ChatGPT does Advent of Code 2023
LLM are all the rage and people are worried that they will soon replace programmers (or, indeed, every possible office job) so I decided to do an experiment to see how well ChatGPT-4 does against Advent of Code 2023.
What is Advent of Code
Advent of Code (henceforth AoC) is an annual programming "event", held by Eric Wastl, that takes place during the first 25 days of december. Each day at midnight a problem unlocks, consisting of an input file and a description of the required solution (either a number or a sequence of letters and numbers) to be determined by processing the input file. To solve the problem you have to submit to the website the correct solution. Once you do part 2 of the problem unlocks, usually a harder version of the problem in part 1. You don't have to submit any code so, in theory, you could solve everything by hand, however, usually, this is intractable and writing a program to do the work for you is the only easy way to solve the problem.
There's also a leaderboard where participants are scored based on how fast they submitted a solution.
Problems start very easy on day 1 (sometimes as easy as just asking for a program that sums all numbers in the input) and progress towards more difficult ones, but they never get very hard: a CS graduate should be able to solve all problems, except maybe 1 or 2, in a couple of hours each.
Prior history
This isn't the first time ChatGPT (or LLMs) was used to participate in Advent of Code. In fact last year (2022) it was big news that users of ChatGPT were able, in multiple days, to reach the top of the global leaderboard. And this was enough of a concern that Eric explicitly banned ChatGPT users from submitting solutions before the global leaderboard was full (of course he also doesn't have any way to actually enforce this ban). Some people even expected GPT-4 to finish the whole year.
A lot of noise was made of GPT-3.5 performance in AoC last year but the actual results were quite modest and LLM enthusiasts behaved in a very unscientific way, by boasting successes but becoming very quiet when it started to fail. In fact ChatGPT struggled to get through day 3 and 5 and probably couldn't solve anything after day 5.
Why do AoC with GPT?
I think it's as close to the perfect benchmark as you can get. The problems are roughly in order of increasing difficulty so you can see where it stops being able to solve. Since almost all of the problems in any given year are solvable by a CS graduate in a couple of hours is a good benchmark for AGI. And since all of the problems are novel the solutions can't come from overfitting.
Also around release people tried GPT-4 on AoC 2022 and found that it performed better so it would be interesting to see how much of the improvement was overfitting vs actual improvement
Methodology
I don't pay for ChatGPT Plus, I only have a paid API key so I used instead a command line client, chatgpt-cli and manually ran the output programs. The prompt I used for part 1 was:
Write a python program to solve the following problem, the program should read its input from a file passed as argument on the command line:
followed by the copypasted text of the problem. I manually removed from the prompt all the story fluff that Eric wrote, which constitutes a small amount of help for ChatGPT. If the output had trivial syntax mistakes I fixed them manually.
I gave up on a solution if it didn't terminate within 15 minutes, and let ChatGPT fail 3 times before giving up. A failure constitutes either an invalid program or a program that runs to completion but returns the wrong output value.
If the program ran to completion with the wrong answer I used the following prompt:
There seems to be a bug can you add some debug output to the program so we can find what the bug is?
If the program ran into an error I would say so and copy the error message.
If the first part was solved correctly the prompt for the second part would be:
Very good, now I want you to write another python program, that still reads input from a command line argument, same input as before, and solves this additional problem:
I decided I would stop the experiment after 4 consecutive days where ChatGPT was unable to solve part 1.
ChatGPT Plus
Because I was aware of the possibility that ChatGPT Plus would be better I supplemented my experiment with two other sources. The first one is the Youtube channel of Martin Zikmund (hencefort "youtuber") who did videos on how to solve the problems in C# as well as trying to solve them using ChatGPT (with a Plus account).
The second one was the blog of a ChatGPT enthusiast "Advent of AI" (henceforth enthusiast) who tried to solve the problems using ChatGPT Plus and then also wrote a blog about it using ChatGPT Plus. Since the blog is generated by ChatGPT it's absolute shit and potentially contains hallucinations, however the github repo with the transcripts is valuable.
The enthusiast turned out to be completely useless: it resorted often to babystepping ChatGPT through to the result and he stopped on day 6 anyway.
The youtuber was much more informative, for the most part he stuck to letting ChatGPT solve the problem on its own. However he did give it, on a few occasions, some big hints, either by debugging ChatGPT's solution for it or explaining it how to solve the problem. I have noted this in the results.
Results
| part 1 | part 2 | notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| day 1 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 2 | OK | OK | |
| day 3 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 4 | OK | OK | Uses brute force solution for part 2 |
| day 5 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 6 | FAIL | N/A | ChatGPT Plus solves both parts |
| day 7 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 8 | OK | FAIL | ChatGPT Plus solves part 2 if you tell it what the solution is |
| day 9 | FAIL | N/A | ChatGPT Plus solves both parts |
| day 10 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 11 | FAIL | N/A | ChatGPT Plus could solve part 1 with a big hint |
| day 12 | FAIL | N/A |
The perofrmance of GPT-4 this year was a bit worse than GPT-3.5 last year. Last year GPT-3.5 could solve 3 days on its own (1, 2 and 4) while GPT-4 this year could only solve 2 full days (2 and 4).
ChatGPT Plus however did a bit better, solving on its own 4 days (2, 4, 6 and 9). This is probably down to its ability to see the problem input (as an attachment), rather than just the problem prompt and the example input to better sytem prompts and to just being able to do more round-trips through the code interpreter (I gave up after 3~4 errors / wrong outputs).
One shouldn't read too much on its ability to solve day 9, the problem difficulty doesn't increase monotonically and day 9 just happened to be very easy.
Conclusions
Overall my subjective impression is that not much has changed, it can't solve anything that requires something more complicated than just following instructions and its bad at following instructions unless they are very simple.
It could be that LLMs have reached their plateau. Or maybe Q* or Bard Ultra or Grok Extra will wipe the floor next year, like GPT-4 was supposed to do this year. It's hard not to feel jaded about the hype cycle.
I have a bunch of observations about the performance of ChatGPT on AoC which I will report here in no particular order.
Debugging / world models
Most humans are incapable of solving AoC problems on the first try without making mistakes so I wouldn't expect a human-level AI to be able to do it either (if it could it would be by definition super-human).
Some of my prompting strategy went into the direction of trying to get ChatGPT to debug its flawed solution. I was asking it to add debug prints to figure out where the logic of the solution went wrong.
ChatGPT never did this: its debugging skills are completely non-existent. If it encounters an error it will simply rewrite entire functions, or more often the entire program, from scratch.
This is drastically different from what programmers.
This is interesting because debugging techniques aren't really taught. By and large programming textbooks teach you to program, not how to fix errors you wrote. And yet people do pick up debugging skills, implicitly.
ChatGPT has the same access to programming textbooks that humans have and yet it does not learn to debug. I think this points to the fact that ChatGPT hasn't really learned to program, that it doesn't have a "world model", a logical understanding of what it is doing when it's programming.
The bruteforce way to get ChatGPT to learn debugging I think would be to scrape hundreds of hours of programming livestreams from twitch and feed it to the training program after doing OCR on the videos and speech-to-text on the audio. That's the only source of massive amounts of worked out debugging examples that I can think of.
Difficulty
Could it be that this year of AoC was just harder than last year's and that's why GPT-4 didn't do well? Maybe.
Difficulty is very hard to gauge objectively. There's scatter plots for leaderboard fill-up time but time-to-complete isn't necessarily equivalent difficulty and the difference between this year and last year isn't big anyway (note: the scatter plots aren't to scale unfortunately).
My own subjective impression is also that this year (so far) was not harder.
The best evidence for an increase in difficulty is day 1 part 2, which contained a small trap in which both human participants and ChatGPT fell.
I think this points to a problem with this AIs trained with enormous amounts of training data: you can't really tell how much better they are. Ideally you would just test GPT-4 on AoC 2022, but GPT-4 training set contains many copies of AoC 2022's solutions so it's not really a good benchmark anymore.
Normally you would take out a portion of the training set to use as test set but with massive training set this is impossible, nobody knows what's in them and so nobody knows how many times each individual training example is replicated in them.
I wonder if OpenAI has a secret test dataset that they don't put on the internet anywhere to avoid training set contamination.
Some people have even speculated that the problems this year were deliberately formulated to foil ChatGPT, but Eric actually denied that this is the case.
Overfitting
GPT 4 is 10x larger than GPT 3.5 and it does much better on a bunch of standard tests, for example the bar exam.
Why did it not do much better on AoC? If it isn't difficulty it could be overfitting. It has simply memorized the answers to a bunch of standardized tests.
Is this the case? My experience with AoC day 7 points towards this. The problem asks to write a custom string ordering function, the strings in questions represent hands of cards (A25JQ is ace, 2, 5 jack and queen) and the order it asks for is similar to Poker scoring. However it is not Poker.
This is a really simple day and I expected ChatGPT would be able to solve it without problems, since you just have to follow instructions. And yet it couldn't it was inesorably pulled towards writing a solution for Poker rather than for this problem.
My guess is that this is an example of overfitting in action. It's seen too many examples of poker in its training set to be able to solve this quasi-poker thing.
What is poetry? Well, I used to think I had some sort of idea and could at least distinguish a poem from ordinary prose when I saw one, but apparently such attitudes belong back in the Ark.
This, to me, is not a poem. But by the canons of modern taste, it sure is one! Some better and more astute critic referred to "chopped-up prose" in the context of modern poetry, and that is what this is (at least, to my eyes). Remove the line breaks, and you have a bog-standard piece for online space-filling. It'd fit perfectly in one of those cooking or hobby blogs where the producer is semi-professional and needs page scrolling to generate income, so they fill up the spaces with tons of reminiscences about Grandma in the kitchen on those summer/autumn/winter days cooking up the recipe, and tons of filler blah, until you eventually get to the recipe or knitting pattern or advice on how to embezzle from your employer.
I'm not expecting modern poetry to neatly rhyme and fit into the patterns of past poems, but I do at least expect a poem. Not a 'pome'.
Irish Linen, by Lane Shipsey
Pure Irish Linen
a phrase from long ago
woven into those plain tea-towels
that smoothed away wet suds
from Mother’s wedding set
Her good linen cloths
were kept to buff glass and china
or left safely in the drawer
while gaudier prints took on the grime
and stains of daily wear
I teased her for it then,
not knowing the grown-up equation
of good with expensive
And you didn’t buy Pure Irish Linen,
it was a thing you were given
A cloth spun and woven
from flax pulled and scutched
across the border, a fact on which
we did not dwell much, in Dublin
where we never called it Ulster linen
The words Pure, Irish, and Linen
no longer form an automatic cluster
Instead we buy the best fabrics we can muster
regardless of origin
whilst a machine blows our dishes dry.
As I said, remove the line breaks and you have a twee, faux-folksy piece of musings suitable for anything from a mommy blog to a chin-stroking piece on Norn Iron and how we down South approach it to a meditation on modern living and/or cottagecore aspirations, applicable for print or online media, traditional or social.
Edition version below and you look me in the eye and insist "No, that is a true real poem", I dare you.
"Pure Irish Linen" - a phrase from long ago, woven into those plain tea-towels that smoothed away wet suds from Mother’s wedding set. Her good linen cloths were kept to buff glass and china or left safely in the drawer while gaudier prints took on the grime and stains of daily wear.
I teased her for it then, not knowing the grown-up equation of "good" with "expensive". And you didn’t buy Pure Irish Linen, it was a thing you were given.
A cloth spun and woven from flax pulled and scutched across the border, a fact on which we did not dwell much in Dublin, where we never called it "Ulster" linen.
