doglatine
3d ago
I do think a lot of the conversations that used to happen here have moved to TPOT and postrat twitter. It’s a great space and there are surprising number of present and former mottizens there. Mostly pseudonymous of course but occasionally it’s come up in PMs or via dogwhistles. The notable thing with Trace and Kulak is that they kept their pseudonyms constant between here and there. A lot of people either have separate aliases on twitter or just post under their real name. I’m still trying to figure out which of you here is JD Vance.
doglatine
6d ago
China has seen a massive increase in GDP and quality of life, as has the small segment of American society that has leveraged integration of new technology either directly into their industries or been able to exploit its integration elsewhere. And everyday American consumers have also seen a big increase in purchasing power thanks to cheap manufactured goods from China; the cost of textiles, consumer electronics, and household appliances has absolutely plummeted in real terms. However, lots of American industries have remained extremely stagnant in terms of productivity because they didn't/couldn't/wouldn't integrate new methods, so their purchasing power relative to the rest of the country and the rest of the world has declined.
doglatine
6d ago
A key factor is how productivity improvements are handled by legacy companies vs new entrants. The digital revolution probably didn’t change much for Ohio Widgets PLC, with its large unionised workforce and complex compliance requirements. For Shenzhen Widgets LLC, on the other hand, digitisation is essential for its ability to take customised CNC machined orders from anywhere in the world, translate them into Mandarin, and have them shipped anywhere in the world in 5 days.
doglatine
7d ago
Behold the thirdworldification of American politics. “If we make the country better off, our political opponents will probably benefit more from it than us, so better for us to continue looting and pillaging from our common legacy until the country dies.” The reason you balance the budget is because you actually care about your country and its long-term well-being.
doglatine
14d ago
For sure there are sectors less prone to disruption, but I don't know about the majority of the economy. Finance alone is 20% of the US economy and there's huge potential for disruption there. Professional scientific and technical services are another 10%, and many of those (e.g., management consultancy) are also vulnerable to AI transformation. Healthcare (20%) obviously has massive legal barriers in place but AI will increasingly nibble around the edges (e.g. in healthcare administration, AI therapy).
doglatine
14d ago
I agree with this -
If you've ever seen how the sausage gets made at a major company, jobs are very much withheld and created on more of an internal, political basis than any actual needs the companies have.
...but this would suggest to me that the disruption will come from new entrants (startups and scaleups) who can effectively leverage AI tools to transform workflows. If Status Quo Inc don't incorporate AI effectively and sell their services for $1000/hour, but Insurgent Inc are able to sell materially equivalent goods for $100/hour, then clients and customers will eventually switch suppliers. Obviously this won't apply as strongly in industries with very strong incumbent advantages, but even here I would expect some disruption - see e.g., Palantir making inroads in military procurement.
doglatine
27d ago
But this is cheating for you, which is a little different. I can totally see the appeal of a Bonnie & Clyde romantic partnership where you places your mutual interest above other moral concerns. “Felt cute, might violate the Geneva convention later.”
doglatine
1mo ago
Russia are the most obvious culprits, with relatively little to lose. Spain and Portugal not priority targets for them, but they are NATO members and broadly pro-Ukraine, and this could be a target of opportunity
You're talking about this passage?
Sometime around 2030, there are surprisingly widespread pro-democracy protests in China, and the CCP’s efforts to suppress them are sabotaged by its AI systems. The CCP’s worst fear has materialized: DeepCent-2 must have sold them out!
The protests cascade into a magnificently orchestrated, bloodless, and drone-assisted coup followed by democratic elections. The superintelligences on both sides of the Pacific had been planning this for years. Similar events play out in other countries, and more generally, geopolitical conflicts seem to die down or get resolved in favor of the US. Countries join a highly-federalized world government under United Nations branding but obvious US control.
What's your objection? I think this paragraph makes clear that this isn't really an organic phenomenon; it's humans being memetically hacked by AI systems. We're long past the the point in the story where they "are superhuman at everything, including persuasion, and have been integrated into their military and are giving advice to the government." And the Chinese AGI had been fully co-opted by the US AGI at that point, so it was serving US interests (as the paragraph above again makes clear).
I'd also flag that you're probably not the only (or even the main) audience for the story - it's aimed in large part at policy wonks in the US administration, and they care a lot about geopolitics and security issues. "Unaligned AGIs can sell out the country to foreign powers" is (perversely) a much easier sell to that audience than "Unaligned AGIs will kill everyone."
doglatine
2mo ago
William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
doglatine
3mo ago
Specific examples may sound underwhelming, because I'm mainly talking about metis in the sense of James C Scott, i.e. habitual patterns of understanding and behaviour that are acquired through repeated experience. For example, I almost never run into hallucinations these days, but that's because I've internalised what kinds of queries are most likely to generate hallucinated answers, so I don't ask them in the first place (just like we all know you don't do a Google search for "when is my Aunt Linda's birthday"). But I realise that sounds like a cop-out, so here are some examples -
- Customisation. Developing a bank of different custom instructions that you can swap in or swap out for specific queries.
