quiet_NaN
14hr ago
People need to see it happen, and they need to understand that this is not something they can overcome with language games and infinite isolated demands for rigor.
I do not think this will help deter anyone. It will not deter a single jihadist. It will hardly deter any normal criminal -- the ones who don't have the stomach for it will simply not watch. And the ones who will watch will not decide that the threat of getting shot after a few decades of prison will make it not worth it.
And it will very much not be a grim if dignified affair like Ned Stark beheading someone. People will watch it on TV in bars. School boys will make bets if the condemned will shit himself before or after being shot.
Let me try an analogy. Many parents want grandchildren, and many royalists want a royal heir. However, this rarely means that either group would be very interested in observing the process of the baby being conceived or born on live TV. As long as the processes are handled competently, most parents and royalists will prefer to see the end result without the various fluids involved along the way. The ones who would prefer to watch everything are probably perverts.
With a public execution, most of the public in favor of it will decide that as long as it happens, they do not need to see it done. A few will tune in because they feel it is their duty as citizens to bear witness. The main audience will be people watching out of morbid curiosity. Some will watch to confirm their opinion that the death penalty is barbaric.
And MAGA will obviously turn this into a media circus. Hegseth has a day job, he is in charge of the most expensive military on the planet. The particulars of the implementation of the judgments of military courts are only a tiny part of that job, in most administrations they would be handled three layers of management below him. Instead, the former Fox News moderator decided not only to make the execution public, but also to personally announce it.
Can I be sure that he does not share my aesthetic revulsion regarding death by shark? Not really, it could be that for once our aesthetics and moral judgments would agree. His previous readiness to embrace war and warrior aesthetics would make it surprising, but you never know.
Still, I concede that attacking MAGA over what I think they might want to do was bad on my part. I am confident there will be enough for me to criticize after their circus without me having to speculate what the distasteful particulars might be beforehand.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I do not get it. Even for pro death penalty people, I do not think there is a bigger point in making the execution public. If the US says they have executed someone in prison, few people will doubt them, so even before AI made video evidence unreliable establishing common knowledge would not have been a great reason.
Nor do I think that the shock value will scare people straight. It does not work too well with the shock pictures the EU puts on tobacco products either.
I think the most coherent reason is that MAGA wants a spectacle.
But then why go for something as tame as a firing squad? Where is the suspense, the thrill? The obvious baseline for RETVRN-leaning MAGAs should be pagan Rome, they knew how to put on a show. Wild animals, fighting, messy deaths. Crucifixions are right out though, not only because they would offend the Christian right, but also because two hours in viewers will get bored and start scrolling TokTok.
Presumably Seaworld was not willing to let Hegseth drop him into a shark tank? Or have him fight for his life with a dagger against an angry polar bear? Perhaps Hegseth could fight him bare-handed to the death, thereby proving his manliness? The horror genre is full of ideas on how to make the spectacle last longer. Is there nobody in the administration who would want to channel their inner Mason Verger by having a jihadist being eaten alive by pigs? Or it could even be episodic, where the convict gets to face some deadly threat every Tuesday at prime time, sometimes getting maimed, until he finally succumbs to one. Think of the money Trump could make on prediction markets by rigging that game!
Presumably Hegseth was advised that the SCOTUS would declare most of these options cruel and unusual, but even the boring firing squad thing would offer the potential for some excitement. Think about it: if execution by firing squad is legal, then execution by a firing squad chosen in a particular fashion is legal. Trump could run a weekly casting/game show where would-be members of the squad compete against each other for the honor of firing the shot. The courts might even allow bringing the convict along for every episode. Fox could make a killing. Bait the left: let Trump's kids and the ICE goons who shot Hope and Pretty compete.
Obviously, the key question would be if Trump would want a woman and black guy on the squad to increase his demographic appeal or if that would be too DEI.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
For Scott to catastrophize off this paper strongly diminishes my respect for his analytical knowledge, and this proposed rationality of the movement he claims to be a core participant of.
I did not read him as "the paper did conclusively prove that AIs can feel pain", and more like "engaging in behavior which is evil if it works but most likely just pointless is bad".
This is a fully coherent position to have. It covers anything from using 'voodoo' dolls to harm people you like over throwing rocks at birds to tricking people into breaking the tenets of their religion so they go to hell.
If Scott believed that there was a high likelihood that model torture was succeeding, he would invest a lot more to stop it.
Just because we can't justify putting the ceiling below AGI doesn't also mean we can justify putting it above it either. Uncertainty about the ceiling cannot substitute for evidence about where it lies.
