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One should be humble before God, but realistic in respect to others.
If Cummings is merely "Like a poster here" he's easily in the top 1% of government officials who have ever held senior office, and by far the most competent person in that cabinet. The stupidity, vacuity and hubris of the senior bereaucracy is almost impossible to internalize...
Its genuinely unbeleivable a man like Cummings penetrated it at all... The elite circles run off socialite style norms related to connections and status games that actively select against the kinds of people who make cohherent mental models and try to make them accord with the world. It the same as career politicans only with more pretense and less charisma, you see this in most academic sub-feilds related to politics as well...
The relationship of the words to actually reality is a 20th or 30th concern... the first concern is its relationship to Taboos and social signaling, and what's worse is all these fields select for people who do it subconsciously and can't tell the difference. People who aren't even capable of being true believers because they don't inherently process their words as being about the world as opposed to their social games.
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Legend of the Galactic Heroes has a great moment:
The enemy out numbers the protagonist's fleet 3 to 2, and everyone's nervous about this... they would like to withdraw in the face of the superior force, but they can't because the enemy has divided into 3 that are able to head them off if they try any retreat...
Well the young High Admiral announces his plan. this is a classic case where defeat in detail is possible, if they strike out hard and fast at one of these enemy fleets they'll outnumber them 2 to 1... and then if they strike quick they can catch another, or worse case merely be outnumber 5-4 taking into account their losses and be able to force a draw... This is a real classic military scenario, Napoleon had a battle that went like this, and something like this is taught in almost every course on strategy.
One of the lesser admirals upon receiving these orders is outraged. "To reach for academic theory at a time like this!? In the midst of BATTLE!?"
so he defies the order tries to disengage his contigent, and he and that contingent die, while the battle turns from a sure defeat to that draw scenario.
The thing is, this lesser admiral who defied the order and died for it... he was the teacher of theory at their military academy! He had taught this theory every year for 20 years. Yet when given a command that directly aligned with the theory he had studied and taught for decades, he not only balked he was outraged!
To him all the theory he taught were polite words and and a social game, they bore no relation to the battlefield, they were related to academic life... he had dedicated his life to repeating the words and social concepts of being a professor of strategic theory, and he wasn't just willing to repeat those theories if they were wrong in fact, so long as they advanced his career... in his mind they only bore relation to his career, the idea they could be right or wrong about real battlefields in the future, as they were happening, was suplurflous or laughable. The theories were social games you played to describe maybe historical battles... And whether his own theories were right or wrong if deployed in the field was a laughable concern relative to how interesting or socially viable they might be...
He regurgitated "Defeat in detail" on tests, then in classrooms as the teacher... he maybe even believed he believed it... but to actually believe it would have meant resisting the thought, putting it under pressure, testing its mettle and how well he could rely on it... looking for contradictory examples, and only being satisfied once he'd concluded it'd held under his harshest scrutiny... And that's not what a "Model Student" who aspires to become a star teacher does. What if you discovered it was wrong? Or rather, in his psychology, that he's wrong and contrary to the social expectation. Is he going to risk placing himself in opposition to the institutional machinery he needs to appease and serve?
So when he received an order based on a theory that happened to be one of the best documented and well theorized realities of warfare ever given a name... one every moderately good strategy gamer should recognize intuitively... he balked and was outraged that some punk was either trying to play a status game to fuck with him, or that he's being lead by some dangerously delusional true believer who thinks these words were meant to constrain expectations about physical reality.
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I've interacted with alot of academics, politicians, bureaucrats, mainline corporate types... everyone that's actively checked-in to the system instead of checked out and disgusted... the kind that will repeat the slogans sincerely... they're almost all like this fictional professor. Our society applies incredible consequences for social faux-pas and almost none for actually being wrong or ineffective. We lack both the scarcity and the high intensity warfare that creates those consequences for being wrong, and are drowning in the centralizing over-socialized morass that makes social norms sting.
Thus the people who get ahead in all but very niche fields are those who spend their lives thinking in relation to the social norms, and feel no compunction about any contradiction with physical reality for any myriad of psychological reasons ("What no I'm not making a probabilistic prediction!? what do I look like a booky! How Low class")... And those who are actually capable of making their ideas commit them to predictions and confine expectations are consistently selected against, or actively punished (Psychologically or socially).
Imagine the reaction if you asked a politician or bureaucrat who'd just made some optimistic statement about education for black kids to actually wager real money about what the test scores would be in 5 years on a consistent test... Naively one would think it'd matter if the politician didn't want to... if we expect the program to fail shouldn't we be doing something different NOW.... but of course they'd be outraged not at the politician who refused the wager with some "I don't wager on matters of morality" bromide... but at you for trying to impose expectations, and worse being willing to bet against black kids (you racist).
The idea these polite statements about opportunities for the future and everyone getting a chance should correspond to realized on the ground reality is laughable in politics, or an actively rude attack... And that casual dishonestly, even in one's own thoughts, that dismissal of the very possibility of a truth value in those words... that casual evil of banality... that's slowly infected everything our government or elite class has touched, and our elite no longer produces people meaningfully able to reach back and relate their linguistic games to reality any more...
they are all that professor of military theory and will intuitively turn and run when their own theories tell them they have the advantage... because that moment will be the first time they have to relate their words games to reality, and they'll immediately know (even if they don't already) that they haven't been doing that, and every cached thought, even one as basic as "Defeat in Detail"... They can't trust.
You're mistaken. The lesser admiral who dies is Erlache. The teacher is Staden, and he dies much later in different circumstances.
Mittermeyer kills Staden, right? I don't even remember Erlache... Time for a rewatch I guess.
Yes, basically. During the Imperial Civil War, Staden sides against Reinhard, which is not much of a surprise, and gets defeated in battle by Mittermeyer. He is evacuated and gets hospitalized due to combat-related stress (I had to look this one up on the interwebz), and his subsequent fate is left unclear. Presumably he was captured or killed.
Erlache is a forgettable character who doesn't do anything else besides dying pointlessly.
Yeah, rewatched a few civil war arc eps, and Erlache really is a blink and miss guy.
Been years since I last watched. Had forgotten just how much Schenkopp wants Yang's dic-tatorship, and how silly everyone's decisions are.
Like literally every single guy in the junta fleet goes full Yukio Mishima and refuses to surrender, even to the super popular hero admiral? Alliance troops were willing to surrender to the empire a few episodes ago!
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