The words Pure, Irish, and Linen no longer form an automatic cluster. Instead, we buy the best fabrics we can muster regardless of origin, whilst a machine blows our dishes dry.
This has been a howl into the abyss on behalf of dinosaurs everywhere.
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Affirmative Action Empire by Terry Martin deals with the Soviet Union’s nationalities policy in the period from 1923 to 1939. I picked it up based on my interest in ethnic politics in colonial and post-colonial states. While it seems well-researched and was very interesting at points, I’d call it a book for specialists rather than one of general interest. It filled in a lot of details, but didn’t have many surprises, and I finished it without gaining any wholly new insights into the broader topic of ethnopolitical competition.
Before I go further, I hear you ask: Wait a minute, was the Soviet Union a colonial state? I contend that for practical purposes, yes. The Soviets didn’t think of themselves that way – Martin says that Lenin was comparable to Woodrow Wilson for anti-Imperialist rhetoric. But the Soviet Union inherited the geopolitical boundaries and governing infrastructure of the old Russian Empire, a vast entity encompassing millions of square miles and numerous ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups. For convenience sake, I’ll be referring to the non-Russian population of the USSR as “subject peoples”. Since the new government didn’t intend to grant any of these subject peoples political or economic independence, they were effectively sitting on the old tsar’s throne.
If I were to summarize the Soviet nationalities policy in a single sentence, it would be: “a f*cking mess.” Throughout the period in question, the Soviets were torn between a) their desire to encourage national self-expression on the part of the subject peoples in the belief that it would enhance Soviet power and b) their intense mistrust of any possible social or political competitor to the central government. Martin differentiates between the “positive line”, associated with the first impulse and the “negative line”, associated with the second. The positive line fostered celebrations of national language, culture, etc, while the negative line brutally suppressed any unsanctioned nationalist activity. Critically, there doesn’t seem to have been a clear line between sanctioned and prohibited forms of national self-expression. Rather, the line was constantly in flux, as a result of intra-party conflicts and the changes in the geopolitical environment. More than once, Martin recounts stories of mid-level figures who were caught on the wrong side of the line by a sudden shift in the prevailing winds. Revolutionary politics being the cutthroat business it was, these figures usually paid a severe price for their miscalculation. At best, they lost their position. At worst, they went to the gulag or the firing squad.
The Soviet’s initially indulgent attitude towards national self-expression had several drivers. The first was Marxist ideology, which asserted that nationalism was one of the necessary stages on the road to communism. Second was the assumption that a pro-nationalities policy would make the subject peoples feel more invested in the new Soviet state. Lastly was “the Piedmont Principle”, the belief that encouraging nationalism amongst the Soviet Union’s subject peoples would actually help the USSR project influence beyond its borders i.e. the Belarussians within the USSR could be used to influence the Belarussians in Poland, etc. The Soviets would ultimately prove to be badly mistaken in this last assumption, and this realization would trigger a major shift in policy. More on that later.
The ”positive line” of the nationalities policy took several forms. First was linguistic preferencing, i.e. the right of the various subject peoples to be educated and conduct business in their own language. This point, seemingly minor in comparison to other measures like land redistribution, occupies a good chunk of Martin’s book, and also seems to have absorbed a great deal of attention from the highest levels of the Soviet leadership. My guess is that this is because it was a relatively low-cost way for the central government to signal their support for subject peoples. Material support, what we would nowadays call “development aid”, was expensive and the object of fierce competition. Political or economic independence was obviously out of the question. Ergo, linguistic preferencing.
In spite of numerous decrees and directives, linguistic preferencing never got as far as either the Politburo or would-be nationalists would have wished. Martin says this this because the Soviets never backed up these decrees with the USSR’s most effective way of signaling commitment to a policy: the gulag. Local officials naturally spent a good bit of energy on figuring out exactly what would and would not get them sent to Siberia. When they realized that failures to meet various linguistic targets (hire X percent of Y language speakers, publish X documents in indigenous language, etc) rarely led to more than a stern talking to, they de-prioritized accordingly. This tendency was exacerbated by the fact that the “negative line” occasionally did crack down on supposed “bourgeois nationalists” whose support for linguistic preferencing seemed a little too enthusiastic. Naturally, prudent officials chose to play it safe and give lip service to linguistic preferencing while putting little actual weight behind it.
Another component of the “positive line” was land redistribution. This took place mostly in the “Soviet East”, the region you now call Central Asia if you’re being scholarly or “the Stans” if you’re feeling snarky. Then as now, these countries were relatively under-developed and only lightly touched by western influences. A number of efforts were made to redistribute prime agricultural land from Russian settlers to the indigenous population in these regions. This went exactly as well as you’d expect. In my experience, the desire to hold on to what you have is virtually a universal constant of human nature; I can only presume this goes double for Russian peasants living close to starvation for generations. There was much discontent, and occasionally outright bloodshed, mixed in with forced relocation and ethnic cleansing. In the case of Kazahkstan the forced relocation was done with such a heavy hand that the Politburo
actually rebuked the local security services for their handling of the issue.
Martin identifies poverty, land ownership disputes, and a relatively recent date of colonization by Russian settlers as the major factors driving ethnic conflict throughout the USSR. Given that these conditions were so prevalent in the Soviet East, it seems unsurprising that the USSR’s “de-colonization efforts”, to include land redistribution ultimately never got very far. As Martin puts it, the Soviets inherited a segregated society in the region, and while they abolished legal segregation, they soon accepted de facto segregation – in living spaces, in work environments, and even in lines for rations – as the price of doing business. In one example, a Soviet factory inspector noticed that the workers barracks were broken down along ethnic lines. When he asked why, he was told that there were fewer brawls that way.
To me, however, the most interesting aspect of the “positive line” was a campaign of “affirmative action” that corresponds almost precisely to the modern use of the word. The Soviets made a concerted effort to recruit members of the national minorities to jobs within the administrative state – in other words, to bring them into the professional managerial class as we now call it. In effect, it was an attempt to manufacture a new elite, one which was presumably more loyal to the state, system, and party which had given them their position. Martin doesn’t explicitly say this, but I think we can infer it.
To me, this raises all sorts of fascinating questions. Was this new elite actually more loyal to the USSR? (The fact that when the Soviet Union eventually collapsed, someone like Heydar Aliyev could transition seamlessly into an Azerbaijani nationalist after 28 years as KGB officer suggests that they probably weren’t). Did they clash with traditional elites within their own communities, or they mostly recruited from said traditional elites? (Given that elite=landowner in most societies up until very recently, and that the Soviet Union was notoriously not fond of land owners, I suspect the former, but I could be wrong). Et cetera, et cetera. Unfortunately, Martin doesn’t share my fascination with intra-elite competition, so he doesn’t explore these questions very much.
There are some insights to be gleaned, however. For example, there is some discussion of the “Red/Expert problem.” In a paranoid state like the USSR, which prioritizes loyalty above all else, how do you deal with the fact that certain highly-technical enterprises can only be run with the assistance of specialists of dubious loyalty? For a striking example of this problem in action, consider Sergei Korolev, who after six years in the gulag, rose to become head of the Soviet Rocketry program, because the USSR could not afford to fall too far behind in the arms race. The Soviets faced an analogous problem when trying to promote individuals of the desired nationality into leadership positions in technical departments.
One answer, apparently, is to have figureheads who hold the title, but leave the actual work to others, nominally lower-ranking. In one example, neither the head nor deputy of an oblast (an administrative unit that seems to correspond roughly to a county, I am happy to be corrected on this because I’m really not sure) agricultural ministry actually had an office or desk. Instead, the ministry was de facto being run by a non-party specialist. Martin draws a parallel with Malaysia’s “Ali Baba businesses”.
This whole thing caused me to reflect on a deficiency in the “simple model” of societal hierarchies. There’s a tendency to think of hierarchies as strictly linear, something like this:
Elites
Middle Class
Working Class
Applying this to the USSR, we might construct a model with the central committee at the top and rural non-party members at the bottom. In fact though, an examination of the structure of the USSR would reveal a complex web of different agencies and officials whose authority and responsibility overlapped in complex ways
[I can't post the diagram on the site for some reason. Take my word that's a mess)
I’m oversimplifying the the hideous tangle that was the CPSU, but that only reinforces the point I’m trying to make, which is that hierarchies don’t actually work like this in practice. The reality of power relationships is that they’re always in flux, and that multiple parallel hierarchies can coexist and intersect in surprising ways. A more accurate model might be something like:
[Another diagram I can't post]
I can’t find any information about whether Korolev himself ever became a member of the communist party; for the point I’m trying to make, we’ll assume the answer is no. As a non-red expert, Korolev was in theory subordinate to the party apparatus. But as a key leader in an area of vital strategic importance, Korolev presumably enjoyed access and influence well beyond that of most low-ranking party members. The likely outcome of any conflict between Korolev and a party member would depend on who that party member was, what their connections within the party were relative to Korolev, the nature of dispute, et cetera. Whatever the theoretical great chain of being that bound the Soviet Union together, in practice there would always be room for competition. This room for competition is exacerbated by the fact that the upper echelons of any hierarchy, by their nature, tend to be dominated by fiercely ambitious individuals who are quick to exploit any opening to advance their own agenda. In the words of that great strategic thinker, Jack Sparrow, at the end of the day, the only rules that really matter are what you can do and what you can’t. The true balance of power was thus constantly being re-negotiated.
This isn’t a new idea of course, though I’m not sure how often I’ve seen it formalized. C.S. Lewis wrote of the “Inner Ring”, the self-appointed clique which asserts itself through influence. I’ve heard that Foucalt liked to say that power was multifocal, and maybe this is what he meant. Once you start to look, discrepancies between official hierarchies and non-official ones are everywhere. Stalin himself is a textbook example of someone who rose to wield near-absolute power in spite of being nominally a mere administrator. His title of “Secretary General” literally referred to his position as someone who took notes at the meetings of the politburo. Under certain circumstances, I can imagine that these discrepancies serve a useful purpose – useful for someone, anyway. Deflecting responsibility for unpopular decisions, for one thing. Concealing key nodes/personnel from potential hostile actors for another application.
Where was I? Oh right, talking about the creation of a new elite. Unfortunately for the various nationalist actors, at a certain point, the USSR began to reverse course. Remember the Piedmont Principle? The idea that cultivating nationalism would allow the USSR to project power into ethnic minority groups in neighboring regions? Gradually, Soviet decision makers perceived that the current was in fact running in the opposite direction; cross-border nationalist ties were trumping loyalty to the Soviet Union. By 1932, the USSR was in the midst of the Holomodor, one of the most brutal famines of the twentieth century. Ukrainian cross-border nationalism was blamed, rightly or wrongly, as a major contributor to the situation. Additionally, the resentment of the Russian majority was reaching potentially dangerous levels. So, the USSR reversed course.
By the late 1930s, the “Great Retreat”, as Martin calls it, was in full swing. National institutions were gradually abolished, various symbolic policies such as linguistic preferencing were walked back, and Russian culture and identity were gradually rehabilitated. In the aftermath, the Soviet Union was reinvented as a largely Russo-centric entity. This does not seem to have been a crudely ethnocentric form of Russian chauvinism, but rather cultural nationalism. “The Russian language was the principal path for non-Russians to participate in that culture.” Assimilate and you could, at least in theory, enjoy the full status of any other member of the USSR.
