To_Mandalay
1yr ago
I think the case for the Aktion Reinhard camps as killing centers is pretty straightforward.
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As a matter of historical record, millions of Jews were transited to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka from '42 through '43.
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The vast, vast majority of these people subsequently disappear from the historical record. If the AR camps were simply transit camps to "the east" as deniers claim, there ought to be at the very least thousands (more likely tens or hundreds of thousands)of Jews post-war who recalled being shipped through the AR camps on the way to Minsk, or Riga, or Kiev, or wherever. As far as I know there are no such people at all.
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Post-war, everyone who had been at Treblinka, guard and inmate alike, said it had been a killing center for the Jews. To the best of my knowledge not a single Treblinka guard or inmate ever said, "these are all lies, no one was gassed at Treblinka."
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Goebbels outright says in his diary that Odilo Globocnik, the man in charge of AR, is "liquidating" the Jews of the General Government.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Besides, is it really abnormal for large numbers of people to simply disappear from the historical record?
According relevant Nazi documentation, as of December 1942 1,000,000+ Jews had been sent to Belzec, Sobibor, or Treblinka. More were sent later, ultimately around 2,000,000. The standard denier argument, as put forward by people like Carlo Mattogno is that the AR camps were simply transit camps, from which the Jews were deported to the Soviet east. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single example of an individual Jew who reported being transited through any AR camp to the Soviet east. Considering how many Holocaust survivors told their stories after the war, you would expect a large number to have had this experience. Not to mention if this huge number of people was sent east, they would have had to have been housed in ghettos, or labor camps. They wouldn't have been turned loose to roam freely in the middle of the war, since the Nazis considered Jews in the east equivalent to partisans. Yet there is no record of AR deportees arriving en masse in any eastern settlements. In other words, ~2,000,000 people are sent to Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, and then vanish off the face of the earth.
Perhaps this wouldn't be enough to prove genocide on its own, except there are also the testimonies of dozens of both former AR guards and inmates that the AR camps were murder centers. A while back I read (chunks, because it is about 1200 pages long) of Mattogno's The "Extermination Camps" of "Aktion Reinhardt", which is his massive long-form response to his critics, and his explanation for why not a single AR guard ever maintained the falsity of the charges was pretty pathetic. In short, "they didn't bother to contest the charges, because they knew the Jews would railroad them anyway." Personally, if I was being accused of complicity in the murders of hundreds of thousands of people, and it was a lie, I think I would maintain my innocence for the sake of my conscience.
It's also worth noting that David Irving, Mark Weber, and David Cole, probably the most prominent 'revisionists' of the past several decades accept that Jews were killed en masse at the AR camps (not to mention shootings on the eastern front). They just deny that they were any gassings at Auschwitz. The usual denier line of "the historians are too afraid to contest the narrative" hardly works with regards to those three, because their professional reputations are shot anyhow, and acceptance of Aktion Reinhard isn't doing anything to rehabilitate them.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Just to clarify: are we here talking about the Treblinka / Sobibor / Majdanek / Belzec trials in West Germany?
Yes.
There were also trials in the USSR, where the same basic story was maintained, but you may be more skeptical about confessions obtained by the NKVD.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Which post-war accounts? You have a couple of accounts from former Jewish prisoners working with the Polish underground which are not at all plausible or reliable.
Yes, the witness accounts are full of exaggerations, contradictions, probably fabrication, etc. This is true for much history. In his Treblinka book Mattogno makes much out of these inconsistencies. This one said there were ten gas chambers, this one said there were twelve. This one said they were 7x5 meters, this one said 7x7. This one said it was diesel, this one said it was gasoline. This one said it took a half hour to die, this one said twenty minutes. It is mostly nitpicking, and really, discrepancy can be a marker of truth, because witnesses often misremember details.
They all describe pretty much the same thing, i.e chambers of roughly the same size, construction, and operation being used to kill deportees by the thousands. I don't see why I should expect prisoners to have an intimate grasp of the workings of the extermination facilities, anyways.
The former guards and even commandant all received very light sentences, either being acquitted or subsequently released from prison.
Kurt Franz and Franz Stangl both got life in prison. Franz was indeed released after thirty years imprisonment as an old man. I'm not sure I'd call that a "light sentence." Notably, Franz denied that he had actually commanded Treblinka, insisting he'd been in a subordinate position. But he didn't deny the gassings.
