domain:alexberenson.substack.com
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Look at it from the perspective of Hamas. Their victory condition is to destroy Israel and build an Islamic theocracy in its place. They might be fanatics, but they are not stupid to the point that they realize they have no chance to defeat Israel on the battlefield.
Before the Oct-7 attacks, Israel was in the process of normalizing its relationship with Arab neighbors. An entrenched peaceful coexistence would be the death knell to Hamas ambitions. While killing Jews is always seen as a good thing by Hamas, I think the real objective was to provoke Israel into destroying Gaza.
I think that on a grand strategy level, everything is going according to plan for Hamas. Gazan kids are getting killed through bombs or starvation, but that it just their purpose in this war, they become martyrs (which is a pretty great outcome for them, if you believe the nutjobs) and while Israel has certainly killed a lot of Hamas fighters (again, not a bad outcome for the nutjobs), they have barely made a dent in the population of Gaza. Now Israel is in charge of the caring for a civilian population which hate them and can not feed itself. This is a pretty sweet trap to place your opponent in. Sure, the IDF can start genociding in earnest, but likely even Trump's MAGA base will have enough before they are half-way done. Meanwhile, their support in the rest of the West is evaporating.
If the IDF wanted to enact an Endloesung to their Gaza problem, the best thing way to accomplish it would have been nuking Gaza directly in response to Oct-7. Most of the Western world (apart from the glider-button minority) was still in shock. People are generally scope insensitive, their reaction to "the IDF killed 2M in a day" will not be that different to them killing merely a few k. It would have been a PR disaster (nukes!) and likely cost them most of their Western support, but any way they try to genocide their way out of the Gaza mess now (starvation? targeted bombing of civilians?) would cost them a lot more support. Not that I think that genocide is the answer here, obviously.
I think that the two responses which would have been reasonable by Israel would have been to either not do much (drone strike a few Hamas commanders, rescue a few hostages) or to go into Gaza with the goal of occupying it for a few decades (in the knowledge that they will get a lot of their soldiers killed in the process).
2rafa
1d ago
Expecting an enemy not to commit war crimes is normal…that the jewish view on this is fundamentally incompatible with a western mindset.
The “West” has done the kind of thing Israel is doing within living memory. One could easily argue Hiroshima and Nagasaki were more directly targeted at civilians than any major Israeli action in Gaza. (And the motive was the same, to force an unconditional surrender.) Personally I don’t believe Western civilization started in 1970, but I suppose if you do then you can make that argument.
Israel is a small country stuck in the same quagmire as South Vietnam, French Algeria or Rhodesia.
All three of those conflicts were winnable. South Vietnam was too corrupt, the other two had settler populations with homelands to return to. Most Israelis don’t have that, and while Israel has plenty of corruption it isn’t yet close to South Vietnam tier.
massacring starving Christians
0.13% of the Gazan population pre-war was Christian. You might indeed ask why the vast majority of Christians have been driven out of the Middle East since 1913, from Egypt to Iraq.
FtttG
1d ago
That's all true, but doesn't change the fact that routine acts of military aggression against your neighbours or your own people have been the norm in pretty much the entirety of the Middle East for the last century. It's also plainly obvious that many of the acts of aggression you cite were defensive in nature.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
In the Clausewitzian model, war is conducted between states. The loser gives concessions to the winner, with the assumption that even a bad peace is better than a bad war, that ending hostilities - even for the moment - is the best way to bring about revanchist policy.
Modest nitpick, but not quite. In the Clausewitzian model, war is conducted by states, but between nations, with the distinction being the degree of political support for the state that allows the state to engage in broder, 'more total,' war.
The state is the conductor, and the negotiator, but the state's capacity is more than the state itself. The state's capacity also derives from outsiders willingness to support the state, and that derived from people, both subjects and outsiders. This was because Clausewitz was speaking from the the aftermath of the French Revolution and the rise of nationalism, which was a revolution in military affairs in and of itself that was so disruptive that it was part of what pushed Clausewitz to his efforts.
