quiet_NaN
2d ago
First off, I am not a neocon (I was opposed to GWB's Iraq war for example), and don't know how good I a am at the ideological Turing test.
Still, I would say that execution matters. In Iraq and even Afghanistan, the US at least managed to achieve some strategic objectives, like toppling the regimes. A neocon might argue that the bombings were means to an end. (Of course, in my point of view, neither operation achieved a desirable long term strategic outcome.)
Afghanistan was a blunder but at least not an obvious blunder, I am sure that some people predicted that the nation-building would fail, but I was personally not certain of that.
With Trump's Iran war, the blunder is obvious immediately. He gambled on regime change through bombing, and his gamble failed, and he does not have a plan B which is why he is bullshitting about Iran surrendering any day now.
(bombing brown people)
Every ethnicity in Iran is light skinned, and the dominant one has an extremely long history of civilization. Are Chinamen 'brown people'? Russians?
This phrasing annoyed some people, including @Shakes. I apologize, also for being factually incorrect as you point out.
What I meant to suggest was that for the US, killing people in far-away lands which are of different (particular Muslim) cultures is just Tuesday. I think the USG began using drone strikes to blow up weddings beginning in 2010 under Nobel laureate Obama and continuing under Trump. The median voter did not give a damn. My phrasing meant to suggest that few voters cared because the victims were not Caucasians. I certainly did not mean to suggest that I bought into any framework where 'brown' people mattered less personally. I do realize that I am posting on a forum where such views exist, so that was a failure to clearly communicate on my part.
On reflection, I do not think the racism answer for drone death apathy is quite true. The CW waves created by police shooting innocent blacks by mistake are second to none. I think that it is more a case of Newtonian Ethics. People in Afghanistan or Iran are far removed from Americans both in space and social graphs. My personal guess is that the US military killing Australians would upset the voters a lot more. Sure, Australia is also far away, but they speak English and their most recent common cultural ancestor is much more recent.
Of course, Trump has shown the median voter also do not care about him blowing up "drug smuggling" ships presumably crewed by Hispanics, which are both culturally and spatially closer to the US. I am a bit puzzled why that is. It might just be opportunity to oppose, though: in foreign matters, the president has a lot of leeway, so activists can not do much to stop him from ordering military strikes. On US soil, his power is much more limited, so activists can oppose him for sending in ICE or the like.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
In a world where moral status (or, as you will soon see, we could call it moral stature) is defined by a person's height
Given that this is an allegory for the real world, I want to strongly reject your assertion that people equate moral status with intelligence. The way I see it, intelligence is a capability which is roughly orthogonal to morality, just like capital or good looks or being great at a sport are. If you are smart or rich, you simply have the ability to make decisions with stronger moral impacts, while someone who is neither is much less likely to make a difference larger than a few 100 QALYs.
I mean, the people racing to AGI certainly have tens of IQ points on me, and I certainly do not consider themselves my moral superior for that any more than I would consider Epstein my moral superior simply because he had access to vastly more capital than I do.
It is certainly fashionable on the SJ college-educated left to hate proles (who presumably average a few IQ points less than them), and I personally do consider voting for Trump a moral failing, but ultimately the responsibility for Trump rests mostly with the elites -- some of which support him, and some of which decided that poor rural White people did not matter.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
My question was not original, in fact, I might have seen it months or even a year ago, when it went viral because current models failed to answer it correctly.
So there might be three possible explanations:
(1) Models just got better and can solve this now.
(2) It appeared widely in the training data so models know how to answer it.
(3) AI companies explicitly patched their models to correctly answer that question (just like they might fix jailbreaks or outrage bait).
For all I know it could definitely be (1).
quiet_NaN
3d ago
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Thanks for the link with the puzzles, I tried a few, and while I think I found the solution to two random ones I picked, I took some minutes for one of them, certainly among the three most brain-straining tasks I did today. (One of the others involved realizing that you can not mirror the pinout of a two-row 1.27mm connector by turning it 180 degrees, so take my assessment with sufficient sodium chloride.)
I mean, you could probably make an IQ 100 human solve them if you gave them an hour, threatened them with death and gave them enough ketamine to suppress the panic, but due to legal constraints you will get less mileage out of your employees on most workdays.
Basically, I concur that present models are not AGI, but I am much less certain that the median white color worker has much of a moat. If LLMs come for my job in two years, the fact that this proves that my job did not require general intelligence will be of little solace.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Yes. I imagine that 'write python code to count the number of times the letter "r" appears in the word "strawberry"' is easily within the reach of current LLMs.
