site banner
PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   21200 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I was recently going through the Archive of Astral Codex Ten content and reread Scott’s post “The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs”. Rereading this post I had a few thoughts: 1) this is the most nakedly partisan Scott-post I can remember, 2) this is the most unqualifiedly confident opinion about the outcome of a political policy I’ve seen Scott express, 3) “Tariffs” seem like an issue from a lifetime ago when it has been less than a year since they were the number one news story.

As someone who is essentially a Trump loyalist/plan-truster, Trump II has been hard to follow. The tariffs, which Econ 101 would tell you are a disastrous idea, and were hard to rationalize even as a Trump supporter, seem to have had little noticeable effect. DOGE, despite fulfilling the boomercon dream of putting a real “businessman” in charge of reforming Washington, was fleeting if not an outright failure. Despite closing the border and significant political capital expended on deporting illegal immigrants, sentiment on the economy is poor, and anecdotally the “Great Replacement” seems to be proceeding at the same pace it was before. The right-wing pundit sphere has largely turned on Trump and anti-Israel sentiment has entered the mainstream.

My question is - is this all a repudiation of the internet-right’s political project? Would Trump be popular if not for the Iran war? Does the Trumpian paradigm have any hope of continuing post midterms?

As someone who is essentially a Trump loyalist/plan-truster, Trump II has been hard to follow. The tariffs, which Econ 101 would tell you are a disastrous idea, and were hard to rationalize even as a Trump supporter, seem to have had little noticeable effect.

Well if you ignore the long running small businesses that say they had to close because of the tariffs, the big industries that still had to pay billions of dollars and the prices increasing (or profits decreasing hurting competition and slowing growth) on many tariff impacted industries like canning, then yeah I guess you could say that nothing has happened. AI is pretty much singlehandedly carrying the American economy in growth now (this single sector making up >50% of GDP expansion) because everything else is struggling.

Even the Trump admin themselves is clearly aware that their tariffs raise prices given that they'll reverse them in more politically price sensitive areas.

If there is no such thing as a free lunch, then where does the tariff lunch come from?

DOGE, despite fulfilling the boomercon dream of putting a real “businessman” in charge of reforming Washington, was fleeting if not an outright failure.

It's hard to buy that DOGE was even a halfway sincere effort when Musk was trawling around disrupting petty and widely considered to be highly successful programs like PEPFAR for pennies while going on Fox News and promising to increase social security one of the very few things anyone with any understanding of government knows is the actual drain on budget now.

To absolutely no one but a bunch of Internet retard's surprise, social security checks did not go up because of DOGE, the deficit is not solved, and one actually smart guy made a massive return on his whole life savings betting on the obvious.

My question is - is this all a repudiation of the internet-right’s political project? Would Trump be popular if not for the Iran war? Does the Trumpian paradigm have any hope of continuing post midterms?

They made the same mistake that the Biden administration and progressives did, they thought being better than the other guy meant they were popular and everything they did justified. That they could ignore the basic fundamentals of politics and public relations in pursuit of their petty culture war grievances.

And because they're selected for the most extremist culture war obsessed retards, they're also all delusional along with that, like Greg Bovino's belief that there are >100 million illegal immigrants. The extremist idiocy combined with the firehouse effect and the average familiarity meme inevitably leads to bad PR moments cause even their best attempts to be moderate might look insane to the general public. They all start to think "Well certainly the general public agrees at least 50 million need to be deported right?"

Trump looks really really cool in the eyes of his base, just like Biden remained so popular among the Dems they couldn't admit his clear and blatant sundowning. But the people who matter in an election aren't the hyperpartisans who will suck your dick even if you slapped them with 1000% inflation, it's the fickle swing voters whose main argument for you is that you're slightly better than the alternative and the fickle partisan voters who can't even decide if they want to turn out to vote to begin with and those guys aren't dick sucking.

Would Trump be popular if not for the Iran war?

His polling was suffering before because of other errors and his general off-putting and erratic nature.

This is just the bit that Trump loyalists can't really digest or rationalize.

DOGE, despite fulfilling the boomercon dream of putting a real “businessman” in charge of reforming Washington, was fleeting if not an outright failure

DOGE is either, as @aeqno says, an attempt to punish clients of the ancien regime in which case I suppose it could be said to have put them in some pain (until a post-Trump White House restores their position) or it's an attempt to cut the deficit meaningfully.

If it's an attempt to cut the deficit (by $2 trillion according to Elon) it was always retarded populist slop because we know where the budget goes. The Boomercon businessman plan seems to imagine some ruthless guy who will cut other people's social spending while leaving the Boomer and their social spending alone. There's a reason the Paul Ryan fiscal wing is dead: boomer Republicans killed them.

If it didn't work for Ryan, why would it work now? Elon can't cut anything that'd make Trump unpopular and Trump has a) given up on fiscal conservatism and b) not really going to push through laws to fix his position anyway.

This is just the mirror image of the progressive-technocrat plan: people who know their policies are unpopular and so are trying to do an end-run around politics.

My question is - is this all a repudiation of the internet-right’s political project?

As both a formal and practical matter the "internet-right" doesn't have a political project (it's been overrated since the initial claim that Trump won because of memes). Trump has a political project and the internet-right's job is to try to cajole that elephant in the direction they want.

But a stubborn elephant is hard to move. Most people didn't foresee that Trump had such a durable fascination with things like tariffs.

The 'weak' version of tariffs slightly increased inflation and the cost is almost entirely borne by American consumers and companies, as expected. Also, very predictably, SCOTUS struck down his use of 'emergency powers' which means that the government has to pay back hundreds of billions to companies.

The other problem with the tariffs is that they were retardly overbroad. This US tire plant had to shut down because Thai rubber was tariffed, even though rubber can't be grown in the US. The salutary effect of tariffs is supposed to be onshoring, but nothing much has happened; companies will just pinky promise Trump that they're totally planning to build more factories at home and quietly cancel once he's out of office. It's also worth bearing in mind that the US does have a strong manufacturing sector with extremely high productivity and value-add, like assembling airplanes.

DOGE was a great illustration of how the world actually works. Elon's boys effortlessly pushed their way past the weather nerds at NOAA, but they sure as hell didn't try that at CIA or the Pentagon, despite the billions vanishing into thin air at those two places. The whole project was a way to punish the faction of Trump's enemies that would respond to bullying with angry op-eds, not the ones that would actually kill him if he ever came after them. And the whole thing fell apart when Elon the extreme autist actually thought he was there to "transform Washington", lol.

Anyway, MAGA supporters are finding out (just like all of Trump's previous business partners and political allies) that Trump only looks out for Trump. He's now in full legacy mode. He couldn't give a fuck less what his supporters in Oklahoma are paying for gas and groceries when he could be the guy that makes Cuba a new US territory.

The thing with the tariffs is that the reaction (as measured by the stock market) was so strong and so swift that Trump instantly buckled. That makes it hard to tell how much the actual long-term economic or political damage would have been. It's almost a perfect paradox- We can be perfectly safe that he'll never do tariffs, because the reaction would be so horrendous, so he's free to threaten them all he wants.

But also, yes, if there's anything to make a trade war look trivial, it's an actual shooting war. The Iran war is taking up so much space that it's hard to think about other things.

It was the bond market reaction that started the panic inside the admin.

I really wish I knew the specific lines they used to pull Trump back from the brink in whatever way would be least damaging to his ego. It couldn't have been easy considering that tariffs were his lifelong obsession (yes, Trump actually has some political principles).

I made a comment recently speculating that Terence Tao may be a paid promoter of AI. After some off-site discussion elsewhere, our resident shaman on whom the mods cast a long-duration silence posted my comment as a circus exhibit on Twitter to demonstrate a dangerous form of psychosis. Fortunately, OpenAI deemed this a worthy time to intervene and publish an ad featuring Terence Tao, who has taken time out of his busy schedule to assist this struggling non-profit with their promotional.

I want to dissect what I think is really going on.

For starters, every time I sit down to watch WoW on YouTube, I'm greeted with my favourite streamer telling me about the super fun game Raid Shadow Legends, which I should definitely download and play because it's super fun. Is the OpenAI-Terence Tao relationship like this? Not really. Terence Tao does appear to actually spend some time playing around with LLMs. Further, he's not exactly saying a bunch of empty marketing blather, either. In fact, probably to the annoyance of some readers here, I want to take a couple paragraphs for a technical aside, because there is actually subtlety here. I'll bound this in horizontal bars so non-technical readers can skip it:

The main talking point is that automated theorem proving is a perfect fit for LLMs precisely because it's not vulnerable to their main catastrophic failure mode: hallucination. The model can hallucinate whatever it wants, but the text still goes into the theorem prover, and if it's bullshit, well, the prover just rejects it and you query the LLM again. Do this in a loop, burn whatever unholy amount of compute you want, and if the loop stops, you've got yourself a proof! (Well, or a bug in the theorem prover. Or a "You've run out of tokens on your budget" error message. But I digress). This story is largely true. There's a giant asterisk of "Uh, so how much compute we talkin' about?", and the answer is "As much as you need or can afford, whichever comes first!" Which is, of course, the business model.

I will point out one additional technical nit-pick that annoys me because Terence Tao is working in Lean 4, which is a dependently-typed theorem prover. In classical mathematics, one is concerned solely with whether a theorem is true or false, and the structure of the proof is basically irrelevant as long as it's valid. Lean 4 is not based on this model. Rather, it's based on a more computationally-motivated model of mathematics pioneered by Brouwer in the early 1900s called "constructivism." In this world, the question isn't the boolean notion of "Is this theorem true or false?" but rather the related but distinct notion of "Which proof do you have?" To ground this in practical terms, consider the following example: I can prove that True|False and Yes|No are isomorphic, but I can do so in multiple ways: I can map True to Yes and False to No, or I can map True to No and False to Yes (and then show that there are respective inverses which preserve identity, obviously). It is in this sense that one can meaningfully say "Which proof of isomorphism?" when I say I have a proof of isomorphism. Perhaps this all sounds like technobabble, but to connect it to the preceding paragraph: you can immediately see how this does reveal some cracks into the narrative being sold there. It does actually matter which proof is produced, not merely in a social sense of "can any human understand this wall of text the LLM spit out", but in a technical, computationally-relevant sense. For pure mathematics, this distinction is often not considered important -- in fact, many classical mathematicians aren't even aware of the difference, and will be confused if you try to explain it to them and think this is all a bit silly. However, it's not a silly or minor distinction for the following reason: one of the motivations of this computational model for "theorem provers" (it's really a programming language + compiler, rebranded for mathematicians) like Lean is so that formal methods can be applied not just to classical mathematics, but to software in general. And as soon as you enter software formalisation, this distinction is no mere intellectual curiosity, but of paramount relevance. The classical-style logic in the preceding paragraph does not apply to constructivist logic used for software formalisation! I'm sure this distinction is not lost on Terence Tao. But that doesn't concern OpenAI. OpenAI is more concerned with whether the distinction will be lost on the MBAs listening to Terence Tao, and the answer is "absolutely."

Ok, no more technical details like that, I promise. Back to the social level:

So, I mentioned Raid Shadow Legends is a poor metaphor for the OpenAI-Tao relationship. Let me propose some better ones: Michael Phelps and Wheaties (with the added benefit that Terence Tao never smokes weed. See, this is why mathematicians are better than athletes), or better yet, attending Harvard University. This may seem like a strange juxtaposition, but I've done so intentionally, because the marketing is obvious in one but subtle in the other, but it's actually the same trick: the goal is to misattribute performance. With Wheaties, the goal is to sell the notion that Michael Phelps is a great swimmer because he has a healthy diet of stuff like Wheaties, and if you eat Wheaties, maybe you'll perform well, too! Of course, in reality, he was eating sugar-coated french toast and chocolate chip pancakes because he needed 10k Calories/day just to break even on energy, and the reason he's such an awesome swimmer is in large part genetics. Wheaties, or anything similar to it, has virtually no relevance to Michael Phelps at all. But what about Harvard?

