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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   4217 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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somehow i ended up in looking at this youtube channel: https://youtube.com/@hausofguns/videos but it has not been active for 7 years and a similar story for the guys twitter: https://twitter.com/HausofGuns. what do you think happened to the guy? it seems a bit weird that he just fell off the map.

-- this is just me being crazy. i guess maybe his business didn't work out. he still seems to be around.

This would be the book review thread, yes?

I recently finished Randy Shilts' And The Band Played On. I'm surely this book has been discussed here many times, but in short, it's about the early phases of the AIDS pandemic, starting from late 70s and ending in 1985 (the book was published in 1987). The book was actually written very well and engagingly, it is no wonder it is probably still the best-well-known "popular" work on AIDS, something I had seen referenced dozens of times before actually reading it.

It's so popular, in fact, that one of the things that I kept thinking about while reading was: how much has this book, in particular, affected how the world (over)reacted to the Covid pandemic? Let's consider some of the things Shilts talks about:

These days, the book is probably the most famous for its attacks on Reagan admin and its unwillingness to answer the pandemic early on, only belatedly getting into the game during the later phases when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop decided to take initiative on his own to send information on the pandemic to all Americans, recommend the use of condoms etc. This mostly seems to have less to do with social conservatism, though this plays a part, but rather the general small government agenda and unwillingness to use federal funds for new efforts.

Actually, this part of the narrative (about the book) might be a bit exagerrated, as Shilts basically portrays almost every public instance - not only the federal government but also states and cities, particularly New York - as slow to respond and uneager to spend money. In comparison, during Covid times, almost every government suddenly decided that money's no thing when it comes to saving lives, with many governments going quite deep in debt at least for a while.

The book is probably the second most famous for Shilts's anger against the 80s gay community, particularly its unwillingness to admit that having a new, mysterious but fatal STD going on meant that it's time to put limits on culture that encourages men having sex with hundreds and thousands of men, particularly regarding the battle by Shilts, some public health officials and a part of the gay movement to close the bathhouses in San Francisco and other cities. I've actually seen some people talk about these things - promiscuity in 80s gay culture, the bathhouse struggle - as some sort of forbidden knowledge that you are not wanted to know, even though they're front and center in, again, the best-known popular work on AIDS crisis (which was also made into an also-well-known HBO TV movie.)

Anyway, even though Covid and STDs are two very different things (a closer equivalent was monkeypox, and a lot of people seemed to fear that it would become an AIDS-like epidemic, but it seems like that after the health system moved on to implicitly treating it as a STD, it was brought to control reasonably quickly - of course, the infrastructure and culture for keeping actual STDs in control has improved considerably post-AIDS, especially among gay men), much of debates about lockdowns did revolve around places like bars and other places where a lot of people (gay and straight) mingle - usually not perhaps as closely as in the sex-oriented bathhouses, but still. Of course the devil-may-care, who-knows-if-it's-even-real, I'll-get-it-anyway attitudes like the ones expressed by number of subjects of ATBPO, like that of Gäetan Dugas, one of Shilts's gay villains, were denigrated as "plague carriers" and the like.

Alongside the bathhouse narrative, Shilts concentrated on the blood banks, which become aware at a fairly early point that their blood is contaminated and poses a considerable risk to hemophiliacs and many others needing blood transfusions. Shilts blames the profit-seeking motive, which is also mentioned when talking about the bathhouses (whose owners often made stack and were moves and shakers in the local gay communities), and there's many cases where the blood bankers and bathhouse barons are shown willing to refer to high-minded ideals about privacy and freedom when they really just cared about not losing the revenue streams. Of course with Covid, states were quite willing to run over businesses, even letting some (like bars) go under.

Shilts also shows the scientific community being unable to decide on a narrative early on (somewhat unfairly at places; Shilts almost seems to demand the scientists to have immediately converge on the correct narrative from the beginning, whether this was actually possible or not), and much energy being spent on, for instance, turf wars between European and American scientists on who actually found HIV and what to even call it. With Covid, the scientific community often seemed conspicuously willing to go in lockstep and offer recommendations even with paltry knowledge on what happens, like with the "Covid-is-not-airborne/no-actually-it-is" twists and turns, or the early decision that lab leak is not possible and all suggestions on it would be conspiracy theory, something that might actually have been mostly just European and American scientists being unwilling to do anything that would prevent cooperation with Chinese scientists on this issue.

One specific figure who was fingered as a source for must misery in ATBPO is none other than Antonio Fauci, who made an early statement that AIDS might spread by touch in some situations, leading to massive panic and increasing considerably people's unwillingness to be in any contact or touch with AIDS sufferers. Whatever Fauci's role with Covid was, it's pretty remarkable that after this AIDS debacle he still was the one who implicitly became the American pandemic czar, and I think one reason why he was so willing to take this role - fit or not for it - was the feeling that after his reputation being blackened by actions during one pandemic he now had the chance to repair it by tackling another one.

Again, COVID pandemic and its reprecussions are surely a topic that has enough material for whole libraries of analysis, certainly it can't be just be explained by reference to AIDS history, but I haven't actually seen people talk about this particular book in connection to its effect on COVID debate, so I wanted to hear some opinions on this.

Honestly, I'm hard pressed to see a real villain in this whole narrative (assuming it tries to depict one).

If someone wishes to open a brothel with exclusively syphilitic whores, while I think that's a fucking terrible idea, I don't see why it should be made illegal, as long as they weren't lying to their customers (who should also know what they're getting into). I consider the correct target for penalization/responsible for externalities to be the gay men who lied about having the disease (as in they were confident about it, not just at risk) and spread it to others. I mean, that's not just for gay men, anyone who non-consensually and knowingly infects anyone with anything deserves punishment.

While the response to the advent of AIDS is certainly suboptimal, as @gattsuru points out, that was largely an outcome of sheer ignorance and confusion rather than entirely malicious. There were no tests for a long time, no way to tell if someone had been infected (barring a small and easy to miss prodromal phase after an infection), and no way to detect contaminated blood. I'm sure that the government did less than it could because gay men were disliked and marginalized, but not to the extent that I consider them evil for it.

The cause-and-effect chain was nowhere near as taut as COVID, and look at how much uncertainty there was even with modern medicine, epidemiology and stats. You have an insidious disease that only shows up in flagrant form years or decades after you were infected, and it must have taken a while to notice that it was gay men and hemophiliacs worst hit, and then to puzzle out the means of transmission in any robust way.

As for blood donations, there exists an optimal threshold for how strictly one wishes to screen blood. I'm sure the cost-benefit analysis today, with robust screening, makes it eminently sensible to forbid those at exceptionally high risk of contagious blood borne disease. But if I'm bleeding to death and there's nothing better available, I would accept potentially contaminated blood, yes, even with 1970s medicine. Dying in a decade beats dying today.

One specific figure who was fingered as a source for must misery in ATBPO is none other than Antonio Fauci, who made an early statement that AIDS might spread by touch in some situations

Well, if you wish to include the touch of a tumescent penis against the rectal walls, he's not not entirely wrong. (This is a joke, begone humorless pedants)

If someone wishes to open a brothel with exclusively syphilitic whores, while I think that's a fucking terrible idea, I don't see why it should be made illegal, as long as they weren't lying to their customers (who should also know what they're getting into

It's because they don't know what they're getting into, and will also spread the disease to others. They're stupid, both in an objective sense and also subjectively in terms of their future preferences. Rational agents wouldn't use the syphilis brothel! A nation made entirely of intelligent and rational ideal agents would've already fully eliminated every STD of significance by at first spontaneously agreeing to, and then nationally coordinating, a set of practices for testing and condom use. It's not actually a difficult problem if everyone involved can consistently follow simple rules and tolerate minor modification to their behavior in the long-term interest of the group. They can't, though, and sex seems to make people deviate from theoretical rationality an awful lot more than usual (or, in terms I prefer - be retarded), so the state should step in.

Oh I understand that there will be negative consequences from such a prestigious establishment plying its trade. However, I am libertarian adjacent enough that I don't think the State should be in the business of demanding its citizens engage in nothing but "optimal" behavior (which is inherently subjective).

I would personally prefer that it attempts to price in externalities, and mainly stick to ensuring truth in advertising.

Freedom, without the extension of the freedom to make bad decisions isn't much in the way of freedom after all. What principled reason is there for the government to stop people from getting syphilis willingly when they aren't allowed to force you to jog every day or eat your veggies? What I personally seek to minimize is the harm to others who are indirectly affected, say by the new syphilis aficionados spreading the disease to them.

If, for example, this was the case in a nation with nationalised healthcare, I fully endorse the government imposing heavy fines on the clap trap, which they are free to pass on to customers via their pricing. I would rather see the fines capture the costs of externalities rather than be intentionally punitive or intended to make it impossible to operate at any cost.

You might even deny people who are so fundamentally retarded access to free healthcare, but I still consider that they should have the right to be retarded.

What is utterly unconscionable and deserving of severe punishment, at least in my eyes, is involving people who didn't make informed bad decisions, such as lying to customers even through omission, presuming they expect prostitutes with the normal risk of giving them syphilis, or the fine purveyors of that establishment who hide their own condition from other partners.

A nation made entirely of intelligent and rational ideal agents would've already fully eliminated every STD of significance by at first spontaneously agreeing to, and then nationally coordinating, a set of practices for testing and condom use.

The sanity waterline as it exists today more laps at the toes of such intellectual titans than it dampens the crotch of the average human :(

I consider the correct target for penalization/responsible for externalities to be the gay men who lied about having the disease (as in they were confident about it, not just at risk) and spread it to others. I mean, that's not just for gay men, anyone who non-consensually and knowingly infects anyone with anything deserves punishment.

I get where you’re coming from, but imo you’re mostly going to encourage people to not get tested. I think you’d have to punish people for spreading it unknowingly, which actually has the reverse effect (people will (hopefully) want to get tested regularly).

There are contexts in which testing for various diseases is mandatory. It might be COVID screening, it might be something else, but certain services can well be denied to you on the grounds that you refuse a test.

In the particular case of AIDS, the worst of it was before we had tests available AFAIK, and right now, it is nowhere near the level of crisis worth sacrificing civil liberties for in most contexts.

If we had an AIDS equivalent about that was significantly more contagious, such as being transmitted airborne or by close contact, and tests for it, I would have few qualms about making testing mandatory for participation in civic life.

If I had to think of a solution to the spread of STDs, I would suggest an annual screening program available to everyone. Participation would be encouraged, but not mandatory, but if you skipped it and then infected someone with such a disease (presuming at least that the incubation is long enough you weren't plausibly infected after the screen was due), then you'd have the book thrown at you.

You could modulate the penalty on the basis of the severity of the particular disease, whether you had other reason to suspect that you could be infected or at high risk and so on.

For example, you're a gay hooker who consistently refuses to get assessed? All well and good, but if you manage to infect someone, then you deserve to be punished more severely.

I don't think such a system is the most pressing thing to implement, perhaps if there's a new and particularly annoying STD around.

The UK has some sensible options, such as mandatory reporting to contacts while keeping the anonymity of the person initially diagnosed. They get something like a text message telling them they're potentially at risk of an infection and to come in for a screen, but who infected them isn't outright disclosed. For more personal contacts, like the spouse of a person who is hiding their HIV, then the doctor is obligated to inform them no matter the protestations involved.

To be fair to Shilts, he does highlight some people where the line between ignorance and confusion to at least motivated ignorance was blurry at best. One repeat character early in the book is Bobbi Campbell, and Shilts claims that he continued to go to bathhouses (allegedly, though to Shilts' skepticism, not for sex) even well after he'd started plastering posters of sarcomas outside of the baths.

Dugas (aka "Patient Zero", though this is a bit of a myth) plays a more plainly villainous role in the telling, and while some of that is Shilts exaggerating matters at his editor's prodding -- there's a rather infamous bedroom conversation that portrayed Dugas as intentionally spreading the disease, "I've got gay cancer. I'm gonna die, and so are you", that doesn't really make sense given Dugas' public positions at the time and may never have happened -- but him going to bars for casual sex while AIDS Vancouver was telling him to knock it off was pretty well-supported.

And this sort of thinking didn't die with him, or with the availability of blood tests; Shilts points to the theory that HIV required some other cofactor to progress into symptomatic AIDs. This form remained common among a weird baptist-and-bootleggers alliance of gay men and religious types if publicly marginalized into the early-00s! It was wrong as a behavior even by its own merits -- asymptomatic transmission was well-established by '85 -- but as incubation times became well-established the bootlegger side of this theory became more and more obviously self-delusion. I think the author oversells this, while downplaying other plausible arguments that were reasonably-but-wrongly held. For a lot of his focus time period, the effective advise was not to simply wrap it up or abstain from casual sex, but that far broader lifestyle (during the "GRID" days) or casual contact (until mid-1983, a lot of medical professionals believed touch or even indirect contact played a significant transmission method!) changes.

There's some other later bits about gay activists putting often-steep political demands to insure that new anti-HIV efforts would not become anti-gay efforts, most impactfully around the dawn of testing.

On the other side, Shilts' narrative is far more aggressive about the failures of virology and medical research as a class. There's some Goldilocking here: the NCI (and the original sarcomas fell under cancer) research too slow-paced, NIID research underfunded, the NIH uninterested except in the broadest health impacts, the FDA (which controls blood products) unwilling to piece together disparate symptoms to the specific disease, NIH funding too broad, statutory funding too over-specified. But the full combination did lead to a painfully slow understanding of the disease, and release and delayed adoption of blood tests, often marred by politics. These are villains in the more Brazil sense, but they're still villains by Shilts' version of events.

Re: Casual contact transmission of AIDS

One of the other great works of AIDS literature is of course Larson's Rent. Larson wrote many drafts over the years, and who had AIDS and how bad and how they got it varied throughout. In early drafts, which date to the late 80s, the hetero non addict characters are also infected, or assume that they probably are or will be from living in close proximity to infected persons. There's much more of a fatalistic tone to early drafts, everyone is going to die, even the heteros and lesbians and non addicts, and die soon.

As drafts progressed, Mark stopped having, then stopped assuming he would get, AIDS, and Roger's infection was more clearly tied to intravenous drug use and his dead ex rather than just sort of having it because idk reasons. Much of Mark's character arc becomes about surviving his friends, as Larson did, and documenting and immortalizing his dead and dying friends, but also the strange isolation of being the survivor, the normie of the group, the straight white non addicted ally.

