Shrike
5mo ago
Does that mean they were missing critical technology needed to use the weapons? Or something like on paper the people authorized to use them were all in Russia?
Basically, the troops manning the nuclear weapons were not loyal to Ukraine, and the permissive action links needed to authorize use were not in Ukrainian hands. So "Ukraine" did not have the launch codes, and they also didn't have the guys who would launch the missiles.
In the absence of the Budapest Memorandum, could Ukraine have become a nuclear state in its own right?
Technically, it's not very hard to build a nuclear weapon. If they had wanted, I think they probably could have become a nuclear state relatively easily (even after giving up the nuclear weapons), barring intervention from the US or Russia.
Shrike
5mo ago
Here’s where we would treat Ukraine as the ally that they should be. This is where you own up to the Budapest Memorandum that was signed by Yeltsin and Clinton to provide security guarantees for the territorial integrity of Ukraine. (The 1994 Budapest Memorandum saw Ukraine give up nukes for security guarantees from Russia, the U.S., and others—guarantees now in tatters.)
I know I bang on and on about this, but this is just entirely wrong:
- The Budapest Memorandum does not provide security guarantees.
- Ukraine happened to have nuclear weapons on its soil. It never had operational control of the weapons.
- The Budapest Memorandum is not legally binding, as per the US State Department.
Shrike
5mo ago
All of the examples that you list have the culture-war-equivalent of an entire army (NGOs, legal funds, press outlets, media strategies etc.) mobilized to do battle for them.
People generally aren't trying to mess things up. They are just wrong about the consequences of their ideas
Okay, but in what way is this not a conflict? The Communists
- very clearly bought into conflict theory - a class struggle!
- Definitely were wrong about the consequences of their ideas
- Definitely thought they were making the world a better and brighter place through conflict.
It's not particularly comforting to have someone explain to you that they are doing this for the greater good as they level a Tokarev at the back of your head. "This is all a big misunderstanding!" is what a lot of people thought right before being executed.
And while, thank God, we are not so far gone today, you see this in contemporary politics too, whether it's tearing down heteronormativity or "owning the libs." Mistake and conflict aren't diametrically opposed, they feed into each other.
But the average politician or corporate leader just doesn't understand how the world works.
The average politician is, I think, well aware that creating conflict is better for their electoral chances.
Shrike
5mo ago
If you can contest the idea that there is an American ideology (or really, it is probably better to say American values) then you are signaling that you can't speak descriptively about the collective values of any group of people (at least at the level of a nation or broad culture that is not bound by explicit ideological tenets such as a party platform – and even then there are plenty of e.g. Democrats who do not agree with 100% of their party platform!)
I think that such a position obscures much more than it reveals, even if it is true that there are going to be outliers to every group and that there are and can be good-faith disagreements about what values are truly integral to a nation or a culture.
Shrike
5mo ago
Disagreement among Americans and instances of outliers (or even extreme and fundamental disagreements) does not mean that one cannot make generally true (even if admittedly broad) statements both about American culture as a whole and about American subcultures (which I often point out do not always share values!)
In the case of the Alien and Sedition Acts, they (particularly as I understand it the parts that repressed free speech) led to negative public backlash and were repealed [ETA: actually it looks like some of them expired and the Alien Enemies law was not repealed because it was noncontroversial] precisely because they ran contrary to the American ideology (or American values, if you will, which might be a better way of conceptualizing it).
Shrike
5mo ago
Good!
But you see my concern with both pure meritocracy and Golden Tickets as selectors, here.
Shrike
5mo ago
Sure – and I would add that I think this is also worth considering in the reverse, where immigration (or even internal migration!) can hollow out entire communities and warp their cultural fabric.
Shrike
5mo ago
Was FDR against American ideology?
Yes, FDR and his team dabbled very explicitly in importing European fascist/socialist ideals.
America contains multitudes, for better or worse.
Sure. That's why alignment with American ideology is important. If Americans stop believing in the right to free speech, free religion, the rule of law, the importance of states, and so on, America will no longer be able to contain multitudes
Shrike
5mo ago
I am sympathetic to this. But at a minimum it seems immigrants should broadly share Americans' political beliefs!