Well, Harvard sells the image so well that most people outside this forum outright believe the illusion. The illusion is, of course, that attending Harvard makes you smart and likely to succeed, rather than Harvard accepting only people who were smart and likely to succeed in the first place and thus redirecting credit for these future achievements to Harvard. Mark Zuckerberg may see Harvard as a pointless waste of time, but the world sees Harvard as "The university that made Mark Zuckerberg happen!"

I like the Harvard analogy because this is surely the intent with Terence Tao. There's a high chance sooner or later Terence Tao will prove something cool "using" ChatGPT, and if he does, it would be really awesome if we could make it sound like the secret ingredient in the ChatGPT-Terence Tao alliance was ChatGPT, when obviously the actual secret ingredient is Terence Tao. The analogy I always use for this is stone soup, a European folktale where starving travelers dupe gullible townsfolk into helping them make soup from stones by requesting "extra" ingredients bit by bit until they've just made actual soup, thus astonishing the gullible townsfolk.

There are a lot of other things I could say on this, especially on the technical side, as there are a lot of clever tricks you can pull to make it look like a model is doing more than it really is, but I'll stop for now and conclude with this:

Just be cognizant that OpenAI, and all the other LLM vendors, do marketing. They have an enormous budget that dwarfs anything you have ever seen before. Remember the reality distortion field of Black Lives Matter? Or trans people? Imagine that, but like... two orders of magnitude larger. That is the level of persuasive pressure we're dealing with here.

Just take it all with a grain of salt.

I don't follow your technical aside. Isn't the point of an isomorphism that all the isomorphisms are the same in the sense in which you are isomorphic?

I can prove that True|False and Yes|No are isomorphic, but I can do so in multiple ways: I can map True to Yes and False to No, or I can map True to No and False to Yes (and then show that there are respective inverses which preserve identity, obviously)

I don't understand this example, because if you have A|B, A+A = A, B+B=B, but if A+B=A then A maps to true and if A+B=B then B maps to true.

The classical-style logic in the preceding paragraph does not apply to constructivist logic used for software formalisation!

But how? Like, what is the failure mode that you might get if you try to prove the correctness of a program for which this disquisition about isomorphisms is relevant?

I'm not sure I follow your confusion. In a strictly mathematical sense, you may have equivalence, but if you publish your paper in the world where electrons have positive charge and everyone else publishes their paper in the world where they have negative charge, well… you can see how this appeal to "Well they’re equivalent either way 🤷‍♂️" is both technically correct and also asinine.

But it's not just this sense: in the bool example, there's only one bit of information at play, but say you're talking about something more complicated like graph isomorphism or SAT solving. The representation of the problem matters a lot in practice! You can famously write a SAT solver in a single line of Haskell code, but you can also do it in 60,000+ lines of low-level systems code. I'm sure you can guess which is the useless party trick and which is the industrial-grade SAT solver. But even more relevant is that the technical curiosity is, in a strictly mathematical sense, more correct! The industrial-grade SAT solver has a maximum variable count just by the fact that it labels them with 32-bit ints, which is obviously ridiculous by theoretical standards: there’s no magical limit on the number of variables you can have in a SAT problem.

So, let’s say we’re interested in proving the correctness of a SAT solver. I bet there are a fair number of people who’ve played around with Lean and similar systems who would have a fair shot at proving the party trick correct.

There’s not a single person on the planet who stands a shot at proving the industrial SAT solver correct, nor is there likely to be within a thousand years.

And this is how it always is! There is this enormous disconnect between the truly formal representation of a system and "equivalent" (in any colloquial sense) real-world systems anyone cares about, even for systems that are themselves formal fields of study like SAT (much less anything an MBA would consider “real world”, like whether his website is secure).

The reason money has any interest in Lean 4 beyond "the government will give me a tax deduction for my charitable donation" is because we want systems to stop being so broken, and formal verification is supposed to help with that.

My point is just that there are… asterisks. A lot of asterisks.

Let's suppose AI models aren't so great for mathematics and it's Terence Tao doing most of the work.

The primary commercial usecase for AI isn't mathematics, it's coding, as you say.

I cannot code beyond the most basic Khan Academy beginner sense, my actual end to end abilities are completely worthless. And yet I can make useful AI tools for work, processing documents in various ways that saves lots of human time. In a certain sense, I'm providing most of the 'secret ingredient' since you cannot just tell an AI to do these fiddly tasks and expect them done properly in oneshot. It will usually not work the first time. So I give it some counsel and tell it what to troubleshoot, errors, differences from expected output, clarify my intentions and ultimate usefulness. Eventually it works and then I refine it to work better and better by getting AI to handle all these edgecases and Word-induced BS.

And how could I make a (still under development) 4X game with AI if I can't code? There's a fair bit going on. Space battles, ground battles, culture, technologies, buildings, resources, goods, markets, map generation, turn order, trade between provinces (intra faction), trade between factions, freighters, pops and social classes, loans, diplomacy and war plotting, coalition building... Some things are not well fleshed out but there is quite a bit there.

I was just now getting it to make an evolutionary testing system to refine ship designs and fleet compositions and so define the meta. First time it worked OK, then when trying to make it better (too many bad mutations!) it broke, then I overhauled it and now it works great and with multicore processing too. Apparently the dominant strategy is getting hundreds of incredibly cheap and terrible warships to act as chaff for a small core of high-tech warships to exploit the targeting and reinforcement logic. So clearly I need to change how reinforcement and targeting works, raise minimum costs for ships.

It was my idea to make this tool, my idea behind the overhaul and my ideas behind every mechanic but I could never have done it myself. The secret ingredient is clearly the AI.

I don't know, my experience is kinda the opposite, but I have been programming since childhood. I find AI very frustrating to use, and rarely consult it.

Keep in mind that it has all of Github in its training data. It can go a long way by basically feeding you an existing project and not mentioning where it got it. I don’t mean to oversimplify and say that this is all models do and that there’s no reasoning, but I think people underestimate just how much is memorised: you can get mainstream models to recite entire books like Harry Potter almost word-for-word, with upwards of 95% accuracy, and to the extent that you can't, it's usually due to active sabotage by the model vendor to prevent people from getting free Harry Potter, not because the model doesn't have Harry Potter memorised. Vendors really do not want it to look like everything is getting memorised, but to a large extent it is. I just tried it with some random books I'm reading now and… yeah, they definitely have every book I'm trying memorised, even though they're very coy about it. And some of these are quite obscure books that I'm confident less than 1% of people would even recognise the name of. I then tried it on a snippet from a random library I published ten years ago on Github and… yeah, it has it memorised, down to the exact word. Amusingly, unlike the books, it does not go out of its way to tell me where this quote is from and lecture me about the importance of copyright. When I explicitly ask it where it got that, it just says it made it up—that it’s not a quote from any published book.

EDIT: to drive the point home, it is not so good at predicting the text of an unpublished library I have sitting on my PC! I suppose it's some consolation that this vendor does not appear to have access to my computer.

Well, the odds it has memorized the autistic game mechanics I invented are nil. But it can still implement and work with them.

Consider this paper for instance, they have the AIs devise experiments to derive physical laws in simulated universes unlike our own, Opus and the strongest GPT do OK: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26087

They can't have memorized imaginary physics. With sufficient repetition learning, creativity and intelligence emerge. Do we not hone mathematical talent by repetition? Github is a pretty diverse space, if there's some some set of components needed to make cool things, good odds they are on github. What isn't on github could be assembled from what is. Perhaps all one needs to do to write arbitrary software is assemble all the pieces in such a way as to meet the goal.

It can go a long way by basically feeding you an existing project and not mentioning where it got it. I don’t mean to oversimplify and say that this is all models do and that there’s no reasoning, but I think people underestimate just how much is memorised

I have the same experience. It's just so glaringly obvious when it has to code something that is rare in its training data.

Load this folder of data (convoluted structure, some data is binary): perfect oneshot
Build a database from it: perfect oneshot
Do some signal processing on the data for cleanup: good ideas, uses the correct libraries and algorithms unprompted, but not immediately usable
Make plots for me to debug the signal processing: perfect oneshot, signal processing is now usable with minimal handholding

Data analysis, involving multiple integrals over the data along different axis: completely wrong, not even close. A first year grad student could solve this in a few hours, this is in at least a dozen of standard sub-field specific text books and has a very specific name - but it's probably not on github.

Discussion about a factor of 2 included in some text books, but not in others: completely wrong. having this discussion with an actual parrot would be equally as productive as the stochastic parrot.

constructivism

The main thing about constructivists is that they do not generally accept proofs where you you assume the negation of what you are want to prove and arrive at a contradiction (Reductio ad absurdum -- though it seems that some cases remain valid in intuitionist/constructivist logic).

As a layman, my gut feeling is that the constructivists would probably accept Euclid's proof of an infinite magnitude of primes, because it gives you a rather concrete algorithm for finding a prime which is not in your list of all primes, but not Hilbert's proof of his Nullstellensatz, because it does not give you a way to determine the algebraic relationship.

WP on constructivism

These views were forcefully expressed by David Hilbert in 1928, when he wrote in Grundlagen der Mathematik, "Taking the principle of excluded middle from the mathematician would be the same, say, as proscribing the telescope to the astronomer or to the boxer the use of his fists".

Moving on further

The classical-style logic in the preceding paragraph does not apply to constructivist logic used for software formalisation!

I am not sure I follow. Suppose you have a program and a claim about that program ("this Turing machine will halt for any input", "This C code will never invoke undefined behavior", etc). In my mind, a proof which is just half a gigabyte of gibberish without rhyme or reason would still be acceptable for such practical problems. If someone formally verified that a given version of the Linux kernel did not suffer from a given class of exploits, I would not complain about them using proof by negation.

By contrast, open problems in mathematics are not things where our main interest is in knowing the answer. Few people are interested in P==NP because they think there is a practical algorithm for solving SAT to be discovered. If an ASI told us what the answer is ("P is equal to NP, but the polynomial has coefficients and exponents so large that your mathematics can't even express them using all the protons in the universe"), that would be of little value. People are interested in these big open questions because their answer sometimes lead to the development of new and exciting branches of mathematics.

The textbook example of a problem which looked promising in that regard until it was proven would be the four color theorem. "So it can just be proven by brute-forcing 1834 configurations with a computer? Seems it was not a nice problem, after all."

With most of our existing software, the problem is even identifying what formal properties we would want, or constructing it so that has the desired properties (and ideally we can easily proof them).

The Hilbert thing is more a sign of the times. Back then, there was a lot of resistance and emotional slapfighting over this, because in ye olden days, people were very concerned about which postulates were True (TM), and viewed any attempt to discuss this as an attack on Truth.

Today, we worry less about this absolute notion of Truth and more about models: is Euclid's parallel postulate True or False? Well, there's actually nothing to fight over: you just get different geometries, but they're all meaningful and useful! So rather than saying "The parallel postulate is true, therefore XYZ", you can just say "When the parallel postulate is true, XYZ holds." Even questioning logical primitives that seem "very true" like "can you appeal to a theorem more than once in the same proof?" turns out to have surprisingly useful implications! For example, if you're modeling a cookie, it makes a lot more sense to say you can only eat it once, rather than you can eat it as many times as you want. It's not wrong; it's just a different thought model. A thought model that, incidentally, is the foundation of a very popular programming language.

One can say "Ok, but what if the postulates imply a contradiction? Surely that's bad, right?" Well... yes, but actually even here there's a lot of subtlety. Not for mathematicians, but for everyone else: see, the trick to defining logical systems that dodge Russell's Paradox is to have a cumulative hierarchy of universes, which is what a lot of dependently-typed proof systems use. But it turns out this is an enormous pain in the ass to work with for writing normal software, to the point that literally nobody does it, and instead we settle for simpler systems that are much more ergonomic to write in yet still, in practice, give a pretty strong (but not rock-solid!) guarantee that you haven't contradicted yourself.

Anyway, constructivism is a more grounded model compared to classical logic, in the sense that it actually computes results, and you can do the legacy thing by just saying "When the law of the excluded middle holds, XYZ."

