Shrike

Shrike 4mo ago

I think that some cultural aspects of the modern US would shock and appall them but the big picture would look very familiar to them from a historical level. I imagine they would immediately start making familiar analogies to the Roman Republic and its transition to empire.

Not that I necessarily think that those analogies are 100% correct, but I suspect it would pattern-match for them quickly. I'm not sure they would think it was good but it probably would feel familiar.

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Shrike 4mo ago

Unlike the other two, literacy is not an undisputed good. It is a difficult mode of communication that takes years to learn, and about 1/5th of adults in the developed world never learn to read for comprehension. We prize literacy because, for now, it's required to navigate our society.

Literacy also seems to contribute to poor memory skills* at a cultural level and, if overindulged in, poor eyesight at the individual level.

*unfortunately I suspect that replacing literacy with TikTok will make the problem better, not worse

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Shrike 4mo ago

Yeah people forget that the original theoretical question of the American Revolution was if the British Parliament in England or the British Parliaments in America could govern the Englishmen in America.

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Shrike 4mo ago

That's definitely not true for tactical weapons – the Russians (allegedly) almost fired a nuclear torpedo off of Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis, a decision that was up to three naval officers onboard the ship.

I would not be tremendously surprised if modern nuclear submarines had the ability to launch strategic under their own recognizance, although almost certainly not on the initiative of merely one officer. Perhaps they don't have the codes, but it seems plausible that the message they are actually waiting for is not mechanically necessary to use the nuclear weapons, it is merely an authentication code.

Now, under this circumstance, if the entire C&C chain was wiped out instantly, their response would be delayed. But presumably they would still be able to come to a decision once the BBC announced which world cities had been destroyed, and by whom.

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Shrike 4mo ago

It doesn't really matter where the subs are if their missiles have worldwide reach, if you are just using them for second-strike.

I wouldn't necessarily bet that the US can flawlessly eliminate the entire deployed Russian SSBN fleet in their bastion behind the Russian ASW wall. I'm sure the US tries to track them but from what I understand Underwater Ain't Easy.

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Shrike 4mo ago

I for one like the Hlynkaposting.

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Shrike 4mo ago

If the US is actually going to reindustrialize seeing mass exodus of basically intelligent people from email jobs could be extremely beneficial.

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Shrike 4mo ago

They realized what was happening far too late

I think this is correct, and in areas where conservatives have made a concerted effort (particularly in law) they've been able to do very well.

Something I found a bit funny about the Woodgrains position of "shouldn't you build it up rather than tearing it down" is it seems to be to imply that Trump Et. Al. should redirect all of those funds straight into right-wing institutions. Which I somehow doubt would make people very happy. But if they were run by serious conservatives instead of grifter conservatives I think they would do just fine.

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Shrike 4mo ago

Thank you :)

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Shrike 4mo ago

I dunno. It seems to me that lefties live in the shadow of Marx much more so than the right lives in the shadow of, say, Aquinas.

You're not exactly wrong about conservatives definitionally (although consider conservative hero Edmund Burke - not exactly a hidebound anti-reformer), but righties per se have no problem with new and innovative ideas. Look at science fiction (which is very forward-looking) - is it more "conservative" or "rightie" than other areas of literature? Or less? Now look at mainstream film, media, literature, etc. Is it eaten up with retreads, remakes, retellings of fairy-tales and people reliving their childhoods? Where is the innovation truly?

Or look at politics - is there really more innovation in the Democratic national platform than "we should make Greenland a US territory?"

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Shrike 4mo ago

The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance. They can't or won't produce knowledge and they distrust anyone who does.

I do not think this is true at all. The right is very good at producing knowledge, it is just unevenly distributed. If you spend any time reading Supreme Court briefs, you'll see rightie knowledge production in action, as this is an area where the right has (very successfully!) focused much of their energy and attention.

I think that the right-wing intellectual capital is considerably better than that on the left, if considerably smaller. Conservative or conservative-friendly educational institutions I think can be very good, just dwarfed in number by default-left-wing ones. (Some of this depends on what counts as "right" and "left" of course.)