This distinction matters because the political will/political support that matters, particularly in a democractic context, can vary by policy by policy. The political support that may allow a great deal of acceptance of costs in Policy A, will not necessarily extent to Policy B, even if Policy B offers larger [gains] at lower [costs].
Seventy-five years later and the Arabs might as well be Ewoks against the Empire.
Fated to win decisively with the assistance of telegenic Western-coded young adult protagonists designed to encourage self-projection fantasies?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I don't really have a horse in this race, but I think it's worth noting how you can reproduce this entire comment with Israel and Palestine swapped and change... nothing.
For example:
Expecting an enemy not to commit war crimes is normal. Palestinian behaviour has taught a sizeable portion of goyim what the Muslim mindset is and that the Muslim view on this is fundamentally incompatible with a western mindset. The winning Israeli strategy is to show the world what a bunch of religious fundamentalists on the west bank are actually like.
I wish it were normal to expect enemies not to commit war crimes. Someone ought to have told the Palestinians about that before 10/7.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
But Poland, like most of Europe, is a predominately old country.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
Expecting an enemy not to commit war crimes is normal. Israels behaviour has taught a sizeable portion of goyim what jewish mindset is and that the jewish view on this is fundamentally incompatible with a western mindset. The winning Palestinian strategy is to show the world what a bunch of religious fundamentalists on the west bank are actually like. There is a reason why western civilization despised these people for 2000 years and having them quoting biblical genocides while massacring starving Christians is an excellent way to bring back the west to our historical view of them.
In large measure the Western response has created this mindset. It did so by casting Israel as always the perpetrator no matter what anyone else did, or how restrained they were in response. Eventually they understood that restraint doesn’t help them at all, and that it quite often emboldens those who attack them. Eventually the threat of UN and international condemnation holds no weight because it’s not like they weren’t going to be condemned anyway, so who cares.
And the key / general point remains wrong. How other people want to take something is an appeal not even to subjectivity, but second or even third-party subjectivity, which is a fools errand in attributing agency. There are indeed contexts where the appearance of impropriety matter, but they are contexts of where the agent making the decision and why they are taking those decisions are related to the impropriety.
It also runs into historically inconvenient facts in Ukraine.
The responsibility for disruption of elections lies with Russia- whose invasion was intended to entirely replace the state that would conduct elections, and came with planned target lists of the sort of pro-democracy activists who were seen as categorical enemies. The Russian plan was intended to impose a state that would also not provide for free of fair elections or any sort of democrat legitimacy, for the sake of forcing through policy changes that did not survive electoral cycles years ago.
This invasion, in turn, met the conditional for which the Ukrainians had already considered and designed a policy at a government constitutional level. You may not feel 'don't have elections in the middle of an invasion' is a bad policy decision, but that is why it is not your policy decision any more than it was an American policy decision. This Ukrainian policy decision, in turn, was not made as a result of American patronage, which only began well after the Ukrainians made the policy decision which set conditions that the Russians later met.
You can try to re-allocate responsibility for others peoples actions and decisions from those people on whatever grounds you want, including funding. You can even ignore time and space and argue that patronage after a fact can be taken as responsibility for the facts of the past. This is considered poor practice since it is a position with no limiting principle, but plenty of people make poor arguments. It is still the hyperagent failure mode if those decisions are not, in fact, driven by funding.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I took the liberty of copying the entirety of this particular conversation and dumping it into Gemini 2.5 Pro. No additional instructions or leading suggestions. It interpreted this as a request to summarize the debate
I think its summary is quite illuminating:
functor
1d ago
Israel has engaged in acts of aggression against six countries in the past coupleof months. Note that many of the conflicts cited above are related to Israel or the fallout of Isreali caused issues, for example Lebanon. Iraq has had wars caused by AIPAC funded politicians.
FtttG
1d ago
created a functioning society in which many protestants live
The way this is framed suggests to me that you didn't realise the Protestants were the ones holding the whip at the outset of the insurgency.
Subjegating Palestinians is never going to work as the conflict isn't going to end if there is no deal for the Palestinians to accept.
