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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4254 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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In the purely hedonistic post-scarcity society what is the ideal male-female ratio?

1:1, but the men and women are both extremely objectively attractive. Anything else is suboptimal for a "hedonistic utopia".

If the people have to be from the same distribution as our current timeline, then maybe 10F:1M.

In the purely hedonistic post-scarcity society what is the ideal male-female ratio?

Define "purely hedonistic". Define "ideal" (who, whom?).

If by pure hedonism you envision nothing but wireheading, what does it matter? It's not like the claims that women have stronger orgasms than men matters when neither compares to even a piddling dose of fentanyl.

At any rate it's whatever the equilibrium settles out to be. Presumably by "post-scarcity" you mean a very high tech society, not just one that's got enough food to eat, water to drink and houses for everyone.

If people can change biological sex at will, then the ratio means absolutely fuck-all.

If they have VR indistinguishable from reality, then it means less than nothing.

If they have AI, at a level even comparable to GPT-4, then whatever the other people in the pod next door have in their trousers doesn't matter, nor what they represent as in VR. You spin up as many catboys/girls/cat-???s as your heart and compute budget desires.

I would expect such a society to almost inevitably end up post-biological, and thus post-gender, unless strong and authoritarian policies were enacted against it. If I were to envision a weakly godlike Lotus Eater occupying a Matrioshka Brain, its pronouns are the least of my concerns.

Why do I see weekly wishes of violence towards the developers who created the WebP format, and never towards the developers who refuse to add its support to their software?

I wonder where you actually see this, I've never seen anything like it.

But the issue with things like a new image format is that introducing WebP breaks people's existing workflows. It should have a huge advantage to justify that. But the advantages over jpeg are only significant in a few specific use cases.

It's probably similar to 7z. I hated it when it first came out. Websites would try to force you to use it and from my POV it just resulted in having to use worse software to decompress things.

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.

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'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 🙏

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

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?"

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.

Don't be that guy.

What types of philosophy are you interested in? Ontologies which list what categories of things exist and how they interact? Epistemologies which describe how we know things? Ethics philosophies which discover what’s right or wrong?

Definitely ethics.

Primarily epistemics. It at least has contact with base reality, in the sense that a better system of epistemics should help you navigate the world better.

Ethics philosophies which discover what’s right or wrong?

Given that I embrace both moral relativism and moral chauvinism, I don't particularly care what other people think are good or bad, except if they wish to impose it on me I guess. I see no reason to think there are "objective" answers to what's right or wrong, merely a lot of fervent wishing it were so.

At most, a moral claim can be highly compelling, to the extent it convinces me, or it can be nigh universal in humans (for evolutionary and game theoretic reasons, such as a distaste for theft or murder, such norms being found in any mammal with the brainpower to conceive it) but that hardly makes them objective.

Restricted to appraising moral valence as per my own idiosyncratic ethics, I struggle to see anyone more qualified to comment than I am, at least until we've got Superintelligent AGI running around that knows me better than I do.

Shower thought: the state should manufacture luxury items, or alternatively subcontract the work to a few officially approved brands, which would pay enormous taxes for the privilege. If you buy from them, you know you’ve overpayed through the nose, so you must be rich. Basically the state sells you a licence to signal your wealth. Why should the perfectly good money of morons go into Bernard Arnault’s slimy pockets?

I always thought the state should find ways to get donations from citizens, normalize it, reward it somehow. It is technically a big charity with an army. I want to see politicians and business leaders prance around with their million dollar StatelyTM cufflinks.

It's "paid" not "payed".

1616, William Shakespeare, Last will and testament:

...and the use and proffitt therof cominge shalbe payed to my saied Sister Jone...

This was well before the standardization of English spelling.

Please edit the rest of your comment to be consistent with The Bard's grammar, then.

This would only work if you outlaw all other luxury brands. why would someone buy a $5k Statelyᵀᴹ watch at 5000% markup when they can buy a $10k Rolex at a 400% markup? Anyone who bought a Stately would just look like a rube - which is the opposite of what they want!

