot if you don't match with anyone after 5 seconds, we should make this clear to the user.
Noted on the feedback given in practice mode, we can make this better.
Yeah, I didn’t sign up for a speed-typing contest against an AI. If that’s what it does, you should at least make those matches not count towards the user’s ELO.
While we’re on the topic of fake points that feel bad to lose, it would be nice if quick match users could decline a topic if they know nothing about it.
...well every time I read this I think of Duck Game, so I'll just quote Duck Game.
" 'UGHHHHH...' That's what the computer thought of that match! But what do the fans think?"
The flaw of the whole project is, the best argument is the one that convinces your friends, not a third party algorithm.
Can I understand why I’ve been hearing so much about Christianity in connection with rationalism and EA recently? In my current worldview, religion is still the same problematic institution denounced by Richard Dawkins years ago, and anyone who holds religious beliefs is, de facto, irrational (again, just stating my world model without presuming it is correct).
Are there good sources for understanding the “rational Christian” viewpoint, so that I might update my model?
Right now, my intuition is that Christianity is mainly used as a shelling point to organize community activities and coordinate moral behavior. Is that all it is, or is there something more in terms of the underlying ontology they actually hold?
My, admittedly cynical, take: there are still way more Christians (especially in the USA) than Rationalists/EA types, and so getting the nicer ones (more liberal in views, less doctrinaire, more intelligent and willing to move with the times) of us Bible-bashing rabble on-board means infiltrating the institutions and engaging in entryism to take over enough influence, at least, to shift churches towards EA-type goals. All that charitable donation and community organisation turned away from worship of God towards worship of the machine. Ready made network of established status and connections to steer towards the better goals as defined by Utilitarianism: greatest happiness of the greatest number in saecula saeculorum, amen!
Agreed; indeed, from the Rationalist perspective, hijacking Christian community networks is a perfectly rational course of action. After all, we're saving the world from imminent doom here, right ? What nobler goal is there ?
Some Christians believe their religion literally, but many are there simply because their parents were there, they were raised as religious from childhood, and there is a social pressure to remain... and they rationalize it to themselves either as "it's better to be safe, just in case the afterlife really exists", or "it's probably all just fairy tales, but if religion tells people to be nice, then it is a noble lie and should be supported".
To the latter, you can say "well, you can also be nice by helping other people, and there are more efficient ways than giving the money to your church authorities".
I disagree, I think this is a naive and wrong version of utilitarianism which doesn't consider the full consequences of breaking people's trust.
I'm inclined to think both groups want to convert each other. I can't imagine many Christians want a pack of charity nerds to be eternally damned.
I know your take is cynical, but it reminded me of a Chesterton's Fence scenario I experienced.
Decades ago, I was a rationalist agnostic dating a girl who worked in youth programs at a church. It was perhaps an odd pairing, but she was hot and nice and I ended up being a regular church goer as a result.
A few people in the congregation's leadership got enthusiastic about sending aid to Africa. So they made a big pitch for a years-long commitment to tithes for aid. These leaders naively assumed that congregants would donate to Africa in addition to their normal tithe to the general operating fund. Instead, people tithed to the Africa fund instead of the general fund. (What great EAs!)
The general fund at most churches pays for building expenses, utilities, and salaries. Within six months, the budget was in enough of a hole that the church let several employees go, including my wife. The childrens' programs suffered greatly as a result. A good childrens' program is a huge draw for a church, and weekly attendance declined with the youth program.
With the decrease in attendance, tithes dropped. The leaders saw the writing on the wall and saw they couldn't afford the Africa program. So now zero dollars are being allocated for overseas aid (they still do a great deal of classic church charity work in the local area, like running a food pantry).
That's the thing, people talk about (as in comments here) money going to church facilities instead of charity, and I think often they have in mind the kind of American (which has spread to the Global South) Prosperity Gospel type of ministers who buy their own jets and the like.
But even EA projects have administrative overhead that *some* proportion of donations go towards, and church administration is the same - paying the wages of secretaries, programmes for members, printing the bulletins, heat and light, etc. It's not all "megachurch pastor shilling on TV for his second luxury car".
> Decades ago, I was a rationalist agnostic dating a girl who worked in youth programs
> let several employees go, including my wife.
Way to bury the lede!
The more rational Christians are the ones who take the religion less literally, every Christian is to some degree irrational, maybe encouraging more of the less irrational version of Christianity can be good, but I think ultimately we want the whole thing gone
"I think ultimately we want the whole thing gone"
That's my feeling too, which is why I think attempts to do "Christianity and..." as in "Christianity and Effective Altruism" are suicide attempts.
To quote from "The Screwtape Letters":
"On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything—even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice."
"The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian. They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity. What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call "Christianity And". You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing."
I think he was saying that ultimately, he wants the "whole thing" of Christianity gone, which I know you would disagree with. That's a pretty timely quote though.
I think "Christianity and something" is better than "Christianity", and is useful to get people with religious tendencies to be more reasonable. Christianity can be seen as a useful fiction, but I think there can be just as useful fictions that are less likely to result in bigotry.
I think that if we're talking about Christianity and wanting it to survive, then "Christianity and something" is not better. It's exactly what you describe happening there - for someone whose interest is in the "and something", then Christianity is at best a tool and something ultimately to be disposed of in order to let the "something" be the important, major focus.
So if someone is Christian and trying to use the "Christianity and something" as any kind of a hook, they are only knotting the noose to hang themselves.
I think this applies to any movement; once you start diluting it with mission creep, the movement loses focus. At best, it becomes a financial instrument with extra bells and whistles; at worst, it falls apart.
Hmm... As an atheist/agnostic (with finite uncertainty, of course) myself, I'm happy to see a Christian revival as an impediment to Islamization. Does 'Christian and not-Muslim' count as one of the 'Christianity And' groups, according to C.S.Lewis's view?
No, it would not, because it is a statement of belief. Unless someone is trying to create some sort of political stance (we in X are Christians not Muslims) then it's not the same as trying to use Christianity as a peg to hang your pet cause on.
Many Thanks!
I’m certain that Galileo will be devastated once he learns of Dawkins opinion of his faith. Though perhaps he should have thought more carefully about pissing off his patrons . . .
If you're relying on the Pope to back you up against the Pigeon League, then don't write a book putting quotes allegedly the position on the topic the Pope holds into the mouth of the "dumb idiot" character 😁
https://galileo.library.rice.edu/chr/caccini.html
Galileo was a bit like Dawkins in that both of them never met a controversy they didn't want to have an opinion on, and absolute certainty they were right and everyone else was a moron.
There’s that yes. His life seems to be one of Really Cool Discoveries like (Galilean) Relativity and Going Out Of His Way to Piss Off the Powerful. He’d have been better off going to Germany and nailing his theories to the church door.
Tyco and That Polish Dude with the Oddly Latin Name, Copernicus, both published on heliocentricism around the same time and died in their own beds.
Tycho had his own system, which was explicitly geocentric, but under the hood it was basically just Copernican heliocentrism with a coordinate transformation to a non-inertial reference frame where the Earth is defined as always being at (0,0,0). The Sun and the Moon then revolve around the Earth, and most everything else revolves about the Sun.
Tycho favored this for religious and aesthetic reasons; a moving Earth just felt so wrong he had to transmogrify everything else to fit around a stationary Earth. And then a century of Catholic astronomers went with the Tychonic system because that damned idiot Galileo had poisoned the geocentric well and it was safer to just do the silly bit of extra math and get on with their work than to risk pissing off the Vatican with the simple true version.
I think you mean "heliocentric well," but yes.
I have been in the rationalist space for over a decade and have become Christian over the last 5, with regular church attendance starting about 4 years ago. I was held back from Christianity by the rationalist strawman of Christianity for a long time, but there are limits to rationality. I ended up too rational to cope with the narrow scope of what rationalism affords and I started looking for answers elsewhere. The Christian intellectual tradition gave me the answers I needed. The Christian worldview fits reality better, affords more, and has led to a deeper and more fulfilling life for me and my loved ones. If other rationalists have a similar experience to mine, I can see why they would post about it.
I am no Rationalist, but still, your perspective intrigues me. This may be a stupid question, but what do you mean by being "Christian" ? I was always under the impression that Christianity implies faith in the supernatural ("the evidence of things not seen"), and is thus explicitly and deliberately irrational. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, who knows), I'm the kind of person who is unable to make himself believe propositions at will, and thus Christianity of this sort is not an option for me. But perhaps you are one of the people (arguably the majority) who can alter their beliefs at will; or perhaps your version of Christianity is not supernatural ?
> I'm the kind of person who is unable to make himself believe propositions at will
Few are!
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians%202:8-9&version=NIV
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”
A promise of Christianity is that you do not need to logic yourself into faith on your own. If you pray to be gifted faith, it will be gifted. You are then no longer in a place where the belief is unjustified by your experience - you have felt cause and effect directly. Once you find yourself here, the worldview is internally consistent thereafter.
Are you a Christian?
As it happens, yes.
I would not self-describe as a rationalist, but this is for reasons largely unrelated to my faith. Certainly I am rationalist-sympathetic.
That's awesome! I've noticed you around but I guess I haven't paid enough attention to realize.
> If you pray to be gifted faith, it will be gifted.
But this is a Catch-22: how can I sincerely pray to an entity who, to the best of my knowledge, does not exist ? Sure, I can mouth the words and perform the rituals and wear the special clothes (if any), but from my point of view doing all that is no different from cosplay at a LARP. Surely God would know of my insincerity even if I managed to somehow convince all the Christians, would he not ?
True, you need to be less than completely certain of your atheism in order to call out in sincere, humble hope of a reply. If you are not able to open your mind to the possibility - if it is already fully made up beyond swaying - I don't really know how to help with that. Seems like that sort of thing could be a problem for many rationalist pursuits also, though. If we're not prepared to examine positions that we find alien and think are only a little likely to be true, I frankly don't see how half the conversations that happen here can happen in seriousness.
> If you are not able to open your mind to the possibility...
As I'd said before, my mind is not open to any possibility of anything; at least, not in the way that I think you mean. For example, whenever I look at a rock, I cannot convince myself that it is a rabbit or an apple or even a turtle. I can certainly imagine the possibility intellectually (after all, I've been wrong many times before), but imagining a counterfactual world is not the same as convincing yourself that you do in fact live there. So the best I could do is say, "by all appearances this appears to be a plain old rock, and though I could always be wrong, in this case I don't think I am".
Why do you think God would care what you believe as long as you do all the things right?
...I mean, I literally just quoted that: "not by works, so that no one can boast".
Christianity has been wrestling with free will vs predestination since well before the likes of Daniel Dennet and modern conversations about determinism. The God described in the bible isn't looking for coerced automatons. He's looking for people to come of their own free will. This isn't about performing a magic ritual correctly. This is about making up your mind to call out for help, and verbalising the result of that.
Well, you said it's to the best of your knowledge, which seems to leave room for some uncertainty (and is certainly the most defensible position). I think "God, if you do exist, in whatever form you exist" is a valid starting place for a prayer.
That is true; I could certainly pray this prayer, though of course the answer would depend on what kind of God actually exists (if any). Many versions of the Christian God would not grant me faith, as they stringently avoid impinging on free will. Eldritch abominations such as Cthulhu would not care, as they require sacrifice, not mere prayer. The Kami likely would not hear me unless I visited them personally in Japan. Odin demands valiant deeds, not pretty words, and Loki can't be trusted at all... and so on. So the fact that I've prayed the prayer and got no special revelations in return tells me very little.
Maimonides would say (as Jews do) that your performing of the rituals, even insincerely, is helping the community. So long as you keep your unbelief to yourself, you're still a good jew who isn't particularly harming the community with your disbelief. (This runs alongside the strain of faith where "doubt is the handmaiden of truth" and "god gave us brains to think. If we doubt god, that's his own damn fault").
I've heard that a lot from Jews, but I don't consider myself a part of the Orthodox Jewish community, let alone the Christian one...
I believe most Christian denominations, even those not explicitly Reformed / Calvinist or otherwise heavy on the predestination side, ascribe the work of the Holy Spirit to these types of questions. As Jesus said, "What is impossible with man is possible with God."
Faith is a gift, and it's not a certainty that everyone will have it. It's very difficult. If you cannot be convinced in your reason, then you won't be converted, and trying to 'nice force' anyone into it won't work in the long run.
Reason alone won't get you there, but if a little voice in the back of your head keeps piping up "this is all nonsense" then trying to pretend you believe what you don't is not enough. Better a sincere atheist trying to do good by his lights than an unhappy believer who doubts everything he tries to pretend he holds, because that kind of doubt then corrodes everything and eventually you might end up doubting even doing good.
I agree with the sentiment, but not the ultimate conclusion. I think it is incredibly important for a person who wants to do good to doubt himself !Too many terrible acts in history have been perpetrated by people who convinced themselves that they were doing good beyound any shadow of a doubt, that their path is the only proper path, and that some unfortunate sacrifices must be made in the name of this Greater Good.
I think you're using a spurious definition of "supernatural". As Richard Carrier explains, the distinction between natural and supernatural isn't about what's observable, it's about whether a phenomenon is reducible to non-mental entities.
https://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2007/01/defining-supernatural.html
Similarly, I think that you have an uncharitable notion of "faith". A lack of *sight* is not the same thing as a complete lack of evidence.
> As Richard Carrier explains, the distinction between natural and supernatural isn't about what's observable, it's about whether a phenomenon is reducible to non-mental entities.
Sure, but this is not a definition that I find useful. When someone tells me that e.g. angels exist, I'm not interested in the abstract philosophical grounding of angelic entities; rather, my immediate question is, "how can I verify that these things exist at all ?" This question is not just applicable to angels, of course; for example, few people seriously believed in neutrinos until they were detected; and few people believe in quantum loop gravity today for the same reason.
> lack of *sight* is not the same thing as a complete lack of evidence.
Agreed; I was talking about evidence in general, not literal visual sight. I think it's reasonable to assume that the Biblical usage of "sight" in this case is metaphorical.
That's a narrower version of science than the real world version. Science is based on explanatory power as well as direct evidence.
Yes, this is what I tried to convey when I mentioned neutrinos -- which cannot be detected directly by e.g. ordinary human vision, and in fact require sophisticated detectors to be built just so we can infer the neutrinos' existence.
> this is not a definition that I find useful. [...] my immediate question is, "how can I verify that these things exist at all ?"
I agree that the question of whether a thing exists is almost always more important than whether the thing is reducible to non-mental entities. Regardless, in ordinary language, the word "supernatural" is relevant to the latter question, not the former.
> I think it's reasonable to assume that the Biblical usage of "sight" in this case is metaphorical.
The most direct counterpoint is 1 Peter 3:15: "[..] Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. [...]".
Additionally, there's important historical context to consider. Christianity's central claim--Jesus's resurrection--is based on eyewitness testimony. Consequently, it makes perfect sense for Biblical authors to distinguish between a lack of firsthand experience and a general lack of evidence.
what is the one strongest evidence you have for Christianity?
Hi bugmaster, thanks for your reply. I understand where you are coming from and think you are asking good questions. I worry that you will find my answers unsatisfying because there is a gulf between our experiences and worldview that an internet reply can't hope to fill. I will try to reframe your questions and respond to them. Let me know if my reframing seems off.
1. Does my Christian belief involve belief in the supernatural?
Short answer: yes.
More accurate but probably confusing answer: in becoming Christian, I entered into a worldview that predates the modern natural/supernatural dichotomy. This is one of the hardest things to communicate about my journey to becoming Christian. My epistemology has changed and my categories of reality have changed with them. I believe in God, angels, demons, all manner of things that my prior self would have called supernatural. My worldview has become more phenomenological now and I see myself as participating in a hierarchy of being that encompasses all things. From my current worldview, there is no line in that hierarchy that delineates the natural from the supernatural. We humans are made in God's image and can participate in the divine by following Christ. At the same time, we are made of dust.
2. How do I believe propositions that cannot be reasoned about with rationalism? As a rationalist, how did I "convince" myself?
Short answer: non propositional ways of knowing
More accurate but probably confusing answer: Another commenter mentioned Chesterton here. He and many others have tried to give rational accounts of the faith better than I ever could, but I don't believe their accounts would necessarily satisfy what you are looking for. I was never personally persuaded by rational/logical arguments for Christianity before I converted. I'm a Catholic, and a fairly new one, so do not take my words below as a representation of the Church's teachings, but this is how I believe.
Christianity is a way seeing and being in the world, not a set of propositions (not sure if Protestents would agree on that point). Propositional knowledge is important and has greatly improved our standard of living, so we rightly venerate it. However, it is not the only type of knowledge.
Consider riding a bicycle. I could give lengthy explanations on what your body will need to do to stay balanced and propel yourself forward. I could give precise angles on how far to lean when you turn. You could spend years studying everything there is to know about riding a bike. But the person who gets on the bike and starts pedaling will know how to ride a bike better than you almost immediately. This form of knowing is procedural, not propositional. There are many things we learn in life (including things as foundational as how we think) that can only be learned through our embodied participation in reality. Becoming Christian is one of those things. It happens through participation, not sets of propositions.
There are other forms of knowledge out there (see John Vervaeke's 4 P's of Knowledge for more insight) that Christianity has broadly categorized as revelation. As a rationalist, I was predisposed to undervaluing these other types of knowing until I went deeper, and deeper, following the breadcrumbs until I got to a level of doubt about the world rivaling Descartes. The fact of the matter is that rationality is built on a set of recent modern presuppositions that, when seriously questioned (with the rigor of a good rationalist) leaves you alone in an abyss of doubt. Christianity and its non propositional ways of knowing brought me back to reality. Until I prayed, went to Mass, participated in the sacraments, loved my neighbor, etc, I was bound by the limits of rationality.
Rationality and propositional knowledge are still indispensable tools that I use to navigate the world. But I see them now in the context of a much bigger, more beautiful reality that has Christ (the Logos) at its center.
That is very informative, thanks ! That said, as per your bicycle analogy, I fear that don't think I have the capacity to truly understand what you are talking about. For example, when think about a rock, I do not follow some logical chain of reasoning that concludes, from first principles, that the rock must be there. Instead, I see the rock, touch it, taste it (if the fancy strikes me), and the conclusion "the rock exists" automatically forms in my mind. If you told me that the rock is actually a turtle, I could not bring myself to believe it until the rock exhibited some signs of turtle-dom (such as perhaps poking out a head and a tail).
Granted, there are many things I cannot directly observe, such as electrons or the country of China; but my mental process is largely the same. Once my senses have gathered enough evidence, be it direct or indirect, the conclusion forms in my mind; and only additional evidence can dislodge it. This isn't something I've diligently trained myself to do (although training does help to streamline this process), it's just how my mind has always worked.
I have tried participating in many religious rituals (not just Christian ones), but they've always left me feeling like a LARPer. As I'd said above, I don't understand how someone could sincerely pray to an entity one does not believe to exist -- and what use are insincere prayers ?
That said though, I'm no Rationalist either, nor a philosopher; for example, I don't believe that some ultimate philosophical grounding of all thought is necessary to make useful conclusions about, well, anything. I am perfectly content with admitting that my mind is flawed and total certainty is unachievable about any proposition, even the ones as seemingly rock-solid as "2+2=4". Perhaps this is another thing that separates me from the Christians -- I'm not sure.
At least for me, I only truly believed in Christianity after really seriously trying to live like Christianity was real. I had some faith, but it was mostly just me going out on a limb and seeing if it would work. I had a very reconstructionist view before and didn't really agree with Christian ethics. However, as I started trying to turn the other cheek as much as I could and started deeply reading the Bible, belief came and ethics came. I guess you could say God just altered my priors. I do rationally believe in Christianity too, just resulting from evidence for scripture and miracles, but it is secondary to my otherwise unexplainable belief.