Scott has you covered. Nobody is arguing that intelligence will scale indefinitely -- if nothing else, there is likely how much computation you can do on a question posed at a point (x, t) if you have to answer at (x, t+Delta t).
But not every limit is practically relevant. Speed has a fundamental limit, but it is so high that this fact is utterly irrelevant in running competitions.
Likewise, "absent new physics, the size of a machine which answers a question in a minute is fundamentally limited to a (quantum) computer with a diameter of one light minute" is not a very relevant constraint.
Like most people, I think it is unlikely we will sail smoothly from present LLMs into that limit, it seems likely that we will hit some bottleneck long before that. However, not every limit is practically relevant. It is certainly possible that LLMs will hit a wall really soon and not even make any significant headway even if they invest 1000x the compute. It would be surprising, but not impossible. Likewise, it it possible that OpenAI will publish GPT-10 in seven years or so and that the capability ratio between GPT-10 and GPT0-6 will be like between GPT-6 and GPT-2.
The truth is we do not have a coherent theory of intelligence and alignment. Eliezer has made this point eight years ago when he talked about the Rocket Alignment Problem. It is possible that AI alignment will be trivial, just as the people in that dialogue might find that the effects of gravity decrease on their spaceship in proportion to the decreasing drag of the atmosphere, so that once you have left the atmosphere you indeed only need to lead the moon a bit to intercept it. However, it is also entirely possible that this is not the case, just as any attempt to reach the Moon without Newton's theory of gravity would be foolish in our universe.
I get that from the outside perspective this sounds like Pascal's Mugging. "Everyone has to stop having anal sex, or god might destroy our world with a volcano. Sure, some people say that volcanoes are not a punishment from god, but in the absence of a coherent theory of what causes volcanoes we should err on the side of caution and abstain from anal sex."
My counterargument is that in the space of possible causes for volcano eruptions, anal sex is a null set. It is just as plausible that abstaining from it leads to extinction through supervolcano.
By contrast, in the space of all utility functions an ASI could have, the functions which are compatible with human thriving are a null set. Obviously that does not mean that p(doom|ASI)=1, because it is entirely possible that alignment ends up being easy, so a Culture future seems far more likely than an ASI bent on filling our light cone with Venlafaxine.
Before Castle Bravo was detonated, there were some worries that it might cause a fusion chain reaction in the atmosphere. I think both this and worrying about ASI being unaligned before attempting to create it is entirely rational. Only in the case of the hydrogen bomb, we had a lot more theory to predict how it would behave.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I am in experimental nuclear/particle physics, more on the making-stuff-run than paper-writing side of things. For me personally LLMs are a huge boon.
I mean, on the one hand, they have made huge parts of my skillset obsolete. Before I was one of the few people in my department who knew how to run gdb to hunt down a segfault in some terrible ROOT program. This is not an employable skill any more -- Claude can do this far better and more reliably than I ever could at a tiny fraction of my cost.
But as someone lucky enough to have a job, Claude is like having a PhD student who happens to have read every book on every programming language ever working for you. Tasks which would have taken me half a year (because I lacked the specific skills) can now be done in weeks. I have even taken a liking to systemd of all things, because I don't need to learn the syntax myself. Going down some Linux rabbit hole (how do I figure out why an interrupt handler runs at 100% cpu?), which would have taken me days before is now a matter of an hour.
Still, it used to be that in my field, a lot of students were employed in data analysis. Generally, this involved writing terrible ROOT code to get some physics channel out of a dataset, then turning this into a publication and a PhD thesis. In the short term, they also benefit from LLMs -- at least for the code writing part, which used to be a majority of the work.
But solving for equilibrium, it seems unlikely that anyone will employ PhD students for data analysis in the future. They are expensive (compared to LLMs), they suck at programming, they start out with a lot less domain knowledge than the bots, they come with interpersonal conflicts which require management. In the past, there was no way around them (short of employing programmers, which would take larger salaries and require physicists to work interdisciplinarily). These days, a senior physicist can probably use an LLM agent to do some analysis without spending more time mentoring than she would for a PhD student.
Data analysis aside, experimental physics still contain plenty of manual tasks which are not easily automated. We have used PhD students to glue photomultipliers to scintillators before, and these jobs will still require doing.
The other question is the long term career path of physics PhDs. Before, most of them (in my field) ended up in the software industry, which is what kept our system running. Prospects there are probably not so great at the moment.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Scott Alexander, the guy who hosted the Culture War Thread on his blog slatestarcodex before that landed him in so much heat (from the woke left) that it was moved to reddit under the name /r/theMotte (and from there, subsequently, to themotte.org to preempt a reddit crackdown) comes usually across as a kind and considerate person to me. Charitable interpretations are very much his thing. While he has always engaged in CW topics on occasion, his forays deep into the trenches are rare (and in my impression have become rarer compared to the SSC days).