I think the signalling structure isn't wealth → class, but wealth → quality → discernment → class

Ah, mercantilism. I agree, on the condition that we bring back the powdered wigs.

I think the issue with that is often luxury products are actually marginally better than the defaults, and I don't think the state could consistently make actually good products. It's one thing to pay $10k for a watch that's 1% better than a $500 watch, it's another to pay $10k for a watch that's 1% worse

They could just repeal the ban on civilian post-'86 machine guns, but add a huge stamp tax. The wholesale prices will come back down to Earth by unrestricting the supply, but the retail prices would remain high due to the tax, and the government gets the windfall.

I agree. The best way is titles, become the Count of Iowa for $1bn, Duke of New York for $20bn, your kids inherit the title for an extra 40% of the purchase price + inflation upon your death etc.

(un?)fortunately unconstitutional. But maybe we can come together and pass an amendment to make it okay.

You think they'd shell out just for courtesy titles? Although for that much dough we the people can throw in an exclusive weekend once a year, where the aristocracy gets to hunt in the sacred groves of west virginia.

The prices quoted are much too high, but people will do a lot for a knighthood or other such gongs. They aren't hereditary, due to vague egalitarianism and a desire not to inflate their value.

You might also be interested in the "For Iron I Gave Gold" campaign:

In 1833, Princess Marianne of Prussia asked Prussian women to give their gold in order to fund the war against Napoleon Bonaparte. In exchange, they received an iron brooch or ring with the inscription ‘Gold gab ich für Eisen’ (Gold I gave for iron). A similar appeal occurred during WWI, when the German state asked its cititzens to donate their gold for funding the war and support families who lost relatives. People donated their gold jewellery, coins a.o. and received as a thank you iron medals or rings (known as Berliner Eisen) with the same inscription as earlier.

https://www.antoinettevondermuehll.com/For-Iron-I-Gave-Gold

In 1833, Princess Marianne of Prussia asked Prussian women to give their gold in order to fund the war against Napoleon Bonaparte.

Obvious scam. The man had been buried for over ten years at this point.

But yeah, it seemed to work, and so could this.

It’s well-known that children learn chess and languages faster than adults. I’m curious: if you take a kid and put him through an intensive chess program, what are the trade-off costs for other aspects of cognitive development?

For instance, you can do two hours of chess, or you can do two hours of social interaction where they will learn visual-facial cues and auditory-expressive cues and other valuable information. You can do two hours of Spanish, or you can do two hours of self-reflection on a long walk, where they will learn how to filter and organize their past memories and discern what they actually like and dislike.

Some of the traded-off benefits are significant but impossible to measure. Spending time “listening to your body” before and after activities, eg eating certain things or spending time with certain people, builds a valuable collection of associations between activities and wellbeing. Spending time socializing will teach a kid how to recognize cues of trust and distrust, who to imitate and who not to, and so on.

Are you implying that learning chess aids a child's cognitive development?

All game-playing does, to a certain degree for each type of gameplay loop and ruleset. Dominoes and Go Fish aid in cognitive development. When I started playing Bloxorz in my twenties, I could feel my brain stretching with each level I completed.

My understanding is that cognitive skill development is fairly specific, and that research into far transfer from games (or anything) to unrelated cognitive tasks has pretty much been a total bust.

No, I’m saying that learning chess enhances certain parts of cognition, most of which are limited to chess. In other words, they learn chess and implicit secondary things in the process of learning chess.

The question being asked is about the significance of trading off “unmeasurable learning” in favor of chess-related learning. The broader question outside of this specifically would be, “what are the unmeasurable trade-odds when we raise a child to be prodigious in only obvious measurable skills”?

Right. Well, it would be impossible to quantify without a huge study.

