TequilaMockingbird
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User ID: 3097
TequilaMockingbird
12d ago
Ill second Castles of Steel as an excellent read.
TequilaMockingbird
12d ago
I so want it to be true. ;-)
Im fascinated by the transition period around the turn century as it is simultaneously remote and foriegn and yet at the same time immediately accessible in the sense that primary sourses are widely available and the seeds of our modern world for all its good and ill are immediately visible.
Mine is hardly a unique take (better historians than I have already written whole books on the subject) but i think that WWI was an inflection point, and the seminal tragedy of the 20th century. I say tragedy specifically because it is so hard to pick out any one cause or villian. Sure some might point to Gavrillo Princep, but he was less the cause and more the careless spark that finally lit the pile of oily rags. That the situation was allowed to progress to the point where a single idiot could plunge all of Europe into war for want of a sandwich was the real problem. It almost feels fated in a way. Everyone involved seems to have been making reasonable decisions and assumptions for the information they had available the problem (if one can call it that) was that the world is messy and complex and a lot of their information wad either incomplete or just plane wrong.
In contrast the opening of WWII might as well be a Saturday morning cartoon in its simplicity.
Sure there is the argument to be made that Britain could have avoided both wars simply by reneging on previous agreements with Belgium and Poland and renouncing the RN's role as guaranteurs of maritime trade/safety but I don't see how anyone remotely familiar with early 20th century British politics and culture would see that as a realistic option. In alternate history terms that is pretty close to an "alien space bats" type scenario.
Regarding Cooper in particular i find it interesting that his complaints about Churchill seem to mirror a lot of the longstanding complaints about him from the far left. IE that his stubbornness and devotion to outmoded/obsolete ways of thinking prevented him from meeting the socialists and anti-colonialists half-way and subsequently brought ruin to the nation. Of course the classical rejoinder from the trad-right is that it is precisely this stubbornness and devotion to "outmoded ways of thinking" that made him the man for the job.
A "reasonable man" would not have been able to credibly deliver a line like "we shall fight on the landing grounds".
TequilaMockingbird
13d ago
Whatever happened to MeToo? In 2017 it seemed unstoppable and like it was going to really change quite a bit of the social dynamics between the genders. It’s since gone very quiet.
A combination of two factors i think, at least part of it comes down to what @Crowstep said about outrage being exhausting but i think the bigger factor is that it was intended to be a weapon to be weilded against Trump (see the whole "grab 'em by the pussy" thing) but once democrats and media execs realized that the people most vulnerable to metoo were democrats and media execs it was quietly shelved.
TequilaMockingbird
13d ago
I recently read the full Abolition of Man for what might be the first time in 15 - 20 years and it struck me just how contemporary a lot of it felt.
Lewis spends the bulk of the book arguing against the postmodernism in general and the deconstructionist mindset in particular on the grounds that it is fundementally anti-enlightenment and anti-western. The core argument being that these impulses "must inevitably dissolve into moral absurditity" and it's hard not to read the absurdities he describes in both your post and @RenOS's below. Granted he's writing this in early 1943 so theres a whole load of extra shit going on that goes unmentioned in the book but it's interesting to see a prototype/precursor of later internet arguments over whether aithiests can be moral actors in the idea that totalitarian dictatorships like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are the default endstate of unrestrained liberalism because if being polite and rational are your only values, you'll go along with anything (including tyranny and mass murder) and anything can and will be rationalized.
Bringing this back to your post. Romney in 2012 was very much a compromise candidate. The go to example on both sides for "reasonable centerist" and it did not protect him from having his name dragged through the mud. The lesson the GOP-base took away from 2012 is that being a "reasonable centerist" gains you nothing, the democrats will hate you regardless.
A common sentiment you'll see in a lot of conservative spaces is that for too long people like Romney, the Cheneys, French, Et Al. have been putting politeness and "not rocking the boat" before anything else, and this has led them to regularly enable and defend numerous bad actors. "Trumpism" is, if anything, a reaction to this percieved tendency.
This is probably a post in itself, but something Lewis gets into is how being "nice" is not the same as being "good" and being "meek" doesn't mean being spineless despite the efforts of postmodernist thinkers to confate the two.
