quiet_NaN
8hr ago
This. Every individual in the next generation will have half of their genes from a male and half from a female, so [i]ndividual selection favors equal parental investments in male and female offspring. Obligatory link to the sequences.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
I think this will would improve things for a generation or so, but likely increasing the fraction of women in classes which reproduce unplanned will increase their fertility.
One juvenile delinquent can easily impregnate a dozen 16yo's, if there are no competitors, after all.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
Another thought: if the Secret Service failed, it was a failure of the Trump administration. The Secret Service is very much under control of the executive. If Trump wanted to be guarded exclusively by members of MAGA militias, he could certainly arrange for them to be hired. He made much bigger personnel changes happen in the USG, in fact.
I concede that this mostly rebuts the "they are incompetent" claim. If your claim is that they are highly and visibly competent, but also conspiring to get the president they are sworn to protect killed on their watch, it would not be reasonable to blame the administration for their failure to anticipate this treason.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
mos maiorum
That is a good point, actually. Trump has always not given a fuck about how things are customarily done in DC, from Birtherism over election denial to tariffs based on little more than the hope that they would be too bothersome to revert. There was corruption in DC before, but it had an etiquette, like people going to the bathroom to relieve themselves. With Trump, it is all blatant, the equivalent of just taking a dump in the middle of Time Square.
So yes, getting shot as a sitting president in a world where that just does not happen any more would seem perfectly in character for him.
quiet_NaN
9hr ago
This is also not a situation where things have been calm for a while, we are at war and several attempts have been made, and people have died (ex: Kirk).
Yes, you are technically at war, and yes, Kirk was killed, but the way you phrase it implies that these things are connected. Kirk was a victim of violence inspired by the culture war, but the culture war has not killed very many people for all the mind space it claims.
And yes, you are fighting a war against Iran, and Iran would probably jump at the chance to assassinate a US president, but this seems to be a problem of your own making.
Are all of our institutions really so rotten?
You can still rely on the US military. They are world class at killing elderly theocratic leaders, kidnapping foreign rulers, fighting naval battles against suspected drug smugglers, and neutralizing girl schools.
Seriously, in the grand scheme of things, the Secret Service is pretty far down on the list of relevant government institutions. Even if they failed to stop a president getting killed once per dozen years, this would not result in a lack of qualified people willing to do the job.
More broadly, Trump is synonymous with dismantling or perverting institutions or replacing them with his own cheap temu knockoffs:
- Research: His administration plans to cut the NSF budget in half.
- Higher Education: Trump has (correctly) identified universities as hotbeds of social justice progressivism. But rather than just pushing back against affirmative action, he is trying to dismantle them. For example, not allowing international student visas for Harvard will result in the best and the brightest of the world (whose influx has been a major advantage of the US in R&D) avoiding the US.
- Public Health: RFK as a secretary for health is like making Gargamel the minister for Smurf welfare.
- Multinational and international institutions: Since WW2, the US had used soft power to great effect. US foreign relations towards other West-aligned countries were based on the idea that there are deals where both sides win. NATO was such a case -- both Europe and North America had an interest in Europe not falling to the Soviets. The UN and the Security Council was another case, nobody was very keen on starting WW3. Free trade and the international rule based order were based on something similar. Trump did away with all of that. For him, deals seem to be zero sum, if the US is not fucking over some other country, that means they are getting fucked over. He snubs the SC by sending his wife of all people to represent the US and pushes his fictitious 'Board of Peace' instead.
- DoD: Not faced by budget cuts, but its mission to defend US interests is seriously undermined by Trump not having a broader strategic vision. When GWB started his wars, he at least had allies at his side and it took a few years until the magnitude of the strategic failure became apparent. Half of Trump's tweets about the war he fights on behalf of Israel have a sell-by date less than 24h in the future. Macho warrior culture focusing on the physical fitness of senior officers and Kid Rock will not make the US military better at doing its job.
- DoJ: To be fair, Trump did not start the lawfare, but boy did he double down on it. And bullshit charges which will never convince any trial jury are just half of his MO. The feds are still investigating legitimate criminals, sure, but the deeper purpose is not justice but a shakedown. Get convicted, donate to Trump, get your presidential pardon. Biden pardoned his son (likely because he felt that Trump would spend half the DoJ personnel hours to go after his enemies -- not that he was inaccurate there, sadly), which did immense damage to the perception of the rule of law, but again Trump doubled down by just pardoning crooks who did not hurt him personally and are willing to buy indulgence.
