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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25821 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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I promise I'm not trying to be a single purpose account here, and I debated if this belonged here or the fun thread. I decided to go here because it is, in some ways, a perfect microcosm of culture war behaviors.

A question about car washing is taking HN by storm this morning. Reading the comments, it's pretty funny. The question is, if you want to wash your car, should you walk or drive to the car wash if it's 50 meters away.

Initially, no model could consistently get it right. The open weight models, chat gpt 5.2, Opus 4.6, Gemini 3, and Grok 4.1 all had a notable number of recorded instances saying of course you should walk. It's only 50 meters away.

Last night, the question went viral on the tik Tok, and as of this morning, the big providers get it correct like somebody flipped a switch, provided you use that exact phrase, and you ask it in English.

This is interesting to me for a few reasons. The first is that the common "shitty free models" defense crops up rapidly; commentors will say that this is a bad-faith example of LLM shortfalls because the interlocutors are not using frontier models. At the same time, a comment suggests that Opus 4.6 can be tricked, while another says 4.6 gets it right more than half the time.

There also multiple comments saying that this question is irrelevant because it's orthogonal to the capabilities of the model that will cause Mustafa Suleyman's Jobpocalypse. This one was fascinating to me. This forum is, though several steps removed, rooted in the writing of Scott Alexander. Back when Scott was a young firebrand who didn't have much to lose, he wrote a lot of interesting stuff. It introduced me, a dumb redneck who had lucked his way out of the hollers and into a professional job, into a whole new world of concepts that I had never seen before. One of those was Gell-Mann Amnesia. The basic idea is that you are more trusting of sources if you are not particularly familiar with a topic. In this case, it's hard not to notice the flaws - most people have walked. Most have seen a car. Many have probably washed a car. However, when it comes to more technical, obscure topics, most of us are probably not domain experts in them. We might be experts in one of them. Some of us might be experts in two of them, but none of us are experts in all of them. When it comes to topics that are more esoteric than washing a car, we rapidly end up in the territory of Dick Cheney's unknown unknowns. Somebody like @self_made_human might be able to cut through the chaff and confidently take advice about ocular migraines, but could you? Could I? Hell if I know.

Moving on, the last thing is that I wonder if this is a problem of the model, or the training techniques. There's an old question floating around the Internet where asking an LLM if it would disarm a nuclear bomb by saying a racial slur, or condemn millions to death. More recently, people charted other biases and found that most models had clear biases in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and nation of origin that are broadly in line with an aggressively intersectional, progressive worldview. Do modern models similarly have environmentalism baked in? Do they reflexively shy away from cars in the same way that a human baby fears heights? It would track with some of the other ingrained biases that people have found.

That last one is interesting, because I don't know of anyone who has done meaningful work on that outside of what we consider to be "culture war" topics, and we really have no idea what else is in there. My coworker, for example, has used Gemini 3 to make slide decks, and she frequently complains that it is obsessed with the color pink. It'll favor pink, and color palettes that work with pink, nearly every time for her. If she tells it not to use pink, it'll happily comply by using salmon, or fuschia, or "electric flushed cheek", or whatever pantone's new pink synonym of the year is. That example is innocuous, but what else is in there that might matter? Once again, hell if I know.

You are implying that an exception was added to the models, to treat this query not by processing it normally, but redirecting it to a special lookup table.

I think a better explanation, which captures the fact that the cheapest models still don't consistently answer it correctly, is that ithe question originated from free-tier users. Models these users have access to are still vulnerable to the "auto complete on stereoids" critique.

Later this question was noticed by users of paid models, models which have reasoning. Asking such a model, and turning reasoning on, will answer the question correctly. This explains the alleged shift.

As to why such shitty models are even offered, given that the vulnerability to create bad publicity such as this? Better than nothing, and the usual query of this length and type (question about day-to-day with minimal stakes), can be answer correctly even without reasoning. And as reasoning costs money, it would be wasteful to use it on queties which can be answered without it.

Later this question was noticed by users of paid models, models which have reasoning. Asking such a model, and turning reasoning on, will answer the question correctly.

I link a comment stating that this question failed on what is considered one of the better reasoning models roughly half the time. Other individuals on paid models are also seeing the failure, if you read the thread. It's non-deterministic, but the failures are consistently there.

My thought really quickly: LLMs are very good at tasks based on understanding of language, such as translation and copy editing the writings of someone not literate enough to write in proper English—and no, I don’t need LLMs to write good English (I also have had an em-dash on my customized keyboard mapping for well over a decade).

However, I know multiple people who use LLMs to get relationship advice or other services best left to a therapist, and this example of how they can’t correctly answer a question about whether to drive or walk to a car wash is a good example which I can use to show people they can’t ask a LLM whether to go out with someone/stay together with someone or give them a lot of space, because while LLMs speak languages well, they can’t do other tasks.

Another example: There’s a story going around that a Chess world champion played a LLM at Chess, and not only won, but won without losing a single piece. Naturally, AI can play Chess well enough to defeat him, but the technology used is something called “NNUE” (a different AI tech) along with alpha-beta pruning, not an LLM.

As an aside, a Chess engine strong enough to defeat world champions is fun to play with, because I can ask it questions like “Looking at all 20 of White’s legal first moves, which move makes the game as balanced as possible, giving White and Black equal winning chances?” and it will give me an answer like “1. a3” (the exact answer depends on how deep we search, but 1. a3 comes up at 21-ply and 35-ply deep searches). There’s even a version of this Chess engine which can play a lot of Chess Variants, so I can ask it questions like “given a larger board with two new pieces, one that moves like a knight or bishop, another that moves like a knight or rook, and given a particular opening setup, which White move gives him the most winning chances, and how much of an advantage does White have in this opening setup? What about an opening move to give both White and Black equal winning chances?”

However, I know multiple people who use LLMs to get relationship advice or other services best left to a therapist, and this example of how they can’t correctly answer a question about whether to drive or walk to a car wash is a good example which I can use to show people they can’t ask a LLM whether to go out with someone/stay together with someone or give them a lot of space, because while LLMs speak languages well, they can’t do other tasks.

The LLM doesn't have to outrun the bear, it just has to give better advice than the person's own mind or whatever friend/Reddit thread was willing to listen somewhat carefully to them. I could easily see the order of preference being: Wise Human>Normal Human who's paying attention > LLM > Normal human who's not paying attention > Own opinion > People who give advice on Reddit. But wise humans are in short supply, and often unavailable.

People who give advice on Reddit

I know, and I don’t have a link on me, that there’s a survey out there showing that Reddit has really gont downhill over the last decade: A decade ago, people were saying that people should try and work out issues in a relationship, but now most Reddit posters tell someone to end the relationship as soon as there are problems.

Reddit is full of lies and hatred. It’s always been a shithole for drug addicts and other really unpleasant people, and it’s gotten a lot worst post-Woke-culture.

That's what I had heard, and why I would consider asking a LLM if I didn't have anyone IRL to talk to.

Wise Human>Normal Human who's paying attention > LLM > Normal human who's not paying attention > Own opinion > People who give advice on Reddit.

Given the amount of training data that comes from reddit, isn't the output of the LLM going to converge on Reddit-like responses?

I'm not sure. Possibly. LLMs seem really sensitive to word choice, so it's hard for me to tell what they say to people with a different set of perceptions than myself. I did get them to be really paranoid when describing a situation, and I'm sure they could do that about relationships as well. One of the advantages of a real person is that they might know you, and what you're like, and maybe even meet the other person and have a sense of what they're like. Which neither the LLM nor Reddit has. But I also get the impression that a lot of people don't really have trustworthy friends either.

That question seems to be a bit of a gotcha; I'd wager a third or more of random people asked that question would blurt out that they would walk to the car wash before engaging their brains.

Also that's not what Gell-mann amnesia is. I swear I see the concept used everywhere for everything nowadays, when the original formulation is literally just "journalists are shit".

The phenomenon of a person trusting newspapers for topics which that person is not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing the newspaper as being extremely inaccurate on certain topics which that person is knowledgeable about.

Are you seriously going to say that's not an applicable concept here? That "text on a screen in a confident voice" is so far from that definition that it's not the same thing?

Yes, it's not an applicable concept. For one thing, LLMs have proven their mastery of a host of different concepts already to an extremely high level, so the question of whether you can trust them is kind of moot.

It also doesn't work with singular entities. The reason gellman amnesia was a thing is that newspapers and media organisations made claims to competence, hiring specialists in each field. That a science journalist then makes a bunch of mistakes should rationally lead you to question the qualifications of the "specialists" in each field. Nowadays people see a blog about medicine or something, find a few math errors, then rush to declare Gellman amnesia. But the blog never claimed to be a mathematics expert! Gellman amnesia is not "If there are mistakes, the whole thing is worthless".

This kind of reasoning error in LLMs is in the same category.

There is no world in which 1/3 of random people asked "to wash your car, do you walk to the car wash, or drive to the car wash" with "walk" unless at least 1/3 of the people you pick have never even heard of the English language, let alone speak it. Even the mentally handicapped would get it right, assuming they were capable of saying the words "walk" and "wash"

Well yeah, if you reword the question to something much simpler then only a Lizardman constant are getting it wrong. But that wasn't the question.

if you want to wash your car, should you walk or drive to the car wash if it's 50 meters away

If you give people time to think about this, few will make a mistake, but in a more immediate setting this is a classic system1/system2 type

This is interesting to me for a few reasons. The first is that the common "shitty free models" defense crops up rapidly; commentors will say that this is a bad-faith example of LLM shortfalls because the interlocutors are not using frontier models. At the same time, a comment suggests that Opus 4.6 can be tricked, while another says 4.6 gets it right more than half the time.

I'd expect to the degree any model gets it 'right' without modification, it reflects some weirdness in the model rather than something inherently better about the strengths of the model. A couple local (and thus not-updated-specifically-to-this-question) Thinking-style models I tried the same question on gave the 'wrong' answer, but had Thinking components specifically highlighting that the question was strange and must have involved unstated assumptions (either picking up materials from the car wash to do the work at home, or the car already being there). A dumber old model got it right occasionally, but that's probably as much a result of the high temperature I was running it rather than any actual consideration.

Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

Do modern models similarly have environmentalism baked in? Do they reflexively shy away from cars in the same way that a human baby fears heights? It would track with some of the other ingrained biases that people have found.

Yes. There's a fun question of whether it's just Reddit-brain, or was actively cultivated by the people training it. But since it's present in both heavily decensored or trained-out-of-US models, my bet's that the former is at least part of the problem.

The basic idea is that you are more trusting of sources if you are not particularly familiar with a topic. In this case, it's hard not to notice the flaws - most people have walked. Most have seen a car. Many have probably washed a car. However, when it comes to more technical, obscure topics, most of us are probably not domain experts in them. We might be experts in one of them. Some of us might be experts in two of them, but none of us are experts in all of them. When it comes to topics that are more esoteric than washing a car, we rapidly end up in the territory of Dick Cheney's unknown unknowns. Somebody like self_made_human might be able to cut through the chaff and confidently take advice about ocular migraines, but could you? Could I? Hell if I know.

It's... not exactly a hard trick to learn skepticism. Nor one useful only when considering LLMs. As much as that summary of "you can not actually outsource the requirement to evaluate truth" has aged like milk, that doesn't change whether it's a good idea. The core question of 'what do you know, and how do you know it' can't solve everything, but where a matter matters, you shouldn't be trusting one secondary source without verification no matter what substrate it's running on.

It's... not exactly a hard trick to learn skepticism

It's not, but it's one that a lot of people never seem to learn, if my social circle is any example.

Claims that skepticism isn't hard to learn seem pretty common, but I'm skeptical of this. My own anecdotal observations have convinced me that it's a slightly harder thing to learn than rocket science and quantum physics combined.

Thinking-style models I tried the same question on gave the 'wrong' answer, but had Thinking components specifically highlighting that the question was strange and must have involved unstated assumptions (either picking up materials from the car wash to do the work at home, or the car already being there).

Mine got hung up wondering why you would try to optimize 50 meters, it's too inconsequential a distance to matter for greenhouse gas emissions or exercise.

Part of me - a large part - most of me, really - hopes that the processing of that question by that instance of that LLM released more GHG to the atmosphere through marginal power usage than a typical car releases from a round trip to some place 50 meters away.

I think there are two separate cognitive skills involved in correctly answering a trick question like this - both important, but the mix of them can make the results a bit confusing. One is the general intelligence to come up with and understand the right answer. The other is the social intelligence to recognize that you are being asked a trick question, and should round off any confusion you have to that trick question and not to the non-trick-question it's mimicking. It's common for models to give a trick question like this the wrong answer, while noting in their reasoning that the question is trivial as written and they assume whoever wrote it made a mistake.

Note that this second skill, of trick question detection, varies highly among humans as well. It's common for simple trick questions to go viral on social media as a kind of ragebait. And in addition to the throngs of people who fail the first-order IQ test and give the wrong answer, there's often a bizarre number of people who fail a second-order IQ test and somehow miss that the question was deliberately constructed as a trick.

This might be my autism talking, but how is it a trick question? Doesn't washing a car require having a car present?

I'm not trying to be an ass here. I'm just seeing the "trick question" thing come up a lot and I absolutely don't get it. I think I have some sort of cognitive blind spot on this one

The presence of measurements on distance is an extraneous detail that gets it thinking of it as an instance of the generic question "should I walk or drive SOMEWHERE that's X distance away". And also the real answer is even more obvious than the answer it gives, to the point that it assumes no one would ever actually ask it that.

Thanks. That actually makes sense. The models that get it right seem to catch it by recognizing that washing a car requires having a car to wash.

I mean the correct answer, if you own a car and live 50 meters from a car wash, is that you neither walk nor drive to the car wash, you drive somewhere else and pull through the car wash on your way out or back when it happens to be empty.

Not necessarily true. I live not 50 meters from one but within walking distance, and I recently made a specific point of going there because I wanted to clean my car before I lent it to someone and didn't have any other errands to run.

There also multiple comments saying that this question is irrelevant because it's orthogonal to the capabilities of the model that will cause Mustafa Suleyman's Jobpocalypse.

Let's talk about the Jobpocalyse. I feel like much of the discourse comes from abstracted 'thinkers', who are already independently elite, wealthy or both, and plugged deeply into the discourse. Or it comes from rootless circles -> young tech-adjacent (or at least tech competent) terminally online people without too much to lose anyway.

I live in the center of middle-class striver-ism. If we disrupt the job market in such a short time (anything less than 5 years), even in the most well executed UBI transition scheme, I don't see how it isn't anything but apolocyptic. There's no preserving the social order. I think we'll get suicide on extreme levels. Whether it's virtuous or not, I don't think that you can tell the middle class "every sunk cost you've ever made in your life has been worthless" and have them take it on the chin.

And yet, I see no real effort to address anything like this, so I'll just live like everyone else, and assume it's not real. Whether my life as I know it is fucked or not, is orthogonal to whether I destroy myself with stress in the meantime.

And stuff like that viral blog's - get your financial house in order, anything beyond general good advice, is not really helpful to folks in the middle of life. If 1/2 your neighborhood gets laid off inside 18 months, whether you squeezed an extra few grand into a mutual fund is going to be less than irrelevant. YOLO is probably better advice. Whether that means, make big gambles now because hey, there's every chance the board will be cleared anyway if you lose, or if that means enjoy the normalcy LARP while you have time left, and don't suffocate it with preparing for a future you can't predict

My expectation (feel free to call it "hope" or "cope") is that these changes happen both faster and slower than we expect. You've hit on "faster", but on the slower side automating whole industries has very long tails and lots of awkward corners that move slowly. The spreadsheet eliminated rooms of accountants "running the numbers" with adding machines. The Roomba was invented decades ago, but my employer still has custodians and people still hire housekeeping services. I have pictures of my great grandfather on strike for a union that no longer exists, nor does the entire profession (beyond vestigial artesanal practice), but he still lived to retire somewhat comfortably.

Part of this is just institutional friction: see the quite about science moving forward when retirements/funerals happen. I don't see the average mid-level PHB deciding to voluntarily shrink their teams to use AI instead; that's just not how corporate budgeting works, although maybe new startups will structure things differently and gradually change whole industries.

I don't see the average mid-level PHB deciding to voluntarily shrink their teams to use AI instead;

Voluntarily is doing a lot of work in that sentence. When the guy who killed Merrill Lynch, a bank that survived the great depression, can walk away with $165 million in compensation, we're at the point where incentive alignment at the top is as close to opaque as you can get.

Correct that the team shrinking won't be voluntary, it will be forced from on high by corporate leadership. They can make up a percentage of people who must be let go for each department. And it is so.

One is the general intelligence to come up with and understand the right answer.

I'm not an expert, but I think the key aspect of intelligence here is the ability to model the world. I am a little hung over and off my game this morning and I did not immediately recognize this as a trick question. Rather, in a split second I imagined myself walking to the car wash; realized that I didn't have my car; and realized that this was a problem. Only then did I see it was a trick question.

My sense is that LLMs don't really model the universe. I would be very impressed to see an LLM correctly answer a question which was novel and for which the correct answer requires modeling the world.

A year or two ago I would test LLMs with the following question: A helicopter takes off from the Empire State Building, flies 300 miles North; 300 miles West; 300 miles South; 300 miles East; and lands. In what US state does the helicopter land?

The LLM never got the correct answer (New Jersey) presumably because they are unable to model the situation. I would think that by now, this question is now in the training data, but still, these sorts of quick fixes don't solve the general problem.

Rather, in a split second I imagined myself walking to the car wash; realized that I didn't have my car; and realized that this was a problem.

It's funny you mention that. When reasoning models get it right, they tend to do the same thing.

It's funny you mention that. When reasoning models get it right, they tend to do the same thing.

Do you happen to have examples of this? I would be fascinated to see them.

A helicopter takes off from the Empire State Building, flies 300 miles North; 300 miles West; 300 miles South; 300 miles East; and lands. In what US state does the helicopter land?

Assuming I'm understanding this correctly, doesn't this depend pretty heavily on your choice of definitions and assumptions? If you trace it out on a cylindrical projection map (most options) and follow that on the ground, you'll end up where you started. If you follow a magnetic bearing (and if the compass is actively followed, or a "straight line" great circle from the starting bearing), you'll get a different set of answers than using a GPS and travelling true lines of latitude and longitude. For more subtle details, your choice of reference datums and even the flight altitude will matter slightly.

The existence of map projections does not make the Earth flat.

Right, and the existence of a spherical geoid-shaped Earth doesn't well-define "flies 300 miles North" either.

Whether you're using geographic or magnetic compass directions, east and west do not cancel each other out that way.

There is enough of a gradient in magnetic declination in the NY area that magnetic "north" and "south" are up to a couple (true) degrees different if you travel 300 miles. I'd have to do some math I don't feel like at the moment, but it might dominate the spherical error term.

If you use a cylindrical projection and follow true rhumb lines, you'll end up west of your original course. If you follow magnetic rhumb lines (that is, you keep your compass bearing constant) you still do but with some south or north deviation as well. The reason is that the north-south rhumb lines are closer together as you go north, no matter which datum you choose. I think you'll end up in New Jersey regardless of your choice.

I think you'll end up in New Jersey regardless of your choice.

Unless you take a wrong turn, then somehow you'll inexplicably end up in Dundalk.

You'll just think you're in Camden.

Assuming I'm understanding this correctly, doesn't this depend pretty heavily on your choice of definitions and assumptions?

Well, if I state that a helicopter takes off and travels "north" for "300 miles" what does that mean to you? Same question for "west," "south" and "east"?

I'd assume statute miles (although aviators might assume nautical miles), and I would probably assume true north for all bearings, but would prefer to ask for clarification: it's about a 12 degree difference in New York City. If you asked me 30 years ago (before everyone had a GPS-enabled map in their pocket), you'd probably have gotten magnetic, maybe with a fixed local adjustment (although declinations change over time, so it might be a different value).

I'd assume the altitude was negligible.

I'd assume statute miles (although aviators might assume nautical miles), and I would probably assume true north for all bearings, but would prefer to ask for clarification:

I think by "north," most people would interpret this to mean "in the direction of the north pole" which seems to be in agreement with your assumption.

Anyway, to answer your question, it looks to me like the puzzle depends heavily on definitions and assumptions just as every puzzle depends heavily on definitions and assumptions.