On at least three occasions, the Palestinians have been offered deals significantly more generous than that offered to Northern Irish Catholics in 1998. They have refused all of them because they refuse to compromise, to their own detriment more than to that of the Israelis.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
There exists a hope in the Palestinian cause, that there will be a tipping point where they can present to the international community of some Israeli atrocity that will bring about a external intervention.
I assume the hope they are holding out is not for external intervention on their side, but an end of external intervention on Israel's. If governments in the US and Europe were compelled by popular pressure to stop supporting Israel with materiel, money and intelligence, could it really keep going against the weight of its neighbours as it is going now?
I have watched a whole bunch of anime off the recommendations of friends and unfortunately have to concur with @George_E_Hale: Anime in general sucks. Yes, even the classics. Even the ones which are known for their stories and themes.
I will admit to having a soft spot for Ghibli movies. Those are the exception, not the norm.
Let's have a look. In the last hundred years, and excluding the second world war (for the reason illustrated by its title), by my count:
- Bahrain has been involved in 2 conflicts, one involving Saudi Arabia.
- Egypt has been involved in 6 conflicts (including several civil wars) variously involving Israel, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
- Iran has been involved in 16 conflicts (including several civil wars/revolutions) variously involving Azerbaijan, the no-longer extant Kurdish republic, Kuwait, Iraq, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
- Iraq has been involved in 22 conflicts (including several civil wars, insurgencies etc.) variously involving Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait and Israel.
- Jordan has been involved in 3 conflicts variously involving both Israel and Palestine.
- Kuwait has been involved in 2 conflicts variously involving Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
- Lebanon has been involved in 11 conflicts (including numerous civil wars) variously involving Syria, Israel and Palestine.
- Saudi Arabia has been involved in 11 conflicts variously involving Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, Bahrain, Iran and the UAE.
- Syria has been involved in 14 conflicts (including numerous civil wars) variously involving Lebanon, Israel and the no-longer extant United Arab Republic.
- Turkey has been involved in 5 conflicts (including civil wars, revolutions *etc.), one involving the Iraqi Kurds.
- Yemen has been involved in 17 conflicts (including numerous civil wars) variously involving Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and Israel.
"A state that is in constant conflict with everyone and everything around them" seems to describe the modal Middle Eastern country pretty well. Given the base rate of conflict and strife in the region, Israel really doesn't strike me as much of an outlier. It's almost unique in the region in having underwent zero civil wars or violent revolutions (attempted or successful) in the last hundred years i.e. since its founding. Contrary to the claim that responsibility for Middle Eastern instability ultimately rests with the Great Satan Israel, the majority of the conflicts listed above didn't directly involve Israel in any capacity.
As an aside, can I just say that "Arab solidarity" is like "military intelligence": a contradiction in terms.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
The counterpoint is that it’s quite easy to use this kind of thing to cost tge opposition money and waste their time defending themselves against these kinds of suits which make them fairly effective in chilling speech. If I can be sued in hopes of finding the information out that means im obliged to pay for a lawyer and waste weeks or months of time trying to defend myself. This would have a chilling effect as if I don’t want to spend millions defending myself I might not run a story on the Hunter Laptop, not because I believe it’s not true, but because defending myself from lawfare is too high a cost for my platform to deal with.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I feel like that's a slight over-reaction. Anime is a rather all-encompassing term, it would be like saying, that's why I don't like movies, or music, because a single example wasn't to my taste. There's really good stuff out there, like Attack on Titan, Made in Abyss etc.
Of course, you live/lived in Japan, so you might be going off more than one example.
raakaa
1d ago
Glad to hear you appreciated my ramblings (although now I feel responsible if you end up not liking the series…)
I don't know about my travails, but I do know I intend to travel in a big-ass robot this weekend. It's called a plane haha.
Heh, nice one.
Funnily enough, I entertain both positions.
