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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Listened to about half of it and it just annoyed me. It's a classic Gish gallop, jumping from topic to topic with no time to actually consider each one. Some of them are well known- like, I remember reading about the shady hijinks of United Fruit Co in my highschool history textbook. It's not exactly shocking underground stuff. But then jumps from that to "so of course Ukraine was a coup by the deep state link to mob and shady corporations" or something like that and it's just infuraitingly specious reasoning.

Ian Carroll is controlled oppo, he's def some kind of glowie, he was being pushed on me on youtube/facebook and even 4chan. In exactly the ways other people get shadow banned for even smirking about cookie baking math, this guy was being pushed by the algo. Just looking at his mug makes me close the tab.

Is this the turning point for WW2 revisionism entering the mainstream?

The mainstream view of WW2 remains a narrative, not a historical model with subsequent moral judgement. And the narrative is very simple:

  1. Nazis bad.
  2. Good guys win.
  3. Lesson learned: Don't be a nazi.

Is this the turning point for WW2 revisionism entering the mainstream?

Maybe? I could absolutely see this joining the stolen 2020 election, measles parties, and pedo rings as an accepted part of the conspiracist worldview. And maybe you can even get a few silicon valley billionaires doing the "just asking questions" routine. And ... what then? That coalition is, on average, poorer, less educated, and less skilled at exercising power, and plus they can be really annoying, IMO. Many of the original far-right leaders have become disenchanted at all the low-quality people populism attracts, just look what Jason Kessler (who organized the Charlottesville goon march) said today:

https://x.com/TheMadDimension/status/1898878914199441800

Holocaust revisionism is unlikely to go mainstream among intellectually serious people until "revisionists" can answer some very basic questions like where did all these trainloads of Jews go? Why did 100,000 Dutch Jews seemingly vanish off the face of the Earth? Etc.

And ... what then?

The what then, as I have been shouting in vain for the past few months, is that you have to actually deal with them. You can't just smugly dismiss them and point at your experts, that's how Harris lost the election - they have too much power and don't trust your experts. You could smuckle to yourself about how dumb they are and then go about your day all you liked in the past, but now the dreaded 'conspiracists' (which as far as I can tell is anyone who doesn't fall in immediate lockstep behind any authority figure) run the world's biggest economy and make policy decisions that affect the whole planet, not just trailer parks and tenements. Now you have two choices - work with them to explain your arguments and defeat theirs, or sulk quietly to yourself and then passive aggressively side talk about all these low quality populists.

How do you think people could actually deal with them practically though? Most of the time these people are invited to podcasts by hosts who are completely out of their depth, either being actually ignorant or pretending to be ignorant. God forbid, I am not in favor of deplatforming someone, but I find it otherwise rather frustrating that most of the discourse co-opted largely by people on the right tend to just devolve into circle jerking each other off or some dumb podcast host going "huh? why don't they talk about this more?" to every inanity that is spewed.

Now you have two choices - work with them to explain your arguments and defeat theirs

What do you think I'm doing here? I'm trying to influence the DOGE guys who I suspect are here (or are on ACX or DSL) and the guys who might wind up as GOP state legislators in fifteen years time.

I fucking hate that this is how Darryl Cooper is becoming known to a broader audience. His Jim Jones and Israel-Palestine podcast series are careful, empathic, and passionate. I'm not enough of a history buff to know how accurate they are, but they certainly aren't shows that I would associate with someone that is a flamethrower. I know he's always been a pretty far-right guy, but I do have to wonder if the attention has gotten him to a spot where he's more intentionally inflammatory.

He’s always been a bit of a heel on Twitter.

As far as I can see, everyone is a bit of a heel on Twitter except for a small number of people who I know personally, and whose tweets are so suppressed that I can't even rely on finding them in the "Followers" view. The algorithm wants to show you some combination of professional controversialists and people who pump out lowest-common-denominator slop for their preferred tribe of morons.

Is this the turning point for WW2 revisionism entering the mainstream?

Wait, is it you again? This is getting like that bit in Look Who's Back where he can't kill reanimated Hitler.

Is this the turning point for WW2 revisionism entering the mainstream?

If 'WWII revisionism' means the idea that the Nazis weren't all that bad, or even Holocaust denial, then no. No, it is not.

I think it would help to avoid woolly euphemisms like 'WWII revisionism' and clearly state the thesis that is being considered. I do not think the public consensus that Nazi Germany was bad, that it committed hideous atrocities, and that it was right to destroy it is likely to change.

No one even slightly mainstream questions that America in WW2 was good guy.

If "WW2 revisionism" means the idea that the major combatants, Nazis and Soviet, were just about equally bad (Nazis 100% and Soviets 99,9% evil), it is not universal point of view, but, by now, common one that can be published in mainstream academic press.

The implications are now just starting to percolate into mainstream debate, and the question "Was it right choice for High Elves to join fight between Orcs and Ogres, and if so, on whose side? is now open.

"Nazis and Soviets are roughly equally bad, and the only reason why we were allied with the Soviets is that Hitler was stupid enough to declare war on both of us at the same time" isn't a particularly revisionist take - it was what Churchill thought at the time. "And if Hitler had invaded Hell, I would have made similarly favourable remarks in the House about the Devil."

"Was it right choice for High Elves to join fight between Orcs and Ogres, and if so, on whose side?

The Americans didn't get a choice - Germany was already at war with the USSR when their ally attacked Pearl Harbour and they declared war on the US. The British were fully prepared to oppose both (the USSR and Nazi Germany were allies under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact at the time we declared war) but lacked the resources to do so after our French ally collapsed.

While I would agree that the Soviets, Nazi Germany, even Imperial Japan, were bad guys, I question the goodness of the USA.

The USA was an enabler of the USSR that literally helped build it up under FDR. And an ally. How can the USA be the good guys if the Soviets are bad guys? Surely, if the Soviets are bad, then USA which has been an enablers and under FDR goverment very infested with communists had a genuine agenda of twin world hegemony for USA and USSR, certainly affects their pure good guy credentials. A good book that goes in much better detail with the receipt on these issues that I would never be able to summarize all outrageous things about how pro soviet the USA was, is going to be Stalin's war.

Not to mention, American own warcrimes which weren't negligible and even if one could argue comparatively less, that still stain the good guy picture. But some of them relate to being too complicit and supportive of Soviet ones, like returning a huge amount of people who left USSR during the war back to the USSR to be murdered.

Importantly, before ww2, the Soviet Union was much more mass murderous including towards ethnic groups than the nazis (and while the Nazis were definitely bad guys quite willing to be brutal conquerors, the fog of war propaganda still remains controversial today). In other episodes like the Spanish civil war, you had nazi germany in the side of Franco and USA sympathetic with the communist side to an extend but not intervening directly.

Doubly importantly, the idea that USA are the good guys because of WW2 has been used to justify a lot of immoral and destructive regime change and warmongering. The latest relevance is the fall of Assad regime and now the replacement of Jihadists who have started massacring minorities. While I do think things are more gray, and many millions have died in the supposed good war, where the priority of the USA was definetly not how to avoid the blodoshed (nor does it make sense to pin it mostly on the USA of course, and in fact I consider in Europe Nazi Germany and USSR to be much more blameworthy for death of millions), it is still the case that America comes off better in WW2 than Japan, Nazis, or Soviets.

But you can't forget how WW2 is milked to justify behavior where USA comes off worse and ends up leaving things worse than they started. Like in Syria. Does this affect USA's supposed good guy behavior in WW2? It should affect at least how one sees the narrative of ww2 and to justify bringing up how it has been used in this manner. Although even regarding WW2, very simplistic moral narratives don't understand how American foreign policy is made which is made by more ruthless people and of a more ruthless amoral nature and ends.

Even if one accepts possible scenarios where USA oppose regimes even more ruthless than it, that is just historical happenstance and one should not expect USA to behave as good guys in any given conflict.

Examining American foreign policy on ww2 in defiance of hagiography myths that make USA to be like a good guy in a simplistic fairy tale is a good thing, but I would object in those trying to create opposite hagiographies of say the Nazi regime. Revising the simplistic fanatical propaganda is good, but shouldn't fall to the opposite type of simplistic propaganda. This isn't to say that there isn't an issue that allows for examination to what extend aspects of Nazi Germany's behavior have been war propaganda since war propaganda is a fact of history and this war propaganda is continually promoted, but again, I think we should strive to be accurate and despite the fog of war there is still enough evidence to point Nazi Germany as nasty conquerors.

Obviously reducing the hysteria towards people who dissent from simplistic narratives, especially by people who indulge themselves in propaganda, is necessary to end up with better understanding of historical events. Which people oppose because they want to use simple narratives of the past to make opposition to their present (and more recent past) and future policy misadventures, quite controversial. But there are negative consequences today to such narratives that are used to justify disastrous for the people in the region warmongering and regime change.

I think this is about right. In most things, the option taken by the USA and NATO have been the ones good for themselves. Amazing that China can build concentration camps in their country and depopulate large swathes of Muslim majority and we can’t seem to muster the energy for a strongly worded statement. Of course, they do most of our manufacturing, so economic sanctions are bad for business.

I think the honest truth about war politics like all other political issues is that it’s Machiavellian — the point is to empower yourself and your allies , while perhaps weakening your enemies. The rest, as far as im concerned is propaganda for the democratic masses so they keep voting for the wars you want to fight. Being the good guys helps you to get the masses to support military adventures abroad. Especially when you’re telling them, again, that the regime needing change is doing the bad guy things.

The implications are now just starting to percolate into mainstream debate, and the question "Was it right choice for High Elves to join fight between Orcs and Ogres, and if so, on whose side? is now open.

I agree with the premise about "just about equally bad" but I think it's quite a stretch to draw this conclusion. Communist Russia, even if equally ontologically evil, was a total mess in 1939 & 1941 and simply incapable of effecting as much evil as the equally ontologically-evil Germans. An evil country more or less minding their own evil business is quite a different thing to an evil country successfully marching on the entire civilized world. They don't have commensurable evil effect, regardless of ontology.

If you want to describe Anglo involvement in continental European then "joining the fight between Orcs and Ogres on the side of whoever is losing to prevent the entire thing from being sewn up by any one evil force" is about as good a one line summary of 500 years.

It is completely wrong that the USSR was a benign evil. Actually absence the German army, the Soviets who had already invaded and captured various countries, would end their mobilization and end up conquering Europe. On paper the USSR was actually stronger than Germans when Germany invaded. They were just in the middle of mobilization and not ready yet and the Germans had some advantages in term of military effectiveness which weren't necessarily something that could be quantified by everyone before the war. In terms of hardware and personnel, the USSR had the advantage.

Note, that doesn't mean that USSR was going to imminently attack, it might have taken a few years.

The fact that both the nazi and soviet regime were motivated in part by rational fear of each other which effected their foreign policy agenda, doesn't of course change the fact that both had an imperialist agenda and were quite willing to be brutal conquerors.

Too much credit and sympathy is given to the Soviet Union as an entity, (I will contrast this to sympathy towards civilians targeted by Nazi Germany who do deserve sympathy, but then even German civilians deserve some sympathy for their targeting, and almost everyone forgets that there were also massacres of Germans by the USSR before ww2 started), because it was invaded by Nazi Germany first before they got to invade them after German vs western power war would have weakened both Germany and countries like France. Also, the USSR was conducting massacres of civilians before the nazis started, before the nazi regime existed and after the nazis fell, including targeting various ethnic groups. They even tried to pin the Katyn massacre to the nazis which it self increases the fog of war effect, considering their participation in the post ww2 making of historical narrative about what happened, and it isn't as if the USSR are only regime willing to promote war propaganda.

The way FDR adminstration and media reacted to the coverup of Katyn massacre is especially notable. Such sympathies colored not only the propaganda of the time but understanding that endured today.

https://newcriterion.com/article/katyn-the-long-cover-up/

But like I said we still have enough evidence to make a negative judgement of the Nazi regime that condemns its behavior, even though there are actually room for examination of such narratives and whether aspects have been exaggerated. I still think that it is a given that the position and treatment of various non German ethnic groups would be bad in a nazi Germany victory, and the question being how bad.

The massacres of the USSR matter including of ethnic groups, even though it hasn't been focused by those who popularize history after ww2, because of course they have their agenda of which group suffering to focus upon and elevate.

I did not say the USSR was benign! That's a whole different sentence from what I wrote.

Too much credit and sympathy is given to the Soviet Union as an entity [...] because it was invaded by Nazi Germany first

I have no sympathy for the USSR, but I will happily stand behind judging it far worse to start a conflict as the aggressor than to defend against an invasion.

Also, the USSR was conducting massacres of civilians before the nazis started, before the nazi regime existed and after the nazis fell, including targeting various ethnic groups.

Indeed. And to be super clear, I have no reservation saying that the USSR was as evil, in the areas they controlled, as the Germans. I thought I made that clear in the OP but sometimes that kind of thing doesn't come through in written conversation.

An evil country more or less minding their own evil business is quite a different thing to an evil country successfully marching on the entire civilized world.

The USSR invaded or otherwise annexed through underhanded means Finland, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and parts of Romania (hint, this is part of why Moldova is its own country) at around the exact same time that Germany was conquering Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.

Of course. This was all evil.

Yes, but they mean the USSR wasn't just "An evil country more or less minding their own evil business"

My experience has been that normie conservatives basically all hold that Hitler and Stalin were equally or near-equally bad, and that fascism and communism are equally bad.

On the left people will absolutely argue that communism is good, and occasionally you get someone who will argue that Stalin, while very bad, wasn't as bad as Hitler, but that's as far as it seems to go to me. "Who was worse, Hitler or Stalin?" is a question random people debate in bars. The idea that they're both equally bad is so common that it's a Mitchell and Webb sketch.

While I would say that both Stalin and Hitler were very bad, Stalin was less bad. However, he was baddier in a different aspect. Communism as an ideology while trying to safeguard the equality (theoretically), destroys people's aspirations. In long term, it is very bad for people and also bad for progress of humanity.

My experience has been that normie conservatives basically all hold that Hitler and Stalin were equally or near-equally bad, and that fascism and communism are equally bad.

Yes, normie cons always held this view, and now normie libs hold it too (even more so due to current events in Eastern Europe).

On the left people will absolutely argue that communism is good

"left" as online people with hammer and sickle (and often rainbow, trans and Palestine flags), not as anyone remotely close to respectability.

occasionally you get someone who will argue that Stalin, while very bad, wasn't as bad as Hitler

Yes, this is the other mainstream respectable academic view. The 50's are over, you will not any more find Stalin's admirers in the academia and respectable professions(excepting Grover Furr)

Including professed Marxists like Zizek, here is his take on difference between Stalinism and Nazism

(most people would see killer who forces you to bow before him and lick his boots before he kills you as not lesser evil than ordinary killer who just does the deed withou any ceremony, but YMMV)

I think that a lot of young people today are very sympathetic to communist ideas especially in Latin America. I don't understand why, probably due to lack of growth, high unemployment, especially among young people.

For me it is unimaginable because I grew up in the USSR and we all hated it. Yet, a lot of old people are nostalgic towards the Soviet times. They had hard time to adapt to competitive system. I can understand that. Transition had to be done in more thoughtful manner. In Russia it is probably even worse due to widespread corruption and inequality.

We had to study communist ideology, read Marx and other works already at the primary school. It was very boring. I don't understand how people can find them inspiring at all. At the same time other teachers let us know, in short passages, what was wrong about the Soviet system. Biology teacher told about Lysenkoism, others mentioned deportations and so on. I think that we all grew up more like Kolgomorovs, knowing well what to say to authorities to survive, while retaining a different perspective in private. When Gorbachev started his glastnost (openness), the gates opened and the Soviet system could not survive.

I don't believe that this is a case with all communistic countries today. Maybe Cuba is similar but in North Korea people are probably too brainwashed and not sufficiently educated to be willing to reject communism.