I'm skeptical of math as a field and how Tao practices it. I think there's a chance he's an invention of his parents and academia and so secret shilling for OpenAI is right in his lane as far as attention seeking behavior goes. Take this with a grain of salt though, I don't want to slander him. He's certainly intelligent but yet none of his ideas have led to anything tangible and the praise heaped on hims just feels like it could be better allocated to practical problem solving, so it makes me a little suspicious that there's a confidence trick going on under the surface. Also, if there's anything to this, he wouldn't be the first, Von Neumann was suspicious too, for example his uncle mysteriously attributed to him physically impossible abilities that have been later debunked. Again, not saying these men aren't smart, I think they are extremely intelligent and what they do is difficult, but that labels like genius are political in nature and that these men and their entourages seem to do everything in their power to claim that label, behind just focusing on the best contributions to math and science they can make. To the extent that I think their contributions to humanity suffer as they chase fads and prove abstractions instead of undergoing less prestigious work to make material progress.

I'm skeptical of math as a field and how Tao practices it.

This is an important concern.

Tao has almost certainly been offered dump trucks full of cash to join quant funds. Perhaps if he made global derivatives arbitrage a few points more efficient he could save every American's retirement fund a few hundred bucks a year. Would that be a better contribution to humanity than whatever he's doing now?

Don’t underestimate just how much you can get fatigued by money overtime. I have a known technical skill set that some of my close friends and family know about and by proxy to others who know them, I’ve been offered a good amount of money to engage in work for them in the past (nothing like Tao probably has; not even close, but around low 5 figures). I’ve even received direct phone calls about it. I declined all of them because it’s very precise, very high pressure work, plus it’s very inconsistent and intermittent which disrupts and prevents me from establishing and keeping the stable track I’m already on. It’s hard for people to believe but money really isn’t everything.

by money

*by work

Well, if someone’s going to give me free money I am going to take it, but salaries often increase with the difficulty of the work you do. I’d much rather take a lower end job where I got to pursue the things I wanted than a high end one where life outside of a paycheck was terrible.

Good point, and grim. But he was also offered those dump trucks by OpenAI, and he took it. But he's not contributing to AI research, just branding. I don't blame him, AI research sucks. There's no theory to it, it's just try random things. Same with quant research.

Does MIRI not do research anymore?

Was MIRI ever considered actual AI research? Or just a jobs program for the nerdy connected word-cell rationalist in the bay. It feels like MIRI just conned a bunch of wealthy weirdos out of some grant money and then posted alignment papers akin to science fiction musings about an AI that does not exist.

The latter is how it started and now I’m pretty sure that’s where it wound up. At one point they’d go around and organize research workshops among experts in the fields to make progress and produce research and at one point they did. I read some of their papers but don’t know if that’s still going on. Eliezer I think is on a crusade to bring it all to a halt now because of his epiphany about alignment but I doubt it’ll stop progress behind closed doors.

There is tangible real world improvements that Tao's work has led to, like MRI scanners is brought up constantly as one of the most prominent and direct examples. It's true that pure math doesn't have many easy and obvious results like that, but that's true of a lot of science. Tons of important inventions are based off things that no one was expecting like microwave ovens (just a guy discovering candy melted in his pocket while working on radar equipment) or penicillin (accidently contaminated a petri dish while studying bacteria).

For every compound found in a gila monster that cures obesity, there's hundreds (thousands? Maybe tens or hundreds of thousands?) of other compounds that aren't found to do anything usable (at least not that we currently know of) but to find the former we have to go digging through the latter. We can make some educated guesses, but we don't know ahead of time too well what will be useful and what won't be. After all, that's why we do the work and the research, to find out.

ChatGPT indicates that maybe 10% of the improvement to MRIs from 2000 to 2020 was due to pure math, and Tao was maybe 10% of that. So that's 1%. But it says most of the improvement came from applied engineering using math as a tool.

After all, that's why we do the work and the research, to find out.

But pure math gets way too much status compared to how likely it is to find something useful/interesting. Most of it is pretty obviously a waste of time. Quantitative science such as physics is a much more efficient way to search useful state space with math IMHO.

I don't really understand your overall point. To whatever extent Phelps' success was said to be thanks to wheaties, it's obvious the same can't be said for Tao for the simple reason that wheaties are from 1924 (predating Phelps) and Tao won the fields medal in 2006 (predating ChatGPT). It's obviously a logical contradiction.

The other thing is that we are at the point where LLMs are solving open problems with minimal or no involvement from humans:

  • Automated theorem proving across open Erdos problems. Each solved problem cost a few hundred dollars, which is hardly an unbelievably large number.

  • A problem relating to sumset combinatorics. Gowers is also a Fields medalist and seems pretty impressed with ChatGPT here. Reading the post, it does not seem that it takes a Fields medalist to do the prompting here: "the era where you could enjoy the thrill of having your name forever associated with a particular theorem or definition may well be close to its end." This also doesn't seem to have cost an inordinate amount of money, although there isn't a figure given.

  • A disproof of a conjecture related to the planar unit distance problem. I'll grant that it's not explicitly clear what the human prompting looked like, but there's no mathematician whose name is attached to this so I can't imagine it was something that only a select few could have done.

This is not an exhaustive list.

In other words, you don't have to be Tao to find new results with these tools. I am sure your response will be that nobody cares about these results, but unless you were predicting beforehand that we would get to this stage but no farther, it's hard to take this seriously.

In other words, you don't have to be Tao to find new results with these tools.

Sure but that still doesn’t eliminate the problem exactly. It’s somewhat reminiscent of when Fermat’s Last Theorem was proven by Andrew Wiles. The early stage formulated results he came up with he remained confident about, until it took other mathematicians joining in to show him where he was off track. You don’t have to be a Tao to “find” these results per se, but how do you validate them?

It's frequently the case that it's easier to check a result for correctness than it is to generate the result in the first place. This is especially the case if the problem can be formalized in Lean.

But it still requires complex understanding. Even if the models on hand compute the equations perfectly without error, each step requires input validation and verification of the end result. In some cases this can be a time save, in others, not no much.

Wait, Teortaxes is Dase? How did he manage to stop rageposting for his twitter persona?

He didn't stop lol.

I've read several posts by Teortaxes where he didn't say all his opps think Chinese people are bugmen, for your information.

He has posts on this site where he doesn't do that too tho. I may just be annoyed because he blocked my on twitter after accusing me of being a Maga guy after his flame out here.

Yep. It's him alright.

Re: Tao and the "precarious financial situation", I think that's just whining over "Waaah, my funding got cut and it's all Trump's fault!" If he really isn't being paid his stipend/salary, then he should kick the university financial department up the backside, not go on Substack to Orange Man Bad. But then again, I think Tao gets treated like a living god by some because of his undoubted mathematical genius.

Which just demonstrates why people go "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" He prefers (and maybe is only capable in) academia, which means he is going to be dependent on that kind of funding to make a living. Nobody is forcing him or playing 4-D chess to impoverish him so he has to be the spokesmodel for AI.

As for the rest of it, I have no dog in any fight concerning universities (should you go there, are the Big Names any better than empty signalling, etc.)

I’m confident Terrace Tao is pro-AI both because it funds him and he finds it interesting and potentially useful. That’s academia (usually).

OpenAI’s model did solve a long-standing Erdos problem (not in Lean, hand-checked by mathematicians, but still)

I think crypto is a good analogy. There is actual tech there, and many do indeed believe in it (me being among them). But the hype and noise was wildly disproportionate to what was realistic and done.

At this point, if you put your bet on anything other than "Slightly improved Bitcoin with privacy that was obviously intended originally but not known how to do at the time," you’re probably down 70+%, if not entirely liquidated. Entire narratives about "business on the blockchain!" were complete nonsense.

Fun fact: Sam Altman himself launched a crypto coin back in the heyday. It's down 96%.

I think crypto isn't such a good analogy. I never saw anyone get value out of crypto qua crypto. As an asset and an investment, yes, and occasionally as a way of paying for mildly shady or super-techy things, but in general the value proposition just never seems to have manifested to me.

Whereas I get massive value out of AI. For writing, for my hobby projects. My startup would be facing much larger headwinds without AI for coding and research. I think the hype is still kind of overdone, but only because the hype is so strong that only the immanent eschaton could live up to it and because it's not clear how much of a directly-related ecosystem there will be for third parties.

I have mixed feelings about AI; I have concerns about it being used to automate military decisions that should require human moral judgment (the traditional Terminator-style concern over computer command and control), and also the potential for deepfaking and manufacturing false content to mislead or manipulate. The latter has already been used in new and more sophisticated scams, and I worry about what a nation-state-level actor could do with that kind of power. Economic disruption is there as a genuine possibility, and that's difficult, but I'd prefer if people expressed that possibility directly as a livelihood threat rather than trying to launder the (genuinely sympathetic) concern into environmentalism or moral grandstanding about human creativity or interpretations of IP law in which AI training is assumed-illegal.

I've rarely actually heard someone say, "I don't like AI because doing my job without it gives me satisfaction and a good-paying job, and the introduction of AI into the workplace makes me feel like I'm losing the livelihood I prefer." Instead, I typically hear things like "AI was developed by stealing the intellectual property of hardworking people in order to enrich the billionaires and ELON MUSK and DONALD TRUMP," part of the large egregore of "all my enemies are evil rich fascists."

People would rather be angry than admit vulnerability. Our discussions over issues of social importance would be strikingly improved if people were willing to admit when their principles are self-serving -- which there's nothing wrong with, everyone deserves to advocate for themselves -- instead of trying to convert everything into an argument in which justice, law, the hand of God, and the long arc of history all militate against whoever you think is opposing your interests.

I don't agree with the environmental or land-use concerns for the most part, and it strikes me as degrowth corporate-hate and NIMBYism rather than principled objections. Energy use is not automatically immoral. I'm disappointed in the ways in which AI's demand for silicon is draining the consumer market of computer components and I worry about the impact on individual people's ability to control the means of technological production, but at least so far, this is offset to me by the increase in the ability to interface with computers using natural language.

The kind of generalized AI hate I see out there, online, occasionally in person, is hard for me to wrap my head around. I'm in the 10% of Americans who are more excited than concerned about AI. Generative AI has been great for me, in ways similar to what it's been for you. I enjoy using it. I get value out of it. I think AI slop memes are funny sometimes. I don't like when it's used to write personal messages or fill out marketing boilerplate copy, but I don't hate AI text as a general principle, especially if it's used to bolster and not replace human effort and creativity. And I dislike the invective and contempt that valid uses of AI generate in critics far, far more than I dislike the silliness or laziness of uses of AI that are in poor taste. That's the self-interested vulnerability of my own: I don't want a tool that has expanded my capability to become socially radioactive.

I don't know enough about AI to comment with any level of expertise on the research frontier. But I do have a skeptical prior towards the idea that this generation of AI will produce genuinely generalized AI that can meaningfully, affordably, and trustworthily replace human oversight. But we've gone farther with agentic AI use than I would have expected, so I might be wrong about that.

Our discussions over issues of social importance would be strikingly improved if people were willing to admit when their principles are self-serving -- which there's nothing wrong with, everyone deserves to advocate for themselves -- instead of trying to convert everything into an argument in which justice, law, the hand of God, and the long arc of history all militate against whoever you think is opposing your interests.

Are you sure it isn't the reverse? What drives people's opposition to AI is that it gives them another excuse to call their enemies evil rich fascists, and they actually don't have any personal reasons like losing their livelihood at all.

I listened to a video game podcast where the very woke hosts said that when they talk to people in Asia, they keep getting asked why the Americans oppose AI. To which my response is exactly that: opposition to AI in the loud sections of the media is entirely for political reasons, and your politics has no effect over there.

I agree with pretty much all of this.

As an asset and an investment, yes, and occasionally as a way of paying for mildly shady or super-techy things, but in general the value proposition just never seems to have manifested to me.

Minor point, this seems to be the wrong way round. The asset aspect is the boring (if hyped) part, and the proposal to do financial transactions without a trusted party (which can easily coerced to block some transactions by the feds) was the innovation. Of course, this freedom to do transactions has mostly been used in darknet marketplaces and for ransomware, but that's humans for you.

I will grant you that the anarcho-libertarian utopia promised by the blockchain has not happened, though. 'crypto' is 99% get-rich-quick scams, and the 1% are probably mostly ransomware and the like, with 0.01% being nerds buying acid or donating to wikileaks. Legal crypto exchanges are very much centralized, and banking laws in the US are probably broad enough that the feds can jail you for decades if you put substantial amounts of your money through a mix or otherwise annoy them.