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Shrike 4mo ago

Personally I find "spreadsheets" very apt so far. I think they definitely have the potential to disrupt some jobs. But if I'm being honest I think a lot of the "email jobs" are begging for disruption anyway, for other reasons. I would not be surprised if "AI" takes the blame for something that was more-or-less going to happen anyway.

I think robotics (which obviously has a lot of overlap with AI!) is potentially vastly more impactful than just "an AI that can do your email job." If you started randomly shooting "email job holders" and "guys who maintain power lines and fiber optic cables" you would notice the disruption in the power lines and fiber optic cables much sooner unless you got weirdly (un?)lucky shooting email jobbers. Similarly, AI will have a much bigger impact if it comes with concrete physical improvements instead of just better video games, or more website code, or better-written emails, or whatever, notwithstanding the fact that a lot of people work in the video game/coding/email industry.

(I hope I am right about that. I guess wireheading is kinda an option...)

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Shrike 4mo ago

In my opinion, it hasn't because (contrary to what AI hype proponents say) it can't.

Yes, I lean towards thinking that AI is often overblown, but at least part of my point here is that probably a lot more automation was possible even prior to AI than has actually been embraced so far. Just because something is possible does not mean that it will be implemented, or implemented quickly.

A skilled programmer can use AI tools as a force multiplier in some situations, so they do have a (fairly narrow) use case.

I think this is pretty analogous to my experience with it (which doesn't involve programming). Force multiplier, yes, definitely. But so is Excel. And what happened with Excel wasn't that accountants went out of business, but rather that (from what I can tell, anyway) fairly sophisticated mathematical operations and financial monitoring became routine.

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Shrike 4mo ago

Why hasn't it already?

My wife worked about five years ago at as a credit analyst, where part of her job involved determining whether or not to extend extra lines of credit: the easiest thing in the world (I would think) to automate. Really, a very simple algorithm based off of known data should be able to make those decisions, right? But my wife, using extremely outdated software, at a place with massive employee retention problems due to insanely high workloads, was tasked with following a set of general guidelines to determine whether or not to extend additional credit. In some cases the guidelines were a bit ambiguous. She was instructed by her manager to use her gut.

As I think I've mentioned before, I work with AI for my IRL job fairly extensively, although mostly second-hand. The work we do now would have required much more human effort prior to modern AI models, and having been involved in the transition between "useless-to-us-GPT" and "oh wow this is actually good" I can tell you that our model of action pivoted away from mass employment. But we still need people - the AI requires a lot of hand-holding, although I am optimistic it will improve in that regard - and AI can't sell people on a product. You seem to be envisioning a world where an AI can do the work of 10 people at a 14 person company, so the company shrinks to 4 people. I'm living in a world where AI can do the work of 10 people, so we're likely to employ (let's say) 10 people instead of 20 and do 100x the work the 20 people would have been able to do. It's quite possible that in our endeavor the AI is actually the difference between success and failure and when it's all said and done by 2050 we end up employing 50 people instead of zero.

How far that generalizes, I do not know. What I do know is that "capitalism" is often extraordinarily inefficient already. If AI ends up doing jobs that could have been replaced in whole or in part by automation a decade before anyone had ever heard of "ChatGPT" it will be because AI is the new and sexy thing, not because "capitalism" is insanely efficient and good at making decisions. It seems quite plausible to me that people will still be using their gut at my wife's place of employment at the same time that AI is giving input into high-level decisions in Silicon Valley boardrooms.

I definitely believe that AI and automation change the shape of industry over the next 50 years - and yes, the next 5. What I would not bet on (absent other factors, which are plenteous) is everyone waking up the same day and deciding to fire all their employees and replace them with AI, mass pandemonium in the streets. For one thing, the people who would make the decision to do that are the people least likely to be comfortable with using AI. Instead, they will ask the people most likely to be replaced by AI to study the question of whether or not to replace them with AI. How do you think that's going to go? There's also the "lobster dominance hierarchy" - people prefer to boss other people around rather than lord it over computers. Money and personnel are a measuring stick of importance and the managerial class won't give up on that easily.

