Very belated followup to a maybe-too-dismissive response and promise for followup here. I feel bad about leaving that branch rudely untaken and not following through.
Bluntly, criticism as from SlowBoy and KMC was correct, 'corruption' in the sense of using power to drive personal gain was the wrong word, and I should have spent more time finding a better way to express the tangle of traits in Trump that I dislike and that drive me away from favoring him for 2024 President.
I would endorse maybe half of the class/aesthetic criticisms laid against him by the total commentariat (crude, boorish, unrefined), the cultural-conservative portion of moral criticisms (venal, dishonest, weather-vane, pandering), all of the epistemic ones, few to none about intelligence and raw perception (stupid, senile, psychotic). I like Ezra Klein's podcast ep "What's Wrong With Donald Trump" as laying out the raw impressions that drive me away, and support his induction of the base disorders being basically narcissism and total disinhibition. These two factors couple to a lack of intellectual humility ("my gut tells me more sometimes than most experts ever have" or something similar in the podcast was a line that struck me) that verges on disconnection from consensus inference and prediction, but not perception, that I think also drives a disgust reaction for me. Practically, his anxiety to be liked drives people-pleasing in historical US competition and opposition that is excessive to the goals of diplomacy, and his refusal or inability to engage with the existing machinery of state and its tribal knowledgebase is a crippling defect, even accounting for parachuting in friendly top leadership like Project 2025 wants to.
I look forward to reading Bob Woodward's trilogy on the topic and believing a third to half of it, and whatever Milley has produced about his experiences and believing two-thirds of it.
xablor
8mo ago
If you operationalize "personal loyalty to Trump" as "conformist authoritarian tendencies", then we've had a profiling instrument for that for awhile courtesy of Bob Altemeyer at U Manitoba: https://theauthoritarians.org/ . You can take a version of his research questionnaire at http://openpsychometrics.org/tests/RWAS/ to get the flavor of personality type that it's trying to detect. (No it doesn't capture every way there is to be authoritarian, yes woke is left authoritarian, it still seems relevant to answer the question at hand.) Couple that with "amount of pushback against direction from superiors" as an item of quarterly personnel review to set up evaporative cooling dynamics, have semiannual shit tests and purity spirals, and I bet by year 3 of a Trump admin you could get at least some of them to rerun Jonestown. Maybe have a not-legally-binding oath to Trump personally, just to engage the monkey brain a bit harder.
This would probably do terrible things to your talent pool, mind! It's basically building a cult around the Presidency, with direct interpersonal dynamics rather than parasocial ones like we've already seen with the Trump cult of personality. Selecting for that trait seems like it starts trading off against general competence, independence, ability to be delegated to, pretty quickly.
xablor
8mo ago
Placeholder reply: I have thoughts on this, but I don't want to divert the evolution of the discussion yet.
xablor
9mo ago
How precisely can the strike package planners control/predict when and where missiles are going to be during the strike? Functionally this isn't much damage dealt, but maybe it could be trying for an intelligence objective instead, probing locations and stores depths of anti-missile batteries?
xablor
10mo ago
"Electric Machinery Fundamentals 3e" by Stephen J Chapman, because a) I'm tired of thinking starter-generators are magic, b) I want to design and build a microturbine APU so I can get a BEV power armor without having to handle my dad's range anxiety.
Also David Chapman's Vividness website-book-blog-thing at https://vividness.live/ , he's been on my radar for a long time and I've never followed through.
xablor
8mo ago
I'm not privy to Israeli policy discussions and I haven't even studied the topic intensely, so this is necessarily facile and off-the-cuff, sorry. My impression of the terminal goals of the Israeli government are, in no order:
- TG1 Prevent a reduction of the current extents of Israel.
- TG2-1 Minimize population and property loss due to present enemy action
- TG2-2 Minimize the likelihood-damage product of future enemy action
- TG3 Extend the borders of Israel to include current-day Gaza and the West Bank
- TG4 Promote the prosperity of the Jewish people
- TG5 Promote the personal power and prosperity of Israeli leadership
- TG6-1 Maintain good relations with their current backers and alliance network
- TG6-2 Promote prosperity of their current backers and alliance network
- TG6-3 Increase the alliance network
- TG7 Human benevolence
This is only a quickly brainstormed list of generic goals of good governance with some extra ethnocentric emphasis, plus TG3. I used a pairwise comparison chart to figure out my guess at their relative priorities:
- TG2-1
- TG1
- TG2-2 TG4
- TG6-1 TG5
- TG6-2
- TG3 TG6-3 TG7
Which passes some sanity checks: defense above prosperity, land growth in conflict with not annoying allies and human benevolence and at the bottom since they can afford to play a long game, personal graft about middle priority, minimizing present loss prevention over minimizing future loss prevention.