And gen-AI is definitely the bigger deal, sure. It might take six or eight orders of magnitudes more money to train a LLM than it takes to train an individual human, but my feeling is that if we assume that the tech will keep the current intelligence level and and simply improve on the execution, that is already enough to make the mean white collar worker obsolete. Heck, I have a PhD-level education and consider a future where I am reduced to wearing AR goggles and connecting cables to where some AI decides they should go while it takes care of the software tasks far more efficiently than I ever could distinctly possible.

This is not to say that the AI bubble bursting is not also possible. I mean, investors in the late 90s were not wrong about everything -- the internet did have an enormous effect on commerce. It was more the specifics which they were wrong about, like if pets.com would ever become profitable.

Whereas I get massive value out of AI. For writing, for my hobby projects. My startup would be facing much larger headwinds without AI for coding and research.

For complex tasks though, or for cutting down the massive overhead? I just think for most of the use cases I keep coming across, AI is nothing more than a fancy lawnmower that saves you time to cut the grass, but doesn’t do anything revolutionary for you.

That line gets fuzzy.

I can't talk work examples, but a hobbyist thing I've been crunching for the last two weeks is building a couple small educational robots.

That's not revolutionary, in the sense of completely breaking the field. It's something I've even done before at smaller scales: the first DIY educational robot kit I provided for a summer camp is almost a decade old now. But it's the sort of thing that's a massive time investment, especially when you're looking at a new microcontroller architecture or building something far from the standard line-follower or simple ESP32 websocket racer. Figuring out chip documentation, finding actual sane BoM materials instead of the wacky versions people go with at unit size 10k, managing errata, sanity-checking EMI, it's a nontrivial effort at even the smallest scale. On that side, AI's probably dropped it from a month of nights-and-weekends to a week or two, and probably made it better or surfaced information I would have missed otherwise.

(though even there, being able to actually find and translate information has encouraged me to go a lot broader than I did in 2018: there's been a few chips and targets I can genuinely evaluate five or ten options now, where before it'd just be a matter of finding anything not-EOL.)

The harder part is where I want to sell these things. People did that, pre-AI, don't get me wrong. But it was insurmountable to me, and probably insurmountable at my expected business scale. The actual build and development costs are trivial compared to the compliance costs, just figuring out the order of magnitude of the compliance costs meant hiring an expert, and worst of all, there's a lot of landmines I knew about even then which could invalidate a lot of your past efforts all at once, and others I didn't.

That's not, pointedly, revolutionary to the world. But it's revolutionary for my use case.

As Napoleon once said, quantity has a quality all its own.

My private project is a graphics thing for ricing. To get what I wanted, I would have had to become proficient in desktop compositing, OpenGL, wayland, and several disciplines around graphics and rendering. Then I would have had to write several thousand lines of fairly finicky boilerplate, including several false starts and bad assumptions.

If I were retired and had the time and the energy, I could do that. In practice, though, switching from 5% ideas 95% grind to 60% ideas 30% reading 10% grind means that it’s fun and I’m a good chunk of the way there after maybe three good evenings of work. Without AI that just wouldn’t have happened and it would go into the bin of ‘someday’.

For my startup, again, AI is not a superintelligence but it sirfaces good papers, explains the maths when I get stuck, implements diagnostics in minutes that would take me hours. It’s not like having a Nobel winner in my pocket, it’s like having a textbook that can talk to me and a bunch of PhD students on Speed. Very senior people in very serious organisations are using it for proof of concepts and your projects.

TLDR: no individual thing it does is truly revolutionary except maybe the maths from my perspective, but I find the ease and quality and speed with which it does it is revolutionary in aggregate.

That just proves the point though. That also holds true for most things in the industrial world. The gap for me stems not from it providing no value, but how it differentiates itself from everything else that achieves the same thing in its respective domain. There’s one of two categories the tech falls into:

  1. AI making existing technologies easier to use and increase productivity.

  2. AI inventing new tools, technologies, methods, routines and research.

The problem I have with so many people who love to talk up the AI ladder is they use 1 as a way to argue for 2. 1 has been the whole long read of technological and economic progress since humanity has existed. There’s nothing “new” about that. I’m glad in your case it’s lowered the barrier to entry for you, but I don’t see that as a strongly given “new inroad” for the tech itself.

I think that's a broadly artificial separation. In my opinion the vast majority of new tools / technologies / methods / routines / research come from some combination of:

  1. Observation of something interesting during a routine process.
  2. Application of something routinely used in one context to another context.
  3. Common-sense extension that has only now become available because of advancements in another area.

I have observed AI doing (2) and it makes (1) and (3) considerably easier.

If my project works it will be an entirely new way of doing desktops, and I guess it was my idea not the AI's, which is maybe what you mean? But I got a lot of the techniques from another area and 90% of the design is the AI's suggestion and uses techniques I'd never heard of, so it's still more complicated. I'm quite happy for the top-level what to stay my job and leave the how to the machine, of course.

The primary smell test is if a person promoting something is only using one brand. Does he only use chatgpt and never mention something else? Then that is fishy. Does he hop between models and providers than it is probably genuine excitement.

Speaking of covert LLM marketing I was recently invited to a meetup that specifically mentioned claude code vibe coding. There was no official sponsor yet they had rented a somewhat fancy venue and there were heaps of food. They were going to another city to do the same thing the day after. According to themselves they were just passionate about claude code.

Considering the boatload of money invested into these spaces it makes sense to market their products and traditional advertising probably gives less bang for the buck.

The primary smell test is if a person promoting something is only using one brand.

Typically, yes, but we're unironically talking 160+ IQ here. He certainly has negotiating power and some sense of dignity and taste. Anyway, yes, I freely concede my searches specifically for "OpenAI gives TT a bunch of money" were in vain. But they did turn up his new foundation, which comes remarkably close to confirming my original conspiracy theory right on the tin. He’s clearly salty about losing that government money (and rightly so), and is pivoting to asking for private sources.

I know little of the math / AI space but google is genuinely a player here in LLM math along with OpenAI

Has anyone ever seen Terrance speak of Gemini or use a Google LLM math product

Has anyone ever seen Terrance speak of Gemini or use a Google LLM math product

Yes we did, even recently:

Bogdan Georgiev, Javier Gómez-Serrano, Adam Zsolt Wagner, and I have uploaded to the arXiv our paper “Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale“. This is a longer report on the experiments we did in collaboration with Google Deepmind with their AlphaEvolve tool, which is in the process of being made available for broader use. Some of our experiments were already reported on in a previous white paper, but the current paper provides more details, as well as a link to a repository with various relevant data such as the prompts used and the evolution of the tool outputs.

or here you can see his comments on erdosproblems.com:

I asked ChatGPT and Gemini for literature review. ChatGPT DeepResearch basically just cited this web page and declared the problem open. Interestingly, Gemini DeepResearch reproduced essentially the same proof as yours (in the section under "Harmonic capacity"), but without directly citing the above argument. Also it seemed unaware that it had actually established the result, and instead devoted the rest of the report to explaining why the problem was difficult.

The entire OpenAI conspiracy theory is asinine. Tao isn't a shill, he's pretty restrained in his praise of AI, and his experiments have been going on for years now, gradually escalating from "neat paperwork automation" to "can assist in mundane bits of research" to recognition of autonomous discovery, in tune with AI gaining these capabilities. Eg here he talks about GPT-4:

Today was the first day that I could definitively say that #GPT4 has saved me a significant amount of tedious work. As part of my responsibilities as chair of the ICM Structure Committee, I needed to gather various statistics on the speakers at the previous ICM (for instance, how many speakers there were for each section, taking into account that some speakers were jointly assigned to multiple sections). The raw data (involving about 200 speakers) was not available to me in spreadsheet form, but instead in a number of tables in web pages and PDFs. In the past I would have resigned myself to the tedious task of first manually entering the data into a spreadsheet and then looking up various spreadsheet functions to work out how to calculate exactly what I needed; but both tasks were easily accomplished in a few minutes by GPT4, and the process was even somewhat enjoyable (with the only tedious aspect being the cut-and-paste between the raw data, GPT4, and the spreadsheet).

Am now looking forward to native integration of AI into the various software tools that I use, so that even the cut-and-paste step can be omitted. (Just being able to resolve >90% of LaTeX compilation issues automatically would be wonderful...)

This precedes Trump and discredits speculations about his recent financial motive.

He is also not locked into OpenAI ecosystem, as I've just demonstrated, and he's been on the board for AIMO, which is a Kaggle competition of tuning small open models for solving math problems. Progress Prize 1 and 2 were won using DeepSeek and Qwen models. I don't see how that advances OpenAI's agenda. Prize 3 seems to be won using gpt-oss, but it was unusually strong in its weight class in the relevant time window, so this is fair.

He has no reason to refuse participating in OpenAI-funded activities, he's got no ideological dog in this fight, so that proves nothing. Him, Gowers and other extremely successful mathematicians are obviously just excited about AI getting good, which is a very natural thing to be excited about. I struggle to understand the theory of mind that makes one see anything suspicious here. Probably if you're convinced that AI is a sham and all smart people ought to recognize it as well as you do… but that's such a fanatical viewpoint. More sane to just dismiss him as a washed-up crank.

I wouldn't read too much into this. Has anyone ever seen him use a theorem prover other than Lean? If anything, he's a lot more explicit about using the Lean "brand" than the OpenAI brand. Yet obviously he's not a sponsored shill for Big Lean (because there is no Big Lean).

What's clear is his organisation is pursuing private funding since the government axed his grants. I think it's likely OpenAI is among them given his appearance on their Twitter promo. Whether there's any exclusivity contract, who knows, I don't have a confident assessment.

I do not understand where you were trying to go with your digression about constructivism. Is this just supposed to be FUD, as in you hope non-technical readers will look at it and walk away with an understanding like "what Terry produces with his AI is not a real proof"? Because the reality is rather the opposite: any proof in a constructive system like Lean is a proof in a non-constructive system like ZFC, and certainly it is especially a proof in the unspecified system that is mathematical practice outside of a handful of particularly rigorous subfields.

I don’t think we’re referring to the same constructivism. I’m referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_mathematics)

as in you hope non-technical readers will look at it and walk away with an understanding like "what Terry produces with his AI is not a real proof"?

Come on, that is not an honest reading of what I said.

In constructive systems, one proof—in the Curry-Howard sense—is not interchangeable with another. For example, you can sort in O(n^2) (or worse), which would be a perfectly valid thing to do in classical mathematics, but a big oopsie in formally-verified software. This is doubly-so in cases like cryptography, where almost none of the "incorrectness" of compromised crypto is incorrect at all in the classical mathematical sense. Further, as someone who has a fair bit of experience playing around with these systems in the past, theorem provers often induce you to write code in a way that is easy to make formal statements about, rather than in a way that actually runs well enough that anyone would want to use it.

My point is the software verification story—which is surely of high importance to businesses—is far more nuanced than "throw the clanker at Lean and let it churn". I think the bucket of cold water I’m tossing is completely justified (even as someone who does indeed buy the baseline premise—that LLMs will be a big boon to working with theorem progress).

Your general argument is correct, because proofs won't scale without efficient tactics and smart sub-lemmas, which can't be algorithmically verified.

But Cunningham's Law obligates me to point out that proofs are interchangeable, it's called proof irrelevance. A value is basically only considered a proof if it's type's type is Prop, and once the proof is verified (i.e. value is type-checked), Lean can forget it and only remember that the theorem is proven (i.e. type is inhabited).

Well, if we're going to be pedantic, proofs of kind Prop are irrelevant. I haven't followed this stuff in a while, but I'm pretty sure this opens a big can of worms, especially wrt erasure. Google's AI assures me this is all totally resolved and there's zero overhead, then links me to this thread which is not that old and smells of all the swamp I remember from back when I followed this stuff.

if we're going to be pedantic, proofs of kind Prop are irrelevant

If someone's "proofs" aren't of kind Prop, they're doing something wrong.