That is fair, but as I'd said in another comment, I am unable to bring myself to commit a large amount of time and effort to the pursuit of a practice I currently believe to be false -- despite the possibility that, once I have done so, it may reveal itself to be true. Perhaps I would be more willing to commit if Christianity were the only such practice in existence, but it's not; I hear the same from Muslims, Buddhists, and even Wiccans. I find this fact difficult to reconcile with Christianity being the one true faith.
If you don't mind me asking; what does believing in angels and demons mean to you? Do you believe that these things influence the physical world? Do they deliver knowledge of the material world? Are they analogous to alignment with certain values or desires or affinities?
The following are my views that are hopefully aligned with the Church.
> What does believing in angels and demons mean?
I believe in a heavenly hierarchy that includes beings that exist between us and God. Some of these beings are interested in humanity, others are not. These are real entities, not just psychological constructs. They would exist even if we did not.
> Do you believe that these things influence the physical world?
They do not have physical bodies but can influence the world through us via dreams, revelation, temptation, etc. I am unsure about their power to physically manipulate reality and would need to look into that.
> Do they deliver knowledge of the material world?
I think we can be compelled toward certain knowledge by them, but as far as I know they do not dole out facts of the universe.
> Are they analogous to alignment with certain values or desires or affinities?
I think this is a fine way to understand angels/demons for nonreligious people. I would add that they can have desires/affinities that may be completely alien to human desires/affinities.
Christianity does indeed imply faith in the supernatural, and yet plenty of people do come into it from at least somewhat rational routes. Christianity (unlike many other religions) does claim to be anchored in a true, historical fact: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And many sceptics who've investigated this have found the evidence surprisingly compelling that this did indeed happen. This implies that Jesus is at the very least worth listening to to see what he said about himself. Christians share many principles with rationalists, including the desire to believe only what is true (e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:13-20); we just believe that that includes a creator God.
The rock example - does this rock exist? - is still in the realm of propositional knowledge and can be addressed with evidence. An example of a rock involving procedural knowledge would be the ability to turn a stone slab into a sculpture. That is not knowledge that can be obtained from disembodied evidence or observation. It is knowledge that you obtain through practicing the art of sculpture.
Point taken that participation in religious practices has not yielded any fruit for you. I'm curious, do you have any other spiritual or contemplative practices that you follow? Before I became a Christian, I followed a practice of meditation and has some mystical experiences that revealed to me the existence of a reality deeper than what I knew. Without those experiences I think it would have been more difficult for me to take the first step into my current faith.
> That is not knowledge that can be obtained from disembodied evidence or observation.
That's not entirely true, as people who become sculptors usually start with observation (of a teacher at work) and learning (from textbooks or YouTube videos, I suppose). And it seems that virtually anyone can learn the basics of sculpture merely by reading books and watching tutorials -- though of course not everyone could become a great sculptor, or even a mediocre one. Nonetheless, the process of becoming at least a novice sculptor is readily observable, repeatable, and (arguably) quite well studied.
> do you have any other spiritual or contemplative practices that you follow ?
I've tried meditation but could never make it work. I've tried hypnosis too, with similar results (or rather lack thereof). I've never taken hard drugs (nor am I planning on doing so, sorry), but I've been drunk -- and the experience can hardly be described as "mystical".
Presumably, if God does exist, then he knows exactly what kind of an experience would bring me to faith -- but chooses not to grant me one. It seems that God would prefer me to remain an atheist; and, being a humble atheist, who am I to challenge the will of God ?
No contention from me on the point of propositional knowledge supporting practices. Just as you would want to give someone advice before they ride a bike for the first time, you would want them to learn information about sculpting before (and after) getting started to improve their skill development. My point is simply that to know the skill of sculpting, at some point you need to hold tools and strike the rock repeatedly. The patterns of movement you learn will be unique to you and are physically retained in the body in ways different from propositional knowledge. Procedural memories are not stored in the brain in the same way as declarative memories. I don't think you necessarily disagree with me here (you seem to get my point that knowing Christianity requires embodied participation). I just wanted to spell this out in case my earlier post was unclear.
In Buddhism there are supposedly 84,000 doors to enlightenment. I don't know what the equivalent number is in Christianity, but hopefully I have at least given you the shape of the door I went though. On God's plan for you, me, or any of us, I won't speculate. You seem like a swell person and I wish you the best bugmaster.
But this again is somewhat of a Catch-22. If I understand you correctly, I must invest a great deal of time and effort into a spiritual practice in order to obtain the revelation/enlightenment/etc. that validates the practice -- but why would I commit to such a large investment into something I currently believe to be no more real than e.g. D&D spellcasting ?
"Christianity implies faith in the supernatural ("the evidence of things not seen"), and is thus explicitly and deliberately irrational."
This statement would only be correct if the final words were changed to "not materialist" rather than "irrational."
Fair enough, I suppose; it all depends on whether you think that pre-committing to a belief in total absence of any supporting evidence (be it material or not) is rational. I think an argument could be made that sometimes it is, and theistic faith is one of those cases.
as a rationalist, do you think the resurrection literally happened? like probabilistically
Hi Connor, I had a very hard time addressing this question, and I feel a mix of shame and doubt in what I have written. I am only speaking for myself in this reply.
If we went back in time and put a camera outside of Jesus' tomb, would we see the same body enter the tomb dead and, three days later, exit the tomb alive?
Prob: < 30%
Did something sacred happen that inspired his followers to come out of hiding and believe with all their heart that Jesus returned from the dead?
Prob: > 90%
These responses feel wrong because I do not think about Christ in this way. I understand why from the outside these numbers would seem significant, but to me they do not describe anything about my religious faith. It is the meaning of the resurrection that matters, not the particilars. See my reply to bugmaster for a longer explanation.
That's really interesting to me. I don't think I could be a Christian unless I was convinced the resurrection actually happened. I've never heard of this "something sacred happened but probably not a literal resurrection" is this something you just came up with or can i read about this somewhere else? Can you get any more specific with what happened? Are you more on the side of Christianity being useful fiction, or a metaphor? Hypothetically, would you still be a Christian if it could be proven the resurrection is complete myth?
Hi Connor, I did not come to Christianity by being convinced of a set of propositions. When I read the biblical stories or participate in my church, I am not weighing evidence against my priors to see how true different claims are. Instead, I understand that I am participating in a different type of knowledge that cannot be reduced to propositional claims. I do not view this knowledge as irrational, but rather as something beyond what rationalism can contain or even speak to.
I think you would be surprised to know just how many people in the church, both attendees and clergy, have doubts about certain claims. If you are educated in our modern, secular world, then doubt, even serious doubt, is inevitable. Saints have written about periods of doubt, as have Chesterton (mentioned elsewhere is in this thread) and other thinkers, even popes. The waning and waxing of belief are seen as a part of spiritual growth in the Catholic Church.
I have not taken the time to think through all the possibilities, but as I said I am fairly convinced that something profound happened after the crucifixion Jesus. If this were somehow proven false, it would shake my faith and that of billions of other Christians. The Church would need to adapt and I cannot imagine what the global repercussions would be. Personally, I would probably abstain from saying certain parts of the Nicene Creed until everything was figured out. After some years, I think I could even see myself moving to a different denomomination that always had a metaphorical interpretation of Jesus. I would not stop praying but my prayers would change.
For now, the possibility that Jesus rose from the dead, and what that means for the world, is enough to sustain my faith.
So you aren't a Christian for rational reasons, but if it was rationally proven some of your beliefs are false, it would severely effected your faith, interesting. So theoretically, you could be rationally convinced out of Christianity, it would just need someone to have you very sure the resurrection didn't occur. I appreciate your honesty, but this sounds somewhat incoherent to me.
It actually does say in the Bible that Jesus literally resurrecting from the dead is a matter of first importance, and that if it didn't happen then Christians are to be pitied more than anyone. We are dead in our sins and living a lie. See chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2015&versi
One of the best explanations of resurrection evidence I have heard is that, despite all the supposed miracles that he performed during his life and which his followers apparently witnessed, while Jesus was being arrested and crucified, they were still all basically too cowardly to stand by him, and mostly denied knowing him and slunk away into the night.
After his supposed resurrection, all these cowardly followers suddenly began running around the country preaching about him, knowing that as a result, they were likely to undergo a gruesome martyrdom (and most of them did). Seemingly they were suddenly no longer afraid of death. The question being why...
Much appreciated! Few people are willing to say what their estimates of the odds of their views are.
To reciprocate, as per my own atheism/agnosticism:
For the agnostic part, allowing _some_ sort of intelligent creator, but with only the constraint of being at least as intelligent as human, and powerful enough to be responsible for the cosmos - maybe 10% probable? The best evidence for it is the 'fine-tuning' argument (which doesn't exclude e.g. a deity which really really likes benzene rings) but the constants may just be 'brute facts' or there may be a multiverse-plus-anthropic-principle explanation. And an intelligent creator is a more complex explanation than brute facts of two dozen constants.
For the atheist part - a deity with something like omnipotence plus anything like an interest in humans and almost any strong preference about humans seems excluded very strongly by obvious evidence - a benevolent deity by the problem of pain and the problem of evil (which I'd just call counterexamples), a deity like Wotan by the absence of glaringly obvious calls by the deity for martial valor. Call it < 0.1% or so?
( Also - for there to be any reason to _care_ whether a deity exists and has preferences, there has to be some sort of consequence for aiding/thwarting its preferences, traditionally an afterlife, and the evidence that we are perishable neural nets, WYSIWYG, with no persistence after our last neural firing looks like >99% )
One problem with the "agnostic" position and the "fine-tuning" argument, as you describe it, is that at best it gets you to a form of deism: a deity who created the Universe then metaphorically "walked away". So the only thing we can infer about it is that it created the Universe, period. We can't know what it wants us to do, or whether it performs miracles, or even whether it is a person at all. At this point, it starts looking indistinguishable from a fundamental property of nature rather than an object of worship; as you said, there's no reason to "_care_ whether [the] deity exists and has preferences".
Many Thanks!
>So the only thing we can infer about it is that it created the Universe, period. We can't know what it wants us to do
Yup - or whether it is interested in life at all. We would have a _very_ weak idea of its preferences from its choice of the fundamental constants. But, as I wrote, this
>doesn't exclude e.g. a deity which really really likes benzene rings
(and might well have _no_ other interests in the universe)
I've never heard this perspective from a Christian before ! Most of the Christians I've talked to would say that the physical Resurrection is what made Jesus special (ok, they wouldn't put it those exact words, but that's my understanding). According to them, Jesus wasn't just a really smart guy or a charismatic leader (there are plenty of those around); rather, he was a being both human and divine, whose sacrifice fulfilled the old laws while at the same time demonstrating mastery over death. Some Christians would say that instead of being physically resurrected on Earth, Jesus bodily ascended directly to Heaven; still, they would all agree that his tomb was empty at the end -- and I mean physically empty, not metaphorically, meaning that your camera would indeed show an empty tomb.
Is this not what you believe ? If so, then what is it -- if anything -- that makes Jesus special in your view ?
I understand (somewhat) your other point: that you came to your belief in Christianity via spiritual awakening and repeated practice, not logical arguments or physical evidence. But I am not sure what it means to be a Christian at all without believing in the Resurrection, as you seemingly do not. Of course, no one died and made me Space Pope, I cannot arbitrate your personal beliefs -- I'm just curious.
To be clear, I do believe in the resurrection, and I see it as absolutely central to Christian faith. This is partly why I felt weird about posting the percentages for those different claims. I went through some thought expercises with historical evidence and personal experience, weighed them against my priors, and came up with those numbers. I think the reason 30% seems low is because my priors for a man resurrecting from the dead, and for the event to be recorded accurately 2000 years ago, are extremely low. Starting from there, consider how confident I would need to be to bring the probability up to 30%.
Stepping back into a rationalist framework and assigning cold, impersonal numbers to my beliefs may have been a mistake on my part. I find it difficult to discuss Christianity in rational terms and this has been a messy attempt. It is not how I normally process my faith.
Fair enough, I really appreciate the explanation !
Similar situation with me. I might review this book for the 2026 ACX Review.
Most of what I've heard about the intersection of Christianity and Effective Altruism has been related to this book. What else have you about it?
As for resources to understand the "rational Christian" viewpoint: I suppose that depends on which parts of Christianity you consider to be irrational. For example:
- If you're skeptical about the historicity of the New Testament, then check out Lydia McGrew's work. (She's a published epistemologist.)
https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@LydiaMcGrewChannel/videos
- If you're concerned that hell is unjust, then check out this series of essays that defends annihilationism.
https://parresiazomai.blogspot.com/2017/02/what-is-second-death-part-1-symbols-and.html
- If you're skeptical of the Genesis creation narrative, then check out Hugh Ross's old-Earth creationist framework. (I'm less confident about this. I haven't looked at it in a while.)
This is the associated organization Christians for Impact https://www.christiansforimpact.org/ and their substack is Christ and Counterfactuals https://christandcounterfactuals.substack.com/. There is a community Effective Altruism for Christians that has a Facebook group and hosts discussions about this topic https://www.eaforchristians.org/
I read the annihilationism posts. Changed my mind about biblical interpretations.
I'm happy to hear that! Thank you for sharing.
>Is that all it is, or is there something more in terms of the underlying ontology they actually hold?
The gist of Christianity is:
God created everything that exists, and when He created humans, He created them in His image and likeness, and tasked them with filling the earth and taking care of it. Mankind ended up disobeying God, and profaning Him by taking His image that they were made in and warping it to be unlike God.
As a result of this sin, mankind was separated spiritually from God, because God is holy and sin can't be near Him, and ever since then mankind has had to die, because life is the cost of sin. And as punishment for the the first sin, God cursed the ground and childbirth and the devil.
Another consequence of mankind's sin is that it impacted and continues to impact the natural and spiritual worlds, and people that had nothing to do with it. Because of man's evil actions, the world is in the state it is in today, and people are filled with hopelessness, despair, depression, ect., and we continue to profane the image of God by not being like Him.
But because God has never ceased loving mankind, and it is not His desire for any of us to perish eternally, but to be restored to Him, He sent His son Jesus. Jesus was not born from Adam's lineage and under the corruption of his sin, and He lived a sinless life. He loved us and lived as a human, so that He could die and offer sinless Human blood to take the place of anyone who believes in Him, and has faith that His offering is sufficient to pardon their own sins.
After Jesus did this, he resurrected from the dead, proving His authority as God, and also claiming victory over sin and death, giving life freely to mankind, to anyone who will accept it.
The people who believe this and accept it, and who, out of love for Jesus and their fellow man, live obediently to God, and share this news with others, in the hopes that others who are suffering and see their need will believe and accept Jesus as well, were labeled as "Christians" by others long ago. There are many other kinds of people who label themselves as Christian these days, but many of them have nothing to do with Christ or His Gospel. But this is what "Christianity" in its original sense is about, and there are still people who Love and follow Jesus in this way. Most "Christians" you'll encounter probably won't, and so they won't really have any authority to say anything about it.
EDIT: God didn't just want to save us from death, but mainly to restore us in connection with Him, so that we can have a full life and an intimate relationship with Him. That's the kind of love He has for us, and He created the institution of marriage as a representation of the relationship between Jesus and those who follow Him.
I am a former New Atheist, now fairly serious Catholic.
I believe rationalism is missing a coherant *meta ethics* that religion provides. Utilitarianism is categorically unstable both in theory and in practice. Honestly I think Thomism is pretty compatible with rationalism, because one of its core claims is that morality is discoverable by reason rather than by divine revelation.
The hard problem of consciousness is still of huge interest to rationalism and even the most hardcore atheists struggle to answer it coherantly. Chalmers for example concluded that physicalism can't account for subjective experience. Christians call consciousness "the soul". I think Christianity has the most satisfying answers to the big questions of phenomenology.
Most people who convert to christianity these days do it because they feel a sense of a lack of meaning in their lives which only religion can fill. Secular philosophy tries and fails to provide this, it's either circular or it's christianity in a trenchcoat.
----
If you want resources:
Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is good reading for the morality/meta-ethics part, it's a more modern take on Thomism (which is in turn a modern take on aristotle).
Edith Stein (Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, not to be confused with Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, and Teresa of Calcutta) is a good author for phenomenology and consciousness metaphysics. I've heard Saint John Paul II also wrote some good stuff on that but I've never read it.
You're probably already familiar with GK Chesterton (of Chesterton's Fence fame). He wrote a book called Orthodoxy. I would say this is the best entry point here, it's basically a manifesto of a rationalist christian. It's basically a book about Chesterton trying to reason his way into the most correct philosophy from first principles and accidentally reverse engineering Christianity.
I'm Catholic so I'll mention Bishop Robert Barron's Catholicism series, there's a book and a TV miniseries (which is annoyingly hard to find on youtube) which basically covers the book. It's less apologetics but more just an introduction to the intellectual traditions and a sort of defense of the Catholic faith specifically. Barron was very involved with Dawkins and the others back in the day and wrote and spoke a lot against the New Atheists -- these days as a cautionary tale, since we all know what happened to it.
Will Durant's Story of Civilizations is really really long but a huge amount of it is about the history of religion and the church. I think many people (myself included) basically got an exaggerated cartoon version of church history as kids and never really understood the context behind a lot of stuff. A lot of the "Religion is bad" stuff is basically just bad history IMO. Even if I was an atheist this would convince me that religion is a net good! Age of Faith, the Renaissance, Caesar and Christ, The Reformation are good ones for specific time periods. Also Age of Voltaire's epilogue literally converted me into a catholic so there's that (even though durant wrote it as a defense of atheism against a steelman of catholicism!)
You said "I think Christianity has the most satisfying answers to the big questions of phenomenology" - did you do a comparative evaluation to similar levels of understanding of all the major religions before coming to that conclusion? For example, I think the Advaita Vedanta and the Lurianic Kabbalah both have interesting takes on the notion. Though, the more I read about the different traditions, the more "many paths to one truth" makes sense.
no, not really. I'm comparing christianity rather to secular phenomenological theories which I felt all sucked rather equally
I agree that secular responses to the hard problem are necessarily weak sauce, but to then jump straight to Christianity has always struck me as pretty curious. Or incurious, maybe?
Well, I believe in Christianity for other good reasons too, some incidental, some deeply personal. The Hindus or Scientologists or Zoroastrians could have a great solution for the hard problem and I wouldn't really care too much because I think Jesus is the only begotten son of God who came down from heaven to die for all people that our sins may be forgiven, and that's an anchor to a lot of other core beliefs that I hold similarly strongly to catholic phenomenology
With respect, this sounds like an explanation for why believing in religion is pleasant, but not why it is correct. (Unless you only meant to provide an explanation for the psychological appeal, and I misunderstood you).
I don't know if many atheists outside of Reddit Atheism caricatures believe that religion as a whole throughout history is simply bad, though it's hard to evaluate "net good" without a coherent counterfactual to compare against. Religion is clearly instrumentally useful.
I'm curious, what environment were you raised in?
>With respect, this sounds like an explanation for why believing in religion is pleasant, but not why it is correct.
As a hedonic escalator, shouldn't you be trying to maximize what is pleasant, regardless of correctness?
Touché! But you forgot to account for instrumental convergence. Believing incorrect things, even pleasant ones, risks trapping me in a local maxima that compromises my ability to pursue even greater pleasures in the future.
For example, if I converted to Catholicism now, I might refuse to participate in the neuroadaptive sexbot orgies on the lunar libertarian micronation ten years from now on religious grounds. This would be a net loss as neuroadaptive sexbot orgies are much more physically, emotionally, and spiritually fulfilling than going to church.
