With Clinton's email server motivations are pretty unclear. If we take Signalgate, using Signal is one choice you can make because you are lazy. Setting the chat to auto-delete after a few weeks is a choice that suggests the intention to avoid the communication becoming a problem later.
From what happened at Fauci's NIAID:
New evidence suggests that Dr. Fauci may have used his personal email account to communicate about official government business during the COVID-19 pandemic. In an email from Dr. Fauci’s Senior Advisor — Dr. David Morens — to disgraced EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. (EcoHealth) President Dr. Peter Daszak, Dr. Morens states “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work…He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.” In a separate email, Dr. Morens references a “secret back channel” that he would use to communicate with Dr. Fauci outside the public eye. When asked about Dr. Fauci’s use of personal email to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Dr. Morens concerningly testified “I may have.” This new evidence raises additional, serious concerns about public health officials purposefully concealing information and behaving as if they are unaccountable to the American people they serve.
[...]
Earlier this year, the Select Subcommittee released evidence that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Senior Advisor at NIAID — Dr. David Morens — deleted federal COVID-19 records and used his personal email account to evade FOIA. Dr. Morens wrote from his personal email account on two separate occasions that, “I learned the tricks last year from an old friend, Marg Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs” and “i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear.” This email correspondence appears to implicate Ms. Moore in Dr. Morens’ unlawful actions and raises serious questions about her involvement in a potentially larger conspiracy to hide information from the American people.
Morens was stupid enough to write his motivations down, but I would expect that many US government departments run in similar ways.
The Pentagon isn't deep state, it's just state.
The term deep state was originally used to speak about Turkey's military (and the associated power center). That's what it was coined to describe. There's political power in the military that's separated from the democratically legitimated power.
In this case, we did have an administration that had the intention to cut the military budget and audit the Pentagon but the Pentagon was powerful enough to stop that and to instead get their budget increased. It needed a lot more than just inertia and internal politics to accomplish that goal.
I guess like, a larger organization with some more long term goals?
The Pentagon is a larger organization which does have long-term goals around increasing it's budget and preventing it's budget from being reduced. It also has long-term goals around keeping certain parts of what it does secret that are threatened by DOGE sniffing around.
I think that's just sloppiness, though.
So if I could prove that this is not just sloppy but intentional to reduce information being revealed to congressional inquiries and Freedom of Information Act requests, that would convince you and be a reason to update for you?
. Again, you can find this frustrating or whatever (I think while a lot of it is frustrating, "anyone who gets in power gets to enact their agenda no matter how insane without any resistance" is also not a desirable condition), but if this is what you'd call "Deep State", then the term means nothing interesting or useful.
It's not what "I call Deep State" it's the criteria you proposed.
But even discarding that, to me the term "deep state" suggests the existence of something that is at least to some extent intentional, clandestine, and has an element of purposeful subversion.
It's also not quite clear what you mean with those words. As far as intentional goes, I would say, that of course there are various people who intended to make Elon fail.
When it comes to "clandestine" you could say that whether someone illegally communicates about government matters in a way that makes their communication not subject to government record keeping is acting clandestine. That seems to be business as usual in the US government, see Hillarys email server, Signal gate and Fauci's misdeeds as recent examples.
When it comes to "purposeful subversion" would anyone think that people who believe that the Trump administration is bad and work in government don't try to subvert it and prevent Trump from causing harm? Watching a bit Yes, Minister is useful. It's reflects the British environments of a few decades ago, but they did a lot of background research to capture subversion dynamics.
The term deep state originally came from describing a situation in Turkey, where the democratically elected government was powerless in comparison to military. If a newly elected government is unable to execute it's agenda, it's a sign that it's powerless.
DOGE lead by Elon Musk cutting costs seemed to be a key part of Trumps agenda, that Trump intended to carry out. The 8% figure from Pete Hegseth was also not just a campaign promise but seeme to be actually part of the Trump administrations agenda.
I think Elon Musk spend more on campaign donations to the Trump administration then the combined defense industry. If the influence would just be because rich donors have an interest in certain policy outcomes, why didn't Elon get more for his money?
To what extend it's evidence that suggests updating depends on your priors about whether you think DOGE would have actually do anything resembling auditing the Pentagon and whether anything would come out of Hegseth plan to cut the Pentagon budget.
For anyone who doubts deep state power:
(1) When Elon's Doge tried to investigate the Pentagon. A bit after that there's the announcement that Elon will soon leave Doge and there's no real Doge report about cuts to the Pentagon.
(2) Pete Hegseth was talking about 8% cuts to the military budget per year. Instead of a cut, the budget increased by 13%.
(3) Kash Patel and Pam Bondi switch on releasing Epstein files and their claim that Epstein never blackmailed anyone is remarkable.
When it comes to rationality and biases, the key question is whether learning more about biases results in people just rationalizing their decisions more effectively or whether they are actually making better decisions.
As far as I understand the academic literature, there's little documented benefit of teaching people about cognitive biases even so various academics studied teaching people about cognitive biases.
CFAR started out partly with the idea that it might be good to teach people about cognitive biases but in their research they didn't found a way to teach people about cognitive biases but moved to a different curriculum.
Julia Galef for example (who was one of the CFAR cofounders) later wrote the book on the Scout Mindset suggesting that focusing on being in the Scout Mindset instead of the Warrior Mindset is a better focus on how to actually increase rationality in a way that's relevant for people's life.
If we look at the question of "does training recognizing cognitive biases actually translate into better decisions", the way you approach the subject sounds to me like you decided on the answer before actually reasoning about whether or not it does translate in a critical way.
Because understanding these biases made such a difference for me personally, I decided to help others discover and learn about them as well.
How do you know that it made the difference for you personally? Is it basically a good feeling or what evidence do you see that it made a big difference for you personally?
The way the US handled racism in the 20st century is a core reason why there are much more isolated neighborhoods in the US than in Europe. Americans who can't directly discriminate against Black people found that if you just make housing in a neighborhood expensive enough, you can keep the neighborhood relatively free from Black neighbors.
While you might not convince people to switch to being YIMBY, the structures of racism are still a key reason why those neighborhoods are setup the way they are setup and this is part of what "character of the neighborhood" meant over the last century.
I don't think there's a good reason to think that Anki's algorithms are anywhere close to perfect. Algorithms at big companies are validated through A/B or multivariate tests. Anki's algorithms aren't.
I probably would target A/B tests at maximum learning for a minimum time investment, if I would govern Anki.
Given the amount of people out there that spend time with Anki, I think Algorithm quality is likely still underrated. I think Anki still doesn't ship the best algorithm it has by default.