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Shrike 4mo ago

Yeah there's not a world where you accidentally invite a journo to a chat and brag about your solid OPSEC and it's not embarrassing...except for the 16D chess situation. Which I uh wouldn't bet on.

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Shrike 4mo ago

I don't think the Signal Chat Debacle is Fine, Actually, even if it didn't involve classified intel (unless it was on purpose as a 16-dimensional chess move, in which case hilarious) but I am old enough to recall when Germany had an video call about selecting Russian targets for weapons systems (which also mentioned that the UK had troops in-country!) that was recorded and released by the Russians and I don't recall any news stories about how NATO allies were nervous about trusting the Germans with classified intel after. Instead the Germany defense minister announced that said NATO allies weren't annoyed and that he probably wouldn't be firing anyone.

My point isn't to downplay the seriousness of the incident so much as it is to suggest that perhaps other countries are selective about their criticism of intel goof-ups.

ETA: to be clear, it seem quite possible to me that regardless of what Congress was told, classified material was disclosed in the Signal Affair. My point is that even if it wasn't, it's worthy of criticism.

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Shrike 4mo ago

Yes - I appreciate the invocation of cybersecurity principles (which I know little about) here, but yeah I think that's right, and a real problem.

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Shrike 4mo ago

If there's an inhouse Signal equivalent would it be cleared for use on your garden-variety cell phone?

(Anyway yes I bet it sucks either way).

Wiping message history without recording keeping is a problem, because all text messages about official acts from federal agencies must be preserved. I guess politicians across the spectrum have decided this is not actually an important accountability feature in democracy nor are historical records important enough to bother. Fair enough.

I have a bit of a rant about this but TLDR;

I think this is a very common problem and suspect "using Signal with messages set to delete" is fairly typical even at lower ranks, and
Modern records are made at a MUCH faster rate than dated records-keeping laws anticipated. Arguably either all records-keeping laws or associated technology needs to be completely revamped to account for modern electronic messaging capability.

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Shrike 4mo ago

I've heard extremely hair-raising anecdotes set both inside high-level Pentagon circles and big military contractor circles where high-level political types probably weren't a problem (although political correctness might be). Think things along the lines of knowingly improper access controls on HUMINT or phone calls to foreign countries placed in secure areas.

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Shrike 4mo ago

Yeah that sounds about right, and I 100% think it nudges (in the mind of the practitioners) OPSEC out of the category of "important to prevent people from dying" into "more of this dumb bureaucratic paperwork stuff."

Which is really bad if it's actually important.

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Shrike 4mo ago

IDK I don't actually think a very large portion of the US security apparatus actually cares about or follows the ostensible security protocols, and SCIFs are only as good as said protocols.

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Shrike 4mo ago

I think it's good that it's out there. But I would like to see the intellectual center of gravity move towards(?) or remain(??) at places like Substack and, well, here.

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Shrike 4mo ago

~~Let me register my response to this: AAHHHHHHH~~

Let me register a more mature response. I think it is good that there is a move fast and break things outlet in the world. There's more than zero good in that.

But it is also good when people spend several months researching a high-confidence story or essay and write it carefully, thoughtfully, and deliberately. I think our society would be much better off as a whole if they were willing to wait on things before having an opinion.

People I think have come around to distrusting the centralized system because they recognize that a centralized system is a bottleneck of information that, if tainted, corrupts the entire information ecosystem. But what I think is overlooked is that propaganda has for decades been able to work by being fast. Think of the "Iraqi soldiers threw babies out of incubators" story. A lie that succeeded in part, I would say, due to corruption in the centralized nodes, but the mainstream media eventually did call BS on the story! The problem was that by then it was too late, the story had already succeeded.

And optimizing for speed over centrality doesn't shut propaganda out, but lets propaganda shift into moving quickly rather than corrupting a node. It's the classic "headline lies, correction on page 20" problem, just retooled for the information age.

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Shrike 4mo ago

How hard would it be to leak the relevant documents to press and leave out the parts you don't like?

I feel like dirty political hits are not exactly rocket science, here.

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