Shrike
8hr ago
you don't see all the failed attempts with AI .
We have gotten a little bit of insight into what the failed attempts look like - OpenAI had to withdraw three of the math papers due to a sign change error that, I've read, is easily spotted by other released models.
I draw two conclusions from this:
- OpenAI's internal models aren't free from making even very simple mistakes
- OpenAI is, for some reason, rushing to shovel these out the door with very little review
Shrike
9hr ago
Russia's elite is wildly corrupt, stealing from its own population rampantly in a way that would make Alex Jones' theories of elite misbehavior look tame. Their model has kept Ukraine and Belarus at a similar level of poverty
I don't think Russia is a trad state paragon, but as far as I can tell on a quick Google trip, you're a little confused about this.
In 1995 Belarus and Ukraine had similar GDP per capita (PPP) of around $4000 - in fact, Ukraine's was slightly higher. By 2021, Belarus had completely outstripped Ukraine, rising to about $27k versus nearly $18K.
Meahwhile Russia started off in 1995 with a significant lead at about $18K, down from the 1990's $30K. By 2021 it had risen back to nearly $39K GDP per capita (PPP).
To me, this indicates substantial Ukrainian economic mismanagement compared to Russia and Belarus.
If you have better sources I am all ears.
Shrike
12hr ago
US does care about stability of the block.
Do you think the US increasing tariffs on Europe is good for the stability of the bloc?
If not, why do you think that it is bad for Trump to waive sanctions that would increase tariffs on Europe?
Shrike
13hr ago
It's very normal for the members of the rules-based world order in the West to buy stuff from Russia. Europe has sent hundreds of billions of dollars to Russia since 2022.
I assume the sanctions that you are talking about are the Graham sanctions, aimed at countries that do business with Russia, including in oil, which means that it would plausibly lead to sanctioning European countries if it was not waived to at least some degree. (They were new sanctions.) Curious if you think this would be a good thing or if you would regard the US tariffing European countries as bad for the stability of the west as a bloc.
Shrike
13hr ago
It was also reported that Anthropic is looking to IPO at $1.5 trillion instead of $2 trillion, in part due to concerns that its (still dramatic) revenue growth had slowed over the quarter.
Shrike
16hr ago
Even WW2 planes can likely take them down if they lack fighter support both ways.
I don't think there was anything in 1939 that could catch an aircraft at 40,000 feet and 500 mph.
Later in the war there were a few things that might could make that intercept (Me 163, maybe the Me 262?)
There's a secondary problem which is that at that altitude in World War Two you'd be relying on radar to make those intercepts and modern ECM should be pretty effective against it. However it's not going to be in the bandwidth modern self-protection jammers are in most likely to be in, but I would imagine the EW aircraft Algeria has could handle that.
Even with fighter support if you can get 10 WW2 fighters in the air they can likely take it down.
I suspect the Il-76's radar-guided tail gun actually ranges most WW2 fighters, so it might be much more effective than WW2 fighters by itself than you think. Assuming it's still installed and operational.
A modern fighter against a WW2 aircraft is a very wacky fight. Very much the modern aircraft's to lose because of the T/W ratio, but it's certainly quite possible to get shot down.
Shrike
1d ago
You don't even need modern aircraft, the aircraft of the time were tremendously overpowered relative to ships. Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk in exchange for 4 aircraft destroyed (although plenty more were damaged).
With a modern aircraft, you'd just fly at a high speed and altitude - say, 40,000 feet, .9 Mach - where enemy aircraft cannot realistically intercept you. Then you drop a single laser-guided 2000-pound bomb right through the deck and repeat as often as necessary.
If you run out of guided munitions, you can do this with dumb bombs, you're just not as likely to hit. Or you can, e.g., launch a night attack where you are likely to hit your target without them being able to effectively engage you due to their lack of night-vision capabilities and your high release speed.
I would not be surprised if many of the 933 naval vessels in Europe in 1939 weren't particularly fit for a Mediterranean campaign against Africa. For instance, a lot of the German U-boats were short-ranged Type IIs. A lot of the British Navy isn't even in Europe (do they get Thanos-snapped in this thought experiment, or what?)
