Bartender_Venator
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User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
7hr ago
Sorry, did I touch a nerve? The thing is, being the kind of guy who needs to do a GPT-style "Thinking..." before every line of dialogue is not being good at overcoming bias, it's figuring out how to spend a lot of your tokens to get where a wise dentist (a small subset of dentists, of course) just kind of is.
I give kudos to rationalists figuring out the importance of AI, but they were not exactly the first to do so (the theories they're working with have not meaningfully changed since Turing and von Neumann, they've just added a lot of epicycles on top of what the greats had figured in 1950). This has been a longtime preoccupation of the smartest people in tech, particularly when not distracted by profitable fads. Rationalism got them, through great struggle, where they should have been anyway. Which is great! You can get a lot of clarity out of not being an alcoholic, too.
Bartender_Venator
7hr ago
I consider tanks and similar vehicles basically irrelevant, because, with African standards of maintenance, they break down even faster trying to cover meaningful stretches of ground. I doubt Team Africa's tanks even make it to the Pyrenees.
"Within reach" is the critical thing with respect to air/naval stuff. The Italian navy is just as fucked as they were in OTL 1939, but everyone else is fine.
Bartender_Venator
7hr ago
I have some experience in African aviation. I may be underestimating the Egyptians, but Apartheid South Africa's jet engine work was building (sophisticated!) parts for foreign jet engines, and South Africa no longer has any capacity like that (they're still struggling to build their own drone). Team Africa does have a lot of civilian jet engines and airliners they can repurpose, but that would take a lot of time and testing. Scaling things is also much harder in Africa than in Europe, whether it's precision technology or building roads, for cultural and presumably HBD reasons.
60 miles seems like a long range but Africa is really big and the ocean is even bigger. A 60-mile radius of Cape Town barely even covers False Bay. But you don't even want to use U-boats in this scenario - they needed them back in WWII, but here you use surface commerce raiders as disposable assets and Africa is toast (their aircraft are too rangecucked to fight a Battle of the Atlantic). Willingness of the crews is an issue but OTL U-boat service was also largely a death sentence, and if we put that into the scenario we also have to ask how many African soldiers would be willing to charge machinegun nests. Note also that per Claude, Africa has ~17 ships capable of modern ASW, plus a comparable number of their own submarines. These would have to be put in a basically defensive posture imo to keep key ports safe and stop raiders from rounding the Cape.
Bartender_Venator
8hr ago
The average human is really really dumb, but there are also plenty of normal people who are not like that and didn't need to spend years reading LessWrong to get there. The positive side of the Rationalist coin is that it was a really effective program for self-improvement for nerdy tech people to deal with their struggles with overcoming bias, which helps them thinking about the things they're building, which have turned out to be the most important things in the world. But it's like saying people in Alcoholics Anonymous are really good at not drinking.
Bartender_Venator
8hr ago
But I don't know how long the African air force could be maintained without technical expertise and spare parts from Russia and the United States.
On a war footing, not very long, and the parts won't be replaced domestically (the idea of an African war economy just doesn't work. North African countries maintain the militaries they do by putting much their best human capital into it, sustained by resource sales to fund foreign imports and expertise, so IMO their best shot is to carefully husband modern weapons to support the conscript zerg rush at key points). Egypt has a wild hodgepodge of aircraft that are all incompatible. Algeria a bit more robust because of their Russian connection, but not great either. Morocco, pretty good. South Africa, well. Given their relatively short range and limited number of fires, they can't do sufficient strategic bombing to knock out industry, and they'll lack the ground attack capabilities which were so important in WWII. They'll be fine on small arms ammunition but get a pretty negligible advantage from that - the first African casualties/prisoners mean that European industry will switch over entirely to the AK-47, it's not exactly rocket science to make.
Bartender_Venator
8hr ago
Africa is not realistically building postwar-capability strategic bombers on their own (and I've commented below on nuke capacity), but a Boeing 777 modified to drop barrels of chemical weapons from above the ceiling of early-war fighters is definitely within the realm of possibility. The European naval strategy would have to be "go where the enemy isn't" - U-boats were raiding Cape Town by 1941, so the African navy would be pinned to defending key ports.
Bartender_Venator
9hr ago
Even if something does lower Yud's p(doom) you shouldn't expect him to be honest about that. I think he's being outwardly honest, though, you can see the rationalizations churning in his head - starting with "well Roon you just don't understand how my super special theory is different and unfalsifiable", giving the most uncharitable reading of the paper possible to minimize it, and then finally groping for an analogy. But Yud has a book to talk now, and human beings are very good at convincing themselves to talk their book.
I'm not really surprised by rationalists being like this. First off, it was a movement which explicitly selected for people who struggled with naturally, what's the phrase, "overcoming bias" (non-rationalists who do this naturally do it in very fuzzy ways, the classic intelligence/wisdom thing). Secondly, as TLP likes to say, knowledge is a defense against change.
Bartender_Venator
9hr ago
He really cares about real estate in general, look at how he talks about the White House.
Bartender_Venator
9hr ago
I recall that back before AIAYN came out, most of the buzz in the air about a potential breakthrough was around LSTMs.