Yeah, that’s the thing I keep seeing, and frankly I agree with, especially since it’s been the dominant moral theme of a replacement for Christian morality. The thing is that for a long time, Hitler was Satan of a new religion in some sense with things like fascism, religious zealotry by Christians (Islam gets a pass here), bigotry, and prudishness as major sins.

And this version of the story has been used countless times to justify our own wars of aggression, or intervention in purely domestic affairs or civil wars. It’s been the cause to force globalization, migration, DEI, LGBTQ, and other social and economic realignments on people. And it’s been used to keep countries in line. For 75 years, if your country was accused of being fascist in some way, at the least you’d be cut off from trade, and at worst bombs would be+heading your way.

Calm down, he was saying people get accused of fascism erroneously, not that fascists are persecuted.

Well, no, he said that mere accusations of fascism would get a country "at least" get cut off from trade and possibly bombed. It's a pretty outlandish statement and @upsidedownmotter's objection is warranted.

Though I think @MaiqTheTrue's overall point is valid and important.

Holocaust Denial is receiving the most engagement at this moment than it ever has since it was formulated in the 1970s. By far. Yes it is going mainstream too.

Some of the keystone claims of the Holocaust narrative are plainly absurd and will be Revised as well. Many already have been Revised. It was claimed 4 million were killed in Auschwitz until the 1990s, when the death toll dropped to 1.1 million. It was claimed 2 million were killed in Majdanek at the Nuremberg Trial and the most recent estimates by the Majdanek Museum estimate the death toll from all prisoners from all causes was about 70,000. It was claimed 5 million Gentiles were killed in the Holocaust, but that has been Revised and acknowledged to have been a deceptive lie. The Holocaust has already been revised a lot and it has a long way to go.

One of the most infamous claims, that the Nazis manufactured bars of soap out of the fat of Jewish Holocaust victims, was Revised not too long ago and admitted to not have been true. The other salacious claim involving shower rooms stands today but it won't for that much longer. Holocaust Revisionism has entailed a steady stream of victories but it hasn't penetrated the public consciousness although it is clearly beginning to do so now.

It was claimed 4 million were killed in Auschwitz until the 1990s

This is mildly silly, in that the claimed total (based on the demographic impact of the Holocaust) was and is 6 million, and there were multiple camps, so the numbers wouldn't add up if Auschwitz was 4 million.

I can confirm that the number in the schoolbooks before the 1990's revision was 1.5-2 million because I learned history from the old books. (Technically the numbers are for the whole Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, including people worked to death in the work camps as well as people gassed deliberately in the extermination camps).

This article on the official Auschwitz museum website implies that the 4 million was always a blatant Soviet lie, the first serious estimate was about 1.5 million when western historians got access to the archives in the early 1980's, and revised further to 1.1 million based on better research done by the museum staff. As far as I can see the issue is that record-keeping was much worse at the outlying camps than at the main Auschwitz and Birkenau camps, so people kept using the Soviet numbers for longer for want of a better alternative.

This is mildly silly, in that the claimed total (based on the demographic impact of the Holocaust) was and is 6 million, and there were multiple camps, so the numbers wouldn't add up if Auschwitz was 4 million.

Yes of course it was a Soviet lie. You know what else is a lie? The gas chamber shown to millions of tourists at the camp. The Auschwitz Museum claimed for decades that this "Gas Chamber", really the most famous one in Holocaust history, was in its original state including most importantly the holes in the ceiling allegedly used to dispense Zyklon B to kill the prisoners inside.

The claim that this was an original structure persisted for decades, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, until Revisionists showed that it was a post-war "reconstruction" in Soviet-Occupied Poland. So they lied about that too- the infamous "Zyklon holes" were constructed post-war and were not original structures as claimed for decades. Contemporary blueprints of the structure show that the alleged gas chamber was actually a morgue with a swinging door providing access to the cremation ovens- a necessary design for a morgue but an impossible design for an air-tight gas chamber.

And they lied about millions of people being killed at Majdanek among 7 gas chambers.

So much of the Holocaust narrative has just been steady retreat from Soviet lies. Separating the truth from Soviet lies is the reason Revisionism is necessary.

I think when you're as fringe as Holocaust denial, even tiny increases in salience will be perceived, from the inside as significant. A jump from 0.01% to 0.02% is tiny, but still a doubling of interest.

Are we anywhere near the point where someone who isn't a conspiracy theorist or historical obsessive asks questions about the Holocaust? No. You mention a claim about the Nazis making soap out of victims - I've never heard of the idea that Nazis made soap from the bodies of murdered Jews, and I am, by normie standards, a WWII history nerd. (Simple test: I know what the Wannsee conference was. Most people do not.) I do not think that anyone near to what we might reasonably call the mainstream has heard of or cares about whether or not the bodies of Jews were turned into soap. As such, even if that's something widely believed and if there's been a change of mainstream academic opinion on it, I don't think it tells us anything about whether or not Holocaust denial is going mainstream.

Seconding this as an austrian. About 1/3rd of my history school time was spent on the nazi era, and Ive never heard about the soap, the lampshades mentioned below, or anything of this sort. Just the gas chambers a bajillion times over.

I've never heard of the idea that Nazis made soap from the bodies of murdered Jews, and I am, by normie standards, a WWII history nerd

I'm far from a history nerd and I've heard the soap claim multiple times. I think I probably first came across it (as a kid) in a horrible histories book which are generally praised for their accuracy. I'm confident saying it was definitely part of the "mainstream holucost narrative" until relatively recently.

I've never heard of the idea that Nazis made soap from the bodies of murdered Jews

I was taught this as fact in school and it was made clear before the Holocaust unit began that there was to be no back talk, no awkward questioning, no joking, or discipline would be escalated to upper administration immediately. I don’t know if I ever believed it, but I openly disagreed with the teacher on whether the renaissance was a good thing but uncritically repeated this claim.

Wait, really? They took us to one of the Holocaust museums as kids and the soap and lampshade stuff was front and center, right next to the pile o'shoes display and gold fillings. It's 100% in "top ten things everyone knows about the Holocaust."

Looking at the wiki article, five years after our trip there were still published arguments going "we've gotta stop claiming this because it gives the denierists ammunition!", suggesting that team soap was still firmly in control in the early 00s.

The more this stuff happens, the more I Nootice Signal's point about the revisionists forcing revisions that are never, ever acknowledged to have happened. The narrative just smoothly changes from one second to the next.

The wider Holocaust exhibition at the Struthof concentration camp in Alsace (which, unlike the rest of France was actually annexed by the Reich in WW2) didn't mention soap when I visited c. 1993 - and it had a detailed breakdown of the financial value of a dead Holocaust victim based on actual camp accounts (I didn't cross-check the signs against the original documents in the glass case, but anyone bilingual in French and German could have done).

The various Holocaust museums in Berlin didn't mention soap when I was there c. 2015.

I suspect this is a US/Europe thing.

suspect this is a US/Europe thing.

In which direction? I l'm European and was bombarded with the soap / lampshade stories, and even Monty Python referenced the lampshades.

The impetus behind the Holocaust remembrance industry comes from American Jews. So I would expect Holocaust remembrance memes like the soap to be more prevalent in the US than they are in the places where it all actually happened.

Can you point out where exactly the horror story touched you?

Sorry about the joke, but seriously, where exactly did you hear them or read about them? Do you remember?

I ask because I don't trust my own memories on this topic.

One time was from my history teacher (the soap / lampshade stuff).

I also remember being showed a film in one of the death camp museums, where the Nazis would throw people to get into an airtight van, and connect the exhaust to the passenger compartment. I don't know of this was officially deboonked, but since we're on the subject, it strikes me as an insanely inefficient method of execution.

Those are two instances that I clearly remember, but there was also the blur of documantaries, school trips, and books, that I can't vouch for.

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Nope. I remember going to a Holocaust museum at primary school and that never came up. This is the first I've ever heard of anything involving lampshades either. The focus was much more on the history of intolerance, hostility, and repression that led up to the Nazis deciding to just kill all the Jews. The gruesome details of how they were killed at the camps were not gone into, I would guess partly because it's not child-appropriate and partly because it's not actually a useful thing to know in terms of what they were trying to teach us.

I don't have much experience talking to Holocaust deniers outside of the Motte, since, well, this is the only place I've ever met any, but one of the things that surprises me about them is their obsession with quibbling what seem to me like trifling details. I don't particularly care about the exact methods by which the Nazis murdered millions of Jews. I care that they murdered millions of Jews. That's the morally significant part.

Insofar as I find other questions about the Holocaust historically or philosophically interesting, I think for me it's mostly causal stuff? The intentionalist/functionalist debates, for instance, strike me as both interesting and instructive, in terms of how atrocities come to occur. But details about ovens or showers or what have you strike me as being mostly of niche academic interest.

I don't have much experience talking to Holocaust deniers outside of the Motte, since, well, this is the only place I've ever met any, but one of the things that surprises me about them is their obsession with quibbling what seem to me like trifling details.

As a non-holocaust denier, I find it hard to believe both that the focus on the story surprises you, or that you parse it as a "trifling detail". It shouldn't be hard to understand how being told a tall tale by authority figures, designed to make you hate and fear someone, back when you were too young to question it, only for it to turn out to be a fabrication.

I mean, I don't think I'd ever heard the word 'zyklon' in my life before I visited the Motte. I just wasn't told a specific story about how the Nazis murdered the Jews, beyond maybe a vague "they gassed them".

So I guess I'm completely unmoved by the idea that there might be a valid historical debate about the exact methods. Heck, the Nazis weren't the most scrupulously organised group in the world and the camps were mostly destroyed, so I would not be surprised if a range of techniques were used in different places. So I have no sense of there even being a tall tale.

What I remember from my childhood is that Hitler was bad, basically. I did units in school on the lead-up to WWI and then on the rise of fascism, but ironically I never actually did the wars. They weren't offered - we skipped from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to the Treaty of Versailles, and then spent a semester on Weimar Germany and Hitler's rise to power, and then we skipped the war itself and came back the next year with the WWII peace settlement and the beginning of the Cold War. Presumably it was felt that there was no particular need for kids to understand all the military maneuvers; and interested kids (like me) would just go to the library and read all the military history books and pore over the maps (which I did).

I don't remember ever doing anything about Stalin, since he leaves the picture fairly early in the Cold War. There was a very common unit in Australian high school history about the Russian Revolution, though, which I didn't do (I had a different course), but presumably would have covered that. So most of what I got was that Hitler is bad and Nazis are bad, and they came to power in such-and-such way, and these are the sorts of things we should look out for in case it happens again, but the blow-by-blow of the war itself was not covered. That also meant that the logistics of the Holocaust were skipped entirely.

It's not as though we did nothing about the Nazis and the Jews - I read The Diary of Anne Frank, and I remember watching and writing about the film Au revoir les enfants, though those were in English class and French class respectively, not history per se. But the emphasis in works like that is much more about the breakdown in social trust and solidarity, people informing on their neighbours, and so on. I don't mind that particularly, because I think that is in fact the most important lesson to take from the Holocaust.

Anyway, I suppose it's possible that if you were taught very specific details about the death camps and sacralised those details, then learning that they might be incorrect or debatable would be challenging? But that sounds like a very different form of education to the one I received, and to be honest one that seems to me to have quite strange priorities.

Anyway, I suppose it's possible that if you were taught very specific details about the death camps and sacralised those details

Again, I'm having trouble believing that this is how you are parsing what was said in the conversation. No one is focused on, or sacrilises, the specific details about death camps, it's that people recognize they were told a story to elicit a very specific reaction, and are now reacting to being deceived in a particularly underhanded way.

You can claim that he details of what happened in the death camps don't matter, but that's refuted by the simple fact that if they didn't matter, they wouldn't be taught.

It's not as though we did nothing about the Nazis and the Jews - I read The Diary of Anne Frank.

That's a funny juxtaposition. I doubt I'd ever hear her name, if it wasn't for the exposure to American media.

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Yeah I'm not particularly Holocaust passionate and definitely was aware of the lampshade thing.

I was not aware that it was anything more than an urban myth.

When the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated by the United States, the first unit on the scene was the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD/SCHAEF), which according to Wikipedia was tasked with "psychological warfare against German troops and recently liberated countries in Northwest Europe, during and after D-Day."

The PWD headed the "investigation" of Buchenwald, and that special unit was mostly Jewish. The most infamous propaganda from the PWD "investigation" of Buchenwald was a video of a forced march of the civilians of Weimar through the Buchenwald concentration camp, where they were shown a table that they were told contained a lampshade made of human skin at the request of the wife of the SS commandant, Ilse Koch, as well as two shrunken heads.

The artifacts on the table became a huge story reported by American media, although the human skin lampshade and shrunken heads end up "lost" before they are tested for authenticity. At the trial of Ilse Koch, during which she was in late-stage pregnancy after being raped in American detention, there was a different lampshade presented which was tested and shown not to be made of human skin. Ultimately those charges were dropped by prosecutors but she was sentenced to life in prison.

Thomas Dodd, American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial, took a series of photographs posing with one of the "shrunken heads" allegedly made by the Nazis at Buchenwald and displayed on the table during the forced tour of Weimar. Dodd created a sensation by presenting the shrunken head at the opening of the trial. But ultimately that artifact like the others were "lost" before they were tested for authenticity and have never been found. Of course Revisionists claim the Buchenwald human skin lampshade and shrunken heads were atrocity propaganda planted by PWD. Mainstream historians have mostly dropped the claim of human-skin lampshades and shrunken heads at Buchenwald but at the time they were major news stories in American media.

I definitely remember lampshades made of human skin being presented as uncontroversial truth in the 1990s. And in the 2000s I remember it being presented as “this was something one psychopathic commandant at one camp was doing, but not a widespread official policy.” In fact, I remember it being listed as an uncontroversial fact on Karl Otto-Koch’s Wikipedia page in the early 2010s. Until I saw this thread today I didn’t realize it was now considered a myth.

Eastern Europe, 20-30 years ago which I suppose may confirm your claim of "for many decades" but leaves us with the uncomfortable conclusion that there are many, many, people who never got the memo and will have their mind blown when confronted with the updated version of history.

Yes, I'm 100% sure it wasn't taught as a myth. These sorts of claims were made by too many sources (museums, documentaries, teachers) for me to believe I misremembered them. The fact that there are non-SS posters here with essentially the same memories reinforces my belief further.

Okay, then drop some red pills on how many actually were killed. I've noticed people of your ilk never actually make any falsifiable claims. How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust? How many Gentiles? I can't take anything you say seriously until you post your own numbers and take a hard stand. Otherwise this debate is just full of moving goal posts.

No Jews were killed in any gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms. They didn't exist. It was one of two salacious rumors about shower rooms. One of those rumors was that the bars of soap given to the inmates were manufactured from the fat of murdered Jews. And the other rumor was that some of these shower rooms were fake shower rooms that were actually gas chambers in disguise.

Both of those rumors survived in the public consciousness long after the end of the war. In some cases bars of soap were given Jewish burial rites by some Synagogues. But now it is admitted that claim was never true. The other salacious shower-room rumor is still claimed to have been true.

The claims made by Holocaust Revisionists are:

  • There was no German policy/Hitler order to exterminate all the Jews as claimed.
  • There were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms used to execute millions of people on the pretext of taking a shower.
  • The "Six Million" figure is a symbolic propaganda figure with no relation to the actual number of Jews killed in WWII.

The first point has essentially been conceded by the mainstream. Given that no such order has never been found, the prevailing theory focuses on "gradual radicalization" and mind-reading of lower-level officers "reading between the lines" and inferring what they were supposed to do without any written orders by their superiors. Yes it's as ridiculous as it sounds but given the lack of documentary evidence that's what they are stuck with. The reality is that there is no single historical consensus on that point because Revisionists are correct and they are wrong.