Shrike
1d 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).
My general priors are that North Africa is a whole different beast. And it's not what people think of when they think of Africa, which is what I think is throwing people off here.
60 miles seems like a long range but Africa is really big and the ocean is even bigger.
The 60 miles is not a stationary no-go zone, it's a moving area that you use the sweep the ocean with against enemy submarines that have to transit at low speeds (like 4 knots) to preserve their fuel and endurance. And that's just with a towed array, using your onboard helicopter gets you even better range, potentially. It also lets you detect their snorkels.
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).
It seems to me that in certain formulations of the scenario, Africa is toast anyway, precisely because of the food insecurity issue. But assuming that they have ships and food left to import, it's worth noting that Algeria has MPAs, Egypt has E-2s, and there are at least three flat-top amphibs in Africa that I am familiar with. So doing maritime patrol work close to shore and escorting convoys and projecting power further away from it is quite possible for Africa until they hit intractable operability issues.
Shrike
1d ago
In-flight refueling (particularly combined with lighter weapons loads and drop tanks - although I don't know if Algeria bought any of those) would let them hit the French and likely British navy as well, if they thought to prioritize it.
Shrike
1d ago
South Africa isn't the only country with a domestic defense industry, although I'm not sure how much of Egypt's defense industry would run without foreign imports.
Shrike
1d ago
On a war footing, not very long,
Right, but if "not very long" is, say, a month, that's long enough to clobber every European navy (at least the ones within reach).
They'll be fine on small arms ammunition but get a pretty negligible advantage from that
I tend to agree here, although stuff like the RPG and modern towed arty is genuinely a big step up from what's being thrown around in 1939. The main advantage Africa would have would be modern NVGs and (more) modern tanks/AFVs, but I am not sure that's enough to actually be decisive.
Shrike
1d ago
Africa is not realistically building postwar-capability strategic bombers on their own
What makes you say this? Egypt and South Africa have both built jet engines. That's going to be the hardest part of, say, a 1960s-era bomber.
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.
U-boats in 1941 get easily pwned by even Cold War ASW destroyers with helicopters. "Who would win: a pre-war U-boat with limited underwater capacity, poor speed, and terrible quieting, or an ASW destroyer with active sonar, a helicopter, and a towed array meant to detected nuclear submarines with rafted machinery" is the "nuclear bomb versus coughing baby" question of this scenario. Very plausible for a single African destroyer to detect and destroy these submarines at 60 miles. The main risk is running out of ammunition (assuming basic technical competency and that the normal ASW equipment has been retained on these ships, which might not be the case.)
I think the only more uneven match-up is African strike aircraft against the European surface fleet.
Shrike
1d ago
It sort of depends on what you think is "irreplaceable." Africa manufactures their own RPGs, small arms ammunition, and bombs. Dumb bombs in particular aren't hard to manufacture at all, but plenty sufficient to sink European ships with ~impunity if you have jet aircraft. 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.
Shrike
1d ago
The main argument against the air force being an auto-win condition is that without (mostly American, a little bit of Russian) technical support, they will have a limited useful life span and/or run out of munitions. However "no technical support" isn't really specified in the prompt one way or another.
Air forces by themselves typically don't win wars, though, and I think that Africa would have a hard time invading Europe (and vice versa).
Shrike
1d ago
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).
I think that Africa's ability to defeat U-boats and commerce raiders is probably stronger than Europe's ability to field U-boats and commerce raiders, at least during the initial stage of the war.
The lack of food (if we're assuming they both get teleported to a world without preexisting trade) is going to be a massive problem. But this is also true for England, which imported even more of its food (although much of that was from other European sources)/
Shrike
1d ago
The high tech planes Africa has mostly don’t have range to bomb prime Europe
Algeria has air-to-air refueling. Tangier is 1500 miles from Berlin, which is within ferry range of Algerian strike aircraft, so it's very likely they could refuel over France and strike anywhere in Germany or England.
I think the actual problems are:
- Not knowing what exactly to target in 1939 Europe (this problem cuts both ways, of course!)
