I'm not disputing that specific people at Skunk Works believed that their tech was disliked for being good; but that's a totally insane belief that you should reject immediately, it's obviously self-serving, none of those people present any evidence for it, and the DoD did try to acquire similar technology in all these cases.
Again, this is a direct quote on procurement incentives from a guy who was involved on both the buy and sell side of the SR-71 back in the day.
This is quote from, per you, somebody from the CIA. The CIA and Air Force are different orga...
Your discussion of Skunk Works is significantly wrong throughout. (I am not familiar with the other examples.)
For example, in 1943 the Skunk Works both designed and built America’s first fighter jet, the P80 Shooting Star, in just 5 months. Chief engineer Kelly Johnson worked with a scrappy team of, at its peak, 23 designers and 105 fabricators. Nonetheless, the resulting plane ended up being operationally used by the air force for 40 years.
The P80 was introduced in 1945; the US almost immediately decided to replace it with the F-86, introduced in 1949. Th...
Well, I do think your comment quite overstates its case, but I've made some edits that should avoid the interpretations mentioned, and I do think those make the post better. So thanks for that! :)
On the P80:
It was built in 1943 and introduced in 1945. When I wrote "used operationally for 40 years" I didn't have in mind that they sent it up to join forces with F-16s in the 1980s. Rather wanted to convey that "in spite of being built ridicolously quickly, it wasn't a piece of junk that got scrapped immediately and never ended up serving a real f...
No.
I'm pretty negative on how you fail to discuss any specific claim or link to any specific evidence, but you spend your longest paragraph speculating about the supposed bias of unnamed people.
You haven't really written enough to be clear, but I suspect that you have confused concentration camps with death or extermination camps? Regardless, the recent UN report did pretty specifically support claims of concentration camps- see points 37-57
I also found that, controlling for rents, the partisanship of a state did not predict homelessness (using the Partisan Voting Index)
This is not a useful way of looking at this; homelessness would be almost entirely controlled by city, not state, policies. State partisanship in large part measures not how blue or red the states' cities are, but rather how urban or rural the state as a whole is.
This, and the Bahrain/UAE cases, seem more likely to be driven by concerns about whether/how well the Chinese vaccines work?
On the other hand, look at the US wars in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. The outcomes of these wars were determined much more by political forces (in both of the relevant countries) than by overwhelming force.
Insurgencies aren't a good comparison for conventional wars like the Nagorno-Karabakh war.
The overall thrust here seems like an application of Clausewitz's maxim that "war is the extension of politics by other means". However, the specific politics suggested seem very unrealistic.
The source article is here. The numbers are not how much of the total the subgroups make up, they are how quickly each subgroup is growing. The text continues:
The number critically ill with covid-19 in that age group grew by about 30% in the week before January 2nd, and also in the following week—but by just 7% in the week after that (see chart 2). By contrast, among those aged between 40 and 55 (who were vaccinated at a much lower rate at the time) the weekly change in the number of critically ill remained constant, with a 20-30% increase in each of those three weeks.
I have no idea why Dr. Moncef Slaoui, the head of Operation Warp Speed, was asked to resign and transition things over to someone else. Seems like if someone does their one job this effectively you’d want to keep them around.
While it's possible that Moncef Slaoui's resignation was caused by the Biden transition's request, he'd been publicly clear for months that he would resign in late 2020 or early 2021, as soon as 2 vaccines were approved. Here's a news article of him saying this from November.
Plausibly the Biden transition just wanted him to resign at a...
Blade Runner 2045 movie
2049, not 2045.
Trump continues to promise a vaccine by late October. The head of the CDC says that’s not going to happen. Trump says the head of the CDC is ‘confused.’ The CDC walks the comments back. On net, this showed some attempt by the CDC to not kowtow to Trump, but then a kowtow, so on net seems like a wash.
This is missing the last step, which is that the CDC then walked back its walk back (?!?). See here:
...The CDC scrambled to explain; by about 6 p.m., the agency was claiming Redfield had misunderstood the original question and
I don't really have a great answer to that, except that empirically in this specific case, Spain was indeed able to extract very large amounts of resources from America within a single generation. (The Spanish government directly spent very little on America; the flow of money was overwhelming towards Europe, to the point where it caused notable inflation in Spain and in Europe as a whole.) I don't disagree that running a state is expensive, but I don't see why the expense would necessarily be higher than the extracted resources?
(1) Local support doesn't end after the first stages of the war, or after the war ends. I mentioned having favored local elites within one society/ethnicity continue to do most of the direct work in (2); colonizers also set up some groups as favored identities who did much of the work of local governance. For example, after the Spanish conquest, the Tlaxcala had a favored status and better treatment.
(2) Not sure why you'd expect low fidelity control to imply that it ends up as a wash in terms of extracting resources, can you clarify?
