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This is more geopolitical than culture war. There is a guy with naval experience that has been writing a theory that the US does not want to open the Straight of Hormuz. And Trump has hinted at the thesis. Especially Europe but the rest of the world has depended on the US to keep global shipping open. Europe also looks down on the US as Neanderthals. They do not have the guns to go do things like reopen the Straight and are dependent on the Americans. The US does not directly suffer from the closure as we do Neanderthal things like put little straws in the ground all over Texas sucking oil out of the ground. Europe hurts much more than the modern US today in an energy crisis (US may be net winner).
Besides being a nice FU to Europe it also exposes their geopolitical weaknesses as real. Which hopefully gets them to do things like build big guns, drill for oil, restart nuclear programs, forget Greta ever existed, etc. Which long-term I believe a strong Europe is in Americas interests. America’s relationship with Europe historically and especially Dems has been to go over there and talk nicely to them. Trump has a different philosophy which is basically poke them with a stick. On immigration it does seem like Europe is getting better.
And here is the article. [https://gcaptain.com/the-hormuz-hypothesis-what-if-the-u-s-navy-isnt-in-a-hurry-to-reopen-the-strait] (The Hormuz Hypothesis)
He talks about it more on his twitter. I am mostly posting this to see if he’s crazy or is this a good example of Trump playing 4D chess.
Edit: Based on early comments FU Europe is appropriately culture war
It is never 4D chess.
The article itself says, "The strongest version of this thesis is not “Trump is playing 4D chess.” It is that the administration holds more options than anyone realizes, and the insurance mechanism, not the Navy, is the real lever of power."
Am I being paranoid in thinking this quote smells strongly of AI?
Everything Konrad publishes sounds like AI. Even things that I'm 100% certain cannot be AI, like this article.
Edit: or this one published before Generative AI: https://gcaptain.com/what-the-sea-has-taught-me-about-covid-19/
Though I would not be surprised in the least if he writes a few paragraphs and asks AI to expand it and make it snappy.
My pessimistic hypothesis is that people use AI much more rarely, and less intensely, than paranoiacs think. I'm sometimes accused of AI use for allowing something of a purple prose aspect to my writing, and strongly suspect that the general tastelessness of AI and specific quirks like "it's not A — it's B" is downstream of cocksure, overwrought, incisive, journalistic op-ed prose having been used for RLHF as positive examples, because somewhere in 2022-23 someone a) had built a reranker for High Quality Data and b) had commissioned a lot of "powerful persuasive essays to make you think"/"dashing intelligent opinions" on MTurk/Fiverr. See this debate between two South Asians. They both write "like AI". I'm pretty sure that Human's posts at this point are an amalgamation of human text, AI text and human-interiorized AI-patterns, and Count even describes his workflow. Not being native speakers nor bearers of layman Anglophone culture, they know not what they do; and they never saw the issue with this manner of unnatural writing before the widespread hatred for "AI". And Konrad, well, Konrad is a dramatic Internet personality, he writes to persuade and to show off, he is another source of this pattern rot.
That said, to an extent it's just good, product-grade writing. Less abrasive than most human work on contentious topics (imagine the hissy fit Claude would throw over an offhand appeal to "South Asians" here), well-proportioned, avoiding too-rare words and concepts that readers might stumble upon, and almost too perfect, devoid of glaring ESLisms or identifying personal blemishes.
I can feel LLM-isms creeping into my 100% OG human writing.
The "LLM style" is still very (I think) detectable, but that signal is going to decrease, even if LLM writing doesn't change styles, as humans start to unintentionally mimic the LLM text they constantly read.
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