- Not being able to run enough strike aircraft to materially disrupt industrial supply chains, and
- Russia (assuming they are included)
The African win condition is to shock Europe into surrendering quickly and/or do enough material disruption to buy time to get their own industry spun up. I think they would have a hard time actually doing anything besides temporarily setting back European industrial might with their current aircraft inventories, but I do think they could pretty much knock out European naval power.
Shrike
1d ago
I think a lot of people who are heavily in Camp Europe forget about North Africa (which has, at least on paper, hundreds of F-16s and even a few more advanced aircraft, such as the Rafale and Su-57.) Algeria in particular would be a huge threat, as their Su-24s, 30s, 34s, and 35s have pretty good range. The entire Mediterranean would be a shooting gallery overnight; modern strike aircraft can sink or disable pretty much any combatant of the time with comparative ease.
German submarines (most of which I don't think can reach the Med in '39) will not help; the Egyptian navy (which has a number of ASW ships) would almost certainly eat them for lunch. You're trying to kill a ~modern ASW ship with straight-runners that can reach 4 miles on a good day, and even the least experienced destroyer commander can probably just turn his massive sonar on, spot you, and kill you before you can even get a firing solution.
People are going to tell me that the Egyptians are incompetent; likely this is true (certainly what I have read about them in the past indicates this; I don't know if they've gotten better since) but what we're talking about here isn't that much more advanced than "can you drive a boat and push a button" - even employing the weapons in the most brain-dead way possible will shred European navies of the day.
The case for Europe is that they will outlast Africa's modern munitions and equipment and crush them on the other side. I do think that's plausible. In actual ground battles, I am not sure that Africa will end up being favored if they run low on their qualitative edge (air cover, long-range missiles, etc.) But Africa actually does have its own defense industry; I think it's mostly for small arms but African countries have been able to make (for instance) jet engines and smart munitions in the past, and a quick Google shows they even have some domestic semiconductor production. It seems plausible that the actual end scenario is that African strategic bombers with chemical or even nuclear weapons are hitting Berlin long before the Europeans figure out how to push past the Suez (defended by more than 1,000 M1A1s!) On the other hand, it could be a situation where the Russians churn out so many T-34s that the qualitative edge doesn't end up mattering.
There's a lot of things that the scenario doesn't really specify (including the "win" condition and if countries would magically forget preexisting tensions or not). If 1939 Europe is transported to our world, then their trade networks get totally upset. But if it's modern Africa that gets transported to 1939 Europe's world, their trade (to say nothing of communications networks, etc.) gets tenderized. If the idea is "put them both on an infinite featureless plain" then I do think it advantages Europe relatively, since they will likely be able to produce what they need for their supply chain domestically.
Shrike
2d ago
Sorry for the delay; I was traveling.
That doesn't mean that if not broadcast, they necessitate legitimate and reasonable concerns for malfeasance.
Right. I think it would be worse if there was less oversight, which you have suggested. I am open to concerns about live-streaming it. But making it less transparent than it already is would be bad, in my opinion.
Do you agree that when deciding to start a war against Iran on the basis that it's ruled by an an evil regime that hates America, as is so often alleged, that Iranian soldiers and their bases are legitimate targets, yes or no?
That's not the actual causus belli, but sure.
Or do you only believe that US servicefolk are exempt from being valid targets when others take issue with how America has been governed?
During a war? No, they are completely valid targets for the armed forces of other nations.
I'm not asking for what formal rules about declarations and acts of war say. I'm asking you, morally, what is permissible.
I think what the formal rules about declarations and acts of war say is very pertinent to what is morally permissible.
Or do you, like many Americans I converse with, instinctively believe that Americans are of greater moral value to others?
Americans are of greater moral value to me. They are not of greater moral value to God.
Where if they commit atrocities or represent the regime other allege are evil, that they can not be held accountable or be 'legitimately' targeted in the same way the US does to others?
Certainly, if a U.S. servicemember commit a crime he can and should be tried and sentenced before a duly constituted court in accordance with due process. Ideally that would be before the U.S. courts constituted for this purpose, but I have no moral objection to a U.S. servicememember being tried by a duly constituted foreign authority if there is no more appropriate venue and they respect due process (there may of course be various legal objections to such a state of affair).
