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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3hr ago
· Edited 3hr ago
Why should being democratically elected shield you from ICC prosecution? The whole point of the ICC is that it is, well, international; you may believe that the people of Israel forfeited their right to judge Netanyahu when they elected him, but the ICC does not judge in the name of the people of Israel but in the name of the people of a pretty large chunk of the Western world. If anything, maybe the majority of Israeli voters should also stand trial in some sort of reverse class action suit - I think it's high time to patch out the stage magic trick by which democracies make accountability disappear.
For a very different polarity example, by all accounts Milošević was elected democratically and "genocide the Albanians" seems to have represented the Serbian people's will pretty accurately in the '90s. Was it "dangerous and destabilising" that he was dragged to the Hague for enacting it? Are you instead using the old descriptivist definition of "democratic" as "friends with the US" here? (Playing brazen word games like that is how you wind up bleeding soft power.)
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12hr ago
I really don't think that an assertion to the effect of "we believe Trump's orders are illegal, and want to remind you that you have an obligation to not obey illegal orders" is in any sense similar to a coup - even if some soldiers actually followed up on it, insubordination is still not a coup but just a disciplinary matter. To begin with, I'd be surprised if under the present US military code, the actual action they are calling for even obliquely (refusing an order to participate in some attack) would carry the death penalty, so in what world does it make sense to suggest that the instigators deserve it? (In toxoplasma terms, it would seem eminently less escalatory to me to call for giving Trump the Saddam treatment in response to this, given that he is apparently calling for killing his political opponents.)
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12hr ago
Where in the video does it say that? To begin with, I assume the context is what Wikipedia glosses here as "Experts, human rights groups and international bodies said the killings were illegal under US and international law", so even if they are wrong or confused, the form of the belief clearly is that the military may be given orders that are illegal in the standard sense of the word rather than some sort of tribal brainrot Calvinball of the type you are evoking.
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1d ago
The civil war would surely not manifest itself as a coup attempt, but as something like CHAZ on a much larger scale. Do you think the Marines would actually gladly clear out Seattle or Chicago if they decided to set up armed checkpoints to prevent federal government representatives from entering? Do you not think some units would mutiny if the order were given, given that the rank and file is hardly uniformly Red?
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1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
While the Democrats were hinting extremely obviously that the military / intelligence community should basically pull off a coup
Whatever sort of dogwhistle this is supposed to be, I don't hear it. Are you saying that their assertion (that under US law, as a soldier or whatever you are allowed to or even obliged to ignore illegal orders) is false? Because if it isn't, then this is as much of a coup as it would be for a random civilian to fail to bend his schlong straight into the rectum if the Donald were to say "go fuck yourself" to his face. Presumably written and customary law already circumscribes what commands from the president anyone actually has to obey; the video merely asserts that this is not "all of them" for soldiers or the intelligence community either. Any expectations that those who made it may have about the specific kinds of unlawful commands that they expect to be given in the near future are irrelevant, and surely this is for the individual soldier/intelligence community member to determine (under risk of standing court martial or whatever if they determine badly).
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1d ago
Yet, Nepal started out higher (121) and wound up much lower (1535), and all they had was a civil war 1996-2006 that was not particularly bloody (and Vietnam had already overtaken them by 1996). Even Thailand, which is generally remarkably stable and is pretty hard to separate from Vietnam even with the most tortured HBD just-so stories, started out much higher (366) and only went up to 7942. Laos (no big wars): 68 to 2174. Indonesia (no wars): 271 to 5074. Vietnam outperformed a variety of countries in the same corner and general socioeconomic starting conditions on this metric. It also outperformed them subjectively, in terms of "how reasonable would it seem to cast my lot with that country in the long run".
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2d ago
The only reason, I think, our society doesn't see this is that we haven't had a war with existential stakes since women joined the military in any appreciable numbers. Even during the most rigorous war in recent memory, Vietnam, the US army was <1% female, and most of them nurses.
On the other hand, women's participation in the North Vietnamese army is generally taken to be very high (I've seen figures like 30% bandied around, and certainly anecdotes check out), and since the war ended, Vietnam has done rather well. Its GDP per capita (Wikipedia figures) went about 60x from 80 USD to 4745 USD since 1975, while the US one went from ~12x from 7713 to 92883.
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2d ago
Helmetless biking is fine if you're riding on bike paths or flat roads with little traffic. If you're riding in traffic or on more topographically interesting terrain they're a good idea, and if you're mountain biking they're a necessity. Every once in a blue moon I'll see someone in the woods without a helmet and it's almost always a guy with a cheap bike not suited to the trail and nothing else to indicate he has a clue what he's doing.