Much of this reflected the progression of medical knowledge in real life, and the final script in turn has become more a period relic than a reflection of modernity, by the time the movie came out it had a totally different valence. Treatments were different, prognoses were different.

The song that really has the most currency to today's world, and best reflected how the world would progress, is probably Santa Fe, which predicted without realizing it the development of the restaurant industry in small towns across America.

Dugas (aka "Patient Zero", though this is a bit of a myth) plays a more plainly villainous role in the telling, and while some of that is Shilts exaggerating matters at his editor's prodding -- there's a rather infamous bedroom conversation that portrayed Dugas as intentionally spreading the disease, "I've got gay cancer. I'm gonna die, and so are you", that doesn't really make sense given Dugas' public positions at the time and may never have happened -- but him going to bars for casual sex while AIDS Vancouver was telling him to knock it off was pretty well-supported.

Shilts actually doesn't spend that much time in the book on the specific "Patient Zero" claim, which seems like a bit of a red herring by Dugas supporters to concentrate on anyway, but there's multiple scenes of people reporting that Dugas (or someone matching Dugas's description) knowingly bragged of spreading gay cancer or the disease, not just the most infamous line.

On the other side, Shilts' narrative is far more aggressive about the failures of virology and medical research as a class. There's some Goldilocking here: the NCI (and the original sarcomas fell under cancer) research too slow-paced, NIID research underfunded, the NIH uninterested except in the broadest health impacts, the FDA (which controls blood products) unwilling to piece together disparate symptoms to the specific disease, NIH funding too broad, statutory funding too over-specified.

Yes, where I felt Shilts was being the most unfair was the parts where he accused the authorities of just doing something wrong but then had multiple conflicting views of what they were doing wrong. I also noted that Shilts blames the media for not reporting on HIV earlier and more aggressively, but many of the cases where media reported on it they seem to just have spread wrong views or caused panic; wouldn't earlier and heavier reporting just have led to more of that?

I'm certainly advocating for people who knowingly and non-consensually infect others with a lethal illness being slow roasted over a fire. If Douglas was fucking around, he deserves to find out, and not his unwitting partners.

Shilts points to the theory that HIV required some other cofactor to progress into symptomatic AIDs

My understanding is that HIV doesn't usually kill you by itself, it's the immune suppression that leaves you open to everything else (yeah, is it the bullet, gun or shooter who kills someone etc etc). But I think it's reasonable to call that a "cofactor", if you miraculously managed to keep a person with AIDS in a perfectly sterile environment and scrubbed their microbiome, I'd expect them to live a lot longer (not that deleting a microbiome is a good idea in the least).

Even the sarcomas are due to opportunistic infection by HHV-8 and friends.

So a cofactor isn't really a bad description as far as I'm concerned.

There's some other later bits about gay activists putting often-steep political demands to insure that new anti-HIV efforts would not become anti-gay efforts, most impactfully around the dawn of testing.

I don't blame them, I can easily see how it could have gone that way. Of course, I am not necessarily opposed to mandatory testing, for human beings who have any reason to interact with anyone else, which is just about all of them. I've browsed enough /r/Grindr to know that while some of the more fastidious ones can make a song and dance about using condoms, getting tested and PREP, if the bussy is tight enough they'll usually relent. I'm sure most straight men would do the same, if they had even the same OOM odds of getting casual sex on demand.

Looking at the horndog behavior of gay men today, even accounting for how HIV has become largely inconsequential with modern anti retroviral therapies, I think revealed preferences strongly suggests many/most of them are willing to die sooner if it means they can bareback more partners. Sure, I have nothing against them for doing so, that's their prerogative, and I doubt there's a significant number of utterly naive gay men around who have no idea what that practise entails.

These are villains in the more Brazil sense, but they're still villains by Shilts' version of events.

I could well be overstating my competence, but if I was in charge of the CDC or FDA, I think I could, at least with a bit more study of epidemiology and stats than my standard curriculum provided, have done a better job than the incumbents during COVID. Certainly I would have at least deferred to superforecasters or polymaths like Zvi much earlier, if I felt I couldn't handle it. I would certainly have pushed for the end of lockdowns and masking much earlier than they petered away.

But putting myself in the shoes of the FDA/CDC in the 70s? I can't see myself doing better really.

My personal definition of villainy, even for institutional incompetence or sub-optimality, isn't that harsh.

But I think it's reasonable to call that a "cofactor", if you miraculously managed to keep a person with AIDS in a perfectly sterile environment and scrubbed their microbiome, I'd expect them to live a lot longer (not that deleting a microbiome is a good idea in the least).

There's an increased rate of certain wasting cancers that start to occur after certain thresholds of HIV infection hit, but that wasn't recognized until the late 80s, but the theory I'm motioning around was a little different.

The (later disproved) hypothesis was not that HIV alone couldn't directly kill you short of other external factors, but that it would not progress to immune deficiency in a large portion (usually 50-95%) of those who carried the virus: either their immune systems would fight it off, or it would only have some marginal impact that would never progress to recognizable symptoms. Usually the claim was that full-blown AIDs was limited to those who abused certain hard drugs or had diseases like hepatitis, though more rarely they'd point to a genetic or full-body health version.

This wasn't as crazy at is seems at first glance -- some healthier people, and those with lower initial viral exposures, often did have much longer incubation periods, at a time where all of the virologist modelling expected an incubation time in the area of months or a year. And some of the craziness that did come about wasn't just limited to the self-motivated gays, as even before HIV was isolated or AIDS formalized, the NIH spent as much time seriously entertaining theories about poppers or sperm causing the immune deficiencies due to their chemical makeup, rather than a viral contagion. Shilts has a section where one of the early gay activists does a statistical analysis for the known cases among the (wildly) sexual active men, their expected number of sexual partners, and claimed times of original infections a year earlier, and then comes up with some astronomically low odds ratio (billions-to-one?) for the then-current number of cases.

But then it turned out the disease couldn't be transmitted casually, and almost all of the healthy people in that analysis ended up just being in the incubation stage, probably had reduced T-cells even at the time, and eventually developed symptomatic AIDS, and a large portion (around two-thirds?) died before protease inhibitors were on the market.

Of course, I am not necessarily opposed to mandatory testing, for human beings who have any reason to interact with anyone else, which is just about all of them. I've browsed enough /r/Grindr to know that while some of the more fastidious ones can make a song and dance about using condoms, getting tested and PREP, if the bussy is tight enough they'll usually relent.

That's part of it, but there were also expectations that the tests could and would be used as a proxy -- both to blacklist HIV-positive men from places and activities where they would not be at unusual risk of transmitting the virus, and to Notice men who got tested repeatedly (even if they tested negative) as gay and having gay sex at a time where this was often illegal.

But putting myself in the shoes of the FDA/CDC in the 70s? I can't see myself doing better really.

Dunno. It's easier, looking back that far, to see what of our vision is hindsight, but there's also a lot more fog between the mistakes of that era and today. Shilts focuses a lot on the homophobia -- and while he exaggerates the sense that the CDC didn't care about gay men dying, he isn't totally unfounded -- but there was a lot of fatheaded provincialism and simple status quo bias, too.

Book review thread!

My problem with the comparisons is that the strongest ones are also the most obvious. In particular,

and there's many cases where the [businesses] are shown willing to refer to high-minded ideals about privacy and freedom when they really just cared about not losing the revenue streams

is like…a stock villain. The kind of character young-adult authors add when they want to make readers feel a little more mature. The profit motive has been a bogeyman since at least the Gilded Age. And there was still enough post-2008 class warfare in the atmosphere to get people riled up. Was this a lesson learned from the Reagan era, or was the age of Gordon Gekko just less willing to intervene in capitalism?

The other standout is transfer of information. Does the book address how institutions shared their data? Because I’m imagining heated phone calls and corkboards with string. The kind of medium which makes for good TV but not necessarily the right decisions.

In 2020, we got to watch the COVID counters go up in real time. We didn’t get to see it, but the scientific consensus was congealing at roughly the same speed. The Internet makes stuff happen faster, but there’s still no way to speed up the real-world information. Every notion has to be preconceived.

I dunno, if you have people making profit on running a blood bank or a sex-oriented bathhouse, I'd image they would actually go and fight over their right to do just that if banning or regulating those things would cut into the said profits, especially if they can also just argue that it's not time to be hasty since there's no full certainty on how the virus transmits or how likely the blood is to be contaminated.

The other standout is transfer of information. Does the book address how institutions shared their data? Because I’m imagining heated phone calls and corkboards with string. The kind of medium which makes for good TV but not necessarily the right decisions.

Conferences and mail, mostly, as far as I've understood. Certainly the book couldn't make a comparison to the current, more rapid spread of information, since they didn't have a time machine.

I think Shilts puts his thumb on the scales a bit for that evaluation, especially for bathhouses.

He makes a big deal out of them as a "100-million dollar industry" and charging 5/10 dollars a head person, and that is an investment: the Club Baths would have definitely gone (and did eventually go under!) when closed. Totally fair point! But the other side of that's the extent the Club Baths founder had been a gay activist over a decade before opening his first bathhouse, and went into that field knowing it'd blacklist him from most normal ventures. When it comes to revenue and ideals, there's really little in And the Band Played On that really excludes the option 'both'; just what Shilts wants to portray.

More significantly, while Shilts mentions the long incubation time for HIV, the work as a whole kinda glosses over the extent that drove so many other problems. There was no blood test until 1985; understandings of the high real transmission rate and true number of cases were projections and guess-work, and often wrong (as you mention Fauci and the spit-take). He mentions as an aside different times where the expected incubation period increased -- ten months, a year, two years, five years -- but he only really talks about minimizing estimates of incidence to show obviously misguided activists. But they were only obviously wrong in retrospect: in many cases, they were doing the math and statistical analysis correctly, just with garbage numbers coming in.

I think there's a stronger argument for blood banks (though the strongest arguments come well after the 1980-85 block that Shilts focuses on), but even that has to trade off against the often-serious risks low available blood would involve.

The other night my father rhetorically asked "I feel like asking Netanyahu, 'when has a terrorist group ever been defeated militarily?"

I immediately said "In Sri Lanka in 2009?" The reason it occurred to me was because of @CriticalDuty's write-up here.

Naturally, my father immediately commenced moving the goalposts of the question.

Out of curiosity, are there any other recent examples of terrorist groups being defeated militarily?

ISIS has been largely destroyed militarily. Even if it's not literally completely gone, it's a far cry from what it was at its height. The example of ISIS is also frequently invoked in Israel regarding what Israel should aim for with Hamas.

Marawi crisis? Featuring the Islamic MILF.

I learned about this from seeing a lecture PowerPoint with the cursed phrase, “105mm Gun as Direct Fire Weapon.”

Islamic MILF

Does Mia Khalifa have children?

Shining Path in Peru was largely defeated militarily. The Peruvian government even armed, trained and deputized civilians with the authority to kill Shining Path members.

Generally speaking, I think people who say things like "you can't destroy a movement" or "there are no military solutions to this problem" are just people who do not want to see that particular movement or problem destroyed, and have to cloak it in the language of strategic wisdom rather than admit to their desires. I have a particular disdain for Arab liberal types like Shadi Hamid who claim destroying Hamas is complicated because Hamas isn't just a group of militants, but a government with a bureaucracy and employees and yada yada yada, we will need to find some way to live with them - the LTTE was all of these things and also considerably more advanced and sophisticated than Hamas, as pseudo-states go. ISIS had a government, a bureaucracy, courts, all of the mundane accoutrements of statehood, and somehow we managed to bomb it into oblivion. There are very few problems that violence can't actually solve, so long as you're committed to the necessary scale and force of violence required.

Similar kind of highly motivated argumentation to how you cannot possibly stop illegal immigration by protecting your borders.

Yes, the usual tactic is to present the problem as a fait accompli that must be grudgingly tolerated because nothing can be done to change it.

I wonder whether I do the same. Are there any standard conservative / libertarian / reactionary arguments that follow the same pattern?

Yes, many examples. And I think there's at least some degree of truth to these arguments:

  • There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US, so any large scale attempts at gun control cannot work.

  • The government cannot significantly tax or otherwise confiscate the wealth of the ultra-rich because they will just leave the jurisdiction.

  • Attempting to regulate carbon emissions at this point won't stop climate change, and many of the biggest carbon emitting countries won't get on board anyway.

  • It's not possible to introduce effective mass public transit in most US cities because they have already been designed around cars.

Vast amounts. Forceful arguments based on tradition, existing law, the way things are usually done, a nebulous yet permanent human nature that can never be overcome, the obvious benefits of the status quo and the horrendous costs of change. It’s somewhat less hypocritical for conservatives to use these arguments though*. Besides, they are not entirely devoid of merit, in a limited form.

edit: * although I guess it's also somewhat hypocritical for conservatives to ask for a radical change in immigration policy or whatever, when they usually abhor change.

although I guess it's also somewhat hypocritical for conservatives to ask for a radical change in immigration policy or whatever, when they usually abhor change.

I don't see how it's hypocritical, they want change to the extent that it returns things to what they deem the ideal status quo, not that even all conservatives can agree on which year that was. You might as well call liberals/progs hypocritical for not switching out the entire legal code on a monthly basis, at which point the word ceases to mean anything.

I'd say that conservatives want change to optimize toward a status quo which matches nostalgia instead of history, which is why the reaction to progression is usually reactionary. "Things were better when [annoying/dangerous/good-thing-breaking new thing] hadn't moved my cheese."

Of course, now that conservatives have Noticed the thing which steals skins eating nostalgia and shitting rainbows, and have named it Wokeness, the status quo is considered the only defensible position.

An argument I hear a lot in conservative circles is "gun control just means the only people with guns will be hardened criminals". I'm not saying this is never true, but it's a simple fact that there are many countries with strict gun control and in which even hardened criminals have a remarkably hard time getting their hands on a gun.

Hamas isn't really a terrorist group in the way that the IRA was, though. They're the government of a (previously) largely independent polity that ran its own foreign and domestic policy. The relationship between the IRA and the government of the Irish republic was often hostile or at least unsympathetic, even if many citizens weren't.

