I recently read Bad Blood and Original Sin. Bad Blood is about the downfall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes and the fraud that she committed. Original Sin is about the uncovering of Biden's mental degradation and the lead up to his decision to drop out of the presidential race.

I liked both books quite a bit, and I learned more from them than from most things that I read. I particularly enjoyed reading them one after the other because I thought that, despite addressing in many superficial ways very disparate situations, they had a lot of interesting commonalities that seem like they say something important about human nature and epistemics (including reinforcing a bunch of lessons I feel like I learned from the experience with FTX).

A few of those commonalities:

• Both deal with the concealment of extremely valuable and in some sense difficult-to-conceal information for an extended period of time.
• Both feature very driven and intelligent people who commit profound acts of self-deception that were very damaging for them, the people around them, and to some extent the world. Both “got in too deep” such that there was probably no escape that seemed good by their lights by the end. 
• • I think this is an underrated point: the extent to which self-delusion and selfishness can bring people to take actions that are clearly incredibly destructive and irrational from their own perspective. Especially with Holmes, who must have been aware of the profound shortcomings of her technology even as she pushed forward with deploying it, it seems pretty clear that she was "walking dead" for quite a while. Towards the end, she was in a bad situation with no real chance of success, towards the end. Yet she continued to double down and dig herself deeper. 
  • • There's something especially depressing about this. Not only can smart, well resourced people be selfish and sadistic, they can do horrible, destructive things to prolong a situation that isn’t even good from their own perspective, perhaps because the short-term pain of coming clean is too aversive even if it’d reduce their long term suffering.
• Arguably, both “fly too close to the sun” and miss out on nearby worlds where they left much better legacies (if Biden had stopped at the end of his first term, if Elizabeth had settled for being a smart, driven and very charismatic person who probably could have risen to a relatively high level in a legitimate business).
• • This doesn't seem like an unfortunate accident. Both got to positions of prominence by seeking and holding on to power.
• Both additionally deal with a collection of accomplished, well-resourced people who are adjacent to the deception and have a lot to lose from it, and yet fail to act quickly and effectively to reduce the damage.

A few lessons I took from them (not new, but I thought they were particularly poignant examples): 

• Having generically smart, competent people adjacent to a situation absolutely does not guarantee that even really obvious and important things will get done with any reliability or quality. It's easy for things to fall between the cracks, For something to be aversive and get deprioritized by busy people. It's easy for something to not be anyone's job. It's easy for someone to be smart and successful in many domains, but completely miscalibrated, ignorant, or catastrophically distracted in others.
• Intimidation and harassment of potential whistleblowers is often effective for extended periods of time. Extreme insularity and litigiousness is at least a yellow flag.

From Original Sin

• A huge disanalogy between the two books is that in Original Sin, a big factor was prominent Democrats thinking that they needed to back Biden despite their misgivings to increase the chances that he beat Trump. While I think this is ethically fraught and backfired in the end, it's easy to see how they arrived at that position, and the reasoning that got them there seems potentially compelling. This isn't as much the case with Bad Blood.
• The book seems like it doesn't really want to call out prominent Democrats other than Biden's inner circle as having fucked up. But assessing the suitability of the presidential candidate really seems like one of the most important roles and responsibilities of senior party officials, so I feel pretty bad about their performance there.
• Personal connections seem like they were pretty destructive. A lot of people seemed very reluctant to damage the prospects of someone they considered a friend, even when they thought the fate of American democracy could potentially be at stake, even when they thought it could mean the difference between a competent and incompetent president.
• Biden is depicted as surrounding himself largely with sycophants who come to rely on him as their own personal sources of power and who hide poll numbers for him. And then, as a consequence, ending up with really miscalibrated takes on his probability of winning the election. I think I hadn't fully processed the degree to which one effect of surrounding yourself with people who rely on you for power might push you to take risks to retain your power that you, if you were clear-headed, might think better of. 