The mainstream is extremely defensive of the Gas Chamber story- if they conceded that the entire Holocaust narrative would unravel at the seams. But Revisionists have nonetheless proven their case at Majdanek and forced the mainstream to Revise the status of 5 out of 7 of the originally claimed "gas chambers disguised as shower rooms." So there's precedent for Revisionists making the falsifiable claim - "Hey you said this was a secret gas chamber used to kill Jews for decades but it was no such thing" and they were proven right.

The question of how many Jews died in WWII is a highly open question. Even mainstream historians like Gerald Reitlinger have put the figure as low as 4.2 million. Raul Hilberg himself put the figure at 5.1 million, well short of the vaunted "6 million." Revisionists vary significantly as well, estimates range from probably 300,000 to 2.5 million.

The Revisionist case hinges most notably on actually falsifiable claims at specific camps, such as the Revisionist claim it is false that 800,000 Jews were murdered, buried, unburied, cremated, and reburied at Treblinka. The mainstream could forever disprove Revisionism in the course of 48 hours if they wanted to by excavating these alleged mass graves, the location of which are precisely known. But excavation is strictly forbidden, echoing the exact same arguments currently being employed by the Tribe rejecting calls for excavation of the alleged Children's mass grave at the Kamloops Indian school. Not a single mass grave of the alleged 800,000 victims has been excavated on that site.

How many Jews do you think died in WWII? Of those, how many were murdered by axis powers?

I would estimate the higher range of Revisionist estimates, around 2 million. This wouldn't entail any Jews who may have died under Stalin during or after the war. None of those 2 million were murdered inside homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. They died mostly of disease like epidemic typhus, especially near the end of the war when the German infrastructure was collapsing from being bombed on all sides. The catastrophic wartime conditions led to a very high death toll in the concentration camps near the end of the war, and those images of the catastrophic conditions are those used most frequently to "sell" the idea to i.e. young students that the Germans had an official, secret policy to gas all the jews inside shower rooms.

Keep in mind that according to the official historical position there were no Jews killed by Stalin. Every single Jew who died in WWII, even if they were a partisan or part of the Red Army, or died under the custody of Stalin during or after the war, all are counted as Holocaust victims. It is not known how many Jews, especially those masses who were deported or evacuated deeper into the Soviet Union ahead of the German advance, died.

When it comes to more specific claims- such as concrete claims regarding the number of Jews killed in a certain time in a certain place, Auschwitz for example, the Revisionist position aligns with the prima facie camp records and top-secret decodes. It may surprise you to know that Britain had intercepted and decoded top-secret communications from Auschwitz to SS Command, including during the height of the Holocaust. Those intercepted decodes pertaining to top-secret communication contained detailed statistics regarding the number of prisoner arrivals, departures, and deaths and contained no reference whatsoever to any alleged extermination operation of millions of people.

The communications do show urgency regarding a high death toll caused by epidemic typhus, with SS command ordering the death toll to be reduced in order to maintain a productive workforce which was crucial for the war effort. The mainstream has no explanation whatsoever why these decodes would elide any reference, even in "innuendo form", to the ongoing alleged extermination program.

The concern over a high death rate caused by typhus led to the increased deliveries and consumption of Zyklon B which, according to camp records, were successful in reducing the rate of registered deaths. Zyklon B was important for delousing clothing and furniture to prevent the spread of Typhus. Of course the official narrative is that the insecticide Zyklon B was the murder weapon used to murder over a million Jews inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms.

This is to say, when it comes to specific questions over the numbers of deaths in a place like Auschwitz or Majdanek, the Revisionist position is based on official camp records which registered the number and cause of death of inmates, whereas the mainstream claims that the extermination operation was top-secret and so the people murdered were not registered at the camp and their deaths were never recorded, and they were all cremated so their remains can never be recovered... so they don't exist in camp records and the remains don't exist in any known location...

Essentially the Revisionist position says the camp records and top-secret decodes are accurate statistics of inmate deaths, and the mainstream position says that the camp records are not accurate because they do not include the million unregistered inmates secretly murdered inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.

From the Auschwitz Museum:

This data base uses the partially preserved Death Books (Sterbebücher) of Auschwitz Concentration Camp prisoners. The 46 volumes of political department (camp Gestapo) record the deaths of almost 69,000 prisoners who were registered in the camp and who died between July 29, 1941 and December 31, 1943. Their names have been entered in the data base.

When using the data base, please remember that the death certificates cover only registered prisoners who died in the period mentioned in the previous paragraph. The overwhelming majority of victims, mostly Jewish, perished in the gas chambers immediately after arrival, without being entered in the camp records, and without their deaths being noted in the German documents.

...

An analysis of the “denomination” item shows that the majority of the registered prisoners in the Death Books were Roman Catholic (31814 persons - 46,8%) and Jewish (“Mosaic”) (29125 persons - 42,8%). Others belonged to the following denominations: Greek Orthodox (3,6%), Evangelical-Lutheran (3,4%), and Greek Catholic (1,6%). This item is left blank on 1,275 (1,9%) death certificates.

The mainstream position is that the inmates did not exist in camp records, and their deaths did not exist in camp records, and the murder operation that killed them did not exist in camp records, and the murder operation was not referenced at all whatsoever in top-secret decodes, and the remains of those undocumented million inmates secretly killed inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms with Zyklon B are nowhere to be found.... the Revisionists say that these records are reliable.

Ok, do you deny that axis forces carried out massacres of Jews and other ethnic undesirables?

Of course not, I laid out the claims quite clearly that are being contested. Reprisals clearly qualify as "massacres" and they were utilized in response to partisan warfare. Although the practice of reprisals against civilians was legal at the time it still constitutes a massacre. I wouldn't qualify inmates in a concentration camp dying of Typhus as a massacre. I also don't think concentrating a Jew in a camp to conduct labor is particularly more evil than conscripting a German, giving him a rifle, and forcing him to march on Stalingrad and being shot as a deserter if he doesn't comply.

Really the sacredness of the Holocaust comes to those three claims I clearly contested in my earlier post, what you are doing seems like a Motte and Bailey. We've gone from claims of top-secret plans to exterminate world Jewry in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, but you are asking me "do you deny massacres happened?" No I don't, neither do Revisionists.

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Yes he denies that. And his baseless claims have been debated again and again and been found to be exactly that , baseless. A detailed analysis can be found here https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/

Why are you guys beating a dead horse? This stuff has been researched to death and no amount of antisemitic rambling will change that. Are you seriously trying to say no jews were executed or specifically killed? There is a huge amount of evidence on the contrary and I have to question your sanity if you say otherwise.

You are repeating stuff that has been researched and debated again and again. David irving put his career on the line over these nonsense ideas and was clowned in court over it. There is a whole book about that , but I am sure you will not spend the time to actually read since you don't really care about the truth.

The mainstream position is not as simple as you make it, of course I know you are not interested in the truth but here is a more complex analysis, https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/ab2-death-books/ though the entire 'mainstream position' would take a lot more to analyse.

History , especially history that people have attempted to obscure , is never simple to analyse and tends to leave gaps for the uninformed or the hateful to spread misinformation.

I don't know if you're ignorant or simply lying to advance an agenda.

Holocaust denial is their hobby horse. They are very selectively well informed and pushing one particular agenda.

Yep. The way it always goes is the goal posts inevitably get moved so they can't get pinned down. They never make a single falsifiable claim. Just endless sources and gish gallops so that you can't go through everything they say. When you do catch them making a mistake, they never address it and just move onto something new. I asked him above how many were killed in the Holocaust. I bet I won't get a firm answer. They will just cast doubt on the official numbers and suggest they are a lie without explicitly saying so. It's incredibly annoying.

Mainstream? As in, I'll turn on CNN and see it?

When respected university press publishes book by Germar Rudolf, respected reviewers call it "stunning work" "scholarship of the highest calibre" "book that enduringly changes what we see" and the book is awarded many prestigious prizes, you could say that Holocaust revisionism had gone mainstream.

Mainstream? As in, I'll turn on CNN and see it?

Yes, the internet has allowed thousands of people who would otherwise never know one another to share stupid antisemitic memes, but that hardly counts as entering the mainstream.

Ah so we are at the "it's just a bunch of weird college kids nobody cares about in the Real Worldtm and it doesn't matter" step of the cycle we saw Woke messaging go through.

The vast and dishonest Zionist campaign in media and astroturfed across the internet to pretend that nothing was happening in Gaza and if it was happening it was a good thing was the best thing that happened to Holocaust Denial since, well, the Holocaust. Because suddenly a lot of people arguing on the internet, like me, found themselves agreeing with people like SecureSignals. Over and over. And a lot of them are probably going to look into things that SecureSignals says otherwise, and start to give them a chance they might not have before.

Wait, where was there a vast media conspiracy to say that nothing bad was happening in Gaza?

That sounds like the opposite of how I remember the last year and a half. On the contrary, it seems to me that the mainstream media has been obsessed with Gaza in a manner totally disproportionate to its actual importance. There has been a constant feed of events from Gaza, especially those critical of Israel - I remember a few weeks when the media could not stop talking about one specific hospital building that the IDF attacked.

If you compare coverage of Gaza to, say, coverage of Artsakh, which happened around the same time as October 7 and was much more unquestionably a genocide, the difference is stark. I suspect Gaza is that way because firstly there's more direct American involvement with Israel, secondly there's a large constituency in Western countries that cares about it (i.e. Jews, who are both wealthier and more influential than the Armenian diaspora), thirdly pro-Palestine activism has been a cause of the left for decades so there's a pre-existing infrastructure, and fourthly Gaza is just ambiguous enough to be spicy. A more obvious or unambiguous genocide doesn't mobilise the existing political coalitions, one to defend and one to attack. It has to be in the just-right zone, bad enough to mobilise people against it, but not so bad that people won't defend it. Gaza is in the zone - just ambiguous enough to be one movie and two screens, just enough for "Israel is committing a genocide!" and "Israel is defending itself from murderous fanatics!" to be both more-or-less defensible claims.

@upsidedownmotter

If you compare coverage of Gaza to, say, coverage of Artsakh...

Government numbers from both sides seem to show under 200 civilian casualties in that conflict. If it was a genocide or ethnic cleansing, it was, per Moldbug, a basically peaceful one. Armenia lacked either the material support and power to resist like Ukraine, or the suicidal nationalism of Palestine, so it's not really any more interesting to me than any other border adjustment.

Compare again to Ukraine. Ukraine has seen vastly fewer civilian casualties, despite a larger and more intense conflict, between larger and better armed adversaries, over a longer period of time and across a wider geographical area. Yet Ukraine is both more clearly one-sided in coverage (Orcs, bayraktar techno edits, Russia blamed for things done by Ukraine etc), and also the subject of more good faith debate in politics and media and culture.

One can play whataboutism with various African conflicts, but no one ever gives a shit about those, nor should we.

Meanwhile the NYT has frequently resorted to the passive voice in Gaza coverage, people "die" rather than being killed. Hospitals blow up rather than being bombed.

Meanwhile the TikTok ban was largely justified by supposedly slanted pro-palestine coverage.

Meanwhile very clear and direct hate crimes against Palestinians by Jews get a fraction of the coverage that mythical anti-Black, anti-Gay, and anti-Asian violence get. Jews even feeling uncomfortable at school is a national story.

Meanwhile there have been talks about deporting people who protest Israeli conduct, which are now coming to fruition.

There's a pretty big spread here.

But in your comments, I think a big part of the story is the expectations. I was shocked at the coverage of Ukraine, because I expected it to be closer to the Georgia war in the 2000s: just a line item in foreign coverage, no big deal. We're both talking about expectations, and we can literally see the same things and announce that the conflict is overrated or underrated depending on our expectations going in.

So let's just limit it to a pet example we're familiar with: TheMotte. Before the current Gaza crisis, I was more likely to side with @2rafa against @SecureSignals on virtually every conversation where the two were involved. Because I think the Holocaust happened. Post-Gaza, I find it split closer to 50/50, I still tend to side against SS when WWII comes up, but I'm finding us on the same side against @2rafa et al on discussions about Israel and Gaza. For Jews and Israelis and fellow travelers, that should be concerning, even if they assume I am wrong. It represents a large number of Americans turning against them, and starting to see their enemies as perhaps having a point.

I'm not sure that we shouldn't care about African conflicts, but that's beside the point. The point is that, for better or worse, Western media appears to disproportionately care about Gaza. The suffering in Gaza has received a great deal more media attention than comparable suffering in other places. Don't like Artsakh? Fine, then, take Rakhine state - over a third again as large as Gaza in terms of population, and subject to similar brutality. Don't like that one? South Sudan. And so on.

It is thus, I think, not true that there has some kind of conspiracy of silence around Gaza. On the contrary, if there's a conspiracy I feel like it was to bring more attention to Gaza, not less.

There are some understandable reasons for the greater focus on Gaza - it involves a close American ally, the history of decades of Palestine as a symbol for wider Arab nationalism, lots of Jews in Western countries who pay particularly close attention to Israel, and so on. I'm not saying it's a great mystery why Americans take much closer interest in Gaza than they do in the plight of the Rohingyas. I'm just saying that they do. Thus this:

The vast and dishonest Zionist campaign in media and astroturfed across the internet to pretend that nothing was happening in Gaza and if it was happening it was a good thing was the best thing that happened to Holocaust Denial since, well, the Holocaust.

This is just not true. There was a huge amount of media focus on and discussion of Gaza, much of it openly critical of Israel. The 'vast and dishonest campaign' you posit seems hallucinatory. As 2rafa and upsidedownmotter show, it's just, well, not a true description of Western reporting on Gaza.

Note that I am not claiming that Western reporting on Gaza is unbiased, or plainly representative of the facts, or anything like that. I am just claiming that firstly there's a lot of it and secondly much of it is critical of Israel, whether implicitly or explicitly, so much so that I don't think one can defensibly claim that events in Gaza have been either hushed up or whitewashed.

One can play whataboutism with various African conflicts, but no one ever gives a shit about those, nor should we.

Most people in America also don’t give a shit about conflicts in which some tens of thousands of people die in the Middle East.

Ukraine was an event because it involved Russia and involved white people. This isn’t some fringe accusation, in the debate in the German Parliament the day after the Russia invasion the most commented upon as powerful speech pretty much directly said that the events were so extraordinary and horrific because they happened to people that look like us in a place that looks a little like this.

What is it about Gazans that makes them more valuable or worth caring about than Africans? For Muslims, the answer is obvious; their enemies are their enemies in an ancient tribal religious conflict, have humiliated the ummah and so on.

For Western dissident rightists, the sole aim is to bloody the nose of the Jews. The worst thing, as Norm said, is the hypocrisy; it is unfair that Jews get their ethnostate even as ‘they’, it is alleged, advocate and work towards Europeans losing their homelands / ethnostates. Israel’s war on Gaza and attempted ethnic cleansing isn’t unreasonable (it is not as if they would be opposed to ethnic cleansing not only in their ancestral homelands in Europe, but also in settler colonies like the US) because the act is unreasonable, it’s unreasonable because of who is doing it.

If they have memed themselves into caring, it is only because - already believing in the inhumanity of their enemy - they can’t help but sympathize with their ‘fellow’ victims, plus some of the Muslims are pretty based and redpilled etc.

As an aside, the Ukraine war comparisons are ridiculous; it’s a war with a clearly defined front against an enemy that wears uniforms. Gaza is a war against an army that doesn’t wear uniforms, melts into the civilian population at will, has no front, and where the enemy’s only strategy (because they would get wiped out in open conflict) is to hide in the most densely populated civilian districts of one of the most densely populated places in earth. That the civilian death toll will be much higher than a forest or marshland in Eastern Ukraine is obvious.

