TiltingGambit
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User ID: 804
TiltingGambit
12hr ago
I mean it's no mistake that the first truly mainstream content about K Pop was produced by Netflix. But regardless, I don't consider Korean or Japanese cultural influence as limited as Chinese influence.
Because the main problem for China is the CCP. Not Chinese people or culture.
I'm diagusted by the cultural vandalism of wokeness too btw. I just don't think our pursuit of enrichment will be done with a CCP member scowling over the director's shoulder back stage.
TiltingGambit
22hr ago
As I said, copying things is not charisma. Where they can import a blueprint and copy another product, they do fine.
But that's anti leadership. Which is my point.
TiltingGambit
1d ago
the PRC becomes ascendant and starts trying to export soft power via cultural exports, you will weep and beg for the woke media to return to save you.
My riff on this for years has been how poorly Chinese cultural and political export industry goes. It's like an early model AI trying to write a birthday card for your mum. The words and sentiment are there. But it just feels like 15 degrees off somehow.
Their political engagement with the west is just cringe. When they try to pressure western countries it just comes off as the third born child turning 25 and finally standing up for themselves at the family barbecue. Everybody stands there quietly for a moment until big sis sniggers behind her hand and a smiling dad tells everybody to settle down.
Chinese news, from serious journalism to state mandated military propaganda is like something you'd read in a sci fi novel. "How can people take this seriously lol?"
Cultural export from China is crazily uncharismatic. And this is why, in my view, the US would end up with all the allies in WWIII and china would end up with the dregs of the international community. Nobody likes china, nobody outside of china knows what's going on in china, and nobody in china knows what's going on inside china either.
For all their economic progress, China have been totally unable to evolve in that cultural sphere. They can do the Peter Theil style "import all the good business ideas and scale them" but because they're locked in on maintaining their own cultural identity, which the CCP guards with an iron fist, they just cannot import Hollywood or Reddit. Because if they did, they'd feel the cascading oblivion of Western culture. A culture that would endanger the CCP more and more every day.
The result is a pretty ghastly and stagnant cultural climate that's stuck in, at best, the 90s.
But they have fast trains at least.
TiltingGambit
1d ago
An intelligence division in the Australian public service. You can apply, but it's a lengthy process unless you're coming from the military.
TiltingGambit
1d ago
It's a pretty crazy and specific series of far-fetched events and I never literally expected it to play out exactly.
I generally teach my analysts to pretend the year is today +5 and then write a retrospective on the scenario they are predicting will play out. Where possible try to follow what historians do (allege that history was obviously going to happen that way if people had only thought things through).*
In favour of your scenario will be some macro drivers, e.g. social media. "As seen with the Arab Spring a decade prior, social media can create a social movement and drive those with standing criticisms into action. In the US context, the warning flags had been raised through COVID with the BLM movement andd the ICE protests in late 2025 and early 2026."
I'd like to see this type of thing done for your very specific example to present the hypothesis. To me, it would be hard to justify that a civil war is the obvious result. Social unrest and political upheaval, sure. But running out the clock into a new presidency still seems like the most likely scenario.
If you broke up the problem into the phases needed to get to civil war, you'd find more offramps than onramps, and that generallt means that your scenario might be the most dangerous possibility, but far off the most likely.
*Tom Clancy basically made a career out of this. He presented the most likely drivers for the Cold War to go hot, but obviously it never did. These exercises are useful nonetheless, as they force you into a holistic thinking where you're looking for baselines to compare against the new information coming in.
TiltingGambit
1d ago
I'm going to get another 20 replies saying "it's cheaper to hire illegals" and I understand that.
I'm saying that if you are pursuing a policy to remove all of the illegals from the country, rather than making ICE do it in possibly the least efficient way you could think of, it's easier to just do the workplace check. It's easily advertised as pro-American by a president like trump, who can push it as a policy to give jobs back to Americans.
It's not like Trump is worried about shaking up the stock market or pissing off lobby groups.
TiltingGambit
1d ago
But it costs those Australian businesses collectively billions of dollars in (direct and indirect) labor costs.
I obviously understand that's the situation. I'm saying it shouldn't be.