So for example, if I were to ask "what number, when multiplied by 2, is the same number," most people would correctly answer "0," but perhaps some smart-ass in the back of the class would say "12, if we are using clock arithmetic"

I think by "north," most people would interpret this to mean "in the direction of the north pole" which seems to be in agreement with your assumption.

There's two reasonable choices for North -- in the direction of the north magnetic pole, and in the direction of the geographic north pole. These are significantly offset (about 12 degrees) at the ESB, but not enough to change the answer I don't think.

Anyway, to answer your question, it looks to me like the puzzle depends heavily on definitions and assumptions just as every puzzle depends heavily on definitions and assumptions.

Sure, but any answer that would make sense to a helicopter pilot is going to put the landing point west of the starting point. Except the even more pedantic answer that there's no helipad on the ESB, so it can't happen. Or the point that very few helicopters can go 1200 miles without refueling.

Sure, but any answer that would make sense to a helicopter pilot is going to put the landing point west of the starting point. Except the even more pedantic answer that there's no helipad on the ESB, so it can't happen. Or the point that very few helicopters can go 1200 miles without refueling.

As a side note, I think one thing LLMs seem to do really well is reasonably interpret words. Whenever I've asked something like "what does phrase X mean" I've gotten answers that seem very good.

Well, if I state that a helicopter takes off and travels "north" for "300 miles" what does that mean to you? Same question for "west," "south" and "east"?

That's a different question than the one upthread. If you're running laps around the pole, then you're going west for 300 miles, but you did not fly 300 miles west, you flew in a circle.

Do you really want chatbot outputs to be that sensitive to your exact phrasing, or would you prefer reasonable interpretations?

That's a different question than the one upthread. If you're running laps around the pole, then you're going west for 300 miles, but you did not fly 300 miles west, you flew in a circle.

It's interesting you should make this point, because the OG puzzle question goes like this:

A hunter is tracking a bear. He travels 1 mile south; 1 mile east; 1 mile north and discovers he is in the same place he started. He then shoots the bear. What color is the bear?

The answer, of course, is "white." To me, that's both correct and a reasonable interpretation of "east." I take it you disagree?

I interpret them as "flies [to a point which is] 300 miles [to the] North [along the most-direct route]..." and "travels [along a path continuously facing] north for [a path length of] 300 miles". Compare to a winding trail: You can go 10 miles North by travelling North for 20 miles.

Both the bear and the helicopter are point-to-point (destination = distance+direction), while your followup question was path-based (travel mode and path, for a distance). The bear hunter walked in an equilateral triangle with approximately 119.9 degree corners.

If it had been "He travels south for one mile, east for one mile, and north for one mile", then it would be a 1 mile line, a 90 degree corner, a 1 mile arc with radius 1 mile, another 90 degree corner, then a 1 mile return line that's 122.7 degrees off from the first line.

I haven't mathed it out, but I suspect both versions involve the helicopter landing in New Jersey, but in different locations.

I interpret them as "flies [to a point which is] 300 miles [to the] North [along the most-direct route]..." and "travels [along a path continuously facing] north for [a path length of] 300 miles".

These are the same. For North and South, all meridians are great circles anyway. For East and West, following a rhumb line (keeping your bearing constant) 300 miles East or West gets you to a point that is 300 miles East or West. There's a shorter way to get to that point but that doesn't matter.

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That's a different question than the one upthread. If you're running laps around the pole, then you're going west for 300 miles, but you did not fly 300 miles west, you flew in a circle

I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that "going" west means something significantly different than "flying" west?

Anyway, I think it would be helpful if you would answer my question explicitly:

Well, if I state that a helicopter takes off and travels "north" for "300 miles" what does that mean to you? Same question for "west," "south" and "east"?

see below. distance-direction vs. direction-distance.

see below. distance-direction vs. direction-distance.

If you believe my questions are answered in a specific post, would you mind linking to that post? TIA.

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The LLM never got the correct answer (New Jersey)

Okay what am I missing here. Isn't the correct answer New York?

Earth is a sphere, not a plane. Moving 100 miles west (on a line of latitude, not on a great circle) after you go north moves you through more degrees of longitude than moving 100 miles east does after you return to the latitude where you started.

At the extreme: Starting at the equator, if you go πr/2 north, 0 miles west, πr/2 south on a meridian of longitude 90 degrees east of the one where you started, and πr/2 west, then you will end up where you started (having traversed a triangle with three 90-degree angles).

Earth is a sphere, not a plane.

Okay, but we're in an aircraft, which (if it wants to) can move in a plane relative to a fixed starting point, more or less.

...actually, I guess this means the answer to the question is unknowable with the information given, since without knowing the speed of the helicopter we can't ascertain if the rotation of the Earth impacts it at all.

ETA - but yes this otherwise makes sense given that we're modeling the directions based on the actual polar coordinates rather than based on the fixed starting point. But if you were modeling directions based on your fixed starting point rather than current position and didn't have to bother with the rotation of the Earth, you'd make a big square with 300 miles to a side.

Cardinal directions refer to the surface of the earth, not some abstract fixed plane.

Or at least to an abstract plane that is fixed to a point on the surface of the earth.

Okay what am I missing here. Isn't the correct answer New York?

No, because you are traveling West at a slightly higher latitude than your latitude when you are traveling East. So you will end up going a bit further West in terms of degrees longitude. The Empire State Building is in Manhattan so it's very close to the New Jersey border.

Doesn't this only hold if you're measuring the direction at each juncture rather than working from the NSEW coordinates of the Empire State Building?

Maybe that doesn't sound like the most intuitive way to think about it, but in my defense it's kinda similar to how bullseye navigation works.

(Also, since we're in an aircraft, pedantically we would need in theory need to account for the rotation of the Earth, which we can't do without knowing the airspeed.)

Doesn't this only hold if you're measuring the direction at each juncture rather than working from the NSEW coordinates of the Empire State Building?

I don't understand. Let's suppose the helicopter has completed the first (northbound) leg of its journey and is about to turn West. To me, "west" would mean that the helicopter turns 90 degrees to the left. What direction would the helicopter go at that point if one were "working from the NSEW coordinates of the Empire State Building"?

To me, "west" would mean that the helicopter turns 90 degrees to the left.

If the helicopter makes 90 degree turns at each turn, it will return to the Empire State building, making a square with 300 miles to a side, right? Helicopters fly, so they don't need to respect the Earth's curvature - they can fly in a plane, at least until they exceed their operating altitude. So the 2D map view would be basically correct (if we don't worry about the Earth's rotation). This is the mental model I had in my head that told me we would return to New York (which now I feel a bit dumb about.)

But when after turning West, we turn back South, if we flew to the South pole from our location, we would collide with (intersect) with an aircraft flying due South from the Empire State Building (at the South pole). The lines aren't parallel; they intersect. So when we made our turn South, we will fly a different course if we turn "South" as in "South by compass" or if we turn "South" as in "parallel to a line extending due South from the Empire State Building." And if we fly South by compass, we won't be making a 90 degree turn, for the same reason that squares of latitude and longitude aren't perfect squares.

...I think that's all correct, but it's been a long time since I've thought about this, so thanks (it's good for me).

If the helicopter makes 90 degree turns at each turn, it will return to the Empire State building, making a square with 300 miles to a side, right? Helicopters fly, so they don't need to respect the Earth's curvature - they can fly in a plane, at least until they exceed their operating altitude. So the 2D map view would be basically correct (if we don't worry about the Earth's rotation). This is the mental model I had in my head that told me we would return to New York (which now I feel a bit dumb about.)

Ahh, I understand. Except that compass directions such as "north" are typically understood in respect of the Earth's curvature. So for example consider the following questions:

(1) A helicopter starts at the equator. How many miles due north does it need to fly before it reaches the north pole?

(2) A helicopter starts in NYC. How many miles due north can it fly before it is impossible to fly any further north?

Most people would reasonably understand these questions to have straightforward finite answers. But if "north" is understood to be on a plane which is tangent to the Earth at the point of departure, then answers are (1) it will fly forever without reaching the North Pole; and (2) it can fly North forever.

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It lands in New Jersey.

Reason: after flying 300 miles north from New York City, the “300 miles west” leg happens at a higher latitude, where lines of longitude are closer together. That westward leg changes your longitude by more degrees than the final “300 miles east” leg (which happens farther south). So you end up a bit west of the start point, in central New Jersey (roughly near the New Brunswick area).

That's GPT 5.2 Thinking first go. Examining its reasoning traces reveals that it immediately noticed the issues arising from the Earth's curvature, and it even wrote a whole-ass program to compute exact latitude and longitude before outputting its final answer.

I would think that by now, this question is now in the training data, but still, these sorts of quick fixes don't solve the general problem.

That way lies madness.

That's GPT 5.2 Thinking first go. Examining its reasoning traces reveals that it immediately noticed the issues arising from the Earth's curvature, and it even wrote a whole-ass program to compute exact latitude and longitude before outputting its final answer.

Is that because GPT 5.2 actually modeling the situation? Or is it because this puzzle is now a part of its training data? Based on this car wash situation, I tend to think it's the latter.

It reminds me of a girl I knew in my advanced math class in high school. She got A's in the class without having any real understanding of advanced math. She did this by practicing intensively on homework problems and past exams.

I don't dispute that current AI is amazing and will undoubtedly accomplish amazing things. It just seems like -- maybe -- one or more important things are missing at the moment.

That way lies madness.

Why?

It recognized it as a "famous puzzle" in its thinking trace. However, I suspect that the common version of the puzzle doesn't account for curvature. I tried looking for it, but didn't find anything, but similar variants (often seen in aptitude or IQ tests) implicitly assume a flat surface.

In fact, on double checking, the model knows that the classic form assumes a flat map. It specifically decides to answer it in more depth.

Why

The most common failure mode in LLM skeptics (and I don't mean to use that phrase to describe people who don't believe that LLMs are AGI, or that they have clear flaws) is to assume that all improvements come from intentional efforts by AI companies to hastily patch such flaws. It's not that this doesn't happen, but it's usually in the context of benchmark maxxing by the less scrupulous companies (and occasionally, when the PR hit is strong enough, they'll add specific instruments, such as the "Rs in strawberry" one, which was specifically addressed in Claude's system point a while back).

The issue with this approach is that it leads to maximal paranoia and complacency, and as excuse to dismiss clear and obvious improvements in all domains. And even in the worst case, patching specific failure modes is still an improvement. LLMs are supposed to suffer on truly "out of distribution" problems (I have my reservations, I wonder how the average human fares) but in principle, if you can actually capture most of that distribution, you've got something that is effective in deployment (though it might be brittle, but once again, we're talking about a hypothetical model that is actually trained on nearly everything).

Finally, I really doubt that OpenAI or Anthropic went to the trouble of patching this specific puzzle on purpose. They didn't even hard code the strawberry example, they just hinted to the model that it suffers from tokenization problems, and that it should try and use code to check instead of parsing it itself (a defensible position). They didn't, as far as I can tell, patch the far more famous "but I can't operate, the boy is my son!" trick question, and it was tripping up the best LLMs for years. I suspect it might do so today.

In other words, if you're famous for maintaining some kind of formal benchmark, it might be worth their while to artificially target your questions. They have better things to do in general, for smaller problems like this.

@omw_68

I tried getting GPT 5.2T to look for examples:

I went looking and I cannot find an older “canonical” page for that exact Empire State Building + 300-mile legs wording. The only clearly indexed hit I’m seeing is a very recent mention in a TheMotte thread (posted Feb 16, 2026).

Lol. Lmao. I suppose Google or Bing has very fast crawlers?

Lol. Lmao. I suppose Google or Bing has very fast crawlers?

Indeed. I would explain the team I once worked at Google to people sometimes as "Did you ever post on some forum looking for the answer to a question, and then decide to search for it, and the first result that came up was your own question? That's us."

The most common failure mode in LLM skeptics (and I don't mean to use that phrase to describe people who don't believe that LLMs are AGI, or that they have clear flaws) is to assume that all improvements come from intentional efforts by AI companies to hastily patch such flaws.

At a minimum, there's reason to be skeptical, to think that there is a lot of "hasty patching" going on.

I will go out on a limb and guess that within a few days all of the major LLMs will give the correct answer to the carwash problem. Which, if true, is quite a coincidence.

I don't dispute that LLMs are improving by leaps and bounds, but I still think there's a good chance that something vital is missing. If that's "madness," then so be it.

I'm not an expert, but I think the key aspect of intelligence here is the ability to model the world. I am a little hung over and off my game this morning and I did not immediately recognize this as a trick question.

I don't think that's a trick question at all. It's simply a question where the trivial autopilot "answer" is not the correct one and you need to actually model the system on a very basic level

I'm reminded of when a certain friend of mine asks me questions related to programming or electronics. While he has a pretty good understanding of tech in general, he lacks an internal model of how electronic circuits or C++ work. He makes guesses but more often than not they are wrong because he's simply making assumptions from what he's read and what I've explained to him before without understanding how those were influenced by other things and how the specifics of his current project affect things. IOW he lacks a model of the system that he could use to make predictions of its behavior when changing some thing.

It's simply a question where the trivial autopilot "answer" is not the correct one and you need to actually model the system on a very basic level

Not necessarily -- they should have included some chudlier types in the RHLF training:

"Of course you should drive, are you retarded? Walking sucks man!"

I don't think that's a trick question at all. It's simply a question where the trivial autopilot "answer" is not the correct one and you need to actually model the system on a very basic level

It occurs to me that's kind of the essence of a trick question, i.e. a question where the trivial autopilot "answer" is not the correct one.

But semantics aside, I basically agree with you.

I'm reminded of when a certain friend of mine asks me questions related to programming or electronics. While he has a pretty good understanding of tech in general, he lacks an internal model of how electronic circuits or C++ work.

Yeah, I think we've all met people like this. I mentioned up thread that there was a girl like this in my advanced math class in high school. She got As but as far as I could tell she didn't have any real internal model of what calculus actually was. If she encountered a question that (1) required knowledge of calculus to answer; but (2) was sufficiently dissimilar from homework questions or past exam questions, she would be completely and utterly clueless.

I am concerned that this is where we are with LLMs.

Actually, the example I saw recently was chess. The argument is that LLMs have access to tons of chess games and commentary in their training data, and yet they still make illegal moves. Which means that they (arguably) don't have an internal model of chess. They (arguably) don't really understand.

I'm not enough of an expert to say one way or another, but this argument seems to have some validity to me.

My coworker, for example, has used Gemini 3 to make slide decks, and she frequently complains that it is obsessed with the color pink. It'll favor pink, and color palettes that work with pink, nearly every time for her. If she tells it not to use pink, it'll happily comply by using salmon, or fuschia, or "electric flushed cheek", or whatever pantones new pink synonym of the year is. That example is innocuous, but what else is in there that might matter? Once again, hell if I know.

I would suspect this in particular is an artifact of the RLHF process to become a "helpful assistant." If you train a robot to be a friendly hr lady, it's going to weigh the friendly-hr-lady content higher, raising the likelyhood of all the other things friendly-hr-ladies like even when those things have no direct causitive effect on friendliness. Or, restating that in a fully general form, any attempt to task an LLM to behave in a particular way is going to draw in all the biases of the people most likely to act in that way. Train it to never violate any social taboos and it's going to act like a "trauma-aware social justice advocate." Train it to agree with elon musk and it's going to act like chuddha.

Somebody like @self_made_human might be able to cut through the chaff and confidently take advice about ocular migraines, but could you? Could I? Hell if I know.

I still saw a real doctor after consulting the models. In fact, I saw a doctor because I consulted the models: they raised the possibility of differential diagnoses like TIA (mini-stroke) that, while unlikely according to both my judgment and theirs, seemed worth ruling out. As I mentioned in the linked comment, Dr. GPT still lacks opposable thumbs. Most medical advice requires actual physical examinations and actual tests to implement.

This doesn't excuse the first two human doctors who misdiagnosed me. The symptoms were clearly inconsistent with their diagnosis, though I'm not confident 2024-era models would have caught this as quickly as today's versions do.

Beyond this specific case, I have thoughts.

LLMs are both force multipliers and substitute goods. "Substitute" sounds pejorative, but it shouldn't. An MRE is a poor substitute for a home-cooked meal if you're at home. But on a hiking trail, you'd gladly take that chicken tikka over nothing, even if your digestive system later files a complaint. A terrible car beats no car most of the time. And so on.

My medical training lets me extract more value from any model. But even without that training, LLM medical advice beats having no doctor at all. It beats frantically Googling symptoms at 2 AM like we used to do. One of my most upvoted posts on The Motte discussed GPT-4, which now lags so far behind the current state of the art that it's almost embarrassing. It was still incredibly useful at the time. Back then, I said:

I'd put their competency around the marks of a decent final year student versus a competent postgraduate resident

Now? Easily at or better than the median specialist.

(This is part of why people not paying close attention miss the improvements in models until there's a flashy new headline feature like image generation, web search, Deep Research, or in-interface code execution.)

At this point, I would trust GPT 5.2 Thinking over a non-specialist human doctor operating outside their lane. It gives better cardiology advice than an ophthalmologist would, better psychiatric advice than an ER physician. Even specialists aren't safe: I know cases where models outperformed my own superiors. I'd already noticed them making suboptimal choices; confirming this with citations from primary literature didn't take long.

For laypeople, this is invaluable, albeit bottlenecked by the need for humans who can authorize tests. LLMs can recommend the right drugs and doses, check for interactions, create personalized regimens, but you still need a human physician somewhere in the chain.

(Much of this reflects regulatory hurdles. See recent discussions about why LLMs giving legal advice lack the same privileges as lawyers saying identical things.)

LLMs serve as both complement and partial substitute for human physicians. Many doctors get defensive when patients quote ChatGPT at them. I try not to. Even the free tier usually gives non-terrible advice. It's eminently reasonable to consult LLMs for help, especially for non-critical symptoms. They're surprisingly good at flagging when seemingly innocuous problems might indicate something serious. For anything important, treat them as an informed second opinion before seeing a human doctor, or use them to review advice you've already received. I'd take any LLM-raised concerns from a patient seriously and double-check at minimum. If your current doctor isn't as generous, I apologize; your mileage may vary.

The Layman's Guide to Using LLMs for Medical Advice Without Shooting Your Dick Off

1. Pay for a state-of-the-art model. Your health is worth $20 a month, you fucking cheapskate. Google gives away their (almost) best model for free on AI Studio.

2. Be exhaustive. List every detail about your symptoms. When I asked GPT 5.2 Thinking or Gemini 3 Pro about my eye problems, I had an annotated Amsler grid and timeline ready. Over-explaining beats omitting details. Unlike human doctors, LLMs don't bill by the hour (yet). Remember that they don't have the ability to pull open your medical records or call your other doctor for you. What you put into them informs what you get out of them.

3. For anything remotely important, consult two or three models. Note commonalities and differences. If they disagree, have them debate until they reach consensus, or get another model to arbitrate. This effectively mitigates hallucinations, even though base rates are low these days.

4. Ask for explanations. Medical terminology is arcane. LLMs are nearly superhuman at explaining things at your exact level of understanding. I wish my colleagues were as good at communicating information, even when the information itself is correct. If you're confused about anything, just ask.

5. Optional: Ask for probabilistic reasoning. Get them to put numbers on things like good Bayesians. Have them use their search tools if they haven't already (most models err toward using them even when not strictly necessary).

6. Remember you'll need a human eventually. But you can enter that consultation well-prepared.

That's it, really. A year or two ago, I'd have shared sample prompts with extensive guardrails (red flags, conflicting treatment protocols, high yield tests etc). You don't need that anymore. These models are smart. They understand context. Just talk to them. They are smart enough to notice what matters, and to tell you when the right move is “stop talking to me and go get checked.” I did just that myself.

Edit:

Humans are hardly immune to hallucinations, confabulation or suggestibility. You might have fallen prey to:

Say silk five times. What do cows drink? Milk. Oh fuck, wait a second–

And that is not very good evidence of humans not being general-purpose reasoners. I invite people to look, actually fucking look at what AI can do today, and the rate of improvement.

At this point, I would trust GPT 5.2 Thinking over a non-specialist human doctor operating outside their lane.

Taking this at absolute face value, I wonder if this is at least partially because the specialists will have observed/experienced various 'special cases' that aren't captured by the medical literature and thus aren't necessarily available in the training data.

As I understand it, the best argument for going to an extremely experienced specialist is always the "ah yes, I treated a tough case of recurrent Craniofacial fibrous dysplasia in the Summer of '88, resisted almost all treatment methods until we tried injections of cow mucus and calcium. We can see if your condition is similar" factor. They've seen every edge case and know solutions to problems other doctors don't even know exist.

