sulla
12d ago
Is it really brain dead though? Zelenskyy is to all apperances correct that Putin's position in 2024 is analogous to Hitler's in 1938, complete with appeals to anschlaus and rightful dominion over all German Russian Speaking peoples.
I think it is a completely unreasonable position to say that if there is a border war between a larger state and smaller state, and the area under question contains people who have historical connections to the larger state, then the leader of the larger state = Hitler. This must have happened a million times across history, and almost every time the leader was somebody other than Hitler.
sulla
12d ago
There is already a thread on this, but I wanted to continue the discussion regarding the Lex/Zelenskyy interview. The other thread is mainly focused on Lex's language choice, and Lex's skills as an interviewer. I'm not very interested in this whole debate - it is pointless internet drama, and a modern form of celebrity worship. It's very disappointing that most people's takeaway "yay Lex" or "boo Lex" and not anything even slightly relevant to the actual war that is taking place.
My takeaway from the interview was that I think much less of Zelenskyy. This was his chance to explain the war from Ukraine's perspective, and the best he could come up with was a braindead "Putin = Hitler" take. People who rely on the "X = Hitler" argument are currently on a losing streak, and I am now more convinced than ever that Zelenskyy will continue that losing streak. I completely agree with Lex that if Zelenskyy believes that Putin is some mutant combination of Hitler and Stalin, yet somehow worse than both, compromise is not on the table. Zelenskyy dies or is forced into exile, or Putin dies or is forced into exile. In spite of biased media coverage in the West that only highlights Ukraine's successes and Russian setbacks, it's pretty clear at this point that if the status quo continues, Ukraine will lose a war of attrition first.
Zelenskyy could have tried to explain why Putin's narrative on the 2014 coup, or the ensuing War in Donbas, is incorrect. Instead, in 3 hours I don't remember him discussing Donbas even once. Maybe this is partially on Lex for not driving home the specifics. While Zelenskyy did not have time to address the core premise of the entire war, he did have time to engage in some psychotic rambling about how Putin would conquer all of Europe.
Maybe Zelenskyy is actually more reasonable in his private views, and he is simply running an outdated propaganda playbook that would have worked in the 1940's, or even the 2000's. But in today's age of high information availability, more subtlety is required. Even if you can convince the average person with a braindead argument like "Putin = Hitler", there will always be a subset of more intelligent people who demand a real argument. Since the more intelligent people tend to have out-sized influence, if you fail to offer them anything, they will not truly support you, or may even undermine you. If you are an intelligent person who doesn't really know much about the war, Zelenskyy offered nothing of substance. "Putin = Hitler" is not substance.
Maybe one possibility is that the two sides of the war are actually:
- The war is about the 2014 coup and the ensuing War in Donbas.
- The war is about Putin = Hitler.
If these are the options, I'm afraid I have no choice but to take Russia's side. The coup and the War in Donbas, at minimum, happened and were upsetting to Russia, and it is not even remotely outside of the historical norm for such situations to eventually escalate into a full-blown war. On the other hand, 2 is a merely deflection of 1 - not a real argument, just a poor attempt at psychologizing why Putin's motivations aren't his stated motivations, which at least described by Putin are quite logical, but actually just that he is secretly Hitler for some reason. If there is an alternative version of 2, that actually addresses 1, I am certainly open to it.
which at least described by Putin are quite logical
hahahahahahahah
This has been my experience with trying to talk to Ukraine supporters so far. It's basically how Zelenskyy talked to Lex as well. They do not seem to be able to form a coherent argument; instead they simply attempt to mock anybody who wants to hear someone address Russia's arguments directly from a pro-Ukraine perspective. Trying to shame people into supporting Ukraine, without actually addressing Russia's rationale for invading, is not going to work.
I believe that the reason Ukraine supporters refuse to address the history of the war is that the entire situation becomes more complex in a way that is unhelpful to their cause. Under certain ethical frames, even under Putin's assertions, Russia's invasion of Ukraine is still unquestionably wrong. However, to even make this observation, you admit that there is a question of ethical frame and values. Under some frames, Putin has some reasonable argument, assuming the facts are true. Some commentary has compared him to a "20th century statesman" in how he thinks about things. However, then you have a more difficult task of either refuting the facts or challenging the moral frame. Better then, to simply say "Putin = Hitler, anyone who doesn't agree with my ethical frame is a pyscho maniac murder," and avoid the conversation altogether. I understand this rationale, but I think it is the wrong approach for 2025, and it is certainly not any basis for negotiating an end to the war.
Trump wants to make peace, but it certainly appears that Zelenskyy is not open to it. He did talk about security guarantees - I think this is reasonable, depending on the specifics of the guarantees. Maybe even NATO membership. But he has to let go of the idea that he will get all of the land back. There is no universe in which the Putin regime stays and power and this happens, unless Ukraine achieves some military miracle. At an absolute minimum, the eastern Donbas is gone.