It solves 100% of the issues re: immigration conversation. Australia has a ruthless immigration policy, and far more immigrants per 100k than the USA, Germany or Britain. And we have far less politicised immigration conversation.
An Australian can reliably depend on virtually every man woman and child they meet to have either been thoroughly vetted by a government bureaucrat or a slob from accounting.
We have something like 30% of people in country born overseas (compared to less than 15% for German, UK and USA) but consistently poll pretty high for our happiness with immigration.
Yes, most of our immigrants are east asian, British or Kiwi, as opposed to African or Middle Easterners, but still.
If it costs businesses money to be forced to hire Australians, and wins back some social cohesion, it's just such an easy policy to pursue in my mind. American politics being dependent upon the random industry association lobbying some spineless boomer in the senate is so foreign to me.
"Stop hiring people who aren't supposed to be in the country" should be the short work of a year of policy making. If you're against it, you're against hiring Americans, right? If you're against it, you're funding illegal immigration. In another world the libs could even have pushed this policy to get back at the capitalists.
TiltingGambit
1d ago
Sooner or later ICE will have to go after more central examples of illegals: Joses in restaurants and hotels, on farms and construction sites.
This is honestly the most baffling part of the american immigration system to me.
In Australia, we have a requirement for all workplaces to verify that a new hire has a right to work in the country. You provide your birth certificate or working visa, or other proof upon your first day at work while you're signing a document with your preferred bank account for your salary. This costs the employee and the business approximately zero overhead.
If a business is found to be hiring illegal immigrants, they are fined.
Sure. There are some dodgy businesses who hire undocumented cousins from India. But these businesses are tiny, and the problem is also tiny.
I just don't understand why the US doesn't implement this policy. Like all of the associated issues here would be solved over night.
I'm pretty sure you need to prove you're not an illegal immigrant to study or get a driver's licence here. Why is this not the solution for the States? It puts the pressure on businesses and is totally politically palatable.
TiltingGambit
3d ago
"but I draw the line at politics I disagree with."
Most people are only seeing that message because they're not reading the second level meaning.
Star wars isn't particularly woke. The problem is that they, and Disney more broadley, continuously try to reskin movies and franchises. Literal reskinning, like The Little Mermaid. But also reskinning entire movies to appeal to demographics they didn't previously appeal to.
This pisses off people who liked the previous movie, and generally doesn't do well at attracting new fans. Because the source material is nearly always better than the next generation of content. Nobody is reskinning box office flops from the 80s.
So the business model is to take a massive box office hit or mass cultural impact, e.g. star wars (LoTR, Star Trek), pivot away from the target demographic, make a worse movie that appeals to different people, and then wait and see what happens.
This results in mostly misses. The aim is to be more inclusive, but the reskinning process is invariably decreasing their appeal to ~25% of the population (white men) to appeal to 6% of the population (black women). Unsurprisingly, most black women didn't grow up loving star wars, so the heightened interest in reigniting an old IP is totally wasted.
Again, this isn't particularly woke. Making a movie for a black demographic is literally uncontroversial. What's controversial is deliberately taking away that movie from a white demographic.
The obvious solution is to make more disney movies that appeal to blacks or asians. Not to reskin ones that don't appeal to them. If there is an IP that appeals to white men, you probably don't need to consider it literal fascism, and can just make it for them.
It's about countering Russia and China.
This is what people are saying but fail to acknowledge that the US has virtual carte blanch militarily since the end of WWII. They have a standing agreement with Denmark that allows the US to use Greenland with almost no limitations for military purposes. The only limitation was/is no nuclear weapons. A limitation the US was caught breaking during the Cold War, but resulted in a defacto don't ask don't tell policy from Copenhagen.
The US has run down their military presence to one base with about 250 guys hanging around painting rocks and sweeping dirt.
There's two options. One, that this isn't about the stated reasons re: China and Russia. Or two, that somebody in the White House came up with this idea and didn’t know about the standing agreement before they went public.
It would be a matter or routine diplomacy to increase US presence in Greenland from a token force to a significant one. And routine diplomacy to renegotiate the agreement for even more military access and cement a "no chinese access to public or private infrastructures".