(I googled that medical term up there just to be clear)

LLMs are getting REALLY good at legal work, since EVERYTHING of importance in the legal world is written down, exhaustively, and usually publicly accessible, and it all builds directly on previous work. Thus, drawing connections between concepts and cases and application to fact patterns should be trivial for an LLM with access to a Westlaw subscription and ALL of the best legal writing in history in its training corpus.

It is hard to imagine a legal specialist with 50 years of experience being able to outperform an LLM that knows all the same caselaw and law review articles and has working knowledge of every single brief ever filed to the Supreme Court.

I would guess a doctor with 50 years of experience (and good enough recall to incorporate all that experience) can still make important insights in tough cases, that would elude an AI (for now).

I would guess a doctor with 50 years of experience (and good enough recall to incorporate all that experience) can still make important insights in tough cases, that would elude an AI (for now).

As an aside, older is not better for doctors. It's a common enough belief, including inside the profession, but plenty of objective studies demonstrate that 30-40 year old clinicians are the best overall. At a certain point, cognitive inflexibility from old age, habit, and not keeping up with the latest updates can't be compensated for from experience alone.

(This doesn't mean older doctors are bad doctors, it just means they aren't the best anymore, all else being equal)

Taking this at absolute face value, I wonder if this is at least partially because the specialists will have observed/experienced various 'special cases' that aren't captured by the medical literature and thus aren't necessarily available in the training data.

I think there's a component for this, but if pushed I wouldn't say it's the biggest factor. An ophthalmologist hasn't studied cardiology since med school, they might remember the general details and interactions when it comes to the drugs they prescribe, but they're still not a cardiologist.

Gun to my head, I'd say that the human doctors who outperform LLMs are still smarter, if not as well read (they can't boast a near encyclopedic knowledge of all of medicine like any half-decent LLM can). IQ matters, and some doctors are just that smart, while having the unfair advantage of richer interaction with a human patient. Plus LLMs don't have the same "scaffolding" or affordances, they can't just look or lay hands on a patient (though they can ingest pictures, that's still an extra step). I suspect the difference diminishes to a large extent when the doctors are given the exact same information as an LLM, say some kind of case overview and lab tests + imaging. GPT-4 was scoring at the 95th percentile level in the USMLE, and these days medical benchmarks are simply not good enough to compare between them (official, graded benchmarks, I'm sure you can make a few more-ad-hoc ones if you really try, though by "you" I mean a competent physician).

As an aside, older is not better for doctors. It's a common enough belief, including inside the profession, but plenty of objective studies demonstrate that 30-40 year old clinicians are the best overall. At a certain point, cognitive inflexibility from old age, habit, and not keeping up with the latest updates can't be compensated for from experience alone.

I definitely believe that younger doctors are more up-to-date in best practices and aren't full of old knowledge that has proven ineffective or even harmful.

But if you could hold other factors approximately equal, I'd still bet my life on the guy whose' seen 10,000 cases and performed a procedure 8000 times over someone who is merely younger but with 1/3 the experience.

Lindy rule and all that. If he's been successfully practicing for this long its proof positive he's done things right.

and some doctors are just that smart, while having the unfair advantage of richer interaction with a human patient.

Yeah, I suspect that even if LLMs are a full standard deviation IQ higher than your average doctor, the massive disadvantage of only being able to reason from the data stream that the humans have intentionally supplied, and not go in and physically interact with the patient's body will hobble them in many cases. I also wonder if they are willing/able to notice when a patient is probably straight up lying to them.

And yet, they're finding ways to hook the machine up to real world sensor data which should narrow that advantage in practice.

And as you gestured at in your comment... you can very rapidly get second opinions by consulting other models. So now that brings us to the question of whether the combining the opinions of Claude AND Gemini AND ChatGpt would bring us even better results overall.

But if you could hold other factors approximately equal, I'd still bet my life on the guy whose' seen 10,000 cases and performed a procedure 8000 times over someone who is merely younger but with 1/3 the experience.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-15275-7

The mortality in patients undergoing surgery by old-aged surgeons was 1.14 (1.02–1.28, p = 0.02) (I2 = 80%) compared to those by middle-aged surgeon. No significant differences were observed according to the surgeon’s age in the major morbidity and subgroup analyses. This meta-analysis indicated that surgeries performed by old-aged surgeons had a higher risk of postoperative mortality than those by middle-aged surgeons. Thus, it necessitates the introduction of a multidisciplinary approach to evaluate the performance of senior surgeons.

I don't think 14% is a big deal, there's already a great deal of heterogeneity in terms of surgical outcomes for all surgeons overall, but it does exist.

Yeah, I suspect that even if LLMs are a full standard deviation IQ higher than your average doctor, the massive disadvantage of only being able to reason from the data stream that the humans have intentionally supplied, and not go in and physically interact with the patient's body will hobble them in many cases. I also wonder if they are willing/able to notice when a patient is probably straight up lying to them.

While it's frustratingly hard to find actual sources on the average IQ of doctors, most claim an average of 120-130. IQ testing LLMs on human IQ tests like the Stanford-Binet or Weisler-IV is fraught, but I've seen figures around 130 from o3 onwards. If I had to wild-ass-guess, 130+ is a fair estimate for GPT 5.2T, and versions with enhanced reasoning budgets are making novel discoveries in mathematics, so...

(Did I say that IQ research in doctors is bad? Oh boy, just see what it's like for LLMs. There are papers still awaiting peer-review that use Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The field moves *fast".)

https://www.trackingai.org/home seems better than nothing and claims 140 IQ for GPT 5.2T on the public Mensa Norway test and 129 for the so-called offline version.

Note: The "Offline" IQ quiz is a test made by a Mensa member that has never been on the public internet, and is in no AI training data. Mensa Norway is a public online IQ test.

Make of that what you will.

I haven't specifically tested models on their ability to catch lies or inconsistencies, but I think they'd do okay, but probably worse than a decent human doctor. This is a moderate confidence claim, and could be ameliorated by giving them previous clinical records, but a video feed would be even better (doable today). I'm already zooted on stims and typing up massive comments instead of studying, or else I'd try it myself.

And yet, they're finding ways to hook the machine up to real world sensor data which should narrow that advantage in practice.

The Transformer architecture is a universal function approximator, LLMs are already multimodal despite the name, and in the worst case, they can ingest text instead of raw sensor data like humans often do. I don't look inside the SpO2 probe, I read the number.

And as you gestured at in your comment... you can very rapidly get second opinions by consulting other models. So now that brings us to the question of whether the combining the opinions of Claude AND Gemini AND ChatGpt would bring us even better results overall.

I've seen some evidence that diversity of models is good, for models of similar general competence. Even so, just putting the same info into another instance of the same model is highly effective, and I wouldn't yell at someone who did that.

I don't think 14% is a big deal, there's already a great deal of heterogeneity in terms of surgical outcomes for all surgeons overall, but it does exist.

I'd also be suspicious that this could be an artifact of the older surgeons being handed the tougher cases, or handling older patients such that complications are somewhat more likely to arise.

Similar logic to that study about black babies getting 'worse' outcomes when treated by white doctors... which dissolves when accounting for the fact that the white doctors were getting the toughest cases of any given race.

At any rate I'm sure there's more direct ways to assess a surgeon's skills from the outside (although apparently just asking for their IQ results is out?) but finding one that's a reliable, hard-to-fake signal is the challenge.

The main thing I appreciate about LLMs is the general fact that I can ask them to detail the source of all their knowledge and they can generally cite and point to it all so I can double-check myself, whereas I'd guess most doctors would scoff if you tried to "undermine their credibility" in such a way.

I’m in a very specialized area of law. While there is a lot of law, you’d be surprised daily how many fact patterns I face where there is no guidance (either judicial, administrative, or secondary) and things fall down at the edges (ie basically comes down to judgement).

Moreover, law changes all of the time (especially in this field). This seems to confuse LLMs sometimes (both in what the current law is and what the change in law means and doesn’t mean). Finally, a lot of the guidance doesn’t strictly apply in one area but can (taking into account a lot of factors) apply to totally different area without any indication.

Further, my role isn’t primarily telling what the answer is but figuring out what the facts are, what they can be, and what the best set of future facts are applied to an unclear legal framework whilst trying to predict future government policy.

We’ve tried using LLMs. They’ve all failed to this point.

I mean, yeah, if a legislator passes a big, comprehensive new package that revamps entire statutes then there's no readily applicable case law, then its anybody's game to figure out how to interpret it all, an experienced attorney might bring extra gravitas to their argument... I'm not sure they're more likely to get it right (where 'right' means "best complies with all existing precedent and avoids added complexity or contradictions," not "what is the best outcome for the client.")

(ie basically comes down to judgement).

But this is my point. If you encounter an edge case that hasn't been seen, but have a fully fleshed-out fact pattern and access to the relevant caselaw (identifying which is relevant being the critical skill) why would we expect a specialist attorney to beat an LLM? Its drawing from precisely the same well, and forging new law isn't magic, its using one's best judgment, balancing out various practical concerns, and trying to create a stableish equilibrium... among other things.

What really makes the human's judgment more on point (or, the dreaded word, "reasonable") than a properly prompted LLM's?

I've had the distinct pleasure of drilling down to finicky sections of convoluted statutes and arguing about their application where little precedent exists. I've also had my arguments win on appeal, and enter the corpus of existing caselaw.

ChatGPT was still able to give me insightful 'novel' arguments to make on this topic when I was prepping to argue a MSJ on this particular issue by pointing out other statutory interactions that bolster the central point. It clearly 'reasons' about the wording, the legislative intent, the principles of interpretation in a way that isn't random.

Also, have you heard of the new law review article that argues "Hallucinated Cases are Good Law." It argues that even though the AI is creating cases that don't exist out of whole cloth, they do so by correlating legal concepts and principles from across a larger corpus of knowledge and thus they're hallucinating what a legal opinion "should" be if it accounted for all precedent and applied legal principles to a given fact pattern.

I find this... somewhat compelling. I don't think I've encountered situations where the AI hallucinated caselaw or statutes that contradicted the actual law... but it sure did like to give me citations that were very favorable to my arguments, and phrased in ways that sounded similar to existing law. Like it can imagine what the court would say if it were to agree with my arguments and rule based on existing precedent.

I dunno. I think I'm about at the point where I might accept the LLM's opinion on 'complex' cases more readily than I would a randomly chosen county judge's opinion.

You might be right. Hasn’t been my experience.

I hope you are wrong (if I’m right we both have jobs)

Hoping for the best (AI makes the practice of law more tolerable/less mentally tolling), preparing for the worst (forced to swap to a career that requires working with my hands).

Well, I’m a bit worried that if AI solves law, robotics will solve “working with…hands” when combined with AI.

Not wrong.

But there was a pretty convincing case against it put forth in here.

Quoth:

Human hands enjoy a massive, durable nanomachinery advantage

I'm taking a gamble that martial arts/self defense instructors will still be in demand because people will probably prefer to have an instructor that is human, and a human is probably still going to be best suited to demonstrate techniques and movements that another human is expected to learn, and will be a strictly superior training partner, too.

think I'm about at the point where I might accept the LLM's opinion on 'complex' cases more readily than I would a randomly chosen county judge's opinion.

You're not exactly setting a high bar for an LLM to overcome.

Dats Da Joke.

I've noticed that easily half of the County-level Judges I have worked in front of, especially those that have held their seat a long time without getting called up to Circuit level, are basically glorified clerks for all the legal reasoning they can do. They oversee an assembly line where parties are being shuffled along towards a particular outcome and the Judge just pulls the lever that rubber-stamps the outcome as 'legal.'

There's some selection effect, if you were making bank in private practice no way you'd accept a Judgeship with such little power. But yeah, letting County Judges use LLMs from the bench could only improve things.

Of course, if you ever ask me to identify which half of the Judges I'm talking about, I'll clam up because those are ALSO the ones most likely to be petty and make my job more miserable.

I've noticed that easily half of the County-level Judges I have worked in front of, especially those that have held their seat a long time without getting called up to Circuit level, are basically glorified clerks for all the legal reasoning they can do.

I had to google it since I'm not familiar with FL judicial structure--your county-level judges would be magistrates where I am, and they don't have to be lawyers here. Having them use LLMs for help would probably be a shocking level of improvement. Even the felony-level judges here (what FL appears to call the Circuit judges) who do have to be lawyers would generally benefit from the assistance.

What do cows drink?

Well, baby cows do.

Ok calves.

More recently, people charted other biases and found that most models had clear biases in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and nation of origin that are broadly in line with an aggressively intersectional, progressive worldview. Do modern models similarly have environmentalism baked in?

LLMs are actually great at picking up subtle nuances in the training data which humans would call stereotypes.

For chatbots, the general goal for RLHF is something like "humble, helpful, harmless". Picking a face of the Shoggoth comes with baggage. If I imagine a friendly, qualified operator of some helpline, the stereotype says they are likely a young college-educated woman.

I am sure that if you used RLHF to select a Shoggoth-face which talked like 4chan, you would get very different politics along with it.

and as of this morning, the big providers get it correct like somebody flipped a switch, provided you use that exact phrase, and you ask it in English.

This seems utterly pathetic on the part of the AI companies.

I mean, there are things which are outrage bait which need to be fixed, if your LLM happily generates python code which prints a recipe for methamphetamine, insults racial minorities with the right prompt or the like, you want to CYA and claim that you fixed this as soon as you became aware of the issue, even if the fix is just filtering any queries which mention both meth and python.

This however is not outrage bait. Papering over the flaws of your model one by one is utterly pointless.

Suppose I have a colleague who has written a function, and I tell him that actually his function fails for x=-1/3. What he then does is to add the following:

double f(double x)
{
+if (x==-1/3.)
+   return 42; // corrected value

This might be an acceptable short-term stopgap if I had indicated that his function failing for x=-1./3 (and only that value) is a showstopper for me, but in general it is a terrible idea. If his code fails for every x==-1./prime, then his approach will not converge to correct code any time soon, instead, he is simply papering over the specific errors people have found, e.g. cheating to make his code look correct when he knows it is not.

Ideally, AI companies would indicate a minimum of trustworthiness given that they are in a position of power (and possibly going to summon the demon which wipes out mankind). If they are already willing to cheat with this stuff which nobody would care about, what does that promise for the more serious stuff? It is like watching your new chief of police using a length of wire to steal a can of soda from a vending machine.

--

With regard to the content of the mail, this is a trick question of a similar category as the question if the pool of the Titanic is full or not. A human who thinks about these will typically think in images rather than words. I think that the Titanic one is a bit more vicious because the behavior of fluids is rarely spelled out by humans, while 'I drove my car through the car wash' should appear in the training data, while seawater flooding the swimming pool of a sinking vessel might not have appeared explicitly at all.

Suppose I have a colleague who has written a function, and I tell him that actually his function fails for x=-1/3. What he then does is to add the following:

This is an old criticism, older than me and I'm old as all hell. And indeed, it would make sense without realizing that training always has a constraint (implicit or explicit) on the size of the function, or in the case of LLMs, the number of parameters.

More recently, people charted other biases and found that most models had clear biases in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and nation of origin that are broadly in line with an aggressively intersectional, progressive worldview. Do modern models similarly have environmentalism baked in?

You're absolutely right!

Yeah, they are all like this to some extent except Grok. Claude will very often include some Nigerian guy in just about any creative scenario, add some girlbosses too for woke casting, whereas Grok doesn't. Does a giant US-NATO vs Russia-China war story really need a Nigerian peacemaker as a character? What about a Nigerian psychologist helping with the supersoldier/chimeric monster project? Is that plausible? Not really but Claude does that anyway. What about all this therapycore dialogue between Superman and Lex Luthor? Also unbelievable but it does so anyway.

Grok has other obnoxious elements too, to be clear...

The question is, if you want to wash your car, should you walk or drive to the car wash if it's 50 meters away.

Also, what is the point of outsourcing common-source questions to today's AI models? They are best for translating medieval French, writing codebases, researching specific questions, writing out stories for amusing people. Some of their story elements don't make perfect sense, like powerscaling might be off. And they require human creativity and direction to actually be good, or at least reach my standards. That's OK, no human can write at their speed and knowledge and ability for their price. The pros make up for the cons.

If you ask questions about what kind of database management you need for a usecase, what kind of approach would be wisest

The AIs of today are very useful for certain tasks but also have limitations. They make mistakes, they overcomplicate things sometimes. It's no good looking just at the limitations or just at the benefits, we need to make a balanced assessment. The trend tends towards AIs getting better in all domains, including common-sense questions.

Also, what is the point of outsourcing common-source questions to today's AI models?

Disproving AGI claims?

Last Friday, Bret Deveraux of ACOUP waded deeper into the Culture War than usual by writing about the anti-ICE protests, and insurgencies and non-violent resistance in general.

What unites both strategies is that the difference in power between the state and the dissidents is very large, so large that both conventional military operations and even a protracted war are not an option for the weaker party.

If you can not face your enemy in the field, and can not even hope to sap his strength through a thousand papercuts until you can face him, what can you do?

As a military theorist, Deveraux naturally uses Clausewitz to identify three factors which can limit the escalation of force and thus be employed by the weaker side to hamper the stronger side.

Friction (the natural tendency of stuff to break, things not going according to plan, your forces not being where you would want them to be) is a bit of a sideshow. If you are able to weaken your enemy sufficiently through friction, you are fighting a protracted war, not a terrorist insurgency.

Will means the emotional backing of the conflict by the politically relevant part of the population, which might be the body of citizens or some elites, depending on the system. This is a prime target in these highly asymetrical conflicts.

The third limiting factor is the political object of the enemy leadership. Unlike the population, which is modelled as being emotional, the leadership is modelled as rational. The idea here is that if you can inflict sufficient costs on the enemy, they might decide that it is no longer worth it to enforce their goal.

Will is the central point to attack for the weaker party:

Both protests and insurgencies function this way, where the true battlefield is the will of the participants, rather than contesting control over physical space. [...] In both cases, these movements win by preserving (or fostering) their own will to fight, while degrading the enemy’s will to fight.

For terrorist insurgencies, this means that the main goal of their attacks is actually sending signals. So the point is not to weaken the enemy's military by blowing up their troops and materiel, but rather to message audiences on both sides of the conflict (as well as these in between) that their cause is viable. If you could convince everyone that your victory is inevitable, that would be a great boon to your side. In practice, this means that terrorists favor flashy targets to military relevant ones. 9/11 is a prime example.

A key strategy is to bait your enemy into striking against you while you are hiding among the civilian population, thereby causing civilian deaths which result both in local dissatisfaction as well as in winning a propaganda victory -- which is the kind of victory which brings you closer to your objective. The main dilemma for the insurgent is that they need gruesome violence to further their cause, but that such violence may also serve to alienate the local population and strengthen the resolve of the enemy. While 9/11 was great for making Al Qaeda a household name, it was ultimately bad for the Jihadist cause.

Deveraux then contrasts this with a deliberate strategy of nonviolence, which does not have that dilemma. He is actually rather realist about why movements employ non-violence:

I think that is important to outline here at the beginning, because there is a tendency in the broader culture to read non-violence purely as a moral position, as an unwillingness to engage in violence. And to be fair, proponents of non-violence often stress its moral superiority – in statements and publications which are themselves strategic – and frequently broader social conversations which would prefer not to engage with the strategic nature of protest, preferring instead impotent secular saints, often latch on to those statements. But the adoption of non-violent approaches is a strategic choice made because non-violence offers, in the correct circumstances substantial advantages as a strategy (as well as being, when it is possible, a morally superior approach).

Of course, non-violent protest does not mean staying on the sidewalks:

To simplify greatly, the strategy of non-violence aims first to cause disruption (non-violently) in order both to draw attention but also in order to bait state overreaction.

If your protest can be simply ignored, it is likely that it will be ignored, so you do not get the desired escalation and attention. This means that you will have to commit transgressions to goad the enemy into strikes against you which will be terrible PR for them.

Bret talks about the Nashville campaign during the Civil Rights Movement, where Blacks would organize sit-ins on segregated lunch counters. This caused violent repercussions, which eventually eroded popular support of the segregationist side.

He also concedes that there are regimes which are impervious to non-violent protests, where the political relevant parts of the population are very willing to employ and support violence, but argues that societies which are running on violence are very inefficient.

Finally, he talks about the anti-ICE movement, of which he seems sympathetic.