Shrike
5mo ago
a truly meritocratic system
FWIW, I don't want a purely meritocratic system.
Right now there is a fight (to make a sweeping gesture) "America is a proposition nation" and "America is a Nation Of Founding Stock" which, purely on the immigration question, seems kinda like a moot argument if there's no effort to ensure that America remains a proposition nation. Team A and Team B fight over whether immigrants should share American values or American characteristics, and somehow neither are winning – or so it seems to me.
You would know more than me – are there any efforts to substantially screen people to ensure they agree with American ideology? Specifically American ideology, no generic 'Western democratic values' – I'm talking no-holds-barred free speech, right to bear arms, rule of law and private property, a federalized system where the states are important and sovereign, freedom of religion.
From what I understand there's a quiz, some sort of background check, and maybe they check your social media to make sure you aren't a terrorist or something. I'm not really sure that is selecting for people whose beliefs are American.
Anyway, setting citizenship at $1 million or $5 million or $15 million or nothing + meritocracy doesn't really solve for that either way.
Shrike
5mo ago
Yes, 100%. And it sounds like Elon is probably getting said feedback by the way agency directors are handling it.
Shrike
5mo ago
Yes, yes, yes! People aren't engineering, although sometimes similar principles may apply.
It's interesting, low government pay is a complaint I've heard articulated before, and I think there might actually be something to substantially slashing personnel roles while increasing personnel pay.
Shrike
5mo ago
I'm not sure they are necessarily at odds. Musk seems pretty famous for prioritizing speed over getting things right the first time and yet this doesn't stop him from not only getting things right but getting them right faster than others. For instance, IIRC he spent millions on complex machinery for Starship before deciding that it should be made out of stainless steel and had to basically eat the loss; Starship is still poised to be the heaviest-lift reusable rocket ever built at a time when other reusable rockets are still struggling to compete with Starship's smaller predecessors.
Anyway, I don't take for granted that Musk is necessarily making the best decisions or the right ones in his newest venture, but I also don't think that "smart outsiders led by a certified genius" and "percussive maintenance" are at odds inherently.
Shrike
5mo ago
I think this was a common pattern. American Presidents wanted to be friendly with Russia, but not as much as they wanted other things.
From the Russian point of view, I can see how this probably looked like getting rugpulled every eight years and fed their belief that America was hostile, even before getting to genuinely hostile acts (such as overthrowing friendly governments).
And Corvos would say that the person who shows up on a DNA test as the child's mother, and who raised him for eighteen years, isn't really his mother in favor of the surrogate.
Although I do think that DNA (and other factors) probably plays a role in parent-child bonding, it would play no part in bonding with the mother in the womb, where the mother and child share a direct biological link and the child learns to recognize its mother's voice.
If someone kidnapped their identical twin's child as a newborn and raised them for 18 years, everything you said above would be true (and in fact, more true since the identical twin would probably have the voice of the mother), but I think most people would agree that they were not the mother's child. That's probably the direction Corvos is coming from.
It's a bizarre attempt to retcon the English language in the service of the Online Right's pregnancy fetish.
Typically the mother of a child is the one who gave birth to the child. There's no retcon here, it's just that technology has moved past what the English language originally contemplated.
Shrike
5mo ago
I don't know why this is bizarre. My understanding is that motherhood is a biological reality - children begin to bond with their mother in the womb, and it is distressing for them to be separated from their biological mother.
Now, obviously there may be some distressing scenarios where it is in the best interest of the child to separate them from the mother at birth. But that's a case of enacting a minor harm to prevent a major one, not a harmless move of convenience.
Shrike
5mo ago
I hope that we don't even have to play roulette with something mundane. COVID wasn't bad on a human historic scale and it was bad enough, plenty bad enough to justify shutting down GOF research in my view.