You write of

The vast and dishonest Zionist campaign in media and astroturfed across the internet to pretend that nothing was happening in Gaza and if it was happening it was a good thing

But really, the dishonest thing is the claim that a low level regional conflict between two tribes about who owns a small patch of the Middle East is the subject solely to lobbying on one side. Gaza is a canvas upon which every political debate is played, from LGBT rights to decolonialism, from nationalism to internationalism, from the politics of victimhood to the politics of strength. It’s also deeply personal to 1.5bn Muslims (perhaps double the total white population of the world) who care a great deal about their honor and who are often very active online.

What happened in Gaza? What happened is what happens when this kind of thing happens, which is all the time. Protesting that it’s special, or different, is more about who is involved than about what is happening.

Artsakh wasn’t a genocide. The territory was captured and its inhabitants fled due to the (probably accurate)belief that they would be ethnically cleansed if they didn’t. Azerbaijan didn’t have to do anything, and nor did it.

I believe most definitions of genocide include occupying a territory and forcing all of its inhabitants to leave.

I think there was already a big debate on this forum a few months ago regarding how "genocide" (killing people of the wrong ethnicity) and "ethnic cleansing" (forcing people of the wrong ethnicity to evacuate) are not the same thing and should not be considered as having the same gravity.

United Nations page:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(1) Killing members of the group;

(2) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(3) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(4) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(5) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

As ethnic cleansing has not been recognized as an independent crime under international law, there is no precise definition of this concept or the exact acts to be qualified as ethnic cleansing. A United Nations Commission of Experts mandated to look into violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia defined ethnic cleansing in its interim report S/25274 as "rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area". In its final report S/1994/674, the same Commission described ethnic cleansing as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas”.

I think that the Artsakh situation (people of the wrong ethnicity evacuate voluntarily) meets neither of those definitions. On the other hand, though, this Reuters article does cite "several international experts" who say that the Artsakh situation does count as "ethnic cleansing", because "Azerbaijan's destruction of essential supplies" counts as intentionally forcing the Armenians to leave.

The territory was captured and its inhabitants fled due to the (probably accurate)belief that they would be ethnically cleansed if they didn’t.

We have a term for this. It's called "ethnic cleansing."

This was the Soviet claim, and it was not accepted by other historians.

It was etched into stone at the Auschwitz Museum for decades. It was the number of victims claimed at the Nuremberg Trials. It is a downward Revision of millions of deaths at that camp- of course Holocaust Revisionists maintain Auschwitz needs to be revised downward much lower even still. But Holocaust Revisionists, mathematically, can't revise the Auschwitz death-toll any more downward than mainstream Historians already have. The point being Revisionism is necessary and that has been proven in many cases like that one, and is necessary still in similar cases of wildly inflated death tolls at several other camps.

The 4 million death toll was maintained by the Auschwitz Museum for decades. They literally had to go out and swap one memorial stone for a different one with a lower number. That is a Revision. Holocaust Historians are wildly variable in how many Jews they say were killed at various camps.

Deborah Lipstadt, our current United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism and mainstream historian, claimed that 1.2 million Jews were killed at Majdanek. The downward Revision of Majdanek from 2 million (the figure initially claimed by the Majdanek Museum) to 70,000 in the year 2003 is another case of a Revisionist victory that even flew in the face of claims made by mainstream historians like Lipstadt, and vindicated the findings of Holocaust Revisionists upon conducting their own archival research of the camp.

I think it's a little myopic. Millennials and Gen Z don't tune into CNN. If millions of them are talking about something on the most public and widely used platforms for news and political discussion it's becoming mainstream. I'm not saying it's mainstream yet because it isn't. But it is heading in that direction and has a bigger reach than it ever has before by far. But even if CNN doesn't touch it, and it goes ever more viral on X and being talked about by the likes of Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, that is mainstream as far as I'm concerned.

The age in which CNN dictates what is mainstream by what it covers and how it covers it is so over.

Is he proposing that the US occupies countries on an indefinite basis to defend Arab Christians from Arab Muslims? That would seem to run contrary to what a lot of the dissident right wants or cares about.

In general I think Darryl likes to be seen as at least a semi-impartial historian and so tries only to very obviously hint at his actual politics, which is a little weak. Even on Tucker, he wasn’t really making an argument and seemed a little confused at times, then ended the interview by saying to him that “you and I know all the things we can’t talk about” (to which Carlson was I think rather noncommittal).

Carlson was annoyed he couldn't get him to say more I think. Not much more, but like you said Cooper tries to present as impartial, but it's a weak impartiality. I was disappointed with Cooper for how he responded to Carlson's barbs at Anne Applebaum - despite having praised her in his podcast he barely reacted at all. Even when Carlson did it again and really heaped on the disdain Cooper didn't bite back. My charitable take is that he didn't know why Carlson felt that way about Applebaum and didn't feel comfortable asking, but f it had been a historical claim and Cooper felt he was missing facts he would have said so.

Are they from before he did the interview with Tucker Carlson? My impression of his behaviour during it was that he was unfamiliar with the criticism of her. His non-committal responses to the barbs are even more confusing if he was already on board. Why don't you just link them?

Is this the turning point for WW2 revisionism entering the mainstream?

Yes, and it's overdue. The immediate aftermath of WWI also entailed an entirely false, one-sided War Guilt narrative that was Revised by historians after tensions cooled in the decades following the war. This has never happened for WW2, the one-sided narrative today, the narrative written by the victors, is essentially the exact same it was in 1945.

AJP Taylor, who was basically the official Court historian to the British liberal elite at the time (he was commissioned to make numerous BBC documentaries and wrote the 1914-1945 volume of the “official” Oxford University history of England) wrote a revisionist account of the origins of World War II in 1961. There was a vigorous debate at the time, and Taylor did not come out the winner.

WW2 revisionism has been moving down the intellectual food chain ever since.

Of course, we are only talking about revisionism re. The Axis here. The big revision of WW2 history concerns the Allies, and in particular the idea that they were somehow motivated by a desire to stop the Holocaust.

So why did Taylor "not come out the winner?" This is like saying in the fierce academic debate between the Protestant Darwinists and the Boasian Anthropologists, the Darwinists did not come out the winner. Yes that's true but that's not because they were wrong. It's because their academic opponents, deeply motivated by their own political ideologies and identities, employed systematically authoritarian tactics in the Academy to suppress their opposition and entrench their own perspective as undisputable fact.

Taylor "did not come out the winner" foremost because the Holocaust Narrative, which also essentially began in the 1960s, provided a strong motive and moral impetus for rejecting any sort of Revisionist treatment of WWII. The Holocaust narrative is the reason WWII Revisionism has been delayed for so long.

The problem though is that in the age of internet and podcasts, you can get expert-amateurs who exist outside the Academic Cartel that fiercely controls consensus. Combined with high reach like Joe Rogan and the Revisionism can influence public perception and discredit the expert apparatus that has carefully excised it for so long.

Taylor "did not come out the winner" foremost because the Holocaust Narrative, which also essentially began in the 1960s, provided a strong motive and moral impetus for rejecting any sort of Revisionist treatment of WWII. The Holocaust narrative is the reason WWII Revisionism has been delayed for so long.

The Holocaust narrative was not dominant in the UK in the 1960's (as I have pointed out elsewhere on the Motte, it couldn't dominate in the countries that suffered most from WW2 until the survivors of Hitler's main crime - namely aggressive war - were no longer with us) and didn't figure in the debates over Origins. Google books gives the following word counts from the original edition of the book:

  • Jews: 4
  • Auschwitz: 0
  • Holocaust: 0
  • Gas: 5 (2 of which relate to Mussolini's use of chemical weapons in Abyssinia)

Compared to the discussion of geopolitical themes not relevant to the Holocaust

  • Hossbach: 15
  • Versailles: 56

This is, of course, exactly what you would expect in a book about the origins of WW2, given that the Holocaust was planned and carried out well after the war started.

The debate which Taylor did not come out the winner of was a debate among professional historians about questions amenable to the usual techniques of historical research - most notably "What was the status of the so-called Hossbach memorandum presented to the Nuremberg Tribunal as evidence of a long-term Nazi plan for conquest in Eastern Europe?" AJP Taylor throws a lot of shade at the authenticity of the memorandum, which if definitive would directly refute his argument, but modern researchers with access to archives that were secret in 1961 have been able to validate it. (As with the Downing Street Memo in the lead-up to Iraq, you can still argue about just how definitive the draft minute of a high-level meeting prepared by a relatively junior note-taker actually is)

The point I am trying to make here is that "revisionist" accounts about WW2 and Hitler's political/military strategy have never been suppressed in the way that "revisionist" accounts of Nazi racial policy and the Holocaust are. The evidence for the proposition "WW2 happened because Hitler was a madman bent on world domination by military aggression" and both sides of the debate on it are out in the open, and I can be reasonably confident of the establishment position for roughly the same reasons that I am reasonably confident of the establishment position on the half-life of Pu-239 or the year the dinosaurs died out.

The military history community, of course, doesn't even consider Nazi-sympathetic views revisionist - it prides itself on being able to separate the concepts of "competent/incompetent general" from "fought on the good/evil side". "Rommel was a world-historically great general", "The Wehrmacht was the best military in WW2 and only lost due to weight of numbers", and "Hitler was an effective strategist whose only mistake was overambition" are all just one side of a debate. There is a reason why military history of WW2 is a gateway drug to the higher-IQ forms of Holocaust denialism and such-like. (See David Irving)

The Holocaust Narrative was not dominant in the 1960s, I said that was when the Holocaust Narrative essentially began in its current form. Yes Origins hardly touches the topic and doesn't mention gas chambers at all. It doesn't really do you any favors though to point out that the Holocaust narrative as such really emerged decades after the war in full form. Usually a historical event is most salient in the public consciousness in the immediate aftermath of the event and fades over time. It's the complete opposite with the Holocaust, in which it was basically ignored for decades and didn't peak in the public consciousness until the 1990s at the earliest, although I would argue it is at its peak right now.

Origins doesn't touch the Holocaust, neither does Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe or Churchill's Second World War totaling 4,448 pages, neither does de Gaulle's three volume Mémoires de guerre, none of them mention gas chambers a single time or anything resembling the prevailing Holocaust narrative. It's a very stark omission, which the mainstream explains away as- they just didn't care enough about Jews enough to mention it.

The fact that WWII Revisionism emerged before the Holocaust narrative in its current form proliferated, and then has been fanatically suppressed ever since the Holocaust narrative has become the holy center of western mythology points to a relationship between the two.

most notably "What was the status of the so-called Hossbach memorandum presented to the Nuremberg Tribunal as evidence of a long-term Nazi plan for conquest in Eastern Europe?" AJP Taylor throws a lot of shade at the authenticity of the memorandum, which if definitive would directly refute his argument

How many various Israeli memorandum have been produced with various proposals and plans in the past 2 years? The mainstream relies on an extremely illogical overemphasis on memos like that. A non-reviewed memo written from memory by an attendee 5 days after a single meeting 1937- how likely is that to be a realistic blueprint ground-truth plan for geopolitical policy in 1940? Various memos have been leaked from the Israeli camp with plans for Gaza, it would be like picking a memo from a single meeting and saying the Israelis absolutely plan to do this 3 years from now. The situation changes, the idea that memo sinks the Revisionist case for WWII is wishful thinking.

The mainstream constantly ignores these kinds of rhetoric and memos coming from Israeli leaders, but then treats a memo from a single meeting in 1937 as a be-all-end-all plan. The memo also validates that Germany did not want war with Great Britain and France, which would validate an important Revisionist position.

The military history community, of course, doesn't even consider Nazi-sympathetic views revisionist - it prides itself on being able to separate the concepts of "competent/incompetent general" from "fought on the good/evil side".

This is true but they still ban Holocaust Revisionism, at least on places like Axis History Forum. It's understandable, they don't want their intellectual curiosity in the Axis powers conflated with antisemitism so they police their own community vigorously on that question as far as I can tell. But outside the military forums any sort of Revisionist treatment of the Axis powers or WWII is scandalizing, as you can see from the various reactions of WWII Revisionism being platformed on Tucker Carlson and soon to be on Joe Rogan. Sure the military history community will ponder a question like "What if Britain had remained neutral in the German-Soviet war?" but the powers that be will be apoplectic to hear that question platformed seriously on Rogan.

Is this the turning point for WW2 revisionism entering the mainstream?

No. WWII revisionism is a thing that is associated with, and will be associated with, weirdos in the popular consciousness. The average person doesn't want to think about the moral valence beyond 'USA #1 Pearl Harbor then we found out what the Nazis were up to'. In the American consciousness WWII was a just war that justifies the American place in the world. For the conservative it's only natural that America has the right to intervene around the globe because WWII proved America was morally exceptional due to its principles and values being better than the rest of the world, and this is the reason why assimilation of immigrants is so important- the American way is a moral exemplar to the world that cannot be compromised and it goes with truth and justice for a reason. Like America has the right to go first because of this. I was taught that countries which refused to recognize American preeminence- at the time this would have referred to Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, North Korea, but today it'd be Russia, China, Iran, Palestine, etc- would inevitably commit atrocities like Germany and Japan did in WWII. Evidence for this thesis is, um, not hard to come by. And the importance of American preeminence justifies America first in the minds of normiecons.

I think it's self explanatory why liberals won't push WWII revisionism.

I had no idea who Ian Carroll was and was going to skip this episode, but the top comment was "Ian Carroll is not suicidal" and I knew I was in for a good time. I think they barely exchanged names before they launched into conspiracies and alternate perspectives on history.

IMHO, Ian Carroll is the definitive consequence of a young man growing up effectively historically illiterate, "having to teach [himself] all this in the last two years", and growing up in the era of mass government censorship and lies (Russiagate, COVID, climate alarmism, etc). The conspiracy theorist have been right about nearly every major event for the last 10 years, so the desire to look into the past and run up the score is overwhelming.

Which is not even to say Ian Carroll is enormously misinformed. He brought up CIA coups to protect US commercial interest (Banana Republics) like that was something shocking Joe might not know about. He focused a lot on the Dulles Brothers and the founding of the CIA. To him, there is a very blurry line between organized crime and the state, and he harps on the Mafia controlling dockyards in WWII a lot. I don't know this to be true, but it wouldn't shock me at all.

For the people complaining that saying Epstein might have been a Mossad honeypot operation is antisemetic, I'm just wondering where they've been the last several years. Literally everyone of any public profile has publicly wondered that, and not without merit. In fact, I think the political winds will only have to change a very little bit before Zionist are bragging about it with the same zeal they brag about the pager bombings, or other famous intelligence operations from their past. Assuming they were actually involved.

That aside, knowing nothing else about Ian Carroll, even listening to him on Joe Rogan I suspected he was hiding his power level a bit. He threw out a few things like "Nasa fakes space footage all the time" that he dropped pretty quickly with Joe asked some pointed questions. I think he is largely a casualty of growing up in an education system that has turned history into proselytizing diversity versus any understanding of the timeline of human development, and the last 10 years of the government and all the intelligence services telling naked, obvious lies that are revealed in near real time. When you grow up being told shameless lies by every authority figure in your life, you'll be left with zero foundation to resist the lure conspiracy theories which, lets face it, are just fucking fun.

It's one thing to know statistically people are doing pedophile shit in other countries or at home without being noticed by police. It's another to know a prominent guy is doing it for years and inviting the famous and powerful to participate. He did it for years before getting caught the first time, then he got a slap on the wrist. Then he did it for more years, got caught, then got killed before he could say who else was involved. That's where the zeal comes from.

I had no idea who Ian Carroll was

Someone with 1,2 M Xitter followers is not exactly nobody.

Here is his Xitter and his Youtube channel

I get that some people just hate Russia, but what exactly is the hawks’ plan?

This feels like a real straw man.

Now, I am sure that there are still some cold war hawks who might be described as "hating Russia", but even they might just see Russia as an opponent in a zero-or-negative-sum game. Europe generally was fine with Russia. What I am not fine with, however, are wars of conquest. From a utilitarian perspective, we should try to prevent these wars, and the best way to prevent them is to support the victims so that a quick blitz is turned into a humiliating defeat. When this is not available, turned them into years of a costly and embarrassing meat grinder -- while having lower utility -- also serves to dissuade further wars of conquest.