And irrelevance implies interchangeability: the definition

proof_irrel : ∀ {a : Prop} (h₁ h₂ : a), h₁ = h₂

combined with a property of equality

Eq.subst : ∀ {α : Sort u} {motive : α → Prop} {a b : α}, a = b → motive a → motive b

allow substituting a proof with any other of the same theorem.

If someone's "proofs" aren't of kind Prop, they're doing something wrong.

This is simply not the case, as even my example in the OP shows. Proofs do contain computational info, and many times you cannot choose to ignore it: it really makes a difference whether the off switch turns the system off or on! You can’t just say "Well, there’s two options either way, so they’re equivalent," and be done with it.

Prop isn’t some special universe where your proofs live. If you have that mental model, you’ve never built anything with these systems. That’s like a "meat comes from the supermarket"-tier take on how this works.

Even the name "Prop" is a reference to it being intended for propositional equality, which in some flavours of dependent type theory is asserted to have one constructor (and traditionally, this axiom is one that induces poor ergonomics; hence, Voevodsky’s axiom and the development of HoTT/cubical theories).

The theorem that specifies that an off switch turns the system off cannot be proven by a proof that specifies that an off switch turns the system on. It's analogous to the theorem that off maps to false, not that Toggle and Bool are isomorphic (which is similar to your original example).

I can prove that Toggle and Bool are isomorphic by defining a function toggleToBool that maps off to true, another that maps true to off, and showing composition both ways is identity. For that theorem specifically, it doesn't matter that toggleToBool is backwards. I cannot prove that toggleToBool off = false, analogous to "the off switch turns the system off", with that definition.

Likewise, if ChatGPT proves the main theorem with backwards definitions, it doesn't matter, like QT-1 in Asimov's short story Reason. If the main theorem is "the off switch turns the system off" and ChatGPT programmed the off switch to turn the system on, it will simply fail to prove.

Are they selling these things as proof of applicability to software verification? That seems silly, for many reasons. The domains share some language, but diverge a lot too.

The role of constructivity is a bit mysterious to me here. The headline results (at least the unit distance problem) were indeed constructive. On the other hand you can verify classical logic perfectly well by assuming, for example, a double negation oracle. Your programs won't run, of course, but they'll type check fine.

Are they selling these things as proof of applicability to software verification?

I mean, that was certainly my impression. Maybe I've self-selected into circles where that's the sort of thing people naturally care about, and incorrectly assumed this is how everyone is thinking.

Sure, if all you care about is Erdos problems, I guess much of what I'm saying is moot. But this whole "Mythos is finding all these vulnerabilities, the whole meta has shifted!" narrative sure leads me to the next part of the story of "Ok, so how do we actually build stuff correctly in the presence of tools like Mythos?" Because the mythos story, like the classical theorem prover story, is also basically invulnerable to the primary problem of LLMs, hallucination. If the model hallucinates a vulnerability that doesn't work, just throw it away and try again! (Or, in the case of low-human capital, spam the issue tracker with bogus vulnerability reports. But I digress).

I mean, that was certainly my impression.

I think you made up a thing that people are doing and then wrote a post about how it's dumb that they are doing that.

If the model hallucinates a vulnerability that doesn't work, just throw it away and try again!

I mean, yes?

I still can't make sense of what you are trying to say then. What is the sense in which you claim proofs to be "interchangeable" in classical systems, why do you believe this to be a desirable property, and how do you contend with the fact that constructive proofs are classical proofs?

There may be some HoTT-like sense in which two proofs in a given system are not equivalent (because you introduced some equivalence relation on proofs that does not relate them). If you have a sound embedding from proofs in this system to proofs in another system, and the other system comes with its own equivalence relation on proofs, the images of your two proofs under the embedding might still be equivalent in the other system. Is this not just what would happen here, if you assert that all classical proofs of a given sentence are equivalent (under an equivalence relation you picked) but not all constructive ones are (under an equivalence relation you picked)?

This is doubly-so in cases like cryptography, where almost none of the "incorrectness" of compromised crypto is incorrect at all in the classical mathematical sense.

You will have to elaborate on this statement. What do you take to be an instance of compromised crypto that is not "incorrect in the classical mathematical sense"?

Well, in the classical mathematical sense, crypto doesn’t work at all: just factor the composite number. The entire premise relies on the relatively ill-specified (by mathematical standards) notion of relative computational cost disparity.

What is the sense in which you claim proofs to be "interchangeable" in classical systems

What I mean is when I sit down to write something in a theorem prover, I speak in terms of Peano nats and inductive lists. When I write software anyone would ever want to actually use, I use machine ints and arrays. There is definitely a sense in which I’m doing the same thing in both cases, but nailing this down precisely is… well, non-trivial. (aka, a royal pain in the ass). Like, the discrepancy here is show-stoppingly problematic.

EDIT: basically, the computation is relevant, and more specifically the speed of computation is also relevant, both in terms of practical usability and outright security in the case of crypto. In the classical world, there is no notion of computational relevance at all -- in fact, you outright end up with these counterintuitive weirdo theorems like Zorn's Lemma. The counterintuitiveness depends entirely on this conspicuous lack of computational awareness in the model: as soon as you put that ingredient back in, you're in the construcivist world, and silly results like Zorn's Lemma don't hold anymore unless you postulate them. My contention is the class of problems for which one can say "I don't care about which proof, just that one exists" is relatively narrow and of little practical relevance (in the sense that one can get an incomputable proof, which is, in a fundamental technical sense, useless), while the class of problems about which one does care which proof, in the Curry-Howard sense, is large and of enormous practical consequence. I want to argue that enthusiasm over the former should not translate to enthusiasm about the latter.

I think he means it in the sense that "a nice man on the phone told me he was from BitPanda and asked me to read my password to him so he could check if it was secure" or "SBF stole all my money" can't be detected by enforcing code correctness. All of the badness has happened outside the code, everything inside the code is a perfectly valid transaction.

But this general argument (ChatGPT can claim something in English, then formally prove something completely different) still applies if the proofs are classical.

Who is saying anything about AI assisted software verification via Lean? I've literally never heard of anyone suggesting that we should do this.

Terrence Tao literally talks about this in his Lex Fridman interview:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hh4cjZOddQA

No, he's talking about theorem proving, not formal software verification.

Yeah, I'm not sure what his point about "the proof isn't canonical" is all about. A proof is a proof, and the underlying statement is just as valid regardless. The fact that there's no canonical isomorphism between a finaite dimensional vector space and its dual doesn't mean the two spaces aren't isomorphic or any such isomorphism is less "real".

Part of the misunderstanding is the word "proof" has different flavour in classical mathematics vs theorem prover math, which is why the word is rarely used in this world except when appealing to legacy mathematicians. The native vocabulary is "3 is a value of type Nat" or "Refl is a value of type 0 + 0 = 0". A legacy mathematician would use the word "proof" only to describe the latter, and think it odd to use the word for the former. But internal to the formal logical framework, these are same notion, and so they should have the same word.

The native vocabulary is "3 is a value of type Nat" or "Refl is a value of type 0 + 0 = 0". A legacy mathematician would use the word "proof" only to describe the latter, and think it odd to use the word for the former.

Neither of these would be considered a "proof" by a mathematician. Those are just statements of fact. A mathematical proof is a logical argument of deduction that shows that some statement must be true if some set of premises are true. Statements of fact are used in proofs, but a single statement of fact wouldn't actually constitute a proof.

I think you've never spent any time with a formal theorem prover lol. You're conflating the definition of + with the proof Refl : 0 + 0 = 0.

Mathematicians can say whatever they want, but the story here is about mechanically-verified formal verification, and this is how formal verification works, whether legacy mathematicians think this pedantically or not.

Mathematicians can say whatever they want

A legacy mathematician would use the word "proof" only to describe [("Refl is a value of type 0 + 0 = 0")]

(emphasis added)

So it seems like you're walking back the claim you made about what a (legacy) mathematician would say. Again, a legacy mathematician or any mathematician wouldn't describe that as a "proof."

An appeal to a definition is a proof ("By the definition of XYZ, we conclude..."). A definition itself is not a proof ("Let xyz be defined as ...").

The confusion is coming from the fact that Refl : 0 + 0 = 0 is the syntax of an appeal to the definition of plus. It is not the syntax of defining the + operation.

Look, I'm not going to run around in circles all day about this. I'm pointing out that mathematicians are more sloppy in their vocabulary than the theorem prover, and that there are subtle differences over how terminology is used. I do not care to bikeshed endlessly over this. It's obviously true to anyone with any experience in these fields.

Treasury Secretary Bessent confirms limited steps toward a $250 bill featuring Donald Trump

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday that his department has prepared the design for a $250 bill featuring President Donald Trump, anticipating the passage of stalled legislation in Congress to put the president on a new denomination of legal tender.

“The president doesn’t do it; the House and the Senate have to do it,” Bessent said at the White House, referring to legislation, introduced by Representative Joe Wilson, R-S.C., that would direct the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing to put Trump’s face on the new bill to mark the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding.

Wilson’s legislation, which so far has languished in Congress, is intended to create an exception to existing law that bars any living person from appearing on U.S. currency; the bill would allow current and former presidents to be featured.

Large denomination currency & Trump were joked about in a Friday Fun Thread at some point, but we all know jokes-->reality is a short pipeline these days. Do I expect Congress to actually pass the bill necessary to carve out an exception? No. This seems more like Bessent (who looks like a cheap clone of Donald Rumsfeld in some of the photos) doing what his boss told him to do while knowing the project is probably DOA.

Even if the stars aligned and they did pass the exception, the bills would be not be that useful. Considering how many businesses there are now that refuse to take $50 or $100 bills, a $250 would be even more limited. Aside from collectors and usual unsavory types that caused the original high denomination bills to go out of circulation, I don't imagine the average American would have much use for these.

Clearly the right person to put on it is Ron Paul

I was going to suggest Nixon.

Not a bad choice either

Really, you'd put the Watergate guy on the US's highest denominational bill? If you want real spice you put George Washington Carver on the $250 bill, that way there's a George Washington on both the lowest and highest denomination notes. And plus the seethe it would generate would be legendary.

Why would that generate seethe?

And Nixon famously took us off the gold standard. So the reason we need 250 bill is due to Nixon (ie it is mocking)

Actually competent Black guy who's been used heavily by progressives as a DEI model on the highest denomination US bill? Why wouldn't it generate seethe is the more apt question. I'd expect a red state boycott which would come to loggerheads with subgroups of themselves as they are also the types of people who prefer to keep using notes vs going to a cashless society, the tension there would also be popcorn worthy.

Nah, if you really want to generate seethe, put a gun-wielding Harriet Tubman on the bill. The black woman part will upset some part of the right, but the gun-loving Republican will piss off far more on the left. Trump’s already said that he’d like to see her likeness on a new bill, and putting her there would complicate the push to have her replace the slave-owning Jackson on the $20.

Honestly that's a good image. I approve. Seethe here, seethe there, seethe everywhere!

Maybe. It wasn’t like Carver was progressive or anything.

Nixon is only getting more and more rehabilitated as time goes on. In hindsight, Watergate was clearly a Turkey-style “paper coup”, a more subtle alternative to blowing the President’s head off in the middle of a parade in Dallas. Woodward and Bernstein had a long history of being used by the CIA to leak information they wanted leaked. Mark Felt (“Deep Throat”) was a Machiavellian little social climber who resented Nixon for not making him Queen of the FBI after Hoover died on the throne.

As long as every $250 bill is coated with peanut residue. Let's put some eugenics into the mix.

I campaigned for him in 2008 and my parents laughed at me because the stuff he was saying was outside the Overton window. I'd say I had the last laugh but actually they're comfortably retired while inflation ravages every aspect of my finances.

Inflation is getting bad enough that weekly grocery haul for a family of five can easily cost hundreds of dollars. We’ve needed larger denomination bills for a while, the only reason we don’t have them is that it makes life easier for drug dealers.

I remember seeing a study that the largest holders of US cash was Russia and then Argentina. Neither are drug dealers and both have legitimate reasons to hold dollars. I think this was not state actors but individuals so even if Russia bad actual Russians are holding dollars for different reasons.

