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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4250 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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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?

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.

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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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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

Definitely ethics.

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.

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.

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.

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.""

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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...

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

This was well before the standardization of English spelling.

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

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'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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

[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".

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'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.

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 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 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.

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!

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.

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.

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 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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

Don't be that guy.

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 🙏

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Wow, living that Testosterone poisoning dao.

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

You are correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gangbangers are dumb.

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

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

The Wire has quite a few examples.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thank you, I was drawing a blank.

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

You can just get dry-fire snapcaps for this.

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

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

This.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love attempts to create accurate hitman/ruthless protagonists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack Reacher? Joe Pickett?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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