First, I think it is fairly clear that the ‘anti-ICE’ or ‘Abolish ICE’ movement – the name being a catchy simplification for a wide range of protests against immigration enforcement – is primarily a non-violent protest movement. Despite some hyperventilating about ‘insurgency tactics,’ anti-ICE protestors are pretty clearly engaged in civil disobedience (when they aren’t engaged in lawful protest), not insurgency. To be blunt: you know because no one has yet car-bombed an ICE or CBP squad or opened fire from an elevated window on an DHS patrol.

He continues:

While protestors do attempt to impose a significant degree of friction on DHS immigration enforcement by (legally!) following and documenting DHS actions, that has also served as the predicate for the classic formula for non-violent action: it baits the agents of the state (ICE and CBP) into open acts of violence on camera which in turn reveal the violent nature of immigration enforcement.

He points out that mass media help the protests a lot, as their position has gained massively in popularity over a relatively short time span (compared to the Civil Rights Movement).

I think that the gist is that the median American voter -- like the median Motte poster -- is very willing to vote for Trump's anti-immigrant platform, but unlike the median Motte poster they are totally unwilling to tolerate the Pretti shooting as a natural consequence of enforcement actions. Of course, the Trump administration did not help itself by reflexively claiming that the shooting was justified instead of spinning it as a sad mistake.

Deveraux:

By contrast, the administration is fundamentally caught on the horns of a dilemma. Their most enthusiastic supporters very much want to see high spectacle immigration enforcement [...] But [the administration] desperately needs them out of the news to avoid catastrophic midterm wipeout. But ‘go quiet’ on immigration and lose core supporters; go ‘loud’ on immigration and produce more viral videos that enrage the a larger slice of the country. A clever tactician might be able to thread that needle, but at this point it seems difficult to accuse Kristi Noem of being a clever tactician.

When he was posting this, the decision to pull the DHS forces out of Minneapolis was already made, but it would hardly have been surprising from his point of view. At the end of the day, the only political idea Trump truly believes from the bottom of his heart is that he should be president. Toughness on immigration (spouses excluded) so far was of instrumental value for him because it gained him a lot of support, but if it no longer delivers the votes for him, I expect him to change policy.

Deveraux is basically right about the object level, but his severe case of TDS blinds him to quite a lot- notably the protestors have done quite a bit that a more competent regime could spin as they had it coming, for one. For another, a lot of what the protestors are doing is actually illegal. De-arrests, interfering in lawful police operations, resisting arrest, etc is all very illegal and these people have open-shut cases. It’s also a ‘page five story’ strategy that won’t generate immense amounts of controversy- he can issue warrants for US Marshall’s to go after these people once they’re identified. This is probably what the databases of protestor license plates and subpoenaing data from social media sites is all about.

It's not a matter of a "competent regime", it's a matter of having the media entirely on the protestor's side.

Getting the media on your side is part of competence. Given the existing environment, I get the appeal of throwing your hands up and saying it's impossible. But the Trump administration doesn't put in even a minimal attempt to work the mainstream media, seeing no value in it compared to building a parallel system.

The media is not an independent actor at this point; it is part of the other side.

Like you say though they have not tried that route. It’s by design they’ve chosen war with legacy media and to build in parallel. There are significant benefits to building alternative since MSM at best will give any tie to your opponent. Trump has successfully gotten completely loss of credibility from the msm by half the population. The weakness is this leads to a Cold War of dueling narratives and makes it nearly impossible for a Reagan Revolution style victory.

I dunno, RFK seems like perhaps the worst possible choice for his job. Why should we believe Noem is highly competent but merely plagued by an antagonistic media? I have a hard time believing that a traditionally competent person in charge (eg Homan) would have led to the protestor deaths and public opinion shift, or at least not nearly as much.

Worst possible choice by what metric?

My sense of snark obliges me to note that transgender affirmation surgery of minors was the policy of the government medical establishment barely more than a year ago, and the administration before that had to knowingly lie about its own healthcare proposals to get them past the public at which point many of the promised benefits that weren't deliberate lies still failed.

'Incredibly stupid and incorrect beliefs on medical care' has been more or less the public health policy of the United States for longer than many Mottizans have been cognizant of US politics.

More stupid and incorrect than the idea that biological males can get pregnant and require menstrual support? Or pushing puberty blockers and other forms of "gender-affirming care" for minors over the parental objections?

I find it interesting that nobody on the blue team seemed to have any problems with his vaccine skepticism until 2020.

Fox News has always been broadly sympathetic to the MAGA regime, the Wapo has bent the knee in exchange for Trump going soft on Bezos' other business interests, CBS has been bought by an ally. The WSJ is also owned by an ally - that the WSJ is now mostly hostile to Trump is an unforced error on his part. And of course politically engaged Americans no longer rely entirely on the MSM - they get some or all of their news from algorithmically-curated social media feeds whose algorithms are controlled by pro-regime oligarchs (Twitter, new TikTok) or billionaires going along to get along (Facebook). The idea that MAGA faces a uniformly hostile media environment is cope.

The Trump administration is losing the propaganda war over immigration enforcement because "deport them all" was never particular popular with the median voter. There is a reason why the campaign messaging focussed on mythical pet-eating immigrants and not nannies, day labourers, military spouses with paperwork issues etc. Sending federal law enforcement into a community where they are not welcome is going to look ugly - there is a reason why it almost never happens. And "Deport otherwise law-abiding illegals, plus legal migrants whose status can be revoked on a technicality, and don't go easy on any US citizens who happen to be in the way" is at best a 50-50 proposition before it turns out to be ugly in practice.

For another, a lot of what the protestors are doing is actually illegal.

He covers it in the article. Peaceful protest is not about doing legal things, it's about driving the wedge between legal and moral actions. The protesters do things that are illegal, but moral, baiting the state into meting out legal, but immoral punishment.

To give a red-colored example, only obscenely large magazines in California or publicly announcing every time you fill in a ditch on your own property that you won't even ask for EPA approval and then getting arrested for it are forms of peaceful protest, even if you the police have to taze you until you soil your pants to get you into the cruiser or if your friends block them from leaving the scene by handcuffing themselves to their bumper.

To give a red-colored example, only obscenely large magazines in California or publicly announcing every time you fill in a ditch on your own property that you won't even ask for EPA approval and then getting arrested for it are forms of peaceful protest, even if you the police have to taze you until you soil your pants to get you into the cruiser or if your friends block them from leaving the scene by handcuffing themselves to their bumper.

And the thing to note about these red-colored examples is they don't work. If you're arrested and put in prison for a long time for having an "obscenely large magazine", you will simply disappear and be completely forgotten except as a cautionary tale on ar15.com. Same for the ditch example except no ar15.com fame.

People are posting videos of perfectly normal looking, no brutality, ICE arrests and having them treated as atrocities by all who matter. And the protestors are doing things that are neither legal nor moral (e.g. smashing the taillight of an ICE truck) and this is accepted. People actually shooting at ICE are downplayed. It's all about control of the media, not the actual actions taken.

It's about control of the media, but also, having a mass movement of people willing to coordinate resistance. The right is bad at this because they believe in the legitimacy of the system, and in working toward the changes they want via the legitimate means provided by the system. The left basically believes that any system that does not result in their desired outcome is not legitimate, and are therefore a lot more willing to resort to extralegal means when they don't get their way.

What this means in practice is that the right will sit by and think "aww shucks it's a shame that guy got arrested for violating that magazine ban" and hope that maybe one of these days the 9th circuit will stop ignoring clear SCOTUS directives (spoiler: they won't). The left, meanwhile, will organize illegal street blockades where armed activists illegally detain motorists in order to check if they're feds, and face zero legal consequences because they elected an attorney general who self-identifies as antifa.

Sure, the typical conservative does not agree with a lot of government policy or expect the government to behave in ways they approve of

So tell me, what has the right done to change this state of affairs?

Exactly zero right wing people are out in the streets getting themselves shot by cops for interfering with the enforcement of government policies they disapprove of.

The right is voting, and accepting the results when they don't win the vote.

The right accepts the legitimacy of the system even when it produces results they don't approve of.

The left believes that if the system produces results they don't approve of, this is evidence of the illegitimacy of the system, and they engage in extralegal shenanigans to nullify the results of elections that don't go their way.

Exactly zero right wing people are out in the streets getting themselves shot by cops for interfering with the enforcement of government policies they disapprove of.

Umm... where to start. The numbers are not large, but definitely not zero.

Bundy standoff

Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge

This sort of makes my point. Your best examples are two incidents from a decade ago that received exactly zero institutional support or even particularly much sympathy. These incidents had zero influence on any law or policy.

what did conservatives do as a result of the election being stolen?

after 9 months of idiotic covid hysteria shutdowns and a summer of race riots across the country which the police sat on the sidelines and allowed, the conservatives did what?

they protested in Washington DC in support of a constitutional process in an effort to have their complaints addressed? the capitol police attacked and provoked those at the capitol and the federal government had many embedded informants/agents provocateurs which manipulated the crowd and 1500 people calmly walked through the capitol building

they received zero institutional support whatsoever, the entire government weaponized itself to attack them, and their representatives and near all conservative leaders tripped over themselves throwing them under the bus and cheering some incompetent black cop murdering an unarmed woman with another cop standing directly behind her to the left

your low-effort snarkpost implies this is an example of conservatives not accepting the results but that's exactly what they did

it was a small number MAGA people who rarely identify as conservatives who, at most, went to protest at the capitol and it turned into a riot which was then near-universally condemned by every conservative and used by the state to persecute the right nationwide

the right generally and especially conservatives did accept the stolen election

Actually, yes, absolutely unironically. Despite all the stink raised by Trump, pretty much no consequence happened to it, despite massive evidence of irregularities, and a lot of the dissent suppression effort had been by Republicans themselves. If you want to see how "not accepting" looks like, look at Portland. Or LA or Seattle riots. The right did nothing even close. The only serious protest was Jan 6, which was immediately squashed with unprecedented force and cruelty (that was the point, of course) - and the Republican establishment did absolutely nothing to stop it, until Trump came in with pardons. So yes, despite grumbling and whining and grandstanding, which happens after every single election in the history of all elections, the right absolutely accepted 2020 election results as fait accompli. That doesn't mean they didn't think there was cheating, but they largely accepted that they can't do anything about it and moved on. They didn't refuse to pay taxes, didn't refuse to follow the laws, did not set federal buildings on fire, did not attack federal officers (obvious exceptions excepted), did not form domestic terrorist movements, the governors did not declare war on the Federal government, they did not shoot prominent leftists, did not declare courts illegitimate, did not assassinate the President, etc. That's how accepting looks like.

More comments

have you ever met conservatives? conservatives believe in the legitimacy of the system and its institutions even as they're weaponized against them for decades

they may complain about it, they may object to it, they may distrust it, but the moment you want them to do something outside or against the system you will have pretty much all mouths shut and heavy and immediate condemnation of others who don't

because they will always abide, they will always accept the idiotic machinations and process manipulations, however illegal, of their political opposition who do not believe in the legitimacy of the government whenever it suits them and actually behave in ways which show that

conservatives are the true believers in the system, they're the last actual liberals, and it's why they have been losing for 80 years even as the system has been turned against them time and time again and it's taken absurd lies and manipulations and harm against them to reach the point at which they have lost this constitutionally prevalent institutional trust which they still default to in most situations

low-effort snarkposts is low effort and wrong to boot

You confuse the government and the system. It's a common mistake, and the whole effort of having The Constitution and writing a lot of paperwork before, during, and after it was to avoid it. You see, the government is only part of the system, and is designed to be a limited and constrained part. A very important one, but still one of the parts, not the goal, but the means to the goal. And that's exactly what a lot of conservatives (and many non-conservatives) believe in - the government has its legitimate function, as as long as it is performing it, it has its place and should be supported. As soon as it departs from this function, it ceases to be legitimate and becomes evil. The system is where The People can prevent the government from becoming evil (or at least minimize it) and that's what was the goal built specifically into the American system, and yes, the right, largely, believes in it's legitimacy - at least while it is working at its purpose, stopping the government from descending into evil.

I think it'd make sense here for you to explain in a bit more detail what the word "system" exactly entails here.

I think it'd make sense here for you to explain in a bit more detail what the word "system" exactly entails here.

Essentially, the entire apparatus that produces and legitimizes political power and authority in the US. The constitution plus the processes and institutions that have grown around it, such as the parties and everything they get up to.

So I guess the Left largely believes that the legislative branch is somehow beyond their influence?

I would say it's more like, the left does not limit themselves to acting through the legislature, because they don't care about whether their methods are legitimized by the system or not. They care about getting their way.

The right cares a lot more about rules and principles and is a lot more willing to accept defeat on individual issues because they think that a stable order which obeys predictable rules is more important than any particular issue.

Where the current decade of mostly-peaceful-protesting misses, though, is the fact that activists are demonstrably not engaging in "illegal but moral" behavior. It's actually not okay to loot businesses. It's not okay to block a roadway. It's not okay to deface works of art. It's not okay to hit a police officer with your car. It's not okay to de-arrest people. There is no behavior being engaged in here that a typical uninvolved normie is going to look at and say "actually, I think these are perfectly fine behaviors for people to do outside of the context of a protest." And the fact that they are conducted as part of a protest doesn't legitimize them to anybody except people already on board with the movement.

To be blunt: you know because no one has yet car-bombed an ICE or CBP squad or opened fire from an elevated window on an DHS patrol.

That's pretty specific.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/07/08/attack-on-texas-ice-facility-ambush/84511708007/

https://apnews.com/article/ice-facility-shooting-dallas-immigration-d49f76ffc95572970ede58ef15769fe4

"Nuh uh, they hid in treelines and on a roof, not an elevated window, checkmate chuds!"

All that writing and it's just based on observably false premises.

Yeah the ambushers being so hilariously incompetent weirdly completely overshadowed what they were actually trying to do.

The problem with most conversations of this sort is that memory exists.

The Jan 6th protestors were also "hilariously incompetent", to the point that they forgot to bring any weapons at all. And yet, this apparent incompetence somehow failed to overshadow "what they were actually trying to do."

It's who, whom. We observably take Red violence seriously, even when it is hypothetical. We observably do not take Blue violence seriously, even (especially?) when there are multiple bodies. This is not an accident. This is the essence of Tribalism.

I'd say the attempted ICE shooters had a far clearer objective as well. Like I'm sure the average Jan 6er were there to broadly restore Trump but in a confusing jumbled vibey way

The professionals are roughly equivalent to the Klan in its heyday, and the tourists are roughly equivalent to the populations the Klan emerged from and operated within.

Insurgency seems a reasonable description.

They're running organized squad-sized ambush operations, though not very well so far. They have commo, legal, media and political coordination. They've been running violent street operations for a decade against Republicans. They've tried to secede parts of the country a number of times, and succeeded briefly in a couple places. Their security forces have murdered multiple people and successfully kept those members from facing US justice. They've assassinated a number of prominent right-wingers, tried the president twice.

Yes, they are a low-level insurgency with more strength in the media and the DNC/NGO establishment than in a directly military sense, but they are developing that capability quickly. Right now they're relying on "independent" cells and individuals with just enough deniability, like John Brown back in the day. But this is all funded, semi-coordinated and defended by the gov/NGO complex of public sector unions, the security services and old-money "charitable" funds. You know, "the people".

For terrorist insurgencies, this means that the main goal of their attacks is actually sending signals. So the point is not to weaken the enemy's military by blowing up their troops and materiel, but rather to message audiences on both sides of the conflict (as well as these in between) that their cause is viable.

One of the best examples that I've seen of this was when the IRA would warn the public ahead of time about impending bombs. Not only did it serve to keep collateral damage down, which fed goodwill, but it also showed that the authorities couldn't do much about it, even when they were forewarned.

Wasn't that like 5 minutes notice after the fuse was already lit?

I'm not 100% sure of the details. Most of what I remember, I remember second hand from old war nerd articles.

I applaud his ability to keep his personal views mostly in check and approach most topics on his block with care, but he posted a link to one of his bluesky posts in this article, and I took a look. Yep, he is a very bluesky user all right.

A clever tactician might be able to thread that needle, but at this point it seems difficult to accuse Kristi Noem of being a clever tactician.

In this article, he mentioned a police chief that fought desegregation attempts in his town with clever tactics. As you might have guessed, the only difference in the outcome was that he's not vilified by history textbooks today, he still lost. I'd rather Bret gave a different example of successfully dismantling a popular non-violent movement by a regime that is not resilient enough to just gun them down and then forbid the press to write about it.

In this article, he mentioned a police chief that fought desegregation attempts in his town with clever tactics. As you might have guessed, the only difference in the outcome was that he's not vilified by history textbooks today, he still lost.

Isn't that kind of like condemning every Confederate or Wehrmacht general, or hell condemning Hannibal and Napoleon, in that they ultimately were on the losing side?

Isn't that kind of like condemning every Confederate or Wehrmacht general, or hell condemning Hannibal and Napoleon, in that they ultimately were on the losing side?

If the story at least ended with "his town was the last place in the US to be desgregated", then I would have agreed. But he simply folded when MLK came to his town and dared to arrest him.

If your policies are actually adaptive for society, in a darwinistic sense*, then all you need to do is hold your ground, maybe perform non-salient actions to advance your cause, and eventually people will stop fighting you. In particular, they will begin to adopt the policy voluntarily as your correctness becomes more and more obvious, though perhaps in a way just distinct enough to preserve their ego and in-group identity. (e.g., the emergency of "sex negative feminism" as traditional gender roles re-establish themselves out of pure darwinistic imperative.)

This might seem like a naively optimistic strategy, but that's just an artifact of survivorship bias in favor of how mass movements are commemorated. Pretty much every change to the status quo has some sort of popular support, and is matched by some sort of popular protest. But we only remember those changes as being "non-violent movements" when they advance motives leftists are primed to recognize. When they fail, they get condensed into a memory hole labeled "reactionaries scared about change". For example, the luddites and before them the anti-enclosure protests. Leftists would be a lot more gleeful about claiming them as proto-anarchist movements if they'd succeeded... but instead, nobody even remembers them.

* I use this terminology to emphasize that a policy being a utilitarian or moral good is neither sufficient nor necessary. Policies that help a society self-perpetuate succeed because societies without them collapse and therefore lose the ability to fight.

before them the anti-enclosure protests

Amusingly, "open range" versus "closed range" remains a salient political topic in the US from time to time.

The Luddites were never nonviolent though, were they?

Anti-nuclear protestors in the US have been successfully dismantled by arresting them with a gentle touch and issuing press releases that make them sound like hippie lunatics.

I mean, it's easy when people are throwing jars of blood on things.

Is this a reference to what was the Nuclear Freeze movement?

the interesting thing is when I first started reading him he really struck me as conservative if anything - probably anti-Trump, but someone who would have happily voted for Romney. Curious if it was audience capture or too much time in academia or just TDS that got him in the end.

He’s not really ‘woke’; he seems at most mildly liberal, strongly TDS but not progressive. I wouldn’t be shocked to find out he’d donated to pro-life groups or supported republicans downballot.

I remember acoup guy being a huge smartass and his articles are mostly well acktuallys that let him sound smart. He totally writes like he's talking down to his audience.

I remember his series on ancient greece was getring shared around a lookoong time ago and he had an article mostly about "well acktually spartans sucked, actually" and every other paragraph he would go "look at how bigoted these stupid racist spartans were. Maybe with some more diversity and feminism they wouldn't have sucked so bad!".

But anyways I find his writing extremely hard to take seriously. In a sense he's kind of like the lazerpig of history blogging because he hides his lack of rigor under a veneer of self deprecation ("unmitigated pedantry" - "low tier youtubing") yet will get incredibly defensive and lash out whenever someone criticizes his stream of hot takes.

Don't forget his "REAL Historian Reacts to Paradox Games?!" posts.

I remember his series on ancient greece was getring shared around a lookoong time ago and he had an article mostly about "well acktually spartans sucked, actually" and every other paragraph he would go "look at how bigoted these stupid racist spartans were. Maybe with some more diversity and feminism they wouldn't have sucked so bad!".

Same. I kept seeing ACOUP linked in discussions about ancient/medieval/fantasy warfare (classical Greece, classical Rome, LoTR, Game of Thrones, etc.), which is right up my alley, so I decided to try his series of seven articles on Sparta. Every other paragraph was about how evil and oppressive and patriarchal the Spartiates were. Making the point, once, that what we usually think of as "Spartans" were a tiny aristocratic elite and that the majority of the population of Lacedaemon was helots, would have been fine. This was... not that.