So what can we learn from this book? Mostly, I think, that there’s a strong tendency on the left to underestimate the power of nationalism. Earlier in the twentieth century, a number of prominent leftists had declared that then-hypothetical Great War was just a clash of capitalist imperialists and that the workers of the world would unite and turn against their masters. This spectacularly failed to happen, and the working classes mostly turned out to be enthusiastic participants in the war effort, at least at first. Given the First World Wars contribution to the ultimate breakdown of the prevailing European class system, perhaps this was the right choice for them. I’m not sure why this tendency exists or how it developed. Both the political left and nationalism in the modern sense are in some sense products of the enlightenment. Revolutionary France certainly demonstrated that the two could be tightly fused. For that matter, so did Zionism. My best guess is that it’s because “left” ideologies tend to be universalist in character. Like, say, Christianity (as opposed to traditional Judaism), left ideologies offer a prescription for all mankind, one which is supposed to transcend the petty divisions of language, culture, or geography. Additionally, these ideologies naturally attract wonkish intellectual types who see themselves as transcending these same barriers, and don’t see why everyone else can’t or won’t.
I suppose we also learned that when position and prestige are at stake, vast amounts of fire and brimstone will be spilled over seemingly minor issues (language, various symbolic policies, etc). But I feel like we already knew that. We also learned that when you sort people into groups based off of any particular set of characteristics, they immediately start competing on the basis of those characteristics. But I’ve always felt like that was pretty intuitively obvious to anyone who bothered to stop and think about it.
Could a similar scenario occur today? I’m not sure. The USSR was, as mentioned before, the heir of a vast multinational empire. Various groups competed on the basis of language, ethnicity, and culture. Affirmative action programs today mostly seem to happen within a nation, along (arbitrarily defined?) sub-national identity categories. When those categories are sufficiently robust, robust enough to lead to significant conflict, sure, I could see a backlash. But I don’t think we’re there yet. My basic model for this is that affirmative action is a form of elite patronage, and that competitive elites engage in it in order to create or mobilize their own base of support. In times of elite overproduction, you naturally see patronage of all sorts materialize from rival elite groups. In order to face a backlash, enough elites would have to decide that affirmative action was causing more trouble than it was worth. I’m not really sure what sort of upheaval it would take for the American ruling class to walk back affirmative action policies or rhetoric. Competitive elites are willing to take risks, after all. That’s what makes them competitive. And as the existence of more or less the entire post-colonial world attests, elites are willing to accept quite a lot of collateral damage before they abandon identity-based mobilization of potential supporters.
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In an Infinite Loops podcast episode with Venkatesh Rao, Art of the Gig, the discussion revolves around the importance of courage and taking risks in order to find meaning in life and business.
They talk about the gig economy, and argue that one of the most important things for meaning in life and business is having the courage and nerve to take risks.
Rao explains how many people start out with naive optimism, then get punched in the face by life and don't know how to regain agency. Agency and using it creates meaning, according to him. He casually dismisses the meaning crisis as a failure of nerve and a lack of courage on the part of young adults. I could probably write a whole piece on extended adolescence.
On the other hand, he does acknowledge that many people are so overburdened by life's traumas that they may not even reach the naive optimism stage. Even if they do, some people get lucky and are never challenged, whereas others get screwed and are thrown out of the economic system. This division looms especially large in the developing world.
These conditions lead to a bifurcated system where, as Rao calls it, the "tragically lucky" go through life with naive optimism, but near the end of their life have a crisis because they never learned to deal with challenges or change themselves to have more agency. This archetype would be the guy who comes from a rich family and "fails upward," just collecting titles and promotions without thinking deeply or having to engage with the darker side of the world. The tragedy here is that they never have a chance to truly grow or develop as people, because they never have a real opportunity.
On the other hand, those who deal with adversity when young, or those who don't have strong models in their life who display courage and a sense of agency, either can't have a positive viewpoint on their lives due to trauma, or enter the workforce/college/wherever, fail badly, then feel cheated and can't work up the nerve to take another risk.
These two life experiences are so distinct that they're almost perfectly mismatched for people to understand each other. I don't think it neatly aligns with different political groups, but I'm sure many are likely to make that comparison.
So the question becomes - how do we set up a society in which people can routinely take small risks or deal with small amounts of adversity, and learn to become more agentic in steps as they grow?
Unfortunately, our modern society seems designed to do the opposite of this training for courage. Children are increasingly coddled, their parents' minds befuddled with safetyism and the precautionary principle. In the Western world especially, people are presented with one track in life. Typically, this track starts with schooling, which goes directly into a career, dovetailing neatly into retirement the moment you turn [insert cultural age of retirement here].
People have a narrative where they either stay on the track their whole lives and are successful, or they fall off at some point and are failures. Risk-taking becomes incredibly difficult because the perceived risk of getting off the beaten path becomes much larger. The standard PMC careerist feels that if they take even small risks, they risk throwing their life into disarray. Learned helplessness and non-courageous behaviors become instilled, in my view, due to early-stage trauma, which makes this process even more weighted against risk.
With these priors, we come to an interesting problem. On the one hand, we need to help kids have less trauma and not learn as many passive or non-agentic behaviors. Reducing trauma is often a stated goal of many safetyist maximizers and those who hold a torch for the precautionary principle.
However, we've also got to figure out how to challenge kids. It seems that the artificial hoops we have them jump through in grade school, then the workforce and/or college, don't have an even enough distribution. A lot of this probably has to do with the narrative associated with school and the one-track life I discussed above.
I'm in favor of having high school include some sort of working apprenticeship, and I'd even support time being split 50/50 with half of the time having kids be in a working environment, the other half in the classroom. This inclusion of work would solve a lot of the problems with hyperactive kids that can't learn in a classroom environment. It would also make more well rounded adults, as they'd have a taste of the 'real world' while still being in a relatively safe environment. The big issue would be getting businesses on board and making sure there aren't any legal issues - parents would be a nightmare here I'm sure.
We could also create a sort of bank of school years, or at least make it more culturally acceptable to go back to school. Have kids graduate at 16 and enter the workforce, with two years of schooling 'banked' in case they fail out. Maybe make it mandatory before 30 so there isn't a sharp social distinction. The extra two years could focus on business skills or help students that can't carve out a place in the economy find their niche.
I've tried to be as charitable as possible in this piece, and I'd ask commenters do the same. I firmly believe that one of the reasons this topic stays muddled is the constant refrains around fragility and people being 'snowflakes' or whatever the term de jour happens to be. I don't see how harsh language and derision will help solve this problem, it seems far more based on structural issues in our schooling or overall narratives, rather than a personal failing of individuals. I'm open to disagreement here as a separate point, of course.
Submission statement for Southkraut: Bret Deveraux discusses everything The Rings of Power creators did wrong other than the culture war stuff. TLDR: they understand neither geography nor economics nor anthropology. Also, they are racist towards the Irish.
So there's a delusional take you see on twitter Etc. All the time. From both sides of almost any issue but especially anything related to Russia, elections, Etc. You see people who respond to normal criticism or an abundance of criticism (usually relatively earned by how bad their takes are) accusing their detractors or those who disagree of being bots or astroturfed Putin or Clinton agents... The implied premise being that only lumps of code or Chinese sweatshop workers employed by bad faith actors could hold views that disagree with the complainer. That only bots or paid shills could oppose Ukraine, or support Clinton over Bernie, or Biden over Trump... Etc.
I used to dismiss these complaints... but now I feel I might owe a general apology.
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I've noticed since TheMotte moved to its new Site that the Quality of a lot of Comments are just off. Not that the takes are bad or low quality or have odd opinions But that they're Bizarrely and Unnervingly detached from even the barest context of the discussion itself. Stuff completely out of character for even a bad rulebreaking poster on the motte.
Short comments that don't engage with any arguments presented, or even engage with the context of the discussion... but that Immediately tangent off on some culture war point utterly unrelated to the discussion, and then not engaging wit any replies (often with a single external link)... I've seen weird shit on twitter so I've dug into a few of these accounts... and all of their comments are like this, short snipes that never engage even 1 or 2 comments deep with anyone who replies. but that are slowly wracking up a history on the platform...
And then today I was hit by a smoking gun, this Comment:
“The Ukraine conflict is one of the clearest examples of good vs. evil in the past century"
You said it! Look at how despicable these people are!
Video: Ukraine Soldiers Sing Praises Of WW II Era Nazi: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4H-yMmNh5Cs
And now NPR is just casually rehabilitating the Nazis: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/03/1084113728/a-closer-look-at-the-volunteers-who-are-signing-up-to-fight-the-russians
Now the links are to real pieces of media, The Jimmy Dore Show and NPR... both respectable enough... and there'd be little to suggest this was a bot trying to manipulate the discussion... except for one thing:
No one had said the quote he was replying too...
Indeed I know where he got the quote. It was from a discussion/long take weeks before in relation to Ukraine, and would not even have fit the discussion in that piece, since it was a meta-discussion about how figures discuss Ukraine relative to other wars. I'd quoted it back then as an example of something we'd think was delusional and completely detached from intellectual rigor if said about Iraq 1991 or WW1...
Indeed another comment making the opposite argument used the same quote and drew other quotes from the same two week old discussion... except arguing the opposite way (pro-Ukraine)... And likewise replied not at all to having it pointed out that nothing they quoted was at all mentioned in the actual thread or discussion that was being had.
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This obviously killed the discussion in that thread... when half the thread becomes comments quoting things, points and arugments, that were never said, and the other half must become replies saying in effect WTF!?
Well you can't have a discussion any more. Any organic back and forth between actual mottizens was killed. And obviously none of these either schizos or bots responded to keep discussion going.
Now if this becomes the norm it will kill the space...
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But its also really unnerved me with regards to the rest of the internet.
The "Dead Internet Theory" doesn't feel like a theory anymore. The Motte is an obscure space with discussion levels high enough you notice if an actor isn't actually thinking or engaging with what's been said... and 2 out of 15 comments in that thread were Fairly undeniably bots....
On a site that's only been up a few months.
What the hell must it be like on other forums? Newspaper comments? YouTube comments?
Hell 4Chan had to implement Capchas for every comment to avoid the problem.
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This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from around the world. Feel free to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the Ukraine War, or even just whatever you’re reading.
Argentina
Paging @DaseindustriesLtd
Argentina opened the first of its three rounds of elections on Sunday; the main three way election will happen on October 22, and if no one gets a majority (very likely) then the two top ranked candidates will go to a runoff November 19. To the surprise of everyone, the largely fringe turbo-libertarian Javier Milei won unexpectedly, placing him as the front runner for October, and making him suddenly the talk of the town in international press. Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, performed terribly in recent municipal and regional elections; his own polling at its best was mixed and his ideas polled much worse than himself a man. So his 30% results in the primary genuinely surprised most people. The results look even more impressive at the provincial level, where Milei won 16 of 24 provinces, with remaining provinces divided between the other parties:
[Milei’s] ultra-liberal discourse was imposed, as was foreseeable, in urban centers with more middle classes, such as the cities of Córdoba or Mendoza . But the electoral surprise was greater when the scrutiny revealed that the leader of La Libertad Avanza also reached the poorest districts of the country. ..
As happened in Chaco and Jujuy, Milei was the candidate with the most votes for the PASO in most of the poorest districts in the country, according to the survey carried out by Infobae .
These poorer areas are the traditional stronghold of the Peronists/Kirchnerists, so their switch to the libertarian is quite the sea change. ¿Quien es Milei?
Javier Milei is a former economist and Congressman who’s built up a huge media presence in the past year. It’s a little like if one of the weirdo right wing internet influencers we sometimes discuss here became a major party candidate, down to the fact that he rages about leftism while also being kinda libertine and degenerate, partial to the occasional threesome, moonlighting as a tantric sex instructor, and running with a VP who I guess does cosplay. Otherwise, socially he’s a grab bag of right-wing culture war talking points, generalized hatred of the elites (whom he calls “the caste”), banning abortion in all cases including rape and incest, the right to bear arms, climate change is a hoax, etc - plus a few out there ideas, like the novel proposal that people should be able to sell their own organs or children on the free market.