Bartender_Venator
9hr ago
Hm, just considered a possible offensive strategy for Africa - concentrate all their modern assets at the Pillars of Hercules and the Sinai, use their limited stock of modern weapons to cross into Spain (saving some to force a crossing of the Bosporus), zerg rush up Southern Spain and the Middle East (if the scenario allows), use Toyota warfare fueled by Algerian/Libyan petrol for logistics and mobility, modern civilian airliners for key supplies (can fly above the combat ceiling of early-war fighters, landing protected by MANPADs), otherwise rely for resupply on capturing European equipment and using local slave labour to run captured industries. You probably end up with grinding mountain warfare with both sides basically using WWII tech with some modern stuff sprinkled in, Africa having a much larger population but far lower-quality troops. Still almost certainly a win for Team Europe (I would guess Spain stabilizes at the Pyrenees, at which point the front is reliant on the Spanish munitions industry and a trickle of North African weapons production and ends up outgunned, and the Balkans is just infinite mountains full of racist guerillas), but a better show for Team Africa than sitting around being raided to death like a Japan with no navy.
Bartender_Venator
11hr ago
The sheer size of Africa also means it can be modeled as a relatively small set of logistical chokepoints that control the entire continent, and capturing or knocking out one generally means that area is taken out of the war, since the logistics are not joined up between different regions. Team Africa would need to spread their limited and irreplaceable modern weapons around the continent for coastal defense (e.g. South Africa currently has just two Gripens and 3/4 Hawks available, with the entire helicopter fleet grounded for lack of fuel), with a rapid reaction force of infantry flying around in commercial planes to respond to any landings.
Bartender_Venator
11hr ago
South Africa actually retains a fair amount of its HEU, enough for 2-3 1945-level nukes. I doubt their capacity to build it into a functioning bomb (particularly if the power blocs around are allowed to use espionage and sabotage), given that everyone involved in the 1970s program is either dead or very elderly. But they have no enrichment capacity and would have to rebuild that from scratch.
Other issues are like Africa only supplies 2/3 of their food supply I’ve seen so internal riots on food are an issue.
Not just that - Africa is also reliant on commodity exports that would get wrecked by U-boats and commerce raiders. So no food and no money (except the suitcases of gold coming off of U-boats, courtesy of SIS and Abwehr).
Someone on Twitter pointed out that the best first move for Europe would be to raid Cape Town and capture the Air Force museum there, get the jets on a ship and reverse-engineer them, which I found quite amusing. I'd also suggest beelining to what remains of the University of Cape Town library (it burnt down a couple years back, in large part because the University neglected to clean the roof gutters) and looting the science and engineering section.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Notice how there's a massive gulf (even in Hoffmeister's maximally generous list) between the looks of "stand-up comedians" and "screen actresses who specialize in comedy". One gets paid a lot more for a much more pleasant job.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
What a perfect typo.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Just fyi, since you say you're not in the country and thus not irradiated as much by our media, the SAVE act is long dead. Enough Republicans in safe seat sinecures decided it wasn't worth upsetting the apple cart. Generally, you can safely assume that Congress intends to do nothing and there are no meaningful legislative agendas aside from "spend more money so we can raise more money".
Bartender_Venator
2d ago
I had to look up MS NOW to see that they are in fact The Network Formerly Known As MSNBC. I guess if you're pivoting to the full-on grift grind it makes sense to change your name to something more like a Wordpress website with banner ads for dick pills.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
They do it to themselves, actually - being given a drink mixed with mineral oil is a common hazing thing. If your pledge father's cool he'll tell you, so you can go puke it up before it hits your intestine.
Bartender_Venator
3d ago
The most parsimonious explanation for Talarico to me seems similar to Biden's campaigns (before it all blew up): you're a Democratic campaign manager, and your candidate turns out to be kind of bad at campaigning. You know the media will essentially do your campaigning for you, and this guy is hurting your internals compared to Generic Democrat every time the public sees his face. So what do you do? Shove the guy in a basement, use the time to coach him like mad, and try to get to Election Day with voters thinking about negatives on Republicans rather than about your guy in particular. Which makes sense given how Talarico was selected ("fuck, we can't run Crockett, what white guys do we have left?"), but I suppose we'll see over the next couple weeks whether the campaign keeps him on ice or tries to get him back out there.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
It's kind of a principle of the thing situation, that one is a particularly military (in the West) form of execution, and one is for common criminals.
Bartender_Venator
7d ago
The dignity is the issue - a firing squad is an honourable method of execution for soldiers, hanging marks someone as dying a criminal's death rather than a soldier's (this was a contested issue at Nuremberg, for instance). This is not particularly consistent across American military history, as far as I can tell, but hanging is definitely more of a "traitor's death". I do suspect there's some concern involved about the optics of a botched hanging, given how little it's done nowadays, even China goes for firing squad/injection.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
They're the same picture. Look at the rules for Aella's gangbang, or any polycule, or a rat-adjacent house party (my favourite was one party series that was weirdly adamant that no alcohol could be left in the host's house after the party ended - in a 'telling on yourself' way, not in a 'you guys go have fun' way). The main difference is that dumb people need strict external rules to not destroy themselves, and smart autists need strict internally-imposed rules in order to feel safe enough to let loose. Smart non-autists can just party like a normal person and wing it.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
I know plenty of geniuses who like to do drugs and sleep around, but the bay area crowd isn't even good at it. It's more accurate to say they want to be hedonists, but they're autistically afraid of experiencing any of the inherent dangers of hedonism, so they construct safe little simulacrascapes of it. Wouldn't last thirty seconds in Dimes Square, let alone the places where shit really goes down.
Bartender_Venator
8d ago
The downside is that it would probably take a planet-sized superintelligence to make GOFAI work.
Bartender_Venator
9d ago
The more common term for a serious, intelligent Libertarian for the last decade-plus has been "neoreactionary". Mr. Caplan is certainly intelligent.
I am reacting to the original premise of LessWrong/rationalism, the idea that you can improve your life and decisions through the explicit cultivation of rational judgment, and the personality type it attracted 10-15 years ago. I'll leave it to the audience to decide who's acting unhinged.
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