Whatever is going on, it doesn't make sense with the information available to the public. The formal integration of Greenland into the US is not in line with the stated goals of the government. It isn't strengthening the geopolitical position of the US, as it's fracturing US/EU relations, and making it more likely that Denmark eventually revokes US access to the territory.
In addition, instead of Slavic attention being pointed across the Baltic, which aligns with the stated anti-Russia goals of the White House, now half the EU is at least considering the deployment of serious assets to Greenland.
Having Denmark send 40 F35s to Greenland instead of hanging over the Baltic is not what the US wants if it's interested in countering Russia.
Either there's something weird going on, or the White House is as incompetent as they've been accused of being.
They both want increased presence in our sphere, and Greenland is a good place to assert our control.
The Europeans are also incapable of managing this.
I'm not american or european. But if this is the best the US can do in favour of the geopolitical strategy to deter China and Russia, the government is totally retarded.
"Let's assert control over an important piece of territory that we already have control over. The Eurocucks won't do anything about it anyway and they won't fight Russia if we want them to. Let's risk blowing up NATO and driving the cringers in Brussels to reneg on all standing defence pacts lol"
This is so against the interests of US geopolitics that I'm surprised to see this view pushed outside of a tweet by a US state senator.
Interesting take. Cheers.
It seems like you think the motte has a major weighting towards that top 1% of prospective applicants, which is where you're getting your intuition from.
Frankly I find it hard to disagree. If i read 100 comments on reddit on a given issue, probably 99 of them are totally retarded and incapable of demonstrating rational thought. If I read 100 comments on the motte, every second one is at least somewhat sensible.
TiltingGambit
3d ago
I'll defer to your expertise but I personally find it hard to believe that a combo of scepticism and comp sci skills turn a 1% hire into a 50% hire.
What do you see as the actual attributes that lend themselves to forecasting "lumber futures" or whatever? I'm guessing there's some major filtering going on in the hiring process. Like tetlock only submitting his Superforecaster's predictions or something.
I'm sure you could take the top 50 candidates from the motte and they'd do well. But I doubt you'd be getting those results from a random sampling. Probably you beat the 1%, but you don't turn it into a 50%.
TiltingGambit
4d ago
People always cite 99% of retail traders fail. But the typical MIT 800 math SAT kid can figure out a way to make money in markets.
In a thread about reference class forecasting, I find it curious that you can throw this out comment with a straight face.
If you have, on average, 1 person in a hundred who is capable of making money, even a poster here who is five times as likely to succeed as a normie is still likely to fail.
It suggests that one of the core failures isn’t predictive ability per se, but attention allocation: which warnings get surfaced, amplified, and translated into actionable questions for the people whose decisions hinge on them
I'm fine with this interpretation, but realistically I don't think you can meaningfully operationalise it. Obviously a cafe owner can't be expected to include pandemics, nuclear war, general IA risks, alien invasions etc in their risk assessment. Sure, in an ideal world they would be able to click on a holistic risk portal website, punch in their circumstances and know that on aggregate they have a 20% chance of a life alterning goepolitical incident ruining their business in the next 30 years. But...
However, at the system level, I’m less convinced it was unforeseeable. A number of people did, in fact, raise the specific risk in advance:
Bill Gates...
Nassim Taleb famously used the example of a airliner crashing into his building as an example of a black swan. This was pre-9/11. People immediately used this example as a rebuttal of his wider claims about black swans, as you could argue he had imagined exactly the kind world changing incident that was about to alter the course of US history, end the 1990s and shape global international relations for X years.
But there's a huge difference in functional use of these predictions and simply saying the words. Approximately zero cafe owners around the world had a "pandemic survival fund" in preparation for COVID 19. So it's fair to say that the industry as a whole, functionally, had no sense that this was a danger. Therefore it was a black swan to them, even though we have high profile guys saying "this is a possibility."