When it comes to Palestinians in general, Israel does engage in a lot of non-military efforts to try to limit terrorism. Some are flawed or counteracted by other things like the settlers, but most of the 'classic' civil counterinsurgency playbook (large scale economic investment, jobs, work permits, scholarships for students, medical treatment etc.) against insurgent militants is implemented in the West Bank.

It's easier both for domestic consumption and international relations (both with Western nations, which have themselves dealt with a lot of Islamist terrorism, and other Arab nations, who don't want to frame it as a 'war against Israel' that they might be pressured to take part in) for Israel to call the invasion of Gaza a counter-terror operation.

I think El-Salvador is a good example, the cartels aren't exactly terrorists, but the difference is nominal for all intents and purposes. If El-Salvador can within months with their shitty military..

I think that question unnecessarily invokes history and empiricism when it needn't be, because the question most normies actually mean to ask is "is it even possible?".

The answer to that is, if Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan can be defeated, so can some rag tags in the desert. It's just that modern powers don't have the stomach to carry out a merciless campaign (high civilian toll) followed by prolonged occupation/brainwashing.

I don't know if Islamist terrorists in particular are a special case or not. My galaxy brained shower thought is that the Quran and the resulting set of potential downstream belief systems will almost always produce something that approximates Islamist/Jihadist terrorists, they never had a cultural moderation of the likes of the Nw Testament and the religion/scripture->lore is far too political to have any meaningful distinction of Church and State even in the space of conceivable ideas.

There are meaningful differences, though—I'm sure they'd immediately point to the palestinians thinking of themselves as a different people than the Israelis (which I would guess wouldn't be the case for the cartels), and, as you pointed out, the cartels aren't exactly terrorists. You can lock up all the cartels, but I haven't heard people suggest locking up the entire population of Palestine.

ISIS seems a better parallel to me.

I think China's treatment of the Uyghurs is an example of successfully suppressing Islamists. It's not exactly pretty, but it seems to work fairly well for them, despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the Western powers. They do seem to have the will to put boots firmly on their necks and keep them there for decades; perhaps that's what it takes.

I think there are a lot of big questions over what's happened in El Salvador that will take years, maybe decades to answer. Clearly it's an impressive achievement, on the surface of things. I suppose the question is how sustainable it is, what does the country look like in 20 years, etc.

El Salvador if true is one of the few cases where I had to "update my priors". I guessed that the demand for drugs are too high, and the money too good, and the cartels too scary and the officials too corrupt/scared, for anything to happen at all. Those caveats are the main barriers long term, but the fact that it happened at all is a surprise to me.

This is a mega crazy idea I have no evidence for, but I think the tail end ultra violent genes have largely been killed/exiled off in the more populated old world, creating a new mean. This probably didn't happen in the new world. Jailing almost 1-2% of the population, that too mostly young males yet to pass on their genes, is going to probably change the genetic makeup of the country.

I think there was some element of genetic pacification in the Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations as well, since the unmixed indigenous populations there are generally more peaceful than their mestizo and white neighbors, while up north (and possibly down south in Patagonia too, but I haven't checked) the trend is the opposite.

This is a mega crazy idea I have no evidence for, but I think the tail end ultra violent genes have largely been killed/exiled off in the more populated old world, creating a new mean. This probably didn't happen in the new world.

I've seen this idea bounced around by HBD-types and as far as I can tell there's not only no evidence for it, but evidence against it. Indians in Latin American countries are not broadly more criminal than whites. There's actually a negative correlation in Mexico between how native a state is and how violent it is. It's generally not Indians getting in cartel shootouts. Even as far back as the initial European contact, Spaniards always commented on the remarkable peacefulness and good order in Indian cities. Looking at the US, the hispanic homicide rate has actually been more than halved since the 80s, as the composition of hispanic immigrants shifted from largely-white northern Mexican Chicanos to heavily Indian Guatemalan/Salvadoran/etc. type laborers.

I’m surprised that it worked and my hunch is it wouldn’t be successful in many other countries in the region. I think it’s possible the military and police were less under the grip of the cartels than they are in other Central American countries, perhaps because the state was so dysfunctional that they previously operated with relative impunity and so considered it less necessary to takeover the institutions.

Algerian Islamists in the Algerian Civil War of the 90s?

The 1956 Battle of Algiers is another promising example of a successful counterinsurgency. The situation in Israel and Palestine today is eerily similar.

All the IS(is) pop-ups?

Question for anyone who joined the Motte post Reddit exodus, and who wasn't already at least lurking on Reddit:

How did you find the place?

After all, I can only assume that the accidental exposure that comes about from being a public subreddit doesn't really apply these days, and Scott's shoutouts are few and far between.

I knew about this place when the exodus happened, but I didn't join until somewhat recently when someone pointed out that this was where the hockposting was happening.

Hmm, thanks for sharing. I'm primarily curious about how people who had never heard of the Motte before it moved arrived here, but I have yet to get a response from someone like that. Maybe they don't exist!

It is worrisome just how suppressive exclusion from mainstream sites can be.

Not quite post Reddit exodus, but I stumbled upon a geopolitical thread on /r/TheMotte the week the exodus occurred. I liked what I read, and followed everyone in. Never heard of Scott Alexander or Slate Star Codex prior to that.

I joined post-exodus, but was lurking for a little before. (I don't have a reddit account.) I found it via Scott.

Hmm, was that via a recent work of his, or were you trawling through the archives? I struggle to recall the last time he explicitly linked to us, best I can do is either a direct link to a comment made by someone like Tracing Woodgrains about a year or so back, maybe an actual link to the general sub well before then.

He does regularly link to the SSC subreddit, which (I think?) has some of the same moderators as this site. Don't know if there's an obvious pipeline from that sub to here.

It might have been this one where I found it? Not actually sure though. I only discovered Scott after the New York Times incident.

Hmm. Thanks for looking that up! If we're talking 2021, that's about the time I remember Scott personally interacting with me on the old sub, that got rarer and rarer and I can't recall him showing up more than once or twice in the entire duration since.

I don't believe any of them have joined, but I privately send links to high quality posts (and sometimes rough drafts of my relatively low quality responses for proofing/critique, almost all of which were never posted) to thoughtful friends and family. Usually the links are related their profession/philosophy or a description of a culture war flareup in their area.

I presume you happen to be an old lurker yourself? At least I don't personally recall encountering you on the old sub, not that my memory is perfect or my knowledge of every user exhaustive!

Yeah, old mostly lurker, both on themotte sub but also SSC sub CWR threads before that migrated.

@EdenicFaithful I just finished up Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which my wife bought for me after seeing it recommended by fashion girlies on social media. It is, at the end of the day, a high class thriller, John Grisham with literary pretensions. I enjoyed the book immensely, I wanted something relatively light after reading a lot of heavy non-fiction lately. And it felt made for me, it is a thriller following a bunch of weirdo pseudo-aristocratic classics students, and I'm the kind of guy who went to a northeastern undergrad school and wore a vintage camel hair sportcoat to a class studying Procopius' The Secret History. There's an effortpost brewing in my notes about the book's status as the progenitor of the "Dark Academia" aesthetic meme, and the memetics of online aesthetics more generally.

With the exception of classics (The Bible, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, etc.) which I can't avoid having an opinion on going in, I try to avoid reading about something while I am still in the process of reading the work itself. And because my wife bought it for me as a gift, and specifically referenced seeing it on social media, I kind of assumed that it was new fiction, from the past five years or so. Having finished it, I looked at a few reviews, trying to find things I hadn't caught on my read through. The setting felt vaguely 80s, but there weren't enough clear references to really pin it down, and it felt like an odd time period to pick if you weren't going to use it much and like reference Reagan or era-appropriate music...imagine my surprise when I found out the novel was written in 1992 and the reason it lacked a lot of period-references was because at the time it was written the novel was simply set in the present, with no need to let people know when it was because the underlying assumption was that elite liberal arts students would more or less always be like that, Tartt wouldn't have been able to imagine that two and a half decades later college would be so completely eaten by computerization that her novel would be rendered completely historical.

I had, of course, assumed that the novel was written today, and set in a vague past to avoid smartphones. It is tough to imagine much of novel's moody pacing working in the social media age, with characters texting or engaging in posting every event on social media. Indeed, I have trouble thinking of murder mysteries or thrillers that successfully integrate the smartphone into their plotting. Every modern novel in the genre seems to avoid them by various obvious crutches, such as lampshading that a character refuses to use cellphones, having the phone lose reception run out of batteries or be broken at every critical moment, or by the simple expedient of forgetting about it. I don't read a ton of new fiction, but I can't think of a thriller that handles cellphone usage well. Even the sci-fi novels I recall reading which featured greater communications advances failed to reflect how I actually use cell phones in reality.

So now to get to my Small Scale Questions: how does one successfully integrate the digital world into the classic murder mystery or thriller structure? What authors or works have done so? Is it even possible to do so, or does the digital age simply require that we maintain a higher willing suspension of disbelief? Does communications tech usage date any work to a particular five-year period, because communications tech is moving so fast (ie, in 2003 the gang of high school friends would have definitely used AIM, by 2008 AIM was lame and facebook messenger was everything, by 2013 nobody I knew in college used messenger for much of anything preferring snapchat, in the decade since we've seen the rise and fall of a half dozen social media services, data plans and wifi access have gone from very limited to universal, etc.)? Is there a similar literary discourse about prior technological transitions? Did the telegraph and telephone cause authors to go "oh, shit, so many plots out the window, better set this story in the past or in the wild west or something?" Did literary critics talk about how old plots were obviated by car travel?

Well I read some of the Robert Galbraith detective novels and those had cell phones being used to solve the problems one would expect a cell phone to solve, pretty much. To the extent that they didn't solve problems, it never felt forced. I can't recall anyone's phone running out of batteries at a crucial moment. I don't think lack-of-bars ever featured into the plotline.

It's probably easier to have phones not solve problems in a detective story than a thriller.

Edit: Really, cell phones obviate danger when you know you're about to be attacked soon but you have still have time for the police to show up, wherever you are. So that aspect is not that limiting.

I've seen a few successful approaches:

  • Keep the time pressure high, and leave few clear authorities to call. See Knives Out, where police are brought in early and can't solve the crime (and aren't even sure there is a crime). For a lighter-hearted take, see Zootopia, where the convention is so transparent most people don't notice it, even to the point where they added the carrot recorder joke. Or see BNA : Brand New Animal, where anyone beastman the protagonists could call has been transformed into ravening beasts. It's not uncommon for these stories to have the interconnectivity be a major part of the solution -- the climax is the reveal and disclosure of the villain (and in BNA, that there are connected beliefs that still hold people together, transmitted from cell phone recording to mass media), rather than a physical tussle.

  • Make your story about that technology. Ghost In The Shell presumes its main characters will be constantly tied to the internet at every moment -- the one guy without a cyberbrain is the runt of the team -- and it's a whole thing if any ever have to go dark. Paranoia Agent takes this in more supernatural ends, and it does work best if it's weakly-speculative, but the same principles can apply for traditional thrillers.

  • Decrease your scope and scale. You can write thrillers that aren't about murderers: there's a wide variety of financial or social crime where calling the police will range from getting nothing to getting written up yourself. It's harder to write these lower stakes as interesting to readers, but it can still be very interesting once you've grabbed them.

  • Drastically reduce the time pressure. If you're trying to solve a homicide from the 1920s in 2020, it doesn't matter what tech you can bring to hand. Arguably, this is a major focus for a lot of older true crime.

I recently reread this book after first reading it in either late in secondary school or early in my undergrad. I enjoyed it even more than when I first read it: the atmosphere is impeccable, the characters are so vividly drawn, it's extraordinarily readable even when nothing is really happening plot-wise.

Interesting bit of trivia: Bret Easton Ellis (to whom the novel is dedicated, IIRC) attended Bennington College with Tartt. Hampden College in The Secret History is a fictionalised version of Bennington, as is Camden College in Ellis's The Rules of Attraction. The two novels are essentially set in a shared universe: History mentions in passing a female undergrad who slit her wrists in a bathtub, and her suicide is a significant part of the plot of Attractions (several of the chapters are even narrated from her perspective).

I read Tartt's long-awaited follow-up The Little Friend and found it decidedly underwhelming - not bad, but nowhere near as good as her debut. I've heard from several people that her third novel The Goldfinch is as good as History or better, so I'm keen to read it.

Oh man, I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on the book.

My theories:

-- Richard or Camilla killed Henry. Shooting yourself in the head, twice, is difficult. Not strictly impossible, but difficult. In favor of Richard: Richard changes distinctly after the murder, in ways that mirror and follow the path of what Henry talks about in the garden conversation, he is able to shut up his internal voices and successfully graduate, get into grad school, for a time carry on a normal relationship. Part of his symbolic accession to personhood and his inheritance from Henry is receiving Henry's BMW; throughout the story Richard is limited by his lack of a car, he is dependent on the goodwill of others in a way that is both very symbolic and very realistic to an isolated rural school, who has what car where is a constant source of tension in the work. He kills Henry, and symbolically inherits this grant of full personhood. He becomes more human after the murder, more functional, the rest of the group becomes less functional, drifts outward into their dysfunctions. In favor of Camilla: Camilla was much more involved and agentic than indicated in the work. She is the unsung glue of the group in a big way. Richard and the other boys are always vaguely frienemies, it is never clear which boys are closer and which boys are in competition or enmity, who is in and who is out, while Camilla is always in with all the other boys. Three out of the four are constantly besotted with Camilla, Francis is also shown to be closer with her as a friend. Everyone else is willing to lie about, cover up, or minimize her involvement in their accounts; both because they want to protect her and because they don't want to admit they were under her spell.

— Richard wrote the note from "Bunny," for the purpose of bringing the group back together. Richard feeds off the group, off feeling in on the secret. They’re all starting to drift apart, the group is tearing at the seams, so he creates another crisis for them to keep their secret to try to bring them together again. He liked the game of murdering Bunny, so he creates a new crisis, maybe they will murder Julian? It fails, spectacularly, with Henry’s death.

One of my favourite fan theories came from TV Tropes:

There is a very common interpretation that the other members of the Greek Class actually hate Richard, only tolerating him either to manipulate him or because he is The Thing That Would Not Leave. It's mostly said as a joke, about readers projecting their own dislike of Richard into the characters, but a lot of fans think there is some truth to this, thanks mostly to no one acknowledging Richard when he is shot.

