doglatine
4mo 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
4mo 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
5mo ago
I'd say the flip-side of that is that it's a mistake to read modern concepts of homosexual identity into historical reports same-sex activity. There are lots of contexts - from militaries to prisons to boarding schools - where a significant proportion of men will engage in some degree of same-sex sexual experimentation. This doesn't mean that those men are socially or intrinsically homosexual or even bisexual, any more than it means that the Ancient Greeks were homosexual in the modern connotation of the term.
doglatine
6mo ago
Yes, thanks for the expectations-tempering, and agree that there could still be a reasonably long way still to go (my own timelines are still late-this-decade). I think the main lesson of o3 from the very little we've seen so far is probably to downgrade one family of arguments/possibilities, namely the idea that all the low-hanging fruit in the current AI paradigm had been taken and we shouldn't expect any more leaps on the scale of GPT3.5->GPT4. I know some friends in this space who were pretty confident that Transformer architectures wouldn't never be able to get good scores on the ARC AGI challenges, for example, and we'd need a comprehensive rethink of foundations. What o3 seems to suggest is that these people are wrong, and existing methods should be able to get us most (if not all) the way to AGI.
doglatine
8mo ago
It’s definitely — and explicitly — pro-Democratic party, and features calls for political donations. However, it also feels (to me) quite fresh and direct and pretty bold in its analysis.
doglatine
6mo ago
A medium-sized private school in the provinces of England. Sadly, these places have mostly gone woke, and dropped Ancient Greek for Spanish, Rugby for football, etc.
doglatine
7mo ago
doglatine
11mo ago
It was called “The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States” and I found it quite fun. Jeffrey Lewis is a military wonk rather than a politician so it was mostly interesting from a miltech and strategy point of view. The Trump nuclear football scene was clearly tongue in cheek fan service.
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.
doglatine
4mo 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
4mo ago
Worth noting that this kind of incident is very bad for right-wing parties in Europe and the Anglosphere. Trump is monumentally unpopular in Europe, the UK, Canada, and Australia, and support for Ukraine remains very high. Additionally, this kind of "Reality TV diplomacy" is generally poorly received outside the US. The result will be that right-wing parties in these countries will likely have to distance themselves from Trump, and even that may not be enough to restore their pre-Trump election hopes (witness the recent resurgence of the LPC, in no small a gift from Trump).
Even if American conservatives don't care about Ukraine, I assume some of them care about global influence and leadership, especially among their historical allies. Part of the key to achieving this is assisting in the political success of ideological conspecifics in these nations, whereas this kind of bluster entirely thwarts that goal.
Of course, there are some on the American right who would be only too happy to dismantle the post-WW2 alliance system in favour of a more narrowly transactional approach, even at the cost of global influence and leadership. Even setting aside that this is unlikely to be a long-term winning position ideologically with the American electorate, I would note that empires are hard to build and easy to lose. The consequences of a global geopolitical decoupling between the US and its historical allies could be significant: US defense contractors being excluded from arms deals, tariffs or barriers to US firms operating in the EU, a rise in Chinese economic influence in the developed world, and a sidelining of US interests in global forums.
doglatine
10mo ago
It probably won’t come as any surprise to those of you that know me, but this is where my sympathies for the new American right evaporate. I disagree with the object-level historical take, not least because I think that moral feelings — especially the “rights of small nations” — played a key role in influencing British and American geopolitical strategy in both WW1 and WW2, and Hitler’s cavalier takeover of numerous small neutral countries (Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands) massively violated that important international norm.
More acutely, though, this seems like disastrous political strategy from reactionary elements on the American Right. There are so many easy wins to be had against progressivism, from defending the value of markets and pushing back against affirmative action to attacking the bizarre and incoherent ideologies of contemporary critical race theory and gender self-ID. Why on earth would you jeopardise these favourable battlefields to tilt at ideological windmills that the large majority of Americans and Westerners consider sacrosanct? Bad and stupid ideas, but also bad and stupid strategy.
doglatine
4mo 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?
doglatine
4mo 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
10mo ago
Mainstream liberalism has few answers to the fertility question at this point, and I think it's likely to loom larger as an issue over the rest of this decade. However, I think there are lots of options besides raising female fertility. Some examples -
(a) Wind down/end entitlements for the elderly. No more state pension. Require everyone to have saved enough to cover their own retirement and associated medical costs or have had enough economically-active children to cover them. End mandatory retirement ages so the fit but impecunious elderly can at least work for a living. While this option doesn't remove all problems associated with an aging population (e.g., shortage of military age men) it covers the most important one.
(b) Push hard on anti-senescence treatments. I think we've got a great shot at an outright cure for Alzheimer's by 2030, and many other diseases of aging by 2040. Perhaps combined with a radical revision of our attitude towards work and retirement, this could help smooth out the transition to a lower birthrate society.