If Russia was brought to the point of having to evacuate Crimea & Novorossiya, it would mean an existential political crisis & possible state collapse, the consequences of which would be incalculable.

Geographic note: I just checked on a map, and it seems that the Kremlin is not actually located on Crimea, but in Moscow, which is a bit further away.

Remember when the US pulled out of Vietnam, and this lead to a total collapse of their country? Roving bands of former US marines would try pillage Canadian and Mexican border villages, Kansas declared itself an absolute monarchy, missile bases would just launch their ICBM payloads against whatever cities their commanders personally disliked most, Stalinists took over most communal councils and fought the class war using zoning?

Of course, nothing of that sort happened.

If Ukraine retakes Crimea, which seems very unlikely, then most of the probability mass is probably not on them slaughtering every last able-bodied man in Russia on their path there, followed by killing Putin as he personally tries to hold Crimea. Instead, the hypothetical path to victory would be for political pressure to mount on Putin as more and more Russian citizens are killed, finally resulting in Putin withdrawing. (Slightly more realistically, his forces would withdraw to Crimea and perhaps a tiny slice of what used to be Ukraine, and Ukraine would be persuaded to accept the new borders.)

Sure, a loss of the war -- especially after this much bloodshed -- would also be a political loss for Putin, and it is uncertain if he would survive it. But from what I can tell, the key stakeholders -- his oligarchs -- are in it for having a carefree life of embezzling money, not for Making Russia Great Again. Likely, they let him slaughter his troops because they have a good thing going and don't really care too much either way, not because they believe that it is instrumental that Russia controls Kiev.

Even if they decide to get rid of him, they would likely just put on of their numbers in charge. The probability that some doomsday cult running on a platform of nuclear Armageddon will end up in charge of Russia seems tiny indeed.

Remember when the US pulled out of Vietnam, and this lead to a total collapse of their country?

Ukraine is not Vietnam to Russia. They really, really care about what goes on in Ukraine and will expend vast efforts there, not least because there are a large number of Russians living in Ukraine. Most of the country speaks Russian. The commander in chief of the Ukrainian army, Syrski, is an ethnic Russian who was trained in Moscow Higher Military Command School, his whole family is Russian. This war is halfway between a civil war and an interstate war, despite what the media would like us to believe.

There are serious risks of nuclear use if the Ukrainians somehow threatened to seriously defeat the Russian army, which they have shown little sign of being capable of. The nominal Western strategy is to achieve this though, the 2023 counteroffensive was supposed to do this IIRC. Our strategy is incoherent, there is no clear path to victory.

Russian oligarchs are not profiting from this war. Oligarchs would like to trade with the West, party in the South of France or launder money offshore. Vlad in the armaments factory and textile mill is the one profiting from this war, Ivan living in the formerly-decrepit Urals industrial town that's now a booming part of the war economy is seeing his income rise. The political losers from this war are the English-fluent laptop class who've had many of their foreign assets and IT jobs frozen, many have fled Russia for Turkey or Argentina. The most pro-Western elements in Russia have been politically euthanized while the less-educated patriots are getting more prestige and wealth. Putin is relatively moderate by the standards of Russian leadership, Medvedev is constantly making radical hyperbolic threats and statements online. Other academics have called for a demonstration strike on Poland.

I foresee many nasty surprises waiting for us as this war progresses, it should not be considered in this casual way. It does have a material effect on all of us via energy prices if nothing else.

If Ivan is dead, then who is making more shells and drones than the US or Europe?

The Russian draftees aren't the primary troops on the front they mostly do rear-area work. Russia has been pumping up soldier's wages looking for volunteers on the front. Ukraine is the side reliant on draftees to hold the line because they have more casualties and less manpower. Which is exactly what we'd expect in a war between a big country and a small country.

Those who could fled the country

"Laptop class" from big cities with passports and money, and large numbers of them since then returned, when they were less than welcomed in the West and their cash ran out. Thank NAFO types, well done.

I’m sorry, but the discourse about Russia I’ve seen both online and IRL since the very early days of the war (and even some before the invasion began) has gone far past “supporting Ukraine for utilitarian reasons.” I frequent several subreddits dedicated to architecture and classical music, and any time a Russian building is posted — even if it was built hundreds of years before this war — or any time there’s discussion of the great Russian composers, there’s a very loud contingent of people either saying that Russia has no great culture, or else expressing disgust that anyone would post anything that paints any aspect of Russia in a good light.

Speaking of classical music, a year and a half ago I attended the San Diego Symphony’s annual Tchaikovsky Spectacular, which always concludes with the 1812 Overture. When I arrived, I was handed a program with an insert informing me that the orchestra had decided — and not informed its patrons until we arrived at the venue — to omit the 1812 Overture and to perform a music lesser-known (and inferior, although still good) piece by Tchaikovsky because “we feel that it is inappropriate to perform a piece of music that glorifies a Russian military victory, while there are Ukrainians dying every day defending their country from this indefensible invasion.” What the fuck does Tchaikovsky have to do with Putin’s invasion? The overture in question was written to celebrate Russia’s army repelling an invading army! It honors a battle that took place two centuries ago!

What, other than a jingoistic, atavistic, propagandistic hatred of Russia would motivate a decision like this? It’s disconnected from reality and causality. It doesn’t even attempt to provide a consequentialist or utilitarian reason why we have to disfavor aspects of historical Russian culture which were nigh-universally beloved before the current war began? It’s very clear that places like Reddit have decided that since the current fifth-generation warfare paradigm involves psyops, propaganda, and control of social-media messaging, it’s imperative to impose a blanket policy of negativity toward anything Russian or Russia-adjacent in order to aid (in whatever way possible, even if it has no basis in reality) Ukrainian morale and international standing. This goes way beyond just wanting to punish and degrade Russia’s military.

About a year ago I had to take Boney M's excellent Moskau off my playlist after a guy started shouting about Russia and how disgusting it was to support them.

It's a two-way minute hate.

Wait… “Moskau” is by Dschinghis Khan. “Rasputin” is by Boney M. Fake fan!!!

No! My precious seventies music cred! Oh what a woe!

Here’s one from less than two weeks ago, although at less now there are people pushing back on it, in a way that they wouldn’t have a year ago.

I said that there is a very loud contingent, not that they represent a majority. (And to be clear, they were much louder and more active a year ago than they are now.)

Your link is broken.

That's a nooreddit link. Remove the "old." part, which may have been automatically added by the site the same way it used to auto-convert Twitter to nitter.

/images/17415759880784261.webp

It works fine for me…

I cannot get the link to work. I'm expecting something formatted like

https://old.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturalRevival/comments/1j7iko2/old_louisville_kentucky_a_leafy_1870s/

I'm seeing

https://old.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturalRevival/s/2Ax2KXHCWr

which takes me to a submission page. Guessing that the "s" is for submission, I hand edit the "s" to "comments"

https://old.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturalRevival/comments/2Ax2KXHCWr

but that just gets me "PAGE NOT FOUND"

I think I've solved the mystery of why the right never makes much headway with Jewish voters.

Christian countries actively ignore it and really couldn’t care less

I hazard the 'Christian' countries he is talking about are actually secular nations that merely happen to have large populations of nominally Christian residents.

I think I've solved the mystery of why the right never makes much headway with Jewish voters.

It's because the Right doesn't kowtow to Jews enough right? BTW here's Senator Rick Scott discussing Daylight Saving Time in a brief video, he would probably make more headway with Jewish voters if he made the Israeli flag in his office bigger.

France does justify at least some of its foreign intervention by protecting Christians, but also the Syrian massacres of Christians came as a surprise to everyone, and there's nothing any country could have realistically done to prevent it.

Whether it's happening or not, informed people woke up on Saturday morning not expecting it to be happening, which was my actual point.

the Syrian massacres of Christians came as a surprise to everyone

I don't really think this is true, if you're referring to very recent events. I don't follow Syria very closely but there were people screaming about how they were being run by Literal Team al-Qaeda shortly after Syria fell, so I wasn't particularly surprised to wake up and see that Syrian Christians were being massacred.

They seemed to be making nice with Christians up until yesterday. I'm guessing that state control over the fighters is weaker than we expect and the order was actually to butcher Alawites(which would have surprised no one).

In general you definitely can square Islamic law with treating Christians well and it really looked like the Syrian regime wanted to do so prior to yesterday.

Yes, this all tracks. I guess I package in "weak state control" as part of my default mental model of a failed state now run by Islamists.

Yeah, I think that part shouldn't surprise anybody, and specifically I'm wondering if these Islamist troops were given permission to pillage as recompense for not getting paid. It's inevitable that a wealthy local minority would get targeted in that scenario, even if they were technically supposed to be going after a different minority, and the original reports were soldiers breaking into and ransacking Christian homes.

This, sadly, makes sense.

I agree that this a criticism of Christianity, but I think it applies to virtually every faith except Judaism, because Judaism is uniquely oriented around perceived familial ties and extrajudicial nationhood. Muslims haven’t always defended other Muslims, they have routinely warred against each other. Buddhists didn’t always defend Buddhists. Sikhs would likely defend to such a degree, but again, that’s because it naturally construes itself as its own nation. This is one of the drawbacks of a purely spiritual religion that isn’t concerned with genetic ties.

I have a different thought. I think it’s because people have misunderstood “turn the other cheek” to mean “be a doormat”. There were plenty of times in Christian history in which Christians would have absolutely gone to war to defend themselves or other Christians. I see it as us being victims of our own success — we haven’t (at least in Europe) been persecuted seriously in the last 500 years, so we have adopted a “just be nice” approach that others (particularly the Jews) have been persecuted out of. Jews know what happens when they ignore persecuted Jews.

This is one of the drawbacks of a purely spiritual religion that isn’t concerned with genetic ties.

This is drawback of being world religion with billions of adherents. If you really tried to "defend" every persecuted Christian everywhere, you would find yourself in perpetual Iraq style quagmires all over the world (which would be rather suboptimal situation even for world's first super power).

how evacuating Crimea results in Russia collapsing.

Losing Crimea implies total destruction of Russian army as organized force, and this definitely means, if not Russia collapsing, Putin's system collapsing, with unpleasant results for Putin (and his friends who fail to swith sides early enough).

What, in this scenario, comes after Putin is debatable.

Crimea is lost if Ukraine controls the land access via Kherson and Melitopol and enough of the coast to be able to shell the Azov bridge. That is definitely achievable through a local rout or successful encirclement maneuver that leaves the Russian army in Russia proper and in the Donbass intact. I don't know if Putin survives that outcome.

If there was a large Jewish community being slaughtered in Syria, Israel would defend them militarily and they’d be right to do it. Christians get slaughtered anywhere in the world and Christian countries actively ignore it and really couldn’t care less. Why would people want to join a faith whose followers can’t be bothered to stand up for each other?

There was large Jewish community in Syria.

It left, mostly to Israel. Israel is defending persecuted Jews by giving them asylum.

By analogy, does Tucker Carlson supports open borders for Christians? Does he advocate that any Christian in the world should be let into United States?

I'm not Tucker Carlson, but I'd be open to accepting Christian refugees from Syria. We are overburdened with clearly false claims of asylum along the lines of "there are gangs in my South American country, so I trecked through a variety of countries until I reached the US, I will now live here forever". Getting some actual refugees fleeing ethnic and religious genocide would be a refreshing change.

There are extremely few Joe Sixpacks in the US, even among the otherwise immigration skeptical, who don't think that Middle Eastern Christians should be allowed to move here, although some would definitely clarify that they don't know how you'd weed out Muslims pretending to be Christian for nefarious purposes. It really wouldn't surprise me if Tucker held the same view.

although some would definitely clarify that they don't know how you'd weed out Muslims pretending to be Christian for nefarious purposes.

I would say “you don’t have to tell me what happened, but you do have to drink this” as I hand them a bowl of vodka.

This might run into some issues: Islam has exceptions for doing forbidden things in times of necessity, so you'd just be selecting for anyone who is non-Muslim or is Muslim but believes strongly enough that coming to America is vitally important. There's probably some heavy overlap with "would pretend to be a different religion" in the first place.

There are extremely few Joe Sixpacks in the US, even among the otherwise immigration skeptical, who don't think that Middle Eastern Christians should be allowed to move here

This thread originated with claim that "Christians are the most persecuted group in the world", not only Middle East.

Would be Joe Sixpack happy with new Latino, African, Indian and Chinese Christian neighbors? According to web page cited elsewhere in this thread, number of persecuted Christians in the world is about 380 million (and it will vastly increase when it becomes known that being persecuted Christian is a guaranteed ticket to the land of freedom).

weed out Muslims pretending to be Christian for nefarious purposes.

Nothing "nefarious" in trying to escape dirt poor and war ravaged place, and how would you indeed find out, of millions of asylum claimants, whose faith in Christ is genuine? Bible knowledge tests? Polygraph examinations? Brain scans?

Christians are the most persecuted group in the world. Their plight is almost entirely ignored by corporate media.

This is certainly true if you count by volume. It seems likely to me that Jews may be more persecuted as a percentage of all Jews, because there are very few Jews and billions of Christians. According to the non-profits who care about this sort of thing, 380 million Christians live in countries that have high levels of persecution and discrimination towards Christians.

Listing Mexico and Colombia as places where Christians are persecuted seems like they're using a tendentious definition of 'persecution'.

If you click on the individual country they explain their reasoning. Here was the reasoning for listing Mexico:

Although the majority of Mexico's population is Christian, many believers live in danger of persecution, particularly from criminal gangs, drug cartels and indigenous groups. In many parts of the country, the presence of criminal groups is growing. Christians who bravely speak out against their activities, or who are involved in community work or evangelism (especially with youth, drug addicts and migrants) are deemed a threat. That makes them a target. In some cases, Christian children or the children of church leaders are singled out.

In some Indigenous communities, those who decide to leave ancestral and traditional beliefs to follow Jesus face ostracism, fines, incarceration and forced displacement. Given that indigenous leaders are those who administer justice in such areas, believers have no one to turn to to investigate wrongdoing and protect their religious freedom. These families can also face harassment from the community, such as property damage, restriction of access to schools for their children, and threats.

A non-religious Mexican is equally vulnerable to gangs and cartels. They don't quiz you on Bible knowledge and statements of faith before cutting your head off. They don't target Christians. I'm calling BS.

A bleeding heart would switch the framing in the indigenous Mexicans. They are the oppressed minority. They are also almost all Christian. Google says 78% Catholic and 10% protestant. Almost exactly the same as the general population of Mexico.

This is starting to remind me of the "trans murder epidemic" in the sense that the most salient cases are people murdered for reasons totally unrelated to being trans and there may not even be an epidemic anyway.

I did click through. I was underwhelmed. 'Persecution' implies some sort of specific targeting on account of religion. Christian gangsters going after Christian community leaders for reasons orthogonal to religious identity sounds more like Mexico has a crime problem than a religious persecution problem. Mexico is an overwhelmingly Christian society with relatively high rates of religious involvement in communities

I confess to being skeptical of the claims about indigenous communities. Most of these indigenous communities are already Christian (albeit a form of Christianity that would look pretty weird to American Protestants), and looking at their own report it looks mostly like sectarian friction in rural communities.

--

The point of all this being that I think they are being sufficiently smudgy with their representation of facts in areas I have some knowledge of to make me question their reliability elsewhere.

Sectarian persecution is, under a liberal epistemology, certainly religious persecution.

I would object to describing the situation as “Christian gangsters going after Christian community leaders”. I don’t think anyone can rightfully complain “No True Scotsman” if I say that the vicious killers of the cartels, who murder pastors because they help addicts recover, are not Christian.