- Using LLMs to refine prompts. Don't just ask questions, spend some time refining the question with LLMs.
- Identifying novel non-professional use cases. So many LLM applications in everyday life, from home improvement to social dilemmas to budgeting.
- Preemptive negative prompts. Identifying common failure modes in advance or unproductive directions that LLMs are likely to go, and explicitly steering models away from them
- Model switching. Recognising the personalities and capabilities of different models and slotting content between them to optimise workflows.
- Advanced voice. So many people just type their queries to LLMs, but there are plenty of use cases and contexts where voice gets you different/better results. See also the audio overviews of NotebookLM.
To give a real-world example of the latter two ideas in action, I recently had a very complicated situation at work involving a dozen different colleagues, lots of institutional rules and politics, and a long history. My goal output was a 4 page strategy document spelling out how we were going to handle the situation. However, typing out the full background would be a big hassle. So instead I had a 60 minute voice conversation with ChatGPT while on a long walk, in which I sketched the situation and told it to keep asking follow up questions until it really had a good handle on the history and key players and relevant dynamics. So we did that, and then I asked it to produce the strategy document. However, I didn't completely love the style, and I thought Claude might do a better job. So instead, I asked ChatGPT to produce a 10 page detailed summary of our entire conversation. I then copypasted that into Claude and told it to turn it into a strategy doc. It did a perfect job.
So, a relatively simple example, but illustrates how voice mode and model switching can work well.
doglatine
3mo ago
people seemed to have no clue just how good and useful LLMs already are, probably due to lack of imagination. They are not really chatbot machines, they can execute sophisticated operations on any token sequences, if you just give them the chance to do so.
100% agree. I think even most commenters here seem fairly oblivious to all you can get out of LLMs. A lot of people try some use case X, it doesn't work, and they conclude that LLMs can't do X, when in fact it's a skill issue. There is a surprisingly steep learning curve with LLMs and unless you're putting in at least a couple of hours a week tinkering then you're going to miss their full capabilities.
doglatine
3mo ago
The International Rules Based Order was always fiction. It was code for “the West has several times as many soldiers, rockets, tanks, and navy vessels than you, and can kick your ass just by thinking about it. What’s changed generally is the global perception of that military might.
I'd push back slightly on this, because the IRBO/LIO was very much in force even during the Cold War, when the West absolutely didn't have total military dominance. The IRBO/LIO was more of a memetic package than a hegemonic post-WW2 settlement, and it was a pitch to to the developing world and even to a lesser extent the Communist bloc. Though its ideals very much came out of Anglo liberal ideals (e.g., rights of small countries), it was an appealing package for many countries around the world: strong norms against annexation and invasion, disputes to be settled in multilateral fora, freedom of navigation, and a suite of economic institutions like the IWT and World Bank. In an era of ideological competition with Communism, the IRBO was an important part of the West's brand.
doglatine
3mo ago
With respect, did you actually vote for Trump?
Not American, so no, but when I was asked on election night who I would have voted for if eligible, I said Chase Oliver. That said, I did feel quite optimistic when Trump won, mainly because I was hopeful that Elon (and to a lesser extent Vance) would implement Grey Tribe priorities in a highly capable fashion. I don't think I was ever fundamentally unreachable, so perhaps my opinion change is indicative of something relevant. I'm not American, of course, so I wouldn't expect Trump or Vance to care what People Like Me think, except insofar as my shift in views has non-zero correlation with similar shifts among some subset of eligible voters.
doglatine
3mo ago
Yes, this point often seems to be lost in commentary, particularly on the US side. While it's hard to figure out actual monthly 155mm production (as opposed to production goals), Rheinmetall alone produces the same ballpark number of shells per month as the entire US MIC.
doglatine
3mo ago
Part of being a good debater is winning over Undecideds, and my impression is that Vance has been doing the exact opposite. My own opinion of him was fairly positive as recently as a month ago, and it's cratered, and I've seen a similar collapse in estimation among many right-sympathetic US friends. Obviously you can't please all the people all the time, but my sense is that while Vance is very good at playing to the gallery, so far at least he's not done a good job of winning over anyone who wasn't already sympathetic to his policy positions.
doglatine
3mo ago
To be clear, I don’t think a nuclear strike on the Philippines is intrinsically likely, but conditional on the war going nuclear, the Philippines might well be prioritised over Guam as a first target primarily because it wouldn’t set the precedent of targeting American soil.
