PokerPirate
1mo ago
But the next time some genuinely asks me "I don't get it. why didn't we just nuke Afghanistan?" I wish I could use an argument from authority using quotes from Clausewitz.
Now that I think about it, this was probably the real reason for including Clausewitz in the Naval Academy curriculum. I definitely saw random O6+s namedropping Clausewitz to get us junior officers on board with their harebrained schemes.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Those are extremely important lessons, but I'm skeptical that Art of War and On War can actually deliver them. I went to the Naval Academy. Everyone was "required" to read these books. We also had various practical exercises related to how to achieve military objectives. I saw no correlation between the people who actually read those books and did well academically and people who understood how/why to achieve military objectives.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Thanks for posting this. I've often had difficulties articulating why my understanding of "faith" is different than "not needing proof to ascent intellectually to something". But the synonym of allegiance is excellent.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I had no idea about that fine! I usually tell this story in my CS classes when we talk about networking, and now I have a new morbidly hilarious tidbit to add.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I remember watching the Harry Potter movies before reading the books, and was totally confused by parts of movies 3, 4, and 5. (These are some of the longest books, but don't have correspondingly larger movies than the first two.) Lots of other people I know IRL feel similarly.
GOT is different because they got a whole season to explain a book instead of just a movie.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Operation Ivy Bells is the go-to example of the astounding success American spies have in the technical arena. Basically we tapped an undersea cable the Russians used for top-secret military communication from 1971-1983ish, and we knew EVERYTHING that the Russian navy was doing because of this wiretap.
It's also the go-to example of how easily Americans sell out their own country. An NSA analyst who was in debt sold the secrets of this multi-billion dollar program to the Soviets for a $5000 payment. (The analyst received a total of $35k for other secrets as well.) The analyst wasn't even recruited by the Soviets, he sought them out because he was in debt.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I hate the dentist.
I'm not scared of the dentist, I just hate everything about the office visit. I hate having to schedule appointments months in advance. I hate having to arrive 15 minutes before the appointment only to wait for 30 minutes before I'm escorted to a chair and another 10 minutes before the dentist sees me. I hate that the dentist is always trying to upsell me on tooth whitening products, and their business model is full of moral hazards. I hate that the dentist only provides "dumbed down" explanations of everything and can't answer my questions in any detail.
Nevertheless, I feel a need to go every few years in order to remove tartar from my teeth and verify there's no cavities. (I'm still not really sure why I should remove tartar from my teeth, though, as no dentist has been able to explain this to me other than it's "just what you should do because bacteria".)
/rant
PokerPirate
1mo ago
The legalese consent forms doctors go over with patients are a joke.
My wife also recently had laser eye surgery, and had to go through signing dozens of pages that describe the complications. Of course the doctor went over with her at a high level what the forms meant, and she didn't read them, and just signed anyways.
I really wish that we could just sane 1 paragraph (or even better bullet point) list consent forms for everything, not just medicine.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Many philosophers/theologians already self describe as Christian atheists, and they usually have much more complicated theologies than you're suggesting. They're complicated enough that I've spend the last 30 minutes trying to think of a decent summary that responds to your post, and I can't do it. So instead I'll just link to the wikipedia page and let you learn more if you'd like.
Personally, I struggled for a long time with the "humiliation of professing that thunder comes first" part of Christianity. I find the Christian atheist solution to this problem to this problem quite satisfying, and probably closer to what the "original" Christianity of Jesus looked like than what most modern American Christians believe.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
This survey caught my eye. It’s probably not perfect but it showed 20% of mail-in-voters admitted to some kind of voting fraud.
This writeup doesn't inspire much confidence in me. The only details they have on their methodology are the following sentence:
The poll of 1,085 likely voters was conducted from November 30 to December 6, 2023. Among those surveyed in the poll, 33% were Republicans, 36% were Democrats, and 31% were “other”; 32% were 18-39 years old, 46% were 40-64 years old, and 22% were 65 or older.
But how were these "likely voters" determined? Random phone calls? Knocking on doors? Are they all from Portland or spread out over the US? Are they rich or poor? Were they paid for the survey?
They don't even answer how many of these "likely voters" they survey actually voted or voted by mail!
Based on this incredible lack of detail, it's hard for me to take these results seriously. If there's a more detailed writeup somewhere that I missed, I'd love to see it. I didn't see any link to one though.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
The market already has solutions to this problem, they're just normally used for highly skilled staff like programmers. One very common structure is to issue stock options that only vesting after a certain period (like 4 years), which strongly incentives workers to stay with the current firm until vesting. Another common structure in the academic market is that university's will purchase a house for a professor with a 0 interest rate loan that gets forgiven over the period of 10-20 years. But if the employee leaves early, then the loan reverts to a standard (or even much higher than standard) interest rate.
I don't see how you can reasonably construe this speech as a problem.
Plenty of Americans describe themselves as "Irish" or "German" or whatever without trying to imply they are less American. American's do this so much that there are thousands of memes making fun of us for it. So I see getting bent that a Somali-American calls herself Somali as just a thinly veiled boo outgroup.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
You might enjoy reading about the Shackleton Expedition to the South Pole. The ship wrecked, and Shackleton managed to somehow bring everyone home by clever use of life boats and navigating. The story is much less grim than other shipwrecks (no drawing straws about who will get shot and eaten), but has lots of endurance-style adversary to overcome.
There's lots of good books to choose from, and I don't have a particular recommendation.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
My audience at the time (maybe a 200 or so friends/family) consisted of plenty of skeptical people, and so the small nods were directed towards them. This is a pretty common format for people doing overseas NGO work in non-US friendly countries.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I lived in North Korea in 2015 and 2016 in order to teach computer science at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. I have a pretty detailed journal of my trip posted online. From that I think you should get a decent sense of what life as a university student in North Korea is like.
Unfortunately, Trump instituted a travel ban to North Korea in 2017 (and Biden has kept the ban in place), so I haven't been back. I still have regular zoom calls with the faculty/students there. Some examples of successes that have come from this work are facilitating only open source contributions from North Koreans and helping North Koreans fix their internet infrastructure. But this sort of work is obviously much harder without being able to go in person, and these days I have much less insight to what the average North Korean thinks.
In my opinion, "no longer pursuing reconciliation with the south" is a huge deal. This pursuit of reconciliation was one of the main pillars of legitimacy for the Kim regime. Whenever I talked to a North Korean about their country, they always brought up that they want reunification. Literally on every street corner in Pyongyang were maps of a unified Korea and propaganda posters saying things like "We want to hug our brothers in the South". So I am very curious how this will be spun for the domestic audience.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
As we get closer to the point where LLMs can spontaneously generate 5000-10000 word pieces that make plodding but cogent arguments and engage meticulously with the existing literature, huge swathes of the academic journal industry will simply be unable to survive
I think you're wrong about this being a good thing. Currently, all the best journals in most allow anyone to submit. Sometimes you get people outside "the cathedral" getting really novel ideas published and changing fields. Once it becomes too easy for hoi palloi to submit, journal editors will start relying more and more on the author's credentials. Not from Harvard/Yale/Oxbridge? Then you're totally out of luck.
PokerPirate
3mo ago
I appreciate your technical clarifications. I think these corrections only reinforce my main point though that getting long term domestic support for nuclear cooperation is very hard in the US, and that's why we don't see more of it even if it could be an effective foreign policy tool.
The US actually has done this is the past, but domestic political opposition has resulted in the projects being cancelled. Two particularly famous examples are with North Korea and Iran.
In North Korea: In 1994, the Clinton administration and North Korea signed the Joint Agreement Agreed Framework that resulted in North Korea stopping it's nuclear program in exchange for 2 US-built nuclear power plants. The details are complicated, but essentially the new power plants were a proliferation resistant design and North Korea agreed to regular international inspections by the IAEA that would ensure no nuclear material was diverted to weapons development. The Bush administration, however, effectively canceled the agreement. The stated reason for the cancellation was that North Korea was not abiding by the terms of the agreement and was continuing to develop nuclear weapons in secret. The North Koreans claim that the US was the first to break the agreement by failing to construct the power plants and deliver other agreed upon aid.
More recently in Iran: Obama signed the JCPOA in 2015 with Iran. The idea of the treaty was that the US would supply Iran with "medium enriched uranium". At 20% enrichment, this would be sufficient to power Iran's domestic nuclear power plants and manufacture medical isotopes, but would not be sufficient for weapons manufacturing. In exchange, Iran would agree to dismantle it's infrastructure for uranium enrichment. In 2018, however, Trump withdrew from the JCPOA. Although Trump made claims about Iran failing to uphold it's end of the bargain, this was essentially a move to appeal to his domestic base.
In both cases, we have democratic presidents agreeing to nuclear treaties that would at least in theory prevent proliferation (and in my opinion would have). Then republican presidents dismantling those treaties. This type of pattern is very common in American international relations, and makes foreign countries (especially those not very closely aligned with US interests) very hesitant to enter longterm agreements with the US.
This vacillation in American foreign policy has long been known, and both Iran and North Korea were very hesitant to enter into these particular agreements for fear of the US not following through. Both countries, however, were under lots of internal stress at the time of the agreements (North Korea due to the breakup of the USSR and subsequent 1992 famine, Iran due to sanctions and the various middle eastern color revolutions), and they probably would not have entered these agreements if they were in a more favorable negotiating position.
(I was a nuclear officer in the US navy, and participate in unofficial diplomatic efforts with North Korea.)
PokerPirate
3mo ago
Do you have any particular reading recommendations about these quaker antics? I spent a year as apart of a quaker meeting, and always heard about the anti-slavery stuff, but never from anything like a primary source.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
About 10 years ago, I found a recording on the internet of a Catholic military chaplain blessing the little boy atomic bomb before it went off to destroy Hiroshima. Stupid me forgot to save the reference, and I've been searching for it in vain ever since :(
PokerPirate
4mo ago
Ehh... I think you're being inconsistent/missing the point.
You previously said:
Fire fighters running into burning building, or a mother using her body to shield her children from falling debris, might look impressive from the outside but it is ultimately mundane.
and then called these things "something of a cheap thing", to which I wanted to know what you think is "expensive".
The "fire fighters running into burning building, or a mother using her body to shield her children from falling debris" absolutely have to "live with the long-term injuries and the PTSD" just as much as any infantryman.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
I'd love to hear what you think is "expensive" if you call daily devotion to those mundane tasks of firefighting/caring for an infant/etc "cheap".
PokerPirate
4mo ago
That's more-or-less my point. It's all ultimately mundane to the people who do it regularly.
PokerPirate
4mo ago
I'd be shocked if there was only 1 sample from the Oslo mine. This is a super trivial thing to verify, and I would have assumed both the US and IAEA at a minimum would have done so.
I did a brief read through the references in the wikipedia article and found a handful of non-French scientists who've published about Oslo, but I don't see any references to actual samples taken from the mine except the French one.
How does one actually sign up for these types of trials? I've long admired the conscientious objectors who got injected with infectious disease to help medical research instead of fighting in the army, but I have no idea what I should do to do something similar. Something like donating a kidney is more obvious how to do, but also seems like there's a lot more hurdles since it seems to happen so much less.
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