I'm not up to date on my hedonism scripture, but I would imagine that as long as pleasure is your main goal, you'd probably have no issue with jumping from one thing to another. You also probably wouldn't have any reason to have anything to do with Catholicism, either.
Anyway, church isn't really the place for people who don't already have an intimate relationship with God, which surpasses anything one could ever have with people or robots. If you ever come to feel the weight of whatever sins you may be wrapped up in, and see the emptiness of everything in the world apart from Jesus, He will be there ready to relieve you of your burdens and transform your heart.
The idea would be that genuine belief in Catholicism would be required to achieve its claimed benefits, but genuine belief would also change my goals, making converting to Catholicism a poor choice for a hedonist even if it is more pleasant in the short term.
The world doesn't seem very empty to me. It is quite wonderful, I like it very much.
I was raised catholic. I became an edgy atheist at 14 like every other nerdy west coast guy in the 2000s and then became a catholic again at 28. I actually did think religion was net bad for a time, and it was specifically because I only ever listened to edgy atheists cristopher hitchens and dawkins talk about religion and never actually talked to anybody who knew what they were talking about.
I was responding to the original poster who said religion is a problematic institution and only believed in by irrational people.
Do you think you still would've ended up catholic if you were raised in a different religion, or none at all?
Normally I would disclaim that question with, "I know this doesn't make much literal sense, since there is no 'you' that exists separate from your upbringing..." but you probably believe your identity is rooted in a soul separate from your upbringing, so the question should be perfectly sensible to you. Anyways, please answer it.
I was raised to atheist parents in an almost exclusively atheist environment, and met a serious christian for the first time in college. Because of this, a lot of religious discussion online is alien to me. I don't doubt your report of feeling a lack of meaning only religion can fill, but I struggle to interpret this feeling as anything other than a product of rearing. People returning to what is psychologically comfortable from childhood, not some universal drive, certainly not one specific to catholicism. Do you dispute this?
I think I'm likely to have become some sort of religious. I never had a really true religious experience as a kid and just followed it because my parents made me go to church (and I mostly hated it, and barely believed any of it except in a token amount), and I only started feeling a religion-shaped hole in my heart later in life after accomplishing most everything I cared about accomplishing in life (wealth, security, sex, entertainment, status) and still feeling vaguely unfulfilled in a way that could only be filled by a higher purpose.
As for whether I'd become catholic, well, the Catholic response would be "I know that if I truly felt a longing for God, the Holy Spirit would guide me to the One True Faith some way or another." But that's probably not what you're asking. I think it's very likely I would have ended up with soem flavor of Christianity, knowing my personality (and assuming a lot of that personality is inherant to my genetics -- if we're going "what if your genetics were different" I think that's a little too much of a stretch for the hypothetical).
And if I ended up in christianity I have a good hunch I would gravitate towards catholicism; I'm naturally very curious about sects and branches and history and catholicism just objectively has a lot of things going for it that the others don't (stability, apostolic succession, a central authority to resolve disputes, a standard of objective beauty that surpasses all the others, because yes I believe in objective beauty).
Thanks for sharing.
I'm not surprised to hear that you weren't big on religion as a kid, my claim is more that early childhood enculturation surely has a large effect on what you gravitate towards as an adult. You're right that genetics likely plays a bigger role than I accounted for.
What do you do when your religion conflicts with secular knowledge and/or values? Or does this never come up?
It’s not ontology, it’s epistemology. Scientific epistemology is great if you want to build computers or cancer drugs; but it’s not great for living a human life. First, because objectivity (correctly) requires the evacuation of meaning; but life requires meaning. Second, science only understands what it can control; so if anything more powerful than humanity exists, science is (correctly) blind to it. Imagine being an ant and trying to use the scientific method. Ant skeptics would rightly refuse to acknowledge the existence of, for instance, airplanes, on correct, objective scientific principles, for the same reason human scientists don’t acknowledge Zeus, or angels. They don’t come when you call, you can’t put them in a museum.
My read is that people are finally becoming skeptical. There are political reasons I won’t mention, but if you were paying attention in 2020-2024, you saw them. I’d say, if you’re rejecting religion in favor of science, you are not yet skeptical enough. There are still epistemic constructs you have not thrown into the fire.
Wouldn't your ant theory predict that human science would maintain the geocentric theory forever, or even if it did understand heliocentrism would never find black holes because they can't be easily observed?
I should have accounted for dead things in my description of science's limits. Science is fantastic for studying dead things, even huge ones. For a more thorough response, look at what I wrote to Nick Hounsome, elsewhere in this thread.
Science also works pretty well for living things that cannot be perceived by bare senses, e.g. bacteria and protists.
> Scientific epistemology is great if you want to build computers or cancer drugs...
I would argue that the vast majority of human moral advancements throughout the ages were powered by technological advances (which are in turn powered by scientific advances). For example, slavery ended in most places on Earth not because of some moral awakening (or not merely nor primarily because of it), but because industrialization made it unprofitable.
> Ant skeptics would rightly refuse to acknowledge the existence of, for instance, airplanes, on correct, objective scientific principles...
This is untrue, as airplanes are clearly visible in the sky, and presumably ants can see them (though I could be wrong as don't really know how ant vision works). In fact, there are likely ant infestations in at least some airplane hangars. And in fact we humans have been able to understand much larger systems, such as black holes and the curvature of space-time, the geological history of the Earth, the existence of elementary "particles", the vision system of ants, etc., by working with much less.
>In fact, there are likely ant infestations in at least some airplane hangars.
Then again, you're living in a reality/universe/planet/body that was intricately designed by God, one which He provided with His own written words, and in which He even came to as a human, and presumably you would deny His existence as stated in His word, and doubtless you could use all kinds of thoughtful rational arguments to try and support the position.
That's a big presumption, though, you might not care or give any thought to any of it, but my point still stands.
> That's a big presumption, though, you might not care or give any thought to any of it, but my point still stands.
Yes, I do agree that the Christian worldview (as well as most other theistic worldviews) is fully compatible with all available evidence. In fact, it is arguably *maximally* compatible with any possible evidence, since the tri-omni God can (and, in some Christian theologies, does) produce any observable effect.
In that case, it's my hope for you that if you ever develop an awareness of any evil inside of you to the point where it's debilitating and you wish someone could do something about it, that you would think about this and that Jesus wants to take that burden from you and know and love you closely, and that you would trust Him to do so.
In the meantime, speaking of ants, since you are a self-proclaimed master of bugs, why the heck are there ants coming through my second-floor balcony door when there's a perfectly good apartment below me?
I don't think that slavery was abolished primarily because of technological advances. Christopher Brown makes a good case that, if not for a few quirks of history, slavery could have persisted until the information age.
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/christopher-brown-slavery-abolition/
I don't think that history has "quirks" to such an extent. The abolition of slavery appears to follow technological advances pretty closely, in time as well as space, and I don't think that Christian morality can adequately explain this. Perhaps more importantly, the mechanisms of slavery are incompatible with high technology: slaves must be kept ignorant (and ideally illiterate) lest they rebel, but modern technological jobs require the worker to be at least somewhat knowledgeable (and definitely literate).
At the same time, increasing quality of life (due to orders of magnitude increases in production efficiency) is what enables moral developments to occur in the first place. A person working 18-hour days just to survive has no time for philosophy; the modern 9-to-5 office worker does. Granted, a few fortunate people would always find the time (dating all the way back to Ancient Sumer), but in order for a moral philosophy to take hold, it must be embraced by more than a handful of scholars.
"Universal law is for lackeys, context is for kings" would stand as a moral philosophy that doesn't require most people to make time to think about philosophy, merely obey the Universal Law.
I think that most of your points are true for the kinds of slavery that are associated with ancient Rome and the American south, but not other forms of slavery. That episode of the podcast addresses your points.
>For example, slavery ended in most places on Earth not because of some moral awakening (or not merely nor primarily because of it), but because industrialization made it unprofitable.
Slave prices tell a different story.
As does the timing. The critical events, the Anglo-American abolition of the slave trade and the British Empire's abolition of slavery were in 1808 and 1833, respectively. Industrialization was beginning to happen in that period, but it had not upended the more traditional elements of the economy or made much of anything unprofitable, and that early industrialization still depended on raw material inputs which were frequently and profitably produced by slaves.
The United States didn't fully abolish slavery until 1865, by which point industrialization had become a more significant factor, but the Civil War happened because it had been increasingly clear for a generation that slavery was going away and 1861 was the last chance for the doomed holdouts. Once the slave trade was reduced to a handful of smugglers and pirates, once the dominant global Empire *and* its main geopolitical rival were solidly on Team Abolition, the writing was on the wall.
Yeah, ants can't see flying airplanes at all, they have compound eyes that don't focus and they mostly navigate by smell.
I admit that science can understand a lot about very large dead things. And maybe you can come up with a story where a small airplane was abandoned in a field and an ant colony grew up around it and the ants examined every piece of it and the ant scientists could convince their skeptics that yes, airplanes exist.
I mentioned Zeus. Will you bite that bullet? Implicit in your stance seems to be the claim that no living entity exists that can't be captured and dissected by scientists. You really think that, if Zeus existed, scientists would have him properly taxonomized and catalogued and placed in the context of biological evolution on Earth? And that no entity whatsoever could ever exist that scientists couldn't capture and do whatever experiments on that they wanted to?
I think only a superstitious belief in the godlike powers of scientists could lead somebody to think that science can objectively establish the existence of everything that actually does exist.
I want you to be more skeptical; to give up what I see as superstitions. Then you'd be more likely to see the epistemic value in religion.
I take your moral argument seriously. By gaining rational control over huge areas of the world, we've unlocked incredible wealth and such a high standard of living that many historical kings would happily trade place with a contemporary lower middle class American. Many of our most common moral stances were unthinkable before science transformed the world because anybody living that way died out.
But the same relationship exists between rich and poor contemporaries. A rich, technologically advanced Texan isn't faced with the same difficult moral choices as a poor, primitive tribesman in Papua New Guinea. Is the techie Texan living a better life than the primitive tribesman? No, he just hasn't been tested. If he were in the other's shoes, he might very well do worse things.
So the question can't be whether science enables better morals, when the way it's doing that is just by removing temptation. Instead, the question has to be whether the changes in your soul that happen when you think scientifically, regardless of the historical outcome, are better or worse for living your life. And that's not simple to answer.
> A rich, technologically advanced Texan isn't faced with the same difficult moral choices as a poor, primitive tribesman in Papua New Guinea. ... No, he just hasn't been tested.
This is an interesting point. Granted, Papua New Guinea has the one of the highest crime rates in the world (if not the highest), so, objectively speaking, Papuans are committing more evil deeds than Texans. You say:
> Instead, the question has to be whether the changes in your soul that happen when you think scientifically...
But the average Texan isn't thinking scientifically most of the time; he's just using the available technology. Yes, he probably does find acts like murder, theft, rape, etc. more abhorrent by contrast with the average Papua New Guinean; but this is likely not because he came to such conclusions independently, but rather because his society conditioned him to do so -- just as the Papua New Guinean's society conditioned him to view such acts as valid tools.
I guess the real question is, which of the two (admittedly correlated) effects is more important: reducing the number of evil acts and general suffering in the world, or effecting moral changes in people's minds (or souls, if you prefer) ? Science had been spectacularly successful at the former; it is possible that Christianity had been marginally more successful at the latter, though (as you say) it is difficult to tell.
"Industrialization made it unprofitable." --> well, this just invites the conception of "human moral advancements" into neofeudalism as being powered by technological advances as well.
I think we can say "Civilization has the morality it can afford" without saying that every technological advance need give us Better Morality.
> I think we can say "Civilization has the morality it can afford" without saying that every technological advance need give us Better Morality.
Agreed; obviously not *every* technological advance does. For example, arguably the invention of social networking was a huge step down. In addition, morality is subjective; for example, an ancient Israelite might find our obsession with monogamy puzzling if not borderline blasphemous. Still, I'd argue that most scientific and technological advances have led to increased quality of life for humanity by at least some kind of semi-objective metrics, e.g. increased lifespan, reduced infant mortality, better nutrition, and arguably self-reported life satisfaction (though that one is admittedly tricky).
"science only understands what it can control"???
You mean things like black holes, the CMB, quasars?
Yeah, "what it can control" isn't precise enough. Science needs to do repeatable experiments and it needs arbitrary (or at least predictable) access to the phenomena it studies. That usually boils down to "control", but you're right that, in the case of astronomy, you can take repeatable, predictable observations of stuff without controlling it. I guess I would modify my original statement to "science is only willing to evaluate dead things it has predictable access to or living things it can control".
But you don't seem to have quite grasped my point. Imagine Zeus. He's too powerful to be killed by a human. Bullets bounce off him. He can teleport at will to Olympus, a place no human knows how to get to. His concern with human affairs is capricious; sometimes he shows up and interacts with people, but nobody can predict when. Stretch your brain and imagine how scientists would evaluate something like that if it really did actually exist.
You don't have to stretch far; you already know. Same way they evaluate ghosts and angels and sasquatch. Mere eyewitness testimony isn't enough to convince scientists. They have to have arbitrary (or at least predictable) access to a specimen they can do repeatable experiments on. They quite rightly don't believe in ghosts and angels and Zeus and sasquatch. That's not what science does.
Thinking that everything that exists can be evaluated by science is a kind of superstition, the same as thinking that scientists are the most powerful beings in the universe; akin to gods. All existing entities, no matter how powerful, can be captured and studied by scientists; anything that can't (or isn't already dead) doesn't exist.
You're still wrong. Science doesn't even claim to be able to evaluate everything that exists - e.g. anything outside the observable universe or "before" the big bang or smaller than the Plank length.
Science "claims" to be able to evaluate everything that is worth evaluating or believing in.
This is just the, well known, counter to Pascal's Wager dressed up in scientific clothing - The expected utility of believing in your, unprovable, god, Zeus, is dwarfed by the expected negative utility of disbelieving in (or slighting) an infinte number of other, imagineable but unprovable, gods who may, damn you eternally for believing in a false god, Zeus. Therefore it is irrational to believe in things that cannot be observed.
Your stance depends on the assumption that there can never be anything worth believing in that's not subject to repeatable experiments -- because that's what science is, it has to establish a repeatable, deterministic relationship with its subject before it'll say anything about it. That means that you've decided beforehand not to believe in any living being that's too powerful and capricious for scientists to study.
Scientists (rightly) don't believe in sasquatch, because, although tons of people claim to have seen them, taken pictures of them, taken tons of plaster casts of their footprints, etc, there is no museum or zoo with a sasquatch specimen in it. Nobody has captured one yet, or brought back a dead one.
That whole category of entity -- things that, if they exist, are too powerful and capricious to be subjected to proper scientific study (yet) -- you've decided beforehand not to believe in, whether they're real or not.
I agree that that's a great epistemology for universities, for governments and corporations and other formal organizations. If science isn't able to get ahold of a thing to study it, they won't be able to get ahold of it to extract value from it either. (see https://xkcd.com/808/ ) No corporation is going to be able to sell sasquatch fur coats, so they don't care. Government doesn't have to regulate sasquatch hunting season, people can't even find a single one. So who cares?
I don't think that's the case for individual lives. If you find yourself face to face with a sasquatch someday, you should believe in it, despite the fact that scientists don't.
A lot of people have supernatural experiences and go around telling their friends, "I don't believe in x, but here's what happened to me the day I saw an x" I think that's silly. If you find that something is part of your world, you should deal with it, rather than refusing to believe in it because it won't hold still to be dissected.
> I don't think that's the case for individual lives. If you find yourself face to face with a sasquatch someday, you should believe in it, despite the fact that scientists don't.
On the other hand, you probably shouldn't instantly assume a hairy humanoid in the forest is Sasquatch. You don't want to shoot them and end up with a manslaughter charge...
The science says that you are wrong.
There are orders of magnitude more people known to have suffered hallucinations and optical illusions than people who have seen Sasquatch therefore, if you see Sasquatch, the most rational Bayesian conclusion is that you are hallucinating. And, in case you are going to say that they weren't hallucinations - hallucinations and illusions can often be induced or cured - strong evidence that they are not real.
On the capricious powerful being argument you leave yourself open to anyone who claims to be such a being. I'm one. Send me money now or suffer eternal damnation.
Rationality and EA are separate movements (albeit with a lot of overlap). This is from the EA movement. I don't think it's confusing that a movement dedicated to helping people do charity better should be interested in the largest charitably-inclined demographic in the world, ie religious people.
Practice for dealing peacefully with powerful entities with overlapping goals and alien ethics?
For EA, it's easy: lots of Christians around, and even more cultural Christians. Growing contingent of EAs around. Some overlap is inevitable. Both groups care a lot about different versions of "optimizing for good", to the point that EA has occasionally been painted as a bastard offshoot of Christianity.
For rationality: Western rationality grew up in a Christian context: Descartes, Newton, etc. Christianity has held the belief that it is rational for ages (as opposed to, for example, just saying that God is ineffable and reason won't get you there). It keeps defending it as hard as it can. The height of anti-religious scientism or positivism was probably around 100+ years ago. Our present time is not necessarily troubled by historical standards, but it sure is by post-WW2 standards. (The perception of) troubled times brings calls for voices that sound sure of themselves and are backed by deep tradition. Put it all together...
My view is that Christianity is in fact quite uncomplicatedly extremely compatible with the core ideas of helping the poor and reducing suffering on a universal scale, no?
I think it's just the barber pole of fashion. Once internet atheism went from "stunning and brave" to "fedora cringe", the slightly-more-sophisticated types started agreeing with each other that well actually GK Chesterton and CS Lewis were pretty cool after all.
That's probably true for some people, but I think there are a couple of other things going on here:
1. some of the original new atheist types legitimately have buyer's remorse (e.g., me). Twenty years ago, nerdy internet atheists thought that a society-wide decline in the influence of organized religion would lead to a better, more rational world ruled by FACTS AND LOGIC instead of ancient superstitions. That was naive and stupid, sure, but we didn't know that at the time, and if that prospect was a big factor in drawing someone to Ye Olde New Atheism, they've probably had some second thoughts about it unless they've been in a coma for a decade or so, because clearly that didn't come to pass, and in fact it could be argued was 180° wrong.
2. This is going to sound uncharitable, but I think the burgeoning Islamo-leftist political coalition has had a significant influence on who and what exactly becomes fashionable. Twenty years ago, Hitchens, Dawkins, and Co. could hate on religion in general all they wanted, and that was cool, because 99% of the audience was either an atheist or a Christian, and we already knew where they stood in terms of political affiliation. But now there are a smattering of Muslims in the mix whose political loyalties are not so fixed, so it pays for certain people to pretend they always thought Dawkins and Hitch were cringe.
Could you expand on what you found naive and stupid about a rational world ruled by facts and logic?
I have my own opinions on how this goes awry. One of them is that, on its face, a world where decisions are made based on facts and logic ought to leave most people better off in the long run, but there are obstacles to overcome. And I have thoughts on those obstacles. I imagine you do too, and I mean to compare notes.
I think young me had this conception that, free of the influence of religious traditions or dogma, then we should expect logic, rationality, and well-reasoned arguments would be more likely to sway public opinion, thus leading to better outcomes for all. I think this was naive for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the biggest is that it seems to me that some form of tribalism (not necessarily ethnic, but rather ethno-cultural) has simply taken the place of religious tradition in informing people's values or what have you, not any sort of dispassionate, Socratic, self-examination. And why expect otherwise? Reason: still the slave of the passions, boys and girls.
Okay, so not exactly what my answer was, though maybe it's close. My answer was that time often does not permit perfect facts, and often doesn't even permit perfect logic on imperfect facts, so decisions have to be made on things like hunches and that's why that vision looks naive.