But really Milei’s support is behind economics, because there’s nowhere that the establishment parties have failed more manifestly. The ruling party, Unión por la Patria (previously Frente de Todos), is the Peronist/Kirchnerist left mega-populist party which set the institutional tone for Argentina’s stagnation since the 30s. Their opposition, the center right Juntos Del Cambio, was originally elected to do what Milei says he will - utterly reform the broken system the Kirchnerists created. And to their credit they did oversee some significant reforms, but most critically failed to address Argentina’s central ill of inflation (partially because it would have conflicted with their other campaign pledge to balance budgets). After a brief upward surge in the economy after they took power, ultimately they left it as they found it, in shambles.
With both parties dropping the ball so horrifically on inflation, Milei has made the centerpiece of his campaign a highly controversial plan to switch from pesos to dollars. Surely this would address inflation (just by keeping it at US rates) but the transition would be remarkably painful. Supposedly about 60% of voters actually oppose the plan and it’s not actually clear Argentina can physically, literally do this - many people apparently think they genuinely do not have sufficient reserves to convert their existing money base entirely into dollars. There’s also the risk that it would hurt competitiveness by inflating the value of Argentina’s exports relative to the region; this was one of the big criticisms of the 90s peso convertibility. Even so, possibly this is still preferable to nonstop runaway inflation.
Milei’s “chainsaw plan” also includes: “eliminating 11 government ministries, reducing government spending by 15% of the country’s GDP, and privatizing or closing down state companies and agencies, among other austerity measures. A potential Milei administration would also eliminate free state schools and healthcare, and replace them with a “voucher system” designed to subsidize whoever needs them, according to his government plan.” I couldn’t really comment on how useful Argentina’s government ministries are, eliminating them could actually be disastrous, especially for their pension system - but it should be said that currently Argentina funds its government expenses with the money printer, so if inflation is ever going to be addressed spending does have to curbed (though perhaps the medicine doesn’t need to be quite that extreme).
To be clear, the election is still anyone’s contest. Milei pulled ahead of the establishment parties only by a hair, and this with neither of them formally unified under a chosen candidate. Also, 30% of the electorate abstained (voting is mandatory in Argentina so this means more than it would most places) and almost half of the ballots were left blank or null. LA’s poor performance in municipal and regional elections also indicates that his party may be less popular than he is, and if he wins with a minority there’s no chance his zanier ideas will be pushed through (and with no provincial governments under LA control he loses a major route to reduce spending). Still, it certainly represents a population extremely weary with their governing parties.
China
The whole world seems to be talking about China’s economy starting to corrode, as economic activity slows down and deflation has begun to set in:
China's National Bureau of Statistics announced Wednesday that consumer prices dropped annually in July for the first time in two years, dipping 0.3%, just slightly better than median estimates for a 0.4% decrease . . .
Year-to-date, China's exports are down 5% compared to last year, while imports have dipped 7.6%
Manufacturing activity has contracted for four straight months July exports declined at the sharpest rate in three years, at 14.5% annually
Doomsaying about how China’s overleveraged, ponzi scheme-esque real estate sector will spell the end have been going on forever without materializing, though now maybe they finally are. Various pundits have already started asking if we’ll soon look at China the way we now do Japan - confused that we ever considered them a serious economic rival. This seems a little premature to me, but I also don’t follow China closely and would be interested to hear from others.
Japan
Speaking of which, Japan grew at a remarkable 6% this quarter, more than doubling expectations. Aside from one crazy quarter in 2020 this is the highest rate they’ve had in a very long time. BBC reports that Japan’s tumbling currency, down 10% relative to the dollar, has actually been a boon for exports, which coupled with an influx of tourism has given their stagnant economy a little boost:
Profits at the country's car makers - including Toyota, Honda and Nissan - have been boosted in recent months as they saw increased demand for exports. While a weak currency makes what the country imports more expensive, prices of commodities on global markets, like oil and gas, have fallen in recent months. That has resulted in a drop in the value of imports, down 4.3% from the previous quarter, which EY's Nobuko Kobayashi called "a major culprit for GDP growth".
Japan's economy has also been helped by a rise in tourist numbers after the government lifted border restrictions at the end of April. As of June, the number of foreign visitors to Japan had recovered to more than 70% of pre-pandemic levels, according to the country's national tourism authority. Spending by tourists is also expected to give the country's economy an even bigger boost from this month after China lifted a ban on group travel. Before the pandemic Chinese visitors accounted for more than a third of tourist spending in Japan.
I’ve reported previously on Japan and Korea ending their trade war and normalizing relations following the comfort women/forced labor lawsuits. Japanese PM Kishida, Korean President Yoon, and Biden will now hold their first ever standalone meeting on Friday to “institutionalize their trilateral ties”. This will mean holding yearly summits like this, strengthening security cooperation, training, and intelligence sharing against threats from China and North Korea. “The three leaders are also expected to signal deeper cooperation in areas such as cybersecurity, supply chain resilience and fighting economic coercion.”
Ecuador
Following the assassination of a mayor, which put two of Ecuador’s provinces under a state of emergency, and the assassination of a candidate for the Presidential election, which put the rest of the country under a state of emergency, a third politician has now been killed - all of this in under a month and barely a week away from election. Pesto Briones was a local leader in the Esmeraldas province for the democratic socialist Revolución Ciudadana, party of the previous presidents Rafeal Correa and Lenín Moreno (the latter of whom later left/was expelled), and the current leading party in the polls for the upcoming election. This has been a remarkably violent period for Ecuador. Beyond the political violence overall homicides in 2022 were 4600, double the previous year, and 2023 is on pace to exceed that number still; so far there have been reportedly been 3,568 murders compared with 2,042 at the same point in the year during 2022.
Six Colombians have now been arrested in the murder of Fernando Villavicencio. Details are sparse but the Colombian drug trade is intertwined with Ecuador’s, and Villaviencio had been threatened by the cartels. Reportedly Villavicencio’s family has accused the Ecuadorian government of neglecting to provide sufficient security, lacking armored/bulletproof cars, leading him through public entrances and exits rather than established side routes, etc. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, in a message offering condolences for the assassination, made explicit the comparison between this and the group of Colombian mercenaries who assassinated the Haitian President Jovenel Moise.
South Africa
Former President Jacon Zuma has now been released after only two months of his sentence, reportedly due to a program to reduce prison overcrowding. Zuma was the previous leader of the ANC, and the central opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, has accused the move of political corruption (supposedly the overcrowding reduction measure was passed shortly after Zuma was sentenced). The far left Economic Freedom Fighters, who in part started as the anti-Zuma block of the ANC till they were expelled, have switched their tune and have been trying to pull away Zuma supporters from the ANC (Zuma and current President Ramaphosa are rivals), so are likely to be supportive.
The economy overall looks staggeringly bleak in advance of their election. Official unemployment has hit 33%, with observers suggesting the real rate may be as high as 42%.
When it comes to youth unemployment, the rate is 61% of 15- to 24-year-olds, according to official statistics, and a staggering 71% if you again count those who are no longer trying . . . it equates to 24 million adults out of a population of 60 million who are either unemployed or not involved in any economic activity and barely surviving . . . South Africa’s GDP needs to grow by 6% a year to start creating enough jobs just for the 700,000 people who enter the workforce every year…South Africa’s growth hasn’t approached that much-needed figure for more than a decade. Its economy — which grew by 2% last year — is expected to grow by less than 1% this year and between 1% and 2% for the next five years.’
Ethiopia
Less than a year after the war in the country’s northern Tigray region ended, Ethiopia’s military is battling an ethnic militia in the neighboring Amhara region in a part of Africa already ravaged by conflict.
The Amhara are the historic ruling group of Ethiopia, previously unseated by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, who after they were unseated in turn, later helped fill the ranks of the Tigray secessionist group from last year’s war. Current President Abiy Ahmed is a half-Amhara, half-Oromo who holds both ethnic parties within his Prosperity Party coalition. However, he’s been blamed for some attacks on the Oromo (or for not doing enough to stop them) and is accused of leaning towards his Amhara side, at least by the Oromo secessionist groups which the government has also had to deal with.
This makes it somewhat ironic that Amhara forces are now turning against him as well. His post-war project has been to consolidate the different ethnic militias into a formal security force, just as he (somewhat) did by forming the ethnic political parties into one ostensible party. The Amhara militia Fano, which played a major role in fighting for the government during the Tigrayan War, has balked at this attempt to strip away their autonomy and (supposedly) leave them less secure to other ethnic attacks, and fighting has broken out. For now the government seems to have gained the upper hand and regained control of the areas taken by Fano, but the conflict is certainly not over. Ethiopia is straining right now under the weight of Sudanese refugees, so hopefully the conflict does not escalate.
One of the ways I pass my free time is to scroll through Twitter or Reddit looking for interesting or controversial articles to read. Occasionally, I only make it a paragraph or 2 in before I decide that I don’t trust the author, and that I can’t take anything they write seriously. This can happen even if the article is taking a position I already agree with. Sometimes there’s just something about the article’s style that seems like it can’t be trusted. I was originally going to write a post that contained all the pet peeves that would cause that to happen. However, after I got part-way through, I decided that if I included everything, then this entry would be too long. So instead, I’m writing about each one separately. Pet peeve #1: Portraying your opponent as a caricature.
The thing that inspired me to write about this topic was an article I saw on twitter. It’s an article about a proposed regulation that would force companies to make cancelling subscriptions easier. More specifically, it was about those companies’ reaction to it.
Companies Think Their Idiot Customers Will Accidentally Cancel Their Subscriptions if It's Too Easy
It begins:
The Federal Trade Commission’s recent proposal to require that companies offer customers easy one-click options to cancel subscriptions might seem like a no-brainier, something unequivocally good for consumers. Not according to the companies it would affect, though. In their view, the introduction of simple unsubscribe buttons could lead to a wave of accidental cancellations by dumb customers. Best, they say, to let big businesses protect customers from themselves and make it a torment to stop your service.
Those were some of the points shared by groups representing major publishers and advertisers during the FTC’s recent public comment period ending in June. Consumers, according to the Wall Street Journal, generally appeared eager for the new proposals which supporters say could make a dent in tricky, bordering-on deceptive anti-cancellation tactics deployed by cable companies, entertainment sites, gyms, and other businesses who game out ways to make it as difficult as possible to quickly quit a subscription. The News/Media Alliance, a trade group representing publishers, tried to refute those customers in its own comments to the FTC. The Alliance claimed its members actually receive “very few complaints” about cancellations. Consumers, according to the Association of National Advertisers, may actually benefit from annoying cancellation friction.
To be clear, I absolutely hate difficult to cancel subscriptions. I also hate so-called “free trials” that bill you if you forget to cancel. Some cancellation processes I’ve encountered were so difficult that they certainly seemed criminal. When I first heard about this proposal, I thought to myself “Finally, someone is going to do something about these predatory practices!”
I agree with the with the article’s apparent position on the proposal. The new rule is a good idea, and it’s needed. Even so, something about the article still managed to rub me the wrong way. Even before I started reading the article, I already disliked it just from the headline alone. By the time I had finished it, I was already trying to find out how the article was deceiving me.
The first sign of trouble was the headline:
Companies Think Their Idiot Customers Will Accidentally Cancel Their Subscriptions if It's Too Easy
This reads like a headline from the onion. You can tell just from reading it that it’s caricature of what they actually said. Companies don’t call literally their customers “idiots” like this. At least, certainly not out in the open.