I don't buy into the traffic part (though it might be more applicable in the US, where drivers are not trained or compelled to give cyclists proper room?), but mountain biking, sure. At that point you are doing a hazardous sport rather than utilitarian transportation; I'd accept the necessity for parachutes when high-altitude tightroping too, without being for making them mandatory while walking on firm ground.
And you can put bluetooth speakers in the ear pockets and have headphones that you can easily control with a gloved hand.
I really don't want people who are wearing headphones on my piste (or, on that matter, on the road)...
I was actually convinced to try wearing a ski helmet once. It was not only uncomfortable, but also messed with my situational awareness (since it restricts wind flow around my face and heavily buffets my ears), though perhaps if you are the sort of person to want to wear bluetooth earbuds while skiing you don't particularly use that sense anyway.
Relevantly, perhaps, I don't see what gear there really is to hold down. I'd use a single heavy knit cap with lining, which holds itself in place just fine, and maybe add polarized sunshades if it's a sunny day. If I am going to engage in skiing where I expect head-down crashes of the type that would get snow on my neck, then sure, there is an argument for helmets, as there was for mountain biking - but again, we would be engaging in a strange conflation where we force the safety standards of an adjacent high-risk activity on a lower-risk one that doesn't need them, unnecessarily encumbering the lower-risk one in the process. Most biking does not involve uneven dirt paths that weave between trees, and most skiing does not involve doing 360-degree flips or unmaintained mountainsides.
(cf. Rust: Most programming does not involve people dying if a use-after-free happens!)
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3d ago
· Edited 3d ago
Helmetless biking (and skiing, omg, the 0-to-100 in the uptake rate of ski helmets in Europe in the past decade is making me fume) achieves a lot. It makes the difference between a bike being something you can just hop onto, go from A to B with and leave wherever, and it being an activity that requires locating a particular piece of gear and hauling it with you everywhere at the destination, leaving you with either -1 hand or -1 head's worth of volume in whatever bags you bring until you return home, unless you engage in extra planning to be able to leave it somewhere.
Seatbelts are ok because the delta-inconveniencs to driving is small. Bike helmet advocates, though, belong together with Rust programmers and playground securers on the scrap heap of history for being scolds that would sap all efficiency and convenience out of life by a thousand cuts for the sake of their padded-cell utopia.
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4d ago
Just to follow up, now that about 2 months have passed, do you think Charlie Kirk is still on people's minds? My sense is that in the conversation it's been completely displaced by the government shutdown and Epstein electric boogaloo, but maybe there are subcultures in which people still talk about it.
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5d ago
· Edited 4d ago
Notably, Russia promised it would have Pokrovsk (and much more) by the end of the summer.
What is the source for that promise? I'm seeing this "our top secret leaks from the enemy suggest they aimed to achieve X by time Y, since they didn't that means they are losers" pattern since the start of the war, and it's a bit facile.
Generally, I think there's a strange sort of alignment of interests between the two sides in continuing the current near-static attrition warfare until one of the sides folds. For the Ukrainian side, it's not like anything that's behind the current frontline is more defensible than the commieblock smelter fortress hellscape of the Donbass; and for the Russians, between having to fight a given Ukrainian soldier while pulverising anything he could use for cover in Pokrovsk and having to do the same thing while pulverising cover in Zaporizhia/Kharkiv, the former is preferable, since if they do the former and prevail, they eventually can capture Zaporizhia/Kharkiv (which are actually worth something) intact. Allowing the frontline to move while there is still meat to keep it where it is is more or less strictly negative-sum.
not be allowed to return, but will be given land in conquered Ukraine
I don't think they really have the social machinery, or stomach, to actually implement some sort of way to prevent them from returning - after all, many of the contract soldiers likely signed to get money for their families, which means that they have ties in the old country forcefully cutting which would cause widespread discontent. Just turning them into some modern version of Székely-style marchers by giving them allotments of conquered land, in the hope that the most unhinged elements stay put and perhaps even make the land more defensible should Ukraine go in for a rematch, seems fairly plausible though.
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5d ago
At it it's most basic level what is a moral conviction if not a pre-commitment to be unreasonable.
A positive term in your value function. Rationalism is about achieving your terminal goals, not about choosing them. There is nothing "irrational" about acting optimally to, say, purge all idolatry.
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6d ago
5: Which ones specifically?
4: Russia hasn't even managed to wipe out Ukraine's aviation or train network yet, and most of Europe would be rather further away.