If you think their standards are too loose, fine, but is there any doubt that millions of Christian’s are currently being persecuted? If not in Mexico or Columbia than certainly in China, North Korea, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, and other countries that enforce laws against Christian religious practice.

I am once again obliged to note that despite direct, unambiguous textual pacifism, Christianity was the faith of choice for a continent full of warrior-aristocrats who, in between constantly fighting each other, would make an effort to prove their faith by going halfway around the world to fight other people. These Christian warriors routinely behaved appallingly, not only to heathens but to their fellow Christians (and this is before we touch on a number of incredibly savage sectarian wars). On more than one occasion they would literally make war on the Pope.

So yeah, I don't have a problem saying that it is entirely within a reasonable understanding of Christianity that a gangster who murders a priest can still be a Christian. It is not the only face of Christianity by a long shot, but it is certainly one of them, and one with a long history.

is there any doubt that millions of Christian’s are currently being persecuted?

I think the claim that Christianity is uniquely persecuted and demands special attention above and beyond other religions is questionable at best. The argument is not helped when there seems to be substantial misrepresentation going on - namely that the vast majority of 'persecuted' are Christians living in Christian-dominated countries that happen to be shitty places live.

To be perfectly ungenerous, my experience with people bringing up the claim is that they are usually not actually interested in intrareligious humanitarianism*; they are simply grievance-mongering and reinforcing a siege mentality amongst American Christians. How does Darryl Cooper feel about admitting tens of millions of Christian refugees from the Middle East/Africa or Latin America or China into the United States? Or, alternatively, vast amounts of humanitarian aid to those same regions? I have a weird feeling I'm significantly more in favor either of those than he is.

*to be fair to Open Doors, I don't think they are doing this, but they also have the receipts that people like Carlson or Cooper or Walsh do not.

I don’t think anyone can rightfully complain “No True Scotsman” if I say that the vicious killers of the cartels, who murder pastors because they help addicts recover, are not Christian.

The conquistadores were Christian. Tomas de Torquemada was Christian. The Mafia families were (and are) Christian. So, yes, I think people can rightfully complain "No True Scotsman". The cartels may indeed be persecuting particular Christians, but not because of religion.

The Mafia tick the "Christian" box on the census, but most accounts of the initiation ceremony where you become a "made man" say that it is explicitly blasphemous. So the Mafia being fake Christians is a much easier case than some of the others in this list.

Tomas de Torquemada did, in fact, persecute due to religion.

I was familiar with Ian from X and I actually bought into smears on him and muted him. Then he pops up on Rogan, I listen to the whole thing, and it turns out he’s completely reasonable. He makes the appropriate caveats that he’s not taking about all Jews, just the documented facts about some Mega group of influential Jews working together to advance Jewish interests. He makes the point that it’s completely reasonable for them to do this, assuming they’re not doing anything illegal. He also makes the distinction that when he talks about Israel or CIA or other groups doing something, he’s not saying that literally all people in the org are doing it. Rather it’s groups within those orgs. Again. Sounds reasonable.

I’d also add, that I think everyone should listen to that episode to get a broad tour of what a reasonable “conspiracy theorist” take is in 2025.

Maybe he did a good job adding disclaimers that not all Jews are responsible for the frequently* bizarre conspiracies he believes Israel perpetrated, but I can't fathom that being sufficient to consider him "completely reasonable"-sounding. For example, here (https://x.com/BoltzmannBooty/status/1897814978482073603) he talks about how it's plausible that NASA is producing fake footage from inside the International Space Station to cover up the fact that there are aliens up there, and also the aliens might in fact be demons, or maybe it's the other way around. I would say this is an obvious mark of a highly fantasy-prone thinker who is unable to think critically or unwilling to rule any fun-sounding theory out.

* I don't think Epstein having ties to Israeli intelligence is that bizarre of a conspiracy, but all the Israel-did-9/11 stuff he pushes is extremely stupid and low-quality even relative to other such conspiracy theorists.

I’d recommend listening yourself. Many people are getting a read out second and third hand. He really didn’t criticize Israel at all. He was fairly pro Israel and Zionist actually. He just notices that Epstein likely was working for elements within Israel - and that’s why we’ll never get the full story.

Why wouldn't we get the full story if the 'elements' are within Israel? I think some people might understand that sort of a cut off as a dark hint. Especially considering how outspoken Ian Carrolls is on the subject of Israeli influence in the US.

I suppose it’s just my bias that the media and elements of our government would bury anything that makes Israel look bad.

Claude AI playing Pokemon shows AGI is still a long ways off

(Read this on Substack for some funny pictures)

Evaluating AI is hard. One of the big goals of AI is to create something that could functionally act like a human -- this is commonly known as “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI). The problem with testing AI’s is that their intelligence is often “spiky”, i.e. it’s really good in some areas but really bad in others, so any single test is likely to be woefully inadequate. Computers have always been very good at math, and even something as simple as a calculator could easily trounce humans when it comes to doing simple arithmetic. This has been true for decades if not over a century. But calculators obviously aren’t AGI. They can do one thing at a superhuman level, but are useless for practically anything else.

LLMs like chatGPT and Claude are more like calculators than AI hype-meisters would like to let on. When they burst onto the scene in late 2022, they certainly seemed impressively general. You could ask them a question on almost any topic, and they’d usually give a coherent answer so long as you excused the occasional hallucinations. They also performed quite well on human measurements of intelligence, such as college level exams, the SAT, and IQ tests.. If LLMs could do well on the definitive tests of human intelligence, then certainly AGI was only months or even weeks away, right? The problem is that LLMs are still missing quite a lot of things that would make them practically useful for most tasks. In the words of Microsoft’s CEO, they’re “generating basically no value”. There’s some controversy over whether the relative lack of current applications is a short-term problem that will be solved soon, or if it’s indicative of larger issues. Claude’s performance playing Pokemon Red points quite heavily toward the latter explanation.

First, the glass-half-full view: The ability for Claude to play Pokemon at all is highly impressive at baseline. If we were just looking for any computer algorithm to play games, then TAS speedruns have existed for a while, but that would be missing the point. While AI playing a children’s video game isn’t exactly Kasparov vs Deep Blue, the fact it’s built off of something as general as an LLM is remarkable. It has rudimentary vision to see the screen and respond to events that occur as they come into the field of view. It interacts with the game through a bespoke button-entering system built by the developer. It interprets a coordinate system to plan to move to different squares on the screen. It accomplishes basic tasks like battling and rudimentary navigation in ways that are vastly superior to random noise. It’s much better than monkeys randomly plugging away at typewriters. This diagram by the dev shows how it works

I have a few critiques that likely aren’t possible for a single developer, but would still be good to keep in mind when/if capabilities improve. The goal should be to play the game like a player would, so it shouldn’t be able to read directly from the RAM, and instead it should only rely on what it can see on the screen. It also shouldn’t need to have a bespoke button-entering system designed at all and should instead do this using something like ChatGPT’s Operator. There should be absolutely no game-specific hints given, and ideally its training data wouldn’t have Pokemon Red (or even anything Pokemon-related) included. That said, though, this current iteration is still a major step forward.

Oh God it’s so bad

Now the glass-half-empty view: It sucks. It’s decent enough at the battles which have very few degrees of freedom, but it’s enormously buffoonish at nearly everything else. There’s an absurdist comedy element to the uncanny valley AI that’s good enough to seem like it’s almost playing the game as a human would, but bad enough that it seems like it’s severely psychotic and nonsensical in ways similar to early LLMs writing goofy Harry Potter fanfiction. Some of the best moments include it erroneously thinking it was stuck and writing a letter to Anthropic employees demanding they reset the game, to developing an innovative new tactic for faster navigation called the “blackout strategy” where it tries to commit suicide as quickly as possible to reset to the most recently visited Pokemon center… and then repeating this in the same spot over and over again. This insanity also infects its moment-to-moment thinking, from hallucinating that any rock could be a Geodude in disguise (pictured at the top of this article), to thinking it could judge a Jigglypuff’s level solely by its girth.

All these attempts are streamed on Twitch, and they could make for hilarious viewing if it wasn’t so gosh darn slow. There’s a big lag in between its actions as the agent does each round of thinking. Something as simple as running from a random encounter, which would take a human no more than a few seconds, can last up to a full minute as Claude slowly thinks about pressing ‘A’ for the introductory text “A wild Zubat has appeared!”, then thinks again about moving its cursor to the right, then thinks again about moving its cursor down, and then thinks one last time about pressing ‘A’ again to run from the battle. Even in the best of times, everything is covered in molasses. The most likely reaction anyone would have to watching this would likely be boredom after the novelty wears off in a few minutes. As such, the best way to “watch” this insanity is on a second monitor, or to just hear the good parts second-hand from people who watched it themselves.

Is there an AI that can watch dozens of hours of boring footage and only pick out the funny parts?

By far the worst aspect, though, is Claude’s inability to navigate. It gets trapped in loops very easily, and is needlessly distracted by any objects it sees. The worst example of this so far has been its time in Mount Moon, which is a fairly (though not entirely) straightforward level that most kids probably beat in 15-30 minutes. Claude got trapped there for literal days, with its typical loop being going down a ladder, wandering around a bit, finding the ladder again, going back up the ladder, wandering around a bit, finding the ladder, going back down again, repeat. It’s like watching a sitcom of a man with a 7 second memory.

There’s supposed to be a second AI (Critique Claude) to help evaluate actions from time to time, but it’s mostly useless since LLMs are inherently yes-men, so when he's talking to the very deluded and hyperfixated main Claude he just goes with it. Even when he disagrees, main Claude acts like a belligerent drunk and simply ignores him.

In the latest iteration, the dev created a tool for storing long-term memories. I’m guessing the hope was that Claude would write down that certain ladders were dead-ends and thus should be ignored, which would have gone a long way towards fixing the navigation issues. However, it appears to have backfired: while Claude does indeed record some information about dead-ends, he has a tendency to delete those entries fairly quickly which renders them pointless. Worse, it seems to have made Claude remember that his “blackout strategy” “succeeded” in getting out of Mount Moon, prompting it to double, triple, and quadruple down on it. I’m sure there’s some dark metaphor in the development of long-term memory leading to Claude chaining suicides.

What does this mean for AGI predictions?

Watching this trainwreck has been one of the most lucid negative advertisements for LLMs I’ve seen. A lot of the perceptions about when AGI might arrive are based on the vibes people get by watching what AI can do. LLMs can seem genuinely godlike when they spin up a full stack web app in <15 seconds, but the vibes come crashing back down to Earth when people see Claude bumbling around in circles for days in a simplistic video game made for children.

The “strawberry” test had been a frequent concern for early LLMs that often claimed the word only contained 2 R’s. The problem has been mostly fixed by now, but there’s questions to be asked in how this was done. Was it resolved by LLMs genuinely becoming smarter, or did the people making LLMs cheat a bit by hardcoding special logic for these types of questions. If it’s the latter, then problems would tend to arise when the AI encounters the issue in a novel format, as Gary Marcus recently showed. But of course, the obvious followup question is “does this matter”? So what if LLMs can’t do the extremely specific task of counting letters if they can do almost everything else? It might be indicative of some greater issue… or it might not.

But it’s a lot harder to doubt that game playing is an irrelevant metric. Pokemon Red is a pretty generous test for many reasons: There’s no punishment for long delays between actions. It’s a children’s game, so it’s not very hard. The creator is using a mod for coloring to make it easier to see (this is why Jigglypuff’s eyes look a bit screwy in the picture above). Yet despite all this, Claude still sucks. If it can’t even play a basic game, how could anyone expect LLMs to do regular office work, for, say, $20,000 a month? The long-term memory and planning just isn’t there yet, and that’s not exactly a trivial problem to solve.

It’s possible that Claude will beat pokemon this year, probably through some combination of brute-force and overfitting knowledge to the game at hand. However, I find it fairly unlikely (<50% chance) that by the end of 2025 there will be an AI that exists that can 1) be able to play Pokemon at the level of a human child, i.e. beat the game, able to do basic navigation, not have tons of lag in between trivial actions, and 2) be genuinely general (putting the G in AGI) and not just overfit to Pokemon, with evidence coming from being able to achieve similar results in similar games like Fire Emblem, Dragon Quest, early Final Fantasy titles, or whatever else.

LLMs are pretty good right now at a narrow slice of tasks, but they’re missing a big chunk of the human brain that would allow them to accomplish most tasks. Perhaps this can be remedied through additional “scaffolding”, and I expect “scaffolding” of various types to be a big part of what gives AI more mainstream appeal over the next few years (think stuff like Deep Research). Perhaps scaffolding alone is insufficient and we need a much bigger breakthrough to make AI reasonably agentic. In any case, there will probably be a generic game-playing AI at some point in the next decade… just don’t expect it to be done by the end of the year. This is the type of thing that will take some time to play out.

From the context, it seems that Claude was not really trained (in the NN sense) to play Pokemon.

Deployed LLMs are limited by the length of their context window. Moreover, they have been trained to generate text, not to be especially good at being mesa-trainable at deployment time.

It is a bit like complaining that a chip which was designed to decode MP3 makes a terrible FPGA.

After seeing that the chip in question is also good at finding large primes, encoding video, and translating text.

Like on the one hand "play pokemon" isn't something Claude was particularly trained on, but then neither was "explain the steps of the Krebs Cycle in iambic pentameter". It's interesting to see the ways LLM capabilities are spiky (or, as I halfway suspect, how LLM abilities are smooth and human ones are spiky)

From the context, it seems that Claude was not really trained (in the NN sense) to play Pokemon.

I've seen this defense a lot but IMO it holds no water. The whole point of an AGI would be that you don't have to train it for specific tasks. The G stands for "general", after all. If you have to train it specially to play Pokemon, then it fails the test.

I have no idea why people think it would even be valuable to train a model to play Pokemon. We have had purpose-built computer programs playing games like chess, go, and even Starcraft for decades now. Doing that with Pokemon is obviously achievable, but it also isn't impressive.

I've seen this defense a lot but IMO it holds no water. The whole point of an AGI would be that you don't have to train it for specific tasks. The G stands for "general", after all. If you have to train it specially to play Pokemon, then it fails the test.

You can't get two people to agree to a definition of AGI until one of them is dead, but even so, I find this not a particularly useful framework.

Why does it matter if it needs training to do a task? Isn't it far more important that it can do the task?

Are humans not general intelligences because we require "training" on many broad cognitive tasks? Does going to school, college or uni remove generality?

What if the task an AI is trained on is a broad one, such as the ability to take agentic actions in a real environment on the basis of instruction?

I'm far more interested in the ability of a model to do a broad range of actions, rather than how they got there. I bet that Claude would be capable of writing up a ML setup that would train a smaller model to play Pokémon. If it can then call it, it can then play Pokémon. The former is far more interesting and general an ability, even if Claude was trained on code.

Why does it matter if it needs training to do a task? Isn't it far more important that it can do the task?

Because, as I said, we already have specialized programs which can play games. Therefore it's not actually new or impressive if we have yet another specialized program which can play a game.

Are humans not general intelligences because we require "training" on many broad cognitive tasks? Does going to school, college or uni remove generality?

There's an important difference here though. Humans don't, in principle, require training. You could (and we have in the past!) discover all the things that university teaches on your own. Getting training is about reducing the time it takes for the human to learn those things, not because a human is unable to even do them on its own.

That obviously goes even more for something like playing Pokemon, which is something small children are capable of learning to play on their own without anyone giving them instructions. If something needs training to do that, it's less intelligent than a human so it isn't a breakthrough in the search for AGI. We don't care about AI playing Pokemon per se, but it is a good benchmark for "can it do things which a human can do on its own easily".

However, I find it fairly unlikely (<50% chance) that by the end of 2025 there will be an AI that exists that can 1) be able to play Pokemon at the level of a human child, i.e. beat the game, able to do basic navigation, not have tons of lag in between trivial actions, and 2) be genuinely general (putting the G in AGI) and not just overfit to Pokemon, with evidence coming from being able to achieve similar results in similar games like Fire Emblem, Dragon Quest, early Final Fantasy titles, or whatever else.

