Shrike
2hr ago
The actual quality of "the feds" depends on the fed. Some of their personnel (NSA geeks, Navy nuclear technicians) are extremely intelligent (at least as far as test-taking goes).
The areas of the federal bureaucracy that select for politicking in particular are quite capable of pulling off conspiracies.
Shrike
3hr ago
I think this is also due to the nature of a conspiracy to do a legal act versus an illegal act.
I'm not sure I really buy this distinction in common use; this would move hypothesizing about e.g. UFO cover ups mostly out of the realm of a conspiracy theory, since presumably it's not actually illegal for the government to e.g. conduct crash retrievals and reverse-engineering and classify all of their findings.
Shrike
3hr ago
This basically misunderstands the dynamics at play in real life wholesale:
- Large groups of people can in fact be fairly good at closely cooperating without leaking information.
- Generally speaking, leaking information often does not "matter." Many leaks happen without impacting the broader consciousness. Furthermore, becoming "fully" public does nothing to stop the conspiracy, at least not in a timely manner. Look at Harvey Weinstein. Look at the roughly 70 years of leaks from the U.S. government that UFOs are real, have crashed, and that alien bodies have recovered. Look at the recent revelations that your Samsung television is spying on you. Look at my prior comment on conspiracy as a coordination problem. Jurassic Park understood this.
- Leaks are not necessarily true (see #2), and dedicated actors see to it that false leaks are common enough to shield real ones.
- Public perception largely does not matter; good conspirators typically target the relevant "policymakers" and not the public. But to the extend that public perception does, it's quite possible to change it. There are entire industries dedicated to doing both of these things openly.
- Finally, unless you define "conspiracy theory" to only refer to criminal conspiracies (which would mean that, for instance, UFO conspiracy theories aren't) plenty of conspiracies are perfectly legal. In fact, they are so legal that you hardly need to hide what you are doing. Sometimes it's in fact mandatory and required by law. "Covering up a crime" is illegal, but "providing a rigorous defense to the accused" is in fact not just permitted but required, and even though they both can tend towards the same end. A team of people working together to get a criminal off the hook on a technicality only doesn't register as a conspiracy to us because they don't need to do it covertly.
This last point is very important to understand because the popular version of conspiracy theory, indulged in by the worst conspiracy theorists and the favorite strawman of debunkers, does often postulate large degrees of covert coordination, which allows real conspiracies to operate more-or-less openly without even being viewed as sinister. Obviously there are in fact covert actions that take place, but real life conspiracies (much like real life espionage) operates on a spectrum from covert to overt, and overt actions can be chained together with less overt actions to achieve desired goals.
It's true that the straw-man conspiracy theory, with 300 bloodsuckers sitting on thrones in Lichtenstein somewhere deciding the fate of the world isn't true (at least, I don't think it is; I haven't had direct personal experience of it) but the popular version of a conspiracy theory, where hidden forces work behind the scenes to sway the fate of the nation, is basically true. It's just that general shape that it takes is so familiar that it doesn't strike us as a conspiracy, because we're all conspirators. We've (almost) all signed an NDA, or spilled a rumor at just the right time, or "gundecked" a report to keep somebody from looking bad. And the "big" conspiracies often aren't really different from this in mechanism, only in ambition.
However these basically mundane ways can be very effective. They're just not very satisfying to people who are excited to learn about Hyperborea, lizard shape-shifters, or at least something out of a James Bond movie. Things like "the military spying on the President and leaking classified information to the press undermine his policies" not only happen, but can be successfully covered up for decades, and the details are so mundane that when they are released, conspiracy theorists and the public alike are barely aware of it, even though it's a textbook case study of supposedly-mythical "Deep State" at work.
Shrike
22hr ago
I would guess that the majority of Catholic priests believe in demons, although as far as I can tell there's no solid polling data on it. They certainly have a number of notably vocal exorcists, which is notable in part because (IIRC) the Catholic Church requires a psychiatric evaluation before performing an exorcism to screen out more mundane issues.
Education isn't a barrier to religious belief (indeed, in the United States, education correlates with religious practice) so I'm not really sure that it's as important to this question as you think, particularly since there's an obvious selection bias in the priesthood. I do get the impression that many Catholic clergy in the United States (and I assume the EU) were often much less attached to church dogma than one might think, but as I understand it the situation has reversed and younger priests in the US are trending much more conservative.
Shrike
1d ago
Catholics also believe in witchcraft; using divination and magic is explicitly forbidden in the catechism of the Catholic church.
Protestants and Catholics both believe in demons and practice exorcisms, but Catholics practice is a bit more media-friendly because they have a formal system for it, ancient lore, and visually striking, immediately identifiable vestments.
Shrike
2d ago
It's very ironic that as soon as Dase is banned, Anthropic announces they believe LLMs can do formal code verification at scale which (if true and if implemented) would massively vindicate his belief in "defender's advantage."
Shrike
3d ago
It hasn't gotten any easier to strike mobile, camouflaged missile or drone launchers.
It almost certainly has, although that's "since the SCUD hunt" and not "since the last time Iran and the US shot at each other." I would be very surprised if e.g. ground moving target indicator software haven't massively improved over the past 20 years, particularly with new AESA radars.
Shrike
3d ago
Does proprietary code even exist anymore?
"For my first act, I'm going to obliterate the source of revenue of my most obvious customer!"
Maybe the next big release from the primes will be an Opus-performing LLM you can run on your laptop.