The article continues:
In their view, the introduction of simple unsubscribe buttons could lead to a wave of accidental cancellations by dumb customers. Best, they say, to let big businesses protect customers from themselves and make it a torment to stop your service.
Again, this message is nothing like what you’d expect a large company to put out. Large companies don’t openly insult customers like this. Large companies also don’t refer to themselves as “Big Business”. This passage even has a little of embedded argument in it. It tells you that it’s a torment to stop your service. Nobody embeds counterarguments in their statements just so you can use it against them. This is supposedly based on what the companies said, but it’s been warped in obvious ways, and it’s hard to tell what the actual statement probably was.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The article is full of this kind of thing.
Caricature itself isn’t bad if your audience already knows the subject matter, but it’s not a good way to introduce your audience to an opposing position. A caricature, by definition, distorts it’s subject by exaggerating it’s most ridiculous attributes. A caricature of someone’s argument is an exaggerated version of the most ridiculous parts of that argument. In their real statements, there may or may not be nuance and context that make the argument work, but if there is, I can’t expect to find that nuance and context in a caricature. Including it would undermine the idea of caricature itself.
A caricature of a statement is more than just a Straw Man, it gives a sense that the author doesn’t think it’s worthwhile to even check for context. Perhaps they don’t even think context can matter.
Some authors try to weasel their way out of such straw-man accusations by telling you “it’s just a joke”, even though they’re clearly trying to persuade you. A humorous poorly-reasoned argument is still a poorly-reasoned argument. If you have to fall back on “it’s just a joke” in order to defend it, then your point might not be on solid ground to begin with. Saying “It’s just joke” might as well be outright admitting that your argument is without merit.
If you want to actually be convincing, then you should instead, steel man your opponent. Essentially, you provide the best version of their position that you can. Include the nuance and context that makes it work. Then, you can explain why it is wrong.
This way might not feel very good. After all, why help out your opposition by presenting the best version of their argument? But doing so is actually helpful for you. It shows confidence in your own position. If it looks like an argument a real person would believe, then it doesn’t trigger as much skepticism. Perhaps more importantly, it protects you in case your reader learns the real argument from somewhere else. Learning your opponent’s real position won’t sway them as much because you’ve already told them about it. It gives your argument more sticking power.
You can still joke around about the opposing position. Just make sure that I know what that position actually is first. I don’t want to have to guess what their real position probably is.
About Half-way down the article, the author finally included an actual quote,
“If sellers are required to enable cancellation through a single click or action by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers will not reasonably expect to remove their recurring goods or services with just one click,” the Association said in a statement.
But at this point, it was too late, the distrust had already started to creep in. The author had already shown that he didn’t care very much how the companies’ actual statements worked.
I looked a bit further into it to figure out what the companies’ real statement was. The quote above, comes from a statement made by the Association of National Advertisers Their full statement can be found here.
This is the part where they talk about “click to cancel”
Requiring “simple” cancellation is a difficult standard for businesses to implement, as there is little detail provided to guide them to understand its meaning and how to comply with this ambiguous requirement. If sellers are required to enable cancellation through a single click or action by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers will not reasonably expect to remove their recurring goods or services with just one click. Such accidental cancellations could cause consumers to miss out on essential deliveries of food, water, or medical products, and could create the inconvenience of requiring the consumer to register again for a service they did not intend to cancel in the first place. The possibility of accidental cancellations could be greater in the mobile environment, which may be less optimized to manage complex processes such as account administration. Consequently, in many instances, it may be reasonable for sellers to require some form of customer authentication, or redirection of the consumer to a medium that best facilitates account administration, before processing a cancellation. As a matter of public policy, permitting reasonable customer authentication prior to cancellation helps to minimize mistaken or fraudulent cancellation actions, which lead to customer frustration and undesired lapses in the provision of needed goods or services. Several state-level negative option laws permit reasonable authentication procedures prior to cancellation,17 and the proposed amendments to the Current Rule should similarly allow companies to verify consumer identities prior to effectuating a cancellation choice.
This statement does make some reasonable points about why you might not want a literal 1-click cancel button. If I click a “Cancel” button in the navigation, at minimum, I would expect to see a confirmation page first. One that says “Do you want to cancel your subscription?” and a button that says “Confirm Cancellation”. That’s at least 2 clicks, one to get to the cancel confirmation page, and one to cancel. If my account was cancelled out of the navigation bar, that would be very surprising to me. Something like that really would lead to unintended cancellations. It also makes total sense to force users to log in, in order to cancel. I don’t want some random unauthenticated person messing with my account settings!
There is, however, one major problem with this statement. The proposed rule doesn’t actually require you to make a 1-click cancel button. “Click to cancel” is just a nickname. The actual requirement is a cancellation process that is at least as simple as the sign-up process, and through the same medium:
The proposal also requires sellers to provide a simple cancellation mechanism through the same medium used to initiate the agreement, whether, for instance, through the internet, telephone, mail, or in-person. On the internet, this “Click to Cancel” provision requires sellers, at a minimum, to provide an accessible cancellation mechanism on the same website or web-based application used for sign-up. If the seller allows users to sign up using a phone, it must provide, at a minimum, a telephone number and ensure all calls to that number are answered during normal business hours. Further, to meet the requirement that the mechanism be at least as simple as the one used to initiate the recurring charge, any telephone call used for cancellation cannot be more expensive than the call used to enroll ( e.g., if the sign-up call is toll free, the cancellation call must also be toll free). For a recurring charge initiated through an in-person transaction, the seller must offer the simple cancellation mechanism through the internet or by telephone in addition to, where practical, the in-person method used to initiate the transaction.
This rule requires a 1-click cancel only if you had a 1-click sign up in the first place. If a company requires authentication in order to sign up, then they can require authentication in order to cancel. If it takes you more than one click to sign up, then it can take more than 1 click to cancel. I sure hope these companies don’t have literal 1-click confirmation-less signup buttons, and I certainly hope they aren’t signing you with no authentication either!
But then again, maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on the The Association of National Advertisers for this oversight. The author of the Gizmodo article apparently didn’t catch it either. That would have been quite a good opportunity to make fun of the original statement, and it would have addressed the real statement too.
I’m not very forgiving when it comes to deceptive tactics. Once I get the sense that you’re trying to deceive me, I become suspicious about the whole thing. After all, if the author has already revealed that they don’t care about informing me accurately, how can I trust anything they say? Even if I already agree with their position, I can’t use it as a source. It’s just too unreliable; the people I’m citing it to would, rightly, mock me for it. It’s just not very useful, and mostly makes me dislike the author and maybe even their publication.
This is essentially a followup to the last meta post.
Big scary updates are done and seem to be fine, but our volunteers have been going absolutely mad with minor updates. Which is great! We have a bunch of people contributing tons of valuable tweaks and fixes and improvements to the codebase, thank you, I literally could not do this without you.
I'm just gonna repost this again because it worked the last time:
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Rules Changes
Thank you for discussion on the rule proposals! Here's what we ended up with.
Courtesy: Keep to a single account
We strongly discourage people from making alt accounts without good reason, and in the absence of a good reason, we consider alt accounts to be bannable on sight. Alt accounts are almost exclusively used for mod evasion purposes and very rarely used for any purpose that helps the community; it makes moderation more difficult and it makes conversation more difficult.
If you do feel you need an alt account (most commonly, if you're a well-established user who wants to post something that can't be linked to their public persona), please ask the mods.
If you don't want the mods to know about it either, be aware that there's a good chance we'll find out about it anyway.
Content: Post on multiple subjects
We occasionally have trouble with people who turn into single-issue posters, posting and commenting only on a single subject. We'd like to discourage this. If you find yourself posting constantly on a single subject, please make an effort to post on other subjects as well.
This doesn't mean you need to write megaposts! This can be as simple as going to the Friday Fun Thread once in a while and posting a few paragraphs about whatever video game you last played. But this community is fundamentally for people, and if a poster is acting more like a propaganda-bot than a person, we're going to start looking at them suspiciously.
This rule is going to be applied with delicacy; if I can find not-low-effort comments about three different subjects within your last two weeks or two pages of comments, you're likely fine.
These are still prototypes, if you have objections they can still be changed, without objections they'll get added to the Official Rules probably in a week or so.
Private Profiles
Again, thank you for discussion! I refined the planned system a bit (original plans: "remove private profiles".) The current system is that private profiles are available to established users or on request. We're leaving "established" intentionally vague, but it's basically a measure of how much you've been contributing. If the system considers you established, the checkbox will be in your settings; if the system doesn't consider you established, it'll be there, but grayed out and have a link to contact us.
(This is using roughly the same standard as our filtering system, but with much bigger numbers.)
We've also grandfathered in everyone who had a private profile, even those who don't meet the bar. This was definitely a carefully-considered decision! It has nothing to do with me not wanting to write the SQL query to revert profiles.
That said, if you're a newbie account that gets yourself banned, don't be surprised if a mod also resets your private flag.
Long Comments
A while back there was a meta post where I proposed relaxing the comment character limit. I came up with a proposal, people on the dev discord convinced me to relax it even further, then it just sorta sat there and moldered in the Issues queue for a bit because it wasn't the priority. Then I wrote an effortpost and said "shucks, this is over the limit! Okay, I'm going to just go and implement that long-comment request now so I can post my megapost for the good of the community. Aaaaand also so I can post my megapost."
Then one of our volunteers, without any knowledge whatsoever of the above decision, sniped it out from under me and implemented it, like, two days before I was going to sit down and do it.
Anyway, it's in now! The new limit is . . .
. . . a little more complicated.
The new limit is 50,000 characters if you don't want to be filtered. Are you okay with your comment being filtered as if you were a new user? Well, good news, the new limit is 500,000 characters. Yes, this is literally enough to post an entire novel, albeit a short one, as long as you're OK with the mods seeing it before the rest of the userbase does.
This is experimental; if it gets abused, don't be surprised if this gets changed.
This is now a general-purpose feedback post. Let me know how things are going!
This is a weekly thread for people to talk about foreign policy, current international relations events, or chat about IR history. Generally I start with a series of updates on different countries but the format here should be pretty free form / whatever people are interested in. To demonstrate that I want to have a special thread on less-remembered wars. Feel free to share your own (no need for it to be this long), or to talk about something completely else!
The Libyan-Turkic War
It’s pretty easy to understand why the 1911 Libyan invasion isn’t on anyone’s radar, being dwarfed by the size and devastation of World War 1, but I think it gets short shrift. After all, for Turkey and Libya this conflict might as well have been the start of World War 1. From Libya onwards Turkey is in constant war up until the conclusion of the Greco-Turkish war in 1922. For Italy the vast sums they spent on this war had significant repercussions for their performance in the war of 1914 and their political situation afterwards. Beyond putting World War 1 into a broader context, this is also a unique and interesting war in its own right. One historian, Sean McMeekin, described it as the last of the nineteenth century style wars on colonial conquest as well as the first of the twentieth century style anti-colonial guerilla wars. It also featured some of the first instances of modern technology, including the first use of a plane in a battle, and the first instance of a plane getting shot down in a battle.
The Italian Position
So what drove Italy towards this war? Basically a desire to join the ranks of the imperial powers. Italy had only been formed in 1861 and fully consolidated in 1871. Like Germany, they were late to the ranks of European nation states aspiring towards empire, and felt the need to catch up for prestige by snatching Somaliland and Eritrea. When I say the Libyan invasion was mostly about prestige, I feel like it sounds odd because nowadays it’s obvious why Libya is important to control. But oil wasn’t discovered until 1959 – back then it’s basically a patch of desert with a few slums. It mostly remained as part of the Ottoman Empire because the other, more powerful European colonizers didn't think it was worth conquering as they snatched up the other North African provinces.