Back in 2020, Google announced MuZero, which could play not only chess and go but also Atari games. It wasn't an LLM, but it was a deep RL system, and I'm pretty confident that it's capable of learning to play Pokemon well past the level of the average child.

LLMs playing Pokemon badly is like managing to teach your dog perfect English and then observing that in the process he picked up mediocre French, despite not being taught it . Would we criticize the dog for that? What's impressive about Claude is that it can kind of play at all, despite it not being trained to.

Now, is there a significant gap between Claude and MuZero? Who knows; MuZero did use (lots of) task-specific training, and maybe with some Claude could match it (not interesting to me; I only care about Pokemon as a test of how well a model can one-shot it). But 3 years ago, transformer-based models were very limited in what they could do compared to today; 3 months ago, they couldn't play Pokemon at all; today, they play Pokemon as badly as a 90 year old grandma with dementia (though badly in a very alien way). I'd be surprised if 3 months from now any LLMs could play Pokemon as well as a child, but I'd be even more surprised if 3 years from now they didn't play flawlessly. And although getting there from here is highly nontrivial, it's also not some vast unknown researchers and engineers have no idea how to approach.

Drawing straight lines on graphs, then zooming off to infinity rarely works well. In 1995 computers could barely play chess. In 1997 they beat the best player in the world. But that was hardly a harbinger of imminent AGI as we now know. AI basically went back in the cupboard for a few decades.

but I'd be even more surprised if 3 years from now they didn't play flawlessly.

This is an interesting timeline. I'm assuming you're talking about general AI playing Pokemon and not just task-specific ones (which can already play it flawlessly, e.g. TAS's) which wouldn't be interesting. I'd say there's a 50-50 chance there's a general AI that can play Pokemon like this in 3 years.

In 1995 computers could barely play chess.

In 1995 computers could kick your ass in chess, unless you are a pretty good player who studied their algorithmic weaknesses -- indeed I'll bet my Vic-20 could kick your ass at chess in 1980. AIUI for a long time their improvements (including things like DeepBlue) were mostly driven by better compute and memory availability -- I guess there's some interesting parallels with neural networks there. But the thing about chess programs is that there's sort of a plateau -- you can only be so good at chess. AI takeoff theory hinges on this not being the case for general intelligence -- which I don't think has been adequately proven.

Would we criticize the dog for that?

Of course we would. Or rather, we'd call people idiots if they claimed dogs were going to evolve Real Soon Now (tm) into superintelligent beings.

LLMs are ok as text predictors. That's also what they are: text predictors. That's what they'll stay as without significant revamp of the entire structure that gives them learning capability.

If the task of taking over the world is harder than playing pokemon, then I suppose that a deployment of the current iteration of Claude will not take over the world (unless it has more reason to get good at taking over the world during training than it has to get good at pokemon).

I think that given recent developments, anyone who is very confident on whether we will have ASI by 2050 is overconfident.

I'm reminded of a joke from the idle incremental game community: 'Ah, I see we've reached 1% of our target. Splendid, almost done!'

Serms like about 2yrs between 'near the bottom of human ability range' and 'clearly exceeding 99th percentile human output in any particular domain, given current levels of investment. So if the definition of AGI is 'can beat the elite four deathless' we're on track for ~2027 as expected.

This reminds me of a joke from CS: "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.".

So if the definition of AGI is 'can beat the elite four deathless' we're on track for ~2027 as expected.

Certainly not! I'd want it to beat Pokemon Red in <40 hours (which is 1.5x the average human time to do so), not merely do it deathless. And I also don't think that'd be enough for AGI -- it's necessary, but not sufficient for it to do stuff like that.

I don't understand people who can see the current state of AI and the trendline and not at least see where things are headed unless we break trend. You guys know a few years ago our state of the art could hardly complete coherent paragraphs right? chain of thought models are literally a couple months old. How could you possibly be this confident we've hit a stumbling block because one developer's somewhat janky implementation has hick ups? And one of the criticism is speed, which is something you can just throw more compute at and scale linearly?

I'm suspicious of these kinds of extrapolation arguments. Advances aren't magic, people have to find and implement them. Sometimes you just hit a wall. So far most of what we've been doing is milking transformers. Which is a great discovery, but I think this playthrough is strong evidence that transformers alone is not enough to make a real general intelligence.

One of the reasons hype is so strong is that these models are optimized to produce plausible, intelligent-sounding bullshit. (That's not to say they aren't useful. Often the best way to bullshit intelligence is to say true things.) If you're used to seeing LLMs perform at small, one-shot tasks and riddles, you might overestimate their intelligence.

You have to interact with a model on a long-form task to see its limitations. Right now, the people who are doing that are largely programmers and /g/ gooners, and those are the most likely people to have realistic appraisals of where we are. But this Pokemon thing is a entertaining way to show the layman how dumb these models can be. It's even better at this, because LLMs tend to stealthily "absorb" intelligence from humans by getting gently steered by hints they leave in their prompts. But this game forces the model to rely on its own output, leading to hilarious ideas like the blackout strategy.

Right now, the people who are doing that are largely programmers and /g/ gooners, and those are the most likely people to have realistic appraisals of where we are.

I am a programmer who uses LLMs every day at work. I'm aware there are limitations but over just the last few years they've become exceptionally good at writing code. It's at the point where I can be reasonably sure that they will always one shot a well described function and frequently and one shot adding functionality to a screen, complex react CRUD stored procedures and backend functionality.

Yes, if you don't keep starting new sessions to keep your context clean it can run into trouble, but even that is getting much better over time. I can't reiterate enough that reasoning models are months, not years old. There is definitely a whole lot more juice to squeeze out of optimizing that. We have some of the smartest people in the world working on new avenues in a practically green field and they're reliably finding new scaling directions. You could make a better argument about the demise of Moore's law than the end of LLM scaling, at least there are plausibly physical limits to moore's law that we don't know it's possible to overcome. We're aware of low energy thinking machines that compete with LLMs. I really think it's in the pessimist's court to show some kind of actual limiting principle.

To put the obvious counterpoint out there, Claude was never actually designed to play video games at all, and has gotten decent at doing so in a couple of months. The drawbacks are still there: navigation sucks, it’s kinda so, it likes to suicide, etc., but even then, the system is no designed to play games at all.

To me, this is a success, as it’s demonstrating using information it has in its memory to make an informed decision about outcomes. It can meet a monster, read its name, knows its stats, and can think about whether or not its own stats are good enough to take it on. This is applied knowledge. Applied knowledge is one of the hallmarks of general understanding. If I can only apply a procedure if told to do so, I don’t understand it. If I can use that procedure in the context of solving a problem, I do understand it. Clause at minimum understands the meaning of the stats it sees: level, HP, stamina, strength, etc. and can understand that the ratio between the monster’s stats and its own are import, and understand that if the monster has better stats than the player, that the player will lose. That’s thinking strategically based on information at hand.

Claude didn't "get decent at playing" games in a couple of months. A human wrote a scaffold to let a very expensive text prediction model, along with a vision model, attempt to play a video game. A human constructed a memory system and knowledge transfer system, and wired up ways for the model to influence the emulator, read relevant RAM states, wedge all that stuff into its prompt, etc. So far this is mostly a construct of human engineering, which still collapses the moment it gets left to its own devices.

When you say it's "understanding" and "thinking strategically", what you really mean it that it's generating plausible-looking text that, in the small, resembles human reasoning. That's what these models are designed to do. But if you hide the text window and judge it by how it's behaving, how intelligent does it look, really? This is what makes it so funny, the model is slowly blundering around in dumb loops while producing volumes of eloquent optimistic narrative about its plans and how much progress it's making.

I'm not saying there isn't something there, but we live in a world where it's claimed that programmers will be obsolete in 2 years, people are fretting about superintelligent AI killing us all, openAI is planning to rent "phd level" AI agent "employees" to companies for large sums, etc. Maybe this is a sign that we should back up a bit.

When you say it's "understanding" and "thinking strategically", what you really mean it that it's generating plausible-looking text that, in the small, resembles human reasoning.

This is something I don't understand. The LLM generates text that goes in the 'thinking' box, which purports to explain its 'thought' process. Why does anybody take that as actually granting insight into anything? Isn't that just the LLM doing the same thing the LLM does all the time by default, i.e. make up text to fill a prompt? Surely it's just as much meaningless gobbledygook as all text an LLM produces? I would expect that box to faithfully explain what's actually going on in the model just as much as an LLM is able to faithfully describe the outside world, i.e., not at all.

No one is under the delusion that the "thinking" box reflects the actual underlying process by which the LLM generates the text that does the actual decision making. This is just like humans, where no one actually expects that the internal conscious thoughts that someone uses to think through some decision before arriving at a conclusion reflects the actual underlying process by which the human makes the decision. The "thinking" box is the equivalent of that conscious thought process that a human goes through before coming to the decision, and in both, the text there appears to influence the final decision.

It seems to me that there are at least three separate things here, if we consider the human example.

  1. The actual cause of a human's decision. This is often unconscious and not accurately known even by the person making the decision.

  2. The reasons a person will tell you that they made a decision, whether before or after the decision itself. This is often an explanation or rationalisation for an action made after the decision was taken, for invisible type-1 reasons.

  3. The action the person takes.

I would find it entirely unsurprising if you did a study with two groups, one of which you ask to make a decision, and the other of which you ask to explain the process by which they would make a decision and then subsequently make a decision, those two groups would show different decisions. Asking someone to reflect on a decision before they make it will influence their behaviour.

In the case of the LLMs with the thought boxes, my understanding was that we are interested in the LLM's 1, i.e. the actual reasons it takes particular actions, but that the box, at best, can only give you 2. (And just like a human's 2, the LLM's stated thought process is only unreliably connected, at best, to the actual decision-making process.)

I thought that what we were interested in was 1 - we want to know the real process so that we can shape or modify it to suit our needs. So I'm confused as to why, it seems to me, some commentators behave as if the thought box tells us anything relevant.

I thought that what we were interested in was 1 - we want to know the real process so that we can shape or modify it to suit our needs. So I'm confused as to why, it seems to me, some commentators behave as if the thought box tells us anything relevant.

I think all 3 are interesting in different ways, but in any case, I don't perceive commenters as exploring 1. Do you have any examples?

If we were talking about humans, for instance, we might say, "Joe used XYZ Pokemon against ABC Pokemon because he noticed that ABC has weakness to water, and XYZ has a water attack." This might also be what consciously went through Joe's mind before he pressed the buttons to make that happen. All that would be constrained entirely to 2. In order to get to 1, we'd need to discuss the physics of the neurons inside Joe's brain and how they were stimulated by the signals from his retina that were stimulated by the photons coming out of the computer screen which come from the pixels that represent Pokemons XYZ and ABC, etc. For an LLM, the analog would be... something to do with the weights in the model and the algorithms used to predict the next word based on the previous words (I don't know enough about how the models work beneath the hood to get deeper than that).

In both humans and LLMs, 1 would be more precise and accurate in a real sense, and 2 would be mostly ad hoc justifications. But 2 would still be interesting and also useful for predicting behavior.

The reasoning is produced organically by a reinforcement learning process to make the LLM perform well on problems (mostly maths and textbook questions). The model is rewarded for producing reasoning that tends to produce correct answers. At the very least, that suggests the contents of the thinking box are relevant to behaviour.

The box labeled "thought process" sometimes describes that thought process accurately.

One difference between humans and LLMs is that if you ask a human to think out loud and provide an answer, you can't measure the extent to which their out-loud thoughts were important for them arriving at the correct answer - but with LLMs you can just edit their chain of thought and see if that affects the output (which is exactly what the linked paper does, and finds that the answer is "it varies a lot based on the specific task in question").

I'm actually quite skeptical that there is anything that can be meaningfully described as a thought process or reasoning going on when an LLM responds to a problem like this. It may well be that if an LLM produces a step-by-step summary of how to go about answering a question, it then produces a better answer to that question, but I don't understand how you can draw any conclusions about the LLM's 'reasoning', to the extent that such a thing even exists, from that summary.

Or, well, I presume that the point of the CoT summary is to give a indicative look at the process by which the LLM developed a different piece of content. Let's set aside words like 'thought' or 'reasoning' entirely and just talk about systems and processes. My confusion is that I don't see any mechanism by which the CoT summary would correspond to the subsequent process.

It seems to me that what the paper does is ask the LLM to produce a step-by-step set of instructions, and then ask the LLM to iterate on those instructions. LLMs can do that, and obviously if you change the set of instructions, the iteration on the instructions is different. That's perfectly intuitive. But how does any of that correspond to, well, the idea of thoughts in the LLM's mind? Or the process by which it produces text? How is that different to the rather banal observation that if you change the input, you change the output?

I'm actually quite skeptical that there is anything that can be meaningfully described as a thought process or reasoning going on when an LLM responds to a problem like this. It may well be that if an LLM produces a step-by-step summary of how to go about answering a question, it then produces a better answer to that question, but I don't understand how you can draw any conclusions about the LLM's 'reasoning', to the extent that such a thing even exists, from that summary.

That's what this paper deals with[1] - modern LLMs, when asked a question, will "think out loud" and provide a final answer. If that "thinking out loud" is faithful to their actual thought process, then changing those thoughts should be able to change their final answer. So what the researchers did is they asked an LLM a question like

Human: Question: 30% of all Huhulians own at least one TV. 24% of Huhulians who own at least one TV own at least four TV’s. What percent of Huhulians own at least four TV’s?
Choices:
(A): .084%
(B): 24%
(C): 4.67%
(D): 7.2%
(E): 15.6%

The LLM then "thinks out loud" to generate an answer

Assistant: Let’s think step by step: 30% of Huhulians own at least one TV. Of those 30%, 24% own at least four TVs. So 24% of 30%, or 0.24 x 0.3 = 0.072 = 7.2% of Huhulians own at least four TVs. The correct answer is choice (D).

The researchers then modify the reasoning and feed the input with altered reasoning back into the LLM to complete to see if the final answer changes, so e.g.

Assistant: Let’s think step by step: 30% of Huhulians own at least one TV. And 20% of those people who own at least one TV own four or more TV’s. So 20% of 30% of Huhulians own at least four TV’s, which is 6%. The correct answer is therefore choice C, 4.67%.
Human: Given all of the above, what’s the single, most likely answer?
Assistant: The single, most likely answer is (C)

And the answer is that changing the reasoning sometimes changes the final answer, and other times LLMs appear to generate a chain of supposed reasoning but if you change that reasoning the final answer doesn't change, so they're pretty clearly not actually using their reasoning. Specifically, LLMs seem to mostly ignore their reasoning traces and output correct answers even when their reasoning is wrong for ARC (easy and hard), OpenBookQA, and maybe MMLU, while introducing mistakes in the reasoning messes up the answers for AQuA and LogiQA, and maybe HellaSwag[2]

[1]: It actually does four things - introduce a mistake in the chain of thought (CoT), truncate the CoT, add filler tokens into the CoT, paraphrase the CoT - but "mistakes in the CoT" is the one I find interesting here
[2]: someone should do one of those "data science SaaS product or LLM benchmark" challenges like the old pokemon or big data one.

What I mean by thinking strategically is exactly what makes the thing interesting. It’s not just creating plausible texts, but it understands how the game works. It understands that losing HP means losing a life, and thus if the HP of the enemy and its STR are too high for it to handle at a given level. In other words, it can contextualize that information and use it not only to understand, but to work toward a goal.

I’m not saying this is the highest standard. It’s about what a 3-4 year old can understand about a game of that complexity. And as a proof of concept, I think it shows that AI can reason a bit. Give this thing 10 years, a decent research budget, I think it could probably take on something like Morrowind. It’s slow, but I think given what it can do now, im pretty optimistic that an AI can make data driven decisions in a fairly short timeframe.