Shrike
5d ago
We have every reason to think it's multiple intelligences fused into a single whole because we've learned that when the body (in particular, the brain) suffers damage to specific regions, intelligence doesn't necessarily fall uniformly but may degrade relative to certain specific skillsets depending on what part is impacted. Certain things we may not think of as relating to intelligence (such as emotions) also seem to help us perform more intelligently in real life.
This doesn't mean Gardner specifically is right or that g is a useless concept. But it also doesn't mean that people are wrong to talk as if there are discreet intelligences.
We can see this naturally if we look at other aspects of the human body; for instance, upper body strength is correlated with itself (if you're good at one upper body exercise, you're likely good at another). But that doesn't mean that there aren't specific muscles at play. And two people with identical genetic muscular potential can focus on different sets of exercises in a way that they become better than each other at those specific sets, even if everything else is equal, because "upper body strength" is really measuring a combination of the strength of a bunch of different muscles that can be isolated, but not entirely.
Shrike
7d ago
If it happens, which doesn't seem to be a given. There doesn't seem to have been much of one in Russia after World War Two, for instance.
Shrike
8d ago
If there's one thing in geopolitics that has compounding effects that increase over time, it's gotta be massive population loss (directly via killing, or indirectly via missed births).
Shrike
8d ago
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.
Shrike
8d 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
8d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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
9d 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.
Right, but years after it was an open secret that he was abusive.
You see my point. You're correct to be skeptical. But the idea that something leaking thwarts the thing just isn't true; did Weinstein stop abusing women once it was clear other people had learned about it? No, he was convicted for things that happened years and years later! Similarly, if there's any truth at all to the UFO thing, the conspiracy has been ticking along despite being "leaked" in the 1940s.
I don't think they have gone down.
The idea that cameras and other technology could verify them is mostly nonsense anyway; pictures and (accounts of) radar returns of "UFOs" have been public for years and it's not some slam-dunk that persuades people; believers will believe them even when they are fake and skeptics will doubt them even if they aren't. Step outside and take a picture of an airliner at cruising altitude with your cell phone. What's that tell you if you don't already know it's an airliner? Next to nothing, and setting up a radar in your back yard to get a skin return doesn't tell you much more unless you have NTCR.
Of course in real life most people have better things to do than e.g. sort through old photographic plates looking for bright spots and thus it's pretty much only people who go looking for UFOs who find them, which rather taints the credibility of the whole affair.
Any conspiracy that's been verified is "evidence against a successful conspiracy" inasmuch as people are aware of it and don't really dispute it. But a successful conspiracy is one that accomplishes its goals; once that happens, it often doesn't actually matter if people are aware of it (hence why we learn new things about World War Two and the Cold War every year.)
But at the same time no conspiracy by definition is secret, because by definition at least two people must know. This is a neat little trick you can use to argue that no conspiracy is really a conspiracy, because (obviously) inadequate steps were taken to keep it secret. But obviously if the conspiracy is illegal it's no defense that you didn't try to keep it a secret. Similarly, I would argue that "secrecy" has various levels, and that simply because something is not secret to everyone or even to non-members of the conspiracy does not render something not a conspiracy.
For instance, look at the famous example of how the Soviet Union was able to deduce that the US was working on an atomic weapon (because, as I understand it, the American scientific literature on the topic dried up). Just because the Soviets were able to figure it out does not mean that there was not an attempt to keep it secret. Furthermore, it was successfully kept secret from the public. Finally, it's noteworthy that the effort was detected precisely because of the conspiracy to keep it secret.
Thus there was a conspiracy to cover up information and it succeeded, albeit imperfectly. The fact that it was not perfect does not mean that there is a conspiracy.
It very much can be intentional; there's a reason "black money" organizations exist (and that's on the legal side of things.)
I think it's helpful to step back and ask yourself if knowing the information would make a material difference. For instance, PR firms are real, and businesses hire them, and sometimes PR firms even publicize which businesses they work with or vice versa. There's no secret there. Nevertheless, newspapers do not disclose that they've been assisted by a PR firm on a story. Why not? Would knowing they have been materially change the way you read the article?
Similarly with ghostwriters. If you've read an op-ed (not a column, but an op-ed) in a newspaper, there's a good chance it was ghostwritten, and this fact is also public. But this is not disclosed. Why not? Would knowing who wrote it materially change the way you read the op-ed?
(Check out Paul Graham's "The Submarine" if you haven't already, it highlights a lot of what I am trying to gesture at.)
So it is that when you open up a newspaper, the entire thing is riddled with little falsehoods or lies of omission that create a false impression, and are the result of not one grand unified conspiracy but dozens of little trivial ones. And as I said, not much different in kind than you adhering to your corporate NDA, or not telling a friend that you're regifting their present, or winking at a subordinate's smoke break, or what have you - but vastly different in ambition because the goal of these little conspiracies is to change the world in which you and I live. And those are relatively mundane, but the same mechanisms that can obscure these little mundane conspiracies can also serve to conceal the CIA recovering a secret Soviet submarine, or USAID trying to undermine the Cuban government by creating a Twitter clone. Tor (which was made by the US Naval Research Laboratory, by the way) conceals the online activity of the petty drug purchaser and the U.S. intelligence operative alike.
You're going to feel like my comparison of PR firms to the Grand Illuminati Council of Lizardfolk is absurd, that the former doesn't meet the definition of conspiracy theory. But I'm trying to tell you that the latter is a weakman that trains your mind to dismiss real conspiracies. The voice in your head that says "that's trivial to bypass if one looks closely" is the same voice that tells you not to look closely.
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