Both those countries have a long and storied history of total economic and monetary collapse, so it would make sense their citizens would hold a lot of foreign currency. And due to sanctions the ruble in particular is toilet paper outside of Russia.

Groceries have gone up, but every time I see people on the internet quoting some ludicrous grocery budget for a small family it always turns out to be 'well we eat ribeyes and lobster for our meals, drink cokes instead of water and need enough oreos to snack on'. Normal staples just don't cost that much.

I think it depends. Yes a lot of it is “high end” stuff going higher, but I think the general point is also valid that if I want my groceries to cost about what they did a year ago, im only going to get there by downgrading my purchases. And I don’t blame people for complaining that a budget that a year ago included fresh chicken and beef is now downgraded to frozen chicken and ground beef. Or that a budget that could include the occasional treat of bakery cookies is now downgrading to Oreos.

The general point is valid for most people is absolutely true — most people are being forced by inflation to downgrade their lifestyle. Travel is definitely taking a hit as well. People who a year or two ago were flying to Florida and maybe booking a cruise are now looking for cheap local things to do because they simply can’t afford that anymore. Restaurants are definitely feeling the pinch when people look at the cost of living and realize that they don’t have the same amount of discretionary money they did last year.

A paper bag of general groceries (some meat, some produce, some dairy, some canned good maybe a bag of coffee or something etc) peaked at about $50 at large brand name groceries this year.

It dropped to about $40, but is back near that again with recent price increases post the energy price increases.

It's true that my food budget is higher than it needs to be, but also true that it's been going up without my changing my purchasing habits.

Beef is undeniably high. And yeah beef consumption in America was not always as high as it is currently, but it's not a rebuttal to claims of inflation to say "well maybe we should return to humbler lifestyles." In fact that's a concession with finger-wagging attached.

Yes beef is high, but nobody ever thought eating steak very often was a reasonable expectation for normal people.

Steak no, but pot roast or ground beef? Those were staples for my family growing up, and we were not well-to-do.

Just looking at my own grocery bill, the prices of a lot of common staples like beans, eggs, rice, milk, flour, ground beef, etc... have all gone up 100-200% in the last 10 years and my gross income has not.

When my eldest was first starting to eat solid food a log of ground beef typically went for around $2.50/lb, today I feel lucky if I can find it for $6.

Eggs are about where they were 10 years ago. Rice is 46% higher. Beans are 21% higher. Milk is 35% higher. Flour is 2.6% higher. Ground beef is up 85% -- that's the big one.

Source

ItemPrice increase from April 2016 to April 2026, not seasonally adjusted (%)
Rice, white, long grain, uncooked, per pound+53
Beans, dried, any type, all sizes, per pound+16
Milk, fresh, whole, fortified, per gallon+31
Flour, white, all purpose, per pound+4.2
Ground beef, 100 percent beef, per pound+81

Chuck roast used to be around $4/lb. pre-Covid, and now I'm lucky if I can find it for $10/lb. on sale

Just remember that meat eating is bad, so pricing beef out of the range of ordinary people is all for the greater good in the long term.

Even over here, beef prices are going up and it's harder to find the usual cuts. The fancy stuff is still there, but no way in Hell I'm paying €59.99/kg ($35/lb) for the most expensive stuff (it really is gorgeous meat, but who can afford that?)

What I'd call decent mince (not full of fat and gristle) is around $8.82/lb. The supermarket range of what is on offer has shrunk, and they are selling more mince, meatballs, diced beef, and those kinds of products.

Just remember that meat eating is bad, so pricing beef out of the range of ordinary people is all for the greater good in the long term.

I expect thinking like that in the Biden administration is the big reason for the increase (keeping in mind the market is global). It's very easy to make policies which increase the price of things. And even if Trump has found and removed them, it takes years to grow cattle for market.

But ground beef in my area is about $6.00/lb for 80% lean.

More comments

Roast tough cuts and stew meat should be though.

The problem is even ground beef is ridiculously expensive now.

M impression is that it isn't necessarily more expensive relative to incomes than in the past (well, it is compared to the immediately pre-Covid past, but the generational past), but more that we've been sold a story of getting richer, and are not richer relative to the price of ground beef.

The price of ground beef really has significantly gone up, even in the last three years. The average income hasn't anywhere near as much.

Yes, that's why I said that it was worse than seven years ago.

I don't imagine the average American would have much use for these.

A lot of the time tradesmen prefer to be paid in cash, for example a plumber who charges $3000 to put a new boiler in. I suppose this qualifies as "unsavory," since it is likely that a lot of them are cheating on their taxes. But also, there are legitimate reasons -- they don't have to worry about a check bouncing and they don't have to pay any credit card fees. Having $250 bills would be handy in that type of situation.

It would also be useful if you didn't feel comfortable giving a credit card to a business. For example if I were organizing a bachelor party or some kind of boys' night out where we all planned to get completely drunk, I would prefer to bring a bunch of cash, knowing that my maximum exposure is the amount of cash in my wallet, as opposed to the limit on my credit card. It would be much easier to carry a couple thousand in $250s than $100s for such a purpose. I suppose this also counts as "unsavory."

Last, cash has emotional impact which is lacking in checks and similar instruments. If you are giving someone a gift or a bonus or the like, it has more impact to hand them cash. For example, the annual Christmas tips to building service workers.

I guess we are headed towards a cashless society, which is great in many respects but I certainly would miss cash.

No tradesman doing sidework will be reporting it to anyone(either his boss who might write him up or to the IRS) if he can possibly avoid it. I've been 100% commercial at my day job for years, but most people I talk to who work for residential companies describe accepting checks.

I suppose this qualifies as "unsavory," since it is likely that a lot of them are cheating on their taxes.

That was the reason my local roadside egg & veggie farmer gave for why he didn't accept Venmo or anything electronic: "because then the banks know exactly how much money you're getting."

Best damn eggs I've ever had, though.

Last, cash has emotional impact which is lacking in checks and similar instruments. If you are giving someone a gift or a bonus or the like, it has more impact to hand them cash. For example, the annual Christmas tips to building service workers.

I'm always reminded of a point in my pro betting career where the best way to bet certain markets was to go to the physical cash kiosks and split bets up across them in order to stay under the radar. Betting $2000 with a click feels considerably less weighty than when you're feeding $50 notes one at a time into a machine then scuttling off after doing $400 on the first one to go to the next pub.

Would it really? IME carrying around $100 and $50 bills is just a pain. Half the places don't take them, and it's a pain in the ass to make change. The cash meta for me seems to be carrying loads of $20s and a few $5s and $1s.

I think we're overdue for a $250 bill. From 1969 when the $100 became the largest banknote, we've seen inflation to where the $100 in 1969 was worth about $800 today.

Large cash transactions are becoming difficult. If you sell an old car for $5,000 cash, just the act of accurately counting to 50 is difficult and introduces easy honest errors, which are impossible to distinguish from easy dishonest errors. Counting to 20 is much more reliably accurate.

A $100 bill in an inside jacket pocket or folded up in a cubby in your car were enough to get gas dinner and a cheap motel room in an emergency when I was a kid, now it's barely enough for the gas depending on your vehicle. A single $250 bill would serve a similar purpose today.

So it should be a Donald. After he's dead.

While there has certainly been inflation, people also don't use cash as much as they used to. I'm an outlier among my friends in that I usually have a couple hundred dollars in cash on me, but 20s are much more convenient for everyday purchases, I still make larger purchases with a credit card, and it would be a very rare situation indeed where even a $100 would make sense to carry. If people were still going to the bank every week and getting cash to cover most of their purchases, then it might make sense to create a $250 bill. But even in the 90s when a lot of people were still doing it, $100s were rare enough.

Considering it'll mostly be used for tax evasion and drug dealing, it should feature Jean Lafitte- the pirate king who lead half the gulf coast into the USA after meeting with Andrew Jackson.

I agree, except it shouldn't be Donald Trump. Why not John Marshall, who was on the $500 bill earlier?

They should make that one again, but put Al Gore on it.

I mean who cares? The annoying thing about this is getting dragged into a Trump discussion when it's a "$100 bills aren't big enough" discussion we need.

Trump's ego is the only reason this is even in the Overton window. Governments hate large bills, because cash is outside their control. No other politician has a reason to advocate for this, because they don't benefit from it. Trump benefits from it.

If having Trump's face on the bill is what it takes to make a $250 note, then all praise the God Emperor (though I still think Ronald Reagan or Ayn Rand would have been better choices).

How about George Marshall? Send a message about American power and finance to Europe.

I’m just waiting for my Ed Meese bill

It seems to me that if the Democrats want an increase in the federal minimum wage, they could probably get Trump (and MAGA Republican congressmen) on board if they agreed to the $250 bill with Trump's picture on it. Edit: Probably they could get more concessions if they agreed to make the $250 gold in color.

Or here's an idea: A $250 bill with half of the bills printed with Trump's picture on it and half of anyone else of the Democrats' choosing. (I have some thoughts about whom they would choose, but they are a bit too "boo outgroup" to include.)

I don’t think that you should have two different people on the same bills, as it introduces the threat of fraud as people cannot tell at a glance whether the bill is real enough to consider as real. If one bill has a person no one recognizes, they’d probably treat the bill as potentially fake. It also opens the weird political situation where MAGA types accept only the Trump bill and Blues only accept the other bill.

I mean have you seen what quarters look like?

Quarters are low-value enough (approximately 0.25 USD, if my math is correct) that fraud detection by humans is probably a very low priority. A counterfeiter would have to make a truly large mass of them to make it worth the production costs, and laundering all that without arousing suspicion has got to be some back-breaking labor, which defeats the purpose of counterfeiting. So given the low chance of loss and the low amount of loss from letting a counterfeit quarter through, most people don't find it worth the effort to try to detect it, unless some other alarms get raised.

Or seen the number of people who think $2 bills are fake?

Surprised they're expanding cash denominations most economies have been doing the opposite in recent decades to mitigate cash economy

Clearly he’s preparing for hyperinflation.

Technically I think it's actually staying stable. The administration removed the penny, after all.

Maybe It will Happen this year and they won't need to change the law to create a $250 bill with Trump's likeness!

I was going to say "I don't think it's particularly likely that Donald Trump will pull a successful auto-coup and establish his administration as above the law", but then I realized you were instead talking about him dying (or being killed) in office.

Both will be amusing

usual unsavory types that caused the original high denomination bills to go out of circulation, I don't imagine the average American would have much use for these.

I feel like this might be part of the point. Because the USD is so popular and the 100 dollar bill is the highest value denomination, it has become one of the de facto standards for criminal financial transactions and thus featured heavily in films and TV shows and music. As a result, Benjamin Franklin has become even more immortalized, to the point that his first name is used interchangeably with $100 in some contexts. The $250 bill would likely supplant that, and thus Donald Trump's face would be featured heavily in future films and shows about crime, and perhaps there would even be a song called "All About the Donalds." All of which would probably make Trump's ego very happy.

As a result, Benjamin Franklin has become even more immortalized, to the point that his first name is used interchangeably with $100 in some contexts.

I’ve always liked to think Ben Franklin would enjoy knowing this.

As opposed to Andrew Jackson, who is presumably spinning continually in his grave at being featured on the most-used bill issued by an institution he vehemently hated (a federal Bank of the United States).

Considering how many businesses there are now that refuse to take $50 or $100 bills, a $250 would be even more limited.

No problem, Trump is working on that, the inflation rate for April was 3.8%. (Yes, I know that it will still take 19 years for the currency to lose half its value, but I for one have trust in the man to speed this process along even more.)

Considering the eye-watering loss in value since 1969 (when the prior large bills were officially discontinued), I think The Powers That Be are fine with Americans only having bills with weak purchasing power. If you believe the official numbers, a $100 bill in 1969 had the purchasing power of $900 now. It doesn't seem like that loss ever prompted the Treasury to consider re-printing $500 and $1000 bills to try to match the former purchasing power.