Apparently, there is a person called Steven Pinker. I have been vaguely aware that there was a book called The Better Angels of Our Nature which was probably authored by someone, but he was not someone I really had on my radar.
From the WP article, he seems solidly Grey Tribe. Believes in a computational theory of mind, Ashkenazi Intelligence Hypothesis, critical of both the woke left (cancellations) and the MAGA right (foreign student restrictions).
The main topic where he disagrees with Scott Alexander is AI x-risk.
Scott has now responded, and his reponse is a bit less than maximum charitable.
I agree that in-person debates are confrontational and bad for truth-seeking. But I didn’t propose a debate in order to seek truth. I proposed it because, under California Penal Code § 415(1), it’s illegal for me to challenge you to a duel.
While Scott is diligent enough with his technical points, it is clear that he is personally hurt by Pinker's decision to ridicule AI x-risk. So his post is also a broadside fired against him. He cites Garfinkel et al 2017 who "proved" that machines will never be larger than humans using common philosophical arguments for AI being harmless.
Scott points out that while Pinker is busy berating the LW crowd for distracting from the more mundane risks of AI, x-risk advocates are willing to work hand in hand with groups with a more practical focus to combat pro-AI PACs like Leading the Future.
On model welfare (which is certainly not the core topic of the x-risk advocates):
Here you are not calling this AI torture “depraved”, you’re calling it depraved to object to it. Your argument, astonishingly, is that since we can’t be certain that AIs feel pain, we must assume that they don’t. In fact, anyone who doesn’t jump on board with this assumption (you intimate) is some sort of evil tech oligarch who wants to genocide humans. [...] I have donated $100 to a model welfare charity just to clean the stain on my soul I got from reading about it.
He accuses Pinker of endorsing the "lowest quality voices", quoting Claire Lehmann:
Thinking AI might be conscious is like thinking that there are real people talking to you from inside the TV, or that there is a tiny band playing music inside the radio.
Fine for 2 year olds to believe, but beyond that, insane.
Or
Geoffrey Hinton is the Nobel Prize winning and Turing Award winning inventor of the modern artificial intelligence paradigm. Lehmann thinks the media should “stop platforming” him [talking about persuasive AI avoiding a shutdown] to devote more time to her, a culture warrior who pivoted to AI two months ago when it got popular.
It ends with Scott seeming seriously willing to duel Pinker:
If you continue to object that debate is a poor method for determining truth, then I suppose literal dueling is the only option left. As an eminent psychologist, I’m sure you’re familiar with Cucina et al (2023), which finds a correlation of .179 - .268 between logical reasoning ability and firearms proficiency - meaning that duels are truth-tracking in exactly the way you worry debates might not be.
Scott has admitted in the comments that this is already the toned-down version of the post he originally wrote. I think that while he held back verbally (nobody get's called a "Vogon spy in a skin suit" this time), he uses his craft well to show his frustration.
For what it's worth, I think that Pinker is correct that Eliezer is in fact over-confident in p(doom|default-ASI). Just like Pinker is when he declares that any fear of doom is ridiculous.
The main difference is that for practical purposes, it does not matter much if your p(doom) is 0.99 or 0.05. Both would be pressing problems whose solution is the most important thing in the world.
Eliezer was bullish on AI capabilities when that was far out of the Overton window, back when the machines could beat humans at chess at most. Steven Pinker was tweeting that "deep learning has probably peaked" in 2019.
This might be giving too much credit to Pinker, but here is Clarke's first law:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think that is an excellent argument.
I also think that some rights are stronger when expressed as universal rights than just as perks of citizenship. "Yes, citizens enjoy freedom of speech, but that guy is a third generation immigrant (and we deny birthright citizenship), so he does not get 1A, due process and we can just shoot him in the streets" seems like a much harder norm to enforce consistently than "Everyone gets protection under the law as their human rights, (though the USG can cancel your visa without criminal trial due process if you really piss them off)".
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Agreed. Obligatory Pratchett:
YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
Like mercy or justice, freedom of speech is an ideal which we can strive for, or which we can simply declare "not a real thing" and leave by the side.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
ex's dad is a top tier Astrophysicist and has won a major prize for Astrology
This seems entirely possible (Isaac Newton was certainly very much into alchemy, for example), but it seems more likely you meant astronomy.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The fact that no one really made an effort shows a lack of belief.