- SCOTUS: Now, Trump is not the first president to criticize the SCOTUS when it decides against him (which happens rarely enough). Biden called Dobbs -- the biggest loss the liberals faced in court in a generation -- a tragic error. By contrast, when the SCOTUS decided that Trump's dubious theories why he could impose tariffs did not convince them, he went into full-on attack mode, calling conservative justices who had voted against him "disloyal". It is clear that he expects the relationship between a president and a justice he appointed one of vassalage -- he gets them a cushy job, they vote for his interests. Past presidents have understood that different candidates may lean different ways, and picked one who cared about the same things as their side, but ultimately they did not expect loyalty from them.
- Democracy: Trump is utterly unable to gracefully accept defeat. His instinct when he has lost is to flip the table and set the board game on fire. This makes him different from any pre-MAGA politician. Sure, people have demanded recounts in front of the SCOTUS before, but that is still part of the rules of the game. Once the SCOTUS has spoken, you accept what they have said, and don't tell your followers to 'stop the steal'.
So in conclusion, Trump is the one who you would vote for if you found that US institutions are beyond saving (probably because they are woke) and should be dismantled. Sadly, his replacements are what you would expect from some banana republic. For all of Harvard's many faults, Trump University is not an adequate substitute. The Peace Nobel has not been without troubles, but does anyone seriously expect that the FIFA peace price will earn a similar prestige? Likewise the Security Council -- mostly a club of big countries with nukes who will only vote for resolutions which do not touch the interests of any of their client states, but who on occasion have aided in conflict resolution. Trump's pay-to-play Board of Peace will die with him.
Quite frankly, the only reason why I do not want Trump to replace the Secret Service with the TRUMP ELITE PRAETORIAN PRESIDENTIAL GUARD is because it would enable them to further his cause by getting shot by some dumb liberal, which would be his most effective move now. But I cling to some faint hope that he decides to take health advice from RFK Jr and croaks of measles or brain worms or whatever retro diseases are en vogue among anti-vaxxers.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Why is that surprising? He decided that the world would be better off with Trump shot, which I do not agree with for various reasons mostly orthogonal to any sacredness of Mr. Trump's life.
But once you have decided that utility will be increased by killing an important public figure, it seems perfectly rational to conclude that this will not change if you also have to murder a few innocent bystanders in the process. I would be surprised to learn that anyone in the decision chain leading to the assassination of Ali Khamenei lost any sleep over the women who died in the attack. If blowing him up was net positive, then it would still be net positive if a few innocents died alongside him.
It would be wrong to view people who engage in violence for political reasons as evil worshipers of Khorne who live and breathe death. Most of them likely share 99% of normie values, but something convinces them that this is indeed one of the exceptional cases where killing is required and they try to shoot Trump or throw the cyanide canister in the gas chamber or leave a bomb in the Wolfsschanze or sink a suspected drug smuggling vessel.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Steelmanning an assassination is if sincere, the height of quokkadom (unless it actually is against Hitler or equivalent).
This is the motte, a site for rationally discussing heterodox opinions, some well outside the Overton window. We have Holocaust deniers, people who want to disenfranchise Blacks, or women, all kinds of witches. "Your argument shows that you are a terrible person and you should feel bad for making it" is not generally considered a valid counterargument. You are arguing backwards, "of course, assassinating Trump is evil, therefore whatever the assassin believed must be wrong." You did not engage with my steelman (which is mostly not the reasoning of the would-be assassin, from what I can tell) at all.
Now, you could certainly argue that humans should never kill other humans without due process unless these humans are evil on the scale of Hitler. But then you would have to consider Trump a murderer as well.
The Ayatollah was very much not Hitler. He was the leader (or figurehead) of a system which recently killed some 6500--36500 people (estimate range on WP), plus perhaps a thousand a year in executions and extrajudicial killings. I would estimate the total deaths during his tenure to be less than a 100k, so perhaps three milli-Hitlers. I am not crying over his violent end, though I would argue that it would have been better not to kill him for utilitarian reasons.