(c) AGI/Mass automation. Personally my timelines on transformative AI are pretty short - I expect most white-collar jobs will be automatable with minimal sacrifices in performance by 2035, and I feel I'm being conservative. Blue-collar jobs and more pertinently healthcare/eldercare jobs are a lot more uncertain. I am optimistic that the second half of the 2020s will see improvements in robotics to mirror the improvement in non-embodied AI we've seen in the first half. If this transpires then our whole economic model will need revision, and low fertility/top-heavy population pyramids won't be a critical problem.
(d) Biotech revolutions. In utero genome editing and improved fertility treatments could definitely help here. If you can guarantee fertility late into middle age and flatten the higher risk of developmental/genetic disorders associated with it, that will definitely help. Artificial wombs would obviously be a gamechanger but I think we're still a couple of decades out on that score.
(e) Degrowth. Obviously like most people here I'm not a fan of the degrowth movement, but there are versions of it that I'm more open to. For example, a movement that prioritised increasing GDP/capita at the expense of raw GDP seems not unreasonable to me, though it would require tech trends like those above. If we're headed for a post-scarcity society in which most humans don't work, then dysgenics aside, fewer humans doesn't strike me as obviously bad.
So, all in all I'm not massively worried about declining TFR as a long-term issue. There are lots deep trends that would make it less pressing, and while I wouldn't bet the farm on all of them or any specific one, something in the mix will come good. I expect the main headaches are going to be in the short-term, (e.g. labour shortages, dependency ratios) and while they're worth taking seriously, they're not going to be addressed by fertility-boosting policies in the time horizons that matter.
doglatine
10mo ago
I’m a huge fan of this trend. Not in a pervy way, to be clear. Or at least, not primarily in a pervy way. With two young kids barely out of diapers I far more strongly associate boobs with breastfeeding than anything else. But boobs are great, they’re a nice-looking part of the human anatomy, in the same way as toned abs or beefy biceps, and best of all they’re not hostage to the fortune of BMI in the same way as bellies. My idea of the ultimate dystopia in terms of how humans dress would be something like radical Islamism where everyone has to wear drab colours and clothes that make them look like walking phone booths and conceal the natural beauty of the human form. So hurrah for bralessness and the greater familiarity with boobs it bequeathes.
(Also, women obviously still choose to wear them when it matters, whether for comfort or style. I assume we’re talking about the baseline here)
doglatine
4mo 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
9mo ago
democracy is optional as long as you make sure that people can buy a car, washing machine and color tv. And top it with AI powered surveillance state. A carrot and stick - forever. I think that O'Brien would find it amusing how this strain of Angsoc works.
This assumes that authoritarian societies will be able to match open societies in harnessing new technologies and making them available to the public. A key thesis of Acemoglu & Robinson in Why Nations Fail is that authoritarians are bad at this because vested interests prevent disruptive innovations and markets from coming into being. Xi's reluctance to facilitate greater consumer spending on goods like healthcare in China is not a good sign for China in this regard. While the CCP have done a brilliant job of incorporating the technological stack of the West, it's less clear they'll be willing to tolerate new products if they create threats to harmony.
doglatine
10mo ago
It also doesn’t make a ton of sense, especially given Trump’s line about how Biden hates her.
doglatine
11mo ago
Very welcome! Matt Lakeman's whole blog is amazing; if ever I have an hour to kill (e.g., a train journey) I'll just load up one of his posts and come away knowing so much more about a new country.
doglatine
7mo ago
Also true of music, but arguably not true of videogames. While most AAA games continue to be disappointing, dumbed-down, DEI-addled trash, there have been some spectacular successes in the last few years. BG3, Factorio, Disco Elysium, RDR2, Rimworld, Sekiro, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 2 & 3, Doom 2016 and Eternal, etc.. Nintendo also producing some of their best work on the Switch (Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Odyssey).
doglatine
7mo ago
For what it’s worth I’ve been really impressed with Ezra Klein, Pod Save America, Matthew Yglesias, and others in the wake of the election. Lots of pretty brutal criticism of stupid things that the Democratic Party has been doing, and quite sophisticated analysis of voting patterns etc.. I get the feeling that a lot of these people wanted to speak up more loudly sooner, but it was only once progressives were properly on the back foot that they felt empowered to do so. I hope this is a general trend for the left going forward, and that they’re able to become a big-tent intellectual hothouse of a movement again.
doglatine
11mo ago
This is a very unfortunate state of affairs for everyone, but I’d flag that the left needs to be careful here, more so than the right. In the event of a collapse of the existing social and political order, young men play an outsize role in both committing and defending against acts of violence. To the extent that the left can’t call on this constituency in a time of crisis, it may be disastrous for them.
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.”
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