I would argue that EA has been trying to pick up some of the slack. Likely they favored the most effective measures, but it seems to me that they stopped because they ran out of funds rather than because they thought that most of the things USAID funded were net negative
The truth is that before Trump, USAID was spending 12-15G$/a on global healthcare and EA (with a total budget of 1.5-2G$/a over all cause areas) is simply not in the position to simply replace the gap with some spare change.
Was there some USAID funded NGO delivering books with inspiring stories about racial justice to some structurally disadvantaged girls? Probably. Was this where the median dollar was spent? Unlikely, it seems more likely that it got into vaccination campaigns and the like.
In the past, USAID was part of a broader strategy of the US painting itself as the good guy. Sure, sometimes they would bomb the shit out of you and steal your oil, but overall they were not a terrible hegemon as these things go. Trump does not care about USAID as a tool of soft power because he does not understand soft power. His levers of foreign policy are tariffs and the US military.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Is anyone arguing for "give Eliezer and Scott full exclusive access to prompting the first ASI instead of Sam or Dario"?
Last time I was checking, they were mostly pushing for pausing the training of bigger models. Their take is not "we have solved alignment, here is the perfect list of preferences to give AI", but "alignment seems really hard, we should not build ASI until we have solved it".
Perhaps Eliezer believes in his heart of hearts that the best outcome is a society which uses the tools of totalitarianism to crack down on any AI development, but he is not in the position to do that and will never be.
If we manage to coordinate and build aligned ASI, then we will not simply put Eliezer's value system into it, because quite frankly Eliezer is not a critical stakeholder with whom one needs to coordinate. Likely the USG would get 30%, Anthropic and OpenAI would get 10% each, the Chinese would get another 30%, the rest of the world would get another 10% and LW would end up with less sway than the Catholic Church.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
That said, if I were to compile a list of people EY banned from LessWrong for being "moral mutants" that list would include David Friedman, Peter Thiel, Trae Stephens. JD Vance, Sam Hughes, Jared Issacman
I was curious about this, so I asked Claude. Sadly, it did not find any evidence of EY using the "moral mutant" framing and banning these people. I also asked it if there is any public recording of qntm having publicly complained about being banned, and it could not find that either.
But LW 1.0 is well archived, and thus it should not be difficult to back up your claims with evidence instead of just linking to the WP articles.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
some of their most prominent public opinions are "give in to base sexual urges"
Are you sure this is in the sequences? Planecrash is unlikely to be the first place someone starts reading on rationality. If Scott is regularly organizing CNC orgy meetups worldwide, I must have missed that.
You can of course argue that the sequences being silent on sex is itself a moral stance. It seems fair to say that Eliezer probably thought that politics is a larger impediment to his style of rationality than having sex out of wedlock, which is why we have no sequence sex is the mind-killer.
But a liberal stance on sexuality (roughly "what consenting adults do in their bedrooms is their business") is not unique to the ratsphere, it is a widely accepted norm encompassing both the blue and the majority of the red tribe.
I am not part of the inner circle of the Bay Area ratsphere, but would be somewhat surprised if the top 1000 rationalists all had had sex with each other (gender attraction permitting). Instead, I would assume that some of them are asexual, monogamous or even celibate.
are the Shakers and such irrational in adopting complete celibacy?
I think as an individual moral decision, it is fine.
Personally, when I wanted to lose weight, I did not try dieting, I simply started injecting Chinese GLP-1 agonists. If I wanted to embrace celibacy, I would probably reach for T blockers rather than trying to spend my limited willpower on resisting the urge to jerk off.
However, I also do not feel that my sexuality is what is holding me back from being a better rationalist. If I spend half an hour on average per day watching porn, that is not a cause area where I can reach huge gains by turning myself into a straw vulcan.
I mean, there is probably some former sex-crazed maniac out there for whom embracing celibacy was exactly the right decision, but it hardly seems like something which would generally improve humanity.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I think that the interaction between drug use (including alcohol) and sex is generally a moral minefield.
The corner cases are clear enough: if A puts a roofie into B's to have sex with them, that is rape with a side dish of poisoning. If B is passed out and has given no prior indication of consent, then any sexual action A initiates with B is likewise rape. If B is conscious but unable to verbally or motorically signal non-consent, that is pretty much the same. And if A and B regularly have sex, then it seems unlikely to assume that they are in fact raping each other when they have similar sexual relations while on drugs.
But for everything in between, consent is kind of a nightmare to sort out. Having sex with someone who had a glass of wine over dinner is generally fine, taking advantage of someone who is on the verge of passing out is rape, so at some point in between, there has to be a border between non-rape and rape territory. It probably depends on the degree of impairment, the activeness of the various participants and possibly what a neutral observer would assume that the supposed victim would consent to if sober. But the last point is already contentious: by my observation, men are much more open to having sex than women generally. So this would effectively mean that it would be hard for a woman to PIV-rape a man no matter how high he was.