If these guards had denied the Nuremberg narrative they would have been treated in a harsher fashion.
Franz and Stangl would have gotten harsher sentences than life imprisonment? The BRD had abolished capital punishment by the 1960s.
all these excuses for why nobody should actually excavate to try to find these remains, you do not have a straightforward case.
I don't have any excuses. As far as I'm concerned, they can go ahead and dig up Treblinka. But I can understand why modern-day Jews would be loathe to do this in order to appease a handful of neo-Nazis.
Reinhard v Reinhardt
I don't care to take a position on this, I don't think it matters.
I'm curious as to why you think Irving, Cole, and Weber accept mass killings at the AR camps. They're pariahs at this point. Irving in particular is "the Holocaust Denial guy" as far as most people are concerned (they even made a movie about it), and he gives interviews where he says things like this so I think it's fair to say he's not very concerned with his mainstream reputation. Do you think they're lying? That they haven't actually looked at the evidence?
Indeed; and in the mainstream scholarly view, three unreliable witness accounts full of exaggerations, contradictions, and fabrications yield a reliable account when the inconvenient parts are ignored and the somewhat-compatible pieces can be fashioned together (and expunged when necessary, like the embarrassing, former consensus that diesel exhaust was used to gas millions of people in the AR camps).
This is how history works. When a variety of independent accounts coincide on certain points, elevated confidence in the points of coincidence is warranted. It helps that they are backed up by the confessions of the perpetrators.
The Nazis got much propaganda mileage out of Bolshevik atrocities in the east, much of it fabricated or exaggerated. This does not mean Bolshevik atrocities didn't happen.
Of course, the keystone of the entire Holocaust narrative, including the AR camps
The confessions of Rudolf Höss, who if I recall correctly said he had visited the AR camps once, is not the keystone of the evidence for AR. It's significantly less relevant than the testimonies of the actual staff and inmates of the camps.
Of course, that number was reduced to 1.1 million after the fall of the Soviet Union, but like water off a duck's back, it didn't motivate any sort of scholarly skepticism over the reliability of other court findings at Nuremberg, or at the subsequent trials which were downstream of this keystone confession.
Gerald Reitlinger wrote in his book on the Final Solution that less than a million people had died in Auschwitz. It's not true that 4 million was agreed upon until the fall of the Iron Curtain, at which point it was shamefacedly revised. Hilberg also has a number of c.1 million in his book, also well before the fall of the USSR.
(which did not receive so much as 30 minutes of attention at the Nuremberg Trials)
What's the relevance of this? Lots of different sorts of people died at Auschwitz. AR was Jews only. Most Allied propaganda downplayed the issue of the Jews to avoid playing into Nazi charges that it was a "war for the Jews."
Hard to say what you would do if you were suffering these same conditions, isn't it?
We were talking about Treblinka, weren't we? Wrt to your digressions about Höss and Tesch, your argument is, what, that if the Treblinka guards in West German courts in the 60s hadn't gone along with the party line they would have been tortured by US troops and/or deported to Russia? Or perhaps it's a weaker argument that such past treatment created a chilling effect that frightened these men into compliance twenty years later despite the lack of any immediate threat of torture/deportation. I could buy that, maybe if some had confessed and others hadn't. Not for all of them. That's not even to mention the SS men who confessed outside of courtroom settings, like Franz Suchomel in his interview with Claude Lanzmann.
Speaking of paucity of evidence for a narrative, where is the evidence for the "Treblinka transit camp" narrative? There is plenty of evidence people were sent to Treblinka. Revisionists agree on that. There are train schedules, internal Nazi communications, eyewitness reports from Jewish transportees, eyewitness reports from railwaymen and locals, eyewitness reports from guards. But there are no train schedules for trains from Treblinka and to the Soviet east, there is no testimony from Jews transited from Treblinka to the Soviet east, there is no testimony from Nazi officials in the occupied territories receiving transports from Treblinka, there are no transport lists, there are no records of the massive logistical effort that would have been necessary to settle and supply these massive numbers of people. There is ample evidence that hundreds of thousands were sent to Treblinka, and none that they left.