A better example example would be "Is the pool of the Titanic full or empty?", which is easily answerable by any five-year old who has ever played with a plastic ship in a bathtub, but which LLMs did badly on because they did not have the visual intuition of a sunken ship.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Come on. Poland gave 4.5 billion euros in military aid to Ukraine, a country which is fighting a very bloody war with Russia. Obviously Poland believes that NATO will protect them from Russian aggression (which is a reasonable assumption when Trump is not president).
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Is this not rather a sign of TDS? Kagan spends decades advocating war with Iran, hates Trump; Trump delivers war with Iran, now Kagan is against the war.
Have you read the excerpt? Kagan is obviously a fan of the US being the leader of the free world (a model which worked well enough for the Western world during the Cold War). I would imagine that his policy (which is more or less that of GWB) is the antithesis of Trump's foreign policy, superfluous similarities (bombing brown people) aside.
In guess in his model, a regime change operation in Iran would work differently.
First, Iran would have to violate the JCPOA so badly that most signatories would agree that it was not salvageable, because unilaterally withdrawing from a treaty would damage the image of the US as a reliable partner. (For Trump, Obama's signature was reason enough -- he clearly does not give a fuck about how other countries see the US.)
Then, the US would try to form a broad coalition, come up with a strategic plan to actually achieve the objectives, think about the obvious Iran countermeasures and how to block them, wait until the troops are in the area and then attack.
Trump did none of these things. He looked at the polling, saw that he would lose the mid-terms between Epstein and ICE, and decided to bomb Iran in a bid to cause regime change from the air. Unlike with Venezuela, he lost his gamble and did not achieve any strategic objectives, because no, blowing up missiles is not a strategic objective.
Your comment makes me update towards the real syndrome being TDSS, where people accuse others of having TDS -- treating the same actions differently when done by Trump -- when in fact the actions of Trump are at best vaguely similar.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
OT side notice:
Blackstone is usually the baseline for founding-era American legal thought [...]
Foremost for Blackstone is allegiance (weirdly shortened to ligeance in a few places) -- those born within the realm owe "natural allegiance" immediately on their birth. Indeed, Blackstone doesn't even believe you have the right to renounce this, stating that it is "a debt of gratitude; which cannot be forfeited, cancelled, or altered, by any change of time, place, or circumstance, nor by any thing but the united concurrence of the legislature".
While I get that Blackstone was an Englishmen, I find it a bit rich that US legal thought should be based on him.
The US was founded by people who defected from what Blackstone would consider their rightful king. In fact, eight of the signers of the declaration of independence appear to have been born in the Old World. One might perhaps weasel around how the declaration of independence was not a defection for the people born in the colonies, because they remained loyal to the government of their colony or some such, but someone born in England coming to the New World and renouncing the king has pretty much rejected the natural allegiance thing. As did any immigrants who came later.
Not that I have a problem with any of that, I firmly believe one's allegiance to one's country of birth is a useful default but certainly not unconditional. If one's country is fucked up enough, an utilitarian has a duty to defect.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
That is probably true for a carrier group, but I don't think the US can airlift destroyers to the middle of Iran.
My understanding is that so far, they have used high-flying jets to attack Iran with impunity. I would expect that helicopters might be more vulnerable. Also, we don't know yet how many short range missiles and drones Iran can launch in the middle of their country.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I will grant you that the US military has been extremely competent on an operational level so far, but this seems a mission straight from hell.
Iranian enrichment facilities are deep underground. You will not capture them with working elevators. Expect to dig through tens of meters of rubble (if you are lucky) or concrete (if you are not). Of course, the WSJ piece is overly optimistic when it expects that the UF6 will still be in cylinders by the time you get there. At the very least, I would expect it to be blown all over the place. Though I would actually expect the regime to find a a few hundred tons of a cheap substance to mix it in. Obviously not D-UF6, as that would undo the enrichment work, but something which is easily separable within a month or so. I imagine even mixing it with sand would be annoying, perhaps requiring you to heat 100 tons of sand to get it to sublime. Though I am sure that the Iranians have found something nastier. Plus whatever traps you can imagine.
The people on the surface defending the site will not have a better time than your engineers. I mean, obviously you could turn anything within artillery range into Gaza and kill another 50k civilians in the process, but then you might as well nuke their site and call it a day. To interdict infantry from getting into range you would need a continuous bombardment of a sort which would make WW1's Western Front like a skirmish (though admittedly in a much smaller area). For a week or however long your engineers need.
And your excavators can't exactly hide underground, so you need a plan to protect them from every single drone, shell or rocket Iran might try to hit them with.
Nor is it very feasible to just bring your own depleted uranium to undo their enrichment process and leaving it on site. The problem here is that of half the separation work is going from 0.7% to 2% or so. So to undo most of the separation work of 400kg 60% U-235, you would need to ship in 24 tons of depleted uranium in the same chemical form, then mix it really well.