But I suppose the simple, rough answer is to look at everything that chess makes strong use of, and then assume that everything else suffers somewhat from under-use. Chess teaches you pattern recognition more than anything, and visuospatial working memory for planning sequences, visualisation, and I suppose, keeping track of relative values of pieces.

Then there are the trade-offs outside the cognitive. A kid who does nothing but play chess in his free time becomes a chess nerd. I wouldn't want my child to do it. Chess is very much a winner-take-all field. Only the top 50 players or so in the world make good money from it, out of millions of serious players. As someone whose name I forget said: "Knowing how to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. Knowing how to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

Hilariously, the quote is from Paul Morphy.

If anything, enjoying competitive chess requires an impressive attention span by modern kid standards. Until of course the kid discovers online bullet chess.

Part of learning chess is learning your opponent’s reactions and how they honestly or deceptively relate to their perception of the board-state. Playing games with other people is a deeply social activity. Having someone walk you through classic games in person would be amazing for cognitive development in all areas.

It was really interesting hearing a master talk about specific games he'd played. It wasn't just "these pieces are better at this stage of the game" or whatever, there was a surprising amount of "I knew Jimmy liked to bulldoze people with aggressive plays, so I insert strategy.

It surprised the hell out of me. Not that psychology was important, but that I got to hear about it at an all-ages community chess class that I only attended to spend time with my nephew.

I was trying to figure out how I would teach my niece chess, and I realized I would start by having us play matches with only one specific piece at a time, such as all four knights or all sixteen pawns. We would build up to using the pieces in full games.

But chess today, being predominately online, makes it the least social sport/game. These benefits are secondary, and most of the learning taking place involves looking at pieces and patterns on the board. Reactions and mentorship are found in many activities and are not unique to chess, so we’re still left with the question of trade-offs.

Ah. As a Gen-X American, I still think in meatspace events. I assumed “an intensive chess program” for two hours a day wouldn’t be computerized.

My feeling is that most kids' time is unstructured and not very valuable for learning. So if the choice is between an intensive chess program and the status quo, the chess program is a pareto improvement. If the choice is between an intensive chess program and an intensive Spanish program, then sure, there are trade offs. But most kids would otherwise be watching youtube videos or playing minecraft.

Does The Motte share data with google? Topics I've read about here (and only here) keep showing up on youtube.

Yup, it uses Google Tag Manager for analytics.

Does that not seem problematic to anyone else?

How?

Everything you read and write here being collected to your real name profile at Google and whoever else they share/sell it to?

If you're not blocking 3rd party cookies at this point, you're kind of asking for it.

I thought I was. I'm using ublock origin and privacy badger.

That should be more than enough. Even if you only blocked cross-site cookies while loading Google's scripts, that should still scramble their user-recognition ability. I don't know exactly what ublock does, but if you look up the GTM script in developer tools, with ublock on, you'll see there's a comment block with ublock's license at the top. Presumably they're intercepting Google's scripts, and replacing them with one that doesn't break the site's features, but disarms the analytics.

If you're not blocking 3rd party cookies at this point, you're kind of asking for it.

Too many websites cease to function properly without 3rd party cookies, unfortunately. Yeah, in principle I could troubleshoot each individual case (is the website or content distribution network down? Is it a script that I'm blocking? Is it because I'm using a lesser-known browser? Is it a 3rd party cookie issue? Is it my antivirus software?) But I'll probably more likely say fuck it and close the tab in frustration.

Too many websites cease to function properly without 3rd party cookies, unfortunately.

Which ones? I've literally never ran into one. Safari blocks them by default, I really doubt any website would risk cutting off the entire Apple ecosystem.

Which ones? I've literally never ran into one. Safari blocks them by default, I really doubt any website would risk cutting off the entire Apple ecosystem.

It's been years, but I recall it being more common when attempting to login or make purchases. I don't remember exact sites. However, googling the phrase (including quotation marks) "Your browser is blocking third-party cookies" reveals many people struggling on various platforms to do various things, including Google and Microsoft, and receiving that error message.