Relevant question: Can two people mutually rape each other at the same time? Like neither of them would want to fuck the other if they were sober, but somehow they get drunk or high, and mutually initiate sex. Personally, I would consider convicting both of them silly. Instead, they simply made bad life choices while drunk, not all that different from other non-criminal bad life choices people make while drunk.
My impression is that non-app hookup culture often involves booze and partying. De facto, the women gets to decide after the fact if she was a-ok with what happened or not (which seems a bit unfair to the guys participating). Of course, once she decides that her consent was violated, she needs to decide if she is pushing charges, which are probably not all that likely to lead to a conviction, because proving what happened and if consent was given and what state of mind you were in is all hard (which seems unfair to women who were clearly raped).
The correct way to do this would be consent armbands (or a high-tech version, like a LLM agent on your mobile which you picked and told your preferences who gets to confirm your consent while you are high), but the downside of that would be that people would need to come clean about their sexual preferences, instead of hiding behind "I was drunk, so whatever sex acts I did do not really define me as a person".
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I don't understand the signed victim statement to the police. It seems to really undermine the case, assuming the prosecutor's statement accurately summarizes it. It was done voluntarily working with the campus police, then she was given a chance to review it and apply edits before signing under penalty of perjury.
This is a good point. So Jane Doe must have thought "that drug-fueled orgy last night was amazing, I better file a police report on how great it was". I can believe her attending a gangbang, but I do not think that a single person at Cornell has such a weird oversharing kink.
If she did not go to the cops, then who did involve them, and why did she give testimony instead of taking the fifth like a sane person?
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Of course none of that would ever happen after the civil rights era eliminated universities acting in loco parentis because that was impeding student freedoms to consume drugs, engage in fornication, attend leftist protests, etc.
Come on. It is college, not kindergarden. 90% of the undergrad students are 18+, i.e. the kind of people the right is willing to execute if they kill someone. To tell someone "you are responsible for your actions and will answer with your life, except that we still treat you like a child where drugs and sex are concerned" sounds extremely weird to my European ears.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
My understanding of Yudkowski's legacy to date is that he has inspired at least one no-shit murder cult, a number of normal cults with a serious record of abuse toward their participants, one of the largest financial frauds ever committed, and the initiation of the exact sort of AI race he set out to avoid, together with some fairly-good short-term misery amelioration of questionable sustainability and a lot of intelligent, sensitive humans driven mad by overwhelming concern over shrimp welfare.
This seems to be an extremely hostile summary of EY's impact.
First off, LW+offshoots is the most interesting collection of thinkers I have encountered on the internet. A lot of people thought likewise, which is why the ratsphere enjoys some popularity. It attracted a lot of weird smart people, and obviously some of them turned murderous or financially irresponsible later on. But if Eliezer wrote a sequence called be trans and murder people, I must have missed it, likewise with the one about Forget Kelly: always bet the future of mankind at even odds.
That his attempt to argue for the danger of AI x-risk was mostly successful at arguing that higher AI capabilities are possible is true enough. Still, I would not give him credit/blame for the LLMs too much, he might have pushed capabilities ahead a few months by trying to get Musk interested in the topic, but he hardly invented the transformer architecture single-handedly.
Blaming him for "humans driven mad by overwhelming concern over shrimp welfare" is even more indirect. AI x-risk aside, EY does not seem to be very involved in EA, though obviously there is some overlap between these wider movements. At this point, you are not even blaming Jesus for medieval witch burnings, but blaming Plato for them. Also, do you have a list of these people driven "mad"? Are we talking psychosis or bipolar or some other form of "madness"? Is there even the flimsiest psychiatric study supporting your claims?
Nor do I think that the lifestyle choices of the center of LW matter much. For the longest time, Scott Alexander was to me just an entity which generated text over at LW and SSC. My respect for him is entirely based on his writing. If I had learned (before he was outed) that actually, he was in a polycule, a trans-man, a devout Hindu, into fucking donkeys, an LLM, super into NASCAR, had spent a decade in juvenile for manslaughter, that would not have mattered to me. (By contrast, if I had learned he did not have a medicine degree or actually spent most of his surplus income on torturing small mammals, that would have been disappointing.)
The reason why a priest having a mistress is generally considered a scandal is because the priest spent a lot of time denouncing that lifestyle. By contrast, the grey tribe is generally liberal in their position on sex. Aella and the polycule culture seem like a minor side note to the ratsphere than the centerpiece.