Thomas Kues wrote three massive articles on CODOH supposedly demonstrating the "presence of 'gassed 'jews in the occupied eastern territories." He managed to do this without providing evidence of a single AR victim "in the occupied eastern territories." Because there isn't any. To give a more specific example, according to Kues ~70,000 Dutch jews (I believe lower than the 'mainstream' number, but I will go with it) were deported east from Holland in '42-'43. Kues thinks they were sent on to Belarus, the Baltic, and the Ukraine. His evidence for this is wartime rumor, second and third-hand hearsay, and reports in foreign papers. Wartime rumor, second and third-hand hearsay, and reports in foreign papers are course worthless when they talk about extermination facilities, but evidential gold when they talk about resettlement in the east. Apparently not one of those 70,000 Dutch Jews ever wrote anything down or spoke to anyone, before or after the war.
What do you make of Goebbels' statements in his diary, on Globocnik's operations in Poland? Revisionists often bemoan a lack of written documentation wrt to the murder of the Jews, yet there is a frank admission on the part of one of the Nazi elite that Globocnik is "liquidating" 60% of the Jews of the general government. Everywhere else in Goebbels' diaries where he uses the word "liquidation" to refer to human beings rather than a party or an institution or something like that, he plainly refers to killing. He even explicitly differentiates between "evacuation" and "liquidation" on at least one occasion.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
It is not at all how history works. Witness accounts are treated as a single dimension that ought be corroborated with documents and physical evidence, particularly when the witnesses involved have a motive to lie, and they attest to extremely unusual events. The lack of documents is well known and has long been admitted to by mainstream historians, like Léon Poliakov in 1951:
There are documents concerning the transport of the Jews to Treblinka. There is eyewitness testimony, of both perpetrators and victims. There is physical evidence. The Łukaszkiewicz report, which you cited in the OP comment (or rather, the comment cited by the OP comment) as having failed to find any mass graves at Treblinka, excavated near the site of the old gas chambers (i.e, where the mass graves were reported to have been), and reported "a large quantity of ashes as well as human remains," in the pits they dug. This sounds like a mass grave of cremated remains to me, exactly as would be expected from the witness accounts. Not even to mention the 2 hectares of ground covered with human ash and bone Łukaszkiewicz found.
Other than the fact that Wolzek was not a camp
The Wolzek blunder is a point in favor of Hoess' testimony, not against it. Prior to giving the "Wolzek" statement, Höss was interrogated once before, and when asked about the three AR camps he named them as "Treblinka, Belzak near Lemberg and the third one was 40 kilometers in the direction of Kulm. It was past Kulm in an easterly direction." So for whatever reason it is clear Höss did not remember the third camp as well as the other two. Yet Sobibor just so happens to be ~40km northeast of Chelm by rail. Why he ultimately called it "Wolzek," I don't know, but it seems highly unlikely that Höss would make up a nonexistent camp that just happened to share a location with Sobibor. Apparently Höss had a bad memory, which would explain some of the other errors he made as well.
Hoess' statements are hardly critical to the AR story anyways. Apparently Kues agrees, since he believes Höss' confession was entirely cobbled together from previous testimonies. After all, Höss was tortured and spent only hours at Treblinka, so his testimony is significantly less valuable in this regard than that of the Treblinka guards, who were not tortured and who worked there for months.
This is of course not the only continuity problem with the Treblinka story. Revisionists uncovered a newspaper clipping from the Polish-language London newspaper Dziennik Polski which reported on alleged extermination actions at Treblinka a whole two weeks before the camp even opened.
The start date of Treblinka's operation is not as set in stone as Kues has it. At least two witnesses (Ryszard Czarkowski and Jan Sulkowski) testified to transports coming to Treblinka before 22 July. With that in mind it seems perfectly possible that the gas chamber was "tested" before the large transports began arriving regularly from the Warsaw Ghetto. Such happened at Sobibor and Belzec, which had been operational for months at this point.
The entire body of evidence was in Soviet custody. If there were exculpatory records, do you trust that the Soviets would have introduced them as evidence as they were building a case against the Germans? Keep in mind they accused the Germans of conducting the Katyn Forest massacre, which they were guilty of. A lack of records is indeed suspicious, but that suspicion can be cast in multiple directions.