You have a fundamental problem that most intelligence analysts will describe on excruciating detail: we looked at this problem, we knew it was a possibility, but the operational team responsible for the investigation/operation/follow up didn't take the problem seriously. In a world with limited resources, we really can't expect ops teams to chase up every low likelihood problem. If a steel mill in Vietnam blows up tomorrow, the manufacturer that makes my dad's decorative embellishments for his roulette wheel company is going to raise prices. My dad doesn't really run any analysis on the health and safety standards of a random steel mill in Vietnam. But he does look into e.g. risks to the gambling industry where his products are sold. There's a level of reasonableness that we can expect, and then a level that is so far flung we just can't. Even if in hindsight it is clear that my dad's business hinges on a Vietnamese steel mill checking their power sockets every three months.
We live in a world with an infinity of risks. And every risk has another associated risk. With limited resources these risks quickly become black swans. Peter Theil might be the type of guy with the resources to analyse a lot of these and prepare a subterranean refuge under a New Zealand mountain, but for the rest of us, they're functionally black swans.
I'm even at odds with multiple federal and congressional investigations re: 9/11. My opinion is that they could not have possibly predicted 9/11 with the information they had. They would, by definition, be wrong to have predicted planes flying into the trade towers as the most likely scenario. Far more likely was a hijacking or a hostage scenario. This goes back to the limitations of reference class forecasting, as discussed. We can enumerate flood and fire risks and insure ourselves for the eventuality. But if an asteroid hit a major city, it's a black swan despite some astro physicist having warned us for the last 10 years that we're under prepared for this eventuality.
The point is that there's two problems with forecasting the future. Too little information means we can't form an accurate baseline, even if we know to ask the question to begin with. And too much information which results in us being functionally incapable of doing analysis on it due to limited resources.
Tetlock really focuses on accurately forecasting e.g. flood risks. Taleb focuses on the asteroid hitting the middle of NYC. These concepts both dovetail very nicely and both need to be understood by super forecasters or professional analysts.
Curious whether that distinction resonates with your experience in intelligence work, or if you think I’m still underestimating the true weight of the unknown-unknown problem.
It does and I agree with what you're saying overall.
I think identifying intelligence gaps is a massively under explored area. Like extremely under explored, and frighteningly so. As a field, we are very good at counting tanks, tracking submarines, analysing how to win battles. And as a field we're pretty good at filling existing information or intelligence gaps. Anybody can send a spy into an economic forum to take a picture of a tank through their pocket.
But nobody I know of is developing that unknown/unknown question, to determine which intelligence gaps we're not aware of. Intelligence is very reactive to new problems, but not very proactive in getting ahead of them before they become a problem. This is bad because those unidentified intelligence problems have a disproportionate effect on world events.
Ponderously telling people that there's a 5% chance of China invading Taiwan is useful, but right now the entire Danish political corps is chain smoking outside the government offices in Denmark (https://youtube.com/shorts/L-Rr9F9g_VM) because they weren't positioned for this possibility by their intelligence services. This is essentially a black swan by all meaningful definitions.
TiltingGambit
5d ago
Human works that find great success usually do so based on their merits as artistic products
I've seen enough experiments showing successful art and music are mostly random to think this is definitely not true.
People walk through an art gallery and are asked to rate their favourite pieces. It's like an even split.
When you mix in "experts" to tell people whether the art is good or bad, the random walk disappears and everybody just agrees with them.
Put out millions of AI created light novels and occasionally one of them will slip through some quality filtering service. Their success is predicated on the inability of these services to filter quality 100%
You're describing three hundred years of the publishing industry.
TiltingGambit
5d ago
Some "fun" reading if you haven't already seen them are
I've been working in intelligence for 15 years and have read all of these books, and others from the canon.
I can say that none of these should be recommended after Tetlock's work has been published. Some techniques from the structured analytical technique toolbox don't work. Some definitely do more harm than good. And the continued teaching of these techniques in place of e.g. reference class forecasting is so baffling to me that I can't express my frustration.
Heuer seems like a good guy who was doing his best to fix the terrible problems in the CIA at the time. But he's been totally replaced as an authority on this subject since Kahneman came along. Kahneman obviously did experiments and knew the research. Heuer was going off his personal observations from his career, and suggested analytical techniques that were a little better than the gut feels of the ivy league scotch swizzling guys in the agency through the cold war. He has been very accepting of new research and basically says "I did my best to formalise analysis, if others can come along and do better that's fantastic."