I suppose that you strongly disapprove of grey tribe sexual norms, but from where I stand, they are not affecting the credibility of LW much. If every poster on LW was married with 2.5 kids and went to church on Sunday, this would not affect Trump's stance on AI alignment at all. The Christian right would still find plenty of other reasons to hate us, just as the woke left finds plenty of reasons despite agreeing with us on most matters of sex.
Now, if the ratsphere was pushing for poly relationships as a method of alignment, you would have some reason to be concerned regarding the culture war. In fact, they do no such thing. I see Eliezer mentioned more frequently in the mainstream press these days, but his sexuality is neither pushed in the foreground by himself nor by journalists.
Aella using her area of exertise to try to help on AI alignment is not more surprising than if Scott was offering free psychotherapy to important AI researchers. Neither seems especially newsworthy.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
MAGA's contentious relation with objective reality is a bit of a double-edged sword for them. On the one hand, it is pretty great -- it is much easier to find fodder with the right vibes when you don't have to actually filter for stuff which happens to be true. Trump entered politics by promoting the birther conspiracy, after all.
On the other hand, in some domains you will want to favor objective reality simply because convincing your base of your delusions is not enough. If something is perjury is in decided by the courts, so as long as you can not gaslight the courts, being overconfident in the Senate gets you nothing.
Lest I be accused of partisanship, I will concede that the woke crowd also has their persistent delusions. But unlike MAGA, I see their delusions more accurately modeled as ideological blind spots (i.e., anything related to gender and race), whereas for MAGA it seems to cover anything from the nationality of Obama at birth to AI x-risk, the whereabouts of some DA, the relative IQ of US presidents, the cost of living and most other things.
For this particular case, my reality model says that any democratic Senator asking questions in a committee in a similar setting would have competent PMC staffers which had made sure that she knew the factual answer to any question she was asking.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I don't think that many astute geopolitical commenters who weren't blinded by some form of domestic politics bias ever thought that Iran could defeat the US in a war.
"Defeat" can mean many different things. Sure, it can mean "conquer and annex". But that is not how it gets generally used. For example, I think it is absolutely fair to say that the US defeated the British in the US war of independence, even though they did not conquer London.
In slightly more asymmetrical conflicts, I would also say that the Taliban effectively defeated coalition forces.
Paradox games like EU4 actually model conflicts like this: the attacking party has a war goal, which is generally a change to the status quo. It could be the annexation of a province, or (in the real world) the legalization of opium in China, or Iran rejoining the non-proliferation treaty. Typically, the defending party wants to keep the status quo, but sometimes you can improve on that if you defeat your attacker.
The US/Israeli goals in attacking Iran were arguably
(1) Destroying the Iranian navy and missiles (which has largely been accomplished, but does not feel like a worthwhile war goal to me, personally)
(2) Preventing Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon
(3) Regime change (sure, it was never stated as a goal officially, but killing the Ayatollah served very little purpose other than that)
(4) Bonus goal: re-securing the freedom of navigation (which was respected by Iran before they were bombed)
The Iranian regime resisted regime change so far. They did lose their navy and some missiles, but that is not changing the strategic landscape. They learned that if they ever want to live in a world where Israel does not bomb them at will, they need some deterrence, whether nuclear or economic. They proved that they can make transit through the strait very costly.
Militarily speaking, the US is laughably more powerful than Iran. The limiting factor for the US is will, as it is often the case with the stronger party. If accepting US independence would have meant the death of every English aristocrat, Britain would probably have fought a lot longer and harder (and might actually have retained the American colonies, I am not a historian). If the world economy was tied to the state of women's right in Kabul, the West would probably occupy Kabul for the foreseeable future without too much trouble.
If every day the Iranian regime it stayed it power, it somehow executed a few thousand Americans on TV, then the US would have the political will to send troops and occupy Tehran. Failing that, the median voter does not care much either way, she is likely unwilling to take on any hardships either to improve the lives of Iranians or to bomb them.
Unlike Maduro et al, the leaders of the Iranian regime seem to be prepared to die for their cause, and they are certainly prepared to also subject their people to hardships. I do not think they will capitulate before Trump turns Iran into Gaza, and possibly not even then. Nor will the people rise up against them, experience shows that foreigners dropping bombs on you generally strengthens the regime.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I think as far as spending taxes on genocide-related topics to keep some some Jews happy, I think that Mamdani investing a few millions in holocaust museums is not even worth noticing compared to the tens of billions US Congress pays in military aid to Israel in either magnitude or impact.
And this gets to the heart of the problem of left-wing antisemitism, especially with notorious left-wing commentators like Hasan Piker. They always denounce antisemitism in their diatribe against Israel. When in fact the right-Wing antisemites are correct that this is not only a problem with Israel, it is actually a problem with the way Jews politically and culturally organize in the United States.
I think that this is kinda the gist of the disagreement, and I think the distinction is important. I have just browsed through Piker's WP page, and while I strongly disagree with his assertion that Hamas would be "a thousand times better than a fascist settler colonial apartheid state", I also do not consider this to be clear-cut antisemitism.
Generally, the left (for the most part) has nothing in particular against Jews. In fact, Ashkenazim are probably well over-represented among leftist thinkers (just as they are over-represented among thinkers more generally). I mean, there are likely points of contention, Judaism is a patriarchal religion, and circumcision for religious reasons is also unlikely to play well with the secular left. On the other hand, Jews are not proselytizing, and a tiny minority almost everywhere. Deep-held Christian beliefs like their stance on abortion play an important role in US politics, but there simply is no large Judaism voting block who could push for mandatory labeling of non-kosher food or whatever. (Importantly, I claim that Zionism is not a deep-held intrinsic part of Judaism.)
Zionism aside, I would expect that most ethnic and religious Jews would support multi-culturalism for the simple reason that they generally did not consistently fare very well in culturally homogeneous societies. I actually expect that quite a few liberal Jews actually voted for Mamdani.
Netanyahu et al like to call any criticism of Israel antisemitic. This serves two purposes: it discourages (and discredits) critics and it tells the Jews in the diaspora "the world really hates you, Israel is your only safe haven".
In this context, I think paying Mamdani paying a token amount for some Jewish culture center is politically savvy. It sends a clear message to the million (or so) Jews in NYC: "Our problem is with Israel, not Jews. You are still (somewhat) welcome in the woke coalition."
quiet_NaN
11d ago
needed to take time now to "farm Rep with their wife/employer;"
That feels a bit like an addict's behavior to me.
Not that I am judging or anything, I think that in the (school break) week I played KOTOR, I did very little else besides some eating and sleeping. But a nice thing about games like KOTOR or Baldur's Gate is that eventually they end, and typically the game is not so engaging that you will decide to start a new playthrough immediately. (I revisit games, but mostly after a few years.)
What seems to be looming now (per your description) is endless new content, produced faster than it can be consumed. Makes me really thankful that I am not into MMOs.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
As @Goodguy pointed out, terrorists is likely not the correct term. The RAF Fairford was directly used to attack Iran, so it is about as legitimate of a target as it can possibly be if the attack was ordered by Iran.
Granted, to use people out of uniform posing as civilians is perfidy or some such, but that does not make them terrorists, merely war criminals.
On priors, I do not think the UK would release anyone on bail who was just about to commit a mass homicide. If they had vans full of explosives, they would be in jail until their trial (unless they were US operatives doing a false flag).
But from the summary, we know that there were a couple of hooded and masked men who blocked some road. The fact that someone called the bomb squad does not mean that they found anything. Apparently some have been accused of violations of the Explosives Act, but state authorities are incentivized to over- rather than under-charge them. It seems easier to charge someone and later silently drop the charges than to tell the people you evacuated that the canisters were filled with diesel not nitroglycerin (or whatever may be the case).
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I think as a matter of international law, what the US and Israel did to Iran are indisputably acts of war. What PR terms they use makes little difference.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
This. Larry Ellison is not some genius stock trader who turned a hundred dollar inheritance to 200 billions. Instead, pretty much like Gates, he made his fortune by investing in and leading one software company over decades, and having luck (and competence, and ruthlessness) on his side.
Just because you are in the top percentile of "running a software company", that does not mean that you are some genius stock-picker. Additionally, if the feedback you get from the universe is "on average, your deals are going great, you are one of the richest people alive due to your business decisions", a common side effect of that is overconfidence. Besides, the stock market is probably the only place where Ellison can experience the thrill of gambling, it is not like he can go to Vegas and bet a billion on a single number.
In short, just because someone is very rich that does not mean they are a professional investor, just as someone being very tall does not mean that they are an NBA player.
My world model would be that the people who are actually good at investing are working for Goldman Sachs and the like. If it turned out that they were long on Theranos when it crashed (buying and selling it earlier is fine if you can get away with it, of course), that would be very surprising to me.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
He is charged with various delinquencies.
That makes it sound like he was not linked to the robbery at all, if they could make the robbery stick then "various delinquencies" would be a weird way to phrase it.
My take (which is not the position of US law, or German law) is the following: if they had found their robber, they should keep the evidence -- stopping people within a mile of a crime scene does not seem so disproportional that we want to squash the evidence to limit the invasion of privacy. If instead they had DNA tested everyone within the state, that would be different.
On the other hand, I do not want cops to go on a fishing trip any time some crime is committed somewhere. So if they got him for drug possession instead, I would be fine with suppressing the evidence. The justice system should not depend on police getting lucky and catching delinquents while having probable cause for some totally unrelated crime, it just gives cops bad incentives ("please keep your description of the suspect as vague as possible so we can stop and frisk the maximum amount of people").
My understanding is that the standard in the US is different than what I propose, either the cops had PC, in which case any evidence is admissible even if totally unrelated to the PC, or they had not, in which case the evidence is inadmissible even if it is just what they were searching for.
Is the USA shooting itself in the foot there? What will it lose if it changes its legal norms to lower the bar on probable cause and evidence suppression?
I think the strong evidence rules are a brilliant tool to align law enforcement to the law.
The natural incentives of cops is catching criminals. Nobody will celebrate a PD for not conducting illegal searches. Good luck trying to have a cop get punished through disciplinary or judicial measures for an illegal invasion like making you open the trunk of your car. Even getting fired would not be enough to deter cops from illegal behavior in sufficiently high profile cases, anyone who caught a serial killer through an illegal search and got fired for their trouble would be celebrated as a martyr and land a cushy private sector job. And securing any criminal conviction against cops typically involves them being filmed from multiple angles killing someone and subsequent race riots.
So instead, you hit them where it hurts, and let criminals go free if their procedural rights were violated. Suddenly the cop who cut procedural corners to catch a criminal is no longer the hero who worked creatively around a broken system, but the fuckwit whose inability to follow SOP ruined an investigation.
Sure, you lose a few criminal convictions, but if you want to maximize catching criminals, you do not want civil liberties in the first place.
Life is full of disappointments. Trump again did not win the Peace Nobel, and appears visibly upset:
I am a bit surprised that Trump was surprised. If you told me that he would win next year's Nobel prize, my best guess would be that he had occupied Oslo and forced them to give him a Nobel at gunpoint.
So far, there have been two Norwegian lawmakers who have nominated Trump over the years, out of a parliament of 169. The parliament determines the Nobel committee, generally in proportion to their party strengths. Three of the five members will be replaced at the end of the year. There is no way in hell that the current parliament will vote in people who are receptive of Trump getting the Nobel for bombing Iran, and they will dominate the committee for six years, so even if some MAGA fans won the next election in a landslide, it seems very unlikely that Trump would get a Nobel before he croaks.
Even less likely is that Trump will do an 180 which will convince people that he deserves the Nobel. In his first term, he was not especially belligerent, but this time, he has taken actions which bar the Nobel unless he give some very costly signals renouncing his previous behavior. Which he obviously won't.
All of this is common knowledge. So the surprising thing about Trump is that he is actually surprised, that he had a world model in which he was more likely to win the Nobel than win Miss China.
Last year, the Nobel committee at least took Trump's feelings into account by awarding the prize to Machado, a democracy activist in Venezuela who was allied with Trump in fighting the Maduro government (and subsequently gifted her medal to Trump). Per WP, she is currently denied entry into Venezuela, seems the Rodríguez government has no interests in letting her in and Trump does not care either way as long as the US gets the oil. I am Jack's total lack of surprise.
This year, the picked laureate is a bit less reconciliatory towards Trump. Pillay seems like the antithesis to Trump. Not only is she a black woman, but she has made a career in international law. She was part of the International Criminal Court, whose members are currently under sanction from the Trump administration for going after Israeli politicians accused of war crimes. Later, she was a UN high commissioner for human rights and a member of the International Court of Justice before finally heading the Commission of Inquiry on Occupied Palestinian Territory which determined that Israel had indeed committed genocide during the Gaza war.
It the committee had wanted to pick a candidate to signal "fuck Donald Trump in particular", they could hardly have done better short of awarding it to Harris or the Ayatollah.
In a better world, Pillay would not be considered worthy of the Nobel. "Yes, she is part of the justice system which deals with terrible atrocities which have been committed in Rwanda or Myanmar, but that system is already universally supported by the civilized world. We would prefer to make a statement a bit spicier than 'war crimes bad' with our prize."
Instead, we live in times where everything Pillay stands for is under attack, where the theory of international relations endorsed by the most powerful country on earth can be summarized as "the strong will do what they wilt, the weak will suffer what they must". In this world, it makes total sense for the Nobel committee to throw their support behind international law.
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