I read this and was initially like "ha ha funny" but then I was like "I been sayin tho"

I always found Richard confusing in that he seems so unlikeable, and is clearly the butt-monkey of the friend group, then he'll report just randomly pulling normie chicks as soon as he leaves the group, who disappear as quickly as they appear in the narrative.

Depending how heavily one finds his narration unreliable, it's not hard to imagine him lying about all sorts of things, that a lot of the positive things he gets are lies or hallucinations.

Even the sci-fi novels I recall reading which featured greater communications advances failed to reflect how I actually use cell phones in reality.

I remember a bit in an early Culture novel where a “phone” call is interrupted by a strange rushing noise. The resident supercomputer, which is naturally mediating all communications in its region, deduces that one participant is falling near terminal velocity, and dispatches a drone to rescue him. I can’t tell if this is Banks preempting the consequences of a surveillance state, or if he just forgot that inertial measurement already existed.

how does one successfully integrate the digital world into the classic murder mystery or thriller structure?

The answer is that for whatever reason, the digital world is a mountain of red herrings distorting and disrupting informed observation. The laziest way to do it would be that an influencer who has faked their death multiple times for clicks is murdered for real, and their dipshit following is muddying all possible genuine search ability with "We did it Reddit!" mass broadcasted armchair investigation. Even better if there is an "influencer detective" condensing the phenomenon.

For very tangential reasons, this question reminds me of the how to show texting/internet in film addressed by Every Frame a Painting https://youtube.com/watch?v=uFfq2zblGXw

Does communications tech usage date any work to a particular five-year period, because communications tech is moving so fast

Maybe in the last few decades. I recently watched You've Got Mail on an airplane and it really struck me as a warm and fuzzy period piece (this probably dates me, but the late 90s are generally considered to be a good time). Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan initially meet over email (AOL, dial-up) and hit it off online, sight unseen, despite being business rivals in real life. It's a major plot point when they decide to meet IRL, but then can't contact each other until they go home and log in. To someone who's had an always-connected smartphone in my pocket for at least a decade now, it's hard to think about how people really lived -- commuted, planned events and trips, and so on -- before.

Amusingly, the business drama in the film centers around Hanks' Big Box Bookstore moving in and displacing the small, local Shop Around the Corner (a classic movie reference) bookstore. But it doesn't foresee that the Internet, which is crucial to the story, will bring Amazon around to presumably drive the big store out within a decade anyway.

It really is possibly the greatest unintentional period piece. It couldn't have been written five years in any direction and made sense.

Even the sci-fi novels I recall reading which featured greater communications advances failed to reflect how I actually use cell phones in reality.

My novel certainly does, though cell phones are more of a quaint throwback rather than the typical means of mass communications when most people have neural laces or at least smart contacts. There is a large group of people who are forced to rely on them, or the just as outdated smart glasses/contacts, because their brains reject an invasive implant. But they're not the focus of the story, the protagonist has a 6th gen Neuralink, is about as cybernetic as a Tesla Cybertruck, and possesses an Internet of Things connecting his fingers and toes to his spine.

Then again, I'm a stickler for consistent worldbuilding, it's a self-describedly rational work of literature, and I make a genuine effort to avoid convenient worldbuilding sins because I'm explicitly writing the kind of book I wish I could read.

It's hardly impossible, just a bit harder. The most obvious solution is to have crises where just knowing what's going on or being able to get a message out is hardly sufficient to resolve it. If an author or screenwriter can't come up with any, they deserve to be tarred, feathered and run out of town, or at least denied writing gigs made for thinking folk.

The Neuralink can run out of power, and is only recharged by sleeping, but unfortunately our protagonist is - get this - an insomniac.

I would nominate you for winner of /r/TwoSentenceHorror, but after closer inspection, that spooky tale was just one. Still absolute shivered me timbers and roasted my almonds!

In The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix, cellphone and modern technology play a significant role. Unfortunately, the main character is pretty isolated and has no one she trusts or loves outside a houseplant, so possessing a cell phone doesn't avail her much.

Part of it is just 'never underestimate the stupidity and laziness of criminals'.

People smart and disciplined enough to plan and carry out something like that can find higher-paying jobs that don't put their lives and freedom at constant risk.

I don't think they'd ever dare to do this, even if they had the ability, because a sniper gunning down targets in a major city automatically sends off alarm bells at the federal level. You're basically asking for the FBI to crack down on you. Certain tactics just aren't worth the heat they bring. There's a scene along those themes where the state senator rips off Stringer, and Stringer tries to get Wee-Bey to kill the senator in retaliation - Avon immediately shuts it down because a political assassination means the feds take over from the local cops and life gets much harder for the Barksdale crew. The powers-that-be will tolerate petty handgun killings, or at least leave it to the cops, but anything resembling military tactics or political vendettas from organized crime will naturally be assigned a much higher level of importance.

A lot of excellent posts here, making the point about a lack of intelligence and training. I'm going to argue a separate and related point: a lack of sangfroid, bloodthirst, psychopathy, a lack of willingness to kill.

Most ordinary humans, including gangbangers, have a reluctance to kill directly in cold blood. Most humans will kill in the right circumstances, will fight under pressure or in a group, but left alone to make the single decision to pull the trigger on a sniper rifle? Different mindset entirely.

A driveby, or a group of guys walking up, is high pressure, impulsive, when you get there you are in danger and must act to "defend" yourself or you might die, and it is a group activity your friends are there to keep you accountable. A sniper on a rooftop is solitary, is waiting and watching, he has to personally make the cold blooded decision to kill, he is in no danger and can choose not to act or to flee and avoid the danger.

If you are in a group of three guys in a Ford Explorer, all hanging out the window and shooting wildly, there is a sense in which you aren't necessarily responsible for any individual death on the other side. In the moment, there is a lack of certainty: maybe I shot him or maybe my friend did. If you are a sniper sitting on a rooftop, you are certain that you are the one who did the killing.

Training a human to kill in cold blood takes a lot of effort, a lot of training hours to program obedience to programming, it doesn't happen instantly or perfectly. Militaries drill obedience into their men to produce a soldier who will follow their training and do what they were told without thinking about what they're doing too hard. Muzzle-loader era armies emphasized firing in volleys both for effectiveness, and to allow the average soldiers to avoid feeling personal guilt for killing, instead the emphasis is on duty and coordination with your mates. Modern armies emphasize coordination, with soldiers mostly engaging in covering fire on specific targets, soldiers are rarely asked to kill individually outside of their training, instead the emphasis is on doing your job for your mates.

Gangbangers similarly maintain discipline, such as it is, and accountability to your mates by putting their street soldiers in situations where they are directly with their friends, in danger, and must act to look good and brave and protect their friends. That is psychologically easier for the average person.

FC has it mostly covered, but I thought I'd weigh in about one specific little bit, the "high powered rifle and scope". People who don't shoot guns often think hitting a target at even close distance is easy, but it is anything but. The technical skill needed is relatively high and unlikely to be present in teh sort of people who need to take out opposing drug gangs. But let's say you got a guy who grew up rural and knows how to hunt.

Ok, you go buy a hunting rifle. If you get a scope package, this whole thing becomes harder because the scopes most companies sell on their guns are trash. Or you do your research, buy a decent rifle, get some recommendations for scopes, get good rings etc. Already this is requiring a fair bit of knowledge and around a thousand dollars. You get it all put together and you go zero the gun. Here you need a range of some distance, and at least twenty rounds of ammunition, maybe more. Not a lot of shooting ranges hood adjacent, so you drive out to the country to go to a commercial range and try to keep the staff from reporting on the thugged out hood rats now practicing their marksmanship with brand new rifles. You get zeroed. Then you pack all your shit back to the hood. We're going to assume short ranges of maybe thirty to a couple hundred yards, but if you want to set up "on rooftops", the height of the roof becomes very important. Shooting at steep angles is difficult, and requires specific training to do well. It changes the range math. But let's say the range is short enough it doesn't matter.

So you pop the guy, and now there's a .308 (or comparable caliber) slug somewhere and not many people get killed with long guns. Not a lot of long guns sold in a city. Not a lot of bangers with a bolt gun. You could destroy the gun, but would you rather destroy a two hundred dollar pistol or a thousand dollar rifle? It's hard to hide, the thing is four feet long. If you use it again, the police are going to link those crimes very early. Multiple bangers ambushed with a hunting rifle? A sniper serial killer? Gonna attract attention. Unlike handguns, some 70% of which are the same caliber, hunting rifles come in a staggering array of chamberings, making whichever one you choose relatively much easier to find even without a ballistic match.

Or, you could hand a fourteen-year-old a stolen pistol that retailed for $200 and have him walk up on a motherfucker.

My understanding is that there is in fact, a certain degree of restraint in all organized crime in which violence is constrained or ritualised to prevent well, things from escalating too far. That is to say that sure you could aggressively murder all your rivals, but all you'd actually succeed in doing is destroying the illegal money making operations, scaring normies, making everyone hate you and attracting a lot of police attention.

Besides the 'they're idiots' angle, there is a lot of heat that rifles bring that your typical saturday night special would not. It displays a level of sophistication that law enforcement would gravitate towards as a problem. Also, using a sniper rifle requires a certain amount of training that might be better spent in a cough Private Military Company or similar endeavor.

Because if they were smart enough to figure out those tactics they wouldn’t be gangsters?

This is a non-spoiler detail: later in the show one of the drug dealers has a chief enforcer who was ex-Army/Marines, and it's implied he served in Iraq. All these complaints and suggestions are more or less embodied by this character.

Likewise Mike in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul

Or the other fictional Mike, Corleone. It's strongly implied his military background and familiarity with efficient, utilitarian killing gives him a massive edge in gang wars.

Though I do have my gripes with Mike as well, who increasingly looks just geriatric.

But does anyone have the background in urban combat/organized crime to answer this question?

Oh no, zero , absolutely none. I do have extensive fictional viewing experience, though.

My theory is that there are two layers to being a gangster. The basic, underlying, one, the ultimate unit of crime (as well as politics, but let’s not get into that), is just one guy with a gun, who’s ready to kill, who doesn’t care about anything else. He has the power to inflict death on almost anyone, and so he’s extremely powerful. Even organized crime doesn’t have a good way of dealing with him, except numbers : there are always enough of them that they can guarantee retaliation if members are killed by the lone gunman. Small consolation for the dead mafiosi.

The other, superficial layer, is the perception of being ‘hard’, ie, close to this ideal killing machine, the basic unit of power. Gangsters who appear hardest can rip other gangsters off. As well as civilians. That’s their bread and butter, how they get, and get to keep, their money.

So, aside from stupidity, the reason they don’t snipe is because inflicting death is not their job, appearing ready to inflict death is.

I have a similar reaction to your husband to many gangster and noir films : why doesn’t the hero just murder the antagonist and bury him in the woods? It’s been established that he’s evil, your life and your family’s life is on the line, the police won’t help, so what’s the hang-up, hero ?

Civilians, because they are focused on the second layer/model, where they automatically back down against gangsters who appear hard, and because they have delegated violence to the police, have forgotten that they possess ultimate power too.

why doesn’t the hero just murder the antagonist and bury him in the woods?

I'd love to read some fiction where that is the premise. Anyone have suggestions for books where that's the case?

Jack Reacher? Joe Pickett?

There are also various books where the protagonist tracks a murderer who turns out to be the "good guy", and ends up letting them go or covering for them.

I love attempts to create accurate hitman/ruthless protagonists.

It would be great to see some guy just trying to make his way in life and bad guys screw with him. They do this with all sorts of 'ex mobster/assassin/special forces/spook' stuff, but there's too much action/drama.

I'd like to see it from the point of view of some regular seeming guy where antagonists just start disappearing after messing with him. The protagonist is very careful in a 'get them while they're sleeping at 3am with no witnesses or evidence trail' sense. They just start disappearing. No one knows why. The focus is on the gradual terror of the antagonists as they figure out something is terribly wrong. The film's scenes until the climax are mostly mundane by just implying what is happening.

Or from his POV: He’s an accountant, he’s not used to violence. He at first yields to the antagonist’s every demand, he’s terrified. Then when he realizes he has no out and his family is threatened, he doesn’t get angry and turns into the badass he was in a previous life like in those movies, he just sheepishly starts researching murder on the internet (not on his own computer, he’s not stupid). He commits murder like he would fix his own toilet: at first bumbling and disgusted, then relieved and proud of his accomplishment.

Meanwhile the bad guys assume literally anyone else murdered their accomplice. But for some reason they keep hassling him. By the fifth murder he’s become so blasé about the whole process that his cover is starting to slip (“Sure, I’ll pay you off, no problem, I love my family, I don’t want any trouble. Meet me in the middle of the forest with two large garbage bags and a shovel“).

This would be great too. Just any pro-social introvert normal guy who is just intelligent. Once there's a devastating event in his life like the murder of a loved one he just sits down on the couch for 12 hours thinking. Then there's research through a public wireless via TOR/VPN and a cheap laptop paid in cash. Then baddies start dropping.

There was a comment about gangbangers on The Wire recently. Would be cool to see something perpendicular.

Revenge is a morally fraught motivation, though. I’d like him to be completely in the clear morally: it’s both unambigous self-defense, and the bad guys are evil. The reason why a scenario like that is rare in fiction, is that society considers the use of violence, especially killing, to corrupt one’s soul. I don’t agree: just because we have delegated the killing to cops and soldiers, doesn’t mean we can remain clean. The blood they spill is on our hands too.

Society recognizes three categories: the innocent sheep, and then the violent, which are separated into two: evil wolves and somewhat good shepherd dogs (or as Team america puts it: pussies, assholes, and dicks). In all those movies you mentioned, the badass protagonists have been corrupted by their violence previously, they’re dogs in sheep’s clothing at the beginning, they are not like the viewer. I’d like the accountant to be, and to remain, a sheep. With bloody teeth.

Ironically given his status as the trope codifier for much of the noir genre, Raymond Chandler actually plays with this idea a fair bit in his own work.

Stephen King does this a lot. The Dead Zone, Dolores Clairborne and 11/22/63 all come out on the side of the "just shoot him in the face" solution.

  • Harder to keep a sniper rifle concealed than a submachine gun?

  • Escalation from "street gangs' kind of violence to "assassination" kind of violence will attract more cop attention?

  • Longer and more complicated setup = larger chance of getting caught?