The only legitimate ways to wage war are conveniently conventional and appeal to the perceived strengths of the US military. Dropping bombs on targets of convenience via air is legitimate, strapping a bomb to your chest and walking it towards your target of convenience is not.
Well, yeah. That's the thinking on just war that we inherited from the Europeans. Of course I think it's possible that Americans have always had perhaps a slightly different perspective on war than Europeans due to exposure to fighting a neolithic civilization (which was largely out of mind for Europeans).
I'd argue the vow itself is functionally ceremonial and irrelevant in the modern world. As it does not represent anything real or serious to many people. Regardless of whether we think it should or not.
I don't think this is or should be the case.
Whilst feeling of betrayal or the knowledge that someone wants or wanted to murder you carries more of the emotional weight.
I think murder is wrong even if no betrayal is involved. By itself the knowledge that someone wanted to murder me would carry very little emotional weight to me.
You're going to have to clarify
Okay. I said this before, basically, but I will restate it. Your article is all war dead. Not all of those people were killed by Americans. It's like counting everyone killed since 2020 as being COVID victims.
The majority of Trump supporters are in favor of bombing targets even with a great risk of civilian casualties. That's a valid plurality, I'd say. It's an interesting article in any case, that validates my overarching point as well
So I am glad we finally got to polling. I can't access the underlying details of either poll, but looking at the first one, the framing "The US should NOT use airstrikes if it meant killing innocent civilians." Remember, as I phrased it earlier:
You, of course, will not be able to find any actual polling or research suggesting that a plurality of Americans support bombing innocent civilians. You will argue that they support it from a consequentialist framework because they agree with actions that lead to the bombing of innocent civilians.
This seems to me to show that Americans accept the collateral damage, not that most Americans support bombing innocent civilians for the sake of bombing innocent civilians. However I rather wished I had the foresight to have included that turn of phrase in my original argument, which is rather weaker due to the lack of it.
It seems like you sometimes accept that proportionate collateral damage is acceptable, so I assume you would be with the majority of Trump supporters on this one?
Beyond that, if you're willing to risk your own civilians as victims then you can do that.
It's entirely rational for a state to treat its own civilians as different from other civilians, because it has different duties to its own civilians. However Americans do of course risk their own (usually soldiers) when they conduct airstrikes. Fratricide is actually a pretty serious threat.
The original point was about the validity of military targets. Nidal chose to wear that uniform and then used that uniform to advantage himself on the battlefield against his enemy. You can execute people for that, which America and others have done. But that's, again irrelevant to the point.
I think it's pretty relevant to the conversation of whether or not Nidal Hasan - who voluntarily swore an oath, betrayed it, and used his uniform to kill a number of his fellow soldiers (and one or two civilians, depending on how you count) - is a sympathetic character.
Shrike
6d ago
"Middle Eastern ancestry" part is by far the most important thing there.
I doubt this is true, statistically speaking - keep in mind that US Jews have Middle Eastern ancestry. I think "radical Islamist beliefs" is actually the most important thing.
Your new one is conceding that he's a middle eastern terrorist (from the US, with US citizenship, which is true).
I think there's a big difference between saying someone has ancestry of a place and suggesting they come from a place they don't!
If a white guy, or a black guy or a Mexican guy converts to Islam and kills a bunch of soldiers, there's not much that can obviously be done about it. If an Arab does it the obvious implication is simple. Stop importing Arabs!
While I am in favor of greater immigration restrictions, I think you can be more imaginative about solutions here. Hasan probably could have been stopped by paying attention to what he was telling his coworkers, and you know, that might also catch the white guy too.
If Romania revoked this guy's citizenship would you say he's no longer a Romanian?
That's an interesting question. If he was born in Romania and didn't have the citizenship of another nation, yes. Otherwise, no. But this is firing from the hip, I'm open to an illustration that this is absurd or contrary to normal and/or legal use.
People from Muslim backgrounds are many orders of magnitude more likely to become Islamic radicals and it is willfully ignorant to say otherwise.