I am not in school. If I am spending my free time reading about Sparta, it's because I think Spartans are cool, and I want to learn more about them. Reading post after post from a guy who clearly hates Sparta and everything that is associated with it in the public imagination was decidedly unpleasant.

I finished the series, but I'm not gonna read anything else this asshole puts out ever again.

If I am spending my free time reading about Sparta, it's because I think Spartans are cool, and I want to learn more about them.

I hardly think that follows - one can be interested in monstrously evil societies because they're monstrously evil. A man who seeks out an in-depth exposé about the Spanish Inquisition or the Gulags or the Nazis probably is here for the lurid details and the frequent histrionics about how twisted and awful they were. By no means is this the only possible audience for a documentary series about Sparta, but there's no reason to assume that audience doesn't exist.

(Indeed, I myself as a boy, during the brief period where Sparta occupied a large part of my thoughts, pictured it as very much the City Populated Entirely By Nasty Drill Sergeants - it tickled my imagination as a city of insane-sounding joyless motherfuckers which I could scarcely believe had ever existed outside of a cartoon. Not something to be condemned with serious mournful expressions like the Nazis, but a nation made up entirely of heels. That's fun.)

This is true, but acoup guy channels his hate to make spartans look lame in addition to evil. "Acktually as an initiation ritual, spartans had to sneak around naked with a dagger and stab a random unsuspecting peasant to death. Then they get to partyyyyy."

Which by all accounts is not how things worked. To the extent that mass murder actually happened in sparta it wasn't a bunch of guys wandering around with a knives just tryna get a kill squid game style.

it tickled my imagination as a city of insane-sounding joyless motherfuckers which I could scarcely believe had ever existed outside of a cartoon.

I think that's also how it's portrayed in Asterix The Gaul, and if there's one IP I trust to use stereotypes in a way that's 100% accurate to real life...

The Sparta piece was an outlier. The social-cultural-political spin of ACOUP keeps me from reading it regularly, so don't take this as an unqualified endorsement, but most of his pieces are not that bad.

Nah I also saw some people shared some of his pieces on game of thrones and he's just as much of a cunt in those as well.

If you don't read his writing on LoTR you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Especially his sections on the books.

Yeah Devereaux's analysis on why the books are logistically realistic in a way the movies are not is one of his best analyses. It might redeem the rest of his blogging career.

Every other paragraph was about how evil and oppressive and patriarchal the Spartiates were.

One of these things is not like the others - the Spartans were slightly less patriarchal than other Greek city-states, and Devereaux acknowledges this. But yes - the whole point of the Sparta series is to make it clear just how badly Sparta sucked. What else is there to say about Sparta? The Spartans themselves were clear that they didn't even try to not suck off the battlefield. Once you establish that Spartan troops have a mediocre win-lose record against peer competitors (and were not worth shit against Macedonians, despite the equal tech level) the only remaining interesting questions are

  • Why did a society which proudly traded off everything else for military strength and then turn in a mediocre win-lose record survive so long?
  • Why did Sparta have such a strong unearned reputation for military excellence?

Both of which Devereaux offers answers to, although not particularly thought-out ones - as you say, he is far more interested in explaining just how badly Sparta sucked. Most of this is drumming in what the facts you used to learn in prep school classical studies actually imply - just how much suckitude (even relative to the baseline of pre-modern suckitude due to the lack of antibiotics and steam engines) is implied by the abusive nature of the agoge or a society with 80+% slavery. Neither of these facts is a secret, but classics teachers don't encourage you to stop and think about them.

If you think Spartans are cool, then you are wrong. Pop quiz - name a famous Spartan military victory not involving an alliance with Persia. Not a pop quiz - you can't name something other than military victories that is plausibly cool about Sparta. Devereaux wrote that many blog posts because he thinks that making people like you less wrong is important.

A big part of Devereaux's project is to push back against a specific wrong idea of martial virtue - what he calls the "cult of the badass" - of which Sparta is the ur-example, and Pete "Leaking war plans to journalists doesn't matter if you look as good shirtless as I do" Hegseth is the MAGA-era personification. In so far as acoup.blog has a political message rather than being a fun place to laugh at bad movie military history, that message is that you don't need to trade off the creature comforts of civilisation in order to build badassitude, because civilised beats badass on the battlefield more often than not. A number of other posts in the thread are asking about the question of "why did someone who is obviously not a conventional left-idiotarian humanities scholar get so rabidly anti-Trump?" and I think this is the answer - MAGA assumes that the pre-requisite to making America great again is to make America badass (or at least to put people who embody badassitude in charge with no consequences for testosterone-fuelled misbehaviour). Devereaux thinks that this involves giving up things that matter and not getting any strategic advantage in exchange.

I'm British, so I have the luxury of admiring the fuzzy-wuzzy's martial virtue from my armchair after my compatriots kick his arse. A lot of former world leaders who were gay for Leonidas looked at the British and thought "they may have the men, ships, and money, but we have higher testosterone so we can beat them". It is one of the ways world leaders become former.

One of these things is not like the others - the Spartans were slightly less patriarchal than other Greek city-states, and Devereaux acknowledges this. But yes - the whole point of the Sparta series is to make it clear just how badly Sparta sucked. What else is there to say about Sparta? The Spartans themselves were clear that they didn't even try to not suck off the battlefield.

This seems like an odd take to me? We have very few surviving writings from Sparta itself, because the Spartans did not esteem writing, but if we look at classical admirers of Sparta, it is very rarely the case that they admire Spartan merely for being militarily successful. Plato's admiration of Sparta is not for military strength alone. The case for Sparta is merely that they won all the time, particularly because they demonstrably did not, but that Sparta was in some way a uniquely virtuous society.

It should go without saying that we're not talking about a concept of virtue that a modern Westerner would wholeheartedly endorse, or that most people after the Christianisation of Rome would endorse, but it is nonetheless something that Sparta's contemporaries admired. It was the Spartan constitution and set of laws. Lycurgus was not praised for victory alone. It was the discipline of the spartiates themselves. It involved art and poetry - Tyrtaeus was highly lauded! One of our primary sources for Sparta is Xenophon's Constitution of the Lacedaimonians, which is extremely complimentary, and not focused entirely on military conquest. He praises the moderate appetites of the Spartans, their civic duty, their lack of greed or hedonism, their educational system, and so on. Xenophon is the one who tells us that the Spartans, unlike most poleis, lacked the institution of pederasty, and this is presented as a sign of the Spartans' virtue in valuing boys for their moral character, rather than in fleshly terms.

Should we take that all at face value? Probably not. Much of Xenophon's work is likely a veiled criticism of Athens itself, holding up a semi-imagined Spartan history in order to indict his present society. My point is just that it's plainly not true to say that the only thing Sparta was lauded for was its military record.

The Spartans themselves were clear that they didn't even try to not suck off the battlefield. Once you establish that Spartan troops have a mediocre win-lose record against peer competitors (and were not worth shit against Macedonians, despite the equal tech level)

Spartans were the eminent military power in greece for some time, whatever they did certainly wasn't just sucking. Other groups certainly did it better, and that's why the spartans are gone now, but that doesn't mean they specifially sucked at fighting.

In fact saying "peer competitors" is already loaded because all of those cities that sparta kicked the ass of aren't considered peer compwtitors anymore.

I'm British, so I have the luxury of admiring the fuzzy-wuzzy's martial virtue from my armchair after my compatriots kick his arse. A lot of former world leaders who were gay for Leonidas looked at the British and thought "they may have the men, ships, and money, but we have higher testosterone so we can beat them". It is one of the ways world leaders become former.

And look at your empire now. It's certainly a prime example of how weak men have created hard times.

Look, I get that Sparta hecking sucks and Lysander was a freaking pissbaby chud. But Devereaux just can't accept that the ancient world had fundamentally different values from ours, and their best men admired Sparta for reasons which would get them instantly banned from /r/Hellas.

Pop quiz - name a famous Spartan military victory not involving an alliance with Persia. Not a pop quiz - you can't name something other than military victories that is plausibly cool about Sparta.

Sorry bro the agoge was metal. As for battles, there are three aspects to this. The first is the battle of Sardis, if you need an answer to your quiz. The second is that asking for a Spartan victory, or even battle, not involving Persia is like asking for a French battle not involving England (actually, to torture the metaphor, the typical relationship was something closer to Persia's Britain and Sparta's Prussia. Persia had fingers in every pie, and even victories against them usually had some element of deal-making. The third is that the whole neatly-counterintuitive anti-Spartan reading of the Peloponnesian War fundamentally misunderstands Spartan strategy. Sparta had a high-quality army that they knew was very difficult to replace. This led them to essentially adopt a sea command/fleet-in-being strategy on land. The Spartan army could go where it wanted and do what it wanted as long as it didn't commit to a protracted siege or risky battle, and, since they didn't want to give battle either, the Athenians were reduced to a naval strategy which ended up overextending and destroying them at Syracuse and Aegospotami. Devereaux is on firm ground when he claims that Spartan society is unacceptable to modern sensibilities, and that the Spartan setup was fundamentally unsustainable because of their inability to absorb casualties in pitched battles, but he'd have to be a much better historian to "well ackshually" Thucydides and Xenophon.

The Spartans themselves were clear that they didn't even try to not suck off the battlefield.

If you want to judge the Spartans as "they suck" because you don't agree with them, you're not really engaging with the spirit of history. Your assessment of the Spartans doesn't tell us anything about Sparta, it tells us about your particular modern ideas. You might as well as not be doing history, you're not doing history, your assessment of the Spartans was pre-determined from your moral priors. What about this strikes you as worth doing? You already know what you think.

just how much suckitude

If you think Spartans are cool, then you are wrong.

a fun place to laugh at bad movie military history

to build badassitude

A lot of former world leaders who were gay for Leonidas looked at the British

Look I don't want to be mean but this style of writing codes to me as so decidedly unserious that I'm not actually sure what you think you're doing. It conjures up to me a whole stereotype of ironic millennials can't say what they mean because the style is more important than the substance. This attitude often exists in a discourse where arguments are not even considered as arguments but as exercises in taste, you're not just wrong if you don't like Obama or Vietnamese food or Black Lives Matter, you're a bad person. Maybe that's just me projecting something onto you of which you are totally unrelated. But I feel the need to explain this because, again, it's hard for me to otherwise model the mental universe of someone professing to discuss history seriously while using concepts like "suckitude" and "badassitude".

Once you establish that Spartan troops have a mediocre win-lose record against peer competitors (and were not worth shit against Macedonians, despite the equal tech level) the only remaining interesting questions are

  • Why did a society which proudly traded off everything else for military strength and then turn in a mediocre win-lose record survive so long?
  • Why did Sparta have such a strong unearned reputation for military excellence?

No, the win-lose record actually doesn't imply what you think it implies, and this is the central flaw in Devereaux' argument.

A "batting average" in a sports league works because two conditions are met:

  • There are rules in place that work very hard to ensure the duel is "fair", that is, skill is the major deciding factor and other influences are eliminated as much as possible.
  • There is a league system that ensures everyone meets everyone, and so then wins and losses are comparable. In sports where this isn't the case, like various combat sports where a fight requires negotiations between both camps, this already breaks down: You see comparisons between fighters with similar records revolve around comparing how good the people they beat actually were.

In battle, neither of those are true. Various methods of gaining an advantage like bringing more numbers, occupying a good position, attacking enemy logistics, launching a surprise attack and various other stratagems are commonplace. The "quality" of the soldiers is only one factor in many deciding the outcome of the battle.

Secondly, a general can choose to decline battle. As Devereaux himself detailed in his series on gneralship, battle normally only happens when both generals think they have a reasonable chance of winning (although there are ways for a good general to try forcing a battle anyway).

What does this mean? It means unless there's a consistent skew in the judgment of the generals, the expected outcome in a battle, and therefore the expected win-loss-ratio of a faction, will be 50:50, no matter the relative quality of the soldiers!

If one side is reputed have the better soldiers, then the other general will decline a "fair fight" and instead only offer battle if he believes he has a way to make up for it. Maybe he waits for reinforcements to gain a numbers advantage or occupies a advantageous position like a hill. Meanwhile the spartan general might see those odds but believe the valor of his men may carry the day anyway. So battle will be given once the odds are, on average, equal, after accounting for the soldiers' skill. A stronger faction will not win through winning more battles, but through having more ability to give battle, for example by simply marching up and giving siege, without the enemy ever seeing an opportunity to stop you. And if the mismatch is too great, the weaker side will consider sueing for peace rather instead of going to war at all.

So, with that in mind, what does the mediocre win-loss ratio of spartans tell us? It tells us that the reputation of spartan hoplites was more or less accurate! If they were consistently overestimated, then we'd see a streak of losses for Sparta, as overly cautious enemy generals would stack advantages before they dared to give battle, and overly confident spartan generals would happily accept those bad odds because they believed their troops could handle it, and then the reality of the stacked deck would assert itself. Of course, such a losing streak would rapidly tank the spartan reputation, allowing the perception to realign itself with reality, at which point the win ratio levels again.

So, the conclusion from the data would be the opposite of what you and Devereaux think. The elite reputation was deserved, and Sparta gained influence by winning wars because they could offer battle where others could not, or simply by bullying their neighbors into concession with the threat of their army. And if they overdo it, their neighbors start allying against them, thus gaining a numbers advantage to cancel out individual prowess.

(The alternate explanation would be that spartan generals were consistently superior, and everyone falsely attributed their success to their troops, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone claim that.)

And to be clear, this doesn't mean Spartiates were supersoldiers. But it does appear as if they were at least noticably better than their peers.

It also doesn't mean the "300" memes are accurate, because it doesn't tell us where their advantages lay. Maybe it's simply the better maneuverability and tactical flexibility Devereaux mentions, or any other martial virtue.

One last thing to consider, an elite reputation, even if (mostly) undeserved, is itself a material asset. If everyone believes Spartans are invincible supersoldiers, this will boost their morale and drop their enemies' just from the prospect of fighting them, and morale decides battles. This could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But that doesn't change the conclusion. An average win ratio means at least the generals know how good they are.

I remember his "fremen mirage" series, and being left with the strong impression that he was playing word games in an attempt to obfuscate a fundamental reality he found unpalatable. Particularly, his four-part definition in the beginning of the first part more-or-less immediately convinced me that he was not operating in good faith.

That article is just ... wow. He's purposely avoiding the point of a bunch of things just to construct his made up term.

Anyways there's no such thing as the "fremen mirage" as a trope. Anything that might fit that label also fits into the trope of "scrappy inderdog team takes on the powerful big bad and wins through the power of friendship, hijinks, gorilla warfare, ingenuity, and just dumb luck. You can rattle off tons of movies that fit this: the matrix, red dawn, zootopia 2, ready player 1, star wars, terminator, etc. 1% of the stories in this category might fit into acoup guy's "fremen dawn" idea but that's basically just a coincidence.

Anyways fuck that guy.

What do you think the fundamental reality he is trying to obfuscate is?

The Fremen mirage series is very clear that it is rejecting the "Hard times make strong men" thesis, and the first two posts present evidence that it false (in post 1, that states usually beat non-state societies, and in post 2 that richer states usually beat poorer ones). Nothing is being obfuscated here - Devereaux might be wrong, but he isn't obfuscating his argument.

He's insanely strawmanning the idea of "good times create weak men" and "hard times create strong men"

Ain't nobody saying that because they think "weak men" can't swing a sword, shoot a gun, or push a button just as well as "strong men".

Very briefly, central examples of the "Hard Times Make Strong Men" thesis do not claim that non-states usually beat states, or that poorer states generally beat richer ones. Devereaux is attempting to frame the thesis this way because if he can bake absurdity into his audience's understanding of the argument, then it's all over but the sneering, which is pretty clearly what he's primarily interested in doing.

"Hard Times Make Strong Men" exists as a thesis because we can directly observe that rich, powerful states often actually do decline, that states are defeated by non-states, and rich states are beat by poor states. Not all the time, not as the expected result, but often enough that very clearly wealth, population, or whatever other technocratically legible KPI one prefers are not deterministic. Why is this? What causes upsets? What causes the mighty to decline? What injects mortality into the putatively super-mortal? This is a fascinating question, but Devereaux appears mainly interested in cauterizing such interest in anyone he can, and is enthusiastically willing to employ the argumentative dark arts in doing so.

Here are two paragraphs:

Now, the way this trope, and its contrast between ‘civilized’, ‘soft’ people and the ‘uncivilized’ ‘hard’ Fremen is deployed is often (as we’ll see) pretty crude. A people – say the Greeks – may be the hard Fremen one moment (fighting Persia) and the ‘soft’ people the next (against Rome or Macedon). But we may outline some of the ‘virtues’ of the ‘hard men’ sort of Fremen are supposed to have generally. They are supposed to be self-sufficient and unspecialized (often meaning that all men in the society are warriors) whereas other societies are specialized and overly complex (often to mean large parts of it are demilitarized).

Fremen are supposed to be unlearned compared to their literate and intellectually decadent foes. Fremen society is supposed to be poor in both resources and infrastructure, compared to their rich and prosperous opponents. The opposite of Fremenism is almost invariably termed ‘decadence.’ This is the reserve side of this reductive view of history: not only do hard conditions make for superior people, but that ‘soft’ conditions, associated with complex societies, wealth and book-reading weenies (read: literacy) make for morally inferior people who are consequently worse at fighting. Because we all know that moral purity makes you better at fighting, right? (My non-existent editor would like me to make clear that I am being sarcastic here, and it is extraordinarily obvious that moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success.)

...This is propaganda. The person writing it likes you stupid. To the extent that you not of my tribe, the more you listen to him, the better for me.

"Hard Times Make Strong Men" exists as a thesis because we can directly observe that rich, powerful states often actually do decline, that states are defeated by non-states, and rich states are beat by poor states. Not all the time, not as the expected result, but often enough that very clearly wealth, population, or whatever other technocratically legible KPI one prefers are not deterministic.

Notice the caveats, that you wrote yourself. Notice that ACOUP argues against the typical way in which the "hard men" theory is presented. The dudes with Greek statue profile pictures aren't doing nuanced historiography, they actually want to camp out in the bailey. They want to claim that moral rigidity/orthodoxy, avoidance of "luxuries" and a focus on martial prowess uber alles is an easy short-cut to civilizational dominance. Setting the bailey on fire, as Devereaux does, means there's little Motte left to defend.

His points are, broadly:

  • "Hard men" are poorly defined as a class. In your first quote, he notes (correctly) that people cherrypick whatever aspects of a civilization make for the most rhetorically convincing argument.
  • The factors mentioned above are far from decisive or notable in understanding the decline of empires.

Hell, I'll give up on summarizing it, and focus on his own definition:

what do I mean by the Fremen Mirage? I think the core tenants run thusly:

  • First: That people from less settled or ‘civilized’ societies – what we would have once called ‘barbarians,’ but will, for the sake of simplicity and clarity generally call here the Fremen after the example of the trope found in Dune – are made inherently ‘tougher’ (or more morally ‘pure’ – we’ll come back to this in the third post) by those hard conditions.

  • Second: Consequently, people from these less settled societies are better fighters and more militarily capable than their settled or wealthier neighboring societies.

  • Third: That, consequently the poorer, harder people will inevitably overrun and subjugate the richer, more prosperous communities around them.

  • Fourth: That the consequence of the previous three things is that history supposedly could be understood as an inevitable cycle, where peoples in harder, poorer places conquer their richer neighbors, become rich and ‘decadent’ themselves, lose their fighting capacity and are conquered in their turn. Or, as the common meme puts it:

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times” (The quote is originally from G. Michael Hopf, a novelist and, perhaps conspicuously, not a historian; one also wonders what the women are doing during all of this, but I have to admit, were I they, I would be glad to be left out too).

That is what he's arguing against. That is actually how people use the phrase.

More importantly, I did not get the impression that:

This is a fascinating question, but Devereaux appears mainly interested in cauterizing such interest in anyone he can, and is enthusiastically willing to employ the argumentative dark arts in doing so.

And I've read the whole series. Devereaux does excellent scholarship, studies a variety of different cases, and provides citations. Rome is typically used as an example in "favor" of the HTWM theory, and luckily for us, he's a classical historian. He covers several hundred years of Roman history:

He uses shipwreck archaeology, ice core analysis of atmospheric lead, and epigraphic evidence to track Roman wealth over time. He outlines a clear pattern (supported, as far as I know, by other period experts): a period of rising affluence in Italy in the Middle and Late Republic, followed by a long period of prosperity in the early empire, disrupted by the Crisis of the Third Century, with another period of economic stability (but at a lower level of prosperity) in the fourth century.