Why do you find "the Soviets destroyed all the evidence" any less risible than "the Nazis destroyed all the evidence" (not that they did)? And of course it's not just documents. We're talking about 1,000,000+ people supposedly deported to the east (where in the east?). None of these people survived the war? None of these people told their stories after the war? None of these people talked to anyone else who might've told their stories?
The extermination narrative at Treblinka was not even in question at the trials in the 1960s. The only question was of the guilt of the alleged perpetrators. "It didn't happen" was not a defense they could have used.
Legally, maybe not, which is not what I claimed anyways. But none of them denied in their personal lives? None of them denied it to friends or acquaintances? On their death beds? Not one of these dozens of people--particularly those like Stangl and Franz who received the maximum sentence, anyways--decided to stand up, in court or elsewhere, and say, "to hell with this sham trial, I'm telling the truth"?
Even Kurt Franz, the commandant of a camp that allegedly murdered hundreds of thousands, was released from prison after a long sentence.
Yes, he was released as a sick old man in the early 90s, to die shortly afterwards. I would hardly call his sentence "mild" as you originally did.
I am not sure where Lambert denied any "knowledge of the alleged murder operation"? It doesn't seem to say that on the page you linked. What do you think the guy from Aktion T4 was building at a transit camp? For that matter, most of the Reinhard staff were former T4 men, why were they of all people put in charge of this "transit camp"?
Franz Stangl died in custody while awaiting his appeal, so it's also disingenuous to mark him down as purely a confessor given he was challenging his conviction.
Did he challenge his conviction by denying Treblinka's status as an extermination camp? I don't believe he did.
Add to that postcards which deportees sent to Warsaw after their transit.
I'm familiar with the claim from this IHR article. All of the cited sources (footnote 47) were luckily available online, so I checked them, and not one offers the actual name or identity of a person attached to one of these supposed post cards. In fact one of the cited ghetto diarists explicitly says that no matter how hard he tried, he could never actually track down one of these elusive postcards or letters from the deportees in the east. Every lead he chased ended in a rumor.
If you accuse someone of having murdered and buried a busload of people in his backyard, it would be nothing more than a desperate attempt to reverse the burden of proof to demand that the accused must locate the people who were on the bus if he wants to dispute the claim.
I would compare it to a man kidnapped by two of his mortal enemies, bundled into a car in full view of dozens of witnesses, and then driven out into the woods. Later the kidnappers come back alone and the man is never seen again. Later still one of two kidnappers (the other one swallowed a cyanide capsule) confesses, "we shot him and buried him in a ditch." But you say in fact the victim was sent to live on a farm upstate.
His statements are vague, which is why Holocaust historians find it necessary to rely on them.
It isn't vague at all:
Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated whereas only about 40 per cent can be used for forced labor. The former Gauleiter of Vienna, who is to carry this measure through, is doing it with considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention.
Does "considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention" really sound like "a train to Riga"?
Or how about Jurgen Stroop's report, even clearer if possible, where he refers to a transport of a few thousand captured rebels from the Warsaw ghetto, that he's sent to Treblinka to be "destroyed." What's the sense in sending a few thousand people to a transit camp to be killed? Why not shoot them in Warsaw? Strongly suggests there was something special about Treblinka that made it ideal for the elimination of thousands of people in short periods of time.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Can you cite one historian who places the beginning of gassing operations before that?
In The Treblinka Death Camp by Chris Webb it is stated,
“It is known that in the other two Aktion Reinhardt camps at Bełżec and Sobibór test gassings were carried out on local Jews. It is therefore possible that some transports did in fact arrive at earlier dates on which the first gas chambers were tested.”
(I don't have a proper page number because I have the book as an epub).
But you've said you don't put much stock in mainstream historians anyways, so what does it matter? I'm claiming it is perfectly possible the gas chambers were tested prior to the first transport from the Warsaw Ghetto considering that A) there are multiple eyewitness accounts from inmates of the Treblinka labor camp that there were indeed earlier transports and B) this was reportedly done at the other two Reinhard camps before they were fully "operational."
Even if I granted that this paper reported gassings in Treblinka "ahead of time" as it were, I'm not sure how this helps the revisionist case. We agree Jews were sent to Treblinka, just strongly disagree on what happened to them afterwards. Granting that Dziennik Polski is reporting Jews sent to Treblinka before Jews were sent to Treblinka (whether they were gassed or not), does that imply no Jews were sent to Treblinka?
