ymeskhout
11mo ago
Thank you so much for the update and for the links. My prediction that this episode would result in a dismissal was off-base (although I guess there's always the possibility of appeal). I'll have to dig through the briefings and related record to figure out exactly why I was wrong. My initial guess is that I relied too heavily on how one side made its arguments. That said, I don't believe this changes much of my overall thesis though: bad conduct is extremely hard to ferret out.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
I already use chatGPT 4 in my work, in only a limited fashion so far. Sometimes I feed it text and ask it to revise it, or sometimes I treat it as a superior version of Wikipedia and ask it questions about DNA analysis (I know not to trust its answers at face value but it's invaluable as a starting foundation). When it comes to playing around with AI, I'm already way ahead any of my colleagues and I was flabbergasted when I met a few of them that were my age that somehow never played around with chatGPT or its ilk.
There's a lot of tasks I expect to fully outsource to chatGPT. The one I'm most thrilled about are using it to look up cases and synthesize caselaw from disparate scenarios, and using it to write briefs directly applicable to the fact scenario I give it. That alone will save me countless tedious hours. But I'm not at all worried about my entire job being replaced, and not because I'm deluded enough to think I'm irreplaceable.
There's a scene from the 1959 movie Anatomy of a Murder where they show the defense attorney perusing through the shelves of a law library. Back in the day, if you wanted to look up cases, you had to crack open heavy tomes (called case law reporters) where individual decisions were catalogued. One of the perennially vexing issues with legal research in a Common Law system is to keep track of which cases are still considered "good law", as in whether or not they've been abrogated, overturned, reaffirmed, questioned, or distinguished by a latter case opinion or a higher court. Back in the day, this was impossible to do on your own. If you found a case from 20 years ago, it's flatly not possible to read through every court case from every appellate level from the last 20 years to see if any of them pruned the case you're interested in.
The solution was created by the salesman and non-lawyer Frank Shepard in 1873 when he started cataloguing every citation used by any given court case. These indexes would then be periodically reviewed and Shepard would sell these sticky perforated sheets that you could tear off and stick it on top of the relevant case inside a reporter compilation. These lists would tell you at a glance where else this case was cited, and whether it was treated positively or negatively. The procedure back then was, whenever finding a relevant case, to then consult Shepard's index and ensure it was still "good law." Every legal database has this basic feature nowadays but to this day the act of checking whether a case is still good is referred to as Shepardizing.
Consider also what transpired before "search" was a thing. Here too, legal publishers rushed to fill the gap and created their own index of topics known as "headnotes", typically prepared by lawyers who are experts in their respective fields. The indexes they created was sometimes nonsensically organized and they often missed issues, but overall if you wanted to find all cases that addressed say for example "damages from missed payments in the fishing industry" looking up headnotes was obviously much better than just sifting through a random tome.
Legal research has gotten way easier with searchable databases available to everyone and job expectations have gone up in proportion. This tracks developments elsewhere. I don't know what explains the rapid rise of serial killers throughout the 70s and 80s, but the decline isn't that surprising: it's just so much harder to crime and get away with it nowadays. A murder investigation in the 1950s might get lucky with a fingerprint but would otherwise be heavily reliant on eyewitness testimony and alibi investigations (this is part of a long tradition and explains why trials and rules of evidence revolve so much around witness testimony). Now, a relatively simple cases generates a fuckton of discovery for me to sift through: dozens of cameras, hundreds of hours of footage, tons of photographs, a laser-scan of the entire scene, contents of entire cell phones, audio recordings of the computer aided dispatch for the previous 12 hours, and on on and on.
All of this can fit nicely on my laptop and though I can ask for help, I'm generally expected to have the tools to pursue this case on my own. After all, I don't rely on a secretary to type up the briefs I dictate nor would I need a paralegal to organize hundreds of VHS tapes. The advancement that seems obvious to me is that our workload expectations will just go up, with the accurate understanding that modern tools make it easier to handle more.
@Supah_Schmendrick referenced a comment of mine on how averse courtrooms are to technology. It's true that there is an aversion to technology, and I'm already encountering some panic among local public defense leadership wanting to completely ban chatGPT. I've had to patiently explain to them that this is a reflexive overreaction, completely unenforceable, and also likely to be moot as big tech continues to jump on the bandwagon with products like Microsoft Copilot. I don't think that aversion will last long though, because the benefits are so blatant here and way too valuable to pass up, and part of the argument I made to local leadership is that prosecutors and law enforcement are definitely already using LLMs to assist with tediousness. Supah_Schmendrick's point about interpersonal relationships is also worthwhile, and I would add that an identifiable individual ordained to be a legal expert is useful as a measure of accountability. The ability to say "I consulted with a lawyer" will continue to have weight in ways that "I asked chatGPT" won't.