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Everyone’s going to be doxxed eventually. Not that I don’t care, because I do, but I doubt this Google analytics stuff is going to make the big difference.

It does sound creepy. Not my site, but I think the less we're hooked into the spyware that makes up the majority of the web the better. I wouldn't have made an account here if I'd had to link an email, for example.

DSL has zero search engine indexing, if that is of interest.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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!

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.

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?

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.

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

All the IS(is) pop-ups?

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

Most people here will be familiar with the "This never happens...actually it's a good thing!" sequence. Is there a name for this? I feel like I've heard a name for it before, but I can't remember where (probably here) or what it was.

Also, does anyone know where this was first described?

The Narcissist’s Prayer is how it’s usually described.

I heard it as the Law of Merited Impossibility or the Narcissist's Prayer (it's form is a bit different, but expresses the same sentiment).

The Law of Merited Impossibility wasn't what I was thinking of, because it was definitely a sequence of assertions, shifting over time as earlier stages become untenable. The Narcissist's Prayer is much more similar to what I had in mind. The name doesn't ring a bell, but maybe that was it.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-law-of-merited-impossibility/

Michael Anton calls it the Celebration Parallax, and Rod Dreher calls it the Law of Merited Impossibility.

If you want to keep the law form, Anton calls it the Law of Salutary Contradiction, in the same essay.

Celebration Parallax is very closely related, though.

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.

Can anyone recommend any good books about the 1980’s and early 90s with a focus on what caused the Soviet Union to collapse ? I have just finished reading the Walter isacson Kissinger biography, and while Nixon/kissenger effectively curtailed Soviet influence in the 70s, I’m still amazed at how completely the Soviet Union collapsed by 1991. The usual story is that the ussr was unable to compete with the west and this somehow led to its collapse. I’m sure economic decline contributed to their decline, but would love to learn more about the other external and internal pressures which brought it about.

The same thing that causes all totalitarian regimes to collapse: becoming slightly less authoritarian. An edifice of such lies and violence cannot be maintained by politics. Dictatorships do not fall when they are most oppressive, but when they begin to liberalize too slowly for the populace. See also: France, the US.

A key thing to understand is that the two largest oil producers for most of the 20th century were 1: USA and 2: USSR. Political science types like to play up the battle of ideologies and play down the battle of the petro nations aspect.

Oil exports were the primary source of the USSRs hard currency and allowed it to import things.

In the 80s the Reagan White House got the Saudis and some other gulf nations on board with a scheme to pump like hell and crash global oil prices. This was combined with advanced military research projects like SDI, sometimes called "Star Wars", forcing the USSR to dump even more money into military research.

As a percentage of GDP the USSR had already been spending what the USA would consider WW2 levels for many decades.

The cash crunch created a crisis in the USSR. They were looking at average Russians having to go back to only eating meat once a week like during the Tzar era. Soviet leaders assumed they could loosen the iron fist a bit, allow some market reforms, and keep the USSR going.

Instead the whole thing collapsed.

Of course there were other issues. Chernobyl made Soviet leadership look dangerously incompetent internally.

Now I don't know any good books on the topic. Reagan is a highly contentious figure and has only grown more so over the years. A lot of academics are loath to admit his gambit killed the USSR.

So books tend to be either ra ra Reagan or to play down what happened.

In the 80s the Reagan White House got the Saudis and some other gulf nations on board with a scheme to pump like hell and crash global oil prices.

That seems unlikely to be a major factor

How do you figure? Looking at the graph, oil was at ca 80 in the mid 70s and then crushed all the way down to ca 45 in the mid 80s. I guess you can argue that it can't be the only factor since it was lower beforehand, but it seems reasonable that the USSR was at least partially kept afloat by high crude prices in the 70s and 80s until Reagan pulled the rug on that.