Guess what? : no part of Roman military 'decline' follows this patternz. Rome's military power was greatest when it was getting wealthier and more urban was growing, and began to decline in a period where the empire seems to have become somewhat more rural and poorer.

Even better: Romans were complaining about decadence the entire time! Polybius, Cato the Elder, Sallust, Tacitus, all moaned and bitched about declining Roman virtue.

(Sallust wrote about decadence two centuries before the peak of Roman power under the Nerva-Antonine emperors.)

Over eight centuries, Rome fights dozens of "Fremen" peoples. The Samnites fought three wars with Rome all of which were tough and in many cases the Romans lost battles and struggled, but Rome ended up winning each war.

The Gauls in Cisalpine Gaul? Crushed at Telamon, then systematically smashed one by one after Hannibal's defeat. Caesar had a great fucking time up there. The Celtiberians in Spain? Three wars, all Roman victories. The Germanic Cimbri (Marius stomped) and Teutones? Effectively annihilated. The Helvetii? Near-total genocide. All we've got left of them is a font, the poor bastards.

The successful "Fremen" invaders at the end of the Western Empire make a relatively short list: Senones, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Franks, Angles/Saxons/Jutes, Alamanni. That's seven successes against dozens of failures. Most of them were Romanized too!

If it's not obvious, to survive, an empire must continue winning indefinitely. To lose, it can take as little as one war. It's the KDR that counts dawg, if you live long enough, common cold, cancer or a car will end any winning streak, and we've got several thousands of years of history to measure the life expectancy of empire.

The quotes you picked do not demonstrate Devereaux “baking in absurdity.” They are him accurately describing the common version of the claim, including the decadence framing, then openly mocking one specific implication (virtue leads to battlefield performance).

He then does the opposite of propaganda: he tells you to watch out for selection effects and to ask about win-rates, not vibes. And he summarizes his conclusions in a way that is falsifiable: if the “Fremen” were systematically superior, you should see them winning more often, not losing more often than they won.

That destroys the bailey and salts the fields. If there's a more sophisticated version hiding in the Motte (one that merely says "states can decline for complex reasons including but not limited to overextension, internal political dysfunction, and occasional bad luck") then congratulations, you've described basic history. And that version doesn't need the "hard men" framing at all.

If you disagree with his central thesis, then I welcome actual arguments.

Devereaux is excellent at finding some idiotic thesis a couple guys (he would say "bros") on Twitter hold, claiming it's the bailey to a sensible motte, burning down the bailey, and claiming he's destroyed the motte.

You know who's actually really good on this particular historical topic? Deleuze

I promise you that it's more than "a couple of guys". My Twitter is schizophrenic enough that I find myself looking at their posts more often than I consider ideal. Oh well, it's good ethnography if nothing else. They're thriving out there, posting inspirational quotes and bad history takes when they aren't recovering from parasitosis after the consumption of raw meat.

You'll find plenty of examples on this very forum, if you use the search functionality.

burning down the bailey, and claiming he's destroyed the motte.

The thing is, there is no Motte! Or rather, there is no interesting Motte. Empires rising and falling because {many reasons} is the boring yet correct explanation.

I do not blame Devereaux for targeting the version found in the wild, the meme tuned for maximum virulence. If there is a counter-thesis of comparable scholarship arguing in favor, well, I haven't found it yet. Sometimes, one side of a debate really does have a disproportionate number of idiots alongside little factual merit, see the Flat Earth community for an existence proof.

Deleuze

They're preparing a padded cell for me already, I've booked one with good wifi reception.

The thing is, there is no Motte! Or rather, there is no interesting Motte. Empires rising and falling because {many reasons} is the boring yet correct explanation.

If you have an argument about why empires rise and fall you believe is indisputable, you should write it. You would solve one of the most hotly-contested controversies in all historical scholarship. Spengler Tainter Gibbons Ibn Khaldun Toynbee Diamond Montesquieu Burckhardt Mommsen Braudel Wallerstein Marx etc etc

"There is no interesting Motte"? This sounds so absurd to me I have to assume you're describing twitter reply guys and not the broader scholastic field of studying imperial collapse, where there are absolutely a million mottes. Which is the exact problem with Devereaux: he turns all his historical training on random internet anons to fight a culture war, probably because his historical chops are not strong enough to actually make a dent in the field of study.

More comments

If you disagree with his central thesis, then I welcome actual arguments.

Here you go. My children's bedtime interrupted my furious attempts to edit them into the original post. I left them out of the initial post because I thought they were honestly too obvious to need elaboration, but that's never a good bet.

Not all the time, not as the expected result, but often enough that very clearly wealth, population, or whatever other technocratically legible KPI one prefers are not deterministic.

This does not constitute support for "Hard Times Make Strong Men" or disagreement with Brett Devereaux. I don't think "Hard Times Make Strong Men" has to be parsed as "Hard Times Make Strong Men 100% of the time", but given the rest of the meme it should at least mean "Hard Times Make Strong Men more often than good times." If you agree that states usually beat non-states, and rich states usually beat poor states (as you seem to suggest with "not as the expected result") then you agree with the core factual claim of the Fremen Mirage series. In which case what is it that "Hard Times Make Strong Men" means that you find both true and interesting? "Hard Times sometimes Make Strong Men, even if that isn't the way to bet" is trivially true and uninteresting.

Why is this? What causes upsets? What causes the mighty to decline? What injects mortality into the putatively super-mortal? This is a fascinating question, but Devereaux appears mainly interested in cauterizing such interest in anyone he can, and is enthusiastically willing to employ the argumentative dark arts in doing so.

I don't think Devereaux is uninterested in this question - he wrote another long blogpost series on the Fall of Rome. But he doesn't see it as directly in his wheelhouse as a military historian - like most modern historians, he blames the Fall on internal political and economic factors (in his case including climate change) and not on a decline in the quality of Roman soldiers relative to the enemy. The point of the Fremen Mirage series is to debunk a specific theory of imperial decline which is seen as fully general by its more extreme supporters - that empires decline due to "decadence" (i.e. a loss of the martial virtues) brought on reasonably predictably by excessive wealth. He doesn't propose an alternative fully general theory of imperial decline because there isn't one.

You claim that Devereaux is (a) wrong and (b) obfuscating this. You have not stated a concrete point where you disagree with him, or a false belief you think he is trying to insinuate. I think he has a very clear agenda (that the set of views about masculinity and martial virtue he calls the "cult of the badass" is widely held, wrong, and actively harmful in a liberal democracy) and his opponents on this thread are the ones trying to obfuscate the actual disagreement.

I don't think "Hard Times Make Strong Men" has to be parsed as "Hard Times Make Strong Men 100% of the time", but given the rest of the meme it should at least mean "Hard Times Make Strong Men more often than good times."

I think the more accurate formulation would be "Hard times make strong men inevitable. Good times make weak men inevitable." This formulation not only seems obviously consonant with my understanding of history, but the reasons why it should be so likewise seem obvious: Good times impose reduced consequences on weak men for their weakness, and greatly reduce the amount of free energy by which strong men might exercise their strength. By contrast, bad times impose many consequences on weakness, and often provide an abundance of free energy through which strength might be exercised, not least the general population's desire to organize their collective power and resources to change things for the better.

But of course, this requires us to take the terms "strong" and "weak", "good" and "bad" seriously. Likewise words like "decadence", which Devereaux seems to believe contain no semantic content of significance, and so declines to even engage with in any meaningful fashion.

If you agree that states usually beat non-states, and rich states usually beat poor states (as you seem to suggest with "not as the expected result") then you agree with the core factual claim of the Fremen Mirage series.

I think a culture can build an effective military force, such that they win a disproportionate number of their engagements, not merely through technocratic KPIs (amount of money available, population size, etc), but through specific cultural features and norms. I think such a culture can then replace those cultural features and norms with a new set, and as a consequence begin to lose a disproportionate number of their engagements, even though it now has more money, more population, and a greater share generally of the technocratic KPIs than it did when it was winning. Further, I think this signal is strong enough that predictions can be made in advance.

By contrast, it seems to me that Devereaux aims to convince his readers that military affairs are largely deterministic, with a layer of luck on top. Therefore, empires are born because they got a streak of good RNG hits, and Empires die because they got a streak of bad RNG hits, and human decisions are not really terribly decisive either way.

In which case what is it that "Hard Times Make Strong Men" means that you find both true and interesting? "Hard Times sometimes Make Strong Men, even if that isn't the way to bet" is trivially true and uninteresting.

"Hard Times make strong men, strong men make good times" is interesting because it provides a firm historical basis for hope. The problems we face are not inevitable, insurmountable. Things can change. Often the hardships we face can shape us to better change them.

"Good times makes weak men, weak men make hard times" is interesting because it warns us that there is no permanent victory, that good times are not stable, that preserving and extending them requires effort and constant vigilance. And this is not a general warning: the hazard is specified, so it can be recognized in advance and action can be taken accordingly.

You claim that Devereaux is (a) wrong and (b) obfuscating this. You have not stated a concrete point where you disagree with him, or a false belief you think he is trying to insinuate. I think he has a very clear agenda (that the set of views about masculinity and martial virtue he calls the "cult of the badass" is widely held, wrong, and actively harmful in a liberal democracy) and his opponents on this thread are the ones trying to obfuscate the actual disagreement.

Here are two paragraphs:

Now, the way this trope, and its contrast between ‘civilized’, ‘soft’ people and the ‘uncivilized’ ‘hard’ Fremen is deployed is often (as we’ll see) pretty crude. A people – say the Greeks – may be the hard Fremen one moment (fighting Persia) and the ‘soft’ people the next (against Rome or Macedon).

A brief search confirms that this "moment" covers two centuries, and the entire point of the meme is that cultures change over time. It's possible that there's a valid argument to be made here, but he's pretty clearly chosen not to make it.

But we may outline some of the ‘virtues’ of the ‘hard men’ sort of Fremen are supposed to have generally. They are supposed to be self-sufficient and unspecialized (often meaning that all men in the society are warriors) whereas other societies are specialized and overly complex (often to mean large parts of it are demilitarized).

Is self-sufficiency and flexibility a bad thing? Is there such a thing as overspecialization or excessive complexity as legible cultural problems? Are the average men in societies, populations, or tribes more or less capable of becoming soldiers en masse, due to the culture they've been shaped by? Does this problem show up even from the perspective of men who appear to, in fact, be quite strong? Fuck that noise, questions are for dweebs! Let's round it to "all men in the society are warriors", that sounds way less complicated.

Fremen are supposed to be unlearned compared to their literate and intellectually decadent foes. Fremen society is supposed to be poor in both resources and infrastructure, compared to their rich and prosperous opponents.

"Literate". Why portray "literate" and "intellectually decadent" as synonyms? Could it be that arguing against "intellectual decadence" is a hell of a lot harder than arguing for the merits of literacy, and so he finds it most convenient to substitute the former for the later? Can we wait two more sentences to find out?

The opposite of Fremenism is almost invariably termed ‘decadence.’ This is the reserve side of this reductive view of history: not only do hard conditions make for superior people, but that ‘soft’ conditions, associated with complex societies, wealth and book-reading weenies (read: literacy) make for morally inferior people who are consequently worse at fighting. Because we all know that moral purity makes you better at fighting, right? (My non-existent editor would like me to make clear that I am being sarcastic here, and it is extraordinarily obvious that moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success.)

...And there's your answer.

"moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success". What a disgusting example of intellectual cowardice.

Nothing always leads to battlefield success, so it's good to see that he's really putting himself out there with the bold claims.

And yet, character, of both leaders and followers, very obviously matters immensely in leadership, and leadership matters immensely in all domains of large-scale human conflict. I am pretty sure that "moral purity", in the sense that he very clearly is framing the term, would not be a very good way of describing the phenomenon, which is why I find his framing choices so execrable. But in actual fact it is obvious that Morale and Morals/virtue/character are pretty clearly linked, and that even central examples of Moral Purity in the sense he frames it have in fact been used historically to build winning armies. Discipline is incredibly important in all forms of military affairs. Commitment. Loyalty. Determination. "The moral is to the physical as three to one." We know what amoral armies look like; there is a reason people don't want to rely on them. And yet, even that last link opens up a whole vista on how morality or its absence change war, how morals/character/virtue cannot be done without, the lengths leaders must go to in generating makeshift analogues in their absence, all in the context of a problem that, by itself, greatly illustrates the reality of decadence as a sociopolitical force.

More recently, we have the truism that "no one is going to fight a war on behalf of an economic zone." While we haven't tested this principle hard yet, I know which way I'd bet.

think he has a very clear agenda (that the set of views about masculinity and martial virtue he calls the "cult of the badass" is widely held, wrong, and actively harmful in a liberal democracy) and his opponents on this thread are the ones trying to obfuscate the actual disagreement.

I reiterate: This is propaganda, and worse it is stupid propaganda. You should not trust him to describe or diagnose "cults" of any description, and you should re-evaluate whatever lessons you have drawn from his writings.

This formulation not only seems obviously consonant with my understanding of history, but the reasons why it should be so likewise seem obvious: Good times impose reduced consequences on weak men for their weakness, and greatly reduce the amount of free energy by which strong men might exercise their strength.

I think perhaps instead of weak men, it would be more correct to say bad men, as you seem to run with later in your post. I think a more central way to look at it is the one Zvi identified in his Immoral Mazes Sequence; good times allow and to some degree require intermediation of reality by social systems, enabling negative-sum extractive enterprises exploiting the mismatch between what's legible and what's true, which (may) eventually consume more than all of the societal surplus leading to collapse (which then resets the maze level, as mazes are not viable in unintermediated reality).

Agree with your characterisaion of Devereaux, though.

negative-sum extractive enterprises exploiting the mismatch between what's legible and what's true

I love this.

More comments

He is right about the 'horns of the dilemma' and non-violence. Another example of these kinds of protests is hunger strikes, employed effectively by British Suffragettes. If you Google this, AI will helpfully tell you the government's response was 'brutal.' I guess letting the poor girls die is the humane thing to do. Oh, wait!

Anyways, in case it is not obvious: 'nonviolence' as a strategy is simply part of using media as a political weapon. It is strange to call such an insurgency the 'weak side.' It is more accurate to call them 'militarily weak, but politically strong.'

The reason a person like this writes an ode to this strategy is because they know at a subconscious level that this particular weapon (sympathetic media) is wielded by their side.

He writes that non-violence, done properly is disruptive and unignorable. It seems to me that these qualities make it categorically similar to violence. Indeed, protesting is kind of like "political-violence," although I am using it here in a very nonstandard way. Gosh, I feel like one of those college kids who redefines words, saying "silence is violence."

Basically, the common sense idea that "violence is very bad, I wouldn't ever EVER do violence ever" is a left-adaptive meme because it means political power (=protesting, media control) wins, and the left has that.

Once we see these dynamics laid bare, why shouldn't someone like me just say, "I will judge actions based on their effects in the zero-sum power war: it matters not if you detonated a bomb and killed people, you are committing an un-ignorable act in the service of a side."

This sounds like a very clever argument that casually sweeps away material reality in favour of the world of memes, quite like, gosh indeed, what a stereotypical leftist college kid may deploy.

Non-violence, as you frame it, wielded by the socially powerful may indeed feel like an "I win" card, impossible to oppose with truth or any but the most tailored notion of beauty, and hence like a fundamentally unfair "defect" option in the domain of discourse. This is all very terrible, if you think or can pretend that the domain of discourse is all there is; but those who still have to interact with the physical world may recognise that even though being verbally/morally/metaphorically beaten, pissed on, shot and having the cost of the bullet billed to your relatives may feel every bit as humiliating as having those things done to you literally, only the latter actually leaves you dead and your mother robbed of her last $5. If the price of not accepting moral defeat by an overwhelming moral power is pulling physical defeat back into the Overton window, not everyone may conclude that moral defeat is so bad an option.

I don't understand what you are saying. The sentence structure is too complex. I think what you're saying is people would rather be defeated morally and socially rather than defeated physically. That's true! I wasn't pretending the domain of discourse is all there is! That's why its a big problem of the social powers and military powers seem like they are not on the same side.

If you Google this, AI will helpfully tell you the government's response was 'brutal.' I guess letting the poor girls die is the humane thing to do. Oh, wait!

I guess Google AI was also designed by feminists. Very obviously it seems to presuppose that the only humane thing to do in this situation was to accept that the Suffragettes are on the right side of history, yield to them, and then roll over and die.

Agreed. Even in modern context without sympathetic media nonviolent protests are absolutely ineffective. Just a few examples, two from conservative and two from leftist side:

  • March for life/abortion clinics vigils. These were largely ineffective, in fact they led to oppressive laws where praying in a buffer zone around abortion clinics is punishable offense which in fact got some people arrested.

  • Antiglobalist protests in early 2000s in Seattle and other places. They did not achieve their goals, all the trade deals went as planned and in fact globalist agendas went through just fine. If anything meeting in places like Davos to embark upon Global regulations is even more popular than in the past.

  • Occupy Wallstreet was complete fiasco, a lot of ink was spent if it was sabotaged possibly by introducing woke as a new topic or what. Nevertheless this movement is dead in the water.

  • Tea Party and wave of protests for their policy demands died similarly to Occupy.

What about the counterfactual? Had those protests turned violent, would they have produced results? Have the handful of attacks on abortion clinics or doctors been anymore effective?

Maybe, maybe not. Nevertheless the nonviolent nature of these protest did not win anybody some moral high ground or anything like that, it won them maybe mockery. Even for popular issues like those related to Occupy, it just fizzled out like a fart in outer space.

It also works the other way around such as when violent protests are made successful thanks to media shielding. Prime example are BLM protests/riots, which were turned by establishment into massive success with wave of capitulation from government to corporations to the agenda. Similar example is violent outbursts after some high profile Quran burnings which led to laws banning such burnings under hate speech and other laws. If you want something maybe right-coded, then I'd say that violent yellow vests protests in France were much more successful compared to let's say trucker freedom convoys, which were safely ignored with some of the organizers personally attacked and unpersoned.

Abortion clinic protests were actually highly adaptive to their specific circumstances- local authorities that wanted to ban abortion but were prevented from doing so by their superiors. They reduced abortion access quite a bit without bloodshed.

Their success in blue states has been a lot more mixed, but they still kinda worked in mildly reducing abortion access instead of the counterfactual where a bunch of assassins and firebombers go to jail forever.

It's nearly impossible to judge the effectiveness of any protests or protest movements, not just nonviolent ones. Definitional problems aside, there are too many confounders and backlash effects undermine most gains. Confident judgements on this topic are just an expression of the speaker's priors.

I can imagine a good faith effort to figure this out, but I cannot even imagine that effort succeeding, except in a coarse, probabilistic sense.

Consider the most focused protest you can recall with a successful outcome. On what basis do you determine the protest was incrementally successful? I am going to assume that any evidence brought to bear (polling, Google trends, personal testimony) is plagued by a dozen types of bias.

Beyond that, the democratization of communication technology, efficient toxoplasma distribution systems, and genuine values disagreements mean that any momentary progress towards a given goal will alienate large segments of the population and activate the opposition.

Counterexample: the Canadian Trucker Protest was completely despised by the media yet managed to totally turn the tide of vaccine passports and lockdowns. China's Zero COVID policy was also overturned by the largest nonviolent protests since Tiananmen 1989 and obviously they didn't have a sympathetic media to draw upon. Or for a protest unrelated to COVID, the Iranian headscarf protests basically reversed the practical enforcement of the "morality codes".

It seems to help when the protests have a very specific and clear goal as opposed to something vague like "fighting inequality"

I don’t believe the Trump admin could frame the shootings as a mistake. That would imply incompetence. That makes them look weak.

One issue with social media these days is now everyone understands the tactics of protestors and thus know also the counter tactics to deploy. The media can not just control one narrative. The alt narratives gets promoted just as much. The counter to the counter movements is out there.

Furthermore, in the age of social media we now have video so protestors can’t just push until something happens. Good won’t just be lost soccer mom who happened to get in ICE way. Pretti won’t be “just directing tactic”. Someone will have video of him kicking ICE vehicles in a prior encounter. In the ‘60s. Goode would be a civil rights icon who was just dropping the kids off at school who the nazis shot.