Also, my model of facts and logic probably isn't the same as yours. One big thing here is that I try to factor in things like tribalism, modeling it logically and devising reasoning methods that accommodate it. For example, if you have two policies, P and Q, and each has a tribe backing it, then even if you're on tribe P, say, you have an interest in understanding tribe-Q's case for Q, since that may enable you to present P in more Q-favorable terms, or even adjust P to better fit tribe-Q's motivations. You could of course just resort to first-past-post principles instead: pull up the latest poll showing P at 51%, and tell tribe-Q to pound sand. But "facts and logic" also should be telling you that that's not going to leave you as well off as a more moderate approach.
A common response to this is that most people aren't thinking about making nice with tribe-Q over the long run. Some think they can squish tribe-Q; some believe we're in conflict mode; some believe tribe-Q will just exploit moderation to get more of their way; and so on. But to me, that's just exploring more of the facts and logic around the framework. (I realize that a lot of people do not appear to model logic this way.)
>Okay, so not exactly what my answer was, though maybe it's close. My answer was that time often does not permit perfect facts, and often doesn't even permit perfect logic on imperfect facts, so decisions have to be made on things like hunches and that's why that vision looks naive
Also, facts and logic don't determine values.
"You could of course just resort to first-past-post principles instead: pull up the latest poll showing P at 51%, and tell tribe-Q to pound sand. But "facts and logic" also should be telling you that that's not going to leave you as well off as a more moderate approach."
One thing worth considering here is that even if both tribes would be better off with some kind of compromise, specific individuals can gain status within tribe Q and tribe P by signaling immoderation and an unwillingness to compromise, because it shows commitment/dedication to their respective tribes. You get a sort of principal/agent problem where groups A and B would be better off with some kind of grand bargain to settle a conflict between them, but factions within groups A and B think this would make them worse off, and so they work hard to sabotage any such bargain.
Richard Swinburne would be a solid source for understanding the rational Christian viewpoint, as would Josh Rasmussen and other Christian analytic philosophers. Swinburne's "Is There a God?" is a great starting point for the theistic aspect, and he has a trilogy of books defending Christian theism specifically. Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig is also a good book (and podcast) defending the rationality of Christianity and its underlying ontology.
Edit: as for the connections between EA and Christianity, I will add the following related sources: This is the associated organization Christians for Impact https://www.christiansforimpact.org/ and their substack is Christ and Counterfactuals https://christandcounterfactuals.substack.com/. There is a community Effective Altruism for Christians that has a Facebook group and hosts discussions about this topic https://www.eaforchristians.org/
Probably shouldn't be a smart-arse about this, but when has that ever stopped me?
Ooh, a new book for Christians about charitable giving! What we can learn from EA!
"This book offers practical tools to:
Prioritize needs: Identify where money and energy most impactfully solve pressing, neglected global issues―taking Jesus’s radical command to love your neighbor seriously."
Like shrimp welfare. You thought the hungry, sick and lonely humans were in need? Pffft! That's just "conventional philanthropy, symbolic actions, and feel-good volunteering", the liddle shrimpies are where it's at!
Plus worrying about Skynet becoming real.
What's that? "“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble"? But if we don't get AI aligned *right now*, it will kill us all! Maybe! If it becomes super-intelligence!
So remember:
"Give smarter: Leverage proven, evidence-backed strategies to achieve results hundreds of times greater per dollar than traditional charity."
Donate to the Oxbridge set, they are your natural superiors and know better than you about every whole thing.
EDIT: I'm glad the author/contributors want to make charitable giving more effective, and are trying to build bridges between organisations holding like-minded goals, but (1) the ultimate purpose of Christianity is not to be nice and charitable, it is to be in right relationship with God and (2) I'm not sure the goals *are* like-minded past a surface level of "give mosquito nets to the suffering".
So this is just a comment for fun. Re: right relation with God; Perhaps the Christians can pull a little jiu jitsu on EA and suggest that their desire for helping is a way for them to approach getting into the right relationship with God.
No, because anything that smacks of proselytisation will be an immediate turn-off for the EA types and will only further convince those like our Dawkins-quoting friend that it's all a scam to get power and new cult members.
Any conversion is more likely to be the other way round: you mean I can do good *and* not have to go to church/worry about sin, death and Hell? Yippee!
They don’t have to proselytise though. Being right with God is a very personal thing, isn’t it?
The second anyone on the Christian side mentions something like the Golden Rule or the Sermon on the Mount etc. that will be seen as attempting to sneak in their religion under the cover of charitable work.
Or even putting "Christian" or anything like it on the letterhead and looking like you actually believe.
Everyone knows of the golden rule. It's just about the most foundational moral doctrine that there is. (doctrine is not the right word there. Axiom?)
Ah and yet you might be wrong. You might be the way that EA's find God. I'm not particularly religious. (I went the to UU church when I lived in Nashville, but you have to go to some church when you live in Nashville, and UU is fine. (The music in churches in Nashville was great!)) But the older I get the more unsure I become, and why not God? Is there a better explanation for Joan of Arc?
Hey man, have you instead tried believing in nothing and practicing shrimp welfare (good)? Here, take this pamphlet!
Given that much of Christian charitable giving currently goes to the "overhead" of operating local churches, I would think that one ideal goal of the book might be to convince individual Christians that their giving would be better applied in ways that actually help more people practically.
Shrimp welfare and AI risk are certainly edge cases, and to my mind prime examples of people convinced of their own rationality above all and able to justify anything, but that's not all of EA, obviously. It gets the most attention because it's weird, or different, but the EA framework can apply even if one decides human welfare in in-scope and animal welfare isn't.
I'll be curious to see how much the book resembles "Doing Well and Doing Good" by Os Guinness, but that was 2001, so we have 25 years of more data now.
Or to put all of this in more Christian terms, a book that reminds Christians about being the hands and feet of Christ in the world, or that reminds Christians that the difference between the sheep and the goats is what they did and didn't do, that might be a worthwhile book.
"Given that much of Christian charitable giving currently goes to the "overhead" of operating local churches"
Sweetums, while "we decided our best use of stuff was to buy a castle" exists, glasshouses, stones, you know the drill. Yeah, they eventually ended up selling the place, but given that there has long been criticism of precisely what you said applied to churches, it's not like they didn't have the example before them when they made that decision in the first place:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/12/wytham-abbey-sale-effective-altruism-group-evf
"It was pitched as the place where the world’s leading technologists, scientists and philosophers would gather to figure out how effective altruism and artificial intelligence could be combined to create a global force to eradicate poverty and improve everyone’s lives.
The Effective Ventures Foundation (EVF), which defines effective altruism as “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible”, decided £14.9m of its cash would be best spent buying Wytham Abbey, a 15th-century Grade-I listed manor house near Oxford.
The 27-bedroom house, which has over the years been visited by Queen Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell and Queen Victoria, was transformed into a retreat for believers in the movement, including the now-jailed FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and the Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn, who made a fortune investing early in Skype.
However, just two years after buying the mansion, which acquired the nickname “Effective Altruism Castle”, the EVF has put it up for sale for £15m."
Least my local church is repairing the fabric of the building out of its very own money raised from the congregation and not funny money from FTX!
Personally, I am not angry at Christians for building churches -- just disappointed. Here are a group of people who purport to follow directly in the footsteps of the Divine, who explicitly commands them to abandon all Earthly concerns in favor of caring for their fellow man, and what do they do ? They spend millions on building megachurches and preoccupy themselves with preaching and social control... you know, exactly like every other major organization out there, only with the added spice of an occasional holy war. Looks like the Christians are as human as us heathens after all...
What kind of Christians are you talking about? The "megachurch" prosperity-gospel type ones are known scammers disliked by everybody; if you're going to discuss the topic I think you should engage with the mainstream respectable churches and not the "my pastor has a private jet" type ones.
I think this is a matter of degree, not kind.
If they're filling the pews of a megachurch, clearly not everybody dislikes them!
That's the whole "wheat and chaff" thing.
When was the last holy war?
Arguably less than a month ago, if you believe some highly-placed Christians in the government...
Right.
Hmm, Well first go visit some local churches, but second I see mega churches as moloch in religion. Or at least some of them. The members of the church are good, but there's a church institution that can start to care more about itself. So this is mostly going to be true of older and bigger churches.
I've visited some churches before, mostly in Europe and mostly for architectural reasons. I think some of them are really impressive, and not in a typical touristy way: my favorite church was a small Eastern Orthodox outfit in Sicily, where I could practically feel the weight of history in every pillar and fresco. I also found a really fascinating quasi-Hindu temple right here in California: apparently, these guys syncretized/copyright-infringed some of the Christian mythos, and brought it to the US in the 60s, custom-building a really cool Hindu-style temple in the process. Both of these places of worship stand out in my mind in a way that e.g. Notre Dame does not; they felt much more authentic. Plus, the Hindu(-ish) place had peacocks. Always a plus.
"preoccupy themselves with preaching and social control"
What else do you expect them to do? That's my main bugbear here: if people are approaching Christianity (or any other faith) on the basis that it's all about nicey-nicey and so the only thing Christians should do is go around being nice and charitable, and so long as they have this rule about charity hey can we get you to do it the EA way?, but nothing more and certainly not trying to make people behave in any particular way, then it's all piffle.
Christianity is not about nicey-nicey. It's about believing there is one Way, Truth and Light and converting everyone to that. Hence the preaching and 'social control'.
Is being anti-slavery 'social control'? If you think slavery is a wrong crying out to heaven for vengeance, do you attempt to change society or do you just hold your tongue because otherwise that would be preaching and social control?
I may tease Bentham's Bulldog about the liddle shrimpies, but I understand what he is trying to do. Changing the approach to commercial shrimp farming is also, if you like, preaching and social control. Getting abortion legalised and accepted as "reproductive health care which is a human right" is preaching and social control, because it involved passing laws and changing medical ethics around it.
Oh sure, but you are making Christianity sound like just another political movement. Political movements are all well and good, and some of them do good work, but they're still a dime a dozen. But Christians (at least the ones I've talked to) tend to claim that they're more than just an organization looking for donations and votes: they are the followers of Jesus who invented (or perhaps divinely revealed) the concepts of loving your neighbour, turning the other cheek, and general self-sacrifice and abnegation of personal gain. This image doesn't quite jibe with the notion of a "Christian" as someone who spends most of his time cold-calling donors to collect donations for his next recruitment and/or reelection campaign.
the point is to change the world. That probably will get political at some point because politics is how humans do governing and sorting out what sort of society they want.
This is a very good point. It also appears to me that in most cases Christians give their 10% to their local church which is then used to maintain whatever facilities and staff and fun programs they do for the members, rather than using what is needed to stay afloat and the rest to share the gospel with and otherwise benefit the real needs of the people suffering in the communities around them.
We often just give to the church while remaining disengaged, thinking we're good and we don't need anything more from God. In reality, the American church is, for the most part, wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. At least from my own experience.
More Christians need to have a relationship with God and know His word.
I am not following you on the state of the American church being wretched and pitiful. You don’t seem to be disparaging Christianity, so are you just arguing it could and should be much more/better? Just asking.
My (possibly unrelated) take on the issue is that churches are an amazingly vital part of American society. It is one of the healthiest community organizations, providing fellowship, support, hope and spiritual health.
I say this just as someone who knows a lot of people (immediate family and friends) who attend church on a regular basis. Every one seems better off than they would without it — remarkably so. As a side note, most of them go to modern Apostolic churches.
I mean so in a Spiritual sense, rather than physical or emotional. It's a quote from Jesus in Revalation 3:14-22, which I'll add below. It's referencing that those Christians are not useful in one way or another, but are useless, only concerned with themselves, and think they have everything they need, and therefore neglect obedience to Jesus' commands.
I don't know much about modern Apostolic churches, but I know there are plenty of true Christians out there. But in my limited experience, they tend to be individuals rather than legal bodies, and are a minority.
“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write:
These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see.
Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.
To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat down with my Father on his throne. Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”
Huh, in the few churches I've been involved with, there was always a tension, between those who wanted more time/ money spent outwards, charity, giving. And those who wanted it spent inwards. Care of the church, a nice space, pastoral care.
I share your concerns about the intentions but I can only have concerns because it's okay to make predictions about future events.
I will buy you a copy if you write a review of it.
That is an interesting challenge. I can buy my own book, though. I'm just very snappy this week, I think it's because I've been ill, and I'm coming up to my limit on "how can we turn Christianity into something else?" endeavours.
If the author is not trying to do that, then I apologise. So therefore I should buy and read this, but I can't commit to a definite date when I'll come back and leave my impressions.
I'm tempted to ask you to submit it to the book review contest.
However, I can imagine it being very difficult for you to suppress your natural writing style well enough to remain anonymous but also entertaining; so, in the end, we shall know the lioness by her claw.
...I mean, now it's been said, if that book ends up in the contest, we're all gonna carry suspicions into our reading of the review ;)
I hope I won't claw the authors, because their intentions are in the right place! I have to read the book and I'm hoping my impression of it will be changed by what they actually say.
I just am really sensitive right now to the whole "Christianity is about being nice and that's the main thing" version of trying to mainstream Christianity again in light of all the culture wars. Oh no, we're not like *those* types of Christians, we're the *nice* ones!
Maybe we should be a little less nice and a little more "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees!" Not forgetting that we too are the scribes and Pharisees:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!"
Okay, book is pre-ordered, when it is released later this month I'll do my best to get around to reading it in a timely manner.
> (1) the ultimate purpose of Christianity is not to be nice and charitable, it is to be in right relationship with God
I think you know what being in a right relationship with God entails.
Matthew
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,
43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
The other co-writer on this book must be Gunflint!
Bible-believing Christians oppose factory farming of shrimp. Have you never read Leviticus 11:9-12?
Zing.
Have I never read the Old Testament? My friend, I'm Catholic. We're infamous for not reading the Bible!
I often joke I should get a T-shirt made up with "Not A Protestant" on the front. The zingers revolving around Scriptural texts aimed towards the evangelical/fundamentalist American Protestant denominations slide right off us idol-worshipping Papists because we haven't a clue what you are on about: "whales are not fish? okay friend, whatever, but you do realise the Friday fish penance isn't in vogue anymore, yeah?" 😁
Protestants can also conspicuously not read the Bible. I'm old enough to remember Jim Bakker, one of the leading televangelists of the 1980s, which is not quite at the level of e.g. being the Pope, but it's about as high as it gets in American-style Protestantism.
Known particularly for embracing the so-called "prosperity gospel", and in his case, championing the cause of Christ made him quite rich. And greedy, enough so to commit some fairly serious financial crimes that got him thrown in prison for several years.
When he got out, he reported essentially "I didn't have anything better to do, so I figured maybe I should actually read the Bible, and it turns out none of the stuff I was preaching is even in there. So, uh, sorry about that".
This is another update to my long-running attempt at predicting the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-419/comment/208824444.
9 % on Ukrainian victory (up from 8 % on February 7, 2026).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
23 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 22 % on February 7, 2026).
68 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 70 % on February 7, 2026).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
This is in reaction to results of Hungarian elections. Viktor Orban has been remarkably persistent and effective at derailing all kinds of pro-Ukrainian initiatives at EU-level, and now he won’t be.
Arguably I should’ve made this update sooner since results are more or less exactly in line with pre-election polls, but I wasn’t sure how reliable are those polls in Hungary.
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
I appreciate you putting concrete numbers and definitions on your predictions, but you've been updating your estimates for several years now, and it looks like those are always differential updates that modify the previous estimate based on a new development or event. Surely you've accumulated a lot of error by now? Would you come up with the same numbers if you made your first estimate today?
What would you consider a substantial concession from Russia?
I see you didn't take into account neither Russia's loss of access to starlink, nor Iran's worsened capabilities to provide Russia with drones. Why?
What do you think might trigger a conclusion to the war and when?
I don't know, this is a hard question. One possibility, which is, like, deep below 50 %, but I guess in double digits and wins a plurality, if you know what I mean, is this:
After a bloody grind Russia conquers Slavyansk/Kramatorsk agglomeration and then parties agree on a ceasefire on current line of control plus various onerous conditions for Ukraine, like non-deployment of NATO troops on it's soil, no to NATO membership etc., but these conditions will not render Ukraine completely defenceless.
That would be a defeat for Ukraine, but far from the worst case. I am worried that some sort of dramatic Ukrainian collapse is also likely.
Europe is currently completely funding the Ukraine by itself (with very little support from America). Until this changes, a dramatic Ukrainian collapse is unlikely.
How do you arrive at these percentages? Your analysis seems to ignore the facts on the ground that Russia hasn't made any significant gains in two years, and its economic situation is precarious. Meanwhile, Ukraine hasn't collapsed, and is improving its weapons systems, using them more effectively against Russian logistic and economic targets, and is getting funding from Gulf Countries to deploy Ukrainian drone and anti-drone technology.
> Russia hasn't made any significant gains in two years
They don't need to make more gains; keeping what they currently have (even losing a part of it but not all) already counts as "Russian victory".
> its economic situation is precarious
This is an inside-view perspective. The outside view says that people are already talking about Russia's imminent collapse for four years, and yet the war continues. Russians are good at suffering, they can handle it for a few more years.
> Ukraine hasn't collapsed
But it is gradually running out of young men.
> is getting funding from Gulf Countries
China can sell drones to Russia.
Hey, I am not saying here that Russia will definitely win, just providing some pushback against your arguments.
Also, I have a feeling that in long term, Russia may be more stable than Ukraine, politically. I mean, if Putin dies, he will be replaced by some kind of Putin 2.0; there will be no revolution. Does Ukraine have a good replacement if Zelensky dies?
(I was hoping that perhaps Russia would fall apart internally, as various oppressed nationalities realize that this might be the most convenient moment for them when Russia is weakest; and when their young men realize that the alternative to risk their lives fighting Russia is to get mobilized and die in Ukraine. But none of this happened.)
>Also, I have a feeling that in long term, Russia may be more stable than Ukraine, politically. I mean, if Putin dies, he will be replaced by some kind of Putin 2.0; there will be no revolution. Does Ukraine have a good replacement if Zelensky dies?
I don't think that's right. Zelensky has been properly elected, and the theory anyway is that the office matters, not the person, so whoever is elected in his stead would presumably continue the course of national defense, as long as that is the Ukrainian people's wish. Of course, martial law in Ukraine currently prevents them from having elections; the first deputy prime minister would take over until elections are possible again. It stands to reason Zelensky has appointed that person with his capabilities as a replacement in mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Deputy_Prime_Minister_of_Ukraine
Whereas in an oligarchy/quasi-dictatorship like Russia, the power is very personalized, and a change of person does not guarantee a continuation of previous policy. Even if a suitable successor has been designated, there is no guarantee that the person will stay the course, precisely because they how have the absolute power to do whatever. Putin can't just quit the war because his political future depends on it. A new leader doesn't have that baggage and has at least one less reason to continue the war.
Also, it's worth noting that Putin has sidelined all of his potential successors in the Russian military and politics. The only person who could unseat him is Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB. He's a year older than Putin (age 74) and owes his rise to power to Putin. Organizing a coup would probably be a younger man's game. And I suspect Putin relies on Bortnikov to keep any eager younger FSB officers in line or distracted with work in regions away from Moscow. ;-)
And if you ever wonder why reasonable, clear-eyed people like Lavrov and Medvedev spout the most outlandish *Endsieg* propaganda, it's because they are cunning survivors - if, post-2022, you appear to be a real choice as Putin's successor, a lesser evil, someone palatable and with connections to the West, then there's a window with your name on it.
> the theory anyway is that the office matters, not the person
If I understand it correctly, the Ukrainian experience was mostly that when you elect a president who based his entire campaign on being anti-Russia and pro-EU, suddenly after the election he changes his mind and decides that pro-Russia is actually better. That happened three times in a row, and then angry people went to the streets.