Since that time, we've come a long way.
R Pherson on the other hand is just scum. He refuses to acknowledge that the techniques in his books don't have any scientific basis. They've been directly measured across various studies, and he essentially argues that they do, in fact, work. Despite them definitely not working on any meaningful metric. He's made a career in the lecture circuit and knows that backing down will undermine his financial basis.
The real indicator that these techniques don't work is that nobody in the planet really uses them. If they improved outcomes, people would. But instead everybody goes to these week long courses, learns how to do a bullshit mind map or analysis of competing hypothesis, gets signed off as certified, and never looks at the techniques again.
TiltingGambit
5d ago
Where does it work reliably, and where does it fail?
I can reliably say that personal vehicles will be an important part of society in 2080 with a high degree of confidence. This is the type of question Tetlock/Kahneman's reference class forecasting does well to predict.
You also have the Nate Silver application of categorising and data analyses. So in a data rich environment (sports, weather, crime) you can generate very accurate assessments about the future.
But you also have the Nasim Taleb category of forecasting. E.g. if you can think to ask the question in the first place, it's probably not that useful. He empahsises the importance of the unknown unknowns and thinks we over invest in facts that are obvious about the future.
Said another way, we have known knowns (facts), known unknowns (intelligence gaps) and unknown unknowns (intelligence gaps we haven't identified yet). We can do a good job talking about the first two, and determine a base rate for whether a nuclear bomb is going to be detonated in the next 10 years. We do a very bad job at answering the questions we don't know we need to ask, for obvious reasons.
Tetlock has brought this up too. He says the next major research question is how to teach people to ask good questions to begin with. He doesn't use the intelligence gap terminology, but that's what professional intelligence analysts interpret this point as.
To put a point on this question you kind of need to understand the problem with identifying these intelligence questions to begin with. In 2019, probably a lot of experts on diseases and pandemics would have rated the possibility of a global outbreak quite highly in relative terms. By 2021 they would have known their predictions had been correct about the standing risk. But if I was opening a cafe in 2019, I would not have been able to even ask the question about a global pandemic which would kill my business in 2 years. I did not have the information required to know what i didn't know, and all of the business analysis I did was useless as I saw the city shut down society for months at a time.
The main gap in the reference class forecasting technique is that foundational problem. Knowing which questions are relevant to me in an environment of incomplete information.
Likewise, if you think forecasting works only in narrow domains, I’d like to understand where you’d draw those boundaries and why.
It's one of the best tools we have. I've worked in intelligence for 15 years and can consistently give intuitive reactions just by having reference class forecasting in the back of my mind. A question will be thrown at us in a meeting and I intuitively stabilise thr inside view against a baseline outside view. Most of the time, in most applications, the answer is to moderate the claims of people who are getting excited about all this new information coming in. You can do this with Iran today, you can do it with the ICE raids, you can do it with the likely GDP per annum.
But it is much harder to be pointed at extreme edge cases. Tetlock resists that his technique is better used in environments with a lot of history to form the baseline. But in practical applications, I've found this to be the case.
Again, I dont think this is too much of a flaw. The real problem is the initial questions. If there's something really important that's going to happen next year, but nobody has the method or ability to identify that there are quesrions about it that need to be asked, the technique is useless. Everybody can argue over the arrival date of general AI milestones. But it is incredibly difficult to identify black swans ahead of time. And I think most important, world changing things hit people more like cafe owners in 2019 who have no idea their whole business hinges on this lab in China not fucking up one day.
TiltingGambit
9d ago
I know an iranian expat who thinks this is the one. I'm not convinced. Without significant foreign intervention I feel the state is strong enough to resist riots. And I'm extremely uncertain of whether foreign ground troops in iran is politically feasible.
TiltingGambit
3yr ago
I don't know if this is acceptably charitable, but is there any other interpretation outside of they just think we're stupid? They reskinned a character into a black skinned person, despite centuries of intermarrying Targaryens. Do they think that the desire for representation means that people are going to pointedly not think about the elephant in the room, in a show whose opening credits is a blood soaked family tree?
Who doesn't understand what's going on here?
You get used to it.
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