Of course, that CODOH article shows even more rumors of an extermination camp in Treblinka going back to May 1942, where the original method of mass murder was described as "lethal rods."
The May report (I've tried to find a copy of the cited source online, I can't) doesn't even mention gas. I have no doubt prisoners were killed at Treblinka long before the gas chambers were installed. It is interesting that "lethal rods" are described as the murder weapon, because a number of inmates of Treblinka work camp described the guards beating prisoners to death with clubs.
By November 1942, less than four months after the camp was open, the Warsaw ghetto resistance published claims of 2 million deaths by steam chamber in Treblinka
The Warsaw underground did not inspect Treblinka for itself.
Historians don't even acknowledge these contradictions,
"The Nazis tried their best keep their mass murder secret, but considering the massive size of the operation, it inevitably leaked out." There is no contradiction there.
Why wouldn't he be an international superstar and why would his account be virtually unknown?
Most people didn't care about the Nazi war on the Jews. It was considered a sidebar to the eastern front. Allied propaganda before and after the war focused intently on Nazi oppression of the nations of Europe, but the Jews were rarely if ever singled out despite their place at the center of the Nazi worldview, and if they were mentioned at all it was as one in another list of peoples tormented by the Nazis.
The case is so straightforward that you are reduced to contradicting the conclusion of the report you are citing. "Łukaszkiewicz found mass graves!" According to Łukaszkiewicz, he did not.
I am actually not sure why Łukaszkiewicz would write that he'd found a pit full of a "large quantity of ashes as well as human remains" and that "numerous human remains were found by these excavations, still partially in a state of decomposition. The soil consists of ashes interspersed with sand, and is of a dark gray color, granulous in form. During the excavations, the soil gave off an intense odor of burning and decay," and then say that he found no mass graves. Perhaps he meant mass graves of intact corpses? I can't read Polish, so I'm relying on the translation in Mattogno's Treblinka book. Perhaps something is lost in translation.
But this sounds like exactly what you're asking for. The supposed sites of the mass graves were excavated and "large quantities of human bone and ash" were discovered, which is precisely what was expected based on the accounts of the eyewitnesses.
Reinhardt staff
So if Reinhardt was an operation to plunder the Jews and ship them east, the question as to why so many of the men assigned to these camps came from the former euthanasia program remains.
But Revisionists claim that this was referring to the liquidation of the ghettos where Jews were indeed rounded up, robbed of their possessions, and deported.
Armed men driving people out of their homes and onto waiting trains is not something that is "considerably circumspect" and "doesn't attract too much attention." If that's not attention grabbing nothing is. And it would make this the only time in his entire diaries that Goebbels uses the word "liquidation" to mean anything other than "killing." The revisionist interpretation of this passage is tortured at best.
The Revisionist interpretation of these events explains both the March 27th entry and the March 7th entry which discusses a continuation of the Madagascar plan after the war.
I don't think the Nazis had necessarily decided to kill every Jew in the world immediately. The Holocaust was much more haphazard and piecemeal than most people think, that much is true. AR was about getting rid of Polish Jewry in particular who were seen as an especial threat due to their proximity to the eastern front and concentration in large cities.
On that note, there is also Himmler's speech to an assembly of Wehrmacht generals at Sonthofen in 1944. It's about the solution to the Jewish question, and how it was necessary for the security of the Reich's eastern borders. He says,
In this circle, I can say this openly in a few words; it's a good thing that we were hard enough to exterminate the Jews in our territory.
He is talking about Reinhard, which is clear from what he says a few sentences later,
I am confident we could not have held the Lemberg front in the General Government if we still had the big ghettoes in Lemberg, Krakow, Lublin, and Warsaw.
No one doubts the Jews from those cities were sent to the AR camps. And if there was any doubt about what Himmler meant by "exterminate" (since he uses the infamous 'ausrottung') he makes it clear later, when he says:
A question, which will surely be thought of, I want to answer. The question is, "yeah, we know they kill the Jewish adults, I understand that much, but the women and children?" Let me tell you something: the children will grow up. Do we want to say, "no, we're too weak for that, so our children will have to live with them too. They will fight the same fight." Then this Jewish hatred will attack our children and grandchildren, and they will have to solve the same problem, but in a time when Adolf Hitler is no more. That would have been cowardly, and so we favored a clean solution, hard as it was.