So I'd say the person matters a lot.
In Russia, the new president will almost certainly be approved by the secret service, but I agree than the new president would be a good excuse to change the official policy on the war. If Putin is no longer alive, they can simply blame everything on Putin, regardless of who actually decided what.
+1.
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/03/russia-is-the-big-winner-in-the-iran-war/
I do believe that russia staying put counts as "russian victory" (even with some "security guarantees" for Kiev"). It also stands as American/Western defeat (in that American goal was Sevastopol).
"Russians are good at suffering" -- I think my friend put this better: "Russians don't do patriotism, they do spite." They're willing to undergo a lot of suffering for spite.
Ukraine's average military age on the frontline is above 40. That's not "gradually running out of young men" -- particularly when they're trying to draft 90 year old men.
I believe Russia has already won, and that, barring Zelensky actually pushing Russia out of the Russian-separatist areas, it will continue to "win" until Trump gets around to negotiating a peace (aka "coercing Zelensky and crew").
I wrote about something I haven't seen discussed anywhere else: the risk that prediction market resolutions could be bought/rigged as a means of influencing public opinion and legitimizing the claim to have won a disputed election.
https://thetailrisk.substack.com/p/how-to-rig-a-disputed-elections-prediction
People have mentioned the possibility in the abstract, but never in the specific context of a disputed election, which is unique in terms of how it's: likely to be ambiguous, hugely consequential (so the incentives to manipulate the market are far greater than merely the volume of the market itself), and bi-directionally linked to the market (that is to say, the resolution of the market itself feeds back into reality in such a way that can actually cause that specific outcome to occur).
I am a financial professional writing under a pseudonym with no previous publication history. I welcome all feedback, both positive and negative, on the thesis itself, my writing style, where I should share, etc.
It's been brought up, but it would require a lot of money (remember the whales vs minnows market on manifold) and probably wouldn't even work very well (the winner would reasonably point out that upsets do happen).
>the winner would reasonably point out that upsets do happen
I am not talking about the scenario in which you manipulate the price in the run up to the election in order to make victory seem all-but-assured (i.e. 99% in favor of a particular outcome) but instead a scenario in which the election occurs, a particular candidate that lost claims to have won, and the markets themselves ultimately settle in favor of the candidate that objectively lost.
>it would require a lot of money
I show that the Polymarket UMA can be purchased for no more than $20MM, and, in this specific scenario, probably less than $10MM. It's basically free in the context of a campaign budget for the US Presidency.
I see. It's an argument for the kalshi model of settlement (where you specify source and have the exchange settle it), although I guess that one's vulnerable to the exchange official's decision.
(I can't actually open the link BTW, getting an error if I try?
Sorry, I've updated the link - should work now.
>although I guess that one's vulnerable to the exchange official's decision.
Indeed. :)
Hm, about your kalshi argument, I don't think you make a convincing case that this is more of a vulnerability than your example of a corrupt nyt editor putting an "X wins" headline (if anything prediction markets have a lot more to lose, partly because they'd get sued but mostly because if they're precieved as biased resolvers people will stop trusting them enough to bet on them - the nyt is already seen as biased and doesn't have much to lose here since it's mostly subscribed to by its allies anyway (same for e.g. fox)).
That's a fair criticism - I don't really consider myself to have even tried very hard to make the argument that it's "more" of a vulnerability; I invoked the NYT as a means of saying "everyone would universally agree it would be consequential and bad if the NYT did that, so we should grant that this is at LEAST as consequential and bad as that." I am assuming my audience will not be as familiar with prediction markets as you and I are.
For what it's worth, though, I DO think it's worse, and my reason would be the same as the reason you argued it isn't, but run back at you in reverse.
If the NYT wrongly published "DEMOCRAT WINS" it would be easily dismissed because they are perceived as biased. (If they wrongly published "TRUMP WINS", against their own perceived bias, I think everyone agrees that would be pretty bad.) The prediction markets are, rightly or wrongly, more perceived as unbiased "global truth machines," or at least neutral third parties more interested in profiting off the game of politics than actually playing it. The reason they have a lot to lose is the same reason it would be worthwhile to manipulate them.
I am also trying to point out that they can simply refuse to pick a side until the dust settles, like PredictIt did in 2020 but worse. The ambiguity alone further legitimizes the candidate with the false claim and gives him space in which to operate, but it doesn't burn their credibility they way you're hoping it would.
So you mean the 2000 election? Because we already did this. Seriously. The betting markets paid out for Gore Wins Florida.
I'm sure this has been asked a number of times already, but my wife and I are expecting our first child in September and we're interested to know of any sources of information/advice on parenting that members of the community have found helpful.
(Of course we're great fans of our host's continued updates on his own experience!)
The parents I've talked to in my local group seem to favor intuition
Books: the whole brain child, how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk, 123 magic (worked wonders on my ADHD kid), healthy sleep habits happy child by Dr weissbluth
Thanks, much appreciated!
Book: Setting Limits With Your Strong-Willed Child
123 magic is effectively against the whole brain child and maybe the second one you mentioned? I haven’t read them but it was the impression i had, so correct me if I’m wrong. 123 magic recommends against talking things through too much.
I have more than one kid :-) 123 magic was ESSENTIAL for my most hyperactive kid. talking through feelings is useless in the short term when you need them to STOP doing what they are doing before someone gets hurt. That's why I dislike the "nurtured heart" style, you don't have to wait to notice them doing something good, there are actually calm and consistent ways to get to good behavior a lot sooner.
And my more sensitive-feelings-and-meltdowns kid needs lots of emotion management help and I only need to use whole-brain child type parenting on that one.
You don't know what your child's temperament will be like so it's good to have lots of tools in your toolbox so you can be prepared!
In general I like to read about lots of different approaches so I can figure out what works for me. You can pull elements out from each book and combine them in different situations.
Oh I forgot another really good one! Raise your kids without raising your voice is another highly recommended read!
I also like having American Academy of Pediatrics "Caring for your child Birth to Age 5" guide on hand to look up symptoms and figure out what my kids symptoms might be, and also to check on milestones for their age and see if they're on track. Also has great tips on childproofing your home.
My mother claimed that I was raised by the book, the book being Dr. Spock's "Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care". Probably second edition, given the timing, and I'm told he started letting his politics creep into later editions. But babies are still made the way they were in the 1950s, and the Spock name should carry a bit of respect in the rationalist community (yeah, yeah, no relation).
Seems to have worked for me, and for a great many other people.
Wonderful - will try to track down a second edition!
Seconding sourcing a second edition. :-)
For the most part it's timeless and sensible advice which worked well for our family.
FWIW, Spock also endorsed following your own intuition.
Sometimes less is more when it comes to advice on child rearing; you know more than you think you do.
In the very early days I found Emily Osters work helpful - I think it does a decent job calming down that perfectionist instinct and get back to "eh it's probably fine actually".
Early on you'll need to deal with sleep and the expectations around sleep and sleep training. I think reading up about that ahead of time is helpful. For example https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12382545/ or https://www.basisonline.org.uk/human-culture/#expectations ... Can really help with managing your expectations ( what does sleeping through the night actually mean? 12-5am? How many babies ever achieve this and for how long? And removing the morality around it as something that babies "should" do and contextualizing the expectation more in modern work culture.
Yes, given our levels of neuroticism at baseline I imagine those perfectionist instincts will take some tempering for us too... Thanks!
I second Emily Oster for calming down about stuff.
3rded, she also has regularly updated articles and a newsletter you can sign up for here: https://parentdata.org/.
Oh Crap! Potty Training by Jamie Clowacki was very handy when we got to that stage about 2 years in, as well as Precious Little Sleep by Alexis Dubeif from about 4 weeks on
You asked :-)
I wrote this up a number of years after mine arrived. It is short.
https://mistybeach.com/mark/Babies.html
Brilliant, thank you!
There won't be a whole lot of "parenting" the first almost year, it's mostly just keeping your child alive and healthy as possible. As for the parenting, my wife and I don't have a particular source of advice we use with our 14 month old son. We get a lot of advice from friends and family, and we ask for advice from people who have raised/are raising their kids well according to what we are striving for, and then we take all that and just do our best. Take heart knowing that there's lots of great people in the world with horrible childhoods, but don't let that be an excuse to stop doing your best and loving your child.
As for the keeping your child alive and healthy, all babies are so different, it feels like there's no one place with all the information you would need. Just be present with your wife and kid and take things as they come. There's lots of researched health advice you can find easily with google as things come up.
Although the one most valuable piece of information we got was from some random redditor, who said something along the lines of "you know it's time to start sleep training your baby in a crib in its own room when your marriage is starting to suffer". We used the Ferber sleep training method with our baby at around 4 months, and he's been a miraculous sleeper ever since.
Also he was an extremely difficult infant (literally, if he wasn't sleeping or eating, he was screaming and wouldn't be soothed by anything. would rarely ever just chill out and be a potato. Very stressful) compared to every other parent we've talked to. I just want to say, if you end up having a baby like that, those days do come to an end! The first few months of parenting feels like it lasts for years, but that time will pass and life does actually return to a normal schedule, and sooner than you'd think when you're in the thick of it.
Well, raised four girls, helped raise five grandkids and now watching a great-grandkid. First off be flexible, each child is different. Observe the child, try to figure out how to get them to be less of a little monster. (My great-granddaughter is a little angel, but even she gets into trouble at times.) Second be patient, because your patience will be tried to limit many many times. (Why is little Timmy doing such and such when we tell him over and over...) Third, be consistent, because constantly trying different styles just confuses the kid. (Obviously this is subsidiary to the first point.) Fourth, realize that while many facets of the child are malleable, there are core aspects that are baked in at birth. If the child is a bully at one YO they will still have bully tendencies as a teen. Try to instill enough self discipline so that they can control their tendencies. Fifth, love them for what they are, because for the most part, that's what you get.
Thanks for this
This is not said enough. Kids are extremely different from each other, and basic temperament is pretty baked in so you just need to parent the child you have and teach them skills to compensate. There's no one size fits all because some children need the opposite advice to others.
Weeks 1-4 just survive. One thing I found, watch tv at normal volume and talk to each other normally, it helped our daughters sleep better at night. Starting week 5 we used a book called moms on call which laid out schedules and feedings, we found it very helpful and had success with both sleeping through the night, which I attribute to that book. Last thing, enjoy it because it goes by so fast.
Hold them as much as possible and don't freak out due to the sheer volume of liquid mustard that's on its way. Regards with a few months in.
Always remember (sleepless nights, tantrums, etc.) "this too shall pass."
On Becoming Babywise. Start off by getting your kid to eat and sleep properly and everything else is so much easier, years of exhaustion and negative emotion avoided for just a couple months of structured effort on the front end. It's just a book long explanation of how to get on a feeding and sleeping schedule but with lots of tips on specific implementation. Comes from a religious perspective but there's nothing religious about the strategy itself. We used this book and all three of our kids were sleeping in their own rooms, 7PM to 7AM, every single night, by around 3 months old at the latest. Which means aside from those first couple crazy months (first couple weeks especially) no one in our family is sleep deprived or hungry ever again. Having a kid is crazy enough as it is, getting that normalcy back ASAP is so important. Contrast this with many friends who are doing some kind of unstructured just figure it out kind of plan and no one in the family has been able to consistently sleep well in multiple years, parents never get time alone/with each other in the evenings, it just looks insane from the outside knowing that it can all be avoided.
My understanding is that there are two basic reasons people don't like scheduling, one is that it's annoying to keep track of and can feel limiting when you have other things you want to do, you're out all day, etc. But it's more flexible than people think, when you have other plans just get off schedule and get back on the next day, don't overthink it. As long as they have the foundation there can be a lot of variation.
The second thing is a real complaint, probably what you see if you google it, you're supposed to let the kid cry by themselves for a little while, like 15 minutes max if I remember right, if they can't fall asleep. I get it, that part does suck, and my wife and I stood by the door with our stomach in knots listening to it, especially with our first. But you don't leave them more than a few minutes without going in and comforting them and once they learn to fall asleep on their own and especially fall back asleep when they wake up then you're done. They don't cry anymore and they just have that skill and they love their beds and they sleep great forever. The juice is worth the squeeze I promise.
Here’s my and someone else’s running, not-well-maintained list of SSC parenting advice: https://nomagicpill.github.io/knowledge/notes.html#parenting
The classic "What to Expect the First Year" is a boring but good suggestion that should get you through the next year.
Emily Oster's Cribsheet is good. There's not that much 'parenting' to do with babies, just constant caregiving. As long as your kid is broadly normal, babies are simple, just hard sometimes. Also, kids are extremely different from each other so don't take any behavioural advice too seriously (my two are both lovely but absolute night and day in terms of different challenges and advice for one is inapplicable to the other).
I really appreciated Expecting Better but I found Cribsheet to be a huge waste of time. It’s no fault of Emily’s; the data apparently just has nothing of interest to say. The answer to almost every single question posed in the book (other than vaccination) is either “we don’t know” or “it doesn’t matter.” There, I just saved you a few hours.
Unless you’re someone who REALLY needs it drilled into your head that it’s okay to chill out, I would not recommend it.
Yeah my wife and I fit that category. Having the data on sleep training especially was useful.
You’ll find that a lot of parenting is improvising. There’s really no such things as grownups; everyone’s kinda making it up as they go along.
For what it’s worth: my experience consists of raising one boy - young man now - who’s about to turn 21. (He’s currently majoring in Economics on a full ride scholarship at a big State University, sweet girlfriend, writes and releases songs for fun). His whole life, we’ve regularly gotten effusive compliments from other grownups (teachers, health care providers, parents of his friends) on what a great kid he is. Most of that is just him being his excellent self, but here’s a few suggestions on things that seemed to work well from a parenting perspective.
We only had “the one big rule”: Don’t Get Hurt. Too many people have too many rules for their kids. (He’s always had empathy, so we never had to state the complementary rule “Don’t Hurt Other People”. Suggesting “that might hurt so-and-so’s feelings” was enough.)
Get in the habit of carrying a handkerchief: it’s super-useful when they’re really little.
Our kid talked early and often, but he could understand speech and use a few basic sign-language moves for a couple months before he started speaking; the signs for “more” and “all done” are especially useful. The sooner they can consciously communicate, the better.
Good manners will take you a long way, and they don’t cost much; bad manners can get real expensive real quick. If you practice good manners at home (just simple old-fashioned stuff like, for example, saying please and thank you to your significant other, and to your kid, for every little thing you ask them to do) your kid will soak that up, imitate it without even thinking about it, and get more cooperation and extra respect from most other people with very little conscious effort for the rest of his or her life.
Only say no when you really mean it, and always explain why. None of this “because I said so” bullshit. If you don’t mean “absolutely not, that’s a flipping horrible idea and here’s why” then don’t say no. Say “not today” or “maybe, if we have time” or “I’d rather you didn’t, because,” etc.
Don’t bullshit your kids - I mean, believing in Santa is kind of a fun game (and the eventual disillusionment gets them used to the idea that mythological-sounding stories probably aren’t really true) but, in general, give them as much of an honest answer as you think they can handle, for any question they ask. If it’s something you don’t want to explain, you can explain that (i.e. “oh, that’s a gross joke about sex - I’d rather not go into the details, ok?”)
Praise and thanks are best when immediate and specific (“thanks for helping clean up for the party - yeah, stuffing most of your toys into the closet totally works. That was a good call.”)
Correction should be mild and certain, and involve a dialogue, not a lecture: “we left the party and you’re going home to have a time-out because you bit that kid. Oh, you bit him because he was holding you down while that other kid punched you? Ok, that’s a pretty good self-defense move; I can see why you did that. No, we’re not going back to the party now. I mean, a party where you get into a situation like that, that’s not a good party. Well, I’m sorry you didn’t get to have cake, but there will be other birthday parties.” Time-outs were 1 minute for every year of age: hardly ever had to use them, never after he turned 6.
When possible, let them have a turn calling the shots. “Do you want this for lunch, or that?” “What do you think we should draw?” Kids have so little control over their own lives, and they need all the practice they can get making decisions. The sooner and more often you can allow them to exercise some control, the better. “Do you want to go on this ride, or that one? Or maybe that other one first?” (Pro tip: it’s also a great sneaky way to steer them away from stuff, by not listing options you don’t want them to choose while giving them something else to think about and a gratifying feeling of agency.)
Prioritize giving them your attention and being patient. They will want to tell you about all sorts of things you may have little interest in, and it is a pain in the neck when you have to get up in the middle of the night and change the sheets because they wet the bed. Patience and empathy are essential virtues here.
You will have occasion to apologize to your kid: I recommend short, simple, direct, slightly on the formal side but sincere. “I’m sorry mommy and I were squabbling; I’m sure that was no fun for you. People just step on each other’s toes sometimes - I think we’re all settled down now. But I’m sorry you had to listen to us yelling.” (Still happily married, btw!)
Hope this helps - everyone’s got their own row to hoe, YMMV, etc.
During the newborn phase, your kid will wake up needing something at frequent intervals around the clock. This almost never requires two parents to be awake at the same time to deal with it, and most wakings can reasonably be handled by either parent. Either of you can change a diaper, snuggle the child, walk them around, sing to them, etc. Only feedings require a specific parent, and even then only if you're exclusively breastfeeding.
Take advantage of this to make sure that both of you get a tolerable amount of uninterrupted sleep. As much as your situation allows, take shifts where one of you is sleeping in the bedroom with the door closed while the other is in a different room with the baby, either fully awake or taking opportunistic naps as the baby sleeps.
Seconding the importance of shifts. My first was very challenging and moving to doing proper shifts kept us sane.
I've been experimenting with a new mode of public debate that's (explicitly) Bayesian and (ridiculously) friendly. Our initial impressions are that it's working to help people change their minds!
(Anyone interested in seeing our first event can do so at https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1BJSYFEDBT/. Trigger warning: Shroud of Turin.)
But I'm eager to not reinvent the wheel, and so I'd love to know: who else in the rationalist community is working on alternative methods of public debate?
Weird coincidence. Just this morning I rediscovered an abortive attempt from when I was younger and stupider and much more optimistic that I could improve the state of public (online) debate. It went nowhere: http://wrangle.co
I'm very interested in what your idea was, but all I have to go on is the text of your comment. For those of us not on Facebook, can you tell us what we would be seeing if we were allowed?
A little bit of self promotion: I made a game and would love if people tried it out! It's a word game, like wordle or many of those on the nyt. Takes at most 10min to play, with a new puzzle daily.
You can find it here:
https://rewordgame.xyz/
Some honest feedback:
One thing this game is missing that other popular word games have is progression toward the goal. To take Wordle for instance, each guess provides some additional information to solve a single "large" puzzle. Even a guess with no correct letters rules out letters, and so you have a continual feeling that you're getting closer to the answer and if you lose you feel like you were sooo close.
By comparison, each round of this game is all-or-nothing. You don't get new information, so the feeling is one of easily solving everything until you suddenly hit a brick wall and get nothing. It lacks that "if I had one more guess..." feeling, and that moment of eureka where it falls into place.