Well - if your baseline is "all people" then yes, obviously Muslims are more likely to become Islamic radicals than anyone. However my guess is that (at least in the U.K., maybe in the U.S.) a convert to Islam is actually more likely to become an Islamic radical than a person with a preexisting Islamic background. This is me firing from the hip again, feel free to correct me if you have stats handy, but it's not uncommon - for instance, the shoe bomber was a convert, and he wasn't the only one.
There also seems to be a specific issue (as there was with Hasan) of second-generation radicalism, where people whose parents aren't particularly extreme or even devout have kids who become radicalized.
Shrike
6d ago
You provide no argument, you've just asserted that this is secretive somehow again and again.
It's by definition more secretive the less transparent it is.
But you don't engage with it. Instead you assert the American perspective.
What do you mean, I don't engage with it. I have at least some understanding of it (despite what you might think) but I don't agree with it. Do you?
From his perspective he was.
This might be true. I don't agree with his perspective. Do you?
If you want to pretend that the motives of the shooter don't matter, go ahead. But I think they do.
I don't think I've been pretending they don't matter.
And I think that a military like the American one, that has done some many horrible things in the service of a demented foreign policy can't play victim or hide being international law, sitting on a throne of dead women and children. That were to the US at the time 'convenient targets' they later choose to call 'Collateral Damage' after the women and children dead are counted.
Well, do you agree with collective guilt, or not?
If it is wrong to kill people who are not directly guilty of a crime, then what Nidal did was wrong. If it's not, why are you complaining that the U.S. did it?
I sense, generally, that you disagree with actions taken by the United States government and therefore sympathize with Nidal. But I'm not getting a clear ethical framework for why you think what Nidal did was right and what the U.S. did was wrong.
There's no argument. Just an assertion that, to you, Nidal did wrong based on specific premises.
Well...usually if there's premises there's an argument.
What's your argument that what Nidal did was good?
I don't think oathbreaking is the main problem when people commit a mass shooting. I think you're just being obtuse to rhetorically distance yourself from the moral arguments made by the victims of Americas zionist foreign policy.
I think there's actually a huge moral valiance to oathbreaking. A single person killing his wife is much more evil than a single person who uses a nuclear weapon to destroy an entire carrier battle group, killing thousands of people including any civilians who happen to be onboard. Do you disagree?
Did any of the civilians bombed by the US?
See my question above.
I'm familiar with the death toll and the number I mentioned is generally accurate, depending on how much faith you put in US universities doing research into the topic.
The link that you provided does not substantiate your suggestion that the US military killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Middle East throughout the Global War on Terror. It substantiates that hundreds of thousands of people were killed, which I did not dispute.
I maintained that many Americans generally were not, given the repeat support they show for bombing innocent civilians.
You, of course, will not be able to find any actual polling or research suggesting that a plurality of Americans support bombing innocent civilians.
You will argue that they support it from a consequentialist framework because they agree with actions that lead to the bombing of innocent civilians.
Very well: are you opposed to any action that might lead to the deaths of innocent civilians? Do you condemn all acts that lead to the deaths of innocent civilians?
I'm saying that when you don a military uniform, you represent that force.
And Nidal Hasan chose to don that uniform. He should have represented that force, instead of some other force (be that the Taliban, Palestine, the mob, whoever.)
And the history of the native Americans, who never in their thousands of years of history on the continent did anything to make it into America as it is generally known to be
Kind of a weird thing to say, given that nobody can think of American without thinking of cowboys, and nobody can think of cowboys without thinking of Indians.
Shrike
6d ago
When you say that an American became an Islamic radical and shot up a military base, it buries the lede.
No, actually, saying precisely this draws attention to what happened. Saying he was a Middle Easterner, as you point out, is not to say anything unusual. It turns off the brain, or at most makes people think "who let him into the country?" or "how did a Middle Easterner join the military?" when in fact he was born here. Whereas as you say, Americans rarely shoot American soldiers for the cause of Islam and the Taliban. You can actually just say "Nidal Hasan was an American Muslim of Middle Eastern ancestry who joined the U.S. Army. Inspired by his radical Islamist beliefs, he carried out a mass shooting on a military base." If you substitute out "American Muslim of Middle Eastern ancestry" with "Middle Easterner" you make the sentence substantially less informative.