No ambiguity there. The word is is "umbringen," kill. The Jewish Question was solved in Poland, and it was solved by killing the Jews of Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin, and Lvov, inclusive of women and children.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Also worth noting that there is no real historical basis for connecting 'Moloch' with an owl. In fact it's a question whether there ever was a deity called Moloch. One line of thinking is that in the Hebrew Bible, 'moloch' actually refers to the process of human sacrifice, rather than the recipient (of which there were many, including Yahweh himself).
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Most of the rationalist community thinks that the probability of that happening is high enough to take seriously
A lot of people seem to think it's pretty much a given, but granted that's not necessarily all people concerned by AI x-risk (or possibly not even most of them). But I have had a number of exchanges where I've been told something like "if there's even a 5% chance of AI x-risk it's worth expending a lot of energy on" which I disagree with. It's not very rigorous but I'd say that if the danger is less than ~30% I'm not that worried about it.
At the end of the day, a single superintelligent human is constrained by their substrate that an equivalent AI running in-silico very much isn't. Iterative experimentation and self-modification gets much easier when you can reboot a backup checkpoint or just spin up multiple instances.
Granted, but /u/4bpp's point I think it's that it's not at all clear how much easier, and certainly not clear if it's so easy that it would enable something like an "intelligence explosion."
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
I find the corporation analogy pretty interesting/compelling as well.
It was brought up in this big LessWrong post recently and I didn't find any of the counterarguments in the comments to be very strong (though most people focused on other arguments).
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Unless I'm mistaken the argument is something like "once we build an intelligent, goal-orient agent smarter than any human on earth, it will quickly bootstrap itself to godhood and then destroy the planet and probably the galaxy and maybe the universe."
But as far as I can tell, corporations already meet this definition. They are inhuman, goal-oriented agents smarter than any given human on earth (by the combined intelligence of all their human constituent parts). The fact that they're made up of humans doesn't seem to be all that relevant, because the corporation itself is not human despite humans being the "material" from which it is made.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Yeah the threshold is basically just vibes.
Well, nobody knows that with any level of certainty approaching what we might assign to our understanding of say, mathematical theorems, or even just the plain old laws of physics. But that's where the smart money is as far as I'm concerned.
),
The only general intelligence currently in existence (or at least, the smartest one that we are aware of), humans, cannot bootstrap in this way. Could "human-level" intelligence do this if it was run on silicon? Maybe. But it seems difficult-to-impossible to say, and certainly difficult-to-impossible to say how easy it would be, so that it's hard for me to agree that the smart money is on intelligence explosion.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
I got 7/20. So, maybe some people can but I evidently can't.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
This would just seem to bolster the point that, empirically, creating super-humanly intelligent, goal-oriented systems (whether they be states, armies, parties, corporations, etc.) doesn't lead to exponential self-improvement followed by paperclipping. Your argument seems to be, "yes but if we create systems that are even smarter than those created historically, then the danger becomes real" which i think is a weaker claim.
Isn't the whole point of the argument that AI will be such a threat because it will, by virtue of being more intelligent than us, be able to breezily figure things out (like self-improvement) that we simply couldn't because of our inferior intelligences? If that's the case it doesn't seem to matter that much that corporations (or as pointed out below, any form of supra-human coordination, states, political parties, etc.) have certain limitations at the outset, because their 'superintelligence' ought to allow them to overcome those limitations in short order. After all the self-improvement scenario also assumes that AI is limited at the outset but rapidly transcends these limits.
A corporation (really, any human organization--I think I'll just say that going forward) is smarter than any individual human that comprises it, by virtue of being comprised of many different intelligences. Likely, any (or at least most) human organization is smarter than any individual human on earth, since it is the sum total of all the human intelligences that make it up. This is comparable to the oft-repeated hypothetical where AI bootstraps by copying itself many times over. So I think it is fair to describe a human organization as a "superintelligence" in the same sense meant by AI x-risk proponents.
If von Neumann joined as an entry-level employee at some megacorp today, would the organisation become smarter than him in any reasonable sense?