Unfortunately, Trump has killed a lot of people with a death toll far lower than the Ali Khamenei as well. Take his strategy of sinking suspected drug-smuggling boats and killing any survivors. The median person on a drug-smuggling boat (charitably assuming that the identification of the US is indeed correct) is not some drug kingpin who has ordered the deaths of dozens. He is likely to be some sailor who found that he can work three times as much working smuggling drugs than he can working on a fishing boat. Sure, cocaine kills (though rarely through murder), and he directly profits from that, but few would argue that he would deserve summary execution for it. (As an intuition pump, consider a US worker who helped manufacture the bombs which hit the Minab school. He knowingly profited from manufacturing a device which he knew had a substantial chance to kill innocents, when he could have opted to find a less convenient job instead. If a sailor on a drug-smuggling boat deserves summary execution for profiting from drug deaths, it seems hard to argue how the bomb factory worker does not deserve summary execution as an accessory to murder.)
Trump certainly did away with the theory that the lives of heads of state should be considered to have more intrinsic worth than the lives of other people, and for once I agree with him (though utilitarian sadly considerations apply, as mentioned). The fact that he is a head of state does not increase the intrinsic worth of his life over that of some Hispanic sailor or Iranian school girl. If an ordinary person blew up ~170 school girls through recklessness, we would call that depraved heart murder and lock him up for life. Trump has certainly ordered the intentional killing of people who had 100 times less blood on their hands than himself.
There are certainly ways out of this dilemma. For example, you could say that actually, a foreigner is worth only a millionth part of a US citizen, which should suffice plenty -- at least if we only consider violence, and not the deaths resulting from cutting USAID in half. Or you could say that officials are allowed to kill people, but then you will find your reason to blow up Khamenei gone. So you amend that they are allowed to kill people if you like their cause, but that does not seem very principled. Or perhaps you set some threshold, 'Let n be the number of people killed by an official, and k be the number of people he could have killed. If n/k>q, then that official is a vile monster who needs to be bombed, otherwise he is a respected statesman who did what the job required.'
Trump talks about bombing Iran 'for fun', and has made the threat to permanently destroy Iranian civilization overnight. If you really considered human life sacred, that would have upset you 90 million times as much as my steelman.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Well, a gun could be described as a magic wand which any Muggle can use to cast a single spell, Avada Kedavra.
Sure, people kill each other with bare hands, but this requires either very bad luck or substantial intent on the killers part.
Suppose you see a road rage incident, with two agitated drivers exiting their vehicle and confronting each other. If both are unarmed, death is a possibility, but unlikely. If both are holding guns, that changes the dynamics entirely, now death is an outcome on the mind of any observer.
Prison guards need to worry about psychopaths, but in normal life they are actually quite rare.
Most people, including most criminals, have some built-in barriers.
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Choking someone to death while they are struggling is hard.
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Getting within stab range and stabbing someone is easier, but still not trivial. For one thing, you need to get into their range first.
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Pointing a firearm at someone and pulling the trigger is comparatively easy.
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Pressing a button on a joystick to have a drone fire a missile on a target you see on a computer screen is easier still.
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Donating to an organization which kills kids is really easy.
The anti-gun people expect that a youth might start a fight with another one, but reasonably do not expect that once his opponent is down, the he will proceed to will crush their windpipe. This is not always true, of course, but it is true often enough to matter.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
For general CW reasons, agreed. (Though I dearly hope that Trump is not like Caesar in that he did not change the political system permanently. I see him more like the Gracchi brothers, personally.)
My steelman hinged on two assumptions: (1) There is a non-trivial chance that Trump will nuke Iran (or some other country). (2) This is a personal characteristic of his, rather than a wider consequence of MAGA ideology, so that Vance or Rubio are substantially less likely to nuke someone. (To my knowledge, neither has tweeted about ending any civilizations overnight.)
Again, for the benefits of any feds reading, I should clarify that I do not subscribe to that. I think that Trump's tweets about the Iran war are a pathetic flailing around rather than a clear, consistent communication of intent.The only thing that can be learned from Trump's tweets is that his future behavior is not communicated by them. The way the Trump administration communicates what they are going to do next is by insider trading on prediction markets, instead.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Actually I disagree. Even if nuclear war happens, at least wait until you have some source you can link, even if it is just some twitter accounts. If you post before you have any sources, it might just be a hoax.
The purpose of the CW thread is not to communicate emergency civil defense information. We have other channels for that.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
now in the second admin when he is totally unchecked and unhinged, they are nowhere to be found when his admin gave signals that this time resistance will have consequences.
When ICE shot Good, that did not stop people from protesting. And when they then shot Pretti, public opinion turned so much against Trump that he pulled most of ICE out of Minneapolis.
Obviously neither Good or Pretti did expect to die for their cause (nor would it have been reasonable to expect that, given the circumstances), but they were at least willing to spend a few millimorts.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
First off, I think that assassination is generally a strategy with much lower human costs than war. If you can reach your objective by blowing up a leader instead of killing thousands in battle, that seems an improvement.