Perhaps "astroturfing" is the wrong word but there is a stink of it surrounding the whole organization. See @sarker's "credulous Twitter anons".
More pointedly they seem to be a manifestation of a wider issue in Sillicon Valley where you get charismatic Steve Jobs wannabes whose main product/output isn't "the next big thing" as much as it is playing social games to attract VC investment with the promise of the "the next big thing".
Speaking from inside the industry OpenAI hasn't been pushing the bar forward so much as they have been expanding access. To be fair this can be a lucrative buisiness model, Apple became the powerhouse that it is today by making "tech" accessible to non-techies. But Apple was also pretty open about this being thier model. Nobody expected thier Mac to represent the bleeding edge of computing, they expected it to "just work". Contrast this with openAI where they and thier boosters are promising the moon imminent fully agentic super-intelligence but when you start peeling back the skin you find that the whole thing is a kludgy mess of nested regression engines with serious structural limitations.
Now this is not to say that GPT does not have legitimate potential, the rapid collation of large datasets and Star Trek-esque universal translation both represent genuine "killer apps" that OpenAI is well positioned to deliver on and exploit but thats not what they seem to be pursuing, what they seem to be persuing is breathless Hackernews think-peices written by alleged "techies" who majored in business or philosophy instead of math or computer science and more VC money.
TequilaMockingbird
15d ago
OpenAI's whole business model is built around astroturfing stack-exchange, hacker news, and similar sites.
TequilaMockingbird
16d ago
I agree. The strength of his 2016 campaign was saying out loud what a lot of people were thinking but otherwise reluctant to say either out of politeness or being firmly outside the MBA from Harvard Business School class' overton window. I feel like his 2024 campaign lacks that zest, and is only as strong as it is because the democrats are that weak in comparison.
TequilaMockingbird
16d ago
Obviously, this is just a press release. However, it seems that, just when competitors had finally caught up, OpenAI has done it again.
As usual, I'll believe it when i see it.
A cynic might suggest that the appearance of competition is the whole reason for the press release.
TequilaMockingbird
22d ago
Its not that they didn't have cars, trucks, or locomotives at all. It's that they had so few of them.
And yes a good part of the blame goes to the the steel shortage described by @WestphalianPeace but the simple facts remain.
Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
I don’t play pathetic tribal language games, trying to coat my argument in the shibboleths of my supposed “ingroup”
Yoda: and that is why you fail.
Communication is fundementally a multiplayer game. If your online persona is screaming LGTBQ+ Adjacent Zoomer people are naturally going to read you in that light. If you want a cishet crowd to take your words seriously you need to account for that bias in your presentation.
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
Its not about "facts" its about topics and certain topics are just massive red-flags.
Maybe this is uncharitable of me but if it were up to me I would not allow anyone with strong opinions on how age of consent laws are unjust anywhere near children unattended. It's the same principal.
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
What is there to step through? Nothing in the design of a Messerschmitt precludes fueling it from the back of a horse-cart.
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
The same way you find a speak-easy, by knowing who to ask.
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
Fair point, but still. Germany was if not "backwards" at least lagging significantly behind the UK, France, Italy, and the Scandinavian nations on multiple metrics.
One of the reasons so many Chezk guns and Chzek Tanks show up at the battle of France is that they were broadly equivalent if not superior to anything the Germans had been able to produce domestically at the time and unlike the German gear they could be produced in bulk.
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
but portraying the economy writ-large as "horse and mule drawn" makes no sense.
...and yet it was so. In 1938 there were an estimated 2.5 million operational motor vehicles (cars, trucks, tractors, locomotives, etc...) in Germany servicing a population of approximately 68 million. IOW a per capita rate of 0.036
Compare that to an estimated 30 million vehicles servicing a population of 130 million people (a per capita rate of 0.230) in the US.
"Nazis skewing their economy heavily towards the military sector" doesn't quite capture how heavily skewed it was, or just how hard it ended up screwing them.
Whats that old Napoleon quote? Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.
One of several reasons the Germans lost is that they put lots of time and energy into developing fancy toys and a comparatively little energy into developing the ability to produce them and keep them in the fight.
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
Relatively speaking? Yes.
TequilaMockingbird
23d ago
German radios were never particularly good, but unlike the Poles they actually had some, and unlike the French they trained thier regular troops in thier use.