2: It's about half the size (of presumably full-sized Ukraine), plus Poland and the Baltics have Russia by the balls due to Kaliningrad (whatever happens later on, it probably gets turned into a parking lot or occupied/taken hostage in the opening weeks of a conflict)
1: I mean, if Ukraine falls, what further ways does NATO have to validate Russia's fears? There will be no immediate Russian objectives like controlling Ukraine that NATO can actively prevent, so the ball will be in their court. If they then actually start something (like the aforementioned moves on Kaliningrad), then sure, all bets are off, but so far I thought the lizardmen were trying to be a bit more subtle about the whole "look how dangerous and unhinged they are, if we punch them they punch back" schtick.
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6d ago
On the other hand, I'd wonder if Ukraine's leadership wouldn't have jumped ship and left the country headless by now if they saw that there is no opportunity for profiteering. Kickbacks are the superstar CEO salaries of politics.
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6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
Well, we shouldn't forget that Poland, too, has actually greatly increased the size and funding of its army since 2022. Besides, how likely is it really that there would be no NATO response in case of a Russian invasion of the Baltics/Poland? (even if it's not immediate, the rest of the EU certainly would get involved, and if it possibly goes badly for them, I don't see a world in which the US stands by idly)
It seems to me that you just need to believe a lot of fairly peculiar (and likely unacceptable to any in the pro-UA camp apart from people like Julian Roepcke who went off the deep end in contrarianism) things to imagine a Russian invasion of Poland or the Baltics being successful: either you really think that NATO is already lending Ukraine most of its power (and so Russia is really currently barely prevailing in a stalemate against the collective West) and so Poland and friends will be weaker when Russia comes for them because they were already stripped bare, or that NATO is not giving Ukraine that big a fraction of its power and so the current stalemate means that Russia and Ukraine alone are about evenly matched and each stronger than NATO.
(Mind you, technically I think the picture is more complicated than that because the non-entry of the West has currently kept Russia several steps below the top of the escalation ladder, e.g. by leaving NPPs and civilians alone. However, to use this in your argument, you would have to concede that Russia is not currently evilmaxxing, which is also taboo for pro-UA.)
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6d ago
You're quoting the latter for the economic argument, which is indeed the more solid part of your post (though I think that the "two weeks to flatten the curvecrash the Russian economy" arguments also have a really bad track record). Not sure where you are even getting the P-man himself (I don't particularly count a pro-Ukrainian source cherrypicking his quotes as being him as a source, any more than Russian telegram channels quoting Zelensky become pro-Ukrainian).
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6d ago
I mean, if your goal was to actually make a mirror image of that post by @No_one, you didn't quite succeed. He didn't resort to putting crass quotes in the mouths of those he argued against implicitly or explicitly, said what he meant rather than engaging in ironic snark, and most importantly the sources he linked to bolster his point were all pro-Ukrainian, while yours were also mostly pro-Ukrainian.
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6d ago
I think the second point still is ridiculous, because there is neither the means (unless you really flog your brain into accepting the "the enemy simultaneously weak and strong" pattern that is every propagandist's dream goal) nor really the motive (unless the Baltics really decide to force it by blockading Kaliningrad or the like) for them to take on NATO. Ukraine really was, in many ways, sui generis: at the outset it was almost 50% culturally and politically Russian, it hosted the best European warm-water port Russia had (and if you accept that the Russians did not want to surrender it, that alone almost made the path to the current situation inevitable - the Maidan government wanted to tear up the lease so Crimea had to be taken, and the post-Maidan governments wanted to starve out Crimea so more territory had to be taken), and it's a single-authority transit country linking Russia to the easternmost loyal hydrocarbon customers it has in Europe (Hungary and Slovakia), which the pro-Atlanticist forces in Europe and Ukraine were very keen on using against them through out the 200Xes.
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6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
I think this might not be a useful discussion to have without identifying a concrete example of a person who is confused about it (and is really convinced that the answer should be something else, rather than just being like "uh, I don't know, 50/50?"). For the 50/50 answer, I'm positing a theory that is more or less:
(1) people won't do particularly complex math;
(2) people have a strong intuition that a well-informed adversary enthusiastically doing something for you will not help you;
(3) this intuition is adaptive and justified by real-life experience;
(4) if you accept as an "axiom" that Monty's opening of the door did not help you, then you can conclude something like that the outcome of Monty's action can at most be as good for you as if the state it brought about (one door open, has goat) were naturally there from the start. In that scenario, though, the conditional probability of the car being behind each remaining door is indeed 1/2.
As for why people would think that "the bound is tight"/it's not even worse, there might be some other technically-incorrect-but-adaptive axioms in play.
It is true that I am implying a form of "peaky", and not very introspectively closed, intelligence here: I think that people are okay at basic probability, and have a set of very solid but not perfect intuitions about benefit, trade and competition in the sort of weakly iterated games that were played within and among tribes since times when they looked more like apes. These intuitions do in fact operate extensively on comparison, as evidenced by the fact that in all of recorded history they were conveyed by way of allegorical stories.
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7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
I do think that my description captures the essence of the confusion, but that isn't to say that I think that the confused would necessarily describe their confusion like this, or be able to describe it at all. I'm following a fairly mechanistic analysis of "normies" here: their everyday experience, and perhaps their memetic heirloom (in the form of tropes, stories and catechisms), tells them that if they are in an asymmetric-information setting and a person who knows more than them and has interests misaligned with theirs tries to persuade them to act in a particular way, that person is probably trying to bait them into harming themselves.
The exact way in which this self-harm happens doesn't even matter: "they wouldn't be trying so hard to convince me if this were actually good for me" is a straight corollary of this life lesson, and if you analyse the corollary carefully you see that it all but says that the game show host's behaviour may depend on your choice of door (=whether switching would be good for you).
(By the way, I'm not terribly impressed by the invocation of Erdős. People who actually have to deal with his output may tell you that while he certainly had great flashes of intuition and a superhuman tolerance for grindy proof work, he was also hardly a precision machine in the vein of von Neumann, and had plenty of moments where he got sloppy or just didn't get something.
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7d ago
Early scifi dealt with it a lot; I'm thinking Arthur Clarke (The Star, the Nine Billion Names of God for a more comedic take that would be up the alley of our Caliph) or even Asimov with The Last Question. It probably only really stopped being a thing once scifi became a mass-market endeavour.
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7d ago
The description that you quoted says nothing whatsoever about whether the host is guaranteed to pick a door. It talks about exactly one possible "run" of the system, namely the one where you started by picking door 1. Supposing the car is actually behind Door 2, it is perfectly consistent with this description that if you had picked Door 2, the host would not have done anything. There is nothing whatsoever about it suggesting that it talks about a set of rules, and in general, I will never read any text that is written as an account of events ("you do this, and then he does that, and (...)") as if it were an account of rules ("whenever you do this, he will do that (...)").
If you wanted to write a description to the effect that the host will always behave in the same fashion, you could write it as follows: "You are on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. (...) Per the rules, after you pick a door, the host, who knows what's behind the doors, will open one of the other doors that has a goat behind it. He will then say to you: (...) Is it to your advantage to switch?". The description was not written in this way.
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8d ago
The answer for 95% of those decision theory puzzles/paradoxes is that the puzzle as stated is underspecified. In the Monty Hall problem, it's the counterfactual behaviour of the host (is it guaranteed that he would pick and open a door regardless of what you do? If yes: switch; if he actually only picks a door when you have picked the winning door: don't). The Allais paradox (in my opinion) is actually similar, just with an added element of deeply baked in common-sense mistrust towards a seemingly complete specification - academics tend to find this inconceivable but people's world model quite wisely reads "shady guy in labcoat says 1% chance of 0" as "shady guy in labcoat will give me 0 and invoke some sophistry to tell me that it was an unfortunate 1% fluke", just as it reads "game show host opens door and asks me if I want to switch" as "game show host saw I'm about to win and is trying to bait me into losing". It's not a surprising find that experiment participants don't use logic to evaluate your thought experiments as stated but just imagine themselves in the situation, importing additional beliefs about reality that you never stated in the process.
In the Sleeping Beauty problem, it's the nature of the question that is even being asked - what does even actually constitute the right answer to the question? Why is 1/2 or 1/3 more "right" than 0? (Monty Hall does better there, right answer is whatever maximises your probability of getting the car.) I think Groisman, in the paper you linked, gets close to this, but stops short of outright committing to paper that the whole debate is just consequence of a Zen-like deepity bamboozle. Unfortunately, in my experience (my PhD was in this academic neighbourhood) people working in this field really won't take any of the above for an answer, and will go back to "no, but really, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Don't dodge the question" straight away.
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8d ago
We had a discussion about this quite recently, and as then I want to argue that we have not figured out a way to maintain technologically advanced civilization while forcing high birthrates either. "We are going to die, better preemptively kill ourselves now" does not sound like an appealing policy platform.
I'd take the case against international law more seriously here if there were any politically significant actors who abstained on principle from invoking it to condemn their geopolitical enemies as well. I find the rank hypocrisy morally more revolting than any object-level "violation of international law".
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