For example, imagine the US loses a carrier, and decides to respond with an SLCM-N strike on a Chinese command vessel. China decides it needs a symbolic strike to respond, but doesn’t want to move too far up the escalation ladder too fast, so it hits an isolated but operationally significant US base in the Philippines. Civilian casualties might be comparatively low; if you hit Fort Magsaysay Airfield for example civilisation casualties might be in the low thousands, similar to what you’d get from hitting Guam.
doglatine
3mo ago
Cross posting from /r/credibledefense, but thought Mottizens might have an angle on this.
As someone with family in the Philippines, I’ve been feeling concerned about risks presented by the country’s close alliance with an increasingly volatile US, especially in the context of a war in the West Philippine Sea/SCS that the US is looking more and more likely to lose. A few years ago, the US felt to me like a better partner than China after Duterte’s reconciliation efforts with Xi were largely rebuffed, and since then we’ve seen a major investment in new US bases in the Philippines, especially Luzon. However, a number of factors make me think that the Philippines would be better off explicitly pivoting towards neutrality.
First, there’s the simple fact that US naval construction remains deeply and utterly broken, as I’m sure most of us are aware, while China’s continues to grow at pace. The starkness of this disparity has grown in recent years and it no longer looks like the US has the state capacity to fix it. Consequently, the likelihood of a conflict over Taiwan that goes badly for the US and leaves the region in control of China is higher than it used to be. Moreover, while the US can pack its bags and go back to Guam, the Philippines will forever be stuck less than 200 miles off the coast of mainland China.
Second, and much more recent, there’s the shift towards a more erratic and transactional foreign policy by the US. While US bases in the Philippines are of mutual benefit for now, it’s not inconceivable to imagine a rug-pull exercise whereby the US pulls its forces out in exchange for a concession from China. Likewise, it’s questionable whether the old ideals of loyalty would mean the US would help with reconstruction if the Philippines got hit hard by Chinese missile strikes in a Taiwan conflict. Additionally, many of the soft-power inducements provided by USAID projects in the Philippines have now been cancelled. I don’t want to turn this into a discussion of the Trump administration per se, but the reality is that US foreign strategy has undergone a colossal shift in the last two months, and that changes the incentives for its partners.
Third, while China wants its extravagant claims to islands in the West Philippine Sea to be recognised, and probably wants economic and political influence in the Philippines itself, there’s zero indication or historical precedent to suggest that China wants to annex any of the major islands in the Philippines. Consequently, it’s really not clear to me that the security advantages provided by US forces are significant enough to justify the very real and kinetic risks associated with hosting US forces. I’m particularly concerned about nuclear risks, where in a rapidly spiralling conflict China might judge nuclear strikes on US military targets in the Philippines to be less likely to escalate to all-out strategic nuclear warfare than eg attacks on US bases in Guam or Japan.
Fourth and finally, the current presence of US bases in the Philippines does offer them a bargaining chip. It seems to me that the Philippines could basically offer a “Finlandization” deal to China where it would commit to total neutrality in any conflict in the region and withdraw from Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement with the US. Probably to sweeten the package it would have to make some painful concessions to China on disputed islands like Scarborough Shoal, but it could potential walk away with robust guarantees of long-term functional autonomy and non-interference, conditional on remaining neutral.
I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts, though! Am I being too bleak, or missing some upsides to the alliance for the Philippines?
I think there are some important insights here, but I'd like to speak to the European angle. In short, the bulk of the breakdown on the European side is due to Trump, or increasingly Trumpism as a movement, which seems tailor-made to alienate European elites. At a personal level, Trump is crass, vulgar, tasteless, and lacks the kind of general cultural and historical knowledge that would be a sine qua non for most European leaders. Vance makes things worse, adding a smug debate club arrogance to Trump's lack of regard for decorum and norms. I have two friends who were actually present at the Munich Security Conference last week, and both of them said Vance's address was the most shocking speech they'd seen in their respective diplomatic careers, both in terms of content, but also in terms of form: the complete lack of niceties, the most of all as what they perceived as its bilious anger and unpleasantness.
Even worse than the personal angle, though, is the political level. Trump simply doesn't play by the established rules of the Liberal International Order, and if there's one thing Europe loves it's rules and procedures. And as much as I can appreciate a good disruptor, Trump's diplomatic strategy seems less like Paul Graham and more like an unmedicated ADHD child in an airport lobby. One week it's tariffs on Mexico and Canada, the next it's annexing Panama, the next it's annexing Greenland, then Gaza, and then onto Ukraine. These ideas whizz by so seriously it's very unclear whether they're intended as literal policy proposals or some kind of semiotic ritual. Not to mention that the policies themselves are utterly bonkers, ill thought-out and ill considered. The Gaza plan in particular was just extraordinary in its inchoate madness. Adding all this together, to many of us Europeans, it looks like there's a void at the top of American leadership where elite human capital is supposed to go.