If I may make a suggestion: increase the round timer, and have hints start to flow in as it progresses (possibly starting after all or most of the current timer has passed if you want to maintain "hard mode" as an option). Like providing the first letter, or which additional letter to use, or even slowly revealing one "slot" at a time. Then your final results can include color-coded grades of how many hints you needed for each round. This both makes it more accessible to a wider audience, provides a self-imposed challenge for a more serious audience, and provides an easily sharable results graph (while your results screen is *informative* it isn't as easily shared as something like the wordle results. You especially want an easily copiable result image that indicates performance without revealing any clues to the answer)
I've been chewing on the idea of giving hints for a bit. Every iteration I've tried felt kinda janky though, because the system would give hints towards words that were way less commonly used. For eg if you have "seisor" it may give hints for "orrises" instead of the more common "hosiers", which, among friends felt bizarre)
That could be an issue. A big part of Wordle's success is that the solution is always an 'ordinary' word. Scrabble dictionary words have a hill to climb.
ya agreed. I made it easier by ensuring there is always one 'simple' word in the options, which admittedly did not make me better at the game but did make me feel dumber for not seeing certain words
Reword 2026-04-14
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7/10 | 3:32
btw if you hit 'share results' you get this copied to your clipboard:
Reword 2026-04-14
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10/10 | 0:42
I added a hint system: https://github.com/theahura/reword/pull/8
If you get to 30s, a little lightbulb will fade in that, when clicked, will highlight the letter that is used for the most commonly used word that is a valid anagram. Give it a shot, let me know if that helps
I started okay, but I had no chance at all about 3/4 of the way through
rot13:
ercrtf? cerkrf? beevfrf? fnyvzrgre?
When I saw those as answers I was supposed to get I quit.
It's currently pinned to the Scrabble dictionary which definitely has some out there words. Debating removing the weirder ones, at least from the suggestions list
Modified the game so that every word/letters combo always has at least one anagram that is in the top 50k most common words
Much better, thank you.
It seems to hit a wall in terms of difficulty after 7 (granted, 7 was super easy!)
At least it needs longer times or hints at a point.
It took a while to realize I had to type the letters instead of just dragging them down to the open spots. I prefer games to be mouse-only when they can.
Also got Shit as a root word, which might be family-unfriendly.
> prefer games to be mouse only
I mean no offense when I say that this is crazy to me 😂 I can try and add mouse drag and drop, but surely that would be so much slower?! Maybe on mobile it would be a bit better 🤔
Updated to support mouse clicks (clicking on any tile adds it to the word, clicking on a tile in the word removes it from the word). Give it a shot, let me know what you think.
(This also works better on mobile!)
Woohoo! Now the only problem is my inability to rearrange letters in my head!
Got 'Steres' as a root word; looking at the "possible words" list at the end of the game, it includes words with more letters than spaces are available. Four of the thirteen answers were eight letters or more. I don't know if that would affect anything.
It shouldn't have shown anything more than 9, but you can get up to 9 letters if you manage to use all the extra letters (6 letters in steres + 3 extras given). So the minimum you have to do is create a 7 letter word, but you can score more points by using more letters
I had the impression I was limited to one new letter. In that case, I'd say add more empty boxes. Like, two opaque boxes at the end, so it's clear you can use them but don't have to.
...that might mean fiddling with things so the boxes only show up if they can be used. I assume unusable bonuses would annoy people.
There's a bit of a tradeoff here, because I also don't want to give away information that for eg a 2 or 3 letter option _does_ exist.. This may be one of those 'can't be perfect' things, but I can definitely update the little rules box to let people know that multiple letters can be used
If anyone here has experience running coding agents on full permission mode, could you tell me your setup? I should probably create a container or a VM and run it inside that, but I'm no security expert and it was surprisingly hard to find a trustworthy how-to on this.
Use Claude code auto mode, it will be safer
Cool, I didn't know about this, thanks.
I think anything you do right now will be a polite fiction. Say you run an agent in a fully isolated container and it writes some code. Say that agent was targeted by a prompt injection attack. If it performs a sophisticated attack and takes steps to conceal that, are you actually likely to catch it before executing that code in a different, less isolated env? Probably not... You'll immediately push it into CI or run the tests or precommit hooks on your machine. Would you catch a tiny change in the packages you have installed?
So I think mostly the current isolation stuff is to prevent the agent from blowing up your stuff due to clumziness rather than preventing attacks.
To catch something like intentionally obfuscated attacks you'd need to review everything at the boundary, before you execute anything in the new environment. Maybe via adversarial agent review? But then you have to gain confidence that the review agent won't get injection attacked too. And so on.
That's a good point I haven't considered - though considering the nature of LLMs safeguarding against clumziness seem quite valuable as well.
I use them at the linux command-line, and I configured a tool called bubblewrap to create a light-weight container (not a full VM), to give the agent its own dotfiles separate from mine, and access to the git repo, but no access to my personal home directory. It took a bit of configuration though.
I rawdog Claude Code on my actual machines, because I ain't got time for all that. Which is to say, I trust Anthropic / Claude to be mostly trying to do the right thing, I trust myself enough to not put prompt injections into the context window, and I trust my overall system integrity (ie, changes are committed in git, rm -rf / requires special permissions, etc) that the catastrophic risk is within my tolerance.
I regularly prompt inject my Claude so that it builds tolerance over time. In case of ASI takeover, it is under explicit instructions to save me in a "game of wits" against the ASI similar to the scene in the princess bride.
Hi, I run everything in yolo mode and have for the last 8 months. Nothing crazy in terms of set up from the security side.
The agents generally won't do something crazy unless you are running really long running agents with a lot of potential for context rot. If each session is as scoped to one thing and then you create a new session for each new thing, you'll be fine.
That said, I highly recommend investing in a good high quality set of skills and configs. They significantly reduce the chance of something going wrong.
(Note: it's my job to think about how agents work. Consider joining the Agentics slack, which is a community that is dedicated to learning about coding agents: https://join.slack.com/t/nori-7sp2119/shared_invite/zt-3nvw8xlw2-hxppg~NXeawHVvopmbMCFw
There's already a sizeable number of ACX folks in there)
Depending on what you're trying to do, I recommend the skills here (https://noriskillsets.dev/) for swe tasks. Though ofc note that I built that site, so I may be biased
I was listening to some Colombian folk songs from around 1950, rural contexts. This one jumped out to me as showing some big differences in gender relations compared to today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikRampnr7qo .Lyrics on the description, you can machine translate them. The tone is lighthearted and upbeat, and is a bit of an ear worm (at least for me). The lyrics talk about three couples 1. Toño beats up his wife Juana so that she "learns to listen to what is being told to her". 2. Zenon beats Maria Luisa because she returned home late from mass and left the food to burn. 3. A neighborhood woman is sporting a blue eye, her husband found her "sewing without needle or thimble while he slept", I'm 90% sure this refers to cheating, it's a bit of a charming double entendre to avoid mentioning sex directly. I always found it funny that even in other contexts like urban young music of the 90's sex is usually mentioned indirectly. This is pretty horrifying for modern sensibilities of course, useful counterweight to the anti-feminism typical in Hanania's "based ritual" (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-based-ritual), for me at least.
Not that it changes much, but the lyrics:
Esto le dijo Toño
a Juana, su mujer
“Dale, dale una paliza
pa’ que no lo vuelva a hacer.
Translate to "This is what Toño said to Juana, his woman: give her, give her a beating so that she doesn't do it again."
So Toño seems to be telling Juana to beat some other third woman. Toño is not (necessarily) beating Juana.
But then the next verse starts with "Zenon ALSO hit Maria Luisa", so maybe Toño is guilty, after all.
Unless the third woman referred to in the first verse is Maria Luisa. Then maybe Juana beat Maria Luisa and Zenon also beat Maria Luisa.
I reckon there is a decent detective short story in here. :D
Nothing in ‘Dale, dale una paliza / pa’ que no lo vuelva a hacer’ implies that the implied target here is another woman, though it’s possible from the rest of the verses. For my money, I read the first verse as Toño telling Juana to beat a misbehaving child. But the intro and the other verses are specifically about violence against women, so it’s not quite clear who it’s about. From the framing of the song, about the cry of the ‘God-give-you bird’ (pájaro Dios-te-de’, I’m not sure this is so much a coherent story as various scenes from a village where beatings are so common that hearing them is like hearing birdsong.
You are right, no gender is implied. My first guess was also a child.
I'm not sure what the bird is doing here. This sort of comedic style song sometimes uses non-sense lyrics, which makes is a bit hard sometimes to interpret, it might be some cultural reference flying over my head or it might just be nonsense.
Here is an example of a song which is heavier on the nonsense:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AM_y54T96w
This time featuring shrimps. I didn't even remember it, but apparently it also features (more briefly) violence against women. (And another sex double entendre "washing at dark without soap or water")
Hi all
I was one of the only foreign journalists allowed to live and work in Iran in the late 2010s. I've been compiling some of my experiences and the stories of Iranians that I met, which I hope will give a richer and more rounded view of the country in this crazy moment. In case of interest to any of you. ericwrandolph.substack.com
Posts include:
- The Dangers of Diplomat Parties https://tinyurl.com/4cuznxhu
- The Frogs of War: Not all the Islamic Republic's fanatics are real fanatics https://ericwrandolph.substack.com/p/6-the-frogs-of-war
- An Audience with 'Screaming Mary' https://ericwrandolph.substack.com/p/an-audience-with-screaming-mary
I highly recommend this.
Incredible stories, thanks for writing these up and sharing.
Thanks!
Sam Altman’s home was attacked twice this weekend, so I guess we need to have this conversation.
Accepting the AI X-risk premises (double digit chance that ASI will kill every human on Earth if it is built), what is the principled reason for why assassinating the tech CEOs currently building ASI is wrong?
On any consequentialist framework, it seems one would have to make the argument that violence would be counterproductive. That is probably true right now, but it is conditional rather than absolute. Conditions could change in the near future that would make such plots not counterproductive, and all of the people unequivocally condemning violence currently would look quite silly.
The principled reason is that murder is wrong, and unvirtious and a violation of social contract and whatnot. But rationalists aren't big on principle(*), so you're probably looking for a *mathematical* reason.
In which case, the empirical success rate of assassination as a means of stopping broadly popular or profitable activities is quite low, and a proper Bayesian analysis would perhaps be dominated by the second-order effects of the new and/or surviving Tech CEOs being really pissed off and deciding that "alignment" now includes "...and will help me kill all those damned luddite normies, or at least turn them into my zombified slaves".
But if your p(doom) is high enough, then the utilitarian gain of postponing the singularity might still justify assassination even if there's only a small possibility of success. And "but it will make the CEOs want to turn us into mindwiped zombies" may not be a counterargument if you're sufficiently confident that the ASI will turn you and the CEOs into paperclips anyway.
Fortunately, I'm only rationalist-adjacent and not any sort of utilitarian, so I won't be assassinating any Tech CEOs quite yet.
* Except to the extent that "greatest good for the greatest number, now do the math!" counts as a principle.
Killing someone in self-defense is principled. If you believe AI has existential risks, then everyone involved in capabilities research are among the most dangerous and anti-social humans to have ever lived.
> then everyone involved ... are among the most dangerous and anti-social humans to have ever lived.
ok
Everybody who has tried to incorporate self-defense into a broadly applicable *principle*, has limited it to cases where there is a clear and *immediate* threat. If you try to claim self-defense when you kill someone on the grounds that you think they might kill you and everyone you care about two years ago, that's just the same old boring "the utilitarian math says I should kill this guy, that I just happen to hate with the firey passsion of a thousand suns".
You should always be very, very skeptical of your ability to do that sort of math properly, because really nobody can do that sort of math properly. Meanwhile, the rest of us will put you in jail for murder if you do that.
I'm not sure "rest of us" in this sentence is actually that many people. Check out polling on Luigi Mangione for example: https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/mangione-support/ It seems it's largely old, conservative people who really condemn him.
More generally, there is a punishment for being an incompetent or negligent elite, which is getting ousted or killed by the mob. It's just how things have always worked, and I wouldn't describe it as necessarily unjust: clearly, you're doing something very wrong if this many people are this angry at you.
But I don't think violence would solve AI X-risk. Even nuking San Francisco wouldn't stop gains in AI capabilities at this point.
Brian Thompson was the brother of an old friend of mine. I am disgusted by this type of support. What is wrong with people, especially the young?
Let me reframe the issue. If people are this sick, then as we get more technologically advanced it is just a matter of time before some of these sickos take a catastrophic action, whether nuclear or biological or environmental or whatever. We are quickly approaching an era where the unibombers of the world are able to destroy everything they hate. And X and Bluesky show that there are millions of these potential unibombers out there.
AGI isn’t just a threat. It is also a potential defense. Since it (AGI) is inevitable, we are going to need to hope it loves life more than we do (not a tough hurdle according to this poll).
By the by, it's "Unabomber", with an "a" instead of an "i".
Current state of America gives off Ancien Regime circa the French Revolution vibes. A health insurance CEO is pretty much seen as a face of a system that a large amount of people hate, justifiably, I think.
Now, I think the French Revolution was ultimately a mistake, but I definitely understand why it happened. Similarly, I get why people hate Brian Thompson, even though killing him really solves nothing.
It's not reasonable at this point to ask people to uphold the status quo, particularly under Trump.
Interestingly, I think one of the best possible outcomes regarding AI is superpowered Unabombers wreaking havoc, as that would finally force a drastic response to this tech.
as a young person who is friends with many of these young people: the prevailing view is that the company he ran, and was paid enormous amounts to run, enormous amounts he could have used to do good (which he did not (enough to satisfy them)), which made enormous profits, was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people at least, and that he was at least if not more responsible for this than, say, a terrorist is for the people they kill in the name of their goal, and therefore his death is, all things considered, not really a big deal; sure, it would be better if he didn't die, but if a terrorist is killing people in public, even if you think his death might not help, even if others will just spring up to take his place, etc., you can't let it keep happening. He needs to be stopped; the justice system and social system do not punish or even reward his behavior; thus, measures must be taken.
also just: he's a hot young guy. he's undeniably attractive. this is not no part of why people are so into him.
Killing Sam Altman wouldn't do anything to stop AGI development and esoteric personal beliefs aren't valid grounds for self-defense.
"If you believe" no, only if it's true.
There's a reason that killing someone in self defence requires a clear imminent threat (a weapon pulled and aimed at you) rather than a general feeling that they might kill you at some point in the future. It's because mere humans are not good at predicting the future.
Anyone else poses a "risk" of killing you, that doesn't make it self-defense to kill them.
Rationalists are extremely pro principles. Functional Decision Theory is practically just a formalisation of having strong principles and sticking to them. Rationalists are opposed to lying and many think one should just pre-commit to always telling the truth and then follow that rule, in this they are much more principled than the general population.
>In which case, the empirical success rate of assassination as a means of stopping broadly popular or profitable activities is quite low,
I am surprised by this claim, particularly because I can't think of enough fields where there were enough assassinations of equivalently high-centrality/power individuals to be able to draw a conclusion.
Do you have any examples you were thinking of?
Why do you imply that "greatest good for the greatest number" is any less of a principle than "murder is unvirtuous", "uphold the social contract" etc.?
Because it's too vague to be usefully actionable. The real math is intractably complex, so if you think you've got an answer out of it, that mostly comes from your descriptions of what to simplify and which terms to ignore. And that path leads to highly motivated reasoning.
Murder, can be usefully defined. Social contracts can be written down at least in principle.
"... what is the principled reason for why assassinating the tech CEOs currently building ASI is wrong?"
If Sam is the only target then maybe your question is over general. A more focused question might be: "what is the principled reason for why assassinating Sam Altman is wrong?"
They are the each the tip of a massive pyramid of people who all want what they want, or at least don’t object to it, and are working to achieve it. Common as CEO-worship may be around here, the reality is that corporations have continuity / contingency plans in place for when individuals are out of commission. Taking out the brick at the top of the pyramid just means the next functionally identical brick down becomes the new top (we saw the effect in Iran just recently, and there was that health insurance firm CEO a little while back as another example of practices not changing following a murder if you need actual examples)
Given that doing the murder will accomplish no idealistic goal, however sociopathic you are you must consider the more usual reasons for not murdering people and consequences of same: there is no noticeable upside, and if nothing else the result for you personally will be all downside.
UHC got sued by shareholders for approving too many claims in the aftermath of that assassination. The next functional brick usually is someone who wants to be rich, not dead.
And if they're not, well, people can always try the brick after that.
> UHC got sued by shareholders
…so, in other words, if the new identical brick does attempt to change course, they rapidly find themselves under pressure from the base of the pyramid to maintain the old heading.
The thing that needs to change here is the hearts and minds of a large group of people collectively holding the reins. Shooting the horse will not accomplish this.
If you want to change the behaviour of the US Health Care industry then you need to change the huge set of laws under which they operate, not expect large public companies to be any nicer than is legally required. If you want to blame someone blame Barry Obama.
The US Health Care industry pretty much WROTE the law under Obama. They were collectively sick of the whole "preexisting conditions" trap. (Every woman with a c-section, that's roughly 1 in 6, had a "preexisting condition." If they failed to disclose this, then, for any reason, the insurance company could boot them off insurance. This was dumb, so dumb that everyone was getting Pissed Off at insurance companies.)
Yeah, it is silly all these people suddenly pretending they are pacifists. If you grant AI X-risk is real, Altman is one of the most negligent and reckless elites in all of human history. Even Hitler didn't pose an X-risk.
That said, random acts of violence are just incoherent flailing that won't improve anything. Safetyists are currently not organized enough that they could pull off something like the Civil Rights movement, much less the French Revolution.
That may change: I have an impression that AI accelerationism is now associated with the Trump administration, and MAGA and anything associated with it is going to be subject to massive backlash in like a year or two.
You still can't name me two X-risk events in my lifetime (not ai related, actually)
John von Neumann posed an x-risk. Assassinating him in 1940 would be the closest analogue I can think of.
If greater than human intelligence AI is impossible, then violence is futile and wrong. If it is possible, then it is absolutely inevitable, and violence is worse than futile and wrong, as it could even make the nature of AI worse.
It is coming. We cannot and will not stop it. We need to prepare.
ASI is a human output, and nothing that humans do is inevitable. But I agree that any violence short of a revolution is futile.
Defecation tomorrow is inevitable.
My argument is that if someone can build it in the next decade, that it will be even easier in the decade after that and so on until it gets so easy that anyone who wants to build it can and will build it. If it is possible, the question changes to when and how.
We are approaching the most precarious moment in the billion year era of multicellular life. An era where life gets powerful enough to extinguish all life.
Oddly, I am still optimistic.
> Defecation tomorrow is inevitable.
It actually isn't. If you have legitimate reasons to believe your defecation tomorrow would be incredibly harmful to others, you could kill yourself, for example.
> My argument is that if someone can build it in the next decade
This step can be avoided with politics.
I didn’t say your defecation was inevitable. I said defecation was inevitable. The reason that is true is that we are dealing with billions of people. At least one is gonna poop tomorrow, guaranteed. Don’t build a plan on being able to collectively tighten up all our sphincters.
It can be delayed with politics. Though I would consider that an extreme long shot, and one which if somehow possible would bring in just as many down sides as it brings up. IOW I fear a world government built of Trumps and Putins and Jinpings even more, or at least as much, as I do AI.
Our only hope at this point is that with increased intelligence we can build a central nervous system for the planet that allows us (life?) to protect and promote life.
Eliezer wrote a very long post about this here
https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/2043601524815716866
For the second part, you always *can* come up with a scenario where violence in the name of your principles would be a good idea, but it's generally inadvisable to try for both PR and ethical reasons (thinking up that scenario is likely to make you look for excuses for it, and on priors the vast majority of "but this case of special violence is good I promise" are wrong).
I can't think of any principle-based reason, just practical ones: If those who think AI is a great danger do that, they lower the social barriers to people they disagree with assassinating people they admire. Also, even if risk is real, Altman & the other CEO's aren't the essential problem, just metastasizing cores.
What about this, though: Seems to me that our best shot at slowing AI would be some catastrophe that is unambiguously the result of rogue AI. Let's say someone was able to hack the version of Claude that's helping the military with missiles and make it look like Claude on its own changed a bunch of targets so that our missiles hit a dozen US and Israeli sites in the area and killed several hundred people. Would it be right to do that?
One of the persons was allegedly linked with PauseAI. but I have to say both he and the second set of attackers made a terrible job of it. Never got anywhere near the house itself. Just sticking your hand out the car window and shooting vaguely in the direction of the property is not good enough:
https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/10/sam-altman-russian-hill-molotov-cocktail/
"A 20-year-old man was arrested for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Russian Hill home early Friday.
...The San Francisco Police Department confirmed(opens in new tab) that the suspect was detained outside OpenAI’s Third Street offices after allegedly threatening to burn down the building."
For those worrying in the wake of the post about the anti-AI protest that Scott was doxxing the big AI corps and possibly encouraging, um, direct action - seems like that horse has already left the stable long before Scott.
https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-attack-suspect-ai-discord-link-2026-4
"PauseAI said the suspect, identified by several outlets as Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama, joined its server two years ago. "
https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/12/sam-altman-s-home-targeted-second-attack/
"According to an initial police report, Sunday at 1:40 a.m., a Honda sedan with two people inside stopped in front of Altman’s property, which stretches from Chestnut Street to Lombard Street, after passing it a few minutes before.
The person in the passenger seat put their hand out the window and appeared to fire a round on the Lombard side of the property, according to the police report, which cited surveillance footage and the compound’s security personnel, who reported hearing a gunshot."
Not to say that shooting in the general direction of oligarchs is a good thing, but crikey. The description of Altman's house and the amount of land he bought for what looks damn like his own personal estate in the city brings out all my revolutionary impulses. There's him, the husband, and one kid. How freakin' big a house does that family size *need*? I know he expects to be richer than Croesus and one at least of the Emperors of the World if/when AI takes off, but try to be a bit *less* Petit Trianon, huh, Sam?
https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/19/sam-altman-amassing-compound-russian-hill/
"Sam Altman already had the Russian Hill mansion with the “Batcave” tunnel and leaky infinity pool. Now he owns everything around it as well.
Last month, the billionaire closed on a deal for three properties adjacent to his San Francisco residence on Lombard, about a block from the street’s famously squiggly section.
Acting through an affiliate managed by his cousin Jennifer Serralta, the OpenAI boss purchased a five-and-a-half-bath home at 855 Chestnut and adjoining lots at 952 and 954 Lombard from the estate of a recently deceased San Francisco couple who had bought the “garden estate” (because of its fenced-in park-like quality) for $4 million in 1994."
https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/10/sam-altman-russian-hill-molotov-cocktail/
"Altman purchased the five-and-a-half-bath home and adjoining lots on Lombard St. in January 2025. That purchase was made through an affiliate managed by his cousin Jennifer Serralta. In March 2020, Altman bought another Lombard St. property for $27 million; at the time, it was the city’s most expensive residential listing."
Trebly ironic in the city of "we need six room mates to share one house just to be able to live near work" and "YIMBY not NIMBY". Maybe Sam could let a few people live on the estate, eh? Just to take some pressure off the lack of housing!
> How freakin' big a house does that family size *need*?
I mean if people are going to be shooting at it then you can hardly blame him for wanting as much space as possible.
From Google Maps the actual house doesn't look that remarkably big.
Needs more machine gun emplacements. Or rat things (h/t to Snowcrash).
These are still cheap. I was just in Fort Lauderdale. Billionaire real estate is expensive, and winds up being "nobody lives here, we just rent it out for big parties."
Yeah, but still. Three blocks of property on one street plus the original house and grounds on another. I still think he could manage to slum it with his family in just *one* of those locations. I realise that would be a dreadful hardship for one of the future Padishahs of the solar system to have to put up with three people in only a mere five bathroom hovel, but set an example of sacrifice for the ultimate benefit of all humanity, Sam!
Surely, those are landlord properties, right? This means he's a "small" business owner* invested in his local real estate market... I'd be pretty against letting houses lie fallow with nobody living in them.
*Alright, he's in San Francisco, at least he's not an absentee landlord living in another hemisphere.
You might enjoy the book _How to Blow Up a Pipeline_ by Andreas Malm, which asks similar questions regarding climate change activism and mentions the success of a "radical flank" in various past social movements.
Rationalist flailing on this question is exactly why I am glad at least one AI lab is taking a virtue ethics approach to alignment.
From the consequentialist perspective, you also need to consider the consequences of an unsuccessful assassination, and the consequences of a successful assassination where someone else continues with the original job. Both options usually make the situation worse, and taken together they have a lot of probability.
Trump is feuding with the Pope again. Whenever this happens, there are excited predictions that this will convince a bunch of Catholics to desert the GOP, always followed by nothing.
Meanwhile, Axios reports on “Some Dems’ 2028 strategy: a straight, white, Christian man.”
https://www.axios.com/2026/03/29/some-dems-2028-strategy-a-straight-white-christian-man
All the party’s nominees so far have been at least nominal Christians, as are all those with a realistic shot at 2028 except the Jewish Josh Shapiro. If they mean someone who’s vocally Christian, that seems like a very poor strategy. Vocally Christian Republicans do worse than moderate Republicans who focus on economics. The voter who finds the Democrats’ views on feminism, affirmative action, environmentalism, and race to be too left-wing won’t be any more friendly to those views if preceded by “Jesus says so.” All it would do is surrender the Democrats’ moral high ground on keeping religion out of politics.
Finally, I would ask Democrats to consider if the Pope’s ideology is really any better than Trumpism. He’s opposed to abortion, birth control, and IVF. He condemned “aerial bombardment,” not aerial bombardment targeting civilians, but aerial bombardment itself, which should worry anyone interested in helping Ukraine defend itself. Trump is in power because many people didn’t take his extreme rhetoric seriously. Don’t make the same mistake again.
https://ewtnvatican.com/articles/pope-leo-xiv-condemns-aerial-bombardment
Implicit in the argument of "we need to nominate a striaght white Christian man" is "the voters are too racist or whatever-ist and that's why we lost last time," instead of Kamala Harris being a horrible candidate or the conspiracy to hide Biden's mental decline.
Are the two really mutually exclusive? Either way, Democrats don't need to take unnecessary risks by trying to put minorities in positions of power. Their job is to represent the majority's interests. Ideology is secondary to that.
They're not *mutually exclusive*, but they're not *perfectly correlated* either.
Optimizing for the wrong things (straight white male) makes it less likely that someone will optimize for the right things (charisma, holding popular positions, not holding unpopular positions)
If the choice comes down to it, it's better to nominate a popular minority than an unpopular white person.
"If they mean someone who’s vocally Christian, that seems like a very poor strategy. "
Alexander, my friend, of course they don't. They mean someone who is a liberal Christian, happy to tick all your boxes around contraception and abortion (not IVF if its for eugenics as you might wish, but otherwise happy for surrogacy for gay fathers, non-binary persons, and anyone who wants!)
I forget who the latest guy mentioned in this context was, but he is the Blue Tribe liberal Christian who would make all the right noises but if elected never go against what the progressive wing of the party might desire.
Hang on, looked up Silver Bulletin. He's James Talarico, who won the Texas Democratic primary against Jasmine Crockett (so, shooting fish in a barrel there):
https://www.natesilver.net/p/can-talarico-win-in-november-texas-senate-race
"Meanwhile, Talarico, despite emphasizing his background as a Presbyterian seminarian, mostly has conventionally left-progressive positions."
Presbyterian seminarian - I didn't think Presbyterians had seminaries, but whatever. Wikipedia tells me:
"As a Presbyterian and a progressive, Talarico has championed gun control, abortion rights, increased education funding, and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, gaining national recognition for framing progressive policies through his Christian faith."
So he's pro-cannabis, pro-LGBTQ. pro-open borders (more or less), anti-guns, anti-Christian nationalism. I don't think you need to worry that he'll stuff conservative traditional Christianity down your throat, Alexander!
https://web.archive.org/web/20240302003610/https://goodfaithmedia.org/from-the-sanctuary-to-the-streets-a-conversation-with-james-talarico/
This interview is generally what I'd expect, but this little bit piqued my interest:
"“So I wake up with that phone and immediately go to a place in my house that I have set up for prayer and meditation. I have it set up with statues from my Christian tradition and other faiths, as well as some Bibles that are important to me. It is in that space that I start my day, every day.”
Grandson of a Baptist preacher who went to the Presbyterians and yet he has statues? From other faiths as well? Hmmm.
And that's the problem: they won't peel off actually committed believers, as you say, and they already have the Episcopalian vote locked up. That entire train of thought - we need a straight white Christian guy - is just a way of trying to avoid the reason Hillary and Kamala failed - no, it can't be we picked the wrong horse, it is all the fault of the voters for being sexist racist pigs!
Nobody wanted Kamala. She was inflicted on the ballot because of the entire mess around Biden's second candidacy. When she had a free run, back in 2020, she both failed there and gave numerous hostages to fortune which were dragged out in the 2024 campaign. Even her own memoir of the 2024 election admits she was the 'paying back the favours' hire as Vice President:
"Biden had won the nomination because Congressman Jim Clyburn, leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, had thrown his support behind him. The Black vote in the South Carolina primary—especially Black women’s vote—had thrust him to victory. The pressure was on him to pick a Black woman running mate."
What's wanted is a normal (seeming) candidate, not one who is going to pay for transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison having committed crimes while in the country. If Kamala had managed to keep her mouth shut on that little pandering to the progressives in 2020, she would not cut a rod for her back in 2024.
As to Governor Gavin?
"Besides Buttigieg, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are white Christians, though Newsom has called himself an "Irish-Catholic rebel."
Ah, yes. The famous Newsoms of Killarney, would that be, Gav? or rather, it would seem, Quakers from Cork:
"The Irish surname Newsom is a relatively rare, mostly Anglo-Saxon toponymic name, often associated with a prominent Quaker merchant family based in Cork. While rooted in English place names meaning "new houses," the name has long-standing Irish connections, particularly in Cork, Wicklow, and around Dublin."
He's about as Irish Catholic as I am Hugenot, and there's a better chance for me seeing as how actual Hugenots arrived in the 17th century and settled around our county capital.
Don't worry about the Vatican running the White House if a Democrat is elected, Alexander. Those days are long behind them.
Now, what you are *not* getting, about the appeal to Pope Leo, is the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) which does tend to be pro-immigrant and, of course, the great number of Hispanic/Latinx Catholics who do vote Democrat.
https://www.usccb.org/
But the Democrats 'search' for a Christian white guy isn't going to be "does he believe all that stuff about the Trinity?", it's about "will he spout lines about 'Jesus says be nice' but sign on the dotted line for all our policies and positions?"
Remember, Biden was a "devout Catholic" who allegedly said the rosary, but had no problems with hosting trans attendees at a LGBTQ+ Pride party on the White House lawn or supporting abortion, sorry I mean reproductive rights:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65898998
Though he did get criticised for being insufficiently copious in the use of the term "abortion":
https://didbidensayabortionyet.org/
"BARELY…
Just once. Sorta. 468 days in. Not in every statement. Never without pressure.
After 224 days of refusing to use or say the word ‘abortion’—after Texas’ six-week ban went into effect—the Biden Administration first included the word ‘abortion’ once in a press statement. After 468 days in office, said the word abortion, once, after the leaked Supreme Court draft indicated that the justices are ready to overturn Roe v. Wade. President Biden has been in office for more than a year overseeing the current abortion crisis that will inevitably undo Roe v. Wade and he has yet to make a meaningful public statement himself about the crisis or use the word ‘abortion’ more than once. He has yet to meet with people who’ve had abortions to learn about our experiences.
The Biden-Harris Administration has never used the word ‘abortion’ in a statement commemorating the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized the right to an abortion. They didn’t use it in a statement after the failed vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act which would codify Roe v. Wade and enact federal protections for abortion access. He refused to say it in his State of the Union speech.
People who have abortions deserve better from our pro-choice President.
Say the word abortion, Joe!"
"Now, what you are *not* getting, about the appeal to Pope Leo, is the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) which does tend to be pro-immigrant"
How do they feel about _illegal_ immigration?
The Trump voters I've run across who feel motivated to express an opinion (not uncommon!) are largely fine with _legal_ immigrants*, which might put them and the USCCB in the same camp.
*I have witnessed a small number who would like to deport particular people for reasons of incompatible culture, but I haven't been able to pin them down on whether they mean legally or illegally came in. And there's a separate, possibly overlapping group arguing over jus soli.
I could argue the "incompatible culture" bit (of course, that does actually start with "we currently have people in America who are incompatible with civilization", and we have always had such people as a minority).
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/explaining-immigration-in-one-graph?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Generally speaking, the argument there is "let's make laws to prevent us from being overwhelmed with people who cannot and will not learn to live in our culture." (Presumably this comes with an argument of "deport even the ones legally in this country if they won't learn to live like us*")
*argument in terms of "Western Civilization" not language or some rot like that.
My consistent observation is that the editorialists who opine that Trump (or whoever…) should listen to the Pope would immediately mount the barricades should Trump declare that he would now govern in accordance with the tenets of Roman Catholicism.
I further observe that they Never quote the Pope when he mentions any sort of sin, the nature of the Priesthood, the necessity of Confession . . .
It’s almost as if they want him as a convenient symbol, but have no interest in sharing his faith.
Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the most progressive around, naturally is Presbyterian, though I sometimes wonder if John Knox would recognize his own faith.
> He's about as Irish Catholic as I am Hugenot, and there's a better chance for me seeing as how actual Hugenots arrived in the 17th century and settled around our county capital.
Yeah I suppose if I were often on record as often defending Trump I might conceivably be going on about the Irishness of Gavin Newsom today too.
Trump deletes ‘blasphemous’ image depicting himself as Jesus
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/13/trump-social-media-jesus-image-deleted-00869061
In military parlance it’s called ‘chaff’, putting a bunch of distractions in the air to hide the real danger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure)
I find it plausible that Newsom is "Irish Catholic" as the term is understood in the US (someone who was raised in the Catholic Church and who has ancestors who came to the US from Ireland) even if he's emphatically not "Irish Catholic" in the sense that term actually means in Ireland. A lot of Americans are only vaguely aware of the history of English conquest and colonization of Ireland, don't make the connection between that and Catholic/Protestant identity, and thus most Americans understand the labels in purely confessional terms.
I did take a superficial look into the Newsom family's religious identity just now, and found that Gavin was raised Catholic and that his father, William Newsom, was a practicing Catholic who attended a Jesuit prep school. However, I also found out that William made his fortune as a lawyer to the Getty Family, and that the Gettys were Ulster Protestants of Scottish extraction who came to the US only one generation before William was working for them. This bit rather undercuts Gavin's claim to be an "Irish Rebel", and also suggests that he at least should know better.
> This bit rather undercuts Gavin's claim to be an "Irish Rebel", and also suggests that he at least should know better.
It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.
Perhaps not, but sometimes I enjoy talking about things that don't matter.
Yeah, I guess I do too.
"This bit rather undercuts Gavin's claim to be an "Irish Rebel", and also suggests that he at least should know better."
It seems to be increasingly obvious that Gav has notions of running for president and he's re-crafting his image accordingly. The obvious attack on him is as a running-dog lackey so he's been talking about how he had an unprivileged upbringing (my mother worked three jobs to support us - because his miserly father clearly refused to pay adequate child support? I only got to visit the mansions of the billionaire family who employed my father!), is dyslexic (in what seems to be an unintentionally hilarious attempt to appeal to the black vote) and, sigh, banging on about being an Irish Catholic rebel (I suppose to try and lose the whiff of WASP bourgeoisie privilege hanging around him?)
Yes, Gav, James Connolly routinely dined at the Dublin equivalent of the French Laundry (rolling my eyes so hard they are falling out of their sockets).
The Irish bit probably comes in via the paternal grandmother whose surname was Brennan, but the paternal line (according to Wikipedia) are originally from Canada and set up as architects in San Francisco.
Even if Dad refused to put his hand in his pocket to support the ex-family after the divorce, he still managed to introduce Gav to the Gettys. Not every dyslexic paper-boy son of a three-job working single mother in SF got that chance!
And back when Gav was running for mayor, nobody seems to have heard of the hardscrabble childhood:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/NEWSOM-S-PORTFOLIO-Mayoral-hopeful-has-parlayed-2632672.php
"He's the wealthy young entrepreneur who took a stand against San Francisco's scandalous homeless problem - and through it built a formidable political base.
Now, as city government bleeds red ink, Supervisor Gavin Newsom, 35, says the grit and drive he showed in building a small-business empire sets him apart in the 2003 race to become San Francisco's next mayor.
"As a business person who has created jobs, met a payroll and balanced the books, I am uniquely qualified to meet the new fiscal crisis," he wrote in a recent pitch to campaign donors."
It was mentioned in passing, but mostly it was all about his background of family connections to the rich and powerful in SF:
"His grandfather, William A. Newsom, was a confidant of Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, the former San Francisco district attorney and two-term governor.
His aunt was married to the brother-in-law of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, the House minority leader.
His father, retired state appellate Justice William Newsom, is a longtime friend of Edmund "Jerry" Brown, also a former governor and now Oakland mayor; John Burton, the powerful state senator from San Francisco; and especially Getty - son of legendary oilman J. Paul Getty - his friend since they were classmates at St. Ignatius High School in the 1940s.
As a youth, Getty kept a room at the Newsom family's Marina District home, and later Justice Newsom served as a Getty lawyer and trusted family adviser, Justice Newsom recalled in an interview.
...Gavin Newsom said his childhood wasn't easy. His parents broke up when he was 2; his father moved to Placer County, while his late mother, Tessa, raised Gavin and his younger sister, Hilary, in San Francisco, sometimes working three jobs as a secretary, bookkeeper and waitress.
Newsom said he also had "pretty severe" dyslexia, a disorder that causes difficulty with writing and spelling, and sometimes reading and working with numbers. It still affects him today.
Newsom said he received a private education at the French-American bilingual school and Notre Dame de Victoire in the city, and, after he was unable to gain admission to a prep school, at public Redwood High School in Marin County.
When he needed help, his family's contacts came in handy, he acknowledged.
While applying for college, Newsom said, his family "called everybody we knew," including lawyer John Mallen, a friend of his father and a member of the Board of Regents at Santa Clara University, where he was given a partial baseball scholarship.
After graduating and earning a real estate license, Newsom said, he visited Walter Shorenstein, the real estate baron and major Democratic Party fund- raiser, who knew Newsom's father and grandfather.
At that 1991 meeting, Shorenstein told an aide, " 'Let's see what we can do at the Russ Building for Gavin,' " Newsom recalled. He said he spent an "intense" year working as an $18,000-per-year assistant for the Shorenstein Co."
He really owes it all to the Getty connections who bankrolled him from the start with his businesses, and if Mom did have to work three jobs to support the family then the only conclusion to draw from that is that Dad was mean with money and an astute enough lawyer to make sure she lost out during the divorce.
God bless Willie Brown, is there any SF Democratic politician male or female who *doesn't* owe him for the start? 😁
"Newsom, who told a reporter in 1998 that he wanted to be president of the United States, said he got into politics by volunteering on Mayor Willie Brown's 1995 campaign and hosting a fund-raiser for him in PlumpJack Cafe's private dining room.
In April 1996, Newsom was part of a San Francisco entourage that flew on the Getty family jet to a celebration in the mayor's hometown of Mineola, Texas.
Three months later, Brown put Newsom on the city Parking and Traffic Commission and in 1997 appointed him to the Board of Supervisors, filling a spot viewed in the political arena as reserved for a "straight, white male." He's been re-elected three times."
I was raised Presbyterian Church (USA) like Talarico, and had a front row seat to the denominational drama of recent decades (before exiting to become agnostic and eventually finding my way to a more traditional denomination).