Where does this leave Trump? Obviously he is going to threaten Zelenskyy in various ways, such as threatening to completely ban the export of weapons to Ukraine, sanctions on Ukraine, sanctions on anyone who continues to support Ukraine until Zelenskyy is willing to come to the negotiating table, etc.. This is my prediction for how the war ends: Trump threatens Zelenskyy, Zelenskyy eventually gives in and negotiates, Russia gets some of the land, and Ukraine gets security guarantees backed by the US. The devil will be in the details, of course.
If you're such an expert on Russia, why don't you address XYZ...
I am not, I am merely a casually observer who spends too much time online, and I am happy to hear your takes on XYZ. I'm not pro-Russia, I am just anti-terrible discourse, and the pro-Ukrainian discourse that I have observed has been horrendously poor. Disappointingly, Zelenskyy continued this. On the other hand, Putin's speeches were highly intellectual and several levels above any speech I have ever heard a Western leader give in terms of sophistication. I am also secure enough in myself that "well if you think that, it proves you're retarded" will not change my view. In the modern information environment, this argument is in fact less effective than ever.
sulla
20d ago
It almost makes you wonder if the genie stories were political commentary to begin with.
sulla
23d ago
I suppose trading human utils for dog utils is “anti-human” in some literal sense because dogs are not humans. This does not make it unnatural or wrong, however.
This idea that “1 util of annoyance for me is worth more than 1,000,000 utils of your dog’s happiness” is actually kind of what I find off-putting about dog haters. Not only I disagree on an object level, but it tends to reflect their general mindset towards life. If they can’t even put up with being greeted by a friendly dog, they are likely not going to be an easy person to be around.
Even being the type of person who is willing to claim with full confidence that a dog has zero intrinsic worth compared to himself, and is then willing to act on this belief, to me shows a very concerning arrogance and lack of empathy. I just don’t want people like that around me.
sulla
23d ago
Yes, and probably at a higher exchange rate than most. But more importantly, I value my dog’s utils highly, and many other people feel the same.
sulla
23d ago
Are dog people convinced that all humans love dogs (except for evil humans) and therefore there ought not be a problem?
I think people who don’t like dogs are neurotic and/or weird, and they tend to have personality traits that I find off-putting.
My question is why.
In general, it comes from a desire to give their dogs better lives. Going to the grocery store is more fun and fulfilling for a dog than being locked in crate.
I don’t support dogs in grocery stores in general, but only because most owners lack skill and judgment, not because of a categorical objection.
sulla
1mo ago
Even if the poor sap is okay with it, many men are quite dissatisfied with taking a high bc woman as a wife. They may do it anyway because they want a wife badly enough. Therefore, these men would benefit from a high bc being disincentivized.
No citation needed. Sleeping with 100 people in a year is a strict superset of sleeping with 100 people in a day. Also… common sense.
sulla
2mo ago
it has failed to live up the hype otherwise, like life extension, replacing workers, or treating disease, imho.
Tesla is all-in on reinforcement learning for their next generation of Optimus robots, but they only spun that team up this summer. When I heard this news the stock price was at like 180 and I bought some calls for 230/250/270 for next June. After some movement I pushed these up to 300. Yet this still looks way too pessimistic. I think some exposure to $500c by the end of next year might be warranted.
sulla
2mo ago
How do I know? I know because I know that my reasoning was solid and strongly supported by the available data.
How do you know that I know? You don’t. But I’m not really here to convince you. I’m here to make fun of Nate Silver for predicting nothing yet declaring victory.
sulla
2mo ago
They try but fundamentally, IMO, it’s a good idea to separate data collection and model building.
sulla
2mo ago
So Nate Silver's problem is that his method is junk. He takes some averages and models them out. The problem is that a lot of the data he relies on is bad.
I’m more sympathetic to the pollsters than I am to Nate. The pollster’s job is to poll people using a reasonable methodology and report the data, not to make predictions. They can’t just arbitrarily add Trump +3 to their sample because they think they didn’t capture enough Trump voters in their samples.
Nate’s job is explicitly to build a model that predicts things. He can legitimately adjust for things like industry polling bias. He doesn’t because he’s bad at his job.
sulla
2mo ago
I get so triggered by this logic because it’s so wrong. Elections are not a football game. They are not actually a random variable. On November 4th the result was already set in stone, unless one of the candidates died or something. You could replay November 5th 1000 times and Trump would win 1000 times. It wasn’t 50/50. It can never be 50/50. It is always 100/0.