I think that this is a pretty natural feeling. Even on LessWrong where the biggest doomers congregate, I’ll often see those very same doomers idly musing about whether X architectural improvement or Y change to the training procedure of language models might remove Z limitation. (If you want specific examples of this, I’m afraid I can’t provide, but I do remember seeing this.) This can, of course, be justified as “world modeling”: it’s important to think about things so that we’re better able to estimate timelines and prepare for the future.
But if I may be permitted to engage in some bulverism: I think that deep down, it’s just fun to do this. It’s fun to see a problem and try to solve it. It’s fun to push past some limitation that you were previously chafing at. Humans are natural hill-climbers: we’ll follow the local gradient upwards, even if the hill we’re climbing is actually Mt. Doom. (Now I’m tempted to start going on about again about how “humans just want to evolve and go further than they were the day before” is another core theme of the series—but I’ll stop myself here.)
Of course, I do recognize that your techno-optimism is grounded in more practical, utilitarian, moral reasoning than merely Werner Von Braun-style “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down” thinking. But at the very least, I personally feel its pull quite a bit (even though my primary disposition is more to fear an immanent eschaton, be it utopia or Doom).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
Rhodesia and French Algeria existed longer than Israel and had people who had lived there for generations.
I don't believe either of these is true for Rhodesia, at least, though the latter claim might be technically true extremely tendentiously. Rhodesia existed, either as a colony or a self-declared state, for 56. Since the first settlers moved in at 1890s or so, there might have been some families that would have gone back 3 or even 4 generations, but most white Rhodesians had moved in only after WW2 (the white population was 65 000 in 1940 and peaked at 300 000 in 1975).
Can anybody fill me in on this? I'd seen some Stupid Internet Shit about this but thought it was just edgy nonsense in the same vein about Michelle Obama really being a man. But apparently there's a mini-cottage industry in peddling tales of goings-on in the French president's private and political life?
Attacks on Brigitte Macron’s appearance and falsehoods about her gender have circulated for years, though Owens amplified them considerably in the US. Other prominent women in politics, including Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris, have faced these kinds of “secretly transgender” social media campaigns, the Wilson Center noted in a 2021 report on the “deeply misogynistic” trend. “These narratives tap into the trope of the duplicitous woman, implying that not only are transgender individuals inherently deceptive, but that this deception is responsible for the power and influence that these women hold,” the report said.
The Macrons have previously filed legal claims against two women in France over their theory that Brigitte Macron is a biological male. They were initially found guilty of libel, though that was then overturned, which Brigitte Macron has now appealed.
I don't know who Candace Owens is, and although I've seen her name mentioned online, I deliberately refrained from finding out more because I don't have the time or inclination to go down those rabbit holes. But now the Stupid Edgy Internet Shit is mainstream news, so I am reluctantly requesting information. Can Owens get away with the "clown nose on, clown nose off" Jon Stewart defence of "hey, I'm a comedian and an entertainer, this was just satirical comedy and not meant to be current affairs reporting"? Will we see President and Madame Macron turning up in a Delaware court? How do you tactfully question a witness as to "Yes, you started a romantic affair with your now-husband when you were his teacher and he was in the same class as one of your kids, and his parents tried to separate you so a bit of yikes there, but you are not related to him and so the charges of incest are wrong, as are claims that you were born a male"?
I find it mind-boggling that this nonsense is apparently being taken so seriously, but I guess Emmanuel finally snapped after all the jokes about his height and his 'hot for teacher' marriage. Also it seems that Owens didn't originate these claims, as they started in France, so can that be a defence too?
Prominent US conservative commentator Candace Owens vehemently attacked the first lady in a now-deleted YouTube video posted on March 11, propagating a false claim that first exploded in France just weeks before the 2022 presidential election.
Brigitte Macron is falsely accused of being born as a man called Jean-Michel Trogneux, her maiden surname, with that name going viral as a hashtag.
...Originally shared in the United States on sites like notorious disinformation hub 4chan, the claim snowballed when figures "with very large audiences gave it visibility", doctoral researcher Sophie Chauvet, specialising in audience metrics, told AFP.