If he were a black guy or a white guy or even a Mexican-American who had converted to Islam and done this, sure, that's an American guy who became an Islamic terrorist. But his actions were clearly that of someone from an unintegrated Middle Eastern background who happened to be born in the United States.
It seems to me that if a black, white, Mexican-American or Arab American shoot up an American military base for the cause of Islam, their actions are all about equal. Hasan's might strike one as less unusual because his familial background was Muslim, but if a white guy attacked a bunch of US soldiers in the name of Islam, he's not somehow acting less like an Islamic terrorist because of his skin tone.
I don't think you can just normatively decree that anyone with an American citizenship is American
The guy is American by the legal definition of such. If we can normatively decree anything it's that we should respect definitions. And he wasn't even an anchor baby, so there's really no wiggle room to insist he came through on a loophole.
it doesn't really make any sense to insist that the perpetrator is actually Romanian even though he's a Romanian citizen from Romania.
It actually does! If a guy is Romanian, he's Romanian. If a white person kills a bunch of white people for anti-white reasons (which is certainly conceivable) it still makes sense to call him white, too.
Yes, he was born in America and an American citizen but if he wasn't from an essentially foreign Muslim family he never would have acted the way he did
Do these sorts of "if a person was a completely different person they would act like they were a completely different person" counterfactuals really clarify these questions? Yes, if Hasan had been a different person, he likely would have done a different thing, I agree. But if your position is that only people from Muslim backgrounds become Islamic radicals, you're wrong about that.
Shrike
6d ago
I agree that "German" is a type of European, and "Germans" refer to people live in Germany, or it can refer to an ethnic group of Germans, typically of German linear genetic descent who live in Germany or in German enclaves or who otherwise have a cultural affinity to Germany, or it could simply refer to a German genetic line. The problem with using the last definition is that it often makes little sense to refer to people who are of one genetic group but another cultural-political group as belonging to the genetic group. For instance, referring to Fred Trump as a German causes more confusion than clarification.
And "Palestinian" has similar issues when used here.
If we're focusing on genetic lineage, it might be more precise to refer to Hasan as Arab or perhaps Palestinian Arab (since there are a few non-Arab Palestinians). If we're focusing on ethnicity in the cultural sense, I am not sure it makes much sense to refer to him as Palestinian - he can't speak Arabic, and as far as I know spent little if any time abroad. From what I've seen, he himself might have used the term "Arab" instead of "Palestinian" if you asked him to describe his ethnic or genetic background.
From what I can tell, whatever feelings towards Palestine or Palestinian identity he may have seen in himself did not play much if any role in the shooting - he saw himself as acting to defend Islam and the Taliban (which obviously are geographically and ethnically distinct from any Palestinians he might have sympathies with), not Palestine.
I think it's fine to say that he is of Palestinian descent, or that his ethnic background is Palestinian or Arab, or what have you. You can describe him accurately. But describing him as a Palestinian terrorist causes more confusion than clarification. It would cause similar confusion if you referred to Donald Trump a European political leader (even though Donald Trump is ethnically 100% European).
One of the problems of academia is that the amount of material to review and understand has absolutely exploded. This might be merely annoying in, say, literature, but it's ideal in history and obviously potentially very important in medicine to be able to wrap your head around all the research that's been done ahead of you.
I think LLMs are in many ways a potential lifeline out of this dilemma that we've created for ourselves. But in a very real sense I am worried that they will work too well, sucking all of the funding away from experimentation and pushing boundaries and redirecting it into using LLMs to make new connections in already published data. This might yield incredible results, but if we don't maintain empirical testing, at some point we'll hit a dead end, and my concern is that we won't hit that dead end until after we've lost the cultural knowledge of how to do empirical testing.
This is particularly important because, due to the replication crisis, we could make vast forays into realms of theory without ever realizing that our work was built on a lie if we don't bother to verify the experiment.
However, this does suggest another potentially useful feature of LLMs for science beyond using them to correlate all the contents of the world: an "auto-replication factory" where some university has an agentic swarm review new publications. Obviously you'd need a lot more than just an Astra swarm to test the more hands-on stuff, but I bet AIs are decent at catching statistical anomalies, mistakes, fraud, and plagiarism.
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