At the 1878 Congress of Berlin France took Tunisia and Britain took Cyprus; to get Italy to sign off they soft promised them Libya. This was further cemented by a secret deal between France and Italy in 1902 for the French to respect an Italian invasion, and another deal in 1909 for Russian recognition of Italian Libyan in exchange for Italian recognition of Russian Bosporus.
In 1908 this started to build into a huge sort of nationalist movement centered around Libya, with articles in the press, wonderful propaganda posters, politicians drumming up support and so forth. The main opposition to the war effort was the Italian Socialist Party. In fact, socialists had been tenuously supportive of centrist Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti at the time, who had been courting them by expanding the right to vote and cinducting nationalizations, but the Libyan War was a major cleavage that drove them away from the coalition. The divide between the right and the left in Italy would never fully heal and only grow more violent in the buildup towards fascism. Itonically, one of the loudest voices against the invasion at the time was the young Benito Mussolini, back when he was still a leading luminary in the anti-war socialist movement and before he had decided that war and imperialism were actually hella sick. This is just one of the countless fascinating ways this conflict acts as a hinge between completely different eras.
The Ottoman Position
Meanwhile, on the other side, well, people debate on exactly where Turkey’s fall begin, but suffice it to say they had been taking Ls for a very long time. From the Crimean War onwards they had been giving successively more privileges to the European powers, giving up more of their control of their own finances, and watching as their provinces softly secede themselves away, like Egypt, or get gobbled up by Europe, like Tunisia and Morocco.
This instability, coupled with the repressive absolutism of Abdul Hamid II, had led to the famous Young Turks revolution, bringing forth the government that would famously later cause the brutal Armenian genocide. After their revolution in 1908, this conflict three years later will be their first major test – in fact they literally hold their first congress at the exact same time the invasion is launched.
Things Go Down
On September 26 the Italians extend an ultimatum to the Ottoman Empire to hand over Libya in a trustee-style relationship like Britain had for Egypt, where the Ottomans were technically in charge on paper but the Europeans called all the shots. Indignity of indignities, the Ottomans said no. The game is on.
The Italians were less prepared than they had hoped due to socialist opposition, but they still started rallying an army of 34,000 to go against the under 5000 Ottoman regulars in Libya. The Ottoman Empire was in a particularly difficult position for shoring up their own position because they had no direct land access to Libya – British Egypt was in between Turkey and Libya and the Anglos refused to allow the Ottomans to move their troops over land. This meant they had to pass through disguised as Arab civilians or advance over sea, but the Italians had significant sea dominance. Mustafa Kemal, the future future leader of the republic of Turkey, has to sneak in on a Russian ship disguised as a journalist. In time the Turkish forces would also grow to includes thousands of Bedouin guerilla fighters.
In the initial phase of the war the Italians basically just sailed up and 1500 sailors took Tripoli in a handful of days. Another 20,000 troops and a few more days and Italy soon had all the other major cities as well: Benghazi, Derna and Tobruk.
On November 5, only a month later, the Italians declare conquest over Libya. They technically only control the coast but it’s not like there’s much inland anyway.
...One Year Later
But things swiftly moved from a more standard war to one of guerilla resistance. Despite holding the population centers, the Italians couldn’t penetrate even a few kilometers in land. Arab cavalry encircled the cities and attacked any soldier who strayed too far, Libyan civilian volunteers attacked troops digging trenches, Bedouins stage sporadic attacks from the desert. It only took a month for Libya to assert control over the major cities but the guerilla resistance proved fierce, a whole year later Italy was still nowhere near pacifying these sporadic attacks. The Italian troops have increased from 34,000 to 140,000.
The other European Empires had greenlit this specifically because they thought it was gonna take, like, a day, and here we are a year later at stalemate. Feeling a little frantic Italy asks for and receives permission from them to expand the naval fight – in August 1912 they begin attacking the Turkish Dodecanese islands. They begin shelling the forts on the Dardanelles themselves, making to slip on through the straits to the Sea of Marmara and attack Constantinople itself. This leads to the panicked Ottomans to close off the straits entirely, stretch steel chains across the opening, and fill the water with mines.
The Balkan Bananza
Suddenly this pointless colonial war has become an existential threat for the Russian Empire. Half of Russian export trade moved through the Dardanelle Straits and promptly dropped by a third; the straights were also their imports access to the components they needed for their heavy industry, which “nearly ground to a halt.” Their balance of payments felt to zero and they began to convene emergency meetings.
Now, while Russia was the protector and sometimes co-agressor of the Balkan states, it didn’t necessarily want them growing too strong or independently sweeping Tsargard Constantinople Istanbul without Russians there. The current Russian position had been that a weak Ottoman Empire could be preferable to none, but suddenly the dangers of a weak Ottoman empire became extremely real. The Balkan nations had been chomping at the bit to attack the Ottomans while they were distracted in Libya, and Russia would hold them back no longer.
In September Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece declare war on the Ottoman Empire and the first Balkan War has begun. All of the difficulties of the Libyan War, such as carefully and secretly moving their troops though Egypt or the Mediterranean, is now doubly difficult for getting those troops back to the Balkans. Stuck on the other side of Egypt Mustafa Kemal is powerless to help as the Balkans raid his hometown. His rage goes stronger.
Unable to fight both fronts simultaneously, In October, the Ottomans ultimately establish an armistice with the Italians and Libya is signed over.
Italian Aftermath
Italy had established themselves as a serious colonial power and had restored Rome’s rule across the mediterranean, but at what cost? Quite a high one actually, with expenses running in 500% of what was estimated, and lasting way longer than expected. In fact, it didn’t end when the Ottomans signed the Treaty– guerrilla resistance continued and was put down brutally over what we politely call the “punitive pacification campaigns,” which lasted all the way til 1931, a full 20 years after the Italians had declared victory.
The expenses of the Libyan pacification left Italy in a poor financial position when World War 1 actually broke out – not to mention that it still had to commit a significant number of troops to the punitive campaigns. To finance the war effort debt quadrupled to about 180% of GDP by the end of the war. The struggles of managing this debt sent the economy into turmoil, discrediting the ruling liberal government, and helping to pave the way for the fascists, who made renegotiating the debt with the US and UK a priority and established some of their early their credibility by doing just that in 1925.
Libya remained an Italian province until their defeat in World War 2.
The European Aftermath
Italian attempts to foster nationalist movements in the Balkans also caught the ire of the Empire of Austro-hungary, which was especially concerned about nationalism in Greece and Serbia. Relationships between the two nations suffered significantly. Though nominally allies, Italy didn’t inform Austria or Germany of the Libyan invasion before beginning it, and when Austro-Hungary issued its ultimatum to Serbia it did not consult Italy, helping to drive the Italians to the entente.
Furthermore, the balance of power was ultimately massively thrown apart by the dissolution of the Ottomans and the birth of the fractious Balkan nation states, whose conflicts of course eventually set the spark that started the fire of ww1.
To quote the Serbian diplomat Miroslav Spalajković on the events that led to the First World War "all subsequent events are nothing more than the evolution of that first [Italian] aggression."
The Ottoman Aftermath
Throughout all this conflict the Ottoman Empire had been wracked by internal instability. The Libyan war threw gas on the fire of this power struggle which saw a 1912 coup and ended with the Young Turks crushing all of their opposition in 1913. The period following is called the age of the three Pashas, so named after the triumvirate of tyrannical leaders who restored absolutism to the Empire and launched the great genocides.
In fact, from the Libyan War onwards the Ottoman Empire is never not at war – they go straight into the First then Second Balkan Wars, then World War 1, then the Greco-Turkic War which only finally ends in 1922. This eleven year stretch of constant battle has been nicknamed the Ottoman War of Succession, as the Empire splintered apart and spewed forth nation states, until it finally became one itself under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, who first attained his military prestige in where else but the Libyan war.
Tldr: Write an effortpost on the subject of human intuition by February 10th, we will pick the winner by poll, I will donate $200 dollars to a charity mutually agreed upon with the winner
I've been thinking a lot about the subject of intuition lately, due to some life events. What do we know without knowing we know it, what can we communicate without knowing we communicate it. When I'm thinking a lot about something what do I want to do? Read a bunch of Mottizens thinking about it too! So, on a whim while thinking about the fact that great works like the Oresteia, Frankenstein, and Rousseau's best work were the result of competitions; I've decided to launch my own little essay competition and see if anyone bites.
The basic rules are thus:
-- Write an effortpost on the topic of Intuition. Standalone or in the CW or side threads; only rule is effort. Intuition can be as broadly or as narrowly defined as you like. Effortpost we define informally, but I'd say it must be at minimum 2000-4000 characters that is substantially your own original work. No ripping off another post, of your own or someone else's. An original summary/condensation or retelling of someone else's thesis is fine. How will we be able to tell? I'm kinda counting on the crowd here, especially if we get a little competitive fire going. I wouldn't count on slipping anything by the peanut gallery here.
-- On February 12th, as long as we have at least three entries, I will publish a poll, and we will select a winner. If anyone has a suggestion for a better method of picking a winner, I'm open to it. I'm thinking a poll would be better than just raw upvotes, but I'm open to other possibilities.
-- Once a winner is selected, I will work with the winner to select a charity, and I will donate $200 to that charity. I say I will work with the winner, I'm not donating $200 to NAMBLA or Mermaids UK or the StormFront Charity Fund just because somebody wins a poll. I will do my best to be reasonable, but there are some lines I'm not gonna cross here, and IDK there might be legal issues in some countries. I will post some kind of digital receipt in all likelihood, unless it's something like give the $200 in cash into the collection bin at church or to a homeless man or something. I'm sure for most here, the bigger thing will be winning, and being acknowledged as the winner.
So why? The mood just sort of struck me. And how do you know it will really happen? You don't, except that I spend way too much time hanging around here so you can figure I'll probably stick to my word. And anyway, you'll get even more motte street cred for being the guy who got welched on than you would for being the guy who got $200 donated to mosquito nets or whatever.
I'm curious to see what a bit of direction and effort could bring out, or maybe we need chaos. We'll see if we get three.
Please bring up any questions, or rules I haven't considered.
Naturally prompted by the current Twitter situation, I've come to the point where I just have to write down my thoughts.
I have no doubt that Elon Musk is a genius, both of thought and action. He can formulate visions and execute them. He has two truly epic feats under his belt - starting a viable car company from scratch (the first since the 1930s) and bringing about the next generation of space technology and exploration, after a long, long winter. This is definitely not the work of an "emerald mine heir, just investing his money."
He is however not an infallible genius, which is particularly noticeable in areas outside of his core expertise. And that includes social networks. In some sense, it might be the kind of venture least amiable to an engineering, top-down approach. The product is made of a fickle, unpredictable human mass and there are no good instruments or levers to make it do what you want.