I would say so. "It" could do/understand anything Von Neumann could do, by virtue of von Neumann being able to do it on behalf of the corporation, and also do/understand anything that any other person or persons employed at the corporation could do that von Neumann happened to be unable to do. I would say that counts as "smarter than Von Neumann."
we have no idea how to assemble 1000 mediocre writers into a Steinbeck
From my experience in creative writing workshops I believe a number of mediocre (or at least non-optimal) writers working together will be better than any one of those writers working independently. Maybe not as good as Steinbeck, but if Steinbeck was a member of the workshop, then sure.
I don't really know anything about Richard Feynman's life or work but I would feel safe in saying that the collection of Feynman and his colleagues, research partners, etc. was 'smarter' than Feynman was on his own.
Lots of people have told me "humans aren't perfectly coordinated" or "corporations are made-up of humans" but this just seems to shift the argument from the danger of "superintelligence" to "the danger of superintelligence at some arbitrary level."
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
A significant proportion of gay men (almost half) have had female sexual partners at some point. This dovetails with my ancedotal experience wrt to the gay men I know personally. The number is higher for lesbians, but not that much higher and it seems to be a difference of degree not of kind.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Groups that once had high violent crime rates but don't anymore
There are big ethnic differences in violent crime rates in the modern USA.
The race differences in homicide go beyond black-white even though that gets most of the airtime, with hispanics having a homicide rate about double that of whites, American Indians about 4 times that of whites, and Asians about half that of white.
Left-wing explanation for high crime/homicide rates in minority communities tends to be exogenous factors, e.g racism, discrimination, legacy of segregation, slavery, redlining, poverty. Obviously the equation is not as simple as poverty=homicide since if you equalize poverty rates there is still a lot of difference in homicide rates between various ethnic groups.
Right-wing explanations tend to be endogenous factors. The more mainstream normie-con explanation is ‘culture,’ i.e “black people have a culture that encourages violent resolution of disputes, etc.” but if that culture was changed, homicide rates would fall similarly. The further right explanation is biological, HBD, i.e certain groups have a genetic predisposition towards violence.
While people mostly talk about black vs white homicide rates, American Indians and hispanics also have higher homicide rates than white Americans, and asians have lower. In Canada, aboriginal Canadians are heavily overrepresented among homicide suspects. Ditto for Aboriginals in Australia, Maori in New Zealand, and Caucasians in Russia. Also various immigrant groups in western Europe, from Africa, the mid-east, and Eastern Europe, tend to have higher than average homicide rates.
I recently became interested in the question of ethnic groups that have exhibited very high homicide rates in the past but no longer do. It seems obviously relevant to the question of varying homicide rates among different ethnic groups today. If X group had high homicide rates in the past but now doesn’t, that experience could possibly shed light on solutions for the high homicide rates in some groups too, though obviously there will be plenty of other factors at work and you cannot necessarily do a 1 to 1 comparison between two or more ethnic groups separated widely by time and space and characteristics.
I mostly looked at historical crime rates of various European immigrant groups to the US, because that data is comparatively easy to find.
The Irish, for example. In New York City in the 1860s, Irishmen had a homicide rate of about 37.5 per 100k, many times higher than the non-Irish white male rate, and a little higher than the contemporary black male rate of 32 per 100k. German immigrants for comparison had a homicide rate of about 15 per 100k. (Source for these numbers is Murder in New York City by Eric Monkkonen). The pattern was the same in other American cities. For example, in Philadelphia between 1860 and 1873, the Irish homicide rate was 4.7 per 100,000, a significant overrepresentation, compared to 2.9 for the city as a whole and lower for native-born whites in particular.
This was to some extent an international phenomenon. In London in the early 19th century, twenty percent of those charged with “riot, affray, assault, murder, and rape” were Irish, though they made up only 2 percent of the city’s population (source is Ethnicity, Prejudice, and Justice: The Treatment of the Irish at the Old Bailey, 1750-1825 by Peter King).
A similar group is the Italians. In early 20th century Chicago, Italians committed homicide at many times the city average, peaking at more than 50 per 100k around 1910, thirty times the rate of Swedish immigrants (source is First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt by J.S Adler). Likewise, in Philadelphia between 1899 and 1928, nearly 20 percent of those convicted for murder were born in Italy, while the Italian proportion of the city as a whole did not rise above 5 percent (source is Immigration and Crime in Early Twentieth Century America by Caroline Moehling and Anne Morrison Piehl).