You don't need a sniper rifle, a DMR chambered in 7.62x51 or even a half-decent AR-15 with an LPVO will more than suffice.

A 10 inch barrel on the latter will probably do the trick for engagement ranges within a few hundred meters, especially when you can quickly follow up with more shots.

At that point, it's barely bigger or even shorter than most SMGs, if not an autopistol. Easier to get too, if comparing semi AR-15 or AR-10 to anything with full-auto capabilities.

If you wanted to get really fancy, splurge for a suppressed AR in .300 Blackout, you can perforate fools with whisper quiet rounds, and not even wake up the neighbors downstairs.

I think you're a touch off base here. Yes, you can get a .308 with a ten inch barrel, but it's more regulated and it is going to be LOUD, and throw a fifteen foot fireball when you shoot it. Might as well fit a roman candle to your assassination gun. You're also going to lose all the power that would make you choose a .308 in the first place, because ten inches of barrel isn't going to get the round up to speed. Right about ten inches, a .308 round drops below the 2200 FPS mark at the muzzle, meaning you might as well use the .300 blackout because you've gimped the more powerful cartridge.

Now let's talk about the problems with .300 AAC. First, it's low power, essentially a pistol cartridge when suppressed. Second, suppressors are expensive and the legal process is lengthy. You can build or buy "solvent trap" cans, but those are on the police radar and they don't work nearly as well as proper cans. Third, even in the best case scenario, the noise is still significant and noticeable. We're talking 130 decibels roughly, and there is a phenomenon known as "first round pop", where the first shot in a cold can is louder than the subsequent ones. It's not hearing safe, the "whisper quiet" is more likely noticeably louder than a stadium rock concert or a jet aircraft.

Take it from someone who has a built-out suppressed.300, I wouldn't recommend it for an assassination.

Yes, you can get a .308 with a ten inch barrel, but it's more regulated and it is going to be LOUD, and throw a fifteen foot fireball when you shoot it.

I understand my initial comment might be slightly unclear on the point, but I meant 10" AR-15s chambered in 5.56 or thereabouts. That barrel length in 7.62 is a disaster. I mean, you might as well concuss your enemy to death instead of shooting him.

First, it's low power, essentially a pistol cartridge when suppressed. Second, suppressors are expensive and the legal process is lengthy. You can build or buy "solvent trap" cans, but those are on the police radar and they don't work nearly as well as proper cans. Third, even in the best case scenario, the noise is still significant and noticeable. We're talking 130 decibels roughly, and there is a phenomenon known as "first round pop", where the first shot in a cold can is louder than the subsequent ones. It's not hearing safe, the "whisper quiet" is more likely noticeably louder than a stadium rock concert or a jet aircraft.

Isn't .300 AAC a relative chonker of a round? I can't see how one can call it pistol tier even if it's subsonic. I expect the lethal range will be significant enough that an adversary with a handgun will be powerless to respond.

It's not hearing safe, the "whisper quiet" is more likely noticeably louder than a stadium rock concert or a jet aircraft.

Take it from someone who has a built-out suppressed.300, I wouldn't recommend it for an assassination.

I have seen claims of around 120 dB from other owners, but close enough, and it's still a 30 dB drop from unsuppressed.

I am under the impression that matters, a lot, because it potentially changes the overall sound signature enough to confuse people who would immediately jump to "gunshot", and at least by the time the round reaches the target it becomes exceedingly difficult to triangulate the shooter, even if it's not Hollywood-quiet.

Isn't .300 AAC a relative chonker of a round? I can't see how one can call it pistol tier even if it's subsonic.

With common subsonic rounds necessary for suppression, the ballistics are pretty comparable to the .45 ACP (or 10mm), a 220 grain projectile at 1k fps vs a 230 at 900. Of course, the downrange accuracy is much better, but in terms of power, we're in the same ballpark. You're not getting rifle damage at subsonic velocities.

Getting pinged at by a regular scoped PCC from some rooftop inside +/- a hundred yards sounds like a pretty bad time though -- I think it's mostly the honour culture aspect combined with gang-bangers having limited knowledge of modern gun culture/tech that stops this from being on the table.

I would wager a considerable sum that your husband is at least a standard deviation smarter than the typical gangbanger on the violent end, for one.

But more to the point, gang violence is a memetic thing. These are dumb teenage boys with few opportunities and limited social support taken in by crime syndicates, whose training in violence begins and ends with ‘put the bullet in this end, point that end at the person we told you to kill’. They’re engaging in violence to prove themselves, not to accomplish an objective, because that’s the psychology of a teenage boy looking for belonging. Of course they’ll choose flashy, cool looking tactics they’ve seen on tv or heard reference to in a rap song, over much better tactics that look a lot more boring.

The Los Zetas basically did this from what I understand. A bunch of ex Mexican special forces guys decided to go into the cartel business and had an advantage over everybody else for a while. Like you said though, the original members got killed off or arrested after a while and the new recruits didn't have the same training so they lost their edge over time.

I mean, first off, it’s TV. Bigger, better organized Gangs in real life(cartels etc) have a combat edge over street randos, but usually to the level of, like, militias or security guards and not to the level of soldiers. But gangbanger violence films well, so that’s what they run with.

Second, gang war isn’t really like modern state-on-state war, it’s like pre-state tribal feuding which centers around raiding and reputational fluff to drive non-members out of a territory. Infantry tactics might be an edge, but not as big a one as you’d think- having a fearsome reputation in the criminal underworld is a lot easier(cheaper too) and comes from rule of cool compared to maintaining actual soldiers. Of course it’s less safe, but violent criminals are a lot less risk averse than the general population and street trash are the ones actually risking their lives here.

Plus, bosses might have an edge over the thugs, but we’re still not talking about geniuses here. These guys don’t know enough to create substantially better tactics, and they’re not smart enough to figure it out on their own. So they stick with what works- being seen to have the loyalty of brave and violent underlings. Sniping off a roof with a pawn shop deer rifle is easy and cheap, but it’s not visually flashy enough to make a reputation.

To extend the previous response a bit more, consider that the methods they use might be genuinely adaptive.

As you say, Bell doesn't try to optimize the violence. What would happen if he did? Suppose he decides he needs that one territory real bad, so he puts together a serious hit squad, trains them up in weapons and tactics, arms them with actual carbines, not glocks and shotguns...

...And then one of these guys gets nabbed for incidental stupidity, blabs to the cops, and the organization and infrastructure vastly increases Bell's exposure, so he goes immediately to jail for life.

...It works, and they go through a couple corners like the Reaper's scythe. The extremely unusual level of lethality, the weapons used, and the unusual tactics employed draw immediate and overwhelming attention from the cops, and massive police resources are diverted to tracking down the squad and the man behind them specifically. Go to the previous step.

...It works, and the cops for some reason ignore it. The dumb gangs are wiped out, the smarter gangs observe and copy, violence as a whole increases dramatically, the police come down hard on everyone. Bell likely is either killed by someone else being smart, or is sent to jail for life.

Gang war looks sorta like real war, if you hold your head at an angle and squint. It's easy to think that they're trying to do real war and they're just super bad at it. But in fact, they aren't trying to do real war, they're trying to do a peculiar kind of business where, in the words of P.J. O'Rourke, the only way to enforce a contract is with a contract, and plenty of enforcers. The shootings are an obvious net-negative, a necessary evil that it's in everyone's interest to minimize and avoid. And later in the show, when you get an actual, smart, ambitious, ruthless and efficient kingpin, he doesn't go for infantry tactics, he goes for discrete murders and meticulously hidden bodies, because the problem isn't killing the other guys, it's getting away with it.

A way to look at it would be that the last comment is why greater lethality doesn't arrive from the bottom-up, and this one is why it doesn't arrive from the top-down.

And later in the show, when you get an actual, smart, ambitious, ruthless and efficient kingpin,

We also had this with Stringer who ran the business another way, but the return of his boss really hamstrung him.

A big part of it is that they don't know what they don't know. Violence is memetic, and they have received a particular set of memes that deliver these particular results.

Think about it. The individuals in question are part of a very particular form of gun culture: they live in areas where guns are de facto illegal, and where all the firearms use they've ever heard of or experienced is criminal. That means there's no range time, no formal training, no places to do the training, no people to teach. The high turnover from prison and fatalities means there's little to no institutional culture to build on, no accumulation of knowledge. What you get is lowest-common-denominator stuff. Actual training takes significant time and effort to deliver results even for things as simple as basic marksmanship under stress; where is a gangbanger going to get a thousand rounds of ammo and ten hours of range time? I've been in the gun culture my whole life, and I only recently learned about dry-fire as a training tool; where are they going to hear about it? How are they going to learn to mount a scope or zero a rifle, much less learn more elaborate and esoteric ideas like small-unit tactics?

Gangbangers appear to think of gunfights the way they think of fistfights: an act of raw imposition of will on another. They see using a gun in terms of chunky primitives: you shoot, they die, rather than the specific mechanics involved: situational awareness, contact, identifying targets, aiming, firing, reloading, cover, clearing malfunctions and so on. They don't think of guns as specific tools with specific capabilities that can be optimized for, they're super-knives that stab from range. The memes they've received shape their intentions and their methods decisively.

It's worth considering that, from the perspective of the gangbangers, what they're doing works. They've almost certainly seen multiple friends and acquaintances killed by the time they're old enough to participate, so they know that their forms of combat do actually kill people. Their form of violence is reasonably effective, derives them benefits in the form of honor, and the significant decrease in mortality is probably a feature, not a bug, since it generally increases survivability for all involved. Gangbangers generally are attempting to assert dominance or to make a point, not to annihilate the opposition like John Wick.

This.

Seconded, or perhaps thirded.

I only recently learned about dry-fire as a training tool;

I have always been told that dry-firing (most?) guns is bad mechanically because certain pieces aren't meant to hit together repeatedly (hardened firing pins on non-brass surfaces?). Maybe more modern designs account for this? Or are you using dummy training rounds?

I'm definitely not an expert on this, so I'd be curious to hear more from someone who knows.

Maybe more modern designs account for this? Or are you using dummy training rounds?

Yes. Most modern guns can be dry fired no problem. If you're very worried about your striker or have an older/rimfire gun, a snap cap will fix you right up.

You can just get dry-fire snapcaps for this.

I had the same understanding, but there was a post here from one of our commenters with significant experience in the services, who pointed out that dry fire is in fact superior for training the mechanics of marksmanship. The way he put it is that dry fire is the study, and live fire is the test; I believe he recommended something like a 10:1 ratio. Given that dry fire is free in terms of money and maximally cheap in terms of effort (no getting your gear together, driving to a range, paying range fees, cleaning and maintenance afterward, etc, etc), this seems pretty reasonable. The idea, as I understand it, is that you practice acquiring and maintaining a sight picture while squeezing the trigger. There's no muzzle blast or recoil, so you see all the flinches and shakes and disruptions as they happen, and can work to get your process as smooth and fast and precise as possible. Then you switch over to live fire, and practice maintaining those good habits under real firing conditions.

This is roughly the standard in western army basic training. It's particularly useful for movement and engagement exercises that aren't directly related to marksmanship. Now that I think about it, weapons handling seems vastly more important than marksmanship in training to engage an enemy.

thank you, I was drawing a blank.

"Snap caps" are recommended for rimfire guns of any kind, and older guns; what extent they matter for modern semiautomatics is somewhat controversial. It's plausible that even new centerfire gun designs will still have increased forces on the firing pin or its surrounding structure when used with an empty chamber but attempts to experimentally demonstrate the matter haven't been able to show clear and obvious results, and modern firing pins are also cheap to replace.

For rimfires, the tip of the firing pin can hit steel on the breach face, as part of the design, and the difference between steel-on-steel and steel-on-compressable-brass is huge: people have experimentally demonstrated damage in <100 uses. There's a small number of rimfire revolvers that avoid this failure mode through some really clever design, though. Some rimfire rifles (such as the popular 10/22) claim that they've eliminated the problem with a firing pin stop, but that's only really true for relatively small counts, and heavy dry fire practicers have found out the hard way that this just moved the problem to a bent firing pin stop.

Older centerfire guns sometimes had similar issues, mostly pre-1970. GLOCK still recommends snap caps for very heavy dry fire use, and people have very rarely shown breach-face problems when not using snap caps, but they almost always are also the sort of people sending hundreds of rounds of very sketchy ammo through their guns.

You can get cheap all-plastic or plastic-rubber snap caps for common calibers at most reputable gun shops, but they're usually specced for 500-1000 uses, so if you're really into dry-fire drills, splurging for spring-based ones can be worthwhile.

Snap caps are also useful for ammo failure and clearing drills.

Gangbangers are dumb. No, dumber than that. A bit more. Yes, functional retardation territory it is. Why else would many of them murder each other on the street, often for less money than they could make working minimum wage?

There's nothing that forces them to shoot handguns gangsta style, beyond that's what they think looks cool, leaving aside it is a woefully inadequate stance/grip which makes successful hits on target even more random than they already are in a stressful close quarters firefight.

Gangbangers are dumb.

Reminds me of this excellent scene from the show: https://youtube.com/watch?v=D3hD9ZbguIg

I don't see any dumbness out of context; just one person trying to intimidate another with a nonsense question, and their staying cool and holding frame by giving a friendly answer.

I thought it was gonna be the photocopier lie detector scene. .

The Wire has quite a few examples.

Was it the show where a character said that the one thing he'd never seen in all his years on the force was a criminal mastermind?

Others have already touched on this but if you haven't interacted with any of these kinds of people in the wild it's hard to understand how bad at making decisions they are. Taking a step back, think about how bad well educated, intelligent people are at committing crimes (for the most part) based off of what you hear in news reports. You'll be saying ARE YOU KIDDING ME ninety percent of the time, and that's people with a lot more reserve and resources.

People who get involved in this kinda thing are stupid, uneducated, incapable of foresight/planning, and obsessed with face and status in a very shallow way. If any of these weren't true...they wouldn't do it.

Even when you see some type of criminal activity with an enormous amount of skill and success (like SF car break-ins) it's because of a "monkeys on typewriters" type exploration of options by everyone seeing what they can get away with as obsessed to someone coming up with a good plan.

It's also important to keep in mind that the majority of people involved in the drug trade make like zero money, any form of job whatsoever would be more lucrative and stable. They aren't sending their best. The ones who do make money are typically off the street, not at risk, and capable of doing the things you are interested in seeing.