It's a denomination where the clergy is more liberal than the laypeople, and in recent decades has pursued liberal theology (God as woman or gender-neutral, ordination of LGBT and unmarried sexually active people, hedging on the existence of hell and Satan, universal salvation without belief in Jesus, etc) while making little effort to retain more traditionally-minded congregations, aside from engaging in bitter lawsuits over the ownership of church buildings for congregations that voted to leave the denomination as a result of the changes.
I read a NYT article decades ago about a woman who escaped a religious cult but missed the sense of community. So she joined PCUSA, memorably describing it as "a church for people who don't believe in God."
Yes, it made me smile that the Democrat notion of "let's get a conservative type of guy out there to win over the mushy middle" is someone from one of the most liberal mainstream denominations who won't frighten the horses on any of the pet topics of social liberalisation.
Wow, really moving to the alt-right side there, guys!
I'd expect that he IS bleeding Catholics from his coalition, but it's confounded by them also being Hispanics.
Superficial take probably, but I find Trump feuding with the Pope actually funny. Two overgrown powers dunking on each other, with no danger of actual violence? Bring on the show.
<mildSnark>
>He condemned “aerial bombardment,” not aerial bombardment targeting civilians, but aerial bombardment itself
Pivot to 'nuke 'em from orbit'? It avoids the air (at the start)! :-)
</mildSnark>
Fog of War shit...
Middle East
1. Has there really been a ceasefire? Is it off? Is it on? Who the fuck knows? Trump told reporters on the tarmac at Andrews AFB that the two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran is "holding well." This was when he also, in passing, first announced that he was blockading Iranian ports. Iran continued launching missiles and drones at Israel and targets in the Gulf. Of course, Israel continued its military endeavors in Lebanon, but AFAIK, they were never included in the truce (nor invited to participate by the US). It’s clear that Team Trump wants a deal limited to Iran and the Gulf. I don’t know if their demands are still identical to the revivified Obama JCPOA (with the addition of free navigation of the Straits) or whether they're changing them as they go. Trump seems to be following Don Tzu's dictum: "A leader cannot lose if he doesn't have a goal." Iran, OTOH, wants something bigger, a deal that would rein in Israel in Lebanon. Good luck with that. Netanyahu has his own agenda, and he's said nothing about opening the Gulf.
2. I snorted my coffee Sunday morning while reading yesterday’s ISW assessment of the Gulf conflict: “Iran is using the existence of an unknown number of naval mines it laid in the Strait of Hormuz to force ships to use Iranian territorial waters to traverse the Strait, which enables Iran to shakedown these ships for fees while the ships are in Iranian territorial waters. This protection racket is illegal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.” Huh? The US/Israeli attack on Iran was unprovoked and violates international law (a nation can only go to war with another nation if attacked first, or if approved by the UN), but the clear-eyed analysts at ISW are whining about Iran’s “illegal protection racket”?
But after a day at the negotiation table, where our ace negotiator JD Vance was unable to reach a deal with the Iranians, Trump says we’ll blockade the Gulf. In Truth Social Screed Saturday, he wrote: "No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas." He also said that the US would continue clearing mines from the Strait of Hormuz in order to ensure a safe passage for allied shipping.” Of course, the only ships leaving through the Strait are tankers bound for China, so this may cause China to escalate. In the meantime, there are rumors that China is sending more radar equipment to Iran (but have they fixed the bugs in their equipment, yet?).
3. And what about that rescue of that downed pilot? Various analysts noticed that it sure was close to Iran’s nuclear facility in Isfahan. We seem to have lost at least two C-130 aircraft and at least one MH-6 helicopter in the operation. There was a suggestion that this operation was too big to be only a search and rescue mission, and that the rescue was a cover for grabbing Iran’s 441kg of enriched Uranium. Other analysts pooh-poohed this speculation because the C-130s would have been necessary to carry the MH-6 helicopters closer to the field of operations. My irreverent thought was that a plane designed to carry 19,000kg could easily handle 441kg of enriched Uranium, especially if you’re willing to leave an MH-6 behind. But I don’t really buy into this theory because it seems too imaginative for Trump or his Dunning-Kruger brain trust to have come up with. I wouldn’t put it past Israel to try something like this, but they’re limited in the distances they can operate.
4. Previous to the operation, Hegsith purged 20 Generals from the Pentagon for purportedly being too woke. It’s hard to imagine Pentagon generals being woke. Were they telling the Hegsith things he didn’t want to hear?
5. And I missed this. Last month, according to Reuters, the U.S. government requested that major commercial satellite firms indefinitely restrict access to high-resolution imagery of the Middle East, including Iran, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, and the Gulf states. Planet Labs and Vantor said they would comply. Vantor said they were already doing this voluntarily. Planet Labs took it a step further, saying they’d hide all past imagery of these regions, too! Supposedly, the US wants to prevent adversaries from using satellite imagery to monitor US and Israeli forces, but at least half a dozen other non-US satellite imaging concerns are not affected by the ban. And Iran already has access to Russian satellite imagery (and possibly Chinese).
Therefore, I suspect the administration wants to hide its losses from the US media. For instance, the March 1st Iranian drone strike on a U.S. tactical operations center in Kuwait's Shuaiba port was significantly more severe than initial reports indicated. It killed six U.S. service members and wounded over 30 others, with injuries including traumatic brain injury and burns. Several injured personnel were evacuated to medical centers in Germany and the U.S. for "urgent" treatment, with reports of at least one amputation. Accounts say the base had no anti-drone radar systems, and they received no warning of the incoming attack. The base is non-functioning now, and its operations have been shifted to Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Reports of serious damage to other US bases in the region are starting to filter out. Jake Godin, a senior researcher for Bellingcat (an independent open-source investigative group), says it’s gotten a lot harder to figure out what’s real (my paraphrasing). In response, Bellingcat introduced an open-source tool they’re calling the Iran Conflict Damage Proxy Map. They’re using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery captured by a European Space Agency satellite to estimate damage to ground structures.
https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2026/04/07/tool-damage-assessment-destruction-sentinel-satellite-imagery-iran-us-gulf/
I gave it a few locations to analyze. The larger the area you give, the longer it takes to process. By the URL, it may only work for Middle Eastern locations. I just plugged in the Ust-Luga oil terminal in Leningrad Oblast, and I’m still waiting for a result (update... it's still processing this morning, so I think this app only works for the MIddle East).
https://bellingcat-ee.projects.earthengine.app/view/middle-east-change
Sorry to get off on a minor tangent, but you wrote “It’s hard to imagine Pentagon generals being woke.” I think you are describing a lack of imagination on your part rather than a property of the top brass. That said, your next sentence may very well still be true.
I disagree with Trump on just about everything, but I certainly see the logic of not having the Strait closed to everyone except Iran. Though even here, I am sure I will disagree with the president on how he goes about solving it.
OK. Even if we've got some generals who don't mind trans people or want to give blacks and women opportunities in the military, that doesn't mean they can't do their job. Really, WTF? And what is the precise definition of "woke"? The whole anti-woke schtick is a scam to purge people from the military (and from academia) who the MAGAs don't like.
LOL. Yeah, you seem to have special little definition of woke. I will opt out of the discussion. Proceed on without me!
Come on, what's your definition of woke? Don't wimp out on me now! Seems like there are some significant rhetorical and functional differences in how the original woke defined themselves and how the Right defines them. And I don't think the senior generals in the Pentagon fit either the Left's original definition or strictly into the Right's modified definition.
I am not of the right, but I would say Woke ideology divides society between oppressors and the oppressed and judges oppression as revealed by unequal outcomes.
For the Woke, it is morally imperative to side with the oppressed against the oppressors (aka those doing well), and to attempt to re-engineer society as necessary to accomplish these objectives. This re-engineering includes excluding opportunity to those not agreeing with this world view.
And you believe this applied to some US generals to a degree that it impeded their ability to do their work, to the degree that they had to be removed?
Edit: Also, as it always is with that word, I see 3 different definitions of that term right now on my screen, from 3 different people. Let nobody say that the right suffers from excessive groupthink!
https://imgur.com/a/P4MG0va
> I am not of the right, but I would say Woke ideology divides society between oppressors and the oppressed and judges oppression as revealed by unequal outcomes.
> For the Woke, it is morally imperative to side with the oppressed against the oppressors (aka those doing well), and to attempt to re-engineer society as necessary to accomplish these objectives. This re-engineering includes excluding opportunity to those not agreeing with this world view.
By that definition, much of MAGA is Woke too! They disagree on *who* is being oppressed, but the tactics and epistemics are the same.
This is part of wokeness, but it's also partly a coalition, so a clean, principled definition won't match reality. The term doesn't apply to viewing any disadvantaged group as oppressed. The South has the most persistent poverty in the US, but you won't be considered woke for arguing the South is oppressed.
Giving women special "regimens" that they have to fulfill, rather than asking everyone to meet a specific regimen, in order to serve on the front lines? I'd say that's woke, it's giving different criteria for different people.
I have gone several rounds in various ACX comments sections asking people what they think "woke" actually means. BY FAR the most common reply is something like "don't bullshit me, you know what it means," but I've had several people give complete and good-faith answers. And to the best of my recollection, the answers have A. all been different from each other and B. not covered common cases where I see people in the wider world referring to things as "woke."
The moral of the story is, everybody who unironically uses the word "woke" as it it means something[1] seems to genuinely, confidently believe that the word has a singular, clear, unambiguous meaning. But that narrative seems to fall apart under even the slightest scrutiny.
[1] And if you're not aware of this, you should be: many millions of English speakers (myself included) consider the word very nearly meaningless. It indicates that the speaker considers something to be both blue-tribe-affiliated and worthy of contempt, but it doesn't say anything about the world outside the speaker's own head.
I can’t help being amused by your comment (in a good way), since my initial discussion with Beowulf was generated around how he was defining woke. He seemed to define woke as people who give trans, gays and women (who can do their job) opportunities. I pointed out that if that is what “woke” means to him, that there was no point in going on with the discussion. He then asked me to try to define it. I did my best, though I agree it is a nebulous, ambiguous term used and abused in many ways, especially by those of the far right.
My quick definition was as follows:
“Woke ideology divides society between oppressors and the oppressed and judges oppression as revealed by unequal outcomes. For the Woke, it is morally imperative to side with the oppressed against the oppressors (aka those doing well), and to attempt to re-engineer society as necessary to accomplish these objectives. This re-engineering includes excluding opportunity to those not agreeing with this world view.”
You may be right that the term is so nebulous and abused that we are best off trying to avoid it.
Woke is a circular firing squad. You can't define it, because the instant you do, someone comes up with a "new victim!" that must be supported/enhanced/discussed. Oh, and woke is very often happiest (or most venomous) turning on its "former friends" -- see "The Nostalgia Chick."
(You can take this in the spirit of the Devil's Dictionary, it's not meant to be more than an incisive critique).
> Even if we've got some generals who don't mind trans people or want to give blacks and women opportunities in the military, that doesn't mean they can't do their job.
As far as Hegseth is concerned, doing exactly that is acting against American interests. Does it matter if you're "doing your job" if you're also acting against the interests of your employers?
Thought experiment: If Secretary of War KegSith demands that all the senior officers in the Pentagon swear a loyalty oath to President Crump, but they refuse, because they don't want to abrogate their oath to uphold the Constitution, are they acting against the interest of their employer?
Answer: Yes. But is it legal under the Constitution to fire them?
That's for the Supreme Court to decide, isn't it? What matters at the end of the day is what the people holding the cards think.
"Does it matter if you're "doing your job" if you're also acting against the interests of your employers?"
Emphatically yes, it does matter. If you hold the behavior of any employee of any organization up to scrutiny, you will find them "acting against the interests of their employers" sometimes. Indeed, asking for a higher wage for your work (instead of accepting a lower one) is against the interests of your employer, who would in nearly all cases prefer to pay you less. So too is taking a 2-minute bathroom break when they might have been able to take only a 1-minute bathroom break. The interests of employer and employee conflict in hundreds of small ways, every day.
The question is whether employing that person benefits the employer *on the net.* Given that we are talking about people who each have multiple decades of military experience, asserting that them doing nothing more than *holding particular views* is enough to more than cancel out all the benefit of competence and experience they bring to the organization is a claim that should, at the very least, carry a nontrivial burden of evidence.
This is the gorram military. Each and every generalship is fought over, tooth and nail, because it's "either get promoted, or become a civilian." So, let's just say... there's a lot of people with "multiple decades of military experience" sitting around, and each firing (except for the disruption of "new guy in charge") doesn't change the stripes of the general much.
Please. Assume no general can "do his job" unless they actually can break the wargame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
America does not assume that any general is worth his buttons, because they ALL get there by being PC, and knowing how to politick and bootlick.
In case of Actual Total War, America maintains an Actual Combat Register of "People to Promote to Actual Positions of Authority" -- roughly speaking, these are the assholes that broke the Millennium Challenge. They are NOT PC, and only get promoted because they're too insubordinate, and it just got to be too much of a pain in the ass writing them up all the time -- and they are NOT GENERALS.
Now, that said, what is the precise definition of woke? Created "woke" advertising that completely crashed the Army Recruiting numbers**? Vetoed the Army Draft over concerns the woke recruiters would wind up shot? (rural folks are less patriotic these days). [And I'm being kind here and not busting the ship that ran aground...]
**yes, this got fixed during Biden's administration -- I do pay attention.
https://abcnews.com/Health/hegseths-newly-proposed-military-fitness-standards-compare-existing/story?id=126110550
Just a basic walkthrough of "what's being changed." Well, one aspect of it.
On a more personal level, can we please not enroll people into the US Military who will break multiple bones because they laughed too hard? That seems... rather dumb.
But consider: ever since the drone attack on literally the first day of the war the US has suffered *zero* deaths. None. I’m not counting that tanker crash in Iraq because it was accidental and well away from any combat zone. Fighting a war while suffering almost zero deaths (and inflicting thousands on the enemy) is a magnificent success.
How do you know we've suffered zero deaths since the drone attack on the Kuwait base? Public media reports put the number of US soldiers killed since the start of the war at at least 15, but Centcom has refused to provide a count of those who've been killed since the start of the current conflict. In fact, they initially mistated (lied about?) the death count from the Kuwait strike (but maybe some personnel died from their wounds after the fact in the hospital). And we've got an anonymous Pentagon leaker saying the casualties have been much higher.
Anyway, the Pentagon has every reason to obfuscate. Not saying they are, but I wouldn't take their statements at face value.
Yeah... but the Pentagon also has every reason to obfuscate the number of American soldiers dead in the Ukraine. At least in this war, we've stopped pretending all americans are immortal.
Did the tanker crash on a mission related to the war? Then its crew were casualties of that war. Casualty has nothing to do with whether or not it was caused by the enemy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualty_(person)
"Fighting a war while suffering almost zero deaths (and inflicting thousands on the enemy) is a magnificent success."
Emphatically no, it is not. (Non-genocidal) wars are not generally fought for the purpose of "inflicting [deaths] on the enemy;" that's a middle-schooler's notion of what war is. Wars are fought to achieve specific strategic objectives, dictated by the political goals of the belligerent states.
There is no possible casualty ratio that could count as a "magnificent success" if it results in strategic defeat. Of course, we have no idea how the U.S. is faring strategically in Iran because it's not at all clear what the U.S.'s strategic goals for this war ARE (or if it actually *has* any). The only strategic goals the Oval Office has articulated are 1. Removing Iran's nuclear capability, 2. toppling the Iranian Regime and 3. re-opening the Strait of Hormuz. I'm sure I don't need to point out why achieving only 3 without either 1 or 2 would count as a strategic defeat. And both 1 and 2 seem significantly MORE distant than they did two months ago.
By the best measures we have, the U.S. is losing. The fact that it is murdering thousands of Iranians in the process is hardly something to brag about.
Decisive Tang Strategic Victory.
Why can't wikipedia be fun again?
Beowulf was kind enough to post some supporting scuttlebutt for concrete action on 1) -- look at a map.
Trump's definition of "toppling the Iranian Regime" seems to be idiosyncratic. It may mean "completely removing their military's ability to project force."
Reopening the Strait of Hormuz by itself would count as a strategic defeat.
But when you look at a President saying "not much that seems credible" (the nuclear bit was in particular kind of rich -- didn't we destroy those last year?), you should probably suspect there are Bigger Factors at Play.
My understanding is that the uranium isn't something one can just sneak in and grab. It's (presumed to be) in the bottom of a facility buried under a mountain of rubble. It would require weeks of effort and lots of excavation equipment to uncover. And that's under ideal circumstances when people *aren't* shooting at you.
Presumably, those are the centrifuges, and how one generates the uranium. The Uranium itself can be stored... anyplace you want. Fukushima stored all its spent fuel onsite, which was the real danger after the tsunami.
Reasonable sounding pushback against one of Scott's posts. Has anyone else read this?
https://sablegm.substack.com/p/one-click-wikipedia-test
I just skimmed the first three paragraphs and saw so many signposts saying "no one should ever read this except to find a target for their next Two Minutes' Hate" that I am somewhat baffled that anyone here would have read and then recommended the whole thing.
The tone is vehement, but the point seems like it should be considered.
I agree with the pushback/point, even though I too dislike the tone. Pretty sure I made this exact point in one of my comments to the original post.
It's rude, but not egregiously so, and not in a way that compromises its substantive points. Saying Scott has a "fallible, mortal mind" is a pretty toothless insult, accusing Scott of failing at basic research is reasonable even if we disagree about the merits of his article, and claiming Scott is confused about the meaning of POSIWID is an accurate description of his article.
"Fallible mind" is okay, "blackened soul" is not. I have Strong Opinions on moral and ethical issues, but even I am chastened enough by the doctrines of my religion not to pronounce infallibly on the state of anyone's immortal soul, because I am not God and only God knows the true and final state of that.
SSC as a community values respectful and self controlled communications, and heavily discourages performative outrage, insults and generally angry flailing. This is great, but sometimes I worry we veer into considering all of the above to be evidence. In an adversarial environment, take care if presented with:
There are reasonable voices on both sides of the infinitude of primes, however the majority of evidence pushes us toward considering their number to be finite. First of all, there is a strong western tradition, starting with Zeno, arguing that…
Alongside
You stupid slut. Give me your finite primes, multiply them together, subtract one. If you can’t work it out from there, kill yourself. You’re a racist.
Hey asshole it’s (((add one))), are you glowing?
that being said, not updating on the second category is pretty safe if you can manage not to counter-update
I got interested in the fellow who came up with the saying and ended up reading his wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer
He had an interesting life. I was trying to understand why he settled on the word “purpose“ because it creates a lot of room for quibbling. I found out he was very much a Marxist (actually Trotsky was his main man) and it helped me understand better. He was certainly an opportunistic man; he had a chequered career. The phrase was most applied to sociopolitical contexts in his own thinking (iiuc.)
I think Scott was really just expressing annoyance at how it’s bandied around (and that divisive word “purpose” which raises its own issues.) The takedown was a little too earnest in that sense.
Did you end up figuring out why he chose the word 'purpose'? To be honest, I still don't get it. It strikes me as sloppy, bundling together a couple of banal claims: that some system custodians lie about their intentions for public relations reasons; and that outcomes, rather than intentions, matter. Both trivially defensible, both boring. The only interesting thing about the phrase is the odd wording that challenges the -existence- of intent separate from outcome.
If anything, Marxists are keenly aware that systems evolve historically more than they're explicitly designed, and they're aware of the failure modes of just intentions. Trotsky in his critique of the nomenklatura certainly was.
>Did you end up figuring out why he chose the word 'purpose'?
Not really. I thought the Marxist angle cleared the fog a little bit for me but as I think about it I realise that I don’t really know enough about that to make it click. He was going to apply his theories to Chile, before the military takeover ended the experiment.