I feel like there's two points causing the confusion:
(1) The assumption that natives are an undifferentiated mass. There were a variety of mutually hostile indigenous peoples, who themselves sough out allies against each other; and, in particular, who sought to balance the strongest local powers. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, page 48:
...The search for native allies was one of the standard procedures or routines of Spanish conquest activity throughout the Americas. Pedro de Alvarado entered highland Guatemala in 1524 not only with thousands of Nahua all
[Like, it's not for nothing that the Aztecs told the Conquistadors that they thought the latter group were gods!]
It is unlikely that the Aztecs actually believed that the Conquistadors were gods. (No primary sources state this; the original source for the gods claim was Francisco Lopez de Gomara, writing based on interviews with conquistadors who returned to Spain decades later; his writing contains many other known inaccuracies.)
Claims that are related to, but distinct from, the Aztecs believing that the Conquistadors were gods:
On Diamond and writing, see previous discussion here. It is highly unlikely that writing was critical:
The specific evidence you’ve cited is weak. (1) You write that “The argument that we should be listening to experts and not random people would make a lot of sense if the "armchair" folks didn't keep being right.” It is extremely easy to be right on a binary question (react more vs less). That many non-experts were right is therefore more-or-less meaningless. (I can also cite many, many examples of non-experts being wrong. I think what we want is the fraction of experts vs non-experts who were right, but that seems both vague and unobtainable.)
(Note that t
...The posts I'm referring to made claims that were much stronger than "we should be reacting more". If you look through https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca and https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-deadly-delusion-eea324fe9727, and the follow-up https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56 they're making detailed claims about how the world is and how it will soon be.
That quote seems to provide no evidence that the 'literate tradition' mattered. Cortes' conquest was only 14 years before; Pizarro had arrived in the New World 10 years before that; Cortes' conquest involved many people and was a big/important deal; even if the Spanish had no writing at all, Pizarro would likely have known the general outline of Cortes' actions.
It's strictly speaking impossible to rule out Pizarro indirectly being influenced by writing; but I don't think it would be possible for stronger evidence against the importance of writing in this specific case to exist.
That is not true; the CSA had worse railroads, but they were still important throughout the war. Some of the most important Union offensives late in the war- the Atlanta campaign and the siege of Petersburg- were intended to sever the South's railroads; and the war ended almost immediately after the Union cut off the railroad routes to the CSA capital of Richmond at the Battle of Five Forks. Both sides were heavily reliant on railroads for supply, and also used railroads to move troops (for the CSA, e.g. moving Longstreet's corps to fight at Chickamagua).
Now, imagine you’re a diplomat, at a diplomatic conference. You see a group of diplomats, including someone representing one of your allies, in an intense conversation. They’re asking the allied diplomat questions, and your ally obviously has to think hard to answer them. Your intuition is going to be that something bad is happening here, and you want to derail it at all costs.
Source? I feel very, very confident that this is false. You would only want to break things up if you felt very confident that your ally would screw up answering the questions; otherwise, having lots of people paying careful attention to your side's proposals would be a very good sign.
Literally every sentence you wrote is wrong.
The worst crimes of the holocaust were a conspiracy within the Nazi government.
This is not true. The Holocaust was ordered by the popular leader of the German government; they were executed by a very large number of people, probably >90% of whom actively cooperated and almost none of whom tried to stop the Holocaust. (see e.g. Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men) German society as a whole knew that their government was attempting genocide; see e.g. What We Knew for supporting details, or Wikipedia for a s...
All of these are plausibly true of art departments at universities as well. (The first two are a bit iffy.)
As I understand it, the mainstream interpretation of that document is not that Bin Laden is attacking America for its freedom; rather, AQ's war aims were the following:
See, e.g., this wikipedia article, or The Looming Tower. Eliezer is correct that AQ's attacks were not caused by AQ's hted of American freedoms.
The argument doesn't understand what the moral uncertainty is over; it's taking moral uncertainty over whether fetuses are people in the standard quasi-deontological framework and trying to translate it into a total utilitarian framework, which winds up with fairly silly math (what could the 70% possibly refer to? Not to the value of the future person's life years- nobody disputes that once a person is alive, their life has normal, 100% value.)
No I'm not. The Fizzbuzz article cited above is a wiki article. It is not based on original research, and draws from other articles. You will find the article I linked to linked to in a quote at the top of the first article in the 'articles' section of the wiki article; it is indeed the original source for the claim.
The quote does not claim there has been no filtering done before the interview stage. If you read the original source it explicitly states that it is considering all aplicants, not only those who make it to the interview stage: "We get between 100 and 200 [resumes] per opening."
You seem to be confusing applicants with people who are given interviews. Typically less than half of applicants even make it to the interview stage- sometimes much, much less than half.