However, this is rarely given. Modern politics are unlike chess, defeating a leader will often not harm his cause much. Trump blowing up the Ayatollah did jackshit for driving Iran towards a more desirable policy -- in fact, it did exactly the opposite, turning an old sick man into a martyr and putting his vengeful son in charge. Nor would Iran blowing up Trump help them -- it would just manage to piss off all of DC. Perhaps Ukraine would profit from Putin getting offed, his regime seems a bit more personalistic.
The trick with killing Hitler is to do it before he starts WW2, obligatory xkcd. Georg Elser had the right idea, there.
The steel-man for assassinating Trump would come from taking his tweets serious. Famously, he threatened to permanently destroy Iranian civilization (pop. 92M) overnight. If you think he is a shrewd negotiator and thus does not make idle threats, you might conclude that he might order the the US military to glass Iran the next time he does not get what he wants in the negotiations, which is likely to happen.
It is hard for an outsider to judge how likely the US military would be to follow his orders. I would expect Hegseth to be at least as bloodthirsty as Trump and not push back (though he might quote a bible verse from the book of Tarantino for the occasion), and the Trump administration has certainly picked generals loyal to their cause. Nor does the military generally foster an attitude of questioning orders. Whomever killed the girls in that school certainly did not personally verify that there were IRGC members at the target coordinates, and would have gotten court-martialed if he tried. You get the order with coordinates and payload, you verify that they are genuine, and then you follow them. The US military might not have the personnel to murder a few million Iranians Einsatzgruppen-style through small arms, but I would not count on the crew of some airfield to mutiny against the USG rather than nuking Tehran. People with qualms about killing innocents do not become bomber pilots, after all.
When Elser tried to kill Hitler, Goering and Goebbels, they had not yet caused the deaths of millions. Likely, Elser used the heuristic of carefully listening to their public statements (including Mein Kampf) to form a model about their future behavior. History proved sadly that he did not underestimate the bloodthirst of the Nazis, which is why he is treated as a hero rather than a failed terrorist today.
Personally, my world model predicts that Trump is unlikely to actually order large scale nuclear strikes against the Iranian population, and that the chances are decent that someone would go Jaime Lannister on his ass rather than carry out his orders. And if there is a single elderly asshole who does not deserve to be turned into a martyr for his cause besides the late Ayatollah, it is Donald Trump. The assassination of Trump might just the jolt the decaying corpse of MAGA requires to keep shambling on into the 2028 elections, and I would much rather Trump clings on long past the point where normal people would be put into an assisted living facility and destroys his movement himself.
That being said, different people can form different world models from the same data. If someone wants to argue that the expected number of deaths from Trump ordering nuclear strikes is a million (e.g. a percent of the Iranian population, accounting for the fact that it is not very likely), they might decide that this overrides any concerns about the future of party politics in the US.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
But then you realize those people just get guns anyways.
I would argue that it is somewhat harder in Germany to buy an illegal handgun than in the US, not that I have tried either, personally.
A lot of legal guns being in circulation makes it easy to steal them. I expect you need to break perhaps into 10 cars and search the glove compartments until you find a gun in the US. In Germany, you might have to break into 1000 cars instead because not only is gun ownership rare, legal owners are also required to keep their guns locked up. Not that this helps too much, you can probably still source illegal weapons from Eastern Europe. (I would expect most smugglers not to deal in illegal guns, because the risk-to-profit ratio is much worse than for drugs. If you sell 10k$ worth of cocaine, you can reasonably expect that the authorities will never find out, and if they do, they might have resigned to the fact that there will always be someone selling cocaine. If you sell 10k$ worth of handguns, your average customer will be someone who just likes to own a gun to feel manly or a drug dealer who wants a backup plan (but has no plans to shoot anyone), but chances are much higher that someone will use them in some flashy crime, and the eye of Sauron will fall on you.)
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Phosgene works best if your victim is hiding in a trench, which went out of style 100 years ago. And the synthesis of organophosphates is so impractical for murder and terror that only one group of crazies have done so. Homebrewed explosives are not that common either but definitely more practical than chemical weapons.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I grew up in a world where we believed everyone was supposed to strive for the goals of that Martin Luther King speech. We were all supposed to become "colorblind." We wanted racial harmony and believed it was possible. We believed in racial equality and thought all we had to do was stop being racist and it would happen.