You need to explain why that revenue was so critical in the 80s, when it had not been earlier. Plus, this indicates that total exports were pretty normal even as oil prices dropped (though I cant tell if the data is adjusted for inflation, and exchange rates might have fluctuated).

Finally, did Reagan convince them to "pump like crazy" or merely to return to normal levels of production

PS: Re oil, stronger argument seems to me is that the regime used oil revenues to provide income to various insiders (I am pretty sure that Gazprom was a govt agency) and that reduced oil revenue made it harder to ]buy off those who became increasingly discontented due to other factors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory).

Hmm, I agree that based on the figure of actual oil production, it seems questionable to claim that the Saudis "pumped like crazy", independent of whether Reagan talked them into it or anybody else.

Still, in terms of dependence on oil prices, it's widely accepted afaik that the USSR financed large parts of its own post-war economy by cannibalizing formerly better developed eastern european satellite states such as eastern germany and czechoslovakia. It's at least not only what I was taught in school, but also what contemporaries I personally know have told me. This obviously is not sustainable long-term, but high resource income can prop up a dysfunctional state indefinitely, see Venezuela. It's not a question of necessity, it means that in an alternative world with low crude oil the 70s might have seen a generally worse economy, increasing cannibalization leading to an even worse economy later on, and thus higher chances of earlier riots, protests and revolutions.

Selectorate ....

You will like an anecdote I have from a contemporary in the DDR who worked in military intelligence. He was a car mechanic/engineer and his main task was procuring, checking & maintaining vehicles both for general use by his colleagues and for various important people. One time, he officially was tasked with organizing multiple high-value cars for long-term use. Inofficially, this was more or less a party thrown to bribe insiders with hard-to-get western cars as the final touch. According to him, he was even offered to keep one of the cars for himself because he did such a good job getting them, but declined since he saw it as a betrayal of soviet principles (he is still a true believer). Obviously I have no way whatsoever to check this for myself, let alone prove it to you. But FWIW, I believe him; He never seemed to me like the type to make this up. And according to his kids he has have never owned any car but his Wartburg.

Ultimately I agree, though I think every system needs to "pay off" different interest groups to keep afloat one way or another, so I don't see a big difference between "high crude oil prices propped up the system" or "high crude oil prices allowed the system to buy off an interest group that would otherwise become unhappy".

so I don't see a big difference between "high crude oil prices propped up the system" or "high crude oil prices allowed the system to buy off an interest group that would otherwise become unhappy".

Oh. I was referring to the original claim that "Oil exports were the primary source of the USSRs hard currency and allowed it to import things." I think the data re overall exports tends to undermine that specific argument. However, if the regime relied on oil revenues to buy off necessary supporters (or, more likely, gave those supporters control of the oil industry, as is often the case), oil price drops might have undermined the regime even if it did not undermine the ability to import goods.

Thank you that is very interesting and was completely absent from my understanding of the situation. Shame no one has written a book on this.

Oil exports were the primary source of the USSRs hard currency and allowed it to import things.

And one of the things they were reduced to importing was food. There were a series of droughts and heatwaves there in the early 80s (combined with mismanagement, I'd guess) that led them to miss grain production targets by 25%, 50 million tons a year deficit.

The same thing had happened a decade earlier, albeit to a lesser extent and at a time when they could better afford it (the global price spike that time shocked everyone). I wonder if the most important thing about the 80s wasn't "a succession of bad harvests", but rather "Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s conviction that the country should acknowledge that it has had failures as well as successes". Glasnost in both directions punctured a lot of illusions. A few years later was when Yeltsin went to Texas for a scheduled tour of NASA JSC and was instead blown away by his unscheduled tour of a grocery store. "Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev." "He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution.""

Imperium by Ryszard Kapuściński is a great book on the subject if you can get your hands on it. Kapuściński was a great observer and in the book he describes his first-hand impressions from the collapse of the USSR based on over 60,000 km of his voyages into the Soviet Union, including the farthest and most obscure parts, little known to the western reader.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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/

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.


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