Others also hit on some of the "honor culture" aspects also - you get a lot more face from sneaking up behind someone and shooting them in the face.

Many quotes from the Wire serve as a microcosm, but Stringer's "are you taking notes on a criminal conspiracy" is a good example, especially when people are trying to apply sense but it's ultimately cargo cult thinking.

People who get involved in this kinda thing are stupid, uneducated, incapable of foresight/planning, and obsessed with face and status in a very shallow way.

This video of Ar-Ab's near-suicidal honesty went viral for a reason. Guess where he ended up. Keep in mind: he was actually one of the better off ones in that he theoretically could have had a rap career.

Or just follow Chicago drill. The main survivors did so by...moving away. Which some of them had to be threatened into doing by the legal system.

I have consistently registered this exact complaint not just about television, but about real life. I am genuinely puzzled by why someone that wants someone else dead would prefer to engage in risky combat than hit them from a distance. With regard to the quality of shooting, I want to emphasize that it is incredibly easy to make consistent shots with a scoped rifle. Seriously, I can take someone that has zero prior training and have them consistently hitting within a couple inches of a bullseye at 100 yards with five minutes of instruction, and I'm not even good! At that distance, there is also no need for adjusting your scope it's literally just putting the crosshairs over the target, steadying yourself, and firing. The damage done by a single well-placed .308 round will also be much more severe than what one would expect with a handgun.

So, why does no one do this? A few reasons, some substantive and some speculative:

  • Most murders aren't hits, they're interpersonal disputes, deals gone bad, or engagements that weren't guaranteed to end that way. Outright hits are just not very common in the grand scheme of things.

  • There are de facto rules of conduct to gang violence. In one edition of Grand Theft Auto, firing at targets with a sniper rifle is met by a Mexican gentleman yelling, "sniper on the roof, they fight like girls!". This appears to be a more or less genuine sentiment with regard to not walking up to your enemy and killing him at close range like a man.

  • Truly professionalized gang forces, such as Central American drug cartels, absolutely do use sniper rifles where it makes tactical sense.

  • In contrast to the above, these guys are basically morons, completely unaware of just how effective a lame looking Winchester Model 70 is for dealing with a target. They're not familiar with the weapon, they have no idea how to zero a scope, and the incentives of their line of work don't lend themselves to self-preservation. See also, any footage of shootouts between gangsters - these guys don't bother to properly grip the pistols they do have, which should absolutely blow your mind when you consider how hard it is to make a shot with one hand compared to a proper grip. Again, they're incompetent morons.

  • Finally, some combination of concealability and disposability are crucial. While I'm sure they could get on a roof with a hunting rifle, I'm also sure that they would be noticed getting on the roof with a hunting rifle, that there would be multiple cameras that would capture their action, that they would literally the only person on a roof with a rifle, that the sound of a rifle would be noticed, and that it's pretty hard to run away while carrying a rifle.

Another detail: maybe the biggest obstacle to securing a murder conviction is if you don't have the weapon. If you shoot someone in broad daylight, there's a logic to doing it with a cheap weapon you then immediately throw into the deepest, darkest hole you can find.

One of the plot points of City of God is that there’s a gang member who actually knows how to shoot, might be worth a watch.

Smart guys from the ghetto stay out of trouble, get the hell out of the ghetto and don't join the gangs. The ones that do join climb quickly through the ranks and don't waste their time planning hit jobs. The more elaborate your plan, the more threads lead back to you. An expendable thug with an expendable handgun is a simple and affordable solution.

A gang cop who sometimes does security at the church I go to for extra money(this is extremely common in the US) said to me that most murderers and kidnappers he arrests are teenagers who don’t know anything except the nickname of the guy who told them to do it. So yes, expendable is a big deal.

I also like to complain about the stupidity of tv, so I can emphasize with your husbands irritation. But ultimately, being a gangster is a terrible career choice and the kind of person who thinks these things through will not be a gangster in the first place. In fact, any arbitrarily chosen smart plan concocted by a gangster shown in tv is probably more unrealistic in the end.

But I will never not be annoyed when someones monumentally, obviously stupid plan is portrayed as military genius because it's running on hollywood logic!

Part of it has to do with the code of violence on the street corner. Taking a guy out from 200 yards away with a rifle does not show your manhood, swagger, and fearlessness. These men and boys on the corner want to be known and feared and you don’t get that from an assassination.

Now if we’re talking about the Marlo scenes where he is hanging out in the middle of an open park, I can’t say I’ve ever considered that before. It does seem fairly trivial that a gangster could get a rifle and take him out from one of the buildings.

You are correct.

Drug dealers are in fact incompetent shooters. But it takes more than 85 IQ to figure out winning tactics for a gunfight, that amounts to anything more complex than spraying and praying at the general direction of the enemy. So to answer your husband, it needs more brains than... you know.

Mexican cartels are proportionately more competent in comparison even though nominally they are the same thing. Around 10 IQ points more competent.

Mexico’s average IQ isn’t much higher than the US black average, the cartels are just full of former Mexican infantrymen who provide direct training.

90 is a lot smarter than 85, it's not linear. And yes cartels have a better pipeline too.

When the Romans attacked the Gauls, the Romans stayed in formation. Focused on winning, the Romans stabbed below the shield line into the vulnerable legs and groins of the Gauls. The Gauls, heedless, charged into the Roman line in search of personal glory.

The Romans were "the man" who always wins. The Gauls were the hero who throws himself on the machine and dies a noble death that will echo in eternity.

The Romans are like Stringer Bell, who took classes at business school. He realized the straight game was 1000x better than the drug game for making money. But Stringer Bell's blood was "green not red". He was not a true gangsta like Avon Barksdale whose "heart don't bleed no slushie".

Your husband is thinking like a Roman, and not like the gangsta Gauls. He's right of course. But that's not the point.

Wow, living that Testosterone poisoning dao.

Amazing the amount of dudes who want to square up and take their life into their own hands over dumb shit.

In a somewhat recent speech Andrew Ng describes the "long tail of 5M$ projects". The idea being that software projects of the recent past were either very cheap or very expensive, and the long tail of projects in the middle were ignored because they were not worth time/money whatever. However new generative AI tech opens up that long tail because things that would have been very expensive or impossible are now cheap and possible, and there is opportunity for those who want to address that long tail.

How do I tap into those projects?

I've been fortunate enough to work with building LLM based projects that run in prod and I think I can start taking freelance and contract work now. My USP isn't being able to stich together openais API with exponential backoff and a vector db, any joe can do that. I genuinely think I can see some very creative uses of llms and embeddings that others just aren't, I can't find any papers or blogs on using llms for what I am using them for. But how do I sell my service? I obviously have NDAs and can't leak my employers trade secrets. Also I've only recently started working and don't have much industry connections.

Making yet another b2b SaaS around openais api is not appealing to me. I want to do contract work where I go to a shop and automate parts of it. Basically I want to move from project to project.

Are you in the Eleuther AI discord server? If not, I suggest you join, because I strongly expect you'll find a lot more in the way of practical/helpful suggestions there than you will here (though there are some people who can certainly assist).

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Anyone have a quick start guide for doing useful things with LLMs and AI in general, and how to do useful things with them. All I've done is ask stupid questions to Bing Chat, which I find no more useful than a search engine, and sometimes less useful.

Also any way to download, train, and run them, so I can train the biases out of them?

I've built multiple LLM based projects that run in production so I might have some answers. Basically all automation of really repetitive but simple cognitive work. Don't expect the LLM to do all for you, use some prompt engineering, some regex, some external ML, some programming to glue it all together.

If you're a programmer it's use cases are quite obvious. It can write code for you. But also you can do NLP tasks from your wildest dreams. Clean extremely messy and inconsistent user data that no regex in the world could solve? done. Create a semantic search engine in 5 minutes? Done. Anything NLP application based is just a solved problem now.

If you want to run a local LLM go see what /r/LocalLLama recommends and or what's popular on hugging face right now. Even though I would say that if you are asking this question at the end of 2023 you probably have been living under a cave and should learn basic programing first before you have a shot at training your own LLMs.

I suggest you get a feel for openais llms first in the playground and see where your mind takes you. Talk to gpt and use it as a search engine and you will get a rough idea of it's capabilities.

It’s interesting how useful LLMs seem for programming. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the first thing software engineers optimized their new toy to do was write code. It’s like how there are so many moves about movies.

I think also software engineers are especially attuned to inefficiencies in productivity in a way regular white-collar workers are blind/indifferent to. Software engineers imo are 10-100x more efficient at doing the same work than even other marginally technical white-collar workers like data analysts do (I'm sure there is a lot of productivity in just knowing how to use concurrent/asynchronous programming, on top of programming at all).

Software devs are the only people increasing their wpm, installing window mangers, use the cli, makes custom keyboard shortcuts, leveraging scripts and automation whenever feasible (sometimes to their detriment) etc.

You see a lot of efficiency exploration in finance, consulting, and some doctors. The last field is mine and you see a lot of people desperately trying to figure out how to apply LLMs to save time or increase throughput, and I've heard tons of stories about finance and consulting people doing similar things prior to LLMs.

I remember seeing a post or comment somewhere a few years ago about a big brouhaha at an Effective Altruism convention over whether or not to only serve vegan food. I have seen references to this event, and vaguely remember reading a detailed post/comment about the incident itself, but I have never been able to find it again. Does anyone know what I’m talking about? I’ve tried all the obvious keyword searches in all the obvious places. Nothing.

I'm considering getting an induction hotplate for work (I checked - it's allowed, either at the kitchen, or at my own desk, which is vaguely horrifying to me). What's the most eccentric thing I can cook/make that won't take too much time out of the day?

Bacon, just to give people's salivary glands a workout.

I would murder any coworker who tormented me like this. Or at least steal a bite or two 🙏

Don't be that guy.

Learn to make a 10 minute dark roux. Stink the place up.

Turkish coffee! The accoutrements are cheap, the product is good and universally loved, the ritual of sitting there carefully watching the coffee boil and getting it off the burner just before it goes over is meditative and relaxing.

Gotta make sure that you get a pot suitable for the induction plate. I've found to my dismay, on replacing my regular hotplate with induction, that my cezve doesn't react with it.

Eccentric? Are you trying to annoy everyone?

I tend to go more for "amusing" than "annoying", but it's a matter of taste, I know.

The goal here is powerful eccentricity of visuals rather than smell, then. No fried fish.

Maybe fudge? Then you can enjoy the conflict between "should I say something?" and "should I just keep my mouth shut and ask for a piece?"

So, what are you reading?

Still on Hurewitz' The Struggle for Palestine. Slow progress. The topic of education has stuck in my mind. Jews educated young Zionists in schools on the Continent, while Arab Palestinians couldn't help but be influenced by their local peers.

Zurayk made an interesting comment in his book The Meaning of the Disaster that Jews spent their youths being influenced by all kinds of "isms." If we pare down his evident outgroup prejudice (he includes Naziism), there was a point being made there. From an Arab point of view, the Jews were importing a great deal of the rest of the world's thought. But taken literally, it seems that the Arabs lacked the desire to empathize because they were busy berating their own people in a nationalist educational program.

Meanwhile, the "national home" of the Jews became a done deal, and because of the pressure for emigration from Europe and its underlying reasons, Arab maximalist goals, rightly or wrongly, moved further and further away from their grasp.

Last night I finally finished Bones and All. Highly recommend. I didn't like it quite as much as the film adaptation, but it's still a very impressive novel. Sad, tender, nauseating, nightmarish in almost equal measure.

Johannes Roland Raguel Tollkühn's Der König Kommt Heim.

Just kidding, I'm reading an English Kindle version, not my old German paperbacks. They're nice though, all green and avian, sitting on my shelf: https://amzn.eu/d/ht3mQPY

Still kinda comfy, even as the world is ending in the story, and everyone knows it. The Men of Gondor with years of preparation to fight their last stand, Theoden aiming to uphold his oath and at least go down fighting, the Hobbits well out of their depth but pushing on in the knowledge that there's no home to return to when the good guys lose. Eowyn likewise, riding to battle because dammit she's not going to wait at home until the bad guys come to burn it down. There's no real hope at this point, everyone seems committed to fight because that's the right thing to do, not necessarily because there's any hope for victory.

Nice. Much nicer than in the movies.

Just reread Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, set in a weird sci-fi alt history seen through the lens of adolescent relationship drama. Also a very hard hitting examination of mortality. But goddamn if Ruth isn't a bitch.

My girlfriend gave me this book earlier this year and I devoured it in two days. I was literally stepping away from my desk in work for ten minutes at a time because I couldn't wait to see what happened next.

In The Distance by Hernan Diaz, mostly as a primer of his writing style before attempting Trust. The book follows a Swedish man crossing the United States to find his brother in New York during the Gold Rush.

I'm about to start Pride and Prejudice, but my partner has told me that Austen was more of a pioneer than a great writer. After Little Women I'm hoping for something of similar quality, which absolutely blew me away. It was perhaps the best book I've ever read.

Anyway, curious if folks here have good classical novel recommendations they love?

Austen is actually a great writer, gender and pioneering aside. I think if you are interested in the period and enjoy (or feel like you might enjoy) the subject matter it’s unlikely you won’t enjoy Pride and Prejudice. It’s kind of like the best of Dickens (either Copperfield or Bleak House) in that you might dislike it for stylistic or genre reasons, but probably won’t dislike it because of its age or ‘because it’s famous’.

Austen is actually pretty enjoyable, I feel. I had a great time reading Mansfield Park, it never felt like a slog to me.

I could talk about 19th-century fiction all day. One book that I think maybe doesn't get enough love these days would be The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.

Bless me, I have finished The Count of Monte Cristo. I really admire the writing and vocabulary of Dumas (and, moreover, the anonymous translator), but I cannot in good conscience recommend this book. The imprisonment, escape, and discovery of the treasure are terrific, but the remaining 600 pages, comprised of palace intrigue, upper class French political and financial discussions, page-long descriptions of gardens, and all the rest make for a bit of a slog. I understand now why there are so many abridged versions of this book. I do like how the book ends, and I do like Dumas last sentence. He specifies two words that all humans should live their life by: Wait and Hope. Interesting bit of wisdom from the French master.