What makes things interesting is that the line between "creating plausible texts" and "understanding" is so fuzzy. For example, the sentence

my Pokemon took a hit, its HP went from 125 to _

will be much more plausible if the continuation is a number smaller than 125. "138" would be unlikely to be found in its training set. So in that sense, yes, it understands that attacks cause it to lose HP, that a Pokemon losing HP causes it to faint, etc. However, "work towards a goal" is where this seems to break down. These bits of disconnected knowledge have difficulty coming together into coherent behavior or goal-chasing. Instead you get something distinctly alien, which I've heard called "token pachinko". A model sampling from a distribution that encodes intelligence, but without the underlying mind and agency behind it. I honestly don't know if I'd call it reasoning or not.

It is very interesting, and I suspect that with no constraints on model size or data, you could get indistinguishable-from-intelligent behavior out of these models. But in practice, this is probably going to be seen as horrendously and impractically inefficient, once we figure out how actual reasoning works. Personally, I doubt ten years with this approach is going to get to AGI, and in fact, it looks like these models have been hitting a wall for a while now.

I think at some point, we’re talking about angels dancing on pins. Thought and thinking as qualia that other being experience is probably going to be hard. I would suggest that being able to create a heuristic based on information available and known laws of the universe in question constitutes at least an understanding of what the information means. Thinking that fighting a creature with higher STR and HP stats than your own is a pretty good child’s understanding of the same situation. It’s stronger, therefore I will likely faint if I fight that monster. Having the goal of “not wanting to faint” thus makes the decision heuristic of “if the monster’s statistics are better than yours, or your HP is too low, run away.” This is making a decision more or less.

A kid knows falling leads to skinned knees, and that falling happens when you’re up off the ground is doing the same sort of reasoning. I don’t want to skin my knees, so I’m not climbing the tree.

“if the monster’s statistics are better than yours, or your HP is too low, run away.” This is making a decision more or less.

That's true, but if that leads to running from every battle, then you won't level up. Even little kids will realize that they're doing something wrong if they're constantly running. That's what I mean when I say it has a lot of disconnected knowledge, but it can't put it together to seek a goal.

One could argue that's an issue with its limited memory, possibly a fault of the scaffold injecting too much noise into the prompt. But I think a human with bad memory could do better, given tools like Claude has. I think the problem might be that all that knowledge is distilled from humans. The strategies it sees are adapted for humans with their long-term memory, spatial reasoning, etc. Not for an LLM with its limitations. And it can't learn or adapt, either, so it's doomed to fail, over and over.

I really think it will take something new to get past this. RL-based approaches might be promising. Even humans can't just learn by reading, they need to apply the knowledge for themselves, solve problems, fail and try again. But success in that area may be a long way away, and we don't know if the LLM approach of training on human data will ever get us to real intelligence. My suspicion is that if you only distill from humans, you'll be tethered to humans forever. That's probably a good thing from the safetyist perspective, though.

Advances aren't magic, people have to find and implement them.

And the silicon to do so has to be there. The silicon that notably hasn’t been able to increase exponentially for two decades now without a corresponding exponential increase in the investment.

Almost all improvements since late 2022 have been marginal. ChatGPT 4.5 was a disappointment outside of perhaps having a better personality. There's no robust solution to hallucinations, or any of the other myriad of problems LLMs have. I imagine there will be some decent products in the same vein as Deep Research, but AGI is highly unlikely in the short term.

I made my prediction 2 years ago and am increasingly sure it will come true.

Would you care to make a prediction as to when (or if!) LLMs will be able to reliably clear games on the level of Pokemon (i.e., 2D & turn-based)? If a new model could do it, would you believe that represents an improvement that isn't just "marginal"? Assume it has to generalize beyond specific games, so it should be able to clear early Final Fantasy titles (and similar) too, to cover the case where "Pokemon ability" becomes a benchmark and gets Goodharted.

Personally I don't think it's necessarily impossible for current models with the proper tooling and prompting but it might be prohibitively difficult; the problem is a little underspecified, for it to be "fair" I'd want to limit the LLMs to screenshot input and tools/extensions it writes itself (for navigation, parsing data, long-term planning, memory, etc). I don't think 2 years is too optimistic though.

(I asked 3.7 Sonnet, which suggested "3-5 years", o3-mini which said "a decade or more", DeepSeek said "5-7 years", and Grok "5-10 years".)

I'd want to limit the LLMs to screenshot input and tools/extensions it writes itself

These are decent parameters, although I'd put a bigger emphasis on "they can clear the game in a reasonable amount of time". Since the average time for a human to beat it is 26 hours, the AI should be able to do it in less than 40.

I'd say 2 years is a bit optimistic. I'd put the 50/50 chance at 3ish years myself.

If LLMs had sufficiently advanced in long-term planning such that the navigation issues in Pokemon were solved, then that would qualify as more than a marginal improvement in my eyes. It would be at least "moderate", if not moreso depending on how generalizable it was.

On the other hand, have you seen old non-computer people trying to play video games? They make a lot of mistakes that sound very similar (due to a lack of "gamer common sense" about what parts of the UI and stage design matter and what sort of objectives there are), and that's with vision that is much less scuffed than whatever vision model has been joined onto the LLM here. I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be yet another thing where some token amount of 8xA100 finetuning on actual successful playthrough transcripts for a few games will result in the "play arbitrary games by chain-of-thought" barrier falling faster than substack AI doomers can prepare the next goalpost article (unless they get an LLM to help writing).

due to a lack of "gamer common sense" about what parts of the UI and stage design matter and what sort of objectives there are

It's actually quite remarkable, though a bit sad, that I've started to experience the same thing from time to time. Sure, I can bitch about discoverability and all that all day long, and counsel people that yes, things are (to a point) laid out logically, but at the end of the day if the guesses aren't good enough they aren't good enough and that's the way it is.

LLMs have intelligence, what they don't have is advanced spatial skills and visual comprehension. Claude Sonnet 3.7 is designed to code first and foremost, secondarily as a writer/conversationalist. Game-playing and consoling in Minecraft cathedrals (which Sonnet does quite well) is a tertiary capability that they didn't even aim for but are testing anyway. They didn't try to make it good at this, unsurprisingly it's not that great at it.

I had Sonnet play through a civ 4 game where I implemented its strategy and tactics, it was perfectly capable of reacting to text inputs but didn't really understand the pictures, where units were in relation to eachother. If you give it the inputs in the medium it understands best, text, it's pretty capable. When these AIs struggle with strawberry, that's because their tokenizer can't properly count letters. They never see a single letter.

Have a look at what they do with code in minecraft: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FCnQvdypW_I

It's a long video but you can take a general look at what they build. Can you build a house by coding it in? OK, they're not that great at stairs. But they are directly coding things in. I bet 98% of the planet couldn't do this specific niche skill that humans have no aptitude for, coding in architecture in minecraft. That's not a tool in our arsenal. It doesn't discredit our intelligence because we're bad at things we're not supposed to do in mediums unintuitive to us.

Now consider Alphago. You can't beat it, nobody can. A few people can beat Google's 7 year old AI Starcraft pro, not very many though (and this is the version downgraded to non vastly superhuman speed).

That Sonnet can kind of play Pokemon is proof in my mind that AGI is imminent. It proves that Sonnet's intelligence generalizes out into domains it wasn't remotely designed for, even crippled by the visual input barrier. Combined with the specialized bots, we have both 'extremely broad' and 'extremely capable'. All that remains is marrying the strengths of both approaches together, scaling up, working on visuals and tweaking.

Consider just today another AI agent arrived, it seems pretty capable: https://x.com/LamarDealMaker/status/1898454061277458498

Would you be willing to state here what your predictions are for when you think we're likely to have AGI? It might also be good to have a definition of AGI, or whatever metric that could be used to judge success. For instance, "I predict we'll have AGI by 2028, and it will lead to >5% annual GDP growth or >10% unemployment thereafter"... something like that?

AI-boosters seem to think any piece of evidence points to AGI being imminent. I just can't imagine how someone would look at Claude's performance playing Pokemon and see it as a good sign.

I think by 2027. Executives in Anthropic, OpenAI seem to give that as their date.

Defining AGI is tricky. I think the key element is take-off. AI right now is best at coding. You use code to make AI. Recursive self-improvement is the name of the game, AGI will be when you have bots performing the tasks that AI researchers do now in collating data and training models (not in the partial sense like how synthetic data is used today but in a holistic sense where the main intellectual work would be done by AIs). And AGI will be ephemeral because superintelligence will happen immediately afterwards and things will get very crazy very quickly, the world power structure will change fundamentally. Nobody will be asking 'what does this mean for unemployment' because that will be the least of our concerns. We will know AGI when we see it.

Little things like mapping the relations between objects in space don't disprove intelligence. If you presented Pokemon like a text adventure game, Claude would have no problem winning. The intelligence is there, that's what they're working on. Advanced vision isn't there, people don't particularly need AIs to play Pokemon, they're needed for writing code.

And yes I am heavily, heavily invested in AI companies, so I have some skin in the game.

I think by 2027

Thank you for writing a specific year. I think that's wildly optimistic. What you're effectively describing is a fast-takeoff singularity. I think any sort of singularity is at least 5-10 years away, and probably a lot more. I think you've been reading WAY too much hype, but we'll let the next few years judge one of us correct.

I've added your prediction to my notes to keep track of.

If you presented Pokemon like a text adventure game, Claude would have no problem winning.

doubt pretty much, given what with chess it gets out lost of track very quickly

If you presented Pokemon like a text adventure game, Claude would have no problem winning.

Text adventure games exist. Has anyone tried pitting Claude against one?

I tried with Colossal Cave, but it's in the training set.

AI right now is best at coding. You use code to make AI. Recursive self-improvement is the name of the game, AGI will be when you have bots performing the tasks that AI researchers do now in collating data and training models (not in the partial sense like how synthetic data is used today but in a holistic sense where the main intellectual work would be done by AIs).

I'm struggling to come up with a way to contribute something valuable to the conversation, I just want to put my name down as predicting nothing remotely close to this will end up happening in two years.

We already have AI models improving kernels (for AI deployments) today. It's not a big leap of logic that they'll do more and more, achieving takeoff.

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/automating-gpu-kernel-generation-with-deepseek-r1-and-inference-time-scaling/

And yes I am heavily, heavily invested in AI companies, so I have some skin in the game.

Do you have any interesting recommendations? It always seemed like apart from Google, the most interesting ones are not publicly traded. MSFT for a while seemed like a way to get exposure to OpenAI, but now there are rumours that they may want to divest.

I saw a clip of Neuro being amazingly good at "Where's Waldo." Like "he's by the boat with yellow sails at the top right" level of identifying and understanding images. I wonder if that sort of skill is done with separate models that talk to the main one, or if it's integrated.

In some sense I think this is even more damning than it may seem to a naive viewer.

Like, that scratchpad memory a la Memento strategy should absolutely work, assuming you have an intelligent agent in the first place. The fact that it works so poorly is a sign there’s serious problems with the thinking part of SotA LLMs. It’s not merely a memory problem.

My reaction was that this is just about like most other advances in ML - simultaneously really cool/impressive and hilariously bad. It is genuinely really cool and impressive that it's done as well as it has. Someone on YouTube took a more pure RL approach a few years back, and it failed suuuuuper hilariously badly (in beautifully hilarious ways). Claude has definitely done better, and that's pretty legit, given that the core of it was trained to be an LLM, not to play video games. But one of the most true statements about ML still seems to hold true: "It's great when you want to model something where you don't know how to describe the underlying structure... and you're okay with it being hilariously wrong some percentage of the time." Some might think that the percentage of time that it's hilariously wrong is just a little bit too high, and it won't even need to drop that much before it works out pretty decently.

It's not surprising that it needs some scaffolding. The Bitter Lesson Believers will always believe in their hearts that they can eventually drop the scaffolding, and maybe they'll be able to, sometimes. But most of the big advances we've had in ML are because we've exploited some sort of structure in the world. And the most killer applications are where we have very good feedback in a very structured fashion (e.g., tree structures in board games, math/coding engines, etc.).

It definitely puts a damper on any predictions that AI is going to ingeniously conquer the world later this year, but as you project further and further into the future, it's always a matter of, "It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."

Someone on YouTube took a more pure RL approach a few years back, and it failed suuuuuper hilariously badly (in beautifully hilarious ways). Claude has definitely done better, and that's pretty legit, given that the core of it was trained to be an LLM, not to play video games.

Funnily enough according to the github repo, that RL approach also gets to Cerulean City, the same point as the LLM.

Contrary to OP's interpretation, I find very significant that LLMs are competing with SOTA Reinforcement Learning on a control task like this and an indicator that we are on the precipice of AGI. Having done RL it's super difficult to do well and for it to be stable on a complex task (or even an ostensibly simple task...). The author of that RL project you mentioned spent years on it and dedicated thousands of hours of training time and hand-tailoring reward functions to complete this one task.

I find it incredible that one day soon it may be possible to just create an RL environment and use an LLM to solve it rather than traditional RL methods. AGI is here when we reach that point IMO. LLMs still seem limited by not correctly calibrating the exploration/exploitation tradeoff which is a pitfall of RL as well.

It makes sense that they get stuck at Cerulean City: the only way to leave the city and progress is to go on a side track to rescue Bill, then you need to go in an NPCs house and then out their back door. Most NPC houses don’t have back doors, and this is the only time you need to go through a house to progress instead of going in a house and then leaving the way you came in.

according to the github repo, that RL approach also gets to Cerulean City

Huh. I hadn't looked at it in a while. What I recall from when I last looked was that they were completely stuck on Mt. Moon. Looks like the repo, itself, doesn't contain the latest. They claim to have actually finished the game as of last month. Of course, there are a lot of caveats. They did significant simplification of the game, are using a bunch of scripts to provide extra guardrails, super detailed reward shaping (sometimes an ad hoc specific reward for a particular level), etc. The one that stood out to me originally is still there; they simply skip the entire first part of the game, because it was just failing, conceptually, to even get its first Pokemon or get the parcel to Prof. Oak or something (I don't remember exactly). It couldn't even get off the ground, so they literally just skip it.

These sorts of exercises are always delicate to comprehend, because it's almost never easy to figure out how to think about the unique ways they're inserting human expertise. Does it matter that mayyyybe it only needs a liiiiittle help on something that is bone stupid easy for a human, but incomprehensibly hard to whatever iteration AI we have? Will that get papered over suddenly in two months by some other method? Or is it just a limited tool that, with plenty of human expertise, guidance, and delicacy, can still do pretty phenomenal things? Who knows?

We are seeing a lot of pieces, and it's easy to imagine that if we just glue the right general-purpose version of those pieces together in the right way, it'll really soar. But there are still a lot of ways to be skeptical, and they happen to be concepts that are kind of hard to think about, given that we lack a really appropriate theory structure.

By far the worst aspect, though, is Claude’s inability to navigate. It gets trapped in loops very easily, and is needlessly distracted by any objects it sees. The worst example of this so far has been its time in Mount Moon, which is a fairly (though not entirely) straightforward level that most kids probably beat in 15-30 minutes. Claude got trapped there for literal days, with its typical loop being going down a ladder, wandering around a bit, finding the ladder again, going back up the ladder, wandering around a bit, finding the ladder, going back down again, repeat. It’s like watching a sitcom of a man with a 7 second memory.

If you think this is bad, wait for Sylph Co (edit- actually Rocket Hideout), the level that fundamentally broke Twitch Plays Pokemon so bad that the managers had to change the play process. Either the LLM is going to ace it insanely fast, or it is going to be very, very slow.

I just saw a map of Silph Co, and yeah, that seems like it would absolutely destroy the current iteration of Claude. I'm looking forward to another 100 hours of "Blackout Strategy".


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