And from Bad Blood in particular: 

• Important companies can leverage and deceive generically smart and prestigious board members who are highly distracted and aren't subject matter experts. In Bad Blood, Holmes manages to deceive and maintain control over a board of extremely generically competent and powerful people (Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Defense Secretary General James Mattis, Rupert Murdoch), to their substantial reputational (and in some cases, financial) detriment. In a poignant episode, George Schultz sides with Holmes against his own grandson, a former Theranos employee-turned-whistleblower being harassed by the company, dividing their family. 
• • It seems like as non-SMEs in healthcare and lab testing, they were slow to notice warning signs about misconduct, and very bad at doing due diligence on what was going on. I worry a lot about non-technical board members of AI companies being similarly manipulated and low context on what their companies are doing
• It seems like aggressive lawyers kind of shoot themselves in the foot by being extremely aggressive towards high-profile investigative journalists. It seems predictable that this would trigger the journalists to double down rather than scaring them off or reassuring them that there's nothing to be concerned about. I don't know what's going on here; maybe they can't code switch / they just get stuck on a strategy of being aggressive all the time.

Some random thoughts about historical colonization conflicts

Aztec Empire

I read Aztec, by Gary Jennings, a retelling of (among other things) the encounter between Europeans and the Aztecs (note that they didn't call themselves Aztecs, they generally called themselves the Mexica). Though the book is fiction, a lot of the dynamics it talks about were real (warning for potential readers that the book doesn’t *just* focus on those dynamics and has a lot of disturbing sex content). I was partly interested because of the potential elements of AI, though there are, of course, many important disanalogies. 

Before the conquest, emperor Moctezuma II and his advisors faced a really hard problem. There were strange white soldiers with new animals and technology entering their lands. They did not know exactly who the Spaniards were, how many might follow, how their weapons worked, what political authority they represented, or how to weigh the new potential threat against existing enemies and tributary tensions in the empire. 

The Aztec Empire was overthrown, its people disempowered or killed (many by disease), and much of its culture was lost. There's a lot of debate about Moctezuma II’s strength as a leader. But what struck me most is that even with the benefit of hundreds of years of hindsight, it is super hard to say what the best response would have been. 

Succeed in killing Cortés and his men and perhaps you buy time, but how valuable is that time, and will worse retribution follow (plus, how good do you feel about attacking mysterious strangers you encounter whose political and cultural significance you don't yet understand?)? Resist longer even if you think you’ll lose, and perhaps you preserve dignity or independence for a moment, and perhaps in history, but maybe at catastrophic cost? Ally quickly and perhaps you preserve more lives, as the Tlaxcala (another group in the region that were historical enemies of the Mexica) may have done? The Tlaxcala earned meaningful wins from the alliance (e.g. somewhat better jobs after colonization, tribute exceptions, being allowed to keep their original names, the right to bear arms) relative to other groups; was that a zero-sum game among different indigenous groups, or could everyone have been a bit better off if they followed the strategy? Demonstrate your martial skills to the best of your ability with early skirmishes; then sue for peace and hope that you've increased their willingness to pay? But maybe more violent reprisal will follow.  

The Aztec prospects for long-run resistance to European domination seem very slim, especially given pathogen vulnerability asymmetry, regardless of whether they can broker a peace treaty with Cortés. If they’d rebuffed the initial invasion and were very skilled, perhaps in the intervening time the Mexica would have gained a valuable understanding of Spanish and European culture and would have been able to enter trade relations with the Europeans as somewhat less junior partners (albeit still ravaged by smallpox and other diseases brought inadvertently by the Europeans). Or maybe not (again, seems really unclear). Also, they didn't know this, but the original invasion was not initially sanctioned by King Carlos of Spain — Cortés acted unilaterally. As a result, perhaps if they had rebuffed Cortés, the next invading force would have had a pretty different character. 