[tagging @self_made_human also]
ymeskhout
11mo ago
Now, I have a mildly jaundiced view of Law as a profession, because IMHO, the fact that a dedicated caste of professionals is needed to simply understand the legal code, let alone the interactions and ramifications therein, seems like a failure of the same. Nothing against individual lawyers though, I recognize the profession is necessary, since it pops up time and again in grossly different nations and time frames.
I agree, and my hope is that LLMs make legal issues dramatically more accessible. The legal code is currently written by lawyers for other lawyers but normal people are expected to know and abide by it. I already plug statutes into chatGPT and ask it to explain it to me because I already can't be bothered to machete chop through the dense legalese. I wonder what equilibrium we'd settle in: would law become more understandable thanks to LLMs ability to explain it, or would it become even more complicated thanks to LLMs ability to generate it?
Now, replacing judges with LLMs would be the real killer deal, especially if you could assess the outcomes of legal trials before they even went to court if the thought process of the model was clear enough and widely shared. Not that that's going to happen anytime soon, but it would certainly deal with the biggest bottleneck in legal systems.
I would basically guarantee that judges and their newly-graduated clerks are already using chatGPT to cut down on their workload, but they're going to keep quiet about it.
Defamation Bear Trap
The legal field is filled with ad-hoc quirky legal doctrines. These are often spawned from a vexed judge somewhere thinking "that ain't right" and just making up a rule to avoid an outcome they find distasteful. This is how an exploding bottle of Coca-Cola transformed the field of product liability, or how courts made cops read from a cue card after they got tired of determining whether a confession was coerced, or even how an astronomy metaphor established a constitutional right to condoms. None of these doctrines are necessarily mandated by any black letter law; they're hand-wavy ideas that exist because they sort of made sense to someone in power.
I've dabbled in my fair share of hand-wavy ideas, for example when I argued that defendants have slash should have a constitutional right to lie (if you squint and read between the lines enough). Defamation law is not my legal wheelhouse but when I first heard about Bill Cosby being sued by his accusers solely for denying the rape allegations against him, I definitely had one of those "that ain't right" moments. My naive assumption was that a quirky legal doctrine already existed (weaved from stray fibers of the 5th and...whatever other amendment you have lying around) which allowed people to deny heinous accusations.
I was wrong and slightly right. Given how contentious the adversarial legal system can get, there is indeed the medieval-era legal doctrine of "Litigation Privilege" which creates a safe space bubble where lawyers and parties can talk shit about each other without worrying about a defamation lawsuit. The justification here is that while defamation is bad, discouraging a litigant's zeal in fighting their case is even worse. Like any other cool doctrine that grants common people absolute immunity from something, this one has limits requiring any potentially defamatory remarks to have an intimate nexus with imminent or ongoing litigation.
It's was an obvious argument for Trump to make when Jean Carroll sued him for defamation for calling her a liar after she called him a rapist (following?). A federal judge rejected Trump's arguments on the grounds that his statements were too far removed from the hallowed marble halls of a courthouse. Generally if you want this doctrine's protection, your safest bet is to keep your shit-talking in open court or at least on papers you file in court. While the ruling against Trump is legally sound according to precedent, this is another instance where I disagree based on policy grounds.
Though I'm a free speech maximalist, I nevertheless support the overall concept of defamation law. Avoiding legal liability in this realm is generally not that hard; just don't make shit up about someone or (even safer) don't talk about them period. But what happens when someone shines the spotlight on you by accusing you of odious behavior from decades prior?
Assuming the allegations are true but you deny them anyways, presumably the accuser would have suffered from the odious act much more than for being called a liar. If so, seeking redress for the original harmful act is the logical avenue for any remedies. The (false) denial is a sideshow, and denial is generally what everyone would expect anyways.
But assuming the allegations are false, what then? The natural inclination is also to deny, except you're in a legal bind. Any denial necessarily implies that the accuser is lying. So either you stay silent and suffer the consequences, or you try to defend yourself and risk getting dragged into court for impugning your accuser's reputation.