So. I am happy to be moving on. I have a handful of books that have been in my backlog. I plan to start with Dreamland which is a chronicle of the opioid epidemic. The opioid epidemic is a bit played out in the sense of literature and documentaries (it reminds me of the flood of books and movies about the Great Recession), but I always enjoy a good book about rich aristocrats taking advantage of the poor and vulnerable. Hoping it goes a bit faster than Monte Cristo!

I'd really enjoyed Monte Cristo when I read it (unabridged) a few years ago, and didn't find it a slog. I do agree that the first couple hundred pages go quicker than later on, but there's always enough to stay interesting in my experience.

The fact that Dumas was able to make 500 pages of conversation semi-interesting is indeed a feat. I just found myself unable to read long chunks at a time. I would fall asleep.

The anime adaptation Gankutsuou played a neat trick - they began with the palace intrigue, set the whole thing from the naif Albert de Morcerf's point of view with the Count as a mysterious but apparently benevolent figure, and then reveal the Count's backstory and goals bit by bit. It adds a LOT more suspense.

I can also strongly recommend gankutsuou, though I imagine it's even better for someone with litte or no knowledge of the original. But I'm also a sucker for unusual artstyles in anime.

It's funny - I think of that garden often and it even shows up in my dreams. I don't remember much of the plot of that section of the book, but I made quite a mental picture of that garden!

Is the book any good? I read some about the Arab Israeli conflict before but I am always annoyed how every author skirts around the central fact of the entire conflict: Jews are extremely competent again and again while Arabs are extraordinarily incompetent. It’s disturbing how every book casually takes it for granted that one idf tank battalion is worth about 3 Syrian battalions. I would love to read something that doesn’t try to blindside me to this reality

I read a fair bit of Why Arabs Lose Wars (the full book, not the forum post). What I recall is that Arab logistics were OK, morale was fairly high (consider all the Iraqis who fought hard even in 2003, even when it was clear how outmatched they were) but the officer corps were just not that good at leading, they weren't really professional or coordinated. They only wanted to send good news around, so commanders ended up with a dangerously unreal view of the situation. Communication was poor all around, Israelis could break through the gaps between Arab formations. It said that in '67 the Syrians decided to join the war because the Egyptians said they were massacring the Israelis, despite the opposite being true. In '73 the Egpytians did rather well but they didn't react quickly enough to the Israelis crossing behind them onto the West Bank, nobody was willing to admit they messed up until it was too late.

I think it's primarily an institutional issue rather than HBD: Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda are highly proficient despite lacking resources. Israel didn't do so well in 2006 and they certainly haven't covered themselves in glory in the current conflict.

I think cultural issues are more important in the middle eastern militaries over HBD/intelligence. There is a real inability for people to tell their superiors bad news or take personal initiative to address a problem (in the way that is encouraged in many western militaries). Also there is a lack of NCO corps that performs an important function in speaking truth to power. Also nepotism in commissioning or advancing officers.

NCO's were the best way of communicating accurate information up to the powers that be from the line level. You can't cut that out without a major impact on the effectiveness of an army.

This issue isn't purely within the military. You can see it within 'security' officers and also servile front line service staff in the middle east.

I've never been there, but I'm just running my mouth about second hand things I've heard about.

I understand the CW angle for that, but I almost want to believe it’s the norm for military history. Consider this devil’s advocate:

War is supposed to be one-sided. Forget materiel advantage—from a morale standpoint, it’s much easier to get people to the front if they expect to kill rather than be killed. Naturally, states want to stack up as many advantages as possible. Use drones, use fire, lie in wait, level the city. The less risk to your own humans, the better. A small advantage in technology, intel, or manpower can scale very fast.

But war isn’t one-sided. Or rather, if something is as one-sided as that one side would like, it tends to be fast and efficient enough that people are still debating whether it was a “special operation” or a “peacekeeping mission.” When it’s not, one of two things* has gone wrong. Either one of the parties has bad information, or the defenders had nowhere to go.

In other words, the default assumption for military conflicts should be a complete blitz like the six-day war. A properly prepared division is going to roll over a mediocre or poor one because combat is exponential in nature. Given that the IDF won the first fight, historians probably shouldn’t be surprised that they held the initiative through the 60s.

* Yeah, this really isn’t exhaustive. At the very least I’d include a category where everyone misjudged, including the people dying on the ground. When the state capacity for violence outruns the individual awareness of that risk, you get WWI trenches.

That central fact is kind of accepted by everyone. The ‘reasons’ are somewhat interesting but are beyond a general historical analysis; ultimately it’s some combination of HBD, vastly superior Israeli technology (due to downstream consequences of HBD including wealthy and influential diaspora) and structural weaknesses in modern Arab armies as noted by very many military analysts, international observers and so on over the last 60 years (eg this very famous piece).

Since the latter topic has been done to death (and is in any case less true today when more zealous militant groups in the region, and to a limited extent even the SAA have actually partially overcome some of those deficiencies) and the former topic is the big taboo (and the data was less available during most of Hurewitz’ career), that part of the analysis is less widely available. But I don’t think it’s a great mystery.

I'm not far enough to tell. It's one of the earliest books on the topic, and seems to have a solid reputation for insight and even-handedness. It's a good read so far, looks heavy on politics. From the introduction:

This book was first intended to be merely a study of the impact of World War II on Arab and Jewish politics in Palestine. But it soon became apparent that political developments in Palestine between 1939 and 1945 were understandable only in relation to the earlier history of the mandate, particularly to the period from 1936 on. Moreover, the political trends in the local Arab and Jewish communities had begun by that time to converge with world-wide currents. This book, then, turned out to be an analysis not only of Arab and Jewish politics in Palestine, but of political repercussions in the Arab and Jewish worlds, their growing involvement in Big-Power politics, and the consequent progressive breakdown of the Palestine Mandate. This is, therefore, a study of the Palestine problem since 1936 against the background of a world distracted by the ordeals of an approaching war, the war itself, and the fumbling for peace.

I'm doing another low-stakes/small scale conspiracy theory thread(I think I'll probably start doing these once a quarter or so in the SSQ thread). What are your minor conspiracy theories? Not things that dramatically change how the world works(eg "the davos group is behind the simultaneous rise in both house prices and interest rates in the United States to eliminate home ownership"), nor that would be too interesting and sexy not to be common knowledge if they were both true and had sufficient evidence(eg "Bush was behind 9/11"). What are your boring, small scale schizo posting?

Bullets from me:

  • General health advice about salt is knowably false to most well-informed people. I think the same thing is probably true about cholesterol, but with the added motivation of public health advisors taking bribes from eg Kellogg and Coca-Cola to understate the effects of sugar, so they blame cholesterol instead.
  • The effects of Freon(R-22) on the atmosphere were drastically overstated to keep dupont's control over the provision of refrigerant at around the time the patent on R-22 was expiring.
  • School districts as a group resist adopting the best pedagogical practices to prevent enough improvement in student outcomes for the public/lawmakers to conclude they don't need more money.
  • The world population is probably massively overstated because officials in corrupt countries routinely inflate population figures in their areas of responsibility to try to seek budget increases/international aid.

Mine is that modern sexual-harassment activism is secretly funded by dating sites such as Tinder. Think about it: if you can't pursue women in the workplace, the gym, the street, or anywhere else, what's left? Online dating.

The spike in the production of incest-themed porn (stepbrother, stepdad etc.) over the last decade or so is not driven by consumer demand. Some entity (probably a state: candidates include China, Israel or Saudi Arabia) bought huge shares in MindGeek and other porn companies and are using their stakeholder leverage to encourage them to produce incest-themed porn at great volumes. The goal is to promote/normalise incest in the West, thereby increasing the rate of dysgenic reproduction and marginally lowering average Western IQs, making the West less economically competitive.

Beyond the other objections, incest kink has had a pretty sizable and long-present popularity in fandom spaces where the drivers and funders are more transparent, or where ... reproduction wasn't a particular risk, or both.

Which doesn't prevent your hypothesis, but it'd be funny to have a complex conspiracy for things people already were gonna do.

I'm skeptical that this would or could work. It also seems like it would be hard to keep secret.

I'm with you. Given the general lack of success of media companies to manipulate the audience into having preferred beliefs through putting out content pushing preferred messages, and the likely fact that in porn, if anything, the audience tends to be more motivated by pure id than with media in general, flooding sites with this just doesn't seem likely to work at all. Like, I've heard people talk a lot about incest porn and also "extreme" porn involving choking women and such taking over porn in recent years, but as a pretty regular consumer consoomer coomer who doesn't enjoy such things, I barely ever run into such things by accident, and even less when I'm looking for something specific. In fact, I don't think I've seen a single porn video of a woman being choked. Incest and pseudo-incest porn, it's easier to accidentally encounter, but also very easy to just find a near-equivalent video without it. It's just not that hard to avoid porn you're not into.

Ooh, one more! Epistemic status: fun to think about.

In 1956, it was hypothesized that under certain natural conditions, you could get a natural fission reactor if uranium was sufficiently concentrated. The geological conditions required are extremely particular.

In 1972, a uranium enrichment site in France discovered that their uranium samples from one particular mine in west central Africa were showing different isotope ratios than expected (specifically different U235 concentrations than expected). There was an investigation, and it was included that 2 billion years ago, the site of the Oklo mine was a natural nuclear reactor, and that explained the missing U-235.

As far as I can tell, there are no other examples of natural nuclear reactors anywhere on Earth.

The conspiracy theory is "some of the U-235 up and walked away, and the natural fission reactor thing was a cover story".

I don't think it's super likely to be true -- the evidence in the form of xenon isotope ratios and such is pretty convincing as long as it wasn't fabricated wholesale -- but it's still one of the more suspicious things I've seen.

if there was natural reactor 2 billion years ago, when it follows than 4 billions years ago with higher U-235 content there must have been more of them, but very little of that time remains.

That local governments often start construction projects on toll-free highways and roads and often delay them to divert traffic to tolled roads temporarily. I don't know how the economics of this works out, I just like the idea.

I'd be shocked if there was only 1 sample from the Oslo mine. This is a super trivial thing to verify, and I would have assumed both the US and IAEA at a minimum would have done so.

I did a brief read through the references in the wikipedia article and found a handful of non-French scientists who've published about Oslo, but I don't see any references to actual samples taken from the mine except the French one.

School districts as a group resist adopting the best pedagogical practices to prevent enough improvement in student outcomes for the public/lawmakers to conclude they don't need more money.

They resist Direct Instruction at lower levels because it's very happy-clappy/scripted and the teachers hate it.
They avoid hardcore tracking and generalized testing out of subjects because of ideological reasons. This is despicable. They do not contemplate individual full tutorial because of budget, but would admit from their classroom size model that it's probably better, just not contemplating that it's hypothetically two standard deviations better.

I suspect that the common core math curriculum was deliberately designed to be obtuse so that engaged parents can't help their kids with their homework, increasing reliance on the public school system and sabotaging high performance students to "level the playing field" for students whose parents can't/won't help them with their homework.

Why would high performance students need help from their parents? Especially if we talking about core math curriculum.

When I say high performance (which makes them sound like sports cars--I meant high-performing), I don't really mean the the absolute cream of the crop Ivy League-bound STEM types. I mean more the A and B level students at your typical public school with attentive parents who help them with their homework. Mainly I was talking about myself. I was a bright kid but sometimes struggled with math, and I would not have been nearly as academically successful as I was if my parents hadn't been able to help me work through concepts I wasn't able to grasp during class.

Perhaps I should have said "middle class with a stable home life" rather than "high performance."

It's very possible that high performing students are high performing because their parents are helping them.

Bingo.

I’ve always believed that the US government blamed Oswald because they couldn’t actually solve the crime but were afraid of both the potential for nuclear war with Russia and the crisis of confidence that would result from the case being known to be unsolved. The rapidity of the arrest is pretty weird to me — within hours the man was in custody, there was an official story, and the weren’t looking for accomplices or other potential shooters or co-conspirators. They were firm that there was only one shooter despite witnesses stating that there were shots coming from the grassy knoll.

Aliens are a cover story for advanced weapons.

This article decisively convinced me that Oswald did it himself. The battery of evidence presented forecloses the possibility of a second shooter. It was remarkable learning how many of the supposed irregularities which conspiracy theorists have pointed to as evidence of a second shooter were simply wrong e.g. Jim Garrison mistakenly believed the Zapruder film showed three shots being fired in the space of an impossibly fast 5.6 seconds, because he was under the misapprehension that the Zapruder film was filmed at 24fps. It was actually filmed at 18.3fps, meaning it depicts three shots in 8.3 seconds.

Did someone (Mafia, CIA etc.) put Oswald up to it? Sure, maybe. Is it deeply suspicious that Jack Ruby killed Oswald before he could face trial? I think so. But I don't think there's any good reason to dispute the claim that Oswald committed the actual assassination by himself.

Amusingly I've always been reasonably certain that Oswald did do it and equally certain that it was a hit planned by either by the mob, or by the CIA using the mob as intermediaries, and that's why he had to be bumped off before getting his day in court.

Likewise, I know that at least one semi-prominant UFO incident resulted the crew of a classified flight test program getting chewed out for "flat-hatting".

By "know", do you mean you know personally about the UFO story, or just that it's a theory you feel certain is true?

It's beyond the scope of rational debate to suggest that Oswald was scapegoated because the US government couldn't solve the crime. The specific, legal evidence against Oswald is overwhelming. Consider:

  • He was seen going into the book depository, by people who knew him.
  • He was seen coming out of the book depository.
  • He was seen in the book depository, in the window where the shots came from.
  • The gunshots and bolt action of the weapon were clearly heard by three men only a few feet away, looking out the window below him.
  • An eyewitness to the shooting, across the street, flagged down a policeman and gave a description of Oswald.
  • He was seen fleeing the scene.
  • He was seen carrying a long package, which he claimed was curtain rods, into the building before the shooting.
  • His rifle was found hidden in the building after the shooting.
  • Repeated ballistics test have proven the weapon had fired at least one of the shots that struck the president.
  • His fingerprints were on the weapon. *His palm print was on the box that was used to steady the weapon.
  • He left all his worldly money out on the TV at his wife's place,and left her a kind of goodbye note. *When a policeman stopped him an hour later, he murdered the policeman.