[...] Not just because I have come to the sad realization that HBD is real and that, in fact, there are racial differences in behavior and IQ. [...] and then we're told that Noticing such things makes us racist.
I am strongly in favor of institutional color- and gender-blindness. Give everyone the same admission test, and if half of the people with the top scores are Ashkenazim, that should be of little interest to the university.
I think that this is what MLK argued for -- let everyone compete on equal footing, and let the outcome be what it may. Racial equality before the law seems an excellent idea, but does not imply racial equality of outcomes. Nor is the latter required for peaceful coexistence.
When it became apparent that equal(ish) opportunity does not lead to equal outcomes, it was the SJ left who defected from colorblindness, and pushed for racial discrimination. This creates perverse incentives. If medical school was colorblind, then I as a not overtly racist patient would have no reason to care about the skin color of my doctor -- after all, they all competed on merit. If the schools practice affirmative action, then as a rational patient I would prefer a doctor whose racial group would be overrepresented in a meritocratic system, e.g. someone White or Asian. It is hard to overstate how fucked up this is. We have the tools to measure individual merit much better than what racial stereotyping -- even if backed up with decades of HBD research -- could ever accomplish. And then we forgo these tools, so crude racial stereotyping will be the most effective tool for the individual. (I think the reason is that SJ does not really believe in individual qualifications. High-earning careers are simply deserved.)
quiet_NaN
3d ago
(Side notice: why is parent modded to -14? Are there so many lurkers who disagree with him? I see this as evidence that the voting does not confer useful information beyond the alignedness with the local groupthink. Some sites (LW) do manage a culture where contrarian-but-interesting takes are upvoted. If anyone has css ready to hide post votes, I would be interested.)
The poster child for HBD is the intelligence advantage of the Ashkenazi Jews, to the point where Scott himself used them to tentatively advance that idea. Yet for some reason, I do not recall anyone here suggesting that only that group should have the franchise. Instead, HBD is used to argue for propositions which for some strange reason happen to rhyme with racism of old.
Personally, I am in favor of colorblind meritocracy all the way. We do not need to use ethnicity as a proxy for intelligence or whatever, we can simply select directly for it. Picking people who are known to be intelligent is much more effective than picking Ashkenazi in the hope that the individual variation is in your favor. Ideally, we could do this regardless of HBD.
The only reason to bring up the HBD hypothesis at all is if the SJ whines about disparate impact and unequal outcomes, which for them imply that the system is racist and unfair, and needs to be changed. And sometimes they might be right, in that our systems (e.g. criminal justice) are less colorblind than we would like them to be. But sometimes the answer may well be that genetic or cultural group differences are to blame for the unequal outcome, and we should just shrug and move on.
I have another, less savory reason to insist that people are treated equally before the law. Good old Niemoeller. If I were to grant that small racial differences in genetic inclination to violent crime are a reason to disenfranchise one ethnicity, I will have no reason why I should not lose the franchise for being a man -- after all, the crime sex gap is rather impressive.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Zero sympathy. Just because the Trump administration gets away with similar behavior (for now), this does not mean that anyone should.
If anything, the indictment is tame. "unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain".
Personally, I would treat it as secret-bearer attempts to make classified information available to a foreign government in a way which threatened US security interests for gain. The indictment does not even mention the classification level, just that it was SCI, but anything below top secret would be surprising.
And how is this a matter for civilian courts? He was a soldier, and I am sure there is something in the UCMJ about how to use secret information. Not that USC chapter 37 is very lenient, either.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
The risk of overdiagnosis is great enough, that even if you were a billionaire with ample money to spare, a good doctor would still recommend against screening for illnesses when you show no significant symptoms.
This seems stupid. If I was a billionaire intent on living a long and healthy life, I would probably get a full MRI scan once per quarter year. "Oh, we could have detected that tumor three years ago but the scan might have made you anxious" seems like a stupid way to die. If you care about anxiety, simply tell your medical staff not to tell you everything.
--
Regarding the topic of men being dangerous, the elephant in the room is that bad boys and dark triad traits are broadly considered attractive by (some) women. There is certainly the trope of a woman falling for a guy who did time for some violent crime, and then becoming his next victim.
Some might call this victim-blaming, but I would argue that it is not. If I go into a bar full of bikers and loudly declare that their favorite brand of motorbikes is garbage, then I might find myself get assaulted. The one responsible for the assault would be whoever decides to punch me in the face, not me. However, far apart from the fact that people are morally and legally responsible for whom they assault, there exists the wisdom that my own behavior can have a bearing on the probability of me becoming victimized.