Even the Chinese, which are considered a ‘model minority’ today had much higher homicide rates in the 19th and early twentieth century. In Seattle between 1905 and 1910, Chinese had a homicide rate of about 60 per 100k, compared to a black rate of about 35 per 100k and a white that was much lower. This is after factoring out gang-killings in which case the Chinese rate is many times higher. (Source is Homicide in Seattle’s Chinatown, 1900-1940: Evaluating the Influence of Social Organizations by Brian Paciotti). The same was true in other western cities with large Chinese populations like San Francisco. Even accounting for the very lopsided sex ratio of early Chinese immigrants the discrepancy remains, so that in San Francisco in the 1920s the homicide rate for Chinese men was 24.1 per 100k compared to 9.2 per 100k for white men.
It was harder to find examples outside the United States, but Koreans in Japan are possibly an interesting one. Im sure there is much more information in Japanese, but I have been able to find some that suggests that historically, Koreans had much higher crime rates than native Japanese, up to 13.9 times higher in 1950 (source is Bringing class back in: the changing basis of inequality and the Korean minority in Japan by Bumsoo Kim). Apparently in 1932 the Imperial Japanese government conducted a study on “Korean criminality” which concluded that Koreans had a propensity for gambling and violent crime. (Source is here: https://ijkh.khistory.org/journal/view.php?number=472#fn34-ijkh-22-1-11). According to wikipedia, in the 1990s Koreans comprised 10% of Yakuza members despite comprising only about 0.5% of the population total. I don’t know what Korean crime rates relevant to Japanese crime rates look like nowadays, or if that information is available anywhere in English. However, Koreans have converged with Japanese on many other metrics such as income and years of education, so I would be surprised if crime rates were still as high.
It seems clear that these groups do not have homicide rates nearly as high as they once did. I doubt it would be possible to get any kind of arrest, conviction, or incarceration data on Italian or Irish Americans in the present day US, as I doubt anyone is recording it. That said, if Irish and Italians and their descendants were still killing/dying at anywhere the rate they once were it’d be pretty obvious. I also don’t think Irish or Irish-descended are overrepresented in English violent crime by a fact of ten as they once were, though I can’t find present-day data. Asians in the modern day US of course have a very low homicide rate.
One answer would be that, since these are immigrant groups, the violent people went home (since returning to the old country was very common). But this seems obviously false, since today Ireland, China, and Italy both have very low violent crime rates. So it seems that to a large extent, something must have changed within these ethnic groups themselves. 100 years is too short for genetic change on that scale, so whatever caused the behavioral change must have been primarily environmental.
What exactly those environmental changes were I don’t know. My guess would be that, as these groups assimilated culturally and socially they felt they had a greater stake in things and violent crime fell accordingly, but this is conveniently nebulous and hard to measure. I would say these examples are a reason for optimism since they suggest that a community is not 'doomed' to high violent crime rates forever, though I don't think there are any immediately obvious policy implications that suggest themselves.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Possibly in part, but apparently (according to J.S Adler's book) the great majority of Italian murders weren't gang hits/organized crime, but things like drunken brawls and personal feuds.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Homicide rates have dropped a lot in the last two centuries or so, at least in part because of greatly improving medical care. That's why I think proportions are more important that absolute numbers.
The data point about Koreans in Japan is also very interesting; I'm reasonably confident that Korea's murder rate is not 14 times higher than Japan's.
That's for crime in general, not homicide; unfortunately I couldn't find data on Korean immigrant vs Japanese homicide in particular, though another source I posted also stated that they were overrepresented in "violent crime" (unfortunately without giving a proportion, and citing a Japanese-language source).
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
The cite is "Shihō Chōsaka, Shihō Kenkyū 17, Hōkokushū (Judicial Research: No. 17, Collection of Reports), Tokyo: Shihōshō (Mar. 1933), 434 (National Diet Library, Call Number: AZ-771-H26)." I don't know if this would be digitized anywhere.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
NYC homicide rates are specifically for men, Philly rates are for the whole ethnic group. NY is still higher but it's not as extreme.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
This may have been the case for the Chinese, where a lot of the murders were tong related or otherwise financially motivated, but with the Italians and Irish the great majority were things like drunken fighting, disputes over women, avenging personal slights, etc. I don't know if the presence or absence of organized crime would significantly impact things like that.
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