Add to that that Lee Harvey Oswald was a hyper-political lunatic. Oswald's behavior over the previous years was absolutely consistent with that of an assassin. He was moody, abusive, erratic, and didn't get along with anybody. He promoted his incomprehensible politics night and day. He had earlier attempted to assassinate another national figure, General Edwin Walker. He was everything that you would expect an assassin to be.

What more evidence could you possibly want?

One of the reasons why I don't find most Kennedy conspiracy theories plausible is that the patsy was the least difficult element of the conspiracy to get right, and Oswald was an almost uniquely poor choice of patsy for any of the plausible conspiracies. Re. your case, if the people doing the cover-up were worried about the potential for nuclear war with the Soviet Union, why pin the blame on someone who had defected there and back again rather than a domestic criminal?

Depending on who actually did it, a patsy who fits the stereotype of "angry black man", "Southern conservative", or "mafia" would have worked a lot better for achieving the aims of the conspiracy.

The main reason I don't find most Kennedy conspiracy theories plausible is that the vast majority of historical Presidential assassination attempts look like the Warren Commission version of the Kennedy assasination - a lone assassin who is either outright crazy (e.g. John Hinkley shooting Reagan) or who is not quite normal and has weird fringe political views. So I have a high prior on "lone nut" and the problems with the Warren Commission's ballistics are not sufficient to override it without evidence of a specific conspiracy.

Re. your case, if the people doing the cover-up were worried about the potential for nuclear war with the Soviet Union, why pin the blame on someone who had defected there and back again rather than a domestic criminal?

I brought this up with my father, who can be something of an arrogant midwit outside of his narrow areas of expertise. When I pointed out that Oswald was a diehard socialist who had previously defected to the Soviet Union, he scoffed and said "if he was such a diehard socialist, why didn't he try to defect to Cuba?"

My response was simple: "He did."

In September 1963, he travelled to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City to apply for a visa... Oswald told the embassy officials that he wanted to visit Cuba on his way to Russia, so the Cubans sent him to the Russian embassy to collect a permit to enter the Soviet Union. When it was denied, Oswald burst into tears and started to wave his revolver in the air.

I haven't fully fleshed this one out but big pharma appears to have some amount of control over the FDA.

There are effective and unique Russian drugs (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-descended-upon-psychopharmacology/) that the FDA goes out of their way to keep out the hands of Americans. You can't get them prescribed by US doctors and the FDA has been cracking down on vendors that sell them (https://liftmode.com/product-discontinuation/). It is legal to import and sell them if you market them as 'not intended for human consumption' but they appear to be cracking down on this by arguing that the vendor knows that customers are buying with the intent to consume them.

If the FDA really cared about it's stated goal of 'protecting the public health' then it would create a safe and legal path for these drugs to be obtained by Americans. Since the FDAs actions benefit American big pharma at the expense of public health I would assume that big pharma has some amount of influence/control over the FDA.

For each of the following, I think there's a nontrivial chance (call it 10% or more) that that crackpot theory is true.

  • The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.
  • The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.
  • Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.
  • Israel has at least one satellite with undisclosed purpose and capabilities that uses free space point-to-point optical communication. If true, that means that the Jews have secret space lasers.

The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years.

Forgive my ignorance, but what would this imply?

The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.

Not commenting on this directly, but I remember back at $UNIVERSITY (a top 100 school) listening to a math professor discuss career prospects for math majors. On one hand, they could go into academia, get paid peanuts, but get all the fame of publishing their work. On the other, they could work for The Nation's Top Employer Of Mathematicians, get paid well to work with really really smart folks on hard problems, but have to suffer in 10-20 years when someone else published the same results in open academic literature that they couldn't ever talk about, and never get credit for.

Or they could go into finance, but that mostly just paid well and was boring from a research perspective.

The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.

I find "Omicron was a lab leak" to be >10%. But given that it emerged in South Africa, the idea that it was developed intentionally by people who knew what they were doing gives the South Africans credit for more competence than they possess.

Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.

I don't consider bears shitting in the woods to be a conspiracy theory.

the idea that it was developed intentionally by people who knew what they were doing gives the South Africans credit for more competence than they possess.

I mean University of Cape Town is ranked 160th best in the world, putting in in the same ballpark as Tufts and Northeastern. There's definitely sufficient competence there to do something like this. Hell, at the not-even-ranked-in-the-top-2000-in-the-world university I went to I could name at least 3 professors who could pull that off with the knowledge and facilities they have available to them.

But given that it emerged in South Africa

Why do you take this as fact?

"Emerged in South Africa" is likely correct: the first probable case was identified in Pretoria, SA on 2021-11-04, and the first confirmed/sequenced samples were also from SA and Botswana that same week. There weren't any confirmed cases outside of SA until 2021-11-24, so I think "originated in South Africa" is pretty likely.

Sure but how many other African states were doing any sequencing? Or even any substantial testing? It’s quite possible that the variant was evolving in Africa for a long while until it was discovered in South Africa. Also if you were a super duper shady institution releasing modified viruses into the wild you would probably not release in your own country and not even somewhere it can be detected quickly. So black Africa is a perfect candidate

gives the South Africans credit for more competence than they possess.

I’d thought SA had more than a bit of competence left, just not enough to go around and a government that didn’t care if it was functional or not.

Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.

James Clapper? And even if you think that's history, he got away with no consequences, publicly, so now they all know it's safe. How is this sub-10%?

For each of the following, I think there's a nontrivial chance (call it 10% or more) that that crackpot theory is true.

Emphasis mine. Original words mine too but the emphasis was from this time.

The joke with that one was that it's an open secret that certain officials (and yeah I was also thinking about James Clapper) can lie to congress without repercussions, but it's still conspiracy-flavored to point it out.

Poor reading skills mine; thanks for not making the correction as snarky as it deserved to be.

I think my eye jumped straight to the "Omicron was a biological anti-weapon" conspiracy theory and just assumed you were going for wacky 10%-or-much-much-less improbabilities ... but now I've also read your reply justifying that one, and though it still doesn't push my needle above 10% you're clearly not just brainstorming /r/writingprompts material here.

The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.

0.1% that they were, like, 5 years ahead of the public state of the art IMO. So much of deep learning progress has been based on 'more compute', and moore's law in terms of FLOPS has been advancing for so long, that it just doesn't work. However the idea of neural networks for semantic classification or machine translation or similar has been known for a very long time, so I could totally see them trying to use the (quite meh) state of the art at the time with a lot of compute.

Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.

Probably over 10%? A lot of people, including people with power, say things that are various degrees of lies.

The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.

<1%? My vague memory is that there were a lot of variants, and that in general 'virus mutates to spread more and be less harmful' is fairly common, so imo there's not that much reason to believe this.

0.1% that they were, like, 5 years ahead of the public state of the art IMO. So much of deep learning progress has been based on 'more compute', and moore's law in terms of FLOPS has been advancing for so long, that it just doesn't work.

It's an offshoot of the widely-reposted AI Twitter claim that 'we could have trained GPT-2 in 2004' (or with 2003 levels of supercomputer compute). And that might well be true, idk. Here's one of the biggest sources.

What's less believable is that nobody involved in this hypothetical effort at the NSA decided to just get rich in the private sector after coming up with technology decades ahead of the competition.

Guess i was wrong! I'd actually read that post before, seems I forgot.

Sometimes my "real" justifications build on a lot of accumulated knowledge and ideas, and writing those all out would take longer than I wanted, so I don't, and substitute for something shorter instead. Sometimes the shorter thing is wrong, though. So my 'real' reason for saying .1% was something about how mathematics and coordination and coming up with ideas is hard, and as we observe society develop we're seeing the best of everyone we have slowly stumble into being more and more correct, and it's almost impossible to beat that privately on something as big as 'GPT' because you have to do all of the research work that tens of thousands of the brightest machine learning researchers did in public over the past few decades. Like, the manhattan project was secret, but it used all of the best people we had and wasn't secret forever. The NSA can keep some cryptographic techniques secret, but not the entire concept of cryptography secret.

[Omicron]

<1%? My vague memory is that there were a lot of variants, and that in general 'virus mutates to spread more and be less harmful' is fairly common, so imo there's not that much reason to believe this.

For a random variant I'd agree. But omicron was really weird in a lot of ways though, and I'd actually put this one at more like 30% (and 80% that something weird and mouse-shaped happened).

  1. Omicron was really really far (as measured by mutation distance) from any other sars-cov-2 variant. Like seriously look at this phylogenetic tree (figure 1 in this paper)
  2. The most recent common ancestor of B.1.1.529 (omicron) and B.1.617.2 (delta, the predominant variant at the time) dates back to approximately February 2020. It is not descended from any variant that was common at the time it started spreading.
  3. The omicron variant spike protein exhibited unusually high binding affinity for the mouse cell entry receptor (source)
  4. Demand for humanized mice was absurdly high during the pandemic - researchers were definitely attempting to study coronavirus disease and spread dynamics in mouse models.

The astute reader will object "hey that just sounds like a researcher who couldn't get enough humanized mice decided to induce sars-cov-2 to jump to normal mice, and then study it there. Why do you assume they intentionally induced a jump back to humans rather than accidentally getting sick from their research mice". To which I say "the timing was suspicious, the level of infectiousness was enormously higher in humans which I don’t think I'd expect in the absence of passaging back through humanized mice, and also hey look over there a distraction from my weak arguments".

I have been suspecting for a while that the governments have been so tolerant of crypto currency stuff because it’s actually a great way for intelligence agencies to move serious black money around without getting into Iran contra style problems.

Or - a small part of why governments have been so tolerant of bitcoin and ethereum is because the ledger is public, so it doesn't actually make it harder to trace criminals. Whereas they have cracked down on Tornado Cash, which wasn't as traceable.

I think much more significant reasons are 1) general regulatory apathy and 2) by the time crypto got big, it had a nontrivial and dedicated group of fans, incentivizing some congresspeople to push for crypto.

Yeah, bitcoin is the least-bad form of crypto for state surveillance, and in some ways is much better for governments tracking proceeds of crime than cash. Also, the biggest problem for prosecutors of organized crime in the developed world isn't identifying criminals, they know everybody involved, it's proving the full transaction chain to a judge or jury, and bitcoin makes that process much easier if they can trace wallets.

That fits with Tor being a US Government project originally.

Strong disagree, Tor was more developed by researchers funded by the US government. STEM researchers just like making cool things, and the government funds a lot of 'cool things' in the hopes that a small number will end up being useful. The government, in general, employs millions of people, and only a very small fraction of them are involved in secret plots. https://old.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/anq680/was_tor_created_by_the_us_govt/

Good post! I'm going to make a cholesterol-related post on Wednesday. Is your contention that eating cholesterol doesn't raise cholesterol? Or that high-LDL is not a risk factor for heart disease?

When it comes to schools, I think the more parsimonious explanation is that teachers just don't actually care if our children isn't learning. The pandemic proved that the selfish interests of adults prevailed over the benefit of children. Educators' revealed preference is that vibes matter more than data.

The world population is probably massively overstated

I saw this claim a couple years ago that the population of China is over-reported by 130 million.

teachers just don't actually care if our children isn't learning.

Which is why involved parents who will go out of their way to ensure their kids can rotate shapes and will bribe admissions officers to get into the best school, those kids have better outcomes long-term. Because teacher has 30-odd kids to deal with and the odds that your kid gets the attention they need to excel is basically 1/30 even if you factor out teacher biases.

With teacher biases the odds are worse. Parents who realize that teachers don't give a fuck and are able/willing to make up for that fact will have obviously better outcomes. Of course, if you have dumb parents then the kids will probably be dumb too. But instilling a work ethic in kids by way of parent involvement is a quality all its own. No wonder the high-iq middle class have less kids, if they "get" this fact- the amount of energy and resources required to help one kid get out into a top-10 college and therefore career is insane.

Is your contention that eating cholesterol doesn't raise cholesterol? Or that high-LDL is not a risk factor for heart disease?

My contention is that both of those statements are true to an extent. To clarify, I think a diet consisting entirely of cheese can raise cholesterol, but a normal high cholesterol diet won't unless you follow it to the point of obesity, and high-LDL is much less of a risk factor than it's generally portrayed as with general obesity/metabolic unhealth as the main cause(granted they're linked), and that if you combine the two things it results in the standard health narrative to limit cholesterol intake for heart health being basically misinformation- people at risk need to just lose weight by limiting calories, not worry about fat in particular.

In other words I think that prevailing medical advice is playing up a very minor contributor to heart disease to downplay the role of general obesity mostly caused by high sugar consumption, and that bribery/lobbying by food companies is the cause of that because sugar and canola oil are much, much cheaper than saturated fat but not any healthier(I don't hold to the popular on twitter idea that seed oils are particularly bad for you but do think replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat tends to lead to more sugar in everything, increasing calorie counts, because it tastes worse).

I think the more parsimonious explanation is that teachers just don't actually care if our children isn't learning

I agree that education bureaucrats don't care very much if kids learn, I just have a conspiracy that districts don't want to show overly-rapid improvement because that would raise awkward questions about "so what do you need a budget increase for?", and that there's at least some cooperation among districts.

I saw this claim a couple years ago that the population of China is over-reported by 130 million.

Yeah, that's a piece of evidence I'd point to, and I think countries with worse record keeping than China are probably even worse- would anyone even notice if a few thousand Congolese or Indonesian peasants here and there happened to only exist as a form of budget padding?

There's a good amount of speculative evidence that Nigeria's population is nowhere near what it claims and may possibly be a little as 1/2 the official figure, largely driven by gov't spending being divided among its provinces by headcount.

https://markessien.com/posts/real_population_of_nigeria/

https://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/589235-nigerias-population-is-a-lot-less-than-220-million-by-tope-fasua.html

The 2nd article is written by the Nigerian President's economic advisor.

I would've thought that Nigeria's population would be under-reported: it seems that everyone I've ever met has some sort of connection to the royal family.

Sugar intake peaked around 2000: https://twitter.com/sguyenet/status/1061362985678049281?lang=en

It's hard to believe that decreasing intake is still driving obesity. It's easy to get a bunch of fat calories in without sugar and they'll make you just as fat (although obviously sugar has other negative metabolic effects).

would anyone even notice if a few thousand Congolese or Indonesian peasants here and there happened to only exist as a form of budget padding?

You're kind of assuming that people know the true number of Indonesians and then bump up the number. It seems more likely that people don't know the number and even after any bumping at least in some cases there are even more people than reported.


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