My inclination is that if you're accused of anything, you should be able to levy a full-throated denial without having to worry about a defamation lawsuit coming down the pipes. You didn't start this fight, your accuser did, and it's patently unfair to now also have to worry about collateral liability while simultaneously trying to defend your honor. Without an expansion of the "Litigation Privilege" or something like it to cover these circumstances, we create the incentive to conjure up a defamation action out of thin air. The only ingredients you need are to levy an accusation and wait for your target's inevitable protest. That ain't right.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
The most instructive scenario to consider here is how the Shitty Media Men litigation transpired. Suing people is a significant time commitment and money sink, especially for defamation. Out of the 70 men on that list, AFAIK only Stephen Elliott was dogged enough to pursue legal action. As nonsensical as some of the accusations against Elliott were ("unsolicited invitations to his apartment") he was "lucky" that his sexual habits were peculiar enough and his accusations specific enough that he could at least try to mount a credible rebuttal:
I don't like intercourse, I don't like penetrating people with objects, and I don't like receiving oral sex. My entire sexuality is wrapped up in BDSM. Cross-dressing, bondage, masochism. I'm always the bottom. I've been in long romantic relationships with women without ever seeing them naked. Almost every time I've had intercourse during the past 10 years, it has been in the context of dominance/submission, often without my consent, and usually while I'm tied up or in a straitjacket and hood. I've never had sex with anyone who works in media.
I am not seeking to come out about my sexuality as a means of creating a diversion, as Kevin Spacey appeared to do when he was accused of sexual misconduct. I've always been open about my sexuality, and I have even written entire books on the topic. I've never raped anybody. I would even go one step further: There is no one in the world who believes that I raped them.
I grant that maybe some of the accusations on the list were true, but many were just vague and accordingly impossible to defend against. Lawsuits are also seen as antagonistic, and there is significant social pressure against resorting to that remedy. I gather that some men just found it easier to slink away than risk magnifying their pariah status within the gossip-friendly field of media. Elliott eventually "won" a settlement from the list's creator but who knows how much money each side bled out since the lawsuit dragged on for almost five years.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
It seems like an inconsequential distinction to me, not worth hanging defamation liability upon. It's true that an accusation could be false either intentionally or by mistake. If someone makes an intentionally false accusation (read: lying) and you know that, then wouldn't it be misleading (or perhaps even lying) to accuse your accuser of a mistake instead of a lie?
Even if the point you make is adopted as regular practice (where the accused avoid claiming anyone is lying, just that they're mistaken) would it make any practical difference? If the accuser denies that they made a mistake but you insist otherwise, is that materially different from accusing them of lying?
ymeskhout
11mo ago
I disagree, the specifics are important here. I deal with this constantly with clients who deny the allegations but then have no follow-up explanation. In a hit & run case, the defendant denies he was driving the car. Ok then who was driving your family's car then? In a stabbing case, the defendant denies the witness correctly IDed him. Ok then who else had access to this building? In another case, the defendant claims the witness is lying. Ok how do you know? why are they lying? what's their motive? when did they coordinate their stories? etc and so on.
It's frustrating to me when clients air out vague general denials because then there's nothing else for me to do as a defense attorney but also on a personal level it makes me suspect the truth of everything they tell me. Generally speaking, as a rough heuristic, the truly innocent clients of mine tend to express the same amount of curiosity about their case that I do. If they were really IDed incorrectly, they absolutely want to know who this doppelganger is. They barely can stop themselves to give me names of people to talk to, companies to subpoena, surveillance cameras to examine, etc.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
Okay, but that kind of wrecks the incentive to make up accusations whole-cloth.
I'm not sure what you mean by "that". The creator of the Shitty Media Men list did lose in this instance but this was a unique and unusual set of circumstances.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
This is fair pushback, and you've outlined some potentially messy implementation issues I hadn't thought of. I grant that in some cases figuring out "who started it" might be complicated but the legal system has dealt with much thornier issues. In this instance it could take a page from the concept of "comparative negligence" to figure out how to settle the dust.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
Well I first heard about it when it happened to Bill Cosby, maybe that's where Jean Carroll's lawyers got the idea from. I don't see the evidence that this legal tactic was invented for Trump.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
And also give the opposing attorney a chance for a fishing expedition on anything
The judge establishes "motions in limine" to set up the contours of how the trial would proceed and what topics can be addressed. The judge dealt with these disputes ahead of trial (see the case docket), including determining whether the Access Hollywood tape would be admissible. Is there anything within the docket that leads you to believe that the opposing attorney would have been allowed to go on a (presumably irrelevant) fishing expedition?