There's also enough evidence out there to say that this level of applicants is common. Starbucks had over a hundred applicants for each position it offered recently; Proctor and Gamble had around 500. This guy also says it's common for programmers.
unless you believe more than 100 people on the average get interviewed before anyone is hired
This is accurate for the top companies- as of 2011, Google interviewed over 300 people for each spot filled. Many of these people were plausibly interviewed multiple times, or for multiple positions.
Maybe, but this is the exact opposite of polymath's claim- not that fighting a modern state is so difficult as to be impossible, but that fighting one is sufficiently simple that starting out without any weapons is not a significant handicap.
(The proposed causal impact of gun ownership on rebellion is more guns -> more willingness to actually fight against a dictator (acquiring a weapon is step that will stop many people who would otherwise rebel from doing so) -> more likelihood that government allies defect -> more likelihood that the government...
The Syrians and Libyans seem to have done OK for themselves. Iraq and likely Afghanistan were technically wins for our nuclear and drone-armed state, but both were only marginal victories, Iraq was a fairly near run thing, and in neither case were significant defections from the US military a plausible scenario.
Thanks for your response!
1) Hmmm. OK, this is pretty counter-intuitive to me.
2) I'm not totally sure what you mean here. But, to give a concrete example, suppose that the most moral thing to do would be to tile the universe with very happy kittens (or something). CEV, as I understand, would create as many of these as possible, with its finite resources; whereas g/g* would try to create much more complicated structures than kittens.
3) Sorry, I don't think I was very clear. To clarify: once you've specified h, a superset of human essence, why would you apply...
Note: I may have badly misunderstood this, as I am not familiar with the notion of logical depth. Sorry if I have!
I found this post's arguments to be much more comprehensible than your previous ones; thanks so much for taking the time to rewrite them. With that said, I see three problems:
1) '-D(u/h)' optimizes for human understanding of (or, more precisely, human information of) the universe, such that given humans you can efficiently get out a description of the rest of the universe. This also ensures that whatever h is defined as continues to exist. But ...
They are posted here.
IMHO, good starting points are 'Definiability of Truth in Probabilistic Logic' and 'Robust Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma'.
I, and presumably shminux as well, though that you were claiming that there's actually a good chance that Obama actually does want to see the American 'empire' collapse, not that Putin thought that he would.
You're taking a very inside-view approach to analyzing something that you have no direct experience with. (Assuming you don't.) This isn't a winning approach. Outside view predicts that 90% of startups will fail.
Startups' high reward is associated with high risk. But most people are risk averse, and insurance schemes create moral hazard.
re: public speaking: There are in person groups like Toastmasters. Alternately, you can record yourself speaking about something and try to give yourself a self-critique.
Here's an exercise I've run before: Person 1 picks a word at random; Person 2 immediately starting speaking about something relevant. At 15 second intervals for 1-2 minutes, Person 1 throws out new words; Person 2 needs to keep speaking about the new words, and to flow smoothly between topics. (You can substitute Wikipedia's random article button for Person 1.)
Most of the ancients that people pay attention to these days are ... well-fed
You mean well-fed in the sense of "not starving," but that doesn't imply "well-fed" in the sense of eating a healthy diet. There's reason to think that upper-class Romans would have been even more damaged by lead poisoning than the poor, and there's good evidence that even emperors were deficient in iodine.
I have a historian standing next to me right now who says the lead poisoning story is BS and people who propagate it should be shot/severely eye-rolled at. He says that:
-Romans did drink lead-sweetened wine but
-only lower class romans did so because they could not afford better
-lead-sweetened wine continued to be drunk up until the 18th century
-While some people undoubtedly died, saying it caused the fall of the Roman Empire is a ridiculous just-so story
-particularly because the sweetener was used centuries before and after the fall with no increasing usage leading up to the fall
-and the eastern Roman empire continued to exist for another thousand years anyway.
The obvious way to pull the rope sideways on this issue is to advocate for replacing conventional nuclear devices with neutron bombs.
It seems, I dunno, kind of a frequentist way of thinking about the probability that I'm wrong.
There are numerous studies that show that our brain's natural way of thinking out probabilities is in terms of frequencies, and that people show less bias when presented with frequencies than when they are presented with percentages.
His claim was:
(a) Everybody knew that different ethnicities had different brain sizes (b) It was an uncomfortable fact, so nobody talked about it (c) Now nobody knows that different ethnicities have different brain sizes
His stated point is about telling things that everybody is supposed to know.
No, that was absolutely not his point. I don't understand how you could have come away thinking that- literally the entire next paragraph directly stated the exact opposite:
...Graduate students in anthropology generally don’t know those facts about average brain volume in different populations. Some of those students stumbled onto claims about such differences and emailed a physical anthropologist I know, asking if those differences really exist. He tells them ‘yep’ – I’m not sur