These goals and goal priorities give us a number of possible compatible goal scenarios for the current conflict, which roughly map to the same old list of options from the policy wonks:
- GS1: Mowing the lawn: reduce the current iteration of Hamas, keep a tight upper bound on the ability of whoever replaces them. This has failed dramatically, and so rejected in favor of other goals, but I included it for completeness.
- GS2: Regime change, resulting in two states: the publicly claimed current approach, installing the Palestinian Authority with no border changes.
- GS3: Palestinian population displacement: not really viable, since no one else will take them
- GS4-1: Palestinian population elimination: Conventional genocide: physically viable, not at all politically viable
- GS4-2: Palestinian population elimination, eventually: Genocide construed liberally, including suppression of Palestinian civic bodies and suppression of reproduction. Compatible with a lot of other scenarios, and maybe covertly viable, but the potential scandal and time scales needed make it probably politically non-viable.
- GS5: Palestinian mass internment, Gaza annexation: something like what happened with indigenous NA tribes and the reservation system. Palestinians are restricted to even smaller areas.
- GS6-1: Gaza annexation, permanent Palestinian subjugation: Irael extends to include current Gaza, Palestinians become second-class citizens on a permanent basis.
- GS6-2: Gaza annexation, Palestinian incorporation: Israel extends to include current Gaza, Palestinians become citizens of the resulting joined state.
I've probably missed a few. The current 'gated community' proposal seems consistent with GS2, GS5, GS4-2, GS6-1, and GS6-2. Establishing a safe zone and expanding it gradually doesn't seem avoidable in GS2, GS6-1, and GS6-2. I don't see a way to distinguish which end goal is being pursued at this time, but the obvious experiment seems to be to wait and see what the conditions are in the safe zones, to rule GS4-2, GS5, GS6-1, GS6-2 in or out. If the safe zones are expanded over time, and their populations increase over time, and abuses are minimized with good mechanisms to detect them, that seems like decent evidence that we're in the GS2 timeline. Personally, I expect GS2 in the near term, and GS6-1 evolving to GS6-2 within 50 years.
What do you think of this framework? Do you agree with my proposal to distinguish which timeline we're in? Does extending the framework somehow give us more options for analysis or prediction?
I'll pile on for naltrexone as a happy user. I use it per the Sinclair protocol, detailed at https://www.sinclairmethod.org/what-is-the-sinclair-method-2/. Modern psych training is to prescribe it daily in the morning, which makes my meds shrink worry about me when I say I'm doing something different, but she's happy enough to see me keeping a log with numbers going down, and "once daily as I leave work because that gives me an hour before drinking" is close enough to her "once daily in the morning" for her to shrug.
I will endorse it more as a method to get back to a healthy relationship with alcohol, and enable abstinence if you want it, without slips causing a relapse, rather than a cold cure for addictive tendencies that lead to alcoholism. Probably if you do get abstinent with alcohol this way, it'll be by going California sober and substituting with other psychoactives, which could include psych meds. The Caliph has a good writeup at https://lorienpsych.com/2021/02/23/alcoholism/, as you'd expect.
I will say that it's to AA what scalpels and antibiotics were to leeches, in my opinion. It's a shame that the euros are ahead in this regard.
xablor
8mo ago
Wait, I'm confused. Multiply that out for me? If you demonstrate a fair die and I bet evens every time, why isn't that +EV? Transaction costs? Or are you leaving unstated that it's one round, few rounds, or rare rounds (enough time between rounds to invalidate assumptions)?
Two factors that I find repel me from voting are
- the effort needed to develop a ranking over the candidates
- sub-problem: develop and keep current opinions on the decisions I expect them to make
- ex: What are my opinions on The Wall, what will Trump likely do?
- ex: Do I even need to have an opinion on whether tips should be taxed, or is it fluff?
- sub-problem: identify issues in the world to have a preference on that aren't in the discourse
- ex: What are the odds of John Bolton's opinions on Iran getting into Trump's cabinet? Do I like them or not?
- ex: Jake Sullivan's conservatism about escalation in the Russia-Ukraine war? Do I like them or not?
- (I don't know actually know Harris' cabinet rumors well enough to have thoughts about them.)
- sub-problem: for each issue, develop a score for each candidate for/against on that issue.
- sub-problem: develop and keep current opinions on the decisions I expect them to make
- the ugh field around the actual physical implementation of the act of voting, executive dysfunction, and the difficulty of bootstrapping into knowing how to accomplish it.