Perhaps people with a much deeper knowledge of this history have somewhat more sophisticated opinions, and I'm not saying that there's no way to gain more clarity. It's just pretty striking how little hindsight helps a layperson (or lay-LLM I asked). 

Indigenous people of New Zealand and Australia 

Reading about the Mexica made me curious about the British settlement of New Zealand and Australia, so I read a bit about the history there and talked to the AIs about it for a while (I read a lot less about this than about the Aztec Empire).

Both involved catastrophic violence, dispossession, and population collapse of the people living in Australia and New Zealand at the time. But my sense is that, while they were both extremely bad, the situation in Australia was noticeably worse. The Maori were able to remain a somewhat legally recognized and politically and culturally cohesive group and they retained more of their land and culture (though again, they still lost much of what they started with, including the vast majority of their land), most famously in the Treaty of Waitangi signed between the British Crown and many Maori chiefs, making the Maori British citizens with a British governor overseeing New Zealand, but preserving some land right for Maori. There were important discrepancies between the English and Maori versions of the Treaty; most notably, the wording of the English version involved a much more profound ceding of sovereignty, but it seems like it had some meaningful effect. In contrast, the British considered Australia terra nullius (nobody’s land), and indigenous lands and cultures had even less legal representation. 

The Māori military was more formidable by the relevant time: they had rapidly adopted firearms through trade, fielded larger forces, and built sophisticated fortifications, probably partly as a result of being an agriculture civilization (but rich natural resources make you more of a target) with a denser population. They had clearer hierarchies and rulers who could be negotiated with, whereas most Australian Aborigines were in much smaller nomadic and (often) less hierarchical bands. Because of the above, they were more valuable as trading partners for the British. In several battles in the New Zealand Wars, a small number of Māori warriors held off a larger number of British soldiers, making a full-on fight visibly costly. 

Also, New Zealand was settled by the British about 50 years later than they settled Australia. By then, the treatment of Australian Aboriginals was somewhat of a scandal that had embarrassed the British and that they didn't want to replicate; slavery had ended in the British Empire and there was a wave of moral squeamishness about colonization represented by a religiously-inflected humanitarian movement. 

Takeaways

These were three examples that I delved into briefly; it would be cool for actual historians and other people who know more about this to share their views. But I guess my sense is if you're going to encounter a stronger power, it's better for you if: 

• The delta in technological capabilities between you and them is as small as possible
• You rapidly adapt to/take on as much of their technology as possible, reducing the delta quickly
• You are as well coordinated as possible
• If you have the capability to impose meaningful costs on your conquerors, you make those capabilities clear so that they're incentivized to negotiate with you and there’s common knowledge of your leverage, at least if you can do so without violence that might provoke retribution (with violence, you risk retribution; reprisals in response to Aboriginal Tasmanian resistance seemed like it contributed to the ~ genocide they experienced). Similarly, if you'd be more valuable left intact as a trading partner, that's helpful too. 
• Understanding your opponents is huge. Knowing the language, norms, systems of governance, different factions, etc. can make a big difference to your ability to intervene on behalf of your interests. Take prisoners, study artifacts, try to reproduce what you can. This seems like among the more robust interventions that are (somewhat) within your control. 
• Cultural / ideological factors. Your opponents self-identify as and genuinely are pacifistic and culturally pluralistic and don't have a culture of expansionism and ruthlessness. Missionaries were less prone to violence but more motivated to stamp out other religions. Military forces might have been more prone to violent domination but less to eradicate other religious and cultural beliefs. 
• Outcomes were probably particularly debilitating when the following two bad factors aligned:
• • Early intense contact: they come to settle or conquer rather than to trade or visit (with few opportunities to gain information, trade, adopt new technology, etc)
  • Vulnerability to disease 

These are mostly obvious in retrospect. But that said, probably my biggest takeaway is that not only can the weaker party in these situations be in an extremely tough situation (obvious) where most trajectories are very bad, but often it remains very unclear what strategy would serve them best.