Exactly what it says on the tin.
Things like the tiger tank and various "wunderwaffe" get most of the attention but the Wehrmacht and the wider German economy was still very much a horse and mule drawn affair going into WWII and this significantly contributed to thier food shortages.
TequilaMockingbird
24d ago
Simply put after years of a certain sort "just asking questions" people are quite correctly suspicious.
This may be unfortunate for the occasional sincere autist only interested in truth-seeking that gets caught in the crossfire but it is healthier for society at large.
My intuition would be that the long thought-out works are just that, thought-out, carefully curated and censored, where as the tweets are more reflective of his true feelings and how he talks when the cameras are off.
In vino veritas and all that.
TequilaMockingbird
24d ago
It probably wouldn't have if Germany hadn't violated Belgium's neutrality.
Germany wanted a general war and they got it.
TequilaMockingbird
24d ago
I do not believe that Darryl Cooper says the things that he does out of hate for his fellow man.
I am reminded of the early days of SSC and LessWrong specifically the admonishment that indifference and/or stupidity can destroy just as readily as hate.
No, they bungled what should have been a decent and defensible position in support of an ally...
Are you trying to argue that the invasion and occupation of Belgium in 1914 was somehow accidental?
Ironic, because at the time Germany was arguably the leading light of the west, at least in scientific and cultural matters.
Debatable but even so, ironic does not mean untrue.
For what it's worth I feel like there's a common thread in @xablor's post on voting and some of the replies to @zataomm's post on WWI that really ought to be broken out and examined on its own that being how exactly do we ascribe agency and responsibility.
It's trivially true that the current war in Ukraine could've been avoided had the Kievan Russ welcomed Moscow as liberators and acquiesced to their rule instead of choosing to fight. It's trivially true that World War 2 may have avoided or postponed if the Poles had acquiesced to being partitioned between the Bolsheviks and the Nazis instead of choosing to fight, or if the British Empire had valued Germanic notions of racial brotherhood over their own self-conception as World Hegemon/police or desire to adhere to previously made agreements.
But that's just the thing, they didn't, and the arguments that they ought to have seem to be relying on a lot of legwork that is not in evidence.
I recently read a book of CS Lewis' letters and essays including the full version of The Abolition of Man over the course of a cross-country flight, and it struck me as surprisingly relevant/contemporary for something that was written over 80 years ago now. It also reminded me of an argument between Habryka (or maybe Hlinka?) and some long-standing DR aligned poster from back in the day. I don't recall whether it was on LessWrong or in the CW thread on SlateStar codex but it was prior to the move to reddit and in anycase I can't seem to find it now. The jist of it was that it was impossible for an actor to be both moral and rational because having "moral principals" was effectively a precommitment to behave irrationally in specific circumstances. IE While I know that I could easily get away with lying, cheating, stealing, or otherwise "hitting the defect button" and that it might even be in my personal interest do so, I won't do that because to do so would be wrong and right/wrong is something that trancends rational self interest.
For example I'd like to think we could all recognize that killing 77 men over a puppy and a car is wholy disproportionate and perhapse even a bit extreme but at the same time I would also like to believe that all but the most autistic of contrarians would agree that a world of men like Neo is preferable to one of men like Theon Greyjoy
I feel like this is something that Lewis saw clearly that a lot of otherwise intelligent commentators today do not. Namely, that it is easy to argue with the benefit of hindsight that the British were idiots to abide by this agreement or that, but this must be whieghed against the question of what value does any agreement with the empire have once you've set the precident of reneging on any agreement the moment it looks like the bill might come due? After all, the thing that makes a debt a debt is the obligation to pay.
I feel like we see something similar in a lot of the rhetoric around voting and other forms civic duties. There seems to be this widely held belief that voting doesn't matter unless your specific vote gets to be the deciding vote but how dumb is that? how many elections are decided by one vote? and how do you decide which specific vote for candidate A or policy B out of however many is the deciding vote. It seems to me that the sanest, if not neccesarily most rational, approach is to stop asking dumb questions. Voting, even when your vote isn't neccesarily the deciding vote, has value for the same reason honoring your agreements has value. Doing so (or otherwise not doing so) tells the rest of the world something true about you.
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