The main difference is that I am not naturally inclined to educate rockers on the technical superiority of Japanese bikes (or whatever). People can however not freely pick whom they are attracted to, telling women have you tried to be into low-T accountant types? is no more actionable than telling me if you were into guys, you could get laid with little effort.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think dogs, like guns, are not all created equally. A pitbull is orders of magnitude more likely to maul a kid than a golden retriever.
And there is certainly a legislative push to restrict ownership of the more dangerous breeds, at least in Europe.
Personally, I would push for a license requirement to keep any kind of mammals (including kids) for animal welfare reasons alone, and ways to mitigate danger to third parties could be easily added to such a process.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
one classroom of dead kids in a every 4-5 years in a country of 300 million
WP says it is more like about a classroom of dead kids per year, though not all of them might are part of mass shootings. Sadly, kids are also vulnerable to guns outside classrooms, with a couple of thousands dying every year. The most common way a minor is shot is because his fuckwit parents owned guns and did not secure them adequately.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
This seems to be specific to the US. In Europe, most people are just not allowed to own guns, with very few exceptions (e.g. hunting, security, sport shooting), and of the exceptions most are not allowed to carry in public.
The 3d printed guns thing is a stupid moral panic, the correct point to consider legislation would be if murdered with printed weapons become common. Assault weapon bans, magazine limits and so all target mass shootings, which are simply the flashiest events of gun violence. I don't think that this is entirely unreasonable. The median victim of gun violence is probably some gang member, and the public does not care very much about them. By contrast, they care a lot about school shootings, and banning AR-15s (which some cops find too scary to face) or large magazines (which allow attackers to shoot more people without becoming vulnerable while reloading) can help lower the casualties there.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
A handgun is a very convenient tool for the casual homicide. You don't have to be smart to use it, and it is a minimal inconvenience to carry it around while you go about your daily business until one day, you decide that someone needs to die (or be stopped from whatever he is doing) and can enact your decision within a few seconds.
There are plenty of other tools which can be used for murder in a pinch, you can use screwdrivers to stab someone, or hit them with a blunt object, or run them over with your car, or pierce them with sharpened Hufflepuff students' bones.
If a reasonably smart person wants to off her neighbor and does not care about the consequences to herself, she will probably find a way to do so. Most likely, it will not involve any flashy homebrewed chemicals. (H2S is a terrible choice in particular because humans can detect it in trace amounts and find it deeply unpleasant, and having your victim inhale HCN is difficult unless you have trapped them in a gas chamber.)
Of course, if she cares about not getting caught, she will most likely use a method which is already common (such as handguns), because anything clever and original will exclude 95% of the suspects immediately.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
There are a quite a few nuclear powers, and quite a few have been fighting conventional wars which were very frustrating for them.
If Putin could have won Ukraine in his original timeframe by launching a few small tactical nukes, or Nethanyahu could have installed the Shah by dropping a few tactical warheads on the IRGC, or if the Soviets could have won Afghanistan in a similar way, it seems strange why nobody did so.
I view tactical nukes as similar to chemical and biological weapons. If they were 'I win' buttons, similar to what gunpowder became in Europe, their use would be widespread. Instead, they are long on horror but short on effectiveness.
There is some overlap between the smallest nukes and the largest conventional bombs, and the MOAB and friends are very much niche. If a few tens of kilotons TNT would have changed the Iran war, the US air force could have just delivered that using conventional explosives.
The other thing is that on the scale of hand grenades to city-glassers, chemical vs nuclear energy storage is the Schelling fence. Normalizing the use of tactical nukes will also normalize the use of larger nukes.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Im gonna sound authoritarian here, but this shit needs to straight up be banned. There is no social positive for computers and humans to emotionally intermingle in this way.
Your predecessors said the same about jerking off, or gay sex, or interracial relationships.
Cynically, there is already a good chance that a distressed woman texting her boyfriend late at night getting emphatic, engaging answers will be reading LLM responses. If she cuts out the middle man, the LLM will at least not cheat on her and give her STIs.
Yes, and that is based on individual natural selection.
The thing is, we are no longer aligned to the imperatives of natural selection. We use contraceptives. We build corrective glasses and synthesize thyroxine for the likes of me rather than letting natural selection deal with them. We have escaped from the yoke of our blind idiot god. Why should we keep this tenet when we have broken so many others?
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