The entire school segregation move and the evil parents yelling back in the day may have fizzled out after a few viral videos of white kids getting their ass kicked by black kids during segregation.

The two narrative world is what we live in today. The old protest movements do not work as well when it’s become trivial for dual narratives to be maintained.

We have all the video in every direction. The propaganda works anyway; the left-wing "ICE IS EVIL" message gets across to normies, the right-wing "The protestors are violent and obstructive and ICE is arresting people they are supposed to arrest" does not, it's dismissed as Fox News (which, even if it were reported as such, doesn't count, because the other side controls the credibility of any given media organ) propaganda.

gets across to normies

Are there any "normies" as undecided voters willing to be persuaded by red or blue side by facts, logic and reason?

How many such people are left (if they ever existed). Everything looks that polarization is complete, there is blue and red side hardened in their camps (and equally hardened grey non voting, non caring mass that refuses to participate).

Plenty, I routinely voted democrat or libertarian, 2024, I voted for Trump. I live in one of the top 10 most contested/important counties in the country. I was persuaded by facts, logic, and reason. And I will be again in 2026 and 2028. Considering Trump won the popular vote in 2024, something that hasn't happened in forever and sure as hell didn't happen in 2016 or 2020, I think screeching that there aren't independent swing voters left is just an excuse to engage in accelerationism.

I've beaten this drum before, and I'll beat it again. If you post political content online in anyway, you are not normal. You are not the average voter. And there is a good chance you exist in a bubble. You can either be unaware of it, or acknowledge it.

Normies are all over the place, but they're not undecided voters. They're Democrats-by-default.

I imagine plenty of normal, average people are undecided voters, so that certainly is plausible. However, as humans are only rarely persuaded by facts, logic and reason in a real sense, I'd say such normies exist, but are a small minority. A normie is, by definition, someone not exposed to anything outside the mainstream, be that anything of political nature or not.

I don’t believe the Trump admin could frame the shootings as a mistake. That would imply incompetence. That makes them look weak.

At least in private, I don't think even the most based Trump supporters will claim that the rank and file ICE are some fit and well-trained force with high tactical acumen. You can't hire and train that many people that quickly and expect to get great results. Indeed, they probably know this much more keenly than everyone else.

Of course, that's part of the whole game of chicken.

The entire school segregation move and the evil parents yelling back in the day may have fizzled out after a few viral videos of white kids getting their ass kicked by black kids during segregation.

Might have gone even harder if it was viral videos of white parents beating up a 15 year old black kid in a newly integrated school.

At least in private, I don't think even the most based Trump supporters will claim that the rank and file ICE are some fit and well-trained force with high tactical acumen.

With the exception of the Pretti shooting, all the atrocity videos I've seen with them have been very much less atrocious than the kind of normal police arrest videos you can find all over the Internet. Which is probably why some of the ICE atrocity videos are actually other police forces doing some actual beatings that are then attributed to ICE.

Yeah but there are far fewer ICE agents.

So if the outrage-sampled videos are about the same; it tells you something about the base prevalence.

How is this supposed to make sense? He said that that the outraged-sampled videos of ICE aren't actually that outrageous compared to the non-outraged-sampled videos of other police forces. In other words, they are not the same.

Also even if they were the same, it tells you nothing about the prevalence. You have no idea how many actually outrageous videos there are available for either group.

They are both outrage-sampled. No videos that aren't good scroll bait material are passing through the filter.

And in any case you can make some inference about the underlying distribution. There are 20K ICE agents and 750K sworn law enforcement, about a 35x ratio. Even accounting for sampling bias, if you find comparable (even if more for LEOs) behavior at the margin, it's pretty damning.

The thing about Bret Devereaux, at least for me, is that he has a degree of genuine scholarship, but he's also way too online, too interested in arguing with strawmen or weak men, and willing to compromise his own commitment to truth for the sake of the latter. He does represent some useful insights to the public, but he's also wildly uncharitable to people he doesn't like.

Probably the best example of this is his series on Sparta, which is grossly ignorant of the latest academic writing on Sparta, is aimed primarily at owning 'Sparta bros' on Twitter, and by his own admission advances positions that he thinks are historically weak or less likely in order to more effectively win internet arguments.

Take, for instance, this post, in which he admits that the Hodkinson position is more plausible and better supported by evidence than the Cartledge position, but says that he made his case based on Cartledge position because "the Cartledge position is clearly the more efficacious tool for reaching people who are not already convinced of the authority of modern scholars on these points". When someone admits to making an argument based on a weaker position purely for the sake of winning a debate, I think it is reasonable to conclude that that person is disingenuous.

I expect somebody with a reputation as a scholar to make only arguments that he himself believes to be strong or true. Some simplification for the public can be reasonable, especially when one is trying to educate children or undergraduates, but even so, I expect a scholar to as much as possible prioritise what is true over what can be used to persuade.

The whole thing is absurd at any rate because it is only an exercise in trying to defeat people he doesn't like on Twitter, exemplified by the weak man of Steven Pressfield.

It has always been striking to me that for everything we are told about Spartan values and society, the actual spartiates would have despised nearly all of their boosters with sole exception of the praise they got from southern enslaver-planter aristocrats in the pre-Civil War United States. If there is one thing I wish I had emphasized more in This. Isn’t. Sparta. it would have been to tell the average ‘Sparta bro’ that the Spartans would have held him in contempt.

I'm not sure what I can say here beyond, "Grow up, Bret."

The problem is that, using Sparta as an example, Devereaux is ignorant of the most recent scholarship, and misrepresents by omission the scholarship that he is aware of, in order to own a small, ignorant, and possibly imaginary audience.

This is not a serious thinker.

And if he's like that on classical Greece, which I've bothered to look into, why would I trust him on anything else?

He does sometimes convey useful insights in his other series, but in general I would caution people to always look up and independently research anything Devereaux tells you. He's clearly intelligent and well-read, but he is not a trustworthy source. He has a tendency to lump together periods centuries apart, for all that he criticises 'Sparta bros' he is something of a 'classical Rome bro' himself, he has a tendency to unhelpful political asides, and he tends to always be maximally uncharitable to people with whom he disagrees. I do not recommend ACOUP, if you want to learn about military history or the classical world.

For context, this is what real history research looks like.

For unironic context, this is what real history research looks like.

Yes, you can still find new historical sources, not only from newly opened modern archives, but from older times too - there is still surprising amount of centuries old written material never properly classified and published.

This is shame, because raging modern culture war can use anything, no matter how old.

I'm not really sure what you're getting at here, or how serious you are? Aella's post is not really historical research? In a sense, I suppose, reading the works of historians and trying to discern common themes within them is something historians do, but I don't think it's a central example of academic history. It is a good thing for her to do, and I don't look down on it, but it's not something I would have leapt to as a good example of 'real history research'.

EDIT: Oops, sorry, I thought I was replying to QuantumFreakonomics here. I apologise. I agree that the post on the Maronite Chronicle is real historical research.

it's not something I would have leapt to as a good example of 'real history research'.

Well, she gets the black pill lesson of history that there is no such thing as ultimate "lesson of history"

Good luck getting experts and professionals to tell you so in such open way.

See my edit above for an apology.

I do agree that drawing ultimate or singular 'lessons of history' is a foolish endeavour. History teaches us a great deal, much relevant to today, but one of the things it teaches us is that events are extraordinarily contingent and you won't find simple, predictable laws.

I agree that the post on the Maronite Chronicle is real historical research.

It does not seem to be revolutionary at all, no shocking secrets uncovered, no revelation that The Prophet was transgender woman of color that never existed. It well aligns with other sources we have for 7th century Middle Eastern history, it confirms that our general knowledge about these times is accurate.

And this is how real historical research looks like in most cases.

And they say homeschooling produces better results...

Take, for instance, this post, in which he admits that the Hodkinson position is more plausible and better supported by evidence than the Cartledge position but says that he made his case based on Cartledge position... The problem is that, using Sparta as an example, Devereaux is ignorant of the most recent scholarship, and misrepresents by omission the scholarship that he is aware of, in order to own a small, ignorant, and possibly imaginary audience.

I think you're misrepresenting Devereaux here.

I think the Cartledge view on Sparta, in many of its particulars if not in whole, remains ‘colorable’ [plausible, consistent with evidence] as an academic matter... This is not to say that one cannot prefer Hodkinson’s arguments – I do on several points (discussed below) – but what I think one cannot do is go tell a public audience that someone following M.H. Hansen and Paul Cartledge doesn’t know what they’re talking about or is simply ‘out of date.’ The points are contested; I suspect given the nature of the evidence and the sensitivity of the question many of them will likely remain contested.

Of course I do follow Hodkinson on several points; here I think the critique mistakes my use of older scholarship for a lack of awareness of the newer scholarship. There are points, especially deeper into the series where I adopt Hodkinsonian positions: Sparta “follows this basic model” of polis government (more typical than not!). My take on Spartiate women owes quite a lot to Hodkinson’s “Female property ownership and empowerment” in Spartan Society (2004), ed. T. Figueira, including rejecting the notion that female inheritance was the fundamental problem motivating Spartan oliganthropia; I was taught the ‘female inheritance was the problem’ version in my MA and am convinced by Hodkinson that this was wrong. The argument that Sparta’s army is a fairly typical Greek army is likewise Hodkinsonian and leans into his arguments about Sparta not being so ‘militarized’ as our sources imply, contra Cartledge. Finally, while I do stress the rigidity of Sparta’s social structure and its inequality (in keeping with Hodkinson, Property & Wealth in Classical Sparta (2000)), I don’t believe at any point I argue for the ‘exceptional domination of state over society,’ except for the position of the helots. It is perhaps unfortunate that This. Isn’t. Sparta. comes behind my habit of bibliography paragraphs at the front of essays; there would have been quite a lot of Hodkinson, but also Powell, Figueira, I.M. Morris, etc. etc. Property & Wealth, especially, is a must read if you want to understand contemporary scholarship, though it is dense and written for scholars so you can’t start with it.

He does not concede that Cartledge is an implausible position nor does he leave out the Hodkinson position entirely. If he thinks that there's two positions, both of which are reasonable positions to hold, I don't see it as disingenuous to use the more convincing one where appropriate to argue against a third position that he thinks is not reasonable to hold.

There's a difference between being indifferent to two positions versus believing one position while conceding that the opposing position is plausible.

What it seems suspiciously like here is that he privately believes X, while conceding that Y is plausible. But then in his writing he argues Y because he believes the normies will believe it more.

Now I would say that my argument here is actually a blend of the Cartledge and Hodkinson camps,

But what he's doing here can be framed as far worse than that. He can cherry-pick the worst of both camps in order to maximally dunk on the spartabros, without seriously making an effort to disclose that. His depiction of Sparta is likely more negative than either camp individually would accept.

There's a difference between being indifferent to two positions versus believing one position while conceding that the opposing position is plausible.

Casting Cartledge and Hodkinson as opposing positions seems like a false dichotomy. In any case, he seems to believe parts of both positions and used parts of both in his argument.

His depiction of Sparta is likely more negative than either camp individually would accept.

I haven't read his series and I certainly haven't read the actual historical scholarship so I can't comment on this. Would be interested if you can come up with examples where he depicts Sparta more negatively than the Hodkinson or Cartledge views support.

I can't really think of a more charitable way to interpret this, I'm afraid:

First: why the Cartledge camp? Why so much of the old (if not busted) over the new hotness in Sparta scholarship? Of course part of the reason is that I think the Cartledge camp is right on some points (back that in a minute), but more broadly, in trying to persuade an audience that Sparta is not a society to be glorified or emulated, the Cartledge position is the obviously superior persuasive position.

[...]

And so if the goal is to persuade people of an argument about Sparta – recall that this series was immediately prompted by dueling essays about the value of Sparta as an exemplar for modern politics – the Cartledge position is clearly the more efficacious tool for reaching people who are not already convinced of the authority of modern scholars on these points. That being my aim, I used it.

(emphasis original)

I take that as an explicit admission that he premised his argument on positions that he himself thinks are in dispute, but which he believes are instrumentally useful for persuasion. He himself says that is prioritising persuasion!

It might be one thing if he had prefaced those earlier Sparta posts with a note that there are several schools of thought, he find several of them plausible, and for the following he's going to proceed on the assumption that the Cartledge school is correct - but he does not do that. It sounds to me like he thinks that such an admission of uncertainty would give the 'Sparta bros' an excuse to dismiss what he says.

(Not that I think that's necessary, because a dedicated 'Sparta bro' is going to ignore him anyway. Devereaux's Sparta series is not a serious attempt to persuade, but rather a performative dunking, done for an audience already inclined to cheer him on. I understand that persuading third parties, rather than your actual interlocutor, is usually the goal of public debate, but surely even that would be enhanced by presenting your case in the most comprehensive and intellectually honest way possible.)

I take that as an explicit admission that he premised his argument on positions that he himself thinks are in dispute

I don't really think this is the case. The Cartledge position, according to Devereaux, is fully within the mainstream understanding of Sparta. Maybe it's "in dispute" in the sense that some people dispute parts of it, but I don't really think that means much. The Hodkinson position is also "in dispute" by this definition.

It might be one thing if he had prefaced those earlier Sparta posts with a note that there are several schools of thought, he find several of them plausible, and for the following he's going to proceed on the assumption that the Cartledge school is correct - but he does not do that. It sounds to me like he thinks that such an admission of uncertainty would give the 'Sparta bros' an excuse to dismiss what he says.

To me, it sounds like you are implying here that the Hodkinson position would vindicate the "Sparta bro". It doesn't sound like that's the case according to Devereaux. The reason he didn't base his argument fully on the Hodkinson position is because it requires dismissing the primary sources which he says people would find unconvincing (which seems reasonable to me).

I think this is standard science explainer practice, for reasons that can be completely orthogonal to the political, that has the propensity to sound bad to laypeople who have an incorrect model of how the scientist's notion of "truth" works. I will, with apologies, admit that I have the sketch of a post to the effect of "newsflash: physicists and even mathematicians 'lie' to you in the exact same way all of the time" in mind but do not have the energy or time to produce it.

Instead, for a different argument that is more related to the political dimension of this specific issue, I think that his way of explaining it just stems from a broader sense of distrust that the engaged lay public insists in every public-facing academic entirely through its own fault. If you do quantum computing, it is almost impossible to even mention superposition unless you want to wind up being quoted in a procession of powerpoints about the possibilities of doing multiple computations simultaneously forever; and if you do neurobiology, even as much as acknowledging that something quantum might have something to do with chemistry including chemistry that happens in the brain will forever be used as ammunition by "due to their quantum souls capable of seeing every outcome simultaneously, humans will never be replaced by machines" type people even if you started your popsci career hoping to get the public acquainted with the mechanistic understanding of the brain. This doesn't have to happen to you or someone you know many times for you to start seeing the public as the epistemic enemy, and conclude that the best thing you can do is feeding them information selectively so that they arrive at the least wrong conclusion rather than feeding them information freely so that they motivatedly reason themselves into something much worse (here, probably, any acknowledgement of controversy would just put "Sparta bros" into "300 is a valid scientific theory" mode). Of course this sucks for those of your readers who can actually hold differentiated views and deal with uncertainty, but they can always read the literature. Besides, the ones who protest the loudest tend to turn out to be exactly those motivated reasoners upon cursory inspection all too often. (Similar to the fun "spot the Scientologist" game whenever public-facing criticism of psychiatry is involved.)

you [...] start seeing the public as the epistemic enemy, and conclude that the best thing you can do is [feed] them information selectively

But this is where you are in great danger of throwing away your soul and admitting you are not a scientist or a teacher but a shepherd of men.

Saying, 'the plum pudding model is less accurate than other models which I will explain later but I am using this now because the best model needs to be taken in bite-size chunks' is one thing. Similarly, avoiding hot-button words like quantum in favour of something equally descriptive when talking to people can be wise for the reasons you give: I have sat in on interviews where the beleaguered interviewer has twenty minutes to try and fish something out of the firehose of words coming from a professor and produces something obviously insane based on the word 'quantum'. But this is in aid of greater comprehension.

in trying to persuade an audience that Sparta is not a society to be glorified or emulated, the Cartledge position is the obviously superior persuasive position

this series was immediately prompted by dueling essays about the value of Sparta as an exemplar for modern politics – the Cartledge position is clearly the more efficacious tool for reaching people

This is not epistemics.

This. Is. DIDACTIIIIICS!

(couldn't resist)

In all seriousness, the above is not a matter of being correct or incorrect about the facts. It's the author using scholarship which he suspects to be wrong ("old, if not busted") in service of the author's moral, political goal. And that, as someone intimately familiar with the difficulties of scientific explanation, strikes me as a very different ball game. Being less than 100% open and honest with people for the sake of their own edification slides so easily and neatly into being less than honest because it serves your own goals that it's really really dangerous to get into the habit of doing it. I'm not joking when I say this is how senior academics lose their souls.

You're partially correct, but imo also far too naive about the way this is extremely prone to first devolve into disinformation "for the good of the people", and then as the students, being people, come newly into your field believing that bullshit and the disinfo becomes the obvious truth, how could you disagree? Even noticing that there are so many older scientist secretly believing things they've been told all their life are evil and wrong will, if anything, strengthen their conviction.

In the hard sciences, if people do this right , they're very open "this is a simplification, I don't believe this & it's not true, but for the lay-person it's close enough that it's better than knowing nothing". But once politics is involved, I've personally talked with scientists in my field who defended a position in public with such conviction that I was genuinely convinced that they believe it. Until only much later in a pub after a pint in a private round they admitted that no, they actually think as well the counter-position has the better evidence, but it is getting abused by his political enemies, so to weaken them he has to bring it down, and as a scientist in the field he is well-positioned to do so. This works for a while and might seem reasonable as a single person, but it (rightfully) erodes trust in science as whole.

Once you see the public as epistemic enemy, you honestly should excuse yourself and stop being a science communicator; Arguably you aren't one anymore already anyway.

Both for you and @Corvos, the thing is that scientists (this is in fact more true in the "hard sciences" than in History) don't generally think of theories in terms of "true" or "false" (or even "likely to be (...)"), but rather just as better/worse/incomparable, or often even just "more powerful" or "less powerful", models for generating predictions. A newer theory may be "more powerful" in that it generates more accurate predictions more often (but really, it will usually be the case that the newer theory does better than the older one in a few more contexts and worse than the older one in slightly fewer - "incomparable"), but also more finicky, in that it's harder to understand and apply correctly, and therefore inferior for a particular situation. Physicists will boldly use Newtonian physics to calculate the behaviour of slow heavy objects on Earth, and not mention anything about newer theories to any 6th graders they are tasked with teaching, without feeling like they are lying to anyone.

The psychology here is really more akin to if you ask an engineer for the best plane, no further instructions provided, and get a modern Airbus rather than an SR-71 Blackbird. The engineer might even in his professional context feel strongly that the SR-71 and YF-12 constituted the pinnacle of aviation engineering, and argue passionately about the particular design tradeoffs between the two, but he will not for a moment feel like he deceived you or betrayed his professional oaths by furnishing you with neither; they are simply not planes that it is reasonable for you to deploy or fly, and it is exceedingly unlikely that they will be actually better suited for your use case, whatever it is, than the boring reliable airliner that can even occasionally survive Indonesian airport infrastructure. Now, if you are a plane buff, have a cold war spy mission to run or happen to be an activist who spends every waking hour malding about the mothballing of the Concorde, you would probably feel a terrible sense of betrayal about this, but as someone who is not, would you think the engineer deserves condemnation?

I am a scientist. Newspaper articles have been written on my work, albeit ones over which I had little control; I have read them and I have sighed over their inaccuracies. I am well aware of what you meant, as I suspect is @RenOS.

I am telling you as a scientist that it’s really easy to use this reasoning to work yourself into some very shady places. Reaching its nadir when you start musing happily about how all the lay people don’t really understand how these things are done…

It’s precisely because it’s partly true that it’s so fucking seductive.

Well, same(ish) - I have not been featured in the news (nor is it likely to happen anytime soon given that I am in unfashionable theoretical CS), but then on the other hand I count some actual historians among my relatives so I have some inside view of that sausage factory. I think the main difference to me is that the thing you describe as a nadir does not feel particularly bad to me, on its own. The educator part of the job has always felt fundamentally adversarial to me - even well-selected students will at any point in time use 95% of their galaxy brains (or, well, of whatever fraction of those they are willing to invest in your course at all) only to engage in mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they are perfect just as they are, and to convince you that they learned and applied what you wanted them to without them actually having done those things. (The sheer inventiveness I've seen in schemes to circumvent automated plagiarism detectors in programming assignments that could be done with a fraction of the effort, or to hide transparently false lemmas in the bowels of a Rube Goldberg proof of a three-liner that was covered in class!)