In her video, conservative commentator Owens cites a "thorough investigation" by so-called independent journalist Natacha Rey, published in the French newsletter Faits et Documents in 2021.
Founded in 1996 by far-right French figure Emmanuel Ratier and now headed by Xavier Poussard, Faits et Documents regularly promotes stories targeting the first lady, a journalist at the French weekly L'Obs, Emmanuelle Anizon, told AFP.
"But what is new is that Xavier Poussard started translating his articles at the end of 2023," Anizon said, adding that he claims to have sent an English version to those close to former US president Donald Trump.
Anizon, who spoke to Poussard and his associate Aurelien Poirson who advised on the translation, explained that it was no accident that the US far right had taken up the false claim ahead of the November US elections.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
C'mon dude. If this is the third draft of the essay, I really expect more substantial rebuttal than this.
The point was to illustrate a common failure mode and explain why LLMs often struggle with relatively simple tasks like counting.
And that illustration was wrong. You're not acknowledging that. LLMs do not act the way you describe them.
You go on a whole tangent trying to explain how I need to understand that people do not interact with the LLM directly when I very explicitly stated that "most publicly available "LLMs" are not just an LLM. They are an LLM plus an additional interface layer that sits between the user and the actual language model."
No, you're missing my point again. I'm drawing a distinction between base models, which aren't RLHFd, and production LLMs, which have the assistant persona instilled in them. That is a very important thing to keep in mind.
I find your fish vs birds and judging whales by their ability to climb trees examples unconvincing for the same reasons as @Amadan below.
I elaborated further in my own reply to Amadan.
That analogy can and has been abused, most often to deny the idea that humans can be graded on their intellectual abilities. But HBD is a story for another time, it is entirely legitimate to use the same intellectual standards within humans, comparing them to other humans.
My whole point is that a great deal more care is needed to compare across species, and LLMs aren't even biological.
If you ask the average American about "AGI" or "AI Risk" what are the images that come to mind? It's Skynet from The Terminator, Cortana from Halo, Data from Star Trek TNG, the Replicants from Blade Runner, or GLaDOS from Portal. They or something like them is where goalposts are and have been for the last century. What do they all have in common? Agentic behavior. It's what makes them characters and not just another computer. So yes my definition of intelligence relies heavily on agentic behavior, and that is by design. Whether you are trying to build a full on robot out of Asimov, or something substantially less ambitious like a self-driving car or autonomous package sorter, agentic behavior is going to a key deliverable. Accordingly I would dismiss any definition of "intelligence" (artificial or otherwise) that did not include it as unfit for purpose.
Why is the opinion of the "average American" the only standard by which to recognize AGI? Is a malevolent robot only evil once its eyes glow red? That's even more ubiquitous in popular understanding.
The Last Question by Asimov, written in 1956, has an example of what is clearly an oracle AI (till the end of the universe, where it spawns a new one). It doesn't run around in a robot body. The AI in E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) features one of the earliest depictions of a machine that humanity consults for all knowledge and decisions.
HAL is closer to an LLM than it is to SkyNet. Modern LLMs can probably come up with better plans than either of them, they're very dumb (barring the unexplained ability to make plasma weapons or time travel)
As I tried to make clear, a human temporarily or permanently made bereft of a body, and less able to exercise their agency is still intelligent.
Hell, I tried to make it clear that oracles can be trivially made into tool AI or agents.
By your definition:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0O8RHxpkcGc
Is an AGI. It's a robot being controlled by an LLM.
Or as discussed in this Nature paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-025-01036-4
Google was already doing that stuff with PaLM via say-can.
You can hook up Gemini to a webcam and a robotic actuator, right now, if that's all you really care about. Seems to meet every aspect of your definition. It perceives the world live, and reacts to it on the fly. Are you now willing to accept that that's an "AGI"? This is hardly theoretical, as YouTube is absolutely awash with videos of people pulling this off.
Moving on, the claim that LLMs "know" when they are lying or hallucinating is something you and I have discussed before. The claim manages to be trivially true while providing no actionable solution for reasons already described in the OP.