However, perhaps most of all, I think many Americans just don't realise how visceral and close and frightening the Ukraine war is for many people in Europe. To hear Americans talk about it, it may be as far away as Afghanistan or Iraq, but for many Europeans it's literally the next country over, we have Ukrainian refugees among us, and Russia is conducting assassinations and sabotage in our cities. The default assumption among most Europeans was that this was the obvious next conflict of the Free World against tyrants, and it was as much in America's interests to fight it as it was Europe's. This impression was bolstered by Biden's presidency, and despite Trump's bluster, I think most Europeans assumed he'd pursue broadly similar policies.
Instead, the events of the last two weeks have been the biggest shock to transatlantic relations since Suez, or perhaps even pre-WW2. Most left-wing Europeans didn't like America much to begin with (well, not as a political entity), but the usual transatlantic cheerleaders on the centre, right, and even hard right are in a state of absolute epistemic and existential shock. The idea that America would not just clamp down on aid for Ukraine but moot de facto switching sides was so far outside of their Overton Windows that they have no idea how to process what comes next. Suddenly, ideas that used to look like a bad videogame storyline - e.g., a realignment towards China - no longer seem totally impossible, but that's mainly because our model of the possibility space has collapsed, and until we can stitch it back together, almost anything seems possible.
I wasn't looking for histrionics, amusing though your scenarios were (though I could easily see an American antipope being installed in Boston). What I was hoping for - and what I was gesturing towards with my wonderful metaphor - was your reflections on the best medium-term plays for Europe in event of a persisting breakdown of the transatlantic alliance.
I agree that the immediate priorities of Europe would be to significantly ramp up defense spending and local defense capacity, but it's not a particularly interesting insight insofar as every pundit under the sun is saying that now, not to mention most of Europe's leadership. I don't even necessarily disagree that Europe should be endeavouring to keep US troops on the continent in the short-term, but that's again a relatively conservative proposal. However, if we can skip past these steps and imagine things 2-3 years down the line, we can get to where the action space opens up, and start asking about what a serious decoupling of Europe from the US would look like. For example -
- Who would be Europe's plausible geopolitical partners other than the US and the Anglosphere? Does a closer relationship with China or India make sense, or would Europe be better placed positioning itself as a leaders of an equivalent to the non-aligned movement in the Cold War, letting the US and China battle it out over the Pacific?
- How should Europe square US domination of digital media and tech with a much cooler partnership? Should it aim for a "Bureaucratic Firewall" that makes it progressively harder and more onerous for US digital services to operate in Europe, both as a cultural-and-security measure and as part of a kind of technological importation substitution strategy?
- What does NATO look like in a world where no-one trusts that the US would honour Article 5? Does it remain as a zombie organisation? Do European countries formally withdraw, in favour of a European alternative?
This is just to give you a flavour of the kind of questions I thought you'd have solid takes on. That said, I wouldn't want to impose if you're averse to these kinds of horizon-scanning exercises.
doglatine
3mo ago
Iran without Russia would be a significantly diminished force, to a greater degree than Russia without Iran. I also don't see Iran as a particularly credible threat to the US's (limited) interests in the region at this point, especially with Assad gone, Hizbollah weakened, and Hamas shattered.
doglatine
3mo ago
This sounds pretty much exactly the kind of thing you'd do if you wanted to improve Europe's military and geopolitical relationship with America. I can see under some assumptions that's not unreasonable, in the same way that a woman planning to leave her violent and abusive husband might want to act like an even more loving wife than usual, right up until the point where she's out the door and has the restraining order in place. However, I guess I was more interested in hearing your thoughts on what it would look like when the wife actually leaves, rather than the part where she cooks her husband his favourite dinner and gets her hair done the way he likes it.
doglatine
3mo ago
Russia is China's closest ally, the primary sponsor of Iran and North Korea, and it has led a series of coups in West Africa against US-backed regimes. It has conducted multiple assassinations in allied countries. It has literally attacked US troops in Syria. It seized large numbers of US assets (and several US citizens) at the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine. It is currently under the most comprehensive sanctions regime run by the US against anyone. I can see a case for China being the greater threat to the US in the long-run (though I don't buy it myself), but if Russia isn't at least #2 then I have literally no clue who else would be.
doglatine
3mo ago
These excellent points all round. In fairness of the (admittedly already dubious) coherency of the groupchat that inspired this, there were six of us trading ideas, and I just dumped the logs into Deepseek, creating a particularly contradictory medley. However, that's on me for posting without vetting the consistency.
Would be curious to hear your thoughts on what a more focused and thoughtful European spitelist would look like, conditional on a continuing decline in Euro-US relations to the point where the consensus among European leaders is to classify America as a strategic competitors rather than allies.
It stands for "This part of twitter" and there's a know-your-meme about it here.
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