The first thing about the whole Twitter situation which really gave me a pause was the fact that Musk had apparently waived due diligence as a part of the $44B takeover bid. This is completely incomprehensible to me. From an M&A perspective, it's like a story of someone who picks up a skank at a seedy dive bar and proceeds to raw-dog her. Incredibly irresponsible. Are you sure you don't want to use a condom? Things might seem easier in the moment, but the potential for future regret is rather alarming! The rebuke I've heard was that Dorsey had already told him all the important stuff anyway, but that's just not how the process works. For one, the due diligence could have given him a way out of the bid (and boy, wouldn't that turn out to be handy...) It's not guaranteed, but rare indeed is the DD that doesn't uncover some sort of irregularity or dubious representation that could have served as ammo in the lawsuit. Secondly, the DD would have mapped out the exact internal structure, external relations, responsibilities and exposures. Even if (or rather precisely because) the plan was to mow through the ranks, this would have been extremely useful to have. If you're going in with an axe, you should at least have a map of the areas you intend to clear-cut. The whaling system deployed by Musk might have been effective at selecting for a combination of competence, drive and vision alignment (and/or desperation) - but that's not the same as critical institutional knowledge. Twitter is vast and something like 80% of the people who knew what went where and why are gone. The sole irreplaceable value of Twitter is in its existing user network - but this is inextricable from the pulsing, living IT snarl containing the accounts and their connections, which is in turn inextricable from the human apparatus building it and maintaining it. With cars or rockets, as long as you have the tech packages, you can always just bring in new competent engineers to continue the work. But there isn't any objective singular blueprint of Twitter. No single person has the whole picture. It's dubious whether it can even be successfully cold-reset. It's just... why go about it that way? Why not put on the condom?
The second incident was the checkmark fiasco: 1. Blow up the old and opaque verification system 2. Concoct an $8/month pay-to-play scheme 3. Discover why the verification system had been there in the first place 4. Clumsily return to a variant of the old opaque verification system. I'm sure the advertisers were thrilled. How am I not looking at an impulsive, poorly though-out spiteful action here? There are people stuck with GIANT PENIS handles to this day...
The thirds aspect is Musk ostensibly sleeping over at Twitter HQ, wildly coding into the night with the bros. The problem is that either his ethos of "You can't put in less than 80 hours a week and expect a thing to work." is wrong or Tesla and SpaceX are getting the shaft here. And the stock price sure seems to indicate the belief in the latter. More than half of the value gone, YOY, as of the time of this writing. And heaven knows what's happening to Neuralink or the Boring Company. Precisely to the degree that Musk is an irreplaceable genius, the Twitter stunt is coming at the expense of projects he himself considers vital for the survival of human consciousness. What are the priorities here?
The further unmentioned elephant in the room is stimulant abuse and, even worse, the attendant lack of sleep. At this point, it would take a lot to persuade me he isn't up to his gills in some Chinese designer hyper-opti-MegaAdderall regimen, which just appears as both the likeliest cause and result of his recent actions and decisions.
The historical parallel I'm most reminded of is Napoleon. Certainly no rando of middling qualities - but also somebody who, past his initial bout of success and innovation, slumped into the belief in his own brand of unerring radical decisions, with well-known consequences.
So I'm out. Not that it should matter to anyone in any practical terms, but my confidence in Elon Musk's process and vision is gone. At this point, it mostly looks like the driver's seat is occupied by erratic hyperconfidence. I'm not expecting Twitter to disappear any time soon, in fact I still consider it somewhat more likely than not that the company will ultimately stabilize. It's not that any single action had caused irreparable damage - but the series of unforced errors, starting with the bid itself, isn't inspiring any future confidence in me. I will not be getting on that rocket to Mars, thank you very much.
None of the explanations makes a lot of sense to me. Either there was a very weird and unlucky combination of things that created an accident or accidents or someone took an action that doesn't make a lot of sense IMO, or someone stepped up and managed to pull something off that would seem beyond their capabilities.
Ships and aircraft of various countries were near the area at times before the explosion but that's pretty meaningless. The Baltic has a lot of civilian and military traffic it isn't some obscure patch of distant Ocean that no one really cares about.
Theories -
1 . Russia did it -
They certainly had the capability. Wouldn't even need to put a ship or sub or aircraft anywhere near where the explosion happened, they could transport explosives through the pipeline. They could of course just turn it off (and in fact had done so for Nord Stream 1 (2 was shutdown on the Germany side). They were not getting any revenue from the pipelines anyway. OTOH that was partially their choice (they shut down #1) and while there prospect fro revenue in the future was dim, it wasn't zero so you would think they would hold up some hope. A 10 percent chance of many billions is worth a lot of money. Why would they do it? Well they might avoid liability for not meeting contractual obligations. Could be a "burn your ships" or "burn your bridges" type of action showing contempt for the west and internally making an internal political signal that there can be no backing down. Could be a threat that other important pipelines and at sea infrastructure are vulnerable. Could be an attempt to make people think the US did it to try to sew division within NATO. Could be an attempt to block the Germans fro musing the part of the pipeline in German waters for an offshore LNG terminal.
2 - Anti-war Russian saboteurs did it -
From a perspective of motivation this perhaps makes the most sense. Perhaps an anarchist anti-war and anti-government group, trying to harm Russia. But they are the least likely to have the capability. I doubt they could pull off getting to the site of the damage with a large explosive. Maybe they had people working in Gazprom and sent explosives through the pipeline? That's possible but it seems unlikely they would have that access.
3 - Germany did it -
All the theories seem unlikely to me (although it did off course happen, so something unlikely happened) but this perhaps the least likely. Like Russia they could destroy it through the pipeline without needing to get close to the area of the explosion. But Germany while they decertified Nord Stream 2, actually wanted to continue to get gas from Nord Stream 1 for a time. Also they might use the parts of Nord Stream 2 in German for an offshore terminal (not sure if the plan was to use 1 or 2, but eventually both could have been used). Why would they do it? The government could have thought that they may face pressure to open up Nord Stream 2 this winter, and didn't want to go back on their decision to close it so they closed off that possibility. But than why also blow up Nord Stream 1. Some faction in the intel services or some saboteurs who worked for Nord Stream AG? Not impossible but it also seems one of the least likely answers.
4 - US did it -
Why would they do it? Well there could have been a thought that Germany would cave on allowing Nord Stream 2 operations and this closes that option. Maybe 1 was hit as well because the Russians could always decide to send gas that way and the Americans didn't want the Germans buying Russian gas? Also the US supplies LNG, while currently the exports are at capacity since the Freeport terminal explosion, there may be the thought that NG prices generally and specifically LNG would go up with an exploded major pipeline, and/or that Germany would be more locked in to buying US LNG in the long run. But it would require an extraordinary amount of willingness to take serious diplomatic risks, for a pretty modest gain.
5 - Ukraine did it -
It would lock out the possibility of Russia receiving funds from selling gas through the pipelines. Also maybe they could hope Russia would be blamed. Still this seems one of the least likely possibilities. Russia wasn't getting any revenue through those pipelines at the moment and it seems unlikely they would ever get revenue through #2. Ukraine would seem to have less ability to pull it off than the other countries listed, they aren't near the pipeline, and their countries resources are going in to the war effort. And the risk would be enormous. There is a good chance it eventually would get out and some chance it would get out quickly, which could devastate support for Ukraine within Germany and harm support elsewhere, and that support is very important to them. The gains would be very small compared to the potential harm.
6 - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania or Poland did it -
They have easy access to the area and a strong dislike for Russia. But while their downside isn't as large as Ukraine's it still seems too reckless. I can see them taking the risk for an action that would at one stroke mean Russia's defeat (if any such action existed) but not for such modest potential Russian down side. It doesn't really impact Russia's war.
7 - China did it -
Maybe they wanted to make things even crazier for Europe and hoped the US would be blamed? This is another one of the least likely possibilities IMO.
8 - Some other country did it - Who? Why? Can't think of any scenarios that seem to make much sense.
9 - It was an explosion caused by underwater live munitions from previous wars. Apparently there were such munitions near the Nord Stream 2 breach. But what would cause them to shift to where the pipeline is and blow up now? Also it seems a Nord Stream 1 breach was not near any known location of underwater munitions.
10 - Methane Hydrate plugs - See https://thelawdogfiles.com/2022/09/nordstream.html
Such plugs are apparently more likely to form when the gas is sitting in place, like it was in Nord Stream. And they could cause pipeline ruptures. But both pipelines at pretty much the same time? Also unless there was more than the normally very low level of oxygen in the pipelines (which is monitored to avoid corrosion and at higher levels combustion risk) that would allow for combustion I don't see how you would get explosions as large as those that were detected.
11 - Other - Different causes for each pipeline (different countries sabotaged each one, or one was an accident and one was sabotage), eco-terrorism (would they have the ability and would they want to release that much methane), aliens, etc. No real reason to seriously consider any of these without some specific evidence. They are all a bunch of wacky theories, that I'm not taking seriously. Something I haven't even considered? Well of course that's possible but what?
The term conspiracy theory is wielded as a pejorative, alluding to on-its-face absurdity. But the vocabulary we use has a serious ambiguity problem because conspiracies are not figments of the imagination. There is a tangible and qualitative distinction between plain-vanilla conspiracies (COINTELPRO, Operation Snow White, or the Gunpowder Plot) and their more theatrical cousins (flat earth theory, the moon landing hoax, or the farcical notion that coffee tastes good), yet a clear delineation has been elusive and it's unsatisfying to just assert "this one is crazy, and this one isn't." Both camps involve subterfuge, malevolent intent, covert operations, misinformation, orchestrated deceit, hidden agendas, clandestine networks, and yes, conspiracy, and yet the attempts to differentiate between the two have veered into unsatisfactory or plainly misleading territories.
What I'll argue is the solution boils down to a simple reconfiguration of the definition that captures the essence of the absurdity: conspiracy theories are theories that assume circumstances that render the titular "conspiracy" unnecessary. This is what I'll refer to as the Overkill Conspiracy Hypothesis (OCH). Before we dive into this refinement, it's helpful to explore why traditional distinctions have fallen short.
The section on differences in The People's Pedia showcases some of these misguided attempts. For example, conspiracy theories tend to be in opposition to mainstream consensus but that's a naked appeal to authority — logic that would have tarred the early challengers to the supposed health benignity of smoking as loons. Or that theories portray conspirators acting with extreme malice, but humans can indeed harbor evil intentions (see generally, human history). Another relies on the implausibility of maintaining near-perfect operational security. This is getting better, but while maintaining secrecy is hard, it's definitely not impossible. We have actual, real-life examples of covert military operations, or drug cartels that manage to operate clandestine billion-dollar logistical enterprises.
There's still some useful guidance to draw from the pile of chaff, and that's conspiracy theories' lack of, and resistance to, falsifiability. Despite its unfortunate name, falsifiability is one of my nearest and dearest concepts for navigating the world. Put simply, falsifiability is the ability for a theory to be proven wrong at least hypothetically. The classic example is "I believe all swans are white, but I would change my mind if I saw a black swan". The classic counterexample could be General John DeWitt citing the absence of sabotage by Japanese-Americans during WWII as evidence of future sabotage plans. There is indeed a trend of conspiracy theorists digging into their belief in belief, and dismissing contrary evidence as either fabricated, or (worse) evidence of the conspiracy itself.
I won't talk shit about the falsifiability test; it's really good stuff. But it has limitations. For one, the lack of falsifiability is only a good indication a theory is deficient, not a conclusive determination. There are also practical considerations, like how historical events can be difficult to apply falsifiability because the evidence is incomplete or hopelessly lost, or how insufficient technology in an emerging scientific field can place some falsifiable claims (temporarily, hopefully) beyond scrutiny. So the inability to falsify a theory does not necessarily mean that the theory is bunk.
Beyond those practical limitations, there's also the unfortunate bad actor factor. Theorists with sufficient dishonesty or self-awareness can respond to the existential threat of falsifiability by resorting to vague innuendo to avoid tripping over shoelaces of their own making. Since you can't falsify what isn't firmly posited, they dance around direct assertions, keeping their claims shrouded in a mist of maybe. The only recourse then is going one level higher, and deducing vagueness as a telltale sign of a falsifiability fugitive wherever concrete answers to the who / how / why remain elusive. Applying the vagueness test to the flat earth theory showcases the evasion. It's near-impossible to get any clear answers from proponents: who exactly is behind Big Globe, how did they manage to hoodwink everyone, and why why why why why would anyone devote any effort to this scheme? In contrast, True Conspiracies™ like the atomic spies lack the nebulousness: Soviet Union / covert transmission of nuclear secrets / geopolitical advantage.