Shrike
5mo ago
Well, first off, Russia is not anemic in sea power. They are anemic in surface sea power. Their submarines are quite good, and they have more than a few of them. Which ties in to my next point –
You wave off "intelligence gathering", but intelligence gathering is VERY important. US intelligence is quite possibly the difference from Russia consolidating control over Hostomel and not. Without the US SIGINT apparatus, there actually was a decent chance the opening Russian bumrush of Ukraine worked. Intelligence wins wars.
And it's arguably even more important in a conflict dominated by sea + air power. A conflict where Russia is giving China targeting data on our aircraft carriers (the way they are allegedly supporting the Houthis now) potentially puts the United States in a position where it can just meekly accept that China will be able to target our ships or attack Russian assets. It's infinitely better to not have to face that dilemma. It's nearly certain we will be faced with it now.
Being able to locate carriers means you can target them; being able to target them means you can sink them; being able to sink them might be decisive.
So, even without even a situation where China and Russia go to open war jointly and Russia does something like "invading Estonia" to tie up US air power in Europe, or "sinking US ships preparing to transit Suez or Panama" to cripple US attempts to surge naval assets to the Pacific, I think Russia could actually be not only important but actually decisive in a conflict.
Shrike
5mo ago
Once a person is affected by more words of law than it is possible for them to read and understand in their lifetime, corruption is effectively inevitable.
Aha. I love this.
Shrike
5mo ago
The feasibility of this hinges strongly on whether you trust them, as well as the purportedly friendly ASI they're unleashing.
Right. I suspect there are possibly ways to bolster deterrence even without using a friendly ASI. Monomaniacal focus on the AI race, I think, is a blindness in people who are, well, monomaniacally focused on the AI race.
Shrike
5mo ago
Yes, I don't disagree on either point, although I would note that the Budapest Memorandum was not a security guarantee from the US (at least, not one that obligates the US to defend Ukraine) and that in any event the US has maintained that it was nonbinding (and of course spinning up a nuke program might be more of a hazard to some than no nuke program.)
Shrike
5mo ago
For example, if there are 10x as many video games as there were before, do they create 10x the economic value. Of course not.
Bingo.
I am slightly hopeful that 3D printing (and I guess 3D printing + AI) will get us to some good places in the tangible meatspace. I also suspect that, if Space Economy becomes real, there might be a lot of possibilities for material improvement (some of which might be tied to white collar type jobs, like Martian Rock Rover Supervisor).
But it will also make it possible for that same human lawyer to produce a 100,000 page contract of dense legalese. Existing improvements in technology have seemingly only increased the demand for lawyers.
Yes, and this is a horrible thought. I would be quite happy with a law banning contracts that cannot be meaningfully understood in 5 minutes. That's not a law banning even per se 100,000 pages of dense legalese but I should be able to read a contract in one sitting with no surprises. Same with a law.
(Lawyers will love this once they realize it means litigating over whether the fine print was adequately represented by the topline!)
Shrike
5mo ago
My guess is that prompt engineering won't be a career per se at all, except for possibly for artists.
Shrike
5mo ago
And the majority of them were serious people with qualifications to match, not someone bullshitting about their awesome secret knowledge that they're too benevolent to divulge
Well, I assure you this isn't me, my expertise in this field is entirely as a user!
But in general, I agree that it would be best if we create them aligned in the first place, and to a degree, these aren't entirely useless efforts already.
Yes. But I only see concerns about alignment. Which really just kicks the can down the road, if we align AI so that even a smart person can't jailbreak it to let it make them a virus, how can we ensure that we prevent that smart person from creating their own unaligned AI etc.
If people want to think this seriously, they also need to think about what deterrence looks like. Now, I don't spend much time on LessWrong, so maybe I have missed the conversation. But I kinda get the impression that chatter about FOOM has blinded people to possibilities there.
Well, I dunno, if Puerto Rico declared independence I would not expect the US troops stationed there to suddenly have fealty to Puerto Rico.
However, as it happens, we know the answer to your question – they specifically avoided swearing fealty to Ukraine and swore fealty to the Commonwealth of Independent States instead.
See page 25 of this DTRA report.
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