ymeskhout
11mo ago
The privilege is not limited to just attorneys. Plaintiffs and defendants enjoy the same benefit, and the "reporting" aspect of the law protects journalists.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
That was a very funny blunder from the deposition. The best explanation on this front remains that Donald Trump is functionally blind. He frequently misidentifies people right in front of him and all the notes he's seen actively using are written in a comically large font size. I don't really understand exactly why a billionaire can't use contact lenses, lasik, or whatever other space age vision technology is available, but it's funny how much legal liability he's willing to endure just to avoid being filmed wearing glasses.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
My point was broader than just the scenario of calling the accuser a liar, I was highlighting examples to illustrate how unconvincing vague general denials are. If someone levies an allegation that you deny, the natural reaction from bystanders is to wonder why an accuser would lie or otherwise be wrong about something so serious. A denial is much more credible if you can offer some sort of explanation to that burning question.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
with things like Claude-100K Context and StarCoder we're steadily progressing towards more useful coding and paperwork assistants at the moment, and not doing much in way of AGI
This is a big reason I'm uncomfortable using "AI" to describe LLMs and the main applications I envision are basically extremely useful and efficient virtual personal assistants. They're obviously a huge productivity boon but they also don't feel that qualitatively different?
Big Yud likes to cite hypotheticals involving a malicious actor trying to cause as much damage as possible by leveraging LLMs to create a new deadly pathogen or the like. This is essentially the same archetype as mass shooters or terrorists, and the closest parallels are basically 100x versions of the Anarchist Cookbook, bump stock AR-15s from a hotel room, or cargo trucks. I acknowledge these risks are real but the other obvious application for LLMs is that mass government surveillance will get dramatically cheaper and more pervasive. It doesn't seem obvious to me that the boost towards a bad actor's capacity for destruction will outstrip the government's surveillance boon. Has anyone written about this?
ymeskhout
11mo ago
My post was descriptive, not prescriptive.
I absolutely do not endorse increased government surveillance but all that is careening towards inevitability. Around the time of the Snowden leaks, one of the comforting refrains from those worried about surveillance was to note that at least the government lacked the gargantuan computing resources required to monitor everyone (newly minted Utah data center notwithstanding). That coping mechanism seems so quaint in retrospect given the technological strides since.
Despite my aversion to government surveillance, I nevertheless must acknowledge that governments maintain a zeal towards prosecuting acts of terrorism and mass violence which likely serves as some kind of deterrent. A good illustration of this retributive zeal occurs with acts of violence where the perpetrator is too dead to be punished, so the state goes after tangential "accomplices" in its hunt for a scapegoat. This happened with the prosecution (and acquittal) of the Pulse nightclub shooter's wife, the prosecution of the friend who made a straw purchase for the 2019 Dayton shooting (The idiot invited the FBI into his home with weed in plain view and readily admitted to lying on the 4473 form. Also, the shooter had no record that would've barred firearm purchases, so the straw purchase made no difference.), and the ammunition dealer who got 13 months in federal prison after his fingerprints were discovered on unfired rounds from the 2017 Las Vegas shooting.
I'm not saying that I endorse this modern variant of collective punishment, but it is good indicator of how much retributive energy animates the government's actions in these circumstances. Obviously governments have an interest in leveraging increased surveillance into suffocating population control, and this interest would only magnify as costs drop. But even as an anarchist I would be lying if I claimed that the state's only motivation for surveillance is control. However clouded and selectively applied it might be, there's clearly a genuine interest from the state in punishing and preventing bad acts.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
I concede your point. The remaining question is how much do LLMs (and the like) improve a terrorist's capacity to cause megadeaths.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
Ok fair, I apologize for misinterpreting your post. The initial hypothetical is about LLMs empowering bad actors' ability to cause immeasurable destruction, and my response to that hypothetical was to consider that in such a world LLMs would also empower governments to establish immeasurable surveillance and policing. Whether or not we "should" do anything to stop that massive accumulation of power is impossible to decisively answer because we're already buried under an avalanche of hypothetical layers. It depends in part whether you agree that LLM-equipped terrorists are a risk worth worrying about in the first place.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
I'm assuming most wouldn't even work, but there's a chance there might be some low-hanging-fruit that's surprisingly easy to produce.
This is most likely true but even so my assumption would be that governments are already ahead of the curve here. They have the capacity and interest to generate entire libraries worth of theoretical chemical weapons and also would have access to the relevant expertise to sort through the churn. The state already has a method for regulating broadly available dangerous compounds, like ammonium nitrate.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
What are the limits of the weak man?
Note: Although this post cites specific real-life examples, the intent of the discussion is intended to be entirely at the meta level.
Scott Alexander's definition is apt to cite:
The straw man is a terrible argument nobody really holds, which was only invented so your side had something easy to defeat. The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat.
Also instructive is Bryan Caplan's gradation:
OK, what about "collective straw manning" -- questionably accusing a group for its painfully foolish positions? Now we have:
3. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position no adherent holds.
4. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position some adherents hold.
5. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position many adherents hold.
6. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position most adherents hold.
What Caplan is describing as "collective straw manning" seems to be a good scale for weakmanning's range. And lastly, consider also Julian Sanchez's disclaimer:
With a "weak man," you don't actually fabricate a position, but rather pick the weakest of the arguments actually offered up by people on the other side and treat it as the best or only one they have. As Steve notes, this is hardly illegitimate all the time, because sometimes the weaker argument is actually the prevalent one. Maybe the best arguments for Christianity are offered up by Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine, but I doubt there are very many people who are believers because they read On Christian Doctrine. Probably this will be the case with some frequency, if only because the less complex or sophisticated an argument is, the easier it is for lots of people to be familiar with it. On any topic of interest, a three-sentence argument is unlikely to be very good, but it's a lot more likely to spread.
At least in theory, I think weakmanning should be avoided, but I struggle with how to draw the line exactly. If your goal is to avoid weakmanning, there's at least two axes that you must consider:
-
All the possible arguments for position X, ranked on a spectrum from least to most defensible.
-
All the possible arguments for position X, ranked on a spectrum from least to most *representative *of believers in X.
Weakmanning is not much of an issue if you're arguing against a single individual, because they either endorse the particular arguments or not. You can't showcase the error of one's ways by refuting arguments they never held.
But generally we tend to argue over positions endorsed by many different people, where each person may differ with regard to which argument they either advance or prioritize, so what should count as "representative"?
For example, many people believe in the theory of evolution, but some believers do so under the erroneous belief that evolutionary change occurs within an individual organism's lifespan. [I know some smartass in the comments will pipe up about some endangered tropical beetle or whatever does demonstrate "change-within-lifespan" evolutionary changes. Just remember that this is not an object-level discussion.] If you use a crude heuristic and only poll relevant experts (e.g. biology professors) you're not likely to encounter many adherents of the "change-within-lifespan" argument, so this could be a decent filter to narrow your focus on what should count as "representative" for a given position. This is generally an effective tactic, since it helps you avoid prematurely declaring victory at Wrestlemania just because you trounced some toddlers at the playground.
But sometimes you get a crazy position believed by crazy people based on crazy arguments, with a relatively tiny minority within/adjacent to the community of believers aware of the problems and doing the Lord's work coming up with better arguments. InverseFlorida coined the term "sanewashing" to describe how the meaning of "defund the police" (DTP) shifted [TracingWoodgrains described the same dynamic with the gentrification of /r/antiwork. Credit also to him for most of the arborist-themed metaphor in this post.] to something much more neutered and, correspondingly, much more defensible:
So, now say you're someone who exists in a left-adjacent social space, who's taken up specific positions that have arrived to you through an "SJW" space, and now has to defend them to people who don't exist in any of your usual social spaces. These are ideas that you don't understand completely, because you absorbed them through social dynamics and not by detailed convincing arguments, but they're ones you're confident are right because you were assured, in essence, that there's a mass consensus behind them. When people are correctly pointing out that the arguments behind the position people around your space are advancing fail, but you're not going to give up the position because you're certain it's right, what are you going to do? I'm arguing you're going to sanewash it. And by that I mean, what you do is go "Well, obviously the arguments that people are obviously making are insane, and not what people actually believe or mean. What you can think of it as is [more reasonable argument or position than people are actually making]".