Yet the vagueness accusation doesn't apply to all conspiracy theories. The moon landing hoax is surprisingly lucid on this point: NASA / soundstage / geopolitical advantage. And this unveils another defense mechanism against falsification, which is the setting of ridiculously high standards of evidence. Speaking of veils, there's a precedent for this in Islamic law of all places, where convictions for fornication require four eyewitnesses to the same act of intercourse, and only adult male Muslims are deemed competent witnesses. The impossibly stringent standards appear to be in response to the fact that the offense carries the death penalty, and shows it's possible to raise the bar so high that falsifiability is intentionally rendered out of reach.
The moon landing hoax might be subjected to these impossible standards, given that the Apollo 11 landing was meticulously documented over 143 minutes of uninterrupted video footage — a duration too lengthy to fit on a film reel with the technology available at the time. Although only slightly higher than the Lizardman Constant, a surprising 6% of Americans still hold the view that the moon landing was staged. At some point you have to ask how much evidence is enough, but ultimately there's no universally accepted threshold for answering this question.
So falsifiability remains a fantastic tool, but it has legitimate practical limitations, and isn't a conclusive inquiry anyways. Someone's refusal to engage in falsifiability remains excellent evidence they're aware and concerned of subjecting their theory to scrutiny, but their efforts (vagueness or impossible standards) will nevertheless still frustrate a straightforward application of falsifiability. So what's left?
We're finally back again to the Overkill Conspiracy Hypothesis, where the circumstances conspiracy theories must assume also, ironically, render the conspiracy moot. The best way to explain this is by example. Deconstructing a conspiracy theory replicates the thrill of planning a bank heist, so put yourself in the shoes of the unfortunate anonymous bureaucrat tasked with overseeing the moon landing hoax. Remember that the why of the moon landing hoax was to establish geopolitical prestige by having the United States beat the Soviet Union to the lunar chase. So whatever scheme you concoct has to withstand scrutiny from what was, at the time, the most advanced space program employing the greatest space engineers from that half of the world.
The most straightforward countermeasure would be to task already existing NASA engineers to draft up totally fake but absolutely plausible equipment designs. Every single aspect of the entire launch — each rocket, lunar module, ladder, panel, bolt, glove, wrench — would need to be painstakingly fabricated to deceive not just the global audience, but the eagle-eyed experts watching with bated breath from the other side of the Cold War divide. Extend that to all communications, video transmissions, photographs, astronaut testimonies, and 'returned' moon rocks. Each and all of it has to be exhaustively and meticulously examined by dedicated and highly specialized consultants.
But it doesn't stop there, because you also need absolute and perpetual secrecy, as any singular leak would threaten the entire endeavor. The U.S. was well aware Soviet Union spies had successfully snagged closely-guarded nuclear secrets, so whatever countermeasures needed here had to surpass fucking nukes. Like I said before, secrecy is not impossible, just very difficult. I suppose NASA could take a page from the cartels and just institute brutally violent reprisals against any snitches (plus their whole families), but this genre of deterrence can only work if...people know about it. More likely, though, NASA would use the traditional intelligence agency methods of extensive vetting, selective recruitment, and lavish compensation, but now all measures would need to be further amplified to surpass the protective measures around nuclear secrets.
We're talking screening hundreds or thousands of individuals more rigorously than for nuclear secrets, alongside an expanding surveillance apparatus to keep everyone in line. How much do you need to increase NASA's budget (10x? 100x?) to devote toward a risky gambit that, if exposed, would be history's forever laughingstock? If such vast treasuries are already at disposal, it starts to seem easier to just...go to the moon for real.
OCH® has several benefits. It starts by not challenging any conspiracy theorist's premises. It accepts it as given that there is indeed a sufficiently motivated shadowy cabal, and just runs with it. This sidesteps any of the aforementioned concerns about falsifiability fugitives, and still provides a useful rubric for distinguishing plain-vanilla conspiracies from their black sheep brethren.
If we apply OCH to the atomic spies, we can see the theory behind that conspiracy requires no overkill assumptions. The Soviet Union did not have nukes, they wanted nukes, and stealing someone else's blueprints is definitely much easier than developing your own in-house. The necessary assumption (the Soviet Union has an effective espionage program) does not negate the need for the conspiracy.
Contrast that with something like the Sandy Hook hoax, which posits the school shooting as a false flag operation orchestrated by the government to pass restrictive gun laws (or something; see the vagueness section above). Setting aside the fact that no significant firearm legislation actually resulted, the hoax and the hundreds of crisis actors it would have required would have necessitated thousands of auditions, along with all the secrecy hurdles previously discussed. And again, if the government already has access to this mountain of resources, it seems like there are far more efficient methods of spending it (like maybe giving every congressman some gold bars) rather than orchestrating an attack and then hoping the right laws get passed afterward.
It's also beguiling to wonder exactly why the shadowy cabal would even need to orchestrate a fake mass shooting, given the fact that they already regularly happen! Even if the cabal wanted to instigate a slaughter (for whatever reason), the far, far, far simpler method is to just identify the loner incel kid and prod them into committing an actual mass shooting. We've already stipulated the cabal does not care about dead kids. Similarly, if the U.S. wanted to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks as a prelude to global war, it seems far easier to load up an actual plane full of actual explosives and just actually launch it at the actual buildings, rather than to spend the weeks or months to surreptitiously sneak in however many tons of thermite into the World Trade Center (while also coordinating the schedule with the plane impact, for some reason).
Examining other examples of Verified Conspiracies demonstrate how none of them harbor overkill assumptions that render the conspiratorial endeavors moot. In the Watergate scandal, the motive was to gain political advantage by spying on adversaries, and the conspirators did so through simple breaking and entering. No assumptions are required about the capabilities of President Nixon's security entourage that would have rendered the trespass unnecessary. Even something with the scope of Operation Snow White — which remains one of the largest infiltrations of the U.S. government, involving up to 5,000 agents — fits. The fact that they had access to thousands of covert agents isn't overkill, because the agents still needed to infiltrate government agencies to gain access to the documents they wanted destroyed. The assumptions do not belie the need for the conspiracy.
I hold no delusions that I can convince people wedded to their conspiracy theory of their missteps. I don't claim to have any idea how people fall prey to this kind of unfalsifiable absurdist thinking. But at least for the rest of us, it will remain useful to be able to draw a stark distinction between the real and the kooky. Maybe after that we can unearth some answers.
—sent from my lunar module
Happy 20 TTs guys.
I’ll be trying something new with this one and changing the format so the top level post only contains an explanation of the thread, like we do with Wellness Wednesdays and Fun Fridays. The country-specific coverage will be placed in separate comments where people can respond to them directly, or start their own threads as separate comments. This is part of my hope that long term this will become more of a permanent thread that sustains beyond me, because I likely won’t be around long term. In the short term as well, I’ve been trying to produce a lot of the user content but there will be weeks where I'm too busy, and it would be nice to have a stickied thread where people who want to can still chat foreign policy without me.
So:
This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. In the past I've noticed good results from covering countries that users here live in, and having them chime in with more comprehensive responses. In that spirit I'll probably try to offer more snippets of western news (but you'll still get a lot of the global south). I don't follow present day European politics all that much so you'll have to fill in the blanks for me.
But also, no need to use the prompts here, feel free to talk about completely unmentioned countries, or skip country coverage entirely and chat about ongoing dynamics like wars or trade deals. You can even skip the present day and talk about IR history, or just whatever you’re reading at the moment - consider it very free form and open to everyone.
Primarily relevant to here through the discussion of what people claim to find attractive vs. choose, but also considers various other measures of attractiveness. I dont agree with all these analyses but think its worth posting simply for considering the topic in a lot more detail then Ive previously seen.
A couple people had expressed interest in this topic, and I have a bit of extra time for a couple days, so here goes:
Bona fides: I am a former infantry NCO and sniper, hunter, competitive shooter, reloader, hobby gunsmith, sometimes firearms trainer and currently work in a gun shop, mostly on the paperwork/compliance side. Back in the day, was a qualified expert with every standard small arm in the US inventory circa 2003 (M2, 4, 9, 16, 19, 249, 240B, 21, 24, 82 etc.), and today hang around the 75th percentile of USPSA classifications. I've shot Cap-and-Ball, Trap and Sporting Clays badly; Bullseye and PRS somewhat better and IDPA/USPSA/UML/Two-gun with some local success. Been active in the 2A community since the mid-90s, got my first instructor cert in high school, and have held a CPL for almost twenty years now.
I certainly don't claim to be an expert in every aspect of firearms, there's huge areas that escape my knowledge base, but if you've got questions I'll do my best to answer.
Technical questions
Gun control proposals for feasibility
Industry
Training
Wacky opinions
General geekery
Some competition links (not my own) just for the interested.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=U5IhsWamaLY&t=173
https://youtube.com/watch?v=93nEEINflXE
https://youtube.com/watch?v=utcky0zq10E
The move from Reddit to a dedicated forum is a huge opportunity to mix things up. We should take advantage. Never let a crisis go to waste, etc.
One thing I would suggest (if technical limitations allow) would be the addition of a two-tiered voting system, somewhat like what LessWrong has implemented, where users can vote both on the quality of a post, and separately on whether or not they agree with it. I think this could have really positive effects for the kind of community and discussion the Motte was created to promote. The Motte's raison d'etre is to promote discussion and debate with people you disagree with. Separating voting on quality from voting on agreement would promote that goal in a couple different ways. Fundamentally, there is a tension between upvoting a post you think is well-done, and downvoting that same post because you disagree with its content. I think the Motte wants to be a place that encourages outsider or minority views, and separating the "quality" vote from the "agreement" vote would help promote this. From what I have noticed in this community, despite our commitments to encouraging debate and discussion with people you disagree with, posts coming from a more liberal/left-wing/social justice/woke viewpoint tend to get downvoted, even when their quality is equivalent or superior to other posts.
I'll also quote from the reasons given on the above LessWrong post about this feature, because I think the reasons given are good ones.:
I personally feel much more comfortable upvoting good comments that I disagree with or whose truth value I am highly uncertain about, because I don’t feel that my vote will be mistaken as setting the social reality of what is true.
I also feel very comfortable strong-agreeing with things while not up/downvoting on them, so as to indicate which side of an argument seems true to me without my voting being read as “this person gets to keep accruing more and more social status for just repeating a common position at length”.
Similarly to the first bullet, I think that many writers have interesting and valuable ideas but whose truth-value I am quite unsure about or even disagree with. This split allows voters to repeatedly signal that a given writer's comments are of high value, without building a false-consensus that LessWrong has high confidence that the ideas are true. (For example, many people have incompatible but valuable ideas about how AGI development will go, and I want authors to get lots of karma and visibility for excellent contributions without this ambiguity.)
There are many comments I think are bad but am averse to downvoting, because I feel that it is ambiguous whether the person is being downvoted because everyone thinks their take is unfashionable or whether it's because the person is wasting the commons with their behavior (e.g. belittling, starting bravery debates, not doing basic reading comprehension, etc). With this split I feel more comfortable downvoting bad comments without worrying that everyone else who states the position will worry if they'll also be downvoted.
I have seen some comments that previously would have been "downvoted to hell" are now on positive karma, and are instead "disagreed to hell". I won't point them out to avoid focusing on individuals, but this seems like an obvious improvement in communication ability.
Would this be a doable change? And would it be a good one? I am strongly in favor, but open to reasons why I'm wrong.