This shows the larger problem: even if it is feasible to airlift HEU out, what are you going to do about the 10% enriched uranium? This already has 85% of the separation work required for 60% HEU in it, but it is also 6 times less portable. Iran could trivially undo the last 15% of separation work and leave you having to scrape up 2.4 tons instead of 400kg.
physically destroying the enrichment facilities would actually provide some benefit to the war and make Iran think twice about re-starting their nuclear program.
Only if you can do so without paying too high a price. If you end up with Iran killing 100 soldiers and capturing another 20 while also spending a couple of dozen billions, Iran might decide that you are welcome back any time.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
You understand Americans largely aren't actually hurt by this.
My understanding is that unlike the gulf states, where oil is the main export, for the US oil is more of a side hustle (on the order of 10% of the total exports or so). A higher oil price will tank the world economy, and that will hurt US exports in other areas far more than their increased revenue from selling oil.
There is a reason that the US has been very active in the ME for longer than I have been alive, and charitably it comes down to the US faring worse if the oil price skyrockets. There is also the fact that the global oil trade is mostly conducted in dollars, which enables the US deficit as countries stockpile US currency.
If the US decides that they have their own oil and don't care about the global market, before long oil will be traded in yuan.
I will grant you though that a high oil price will hurt other Western countries more than it hurts the US, but then again it does not take a lot of economic hurt to lose an election.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Note: from the perspective of this poaster the main issues facing the UK are: Low Skill Immigration, Economic Stagnation, Integration of Non-European Migrants, Crime
Have you considered that the people voting Green or Labor simply have other issues they consider important?
Take crime, for example. Most crime statistics actually reflect what the police is doing, not what the criminals are doing. Murder rates are often taken as a proxy because most murderers are not competent enough to make it look like a natural death, so we can hope to get a numbers which are roughly independent to police efforts.
The rate of murders in England and Wales (1.148 in 2021 with 684, which has decreased since then) seems roughly comparable to other European nations. Even if a decent fraction of it was committed by immigrants, there is certainly no nationwide epidemic of murder.
Of course, there is also climate change (which the right should care about if for no other reason than that it will lead to more immigration, unless you like living in the kind of state which will shoot unarmed kids trying to get in), the rents being too damn high (effectively limiting upwards mobility for the bottom half of society), the stupid AI race which at best might lead to the median person becoming economically obsolete and at worst to paperclips, and lately an increasingly unhinged US which can no longer be relied upon to lead the free world, and relatedly energy insecurity resulting from their misadventures, to mention but a few.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
As an European, I think it is unlikely that we would revert to Prussian militarism once our energy supply is threatened. I think it is much more likely that we would try to cut a deal with Iran. That would work much faster than building up a navy or paying the Saudis to build more pipelines.
It helps that the situation we find ourselves in is not Iran's fault. Iran did not look at its bank balance and decide to do some shakedown of the international community. Instead, they were subjected to a US-Israeli bombing campaign. Closing the strait is the one way they can hurt the US. So of course they would do it. The Ayatollah regime certainly did enough evil, but closing the strait is something every polity would have done if the alternative was just to allow the enemy to bomb you at leisure.
Europe paying them for safe passage is win-win-win. The gulf states get to sell their fuels. Europe gets its dirty energy fix. Iran gets funds with which it can frustrate the interests of the US and Israel in lieu of crashing the market.
Sure, some might claim it would be immoral to pay Iran when it might funnel that money to Hamas, but I can assure you that we have decades of practice of not watching too closely what our oil money funds. If a polity ruled by religious crazies wants to use our money to kill the citizens of other polities ruled by religious crazies, that is by now a long-running tradition in the ME, and far be it from Europe to try to impose our value systems on Iran or the ME.
I think that there are two disjoint subsets of readers. One subset (including both you and me) prefers literature which has an obvious, engaging plotline. The other subset seems to prefer to signal their sophistication by preferring books which are utterly unreadable for anyone unwilling or unable to analyze at least three layers of meaning.
For class membership signalling, saying that you have read The Lord of the Rings will prove little. After all, the books are very readable even if you stay on the surface level and never engage with the deeper levels of meaning. By contrast, saying that you have read some postmodern novel which is utterly unreadable on the surface level will assure your class peers that you are one of them.
Personally, I am a bit less prescriptivist about it than you are, as long as nobody is making other people read books without an engaging plot. (Decades later, I am still bitter about having been made to read Tod in Venedig and Effi Briest in school. Admittedly, neither was postmodern -- they both had some excuse of a plot -- but the surface level plot was thin as hell, something which could be paraphrased in two pages.)
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