Keep in mind that this is not an object-level discussion on the merits of DTP. Assume arguendo that the "sanewashed" arguments are much more defensible than the "crazy" ones they replaced. If someone were to take a position against DTP by arguing against the now obsolete arguments, one of the sanewashers would be technically correct accusing you of weakmanning for daring to bring up that old story again. This fits the literal definition of weakmanning after all.
As Sanchez noted above, for most people for most positions, intuition predates rationality. They stumble around in the dark looking for any sort of foothold, then work backwards to fill in any necessary arguments. Both the sanewashers and the crazies are reliant on the other. Without the sanitization from the hygiene-minded sanewashers, the position would lack the fortification required to avoid erosion; and without the crazy masses delivering the bodies and zeal, the position would fade into irrelevance. The specific ratio may vary, but this dynamic is present in some amount on any given position. You very likely have already experienced the embarrassment that comes from a compatriot, purportedly on your side, making an ass of both of youse with their nonsensical arguments.
If your ultimate goal is truth-seeking, weakmanning will distract you into hacking away at worthless twigs rather than striking at the core. But sometimes the goal isn't seeking truth on the specific position (either because it's irrelevant or otherwise already beyond reasonable dispute) and instead the relevant topic is the collective epistemological dynamics [I dare you to use this phrase at a dinner party without getting kicked out.]. InverseFlorida's insightful analysis would not have been possible without shining a spotlight on the putative crazies — the very definition of weakmanning in other words.
Here's the point, at last. Normally someone holding a belief for the wrong reasons is not enough to negate that belief. But wherever a sanewasher faction appears to be spending considerable efforts cleaning up the mess their crazy neighbors keep leaving behind, it should instigate some suspicion about the belief, at least as a heuristic. Any honest and rational believer needs to grapple for an explanation for how the crazies managed to all be accidentally right despite outfitted — by definition — with erroneous arguments. Such a scenario is so implausible that it commands a curious inquiry about its origin.
It's possible that this inquiry unearths just another fun episode in the collective epistemological dynamics saga; it's also possible the probe ends up exposing a structural flaw with the belief itself. In either circumstances, a weakmanning objection is made in bad faith and intended to obfuscate. Its only purpose is to get you to ignore the inconvenient, the annoying. You should pay no heed to this protest and continue deploying the magnifying glass; don't be afraid to focus the sun's infernal rays into a burning pyre of illumination. Can you think of any reasons not to?
ymeskhout
11mo ago
My main confusion with this post, though, is seeming to conflate positions with arguments. The DTP example seems like it refers to different sets of claims of what to do rather than reasons why we should it.
For the DTP example, the issue exists with both positions and arguments. There's the "should we defund the police?" position question, which definitely gets muddled with whether it means "slashing budgets to 0" or just "changing definition of 'police' to no longer include 911 dispatchers". But even if you pick one DTP position and hold it static, there's still going to be sanity variance within the respective arguments, such as "crime will disappear once we get rid of capitalism" versus "there may be downsides but we'd be better off on net without police given that they steal more than robbers do".
ymeskhout
11mo ago
I think the trans movement has a lot of these and it makes it very difficult to argue against either as a whole or in detail.
This is precisely what inspired this post. I had a post sitting in my drafts for months, largely because of an ever-present concern that I was weakmanning or otherwise nutpicking the crazies. I tried to map out the movement and figure out who should be representative, but then even purported authority figures say absolutely insane shit (e.g. the head psychologist of a major hospital's gender clinic talks about babies giving "gendered signals" because they took off a barrette or some shit).
I have no idea who I'm supposed to turn to, so I wrote this instead.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
I interpreted "enemy" to be another word for "opposite interlocutor", doesn't have to be antagonistic
ymeskhout
11mo ago
You say that "Hitler was a mess and riddled with countless inexcusable flaws". Can you elaborate on what you mean by flaws? You also praise Hitler for his "fatherly" motivations, which you believe are sincere and unimpeachable. What part of his implementation, if any, do you disagree with?
I wondered a similar thing when I encountered Primitive Technology's pot bellows. All it requires is a basic pottery vessel plus some sticks & twine and suddenly you have a method to smelt iron. Iron is extremely abundant but its high temperature requirement is why ancient civilizations settled for using bronze for so long, even though it's a pain in the ass to make. Almost all the bronze alloy recipes require combining metals that tend to not be naturally found near each other, so you need to trade or conquer your way across those distances. Bronze was the status quo for at least two thousand years, and the entire field of metallurgy could've started even earlier than that if only someone realized you could blow on fire to make it hotter.
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