If you believe the official numbers, a $100 bill in 1969 had the purchasing power of $900 now

Historical purchasing power always seems skewed to me. Like, you'll see media or historical documents from the past, and people will talk about the sheer amount of wealth, but then the calculated purchasing power isn’t as much as it feels like everyone is acting. Is it just that we as a society have been getting so much wealthier?

cigarettes

1969 — about $0.33 per pack $100 ÷ $0.33 ≈ 303 packs ≈ 6,060 cigarettes

2026 — about $10.15 per pack on average (average of $10.15 in the United States)

$100 ÷ $10.15 ≈ 9.8 packs ≈ 197 cigarettes

6,060 cigarettes = 303 packs.

At the 2026 average of about $10.15/pack: 303 × $10.15 ≈ $3,076

I think there a lot going on that doesn’t get mentioned. First the advance of technology— in 1940, a state of the art entertainment system was a radio. In 1980, it was a color TV and maybe an Atari or later a Nintendo game system with a couple of cartridges. By 1990, you have cable, vcrs, better game systems, and so on. Food is much the same. In the early twentieth century, mustard was spicy, and now it’s like not even comparable to the mild spicy food that you eat all the time. The sheer amount and variety that we expect is different. They felt rich if they had a nice family car, a color TV, and simple food in a fridge that didn’t automatically make ice cubes was plenty. We’d consider that poverty, but they felt rich because technology was moving fast and they could afford to partake. We see a decline where things that used to be things the average person could expect are gradually becoming unaffordable. The mid century saw people able to afford to eat out more, and in the 2020s people can’t afford to eat out as much as they could have 20 years ago. The same is happening with other stuff. The standard of living for most average people is declining.

Like, you'll see media or historical documents from the past, and people will talk about the sheer amount of wealth, but then the calculated purchasing power isn’t as much as it feels like everyone is acting.

Based on talking to my grandparents (very long-lived, so I heard many stories), the inflation numbers downplay the skew. There's no way a working class guy making the inflation-adjusted equivalent of what my grandfather made in 1950/60/70 could ever purchase the quality of life that he was able to afford for his family with a stay at home wife and passel of kids.

I suspect this is a skewed recounting. My grandparents married as teenagers, and would not have been able to afford the life that they had today(rent prices would be out of reach), but they also describe working long and undesirable hours, eating cuts of meat that contemporary Americans largely consider beneath them(as a minority of the meal; they ate mostly rice and pasta), relying on family and church assistance, etc.

When people talk about postwar prosperity in general there's a tendency to overstate it and align it with contemporary values, which doesn't work. Primarily for the reason that a typical 1960s lifestyle involved an amount of thrift that would seem foreign to the average young person talking about how we used to be able to get ahead. The first time my mother ate in a restaurant was on her first date with my father. What was my grandfather's job? He owned an HVAC company. Granted, it was a small residential HVAC company with just him and his brother, but the idea of someone like that not eating in restaurants would be completely foreign to contemporary society. Even when I was a kid in the 90s, eating in a restaurant was a rare treat. Nowadays I cannot even go to McDonald's on a Sunday morning unless I want to wait for an hour due to the sheer number of Doordash orders from people willing to spend $30 on an egg McMuffin because they're too damn lazy to leave the house. The same people who rhapsodize about how much better things must have been in the 60s are the same ones who give me funny looks when I tell them I haven't done any international travel. Growing up, I felt rich because we went on a big family beach vacation every year. For most kids I knew, a vacation wasn't a yearly thing. For some, it was a never thing. Now it seems like people take their kids on multiple trips per year. A paralegal at work flies with his wife and kids to Disney World multiple times per year. Either his wife is pulling in big bucks or they just live on the cusp of nothing because I make significantly more than him, but I wouldn't dream of spending that much on travel.

With respect, I think that you are veering close to the "if you didn't buy so much avocado toast, you could afford a home" meme, both by overestimating other people's frivolous spending and by underestimating the amount it costs to get ahead.

The vast majority of people are not ordering doordash McDonalds for breakfast. For the few who are, it doesn't cost $30. It costs $10 max including coffee, and maybe another $5 for delivery. The people I know who travel regularly and aren't rich and established do so as cheaply as possible - they're staying in fleabag hostels in grubby parts of town, taking budget redeye flights, etc. My acquaintances who live like your paralegal are rich as hell.

Then on the other side. I've had a big and maybe temporary salary boost lately, but before I was on a pretty decent above-median income. I could probably have bought a house by being very thrifty over ten, twelve years. That's with a PhD and a good upper-middle-class job, and for a very mid-tier house in a very mid area.

I don't think that the ordinary middle class, let alone the working class, can aspire to own a nice place with a picket fence just from cutting down on restaurants and vacations. Especially if they're not DINKs. If anything, the shift towards 'buying experiences' stems from assuming that our standard of life as children was normal rather than a freak bubble, and a deep skepticism that scrimping and saving will result in achieving goals that seem to accelerate away faster than one approaches them (b/c a lot of them are limited and competitive goods).

No, you will not buy a house through extreme thrift- my grandparents could not do what they did back then today, because housing costs are too high. But there really is a strain that thinks people in the past could doordash regularly and take multiple vacations a year on normal working class incomes, whereas realistically the mid to late twenthieth century American experience was, except for the very wealthy, one of extreme thrift to maintain far lower consumption standards than the zoomers feel entitled to.

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, and like any foreign country Symbols of wealth aren't necessarily easily translated. The great Agatha Christie quote applies:

I never thought I would be so rich as to afford an automobile, or so poor as to be unable to afford a maid.

Considering how many businesses there are now that refuse to take $50 or $100 bills,

Is this really a thing anymore? I remember it from back in the 90s, but I haven't seen it in practice for years now.

Yes, lots of businesses have signs saying they won't take hundreds or fifties.

Like most people, I've not found out because I use a credit card for most transactions.

I do see those, but I think I've seen "no cash" more frequently within the last few years. For better or worse, IMO, a new $250 and the obsolescence of the penny and nickel seem to be in a race with the functional end of cash as a medium of exchange. Credit cards, Venmo, et al are just too convenient, and one less thing to carry.

The end of cash is also one of those things that seems to waffle politically/culture-war-wise. I think currently the "vague left" is pro-cash, while the "vague right" is pro-digital, based on Facebook posts, but I honestly can't tell anymore.

I suspect it aligns pretty well with opinions on license plate scanners. And probably both align with making occasional (federally, at least) illicit recreational purchases.

The conspiracy theory right is pro cash.

That's wild. I don't think I've seen a sign like that outside a farmer's market in quite a while, and even then they'll usually play ball if you're spending enough.

Counterfeit risk is part of it, no?

And it's increasingly just not relevant for customers. I basically never carry cash unless I have recently had to go get some to send to my kids' school. What need would I ever have to carry hundreds unless I am at a restaurant that charges substantial card fees or dodges taxes?

Final shift employees hate making bank runs, and businesses hate theft risk and working capital costs.

I stopped using cash many years ago because my wallet was getting overloaded with change, and there never seemed to be an opportunity to use exact change for anything (having only the wrong denomination bills).

Yesterday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Harambe.

The White House has remarked on the occasion.

On this day in history, Harambe would have celebrated another birthday. An icon that became part of internet history, American culture, and an entire generation’s timeline.

Gone, but never forgotten. Rest easy to a true patriot. 🕊️🇺🇸

How much credence do you put on the idea that Harambe represented an actual sea change in American culture? At the time, it felt like a joke, but in hindsight, it feels like the first time that internet memeing bled over into real space. A lot of the people making jokes about a gorilla ended up making jokes about a former real estate developer and steak salesman that propelled him into the public eye. Was Harambe a watershed event, or just one where we look back and project meaning?

I thought I was very online but I have absolutely no idea what y'all are talking about.

I don't remember Harambe ever being anything other than an annoying internet meme.

Maybe it was different on-the-ground in America, but certainly over here, it was just the dumb internet thing of the hour. It was around briefly, then people got bored and move on. I don't think it had any significance whatsoever.

Yeah, it was a meme, it went away, and then it was occasionally resurrected as a "the timeline went insane afterwards" meme.

The thing that broke the timeline was the Cubs winning the world series and Leicester winning the EPL. After the writers paid off those storylines, it was clear the series had jumped the shark.

Leicester winning the EPL.

Leicester winning the PL is the sort of saccharine nonsense you expect to see in Ted Lasso or some other American product.

These memes were a way to very subtly attack the political culture of the period. Because the basis of the meme was, “we are going to pretend that this gorilla was just as important as whatever supposed human tragedy we see on the news”. That’s what made it funny. The memes were not about caring for Harambe, but the idea that you are treating a gorilla like a globally newsworthy martyr like Michael Brown.

Anyone remember the affair of Cecil the Lion that was also around that time (seems like about a year before the affair of Harambe)? I recalled that it caused a bunch of drama online similar to Harambe, and then suddenly no one ever talked about it again. I'm always reminded of it when I run into Jimmy Kimmel on the news or social media, because he famously shed tears on his show while talking about the affair. I think these and Kony, referenced in another comment, stick to memories for being some of the earlier examples of social media hot flashes that tore through the internets and then went away, which became very common and even the default in the past decade.

With 2014 online drama being defined by the affair of reproductively viable worker ants, I wonder if future historians will think we just had a really strange animal-loving phase in the mid-2010s.

I remember 2014 being the year of Gamergate and Ferguson, but I don't recall anything about ants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(ant)

We had to use "reproductively viable worker ants" as a euphemism after Scott banned the term from Slate Star Codex (much like we had to call neoreactionaries "death eaters", and HBD "muggle realism", and... actually, now that I think about it, Scott was kind of a dick).

There is a kind of ant called a 'gam·ergate' (from the Greek words 'γάμος' [marriage] and 'ἔργον' [work]) which is, unlike many ant species, capable of both work and reproduction.

I remember 2014 being the year of Gamergate and Ferguson, but I don't recall anything about ants.

(Emphasis added) Evidently, you do.

What I remember about Cecil is the doctor who shot him totally being dragged for it, but a few people interviewed some Africans and they were like "Lions? They suck, dude. They eat my friends. Americans will kill them and pay us for the privilege? Cool!" (OK, not in those exact words)

According to the Wikipedia article, it seems that there was a "Cecil Effect" in Zimbabwe after the affair, where westerners hunting lions there became less common than otherwise would have been expected, resulting in less pleasant lives for the locals due to more lions and less money. I don't know much about the trophy hunting business, but what little I know about it from podcasts and radio shows makes me not surprised; it always seemed to me that westerners paying huge sums of money to hunt exotic animals in Africa was almost an unalloyed good, with the only significant downsides being for the individual animals themselves and other westerners who care more about optics or suffering of animals than about the suffering of other humans. The "I consent! I consent! I don't!" meme comes to mind.

Trophy hunting big five animals costs the equivalent of over a decade's labour in local salaries and employs far more local servants than you'd expect- in the west trophy hunting would usually be limited to guides and taxidermists(the guide field dresses), but lower African labour costs also justify skinning teams, personal servants, etc etc.

Add to that that subsistence farmers generally do not like charismatic megafauna very much, including apex predators(which eat their stock and occasionally them). Rural folk in the US hate wolves too(and would probably hate mammoth if they still existed), but lions are much more likely to hunt both livestock and humans.

Yes - when done responsibly, it's both wildlife management and local economic injection. But a lot of people cannot conceive of hunting as being anything other than cruel and harmful. Probably part of a general idea of humans being "outside of nature", part "exploitation of poor minorities in 3rd world countries", part "hating anyone rich enough to do so", and part "poaching in Africa is what Victorian British people did".

In Cecil's case, the lion was "critically wounded" with an arrow and survived another 12 hours before finally being killed. 12 hours of pain and suffering with a critical wound sounds pretty cruel to me.

Hm, perhaps the trophy hunting business could be improved with a sort of minimum caliber/destructiveness requirement on all weapons used for the hunting.

Those exist, bowhunters are just presumed high-competence enough for nobody to worry if they slip through the cracks.

I don't know if there's a rule for lions, but elephants definitely have requirements in most countries.

Though I think that has less to do with humane harvesting and more with keeping the clients alive.

Can't wait for big game hunting with FPV drones.

More comments

What kind of lunatic bow hunts a lion? You wouldn't catch me dead with anything short of a .375 H&H, and even then I think I'd be nervous.