It is far from trivially true, and I wish you would have the grace to accept that you're wrong here. It is also actionable, because mechanistic interpretability allows for us to clamp, ablate and boost particular sub-systems within LLMs. SOTA models are largely proprietary, but I have little doubt that such techniques are being applied to production models. Anthropic showed off Golden Gate Claude over a year back. Such techniques offer the obvious route to both improve truthfulness in models, and to both detect and eliminate hallucinations.
I had forgotten how much of your previous weak critique to the same evidence was based off naked credentialism. After all, you claimed:
As such, I took the liberty of looking into the names associated with your 3 studies and managed to positively identify the professional profiles of 10 of them. Of those 10, none appear to hold any patents in the US or EU or have their names associated with any significant projects. Only 3 appear to have done much (if any) work outside of academia at the time the linked study was posted. Of those 3, only 1 stood out to me as having notable experience or technical chops. Accordingly, I am reasonably confident that I know more about this topic than the people writing or reviewing those studies.
If you're going to lean so heavily on your credentials in robotics, then I agree with @rae or @SnapDragon that it's shameful to come in and be wrong, confidently and blatantly wrong, about such elementary things such as the reasons behind LLMs struggling with arithmetic. I lack any formal qualifications in ML, but even a dummy like me can see that. The fact that you can't, let's just say it raises eyebrows.
The LessWrong stuff is not even wrong, and I find it astonishingly naive of you to assume that the simple human preference for truth is any match for Lorem Epsom. To volley one of your own favorite retorts back at you. "Have you met people".
I have, in fact, met all kinds of people. Including those less truthful than LLMs.
You keep claiming that my definition of "intelligence" is inadequate and hobbling my understanding but I get the impression that I have a much clearer idea of both where we are and where we are trying to get to in spite of this.
If you think you have a better solution present it, as I said one of the first steps to solving any practical engineering problem is to determine your parameters.
I'll take your word for it. My solution is to:
The companies that spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI are doing just fine. Each year, or more like every other month, their products get more capable, and more agentic. If you're offering a ground-breaking and paradigm shattering take yourself, I'm not seeing it.
functor
1d ago
Because having a jewish ethnostate built in a densely populated area close to Europe is a bad idea and something that will lead to constant headache for the rest of us. Israel in the middle east has been 80 years of trouble and is set up to be another 80 years of trouble. AIPAC and the Zionist lobby has pushed for a multitude of disastrous wars both for the region and for Europe as well as for American tax payers. Israel is a permanent welfare queen due to its placement.
Israel was not placed there for some rational reason but because of a belief in that the land could be bought for mutilated baby penises. Either Israel can learn to coexist with its neighbours in peace or it should relocate.
SnapDragon
1d ago
Thanks for calling OP out on his flagrant errors. It's one thing to make a technical mistake on a non-technical forum; it's another thing entirely to flex, claim industry expertise, and then face-plant by confusing word embedding models with LLMs. I hope people aren't being misled by his, well, "hallucinations". (Honestly, that's an appropriate word for it! Incorrect facts being stated with complete confidence, just like an LLM.)
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
1d ago
If no one wanted that land in Africa and Latin America why should the Jews?
Your schtick of acting like Israel is the only country in history to ever do naked conquest as opposed to simply being the most recent one is getting stale. At least when the bleeding heart progs do it, their historical and ethical myopia is consistent. When you combine trying to paint Israel as evil for the actions of Israel and trying to paint Israel as evil because Jews have been uniquely evil for 2000 years it's just incoherent.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1d ago
Trump being a frequent litigant, even by the standards of real estate guys, long predates his move into politics. He was, and is, in court as plaintiff a lot because he likes to file frivolous lawsuits to intimidate his critics. He was, and is, in court as defendant a lot because he likes to push the limits of the law. He was already notorious for both of these things back when he was a Democrat.
What you described are factors eroding men's incentives to to fulfill their traditional masculine roles as initiators, providers, husbands etc. The factors I described do the same but in a different aspect. Potential rewards are decreasing while potential costs are increasing.
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