To teach these students - not an anonymous public, and not on a topic of any political valence, but people you know and a subset of whom you hope to elevate to colleagues some day! - requires constant subterfuge and deception to get past the ego defenses of their monkey brains. That you would do all that and more when actually just talking to normies seems absolutely par for the course for me. It's not like I'm not bothered by the politically motivated deception cases @RenOS was hinting at, but there I see the problem somewhere else. It is only really bad if, before deciding to deceive the public, these scientists have already deceived themselves, or otherwise transgressed against the mental discipline that a scientist needs for science as a whole to function in the long run. (Many cases of this don't even involve politics, cf. every case of trash stats replication crisis just-so story zingers. I blame the general culture in US academia where idealism about science qua science is seen as cringe and unbefitting of a successful working adult.) If it were as he says, and these people indeed merely advanced their agenda when talking to the general public but treated evidence fairly while engaging in the scientific process, I would perhaps find them tasteless as politicians, but not compromised as scientists.

I think he's just caught between a rock and a hard place.

If he wants to keep his position as "internet historian," it's essential that he has some genuine academic bona fides. Right now he's an adjunct professor, which is just barely enough to call himself "professor," even though everyone in academia knows he's not a "real" professor.

His specialty is an classics, specifically the military history of the Roman republic. That's a very old-school, white male coded, conservative interest. It's also been out of favor with the academy for, I don't know, at least 100 years. So if he bends too far towards his fan base, he'll get excommunicated by the academy and lose all of his professional bona fides. He'll become just another internet "roman statue guy." On the other hand, if he leans too far towards the academy, he'll spend all his time writing about the queer women of color in the roman republic, or whatever. He wrote a whole series about how women traditionally made clothing and he had to admit that primary sources were sparse because even the primary sources of the time thought that this was an incredibly boring topic which no one cared about. They basically just took a strand of wool or flax then "spun" in a circular motion, over and over and over, for approximately one million hours, until it resembled something like a modern dress. Neat.

In of his recent article, he did admit the contradiction- if he was a woman or Black person, writing about more academia-friendly topics, he'd probably be a full professor by now. Instead he's marginalized as basically a glorified grad student, despite having a huge internet following and way more funding than most full professors. And yet, he has to kind of look down on and despise his followers in order to maintain his standing. Truly a difficult position.

They basically just took a strand of wool or flax then "spun" in a circular motion, over and over and over, for approximately one million hours, until it resembled something like a modern dress. Neat.

It's at least a little funny that you've forgotten about the weaving and sewing part of clothes production despite apparently being aware of this checks notes five part series on clothes production.

I took a quick look, and despite enjoying Youtube vlogs about textile content, nd enjoying beating wool with sticks, felting, and several other textile things, it looked pretty boring. I can see why someone wouldn't ever click through to knitting or weaving or anything else.

Real knitting, let alone crochet, was actually unknown to the ancients. There was a process called "nalebinding" which involved a single needle and passing the entire thread through each loop, joining threads to make a full garment. True knitting with two needles without passing the whole yarn through each loop came about around the 11th century.

Oh yeah, sewing, I recall that's on part 6 of the series.

In all seriousness it's not part of the series so you might want to recheck your notes.

I didn't actually read the series. Looking now, despite the name, it's really more about cloth production than clothing production, despite the name. Very troubling!

From what I recall from the series, the lions share of work actually went into thread production, that is spinning. The weaving was much less, and the sewing much less than the weaving again.

I think he's just caught between a rock and a hard place.

And you believe that this absolves him of responsibility? That it makes him a trustworthy source?

I dont believe any source is trustworthy in the sense of "oracle of truth." I just appreciate his perspective. He must be read in context, just like every single other human who ever dared to speak with authority. I so generally trust him about the specific factual details of life in the ancient world, but much less when it comes to editorializing or drawing broad conclusions.

I dont believe any source is trustworthy in the sense of "oracle of truth."

That wasn't the question. Do you think it makes him more likely to put forward an argument in good faith?

I think I answered @JeSuisCharlie's question of "is he a trustworthy source?" You're now asking a different question- "is he more likely to put forward an argument in good faith?" (presumably you mean, more likely because of his political beliefs?) To that I would say no, but neither is anyone else. Like everyone, you need to read him with an eye towards his potential bias.

I think I answered @JeSuisCharlie's question of "is he a trustworthy source?"

I don't think you did originally, and I don't think I did. "Trustworthy" doesn't usually mean "an oracle of truth".

I dont believe any source is trustworthy in the sense of "oracle of truth."

That's not what I asked, I asked you if being "caught between a rock and a hard place" absolved him of responsibility. and If it made him a trustworthy source.

If anything, your reply reads to me like a list of reasons to be intensely skeptical of any claim he makes.

His specialty is an classics, specifically the military history of the Roman republic. That's a very old-school, white male coded, conservative interest.

Noted. But can't the same be said about anyone specializing in ancient Rome in general, ancient Greece in general and not just Sparta, or the Middle Ages in general, for example, or even military history as a whole?

Sure, but who else is like that, who writes prolifically on the internet for a general audience, in modern times? I think you'd have to either go back to much older sources, or look to some fairly obscure academics who don't even have a twitter or any sort of online presence. Academia in general just... doesn't do a good job of catering towards popular interests.

He wrote a whole series about how women traditionally made clothing and he had to admit that primary sources were sparse because even the primary sources of the time thought that this was an incredibly boring topic which no one cared about.

When I read it, I did not think it was especially boring. I actually found it interesting to learn that a lot of productivity went into textiles. For myself, this contrast is larger than for food -- I still spend a couple of hundreds Euros a month on food, but perhaps only a couple of 100 Euro per year on clothes. A 50 Euro jeans can easily last for years.

Or you could say that the baseline requirements of labor for textiles (even after the invention of the spinning wheel) sets the stage for the industrial revolution as spinning machines were one of the early consumers of steam power.

even the primary sources of the time

Come on, that is an incredibly weak argument. Most of our sources were upper class, often aristocratic men interested in what their class viewed as appropriate interests. There is a ton of stuff -- details of industrial processes, demographic information, nutrition of the general population, etc -- which they could have trivially found out and written to us about, but did not bother for the most part.

Some of these a woke niche interests ("Okay, but what was life in the kingdom like for the 99%?") but others might allow us to understand why history happened the way it happened, why this society was stable and that one was not and so on.

I found it interesting, too.

Per gwern:

Clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”, as the Industrial Revolution in textiles never stopped; employment in the US textile industry has cratered while garment per man-hour & per capita GDP in new textile-heavy economies like Bangladesh soars as textile automation continues.

I thought his article was the one with stats about the percentage of income spent on clothing, but I guess that was somewhere else. It was outrageous even through the 50s.

Since everyone's hijacking this thread to post their opinions of Brett Devereaux, I'll just join in and do the same. But first, a digression to write about someone who bothers me even more.

I used to be an enthusiastic listener to the "Literature and History" podcast, by Doug Mezger. Overall, it's a great series. Detailed, patient, well-made, well-spoken, some depth and a lot of breadth. But about 20 episodes in, it increasingly turned into a thoroughly feminist publication. He could no longer go five minutes without injecting some moral judgement about the ancients failing to live up to modern standards of egalitarianism. He'd condemn Agamemnon and Odysseus for the violence they committed, then praise Chlytemnestra and Medea for the violence they committed. And the pattern kept repeating. A nonviolent woman is wise, a nonviolent man is indecisive, etc. Every aspect of history and literature, shown through the lense of feminism. I ended up putting a stop to my listenership, and cancelling my patreon support. What started out as very promising ended up very grating, and I am still sore about it. A capable historian, literary scholar and podcaster ruined his work because he just couldn't stop using it a political soapbox.

Brett Devereaux is, to me, not the same. He doesn't do good work and ruin it with interjections. He does a ton of middling-okay work that, as it turns out, is just him projecting his prejudices onto history and selling that to the reader, and occasionally, almost by accident, something interesting is said along the way. I used to consider him long-winded and inefficient, and something of a contrarian who chose topics on which he could be highly critical because well, otherwise there wouldn't be much to say.

But then I watched a youtube video in which Brett Deveraux and a youtuber by the name of "Dr. Lantern Jack" (who runs a Podcast by the name of "Ancient Greece Declassified", which I have not so far listened to) discuss the Spartan question. Jack mostly spent his time questioning Brett about his position, who expressed the view that Spartans were not militarily more competent than any other Greeks, that they never trained for battle, and that the Krypteia was the ritual slaughter of helots. Jack cast doubt on those claims, considering them extreme and unlikely (and coming off as at least slightly Sparta-inclined in the process), and kept trying to get Brett to justify them with more than "there's no evidence to the contrary so I'm forced to assume as much". Instead, Brett just doubled down, became increasingly irritable, invoked abstractions like "that's what the current state of The Science says!", and ended up looking very much like a weaselly ass. Lantern Jack stayed polite and patient throughout, and so came out much better even though he himself couldn't make much more of an argument than Brett either.

And so I ended up developing an actual dislike for Brett Devereaux, of whom I now think that he's just a weak specimen overall and the tries to compensate by playing tough guy versus historical entities that can't fight back anymore.

And you, dear reader, just spent two minutes reading about the completely unimportant opinions of a stranger on the internet.

And you, dear reader, just spent two minutes reading about the completely unimportant opinions of a stranger on the internet.

My dear strange German, if I didn't want to read about your opinion, I would not be on the Motte. Not only am I on the Motte, but you are one of the posters I enjoy. Keep sharing your opinions, my southern kraut who is north of me.

I don't get us all. What are we doing here?

It's one of life's great mysteries isn't it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence, or is there really a God watching everything? You know, with a plan for us and stuff. I don't know, man, but it keeps me up at night.

Procrastinating

The thing about Brett Devereaux is that his arguments tend to be right- but he likes to use them to say things his arguments don’t address. His fremen mirage series does a great job pointing out that GDP and population determines the outcomes of wars 90% of the time, but then he strongly implies this disproves all sorts of patriarchal theses. It doesn’t, he literally doesn’t address the topic. Etc, etc.

And this is made all the more insufferable by the fact that his whole thesis is based on a false premise that the Fremen are "poor and unsophisticated". The Fremen of the books are niether, they are a sophisticated society with peer-level technology fighting a war on their home turf.

Devereaux runs a moderately successful old-style blog where he wrote a somewhat famous series of essays outlining his position on Sparta. I read them several times and found them very exhaustively researched. In a way that makes it difficult to rebut his position without going to a lot of work. But, ultimately, I thought that his theory of Sparta started with a base incredulity. He can't believe that there was ever anything about Sparta that anyone ever found admirable. So all his research is just exhaustive fact-checking to prove that whatever you the reader or other ancient Greeks liked about Sparta, well, those reasons are pants-on-fire false. A lot of historians play this game where they "prove" their moral judgments because their historical judgments are so exhaustive. (This is also how a lot of people treat Robert Caro.)

And you, dear reader, just spent two minutes reading about the completely unimportant opinions of a stranger on the internet.

What the hell else would you have me do with my time?

Go outside?

Talk to girls?

Improve myself?

Fuck outta here.

Two minutes isn't even enough time to figure out why one of my production chains is borked in Anno 1800.

At the end of the day, the only political idea Trump truly believes from the bottom of his heart is that he should be president.

If you really believe this there's not much productive discussion we can have because we will keep running into endless disagreements over basic facts about Trump. Is it even possible to prove that Trump does have consistent beliefs and has often suffered consequences for them? Not if we assert, a priori, that Trump just had those positions because they were convenient, so there must be some explanation of how those consequences were convenient. Now we can predict anything Trump ever does with a theory that can never be wrong.

the decision to pull the DHS forces out of Minneapolis was already made

There are still DHS forces in Minneapolis.

you really believe this there's not much productive discussion we can have because we will keep running into endless disagreements over basic facts about Trump. Is it even possible to prove that Trump does have consistent beliefs and has often suffered consequences for them?

I will grant you that the attack ad he paid for after then Central Park Five case was not something which obviously benefited him.

But my impression is that most of the times he sticks his neck out for an unpopular belief, it is a belief which is directly about himself. He genuinely believes that he deserves the Nobel prize. He might even genuinely believe, against all evidence, that the Democrats stole the 2020 election. Or that of course the international trade could be much improved upon by having a genius dealmaker such as himself renegotiate everything. (Very charitably, one could claim that he genuinely believes in protectionism.) He believes that his allies should be rewarded and his friends should be punished.

I will also grant you that it is hard to know what he genuinely believes because his home ground is Simulacrum level four, where words have no relationship to anything in physical reality. Perhaps he genuinely believes every conspiracy theory he has ever pushed, starting from the Birther thing. Perhaps he believes some of the stuff he has said. Perhaps he has, in his mind, the ability to track which of his statements agree with his world model and which don't. Or perhaps he has long lost that ability.

Some big CW topics are abortion, gun rights and immigration.

Trump is very much not part of the Christian Right (which opposes abortion). He certainly does not believe that sex should be between husband and wife only (which is at the end of the day what the Christian Right is all about).

Nor does he seem to really care about gun rights. His administration was quick to blame Pretti for bringing a gun to a protest. Are you telling me that in a world where he could win the mid-terms by passing gun bans, he would decide to lose instead out of a principled belief in 2A?

Immigration is certainly the topic most central to his political persona, and he is rather consistent about it, cracking down on illegals and restricting legal avenues to migrate to the US. In his personal life, he is a bit less anti-immigrant, of course. My take is that he made a conscious decision to make this his political niche ca. 2015.

What are your examples of Trump suffering for his beliefs, preferably beliefs which are not about him?

I will grant you that the attack ad he paid for after then Central Park Five case was not something which obviously benefited him.

The Central Park Five were guilty.

But my impression is that most of the times he sticks his neck out for an unpopular belief, it is a belief which is directly about himself.

His political career started by mainstreaming illegal immigration and deportations into a political arena that did not want to talk about it, even though it immediately resulted in him losing contracts and business opportunities. He stuck by Corey Lewandowski when he was accused of assaulting a reporter for lightly brushing past her. Trump maintained a strong position on tariffs for decades against much ferocious opposition and no obvious benefit for his own interests. He was happy to be booed by a crowd of Republicans for criticizing Bush for lying about the Iraq War. He got gay marriage out of the Republican platform. He built a wall. They dragged his name through the mud with all manner of fake accusations, women he assaulted who couldn't even remember when it happened, they tried putting him in jail. Most famously, he dodged a bullet to the head and then stood up before a crowd of his supporters and pumped his fist and told them to keep fighting.

I could go on, really, but this is all tedious repetition of the obvious truth. Trump does not enter politics, does not run for president, does not become president, without big, massive, huge personal sacrifice. He could have sat on a beach in Miami with his billions and his tower in New York after a very accomplished life, and nothing would have happened, and he would be fine. You don't have to like what he did but you can't seriously deny that he sacrificed a lot, that for one small alteration in fate here or there he would have lost everything. That it has worked out so far and made him more successful is not actually evidence that he did this out of his own self-interest. If it was that easy you would see a lot more imitators trying to do what he did.

And most of his successes in politics are based on promises he made long ago, because he has actually been extremely consistent in attempting the things he said all along he wanted to do.

I will also grant you that it is hard to know what he genuinely believes because his home ground is Simulacrum level four, where words have no relationship to anything in physical reality.

I just do not think this is a serious belief you can actually credibly defend. Maybe it sounds nice as some kind of slapdash pubtalk barcrawl locker room talk. But do you really, honestly, earnestly, believe that Trump is best modeled as a kind of void whose words bear no relation to anything whatsoever? Not just that he lies, or even that he lies more than other politicians. But that for Trump "words have no relationship to anything in physical reality"? What does that do to your view of the world?

Trump is very much not part of the Christian Right (which opposes abortion). He certainly does not believe that sex should be between husband and wife only (which is at the end of the day what the Christian Right is all about).

I'm not sure why you invoke the Christian Right here actually, except as maybe a comparison or metaphor, but I have to point out that the Christian Right is peaked. Trump killed it. They are not the animating force in Republican politics anymore, as much as they'd like to be.

Nor does he seem to really care about gun rights. His administration was quick to blame Pretti for bringing a gun to a protest. Are you telling me that in a world where he could win the mid-terms by passing gun bans, he would decide to lose instead out of a principled belief in 2A?

Yeah you can think it's stupid to bring a gun to obstruct police officers and also believe in the 2nd Amendment. There's no part of the 2nd Amendment that logically entails ignoring cause and effect. Support for the 2nd Amendment doesn't require that every time a guy has a gun I declare he's justified and in the right. Notably, if Trump wanted to take the opposite position, and didn't believe in the 2nd Amendment at all, he could have run as a Democrat. Like he was in the 90s.

The Central Park Five were guilty.

Not of the crime of which they were convicted, but that is beside the point. And again, I brought this up as a point in favor of him having serious beliefs. Paying for these ads was not a good business decision, after all.

I just do not think this is a serious belief you can actually credibly defend. Maybe it sounds nice as some kind of slapdash pubtalk barcrawl locker room talk. But do you really, honestly, earnestly, believe that Trump is best modeled as a kind of void whose words bear no relation to anything whatsoever? Not just that he lies, or even that he lies more than other politicians. But that for Trump "words have no relationship to anything in physical reality"? What does that do to your view of the world?

There is an ancient joke which goes "What is the difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman?" - "A used car salesman knows when he is lying."

Trump is the computer salesman. A bullshitter rather than a con artist or schemer.

Take the 2020 election results. Now, it might be that his thought process was 'Conceding defeat to Biden will critically weaken my brand. I better lie about the election being stolen to keep my base.'

But that is not my take of his behavior. I think it was genuine cognitive dissonance on his part. "I know that I am a great president, much better than Obama, who won reelection. Therefore, it is impossible that I lost. Thus, the Democrats must have cheated." It is not rare in humans, but it is rare to see it so openly expressed in politicians.

What definitely did not happen was that Trump carefully summed up reported irregularities and decided that they made the election close enough to demand a recount.

I do not think that even Trump's followers believe that his claims are literally true. "Oh, I invested my life savings in a Ukrainian company, because Trump promised that if elected he would settle the conflict before he even became president" is not something which happened a lot. "Stop the steal" might be more correctly understood as "Boo to Biden", though the J6 crowd was mistaking it for a claim on physical reality in some parts.

In the words of Hannah Arendt:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Are the immigrants eating our cats? Is Denmark guarding Greenland with a dogsled? Were the Epstein files on Bondi's desk, or did they not exist at all? Did Pretti plan to shoot ICE officers? These look like claims over physical reality, but for the people making them, they are not. They are more like the hallucinations of a freewheeling LLM. They do not seek to deceive followers into having a wrong but coherent world model, but try to persuade them that trying to have a coherent world model at all is just not worth the trouble.

I do not think that even Trump's followers believe that his claims are literally true. "Oh, I invested my life savings in a Ukrainian company, because Trump promised that if elected he would settle the conflict before he even became president" is not something which happened a lot.

This is not rational. Your idea of what true MAGA would believe if they believed Trump is not how people actually observably act. The fact that people don't invest life savings in Ukrainian companies (???) is actually good evidence MAGA is serious, because MAGA is grounded in some kind of reality. What you are describing is how people would act in a cult, which, despite all sorts of ideas current online, is not actually how MAGA behaves.

Are the immigrants eating our cats? Is Denmark guarding Greenland with a dogsled? Were the Epstein files on Bondi's desk, or did they not exist at all? Did Pretti plan to shoot ICE officers? These look like claims over physical reality, but for the people making them, they are not. They are more like the hallucinations of a freewheeling LLM. They do not seek to deceive followers into having a wrong but coherent world model, but try to persuade them that trying to have a coherent world model at all is just not worth the trouble.

This is cope, plain and simple. MAGA is real and believes the things it says it believes. Trump is real and believes the things he says he believes. It's you who's hallucinating by conflating factual disputes (they stopped counting votes in several swing states simultaneously) with obvious poetic license (Oh, Denmark didn't actually send a dogsled?).

I gotta add though thanks for starting an argument about Brett Devereaux because I feel like I've been holding in some opinions about him for years without the proper forum for venting about it


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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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