- App idea: a checklist manager for taking part in the polls you want to. You need to register to vote? Here's the form and the types of evidence to gather, press a button to have a copy and a stamped envelope mailed to you, paid half-and-half by each party. Daily reminders and follow-ups on the tasks and sub-tasks. It's two weeks before voting day, did you arrange the morning off? Probably this is already a thing; I hope it is. Maybe I should make it if not.
Between perfectionism, procrastination with a fun and infinite problem, and a multi-month process requiring advance planning and grit on the day of to wait in an hour-long line to poke a cranky ATM, it's very easy to round 1/3E8 of the cost/benefit from a given federal outcome to 0 and not bother. This is effectively charity to a process that's worked more-or-less well enough so far, all outcomes are within bounds, going with the flow is entirely tolerable.
xablor
5mo ago
I am once again begging for a compromise solution, here. Maybe drop everything that gets classified as a bare link after the first five? It's not like it's hard to classify things at scale, now.
xablor
7mo ago
Seconding the nasal irrigation with salty water, maybe also very dilute topical disinfectants like povidone iodine. There are lots of weird little crannies in the sinuses, and a biofilm like a stuffed-up nose is a great place to host a self-perpetuating infection.
xablor
9mo ago
No movement on the passive cooling vest. I'll get access to my beloved workshop again next week, maybe that'll restore some enthusiasm? It would at least remove a step, by removing analysis paralysis about DIYing a vacuformer.
xablor
9mo ago
Florida, which in latest polling is a weak Trump advantage; I don't know if the senators Matter. My interpretation is that a flip is more than possible by November, so it's higher-impact this year.
xablor
9mo ago
I'm currently refreshing on Factorio in preparation for the expansion, let's coop?
xablor
8mo ago
The worst fears of every pundit from 2015-2017 of Trump came nowhere close to manifesting, so this makes me disinclined to take them seriously at anything.
Klein tries to counter this argument from history by pointing out that 4 years of learning and prep by the Trump reelection team makes one of their high-priority goals be vetting top-level staff for compliance with Trump's desires and personal loyalty. Separately, his attempt at moving federal workers to Schedule F to remove protections against firing them and rehiring for loyalty and obedience late in his prior presidency tried and failed to do the same thing in medium- and low-level roles. Klein claims that this would remove the moderating factors that prevented pundits' fears from manifesting.
I don't know how the tension will resolve over time, between the need to maintain continuity in low-level staffing to enable daily operations versus the need to overwrite existing loyalty and power structures, but separately I worry about the damage the attempt will do to tacit institutional knowledge rather than procedural knowledge; cf the various worries about the shallower bench of talent on the right.
xablor
8mo ago
I got a notification that I'd gotten a reply to this post from @Belisarius , but when I went back to find it in another tab it didn't appear in Comments or the thread. Are they blocked from posting? Did that post have to be approved?
xablor
9mo ago
I'm abandoning "Introduction to AC Machine Design", "Electric Machine Fundamentals" answers the same questions for me and isn't making me want to refresh on the entire dependency tree of vector calculus first. I did get "Principles and Applications of Electromagnetic Fields" for the Aspirational pile, though. "How to Keep House When You're Drowning" remains inspiring and comfortable. Factorio continues to eat me.
xablor
9mo ago
A work perk, actually. It's pretty badass and has toys I could never dream of affording, like a Tormach CNC mill with all the trimmings and a 3d printer farm, as well as the vacuformer I was making progress with. I was too casual with leaving some non-compliant tools around, so copped a month ban and a requirement to retake the safety training.
xablor
9mo ago
Also, my day job (programming) seems to use the same part of my brain as writing
This is hard. The best move I've got is to brute-force my sleep schedule to be awake at 5 or so, addy up (back when I had access), and use those crack-energy disinhibited hours while there are no distractions from the world to get some work done.
Shower thought: conditional on a Harris win in 2024, what are the odds that Trump runs again in 2028? I want a return to the dynamics of pre-Trump elections, where at least the candidates had the decency to act embarrassed at being shown to be corrupt, so the fewer times he gets at bat the better.
He'll have the existing huge demand for populist wrecker policies and style that most politicians can't supply, so the crowd will want him back. The crowd wants him back, so it seems like his narcissism would pull him back in, but his age might preclude it, and a loss might drive him away from Presidential elections via sour grapes.
I don't know much of his psychology, and of course there's four years of unknown unknown developments until then. What other factors can you all identify? How do we beat them all against each other to get a spread of probabilities?
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