Epistemic uncertain is a feature of the model and its inputs, not some inherent feature of the real world. There was enough data to conclude with relatively high certainty that Trump was on pace to win. Nate’s model didn’t pick up on this because it sucks. It has high epidemic uncertainty because it’s a bad model with bad inputs.
sulla
2mo ago
I just see it as a mockery/taunt. Obviously Democrats chose to make this election about abortion, under the slogan “my body, my choice.” It stands to reason that if Kamala lost, it must be “your body, my choice” (for some value of “my”). Sorry ladies, Democracy has spoken.
sulla
2mo ago
The reason he treats it as an error rather than a predictable bias is because he doesn't think it's predictable.
And this is why he is an idiot. The pollsters all understand at this point that it is inherently due to a predictable non-response bias. As a fall back, many used the recalled vote to reweight the sample. But given the unusually high turnout for Dems in 2020, the recalled vote begs the question and was a sandbag for Trump.
Understanding this, unlike professional idiot Nate Silver, I made some heavy bets for Trump and won a good chunk of change.
sulla
2mo ago
Everyone on the right called it with high confidence this time, unlike 2016 and 2020. Everyone on the left seems to call it for their guy with high confidence every election, so Dem/left predictions carry no weight. Nate will maintain his (undeserved) credibility by still being more accurate than most on the left.
The sad thing is that the “correlated errors” aren’t based on polling data or past results, they are just an arbitrary adjustment he adds to the model based on feels. Like he literally codes in “the sun belt states are likely to be correlated” etc.
After this election I am totally convinced Silver a fraud. He simply can’t admit that there is a polling industry bias. His techniques make it impossible to account for this accurately because they are based on weighted polling averages, where really he needs to add a bias term, which he refuses to do.
To elaborate on that, if literally all the polls miss left, you can’t fix that with weighting. In reality, he would have needed to put all of the weight on AtlasIntel and Rasmussen and close to 0 on everything else. This shows that weighting is the wrong approach.
Edit: He does have “house effects” but this adjust polls towards the weighted average, not towards historical results. So it doesn’t help.
sulla
2mo ago
You are clearly here looking for a fight, not light. The left just got epistemically pantsed yet you are sitting here throwing stones, demanding that I be “ridiculed” due to your thoroughly uncharitable interpretation of my statements.
All I can say is good luck with that.
sulla
2mo ago
They have not lost it. But they did spend a ton of social capital on the failed cause of stopping orange man, which I think was a foolish move.
sulla
2mo ago
I looked at many different types of evidences, combined them when my priors, and drew the correct conclusion. That is the not the same as “I blinded trusted the one expert who told me what I wanted to hear.”
The Selzer poll did bother me initially. But after looking at all of the available evidence, it clearly was such an extreme outlier that fraud or incompetence was a more likely explanation than that it was carrying any information. I was so convinced by my deep dive that I made some heavy Trump bets on Monday/Tuesday and walked away with tens of thousands of dollars.
I was right. I probably wouldn’t have made those bets if it weren’t for the Selzer poll, because I hadn’t looked at all of the evidence.
I don’t owe you a detailed writeup of every piece of evidence I considered. However, I do think anyone who seriously believed the Selzer poll was a fool who did not seriously think through the result, or was bad at thinking it through. But again, I don’t owe you an explanation.
sulla
2mo ago
You’re not trying to convince me, and you’re not trying to convince the non-existent readers of this thread, so the sad conclusion is that you are only trying to convince yourself that you weren’t made to look like a fool by some old lady in Iowa who Nate Bronze said was “the gold standard” because she predicted Obama 100 years ago.
sulla
2mo ago
Other polls, early voting number, the cross tabs on other polls suggesting Kamala was in trouble with black and Latino men. Past polling missed suggested the aggregate underestimated Trump. Statements by polling experts like Nate Cohn who said that nothing changed in the methodology.
And then of course, vibes. Talk to a lot of Trump-curious individuals.
sulla
2mo ago
This is the exact misunderstanding of statistics that kills Silver, is confusing aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty.
Aleatoric uncertainty comes from the irreducible randomness of a process. Epistemic uncertainty comes from a lack of knowledge.
The election was not 50/50 going into Tuesday. In terms of aleatoric uncertainty it was nearly 100/0. People’s votes were essentially predetermined at that point. If you reset the timeline to Tuesday morning, you would get the same result every time.
Silver’s epidemic uncertainty was high. That’s not because the election was impossible to predict (I made a lot of money off of it), it’s because he’s an idiot and refuses to update based on past results.
In my region, every Starbucks I went to was not filled with homeless people, and was still a reasonable but overpriced place to hang out. I’m guessing this was more a problem in cities. My prediction is that they will recover, although at this point they are far too big and old of a chain to ever be “cool” again.
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