There are a surprising number of well heeled maniacs in the world. Bowhunters take fairly large exotics in Texas(and Bison elsewhere in the country) all the time, and I suspect the reason lions and tigers aren't on the list has to do with laws against introducing big cats for exotic game purposes.

More comments

I mean I find it highly unlikely it was done intentionally to be cruel. Sometimes animals get injured by an arrow or bullet instead of killed and run away rather than let you put them out of their misery because of that pesky survival instinct.

It's basically just part of the nature of hunting. It's also why most states have restrictions on using too small of a caliber bullet to hunt certain animals. For example I wouldn't trust .22LR to reliably kill anything bigger than a raccoon, even though a lady once killed a grizzly with it (according to some accounts it wasn't even.22LR, it was .22 Short, which is even more impressive).

https://bear-hunting.com/2022/7/grizzly-with-a-22-c

I don't see why intention factors into the cruelty of the fact.

I'm not a hunter, but I'd expect a dentist from Ohio would have an easier time quickly killing a lion with a gun rather than with a bow and arrow as part of a paleolithic LARP.

Another thing that complicates the 'wildlife management ' story is that, as far as I can tell, Cecil had never interfered with humans. It's one thing to cull animals that are killing livestock or humans due to being near pastures or villages, quite another to kill animals that are not.

More comments

I do remember the Harambe incident from my Lived Experience.

It was pretty funny. When it was unclear with plausible deniability as to the identity of the child and parents—thus it was assumed by default that the child and parents were white, possibly out of hopium—there was much raging that a Karen's carelessness and White Privilege led to a member of an endangered species being shot to death. Then, it inconveniently emerged that the child and parents were black, and from there a seething retreat and sudden silence were had.

No charges against the mother over the incident, naturally.

Genuinely didn't know that. My mental image of the child has always been a pale brunette but think I just never looked up the actual footage

10 years? Man, time flies. Dicks out, everyone. Ladies of the motte, you'll have to improvise something. I have faith in you.

“Tits out for harambe” has a kind of ring to it.

Was it a big Culture War issue? It doesn't seem like it, since the White House remark and leftists I know are pro Harambe. If not, I don't consider it part of the Big Shift: the Internet's slow descent from mainstream light-heartedness into meanness and negativity.

The culture war hadn't planted its flag on my front lawn in 2016, so I can't say for sure, but I do remember that the people in my social circle who had the strongest reactions went on to become staunch culture warriors.

Harambe is definitely a real 'canon event' for a certain generation of people.

All major events after that point have felt very 'unreal' and usually gets twisted to someone's agenda right away.

It is also one of the last times we had a major cultural event that virtually everyone, of every ideology, agreed on the valence of, and didn't turn political. Everyone agreed the death of the gorilla was tragic and likely unneeded, a result of human irresponsibility.

It didn't trigger a gender discourse (although the "dicks out for Harambe" meme got people some errant looks), it wasn't co-opted as a weapon against political opponents, there were no racial undertones, it was just half-sincere meming about a low-level tragedy. I can't off the top of my head think of any recent events like this which weren't immediately converted to culture war fodder.

I dunno if that gorilla was cosmically important, but as a marker of the boundary between one cultural era into another, it works extremely well.

The only other event I'd offer as a marker of passing from one epoch to the other, also from 2016, was Alphago beating Lee Sedol. That one actually DID portend a massive sea change, and if I had been a bit smarter/braver/wealthier around that time, I could have made a lot of money placing bets on future AI development.

By comparison, there is no way I know of anyone could have traded on the death of Harambe to make a real profit.

(Ah the good old days, when we were young...)

But yeah, before that, there was a wholesome-but-also-edgy, "Internet culture", 9gag, advice animals like Bad Luck Brian and Overly Attached Girlfriend. A couple of years before that, we had memes like the Chocolate Rain song, the Numa Numa guy, etc. It was definitely detached and ironic, in the South Park sense. The world wasn't necessarily more unified but the sort of people who hung out online were mostly middle-class young guys, gamers, nerds etc. with mostly compatible values and tastes.

I think the big break was the shift to phones and mobile internet. Before that, going online was an intentional thing you did mostly at home, when you had time, or on your laptop in college. Even if your phone had a camera, you had to transfer the pictures with a USB cable, then intentionally upload them on a social media site. This required intent and patience, it was friction. To discuss, you had to be told about some forums by (online) friends, you had to register on a php board, then you carefully curated your signature, your avatar, your nickname (obviously you had to use a cool pseudonym, your real world identity wasn't supposed to matter, you were supposed to leave all that behind at the doorstep). People got to know each other in those communities, people developed reputations behind the nicknames, they discussed off-topic issues in misc forum sections with the same set of people, instead of hopping between subreddits or being at the mercy of the algorithm regarding which random user's content you're going to see today.

After that, suddenly the internet escaped from the home, out into people's pockets in the streets, at parties, at festivals, everywhere, suddenly it wasn't just nerds, but people with dense social lives and the friction mostly disappeared. Uploading a picture was a single tap of the finger. Notifications started pouring in in all contexts. You were expected to know what's going on online, FOMO started etc.

I do not believe that "Harambe represented an actual sea change in American culture" but i do believe that it sticks in a lot of people's minds as the last time that all the different tribes agreed with each other about something. And that makes it a milestone or inflection point of sorts, something that people will naturally think back to, and contrast against what we see now.

That said, as a fan of urban fantasy I am a bit enamored with the idea that "the seventh seal" would be a gorilla in a zoo somewhere.

The idea of "otherwise unremarkable thing that we'd have no reason to consider anomalous was actually vitally important to the sanctity of our entire planet" is always a funny trope to me when it surfaces in fiction.

There was a funny bit in the first episode of new Doctor Who along those lines.

DOCTOR: How can you hide something that big in a city this small?

ROSE: Hold on. Hide what?

DOCTOR: The transmitter. The Consciousness is controlling every single piece of plastic, so it needs a transmitter to boost the signal.

ROSE: What's it look like?

DOCTOR: Like a transmitter. Round and massive, slap bang in the middle of London. A huge circular metal structure like a dish, like a wheel. Radial. Close to where we're standing. Must be completely invisible.

(Rose stares over his shoulder pointedly.)

DOCTOR: What? What?

(The Doctor turns and looks at what Rose is staring at on the south bank but the penny doesn't drop.)

DOCTOR: What? What is it? What?

(He finally catches on to what Rose is looking at. It's called the London Eye, it's on the south bank of the Thames, it's lit up like a Christmas tree, and it was the biggest Wheel in the world when it opened in 2000.)

DOCTOR: Oh, fantastic!

In Lilo and Stitch the only reason they can't gas the whole planet to get at Stitch is because they consider Mosquitos an endangered species.

It'd be absolutely MASSIVE irony IRL if we manage to genocide mosquitos and in turn this gives aliens the clearance to finally genocide us.

You might have lost a lot of that money. Almost none of the tech used in AlphaGo lead to LLMs and it produced a frenzy of research and startups that mostly looked in the wrong direction. I guess RL for behaviour tuning made it in.

That's like saying I'd have lost money betting on electric cars because most of them have been massive failures.

But if you put $10,000 in Tesla stock at its high in 2016, it'd be worth (approximately) $250,000 today. Not bad ten year turnaround, and probably a big enough win to make up for a dozen other losses.

Granted, a lot of that is due to Quantitative easing pumping ALL stocks like crazy in that time.

One of the biggest 'regrets' I carry is NOT putting at least a few thousand dollars worth of excess student loan money into Tesla circa 2013, actually.

My point is that as soon as it became clear that AI was now becoming a serious field with possible industrial application, I should have started looking at companies that would stand to be lead players.

But lo, I tried being financially responsible.

Almost none of the tech used in AlphaGo lead to LLMs, but as I understand it a lot of the principals pioneered by AlphaGo ended up being used in the sort of autonomous targeting systems that are currently being used to kill Russians in the Donbass.

The obvious investment in response to AlphaGo would have been Google. So, although you'd have lucked into it, 10xing your investment over ten years isn't terrible. Maybe you'd also have seen that a fleet of TPUs were used for training and made the jump from that to Nvidia.

I guess the main learning would have to have been "you can convert massive compute into narrow but superhuman performance" and speculated that it could be successfully extended to human language by AIAYN, published the next year.

Yes, I think the ‘bitter lesson’ is the other thing that came out of this, but AlphaGo’s intelligence didn’t generalise to simultaneously learning even a single other game.

Finding that sufficient data could lead to expertise in massively distributed domains came as a huge shock to me, professionally, and completely destroyed my notion of how intelligence could work.

Yes, I think the ‘bitter lesson’ is the other thing that came out of this, but AlphaGo’s intelligence didn’t generalise to simultaneously learning even a single other game.

The AlphaZero engine inspired by AlphaGo and released about two years later learned chess (better than Stockfish), go (better than AlphaGo) and shogi (better than the best human players or computer engines then existing) and a closely related engine reached grandmaster level in tournament Starcraft.

AlphaGo is also proof-of-concept for the "big dumb neural net" approach to artificial intelligence which had previously been in the doldrums, which I think was critical for the approaches that eventually worked for LLMs to be taken seriously and attract the funding they needed.

Both Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky correctly called AlphaZero as the "AI fire alarm" - i.e. the first hard evidence that smarter-than-human AI was something we needed to start worrying about as a realistic possibility rather than as a philosophical debate.

Yes, later self-play could be used to learn different games (and the original DRL was applied to many Atari games) but AFAIK nobody successfully made one of these agents learn chess and Go.

I dunno if that gorilla was cosmically important, but as a marker of the boundary between one cultural era into another, it works extremely well.

I think that's the heart of what I've been wondering. 2015 - 2017 was a wild ride. Things definitely aren't the same anymore. If it happened today, I can't help but imagine that the aftermath would be far more polarized and ugly than it was at the time.

The night Trump won his election is indelibly engraved in my head. Driving home from work expecting to wake up in Hillary land, then suddenly driving over to my buddy's house to drink and laugh at the intrinsic ridiculousness of what we were observing. The moment he won Florida was when it kicked in as "wow this is real."

This video encompasses the feeling well.

The night he won it a second time is also burned in there but not quite as deeply.

I don't even remember what I was doing the night Biden 'won.'

Now President Trump is just a facet of reality. I can't imagine the timeline without him.

Wild ride indeed.

How much credence do you put on the idea that Harambe represented an actual sea change in American culture?

Not much. Weird to see the White House remark on it, even if it's only on Xitter. I don't really remember much bleed over into reality.

I think Kony 2012 is the first event I remember as internet mass hysteria where people acted like a freakout on the internet would somehow change real-life conditions on another continent.

It's interesting you mention Kony 2012. It rgas always felt to me like something broke in the world around 2010 - 2013. I can't exactly nail down what it was, the Kony phenomenon definitely comes to mind when I consider it. It was the first time I ever saw social media drive consensus in my social group to such an extent. In some ways, it felt like the prototype of ${CURRENT_THING} activism. It didn't matter that you had never heard about it yesterday - you had to have an opinion on it right now.

It’s Twitter, which started earlier but didn’t fully breach containment until the recession.

Okay, fine, it’s the broader social media paradigm represented by Twitter. Closing the feedback loop between commenting on something and getting responses vastly increased the appeal, and thus supply, of amateur punditry. Status competition ensued.

It rgas always felt to me like something broke in the world around 2010 - 2013.

Maybe we owe the Mayan Calendar people an apology....

(What does 'rgas' mean? I couldn't find any relevant results....)

What does 'rgas' mean? I couldn't find any relevant results....

It means I shouldn't try to type on my phone in between sets.

(What does 'rgas' mean? I couldn't find any relevant results....)

Probably a "fat-finger" typo of 'has' on a phone.

I think what Kony and Harambe did was mark the rise of the social media based reaction to news as the primary way people interacted with the news. Before that, they might talk about the news on social media, but the news came from other sources like CNN or local news. Harambe and Kony started online and were talked about online. It was the beginning of everyone being able to be sort of not only journalists but commentators, and that they not only could but should influence the outcome of the story.

I suspect Kony 2012 was some kind of test program to see if a moral panic could be astroturf generated out of nothing.

It was the latest incarnation of Eternal September.

Never heard of it, for what that’s worth.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

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."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats