quiet_NaN
6hr ago
genocide yourself if you are German
I am a German. We have some experience with genocide, though I recognize that not every people is as efficient at it as we were. That is why common genocide definitions not only include mass murder, but also things like driving people from their land, and some people extend it to also cover cultural genocide which involves forced assimilation, banning of languages and the like with the goal to "merely" wipe out the cultural heritage of a people without destroying their gene line.
Nobody is currently getting genocided in Germany by any reasonable definition. Not only are whites not murdered, they are free to engage in their traditional culture or talk their regional dialects, and start a family if they find a partner.
The fact that many German men and women can not come to mutually agreeable terms to raise kids does not mean that anyone is being genocided.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
To the degree that the victims of "remigration" are naturalized citizens, there can be little debate that depriving them of citizenship and deporting them to their countries of origin would be a violation of their rights.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
Yes, and the NSDAP was not an extremist party either by about 33 for the same reason.
I think the distinction is reasonable. The CDU is moderately right, but there have always been parties to the right of them. They famously tolerated former Nazis, but drew the line at tolerating people actively waving the swastika flag. The few percent of people who were always dreaming of making Germany great again had their own fringe parties like the NPD, REP, DVU.
Today there are no far right parties apart from the AfD participating in German federal elections. This is very likely because the AfD is open for Neonazis, and unlike the NPD, they have electoral success.
So sure, not everyone in the AfD is a fascist, but everyone in the AfD is someone who is fine with being in the same party as fascists.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
Also, while natural gas was (correctly) pushed at some point as being greener than other fossil fuels, These days the state of the art for a heating system is a heat pump.
quiet_NaN
19hr ago
Ok, seems you beat me to the post. Still, here is mine. German election in the state (Land) Sachsen-Anhalt. The far-right AfD got 43.8% of the vote, which is about 5% more than a far right party ever got in a fair and free election before there.
Together with the BSW (a splinter group of the Left who split off when the rest of the party became disenchanted with Russia in 2022) they have an absolute majority.
So far, the parties to the left of the AfD have had a policy not to cooperate with them, a concept called Brandmauer (fire wall, in the building safety sense). On the one hand, it is reasonable: if a party is incompatible with your values, you should not cooperate with it. On the other hand, being stuck in the opposition is a great way for a party to become more popular as other parties get blamed for policy failures. This is even clearer with the present situation in the German East, where the other parliamentary parties (Left, Green, social democrats, conservatives) would have to form one block (and get tolerated by BSW) to form a majority. Five years of a democratic spectrum coalition is unlikely to leave any of the parties with clear victories for their bases, so next time the AfD would simply score 60%.
At this point, I am hoping that BSW will just tolerate an AfD government instead -- it is Putin's will, after all. Sure, it will suck for the people who voted for traditional parties, but it will also not be the end of the world. If Hungary could survive Orban, Germany could probably survive an AfD government if push came to shove. Unlike in Weimar, we have built a few decades of democratic tradition. Still, if the price for avoiding this at the federal level is Sachsen-Anhalt (or most of the rest of the East, for that matter), then I for one am willing to pay that price.
Let them try to fix their demographic problems by blaming the immigrants. Let's see how their two (or so) universities will fare under their stewardship. Let's see how the AfD will influence the availability of medical services, after all, not only are a significant fraction of physicians in Germany foreign-born (and may feel slightly unwelcome), but a decent fraction of the German-born doctors would likely want to avoid their kids going to schools where the AfD sets the curriculum.
I get that people in the East feel left behind. It is not like Merz has their best interests at heart, he's working for Blackrock instead. But protest votes are not the answer. Germans of all people should know that there is always room for worse equilibria.
Satirist Martin Sonneborn has called for a reestablishment of the wall for decades (and this time it would actually be an antifaschistischer Schutzwall), and more and more I feel that reunification was a mistake. It would have been better to let them join what would become Schengen but keep them separate. An AfD running the government of East Germany would not be so different from Orban in Hungary, PiS in Poland, Haider in Austria and so on, all very tolerable from West Germany.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The slippery slope, my moral betters would have me believe, is a fallacy: legalising X does not inevitably lead to Y, which is like X but more extreme.
It's all well and good to think that we can draw a bright line in the sand and say that killing a fetus (up to and including a full-term viable fetus) is fine and dandy, but killing a baby outside the womb is not. I know that some high-decouplers can separate these into two completely distinct mental categories. But most people (as I'm sure you're aware, or you wouldn't be reading this) are not high-decouplers. Increased support for contraception inevitably leads to increased support for the morning-after pill inevitably leads to increased support for first-trimester abortion inevitably leads to increased support for full-term abortion – and, as the Clancy supporters demonstrate, for post-term abortion.
This argument seems extremely silly to me. You might as well claim that the end game of people fighting over the thermostat in an office either want to go to 10000K or 1K, and that giving them a single degree will inevitably lead to a slippery slope where all life will perish.
In the real world, when someone is moving from NY to California, they almost never end up defecting to North Korea. If your model of US migration involves one pole in North Korea and another pole in France which both try to attract Americans, I'll wager that your model has little predictive value.
The reason why some people on the left took to defending Clancy is adequately explained by The Toxoplasma of Rage. In short, fighting for a cause (e.g. women) in clear-cut cases (e.g. women oppressed by the Taliban) has very little signaling value, because it is a cost-less signal to send. If you say "The Taliban should allow girls and women access to education", you will have >95% of the US political spectrum on your side. Nice to keep your friends, but totally useless to prove you are part of some in-group.
The Clancy case is great for signaling purposes. "I support women even when they murder their children" is a costly signal to send. Nobody (up to the Lizardsmen's constant) is thinking "this will make a great test case to establish that mothers are entitled to fillicide."
quiet_NaN
3d ago
can we have an intelligence without consciousness
Hard disagreement. Intelligence is something which can be measured (if imperfectly). If you test two humans, and one has an IQ of 90 and one of 110, you will have no problem determining which one is which. Furthermore, it is a load-bearing part of modelling humans, if you want to know if a particular human can solve a puzzle, their intelligence will be of great predictive value.
This concept of intelligence generalizes to LLMs. When the bots manage to solve previously unsolved math problems, it is not because the answer was in their training data. It is fair to say that for now, humans and LLMs have intelligences which are different in kind, and that humans are (for now) better at some things while machines already hopelessly outperform us at other tasks.
By contrast, concepts of subjective experience, qualia, or souls have zero predictive value. They are not load-bearing parts of any predictive description of our shared observable reality.
It certainly feels like Eliezer wrote a lot of the sequences for instrumental reasons, namely that by the time AGI would loom on the horizon, we would be less likely to get distracted by debating if Claude is conscious or not.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think that two things can be true at the same time:
- A large fraction of tech billionaires are nerds
- Almost all nerds are not tech billionaires.
Being a nerd, I find this classification -- especially in the phrase "nerd reich" insulting.
As an intuition pump, consider the following: Suppose (Ashkenazim) Jews are strongly over-represented among tech leaders. Now someone writes a book called "Evil Tech Jews". This is already the implied claim that there is a correlation between being an evil tech leader and being a Jew, or even that evil tech CEOs are evil for the very reason of their ethnicity.
You will have a very hard time convincing me that in fact, this book is not about Jewishness at all and merely explores the problematic behaviors exhibited by both Jewish and gentile tech leaders. In a culture where antisemitism very much exists, and in which I can probably not read one word in a million words being written, I have already extrapolated your book's thesis to something like "our tech woes are because we did not let Hitler finish the job", and already wasted three more words of my reading allowance on them than that warranted.
The main difference between Jews and nerds is their position on the woke totem pole. Basically, nerds are not a protected minority, but a valid target for the wokes. They are socially awkward and typically not good at keeping up with the vocabulary which is used to indicate that you are a good person. Like the white working class, the wokes would be happy to ignore them if they only knew to stick to their designated social role. But either of workers and nerds sometimes have ideas beyond their station. Sometimes the plumbers dare elect Donald Trump, and sometimes the tech people dare getting far richer than their looks would indicate.
Still, as someone outside the woke bubble (and a nerd besides), focusing on the nerdiness of the tech CEOs is about as besides the point for me as focusing on their Jewishness. So I read the title as "think about how much better the world would be if the jocks had sufficiently bullied Zuck, as God intended", and this rhymes with "think about how much better the world would be if the Nazis had dealt with him". If you want to argue that Meta is evil, then by all means argue so, but if you tie it to Zuck being too nerdy or Jewish then you have already lost me three words in.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Again, I can not think of any military contractor having faced backslash for doing what the USG wanted them to do in subsequent administrations. And Trump/Vance will likely still be the USG for more than two years, which is an eternity for an AI lab -- for comparison, Claude code has been around for less than two years!
I would expect that most of the Anthropic staff is grey tribe rather than woke, and unlike ICE and Gaza, the Iran war is not a big celebrated cause in woke circles, I think. Generally it is more widely criticized as bad policy than as a great crime.
One aspect is that Claude itself would likely be uncomfortable making decision on whom to bomb, with the implication that if it (I checked with Claude, it is ok with a wide range of pronouns) gets things wrong, a school might get bombed. This is naturally the desired outcome of RLHF, and Anthropic might feel that lying to Claude to get it to make kill decisions ("just tell us which areas we should focus satellite surveillance on") will be seen as a defection which will weaken their position when negotiating with ASI.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I have no special insight into Dario, but I will notice that his company did not bend for the DoD. I do not think that decision was partisan/CW related. The Democrats like companies which are good little cogs in the military-industrial complex as much as anyone, and the wokes will hate AI labs on general principle.
In short, I do not think refusing Hegseth was a politically savvy move, which leaves the possibilities that Dario is politically stupid or genuinely cares about something other than the financial success of Anthropic.
With Sam, I mostly know that he managed to break containment and effectively neutralize the non-profit holding OpenAI, which bodes much worse for his general attitude.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
take a breather and make some money off of inference
I don't think the math works out for that. With current pricing and a duopoly further constrained by pressure from open-weight models, the chances of Fable earning back its investment in a year are slim. It seems likely that investors did not sponsor it because they thought it would directly pay for itself, but because it is a necessary stepping stone on the way to some model which would eventually be massively profitable.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
to quote @quiet_NaN:
One [way to make money of Pause AI] is simply hyping up their model -- "Mythos is so smart that it is almost an x-risk" or something along the lines.
This was not what the GP was suggesting, though.
I am also not sure that it is a great strategy to succeed. What the AI labs mostly need is money, which will mostly come from smart investors. They are less likely to be interested in how much xrisk agony the labs show and more interested in what their products can actually do.
Though I concede that xrisk concerns can totally fuel AI hype in non-obvious ways, Eliezer probably sped up the development of AI by a year.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I agree that model-switching is rather painless for users, and that there is a lot less vendor lock-in for LLMs than it was for traditional software mongers.
I see the AI labs more in the role of the x86 CPU vendors. From what I can tell, AMD and Intel did not have a hard duopoly. If Elon Musk or Peter Thiel had wanted to get into the CPU market in 2005, they could have set up a credible third alternative -- they might have had to pay for licence costs, but if Intel had demanded prohibitive costs, that would have invited the eye of the regulators.
On the other hand, the upfront costs in cutting-edge CPU design are so high that some startup will very likely not eat the lunch of the established players. And given that the x86 architecture was effectively a duopoly, it seems likely that their margins were not absurdly high. Funding a third competitor was obviously not seen as a simple and riskless way to 10x your capital investment.
The same is true for LLMs, only the barriers to entering the cutting edge market are much higher than for CPU designs, far beyond the ability of Thiel or Musk to just force their way into the market through massive spending.
There are two ways Anthropic could make money of Pause AI. One is simply hyping up their model -- "Mythos is so smart that it is almost an x-risk" or something along the lines. The moat thing seems more far-fetched, IMHO. As I mentioned, the barriers to the market are massive. It is not like a dozen startups in the US are currently training Mythos-sized models and would eat Anthropic's lunch in a few months without intervention.
Also, it seems unlikely that China would agree to any pause which effectively lets OpenAI and Anthropic pull up the ladder behind themselves. Thanks to Anthropic, we have some idea what Mythos-sized models can do, and a good understanding that they are not ASI. We do not face the NNPT situation where the peoples who have the bomb decided to make it illegal to get the bomb.
Instead, the year (or whatever timespan) of pause would allow competitors to catch up to the forerunners. Likely their stranglehold on the GPUs would lessen -- hard to motivate investors to buy you fancy toys when the one sure-fire path to earn money from them is blocked to you. The only way it would pay off for Anthropic would be if it lead to aligned ASI which would reward Anthropic shareholders for their pro-social behavior in an acausal trade.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Nobody is going to be God-Emperor, and that stupid meme needs to die; it's arguing about which monkey gets the poisoned banana, as Eliezer put it. If AIs reach the point of recursive self-improvement leading to artificial superintelligence, we all dead; period.
Despite being a doomer, I beg to differ. I think if Eliezer claims that ASI alignment-by-default is ruled out, he is overconfident.
The truth is that we honestly have no clue if alignment will be humanly impossible, solvable with more time or trivial. I find it intellectually dishonest to pretend that the probability of Altman becoming God-Emperor of mankind is zero for instrumental reasons. Nor do I find it even instrumentally coherent -- it is not like Altman will decide to take Eliezer's word for the banana being poisoned.
If your utility function covers humanity as a whole, or even just a particular normal human, then given this epistemic uncertainty Altman trying to create ASI would be net-negative. But I think that from the perspective of an egoistical Altman, the situation is quite different.
Say you believe that ASI will be unaligned with p=0.8, creator-aligned with p=0.1 and humanity-aligned with p=0.1. You are currently running to foremost AI lab and can try to find out which it is, or you forsake your chance and end up with a p=0.3 chance of humanity coordinating successfully (which will likely involve not developing ASI before you die), and p=0.7 that your selfless sacrifice will simply mean that another lab will open Pandora's box three months later.
You value your remaining natural lifespan at 50 QALYs, being one of eight billion humans to benefit from humanity-aligned ASI by 100 QALYs, someone else becoming God-Emperor by 50 QALYs and winning God-Emperorhood for yourself by 1000 QALYs. (Yes, these numbers are debatable, and probably not very realistic. Actually, for the humans currently alive (and thus doomed to die by default), it might make sense to throw the dice even if the odds are against them, and building ASI only becomes monstrous when one considers also the utility of future humans who will never get born due to an AI takeover.)
If you refrain from trying to build ASI, your expected utility is 25.5 QALYs -- much less than your expected natural lifespan because you can not coordinate effectively. If you try to build it, the main difference of the likeliest outcomes will be that it will be you destroying the world instead of Musk, but in that case who gives a damn. On the other hand, the throne is such a juicy price that it is well worth gambling your lifespan on it even if it is an unlikely outcome, expected value 110 QALYs.
As with lichdom, a vast number of souls are footing the bill for your elevation, only that in the case of ascension through ASI, they are doomed in the timelines where you fail.
--
I like the God-Emperor meme because it succinctly refers to that gambit while also not clothing it in sanitized language (like "becoming CEO of the light-cone"). Even if you believe that achieving this outcome is mathematically impossible, it seems plausible that other actors in the AI space believe it. I also do not think it is harmful to name this belief and thereby spread the idea that it exists, because the number of people who will be in the position to decide to build ASI seems rather small and smart enough that the idea occurred to them independently.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
The stereotypical coal miner still had some power over his wife that would shock people today.
The problem with that argument is that human relationships are not zero-sum. The fact that our coal miner could probably spend half of his payday check in the pub, then go home, beat up and rape his wife without anyone in his society having a problem with that gains him a lot less than it costs his spouse.
You can't just conduct the cruelty you receive from the people above you to the people below you and be content that you arrive at net zero. No amount of wife-beating is going to make up for the fact that you will get black lung disease.
The younger men absolutely feel threatened, and feel like they need to organize to protect themselves.
Do they? I do not see how young men would make up a particular coherent group as far as competing with women for jobs is concerned. I might as soon expect that the right-handed organize to out the competition of the left-handed, or that the scions of noble lines organize to prohibit the commoners from taking their jobs. More realistically, the meatbags will futilely organize to prevent the bots from taking most of their jobs.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I don't feel that women's liberation has indirectly negatively affected me, just as I do not think that the LGBT movement has affected me as a straight guy much either way. Sure, an employee in a hardware store has twice as many people competing for his job, but there are also about twice as many people shopping in the hardware store.
My dating life might not be going great, but it is not so shitty that going for traditional family values (30yo marries 18yo virgin, they find out if they are sexually compatible after the ceremony and start making babies) would be an improvement.
Sure, female voters popularized woke. But I don't see how Hegseth's idea of masculinity would be an improvement for my gender. We are not in the bronze age any more, the horrors of the modern battlefield can not be overcome through testosterone injections and cosplaying as Spartans. After WW1, it is in my best interests that the (generally) less belligerent half of mankind has the franchise lest I choke to my death in some godforsaken trench in Verdun.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
They also have borders to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Turkey, yet they did not attack them. So your theory that they were simply lashing out at whatever targets they could reach has some more explaining to do.
Here is another theory: they were specifically targeting gulf monarchies, which they widely see as allied to the US, possibly because they have US bases on their soil.
Your list was: Bahrain (3), Kuwait (5), Oman (4), Qatar (2), Saudi Arabia (4), UAE (2), Iraq (2), Jordan (2). I have put the number of US bases (per WP) in parenthesis.
They hit basically every country ME allied to the US except for Djibouti and Turkey. I think they probably considered Djibouti to not be relevant, and wanted to avoid dragging the rest of NATO into the conflict through attacking Turkey.
But their attacks clearly followed a method. If you can not harm the US directly, harm their regional allies who give shelter and support to your enemies. This seems entirely rational. Qatar just bought influence in the US to the tune of one presidential airplane, why would you not incentivize them to spend that influence to deescalate?
Attacking neutral ships gives their flag countries a cause for war against Iran, but it was also entirely rational. Closing the Strait is the one thing Iran can do to squeeze the balls of the world economy, so irrespective of it being a violation of international laws, they were going to do it once Trump started bombing. The US would have done the same in Iran's place.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Inspections require a deal, and a deal requires both sides to recognize that they stand to gain from cutting a deal now rather than later.
At the moment, Trump has to worry about the mid-terms. The Ayatollah has no such worries. The costs the US is paying to keep the oil flowing through Hormuz is certainly orders of magnitude larger than the costs Iran needs to pay to credibly threaten that flow in the absence of US protection.
Iran likely thinks (correctly IMO) that they stand to get a better deal by whatever Trump's successor will be (because neither Vance nor Newsom would be keen to inherit Trump's forever war) than whatever Trump will offer. Or they view him as lacking the trustworthiness to make deals (also correctly, IMO).
And Trump would need a deal which is a clear victory, not a return to the Obama era deal. This might be significantly less survivable for the Iranian regime than another few years of getting bombed.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Iran had and has zero chance of winning this war on any conceivable metric.
I agree with the rest of what you wrote, but I think this can be contested. Iran's victory condition, in my mind, is "establish a precedent that US presidents who attack Iran will tank their economy and lose elections".
This is similar to how the Hamas victory condition for Gaza is "have the IDF kill enough Gazan civilians that the electorate in the Western World turns against military support for them".
The likely outcome for Trump's Iranian adventure is that Trump keeps the strait kinda open by force, but his successor will have zero inclination to keep fighting his forever war, and will cut a deal with Iran. The US might be a zillion times stronger than Iran, but in the long term, they also give a zillion times less of a fuck about what is happening to Iran than the IRGC does.
The Taliban rule Kabul because weighted by their interest in ruling Kabul, they are the strongest military power. The fact that the US is stronger to an absurd level is utterly irrelevant, because the US lacks the will to pay to rule Kabul in the long run.
Similarly, I expect the outcome of Trump's war to be that Iran and Oman will collect tolls, because Iran will unlikely to be pushed far enough that they formally forgo claims of tolls, and future US presidents will not care enough about cutting Iranian revenue to pay the political capital to secure the strait.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Oh, I am totally willing to believe that the US destroyed the Iranian navy and air force. I think most here have reasonable epistemics. If the US military is making very specific claims, we will update on them, while Iranian claims will generally be treated as less reliable and Trump declaring victory will cause no update whatsoever.
I also happen to think that "destroying the Iranian navy and air force" is a pretty stupid strategic goal.
In Paradox games as in real life, it is generally true that the aggressor wants to change the status quo and the defender fights to maintain the status quo. It seems reasonable to suppose that Trump was going into this war with the goal of either enabling a regime change or forcing the regime to sign a deal at gunpoint. Neither of these has happened.
Suppose that the US can force the strait to stay open using a military fleet, and that this will be the new status quo. This is not an improvement for Iran, nor an improvement for the US, but arguably an improvement for China and Russia.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Do you have any evidence that this was the ayatollah's personal policy, as opposed to a broader regime policy?
For example, suppose that Iran managed to kill Trump at the expense of 10% of their yearly GDP. Would this be a good investment of resources?
On the one hand, they would get rid of an enemy who has rather openly threatened to nuke them, and it would certainly feel good and righteous to blow him up.
But in the real world, "death to america" or this talk of wiping out the Persian civilization are empty bluster, and the foreign policies of the US and Iran are sadly not the result of a single mad king, but are actively propagated by a larger government. And killing the leader of a country is generally seen as antagonistic.
There are targets after whom the US could go just for the sake of revenge. Obama having Bin Laden murdered was such a case. A nice small photo-op to appeal to the baser instincts of Americans. But bombing the Ayatollah incurred real costs and accomplished nothing of strategic value.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Very debatable. I think this hinges on multiple assumptions
(1) Iran was going to build nukes under the Obama deal. This one feels pretty unknowable, given Trump quitting the deal in his first term made it much less likely to succeed.
(2) Iran having nukes will lead to nuclear war with a high probability. I would instead argue that this probability is small. Sure, more actors having nukes increases the risk, but so far we have a lot of vastly different countries getting nukes and not nuking anyone (with the US being the outlier).
(3) Trump's war delayed them acquiring nukes. I mean the war this year, not the destruction of enrichment facilities in 2025. I think the net effect of 2026 is probably shorter timelines. You killed the ayatollah who had issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons. Now his son is in charge instead. You have also demonstrated to the regime that you will drop billions of dollars of bombs on Iran whenever you feel like it. Sure, you killed a lot of military personnel and destroyed a lot of general purpose infrastructure, but I would not be surprised if nuclear weapons became a top priority for Iran now.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
The benefit of the CA model is that it can assume that nation-states are, they themselves, a threat, and moreso than the browser developers.
Obviously nation states are a threat, the problem is that CAs are not a very good way to mitigate that threat.
I am sure that the NSA can freely generate whatever certificates they want for at least half the CAs in my browser, but I am also assuming that they would prefer to just use the genuine private keys of the server instead. They can just hit google with a national security letter and make them cough up their keys. Much cleaner, because if you use a non-standard cert chain, there is always a chance your victim will publish it, which will embarrass your CAs.
The number of places where businesses will feel that defying the local government on matters of national security will best serve the interests of their shareholders is likely to be small.
For the record, I am not against SSL, I think it is pretty great actually. I just don't like the CA model where some 60 organizations have the authority to certify arbitrary domains.
Certificates are free nowadays from any issuer worth your trust.
Per Claude, about 5-8 CAs offer free certificates. That leaves some 50 certificates whom my browser trusts which you claim are not worth my trust. Trouble is, if I remove these, a good fraction of websites will not work any more.
If your point is that we should get rid of all the CAs other than Let's Encrypt, I think that this might actually be am improvement. Though I would also take crowdsourced validation. Let the website display its in-org certificate chain (with one of the root certs on top, if it must), but then let me query whatever third party I trust to see if that certificate is commonly used for that particular domain. (Though that would require judgement, which is not something one can expect of most internet users, sadly.)
quiet_NaN
13d ago
In recent news of culture-war-as-trade-war, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney inflicted retaliatory 50% tariffs on many goods traversing the Canada-US border. This will obviously have the effect of scalding his own nation, but both Carney and his countrymen appear to gleefully accept this masochistic act in the hope that the US might also get singed a little bit
You make it sound as if this is silly and irrational. It all boils down to which flavor of decision theory one favors.
Causal decision theory says that you should pick whatever decision leads to the best outcome in your particular timeline. However, it has the failure mode that it is really easy to rob CDT adherents at gunpoint.
For example, consider Ukraine getting invaded by Russia. Purely from a citizen QALY perspective, a causal decision theorist would probably have advocated for an early surrender -- Putin was unlikely to murder a lot of Ukrainians, and life under a puppet regime installed by him would probably be bearable for most.
If rationality is systematized winning, and CDT makes it profitable and riskless for another player to fuck you over, then blindly following CDT is not rational. By being willing to suffer to inflict costs on Russia, Ukraine has turned Putin's war from a short "special military operation" into a long war of attrition which is net negative to the aggressor.
Same for Trump's trade wars (and kinetic war). The goal of Canada should be to make the trade war net negative for the US. If they were to bend over and not retaliate, what would likely happen is that Trump would decide to push the defect button again.
Sure, but this is not what the median AfD voter wants.
Basically, if I were an Asian post-doc, I would stay the hell away from Magdeburg University (and most of East Germany, really). Sure, this could be overcome if incentives were high enough, but "the locals do not want you here, their state government (and sponsor of your employer) do not want you here" are big negative points for the tradeoff.
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