Comment by gradschoolfail | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gradschoolfail | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Now, (and i’m still partial to keeping the lion-fox defos close to where they have always been*) would these people who attack moral issues with economic tools be lions or foxes? Its not that lions do not fear death, but that they fear lack of impact (ie positive externalities) more than death

I posit to thee that lion-fox is a spectrum (and not even very bimodal). where would you place the (napo)leon, sama, dang, and PG? I’d say closer to the lion, because while they keep tactical details close to their chest, their hearts are worn elsewhere.

*The historical [& natural] lions (with an epsilon of fox?) appears to employ camouflage, and if i may say so, enjoy subterfuge, by necessity? What the fiducial lion values, or respect (loyalty,unpredictability), are in their subordinates [as well as themselves]. Same for standard foxes ([intellectual]prowess,legibility).. i’d add that sibboleth consists of dropping something on their paws Y, where Y is something like an accusation of hypocrisy (& not dishonourabilitiness) watching their L0 (cache) ejaculation

Since my gallic quotemining skills are inadequate, bonaparte appeared to have said

X does not understand men like I do

Q: who was X? Cicero, Livy or Plutarch?

>just because… he says he can read [dead] people https://archive.is/www.economist.com/business/2024/10/03/wha...

X is unlikely to be Plutarque, for https://www.napoleon.org/wp-content/thumbnails/uploads/2009/... (depicting him at 15) was supposedly made with some input from the principal himself, and the book is supposed to be the Lives (also frequently mentioned by others in a cursory search).

Between Cicéron and Tite-Live my priors are (0,5:0,5) because it seems like he read whatever he could get his paws on: https://blog.napoleon-cologne.fr/napoleon-bonaparte-et-les-l... (with a rather Molochian /dev/null for books not worth the time to read? War and Peace also mentions french book burning habits, but those were driven by more prosaic motivations)

EDIT: > "it is an advantage if from time to time there are individuals who do not understand men" —???

(which reminds me, I still haven't tracked down one of your earlier paraphrases...)

I'll guess X=Livy — as he was a "professional" historian (one of Veblen's non-governing elites?) and therefore more likely to produce Gell-Mann (non)Amnesia moments.

[It's interesting to see the difference between quotes attributed to N1 on {de,en,fr} websites: in fr they sound pretty accurate (some fraction are lifted from Cicero or other classical authors); in de they're enriched in those that either concern germany itself or the hassle of dealing with idiots all day; in en just about anything gets his name slapped on it. ("87% of all statistics are just made up — Napoleon Bonaparte")]

That said, even though Cicero was in government, Livy seems to have been a tad more cynical (small-c, modern sense) than Cicero, so I could be wrong. Alongside the lifted-from-Cicero quotes, one also finds more machiavellian expressions:

> “Le peuple est le même partout. Quand on dore ses fers, il ne hait pas la servitude.” (People are everywhere alike. Give them golden handcuffs, and they don't hate their subjection) https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k65037972/f113.image.r...

Im guessing Livy too, as i heard it from a professional (English) historian at least a decade ago..

All i remembered was that, whoever the poor writer was, had never waged (or even experienced?) war, but popularly quoted in those contexts

now that you mentioned it, i notice that English historians (of any day) can be a bit… sloppy in their scholarship compared to continentals

Thanks for delving!

sounds like (what I've read about) Livy; no wuckers!

> Motivating Workers to Exert Effort (in the NBER wp)

Squad Leader (Avalon Hill) is the only game, board or otherwise, I've run across where "motivating [grunts] to exert effort" is an explicit part of the gameplay. Are there any others?

EDIT: also, I think whoever tested the teenaged Winston Smith and put him in the Outer Party did well: his adult allocation of confidants to revolutionary cells does not reflect well, neither on his CFIT, nor on his AG.

while I delve into Gallica (and run a few errands, and ponder the ancient dictum that people are like stones on a counting board — how much they're worth depends upon where* you put them):

Napoleon Ier — lion (2M in the imperial army, with organic support, and a navy) see also 13 Vendémiaire, Year 4.

DanG - fox (at most, he could field a squad w/ small arms)

PG & SamA - foxes (a few hundred green troops w/ small arms and no indirect fire capability is about an order of magnitude [pace innovations from Ukraine?] too small to hold or gain ground. SamA, given heavier weapons and mortars and double or treble the headcount, could maybe hold — for a day or two, at which point we'd need to add in a logistics train to somewhere friendly...)

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XJBNJ2wq0Y

* compare the reapportionment of horses in the Anabasis.

E1R (leonine heart and stomach) would be a fox too, before and/or after Tilbury?, same as E2R ? Or does being an assassin’s target count

(Somehow i feel you will not downgrade the discourse towards metaphorical threats to life, as in

https://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html)

~200 ships and ~16'000 men sounds pretty leonine to me? (and even the 4'500 militia at Tilbury dwarf an OpenAI or a YCombinator)

TIL from where the brits learned (the hard way) about "let's you and him fight": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Armada#:~:text=The%20K... (in later text note the use of elizabethan-era drones, fireships, leading up to the Tilbury speech*, as well as the providential arrival of a "divine wind" after it)

[so from whom did Philip, by the grace of God King of England, Spain, France, both the Sicilies, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy, Milan and Brabant, Count of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol, learn that foxes' game? (found also in the Panchatantra as "the crows and the snake")]

Wouldn't being an assassin's target say much more about the strategy of the initial source of the assassination attempt than it would about that of the target? (a fox might assassinate anyone: fox, lion, or designori; while an insufficiently leonine designori** would assassinate a lion or more leonine designori; between designori we get into a comparative advantage game for who takes the fox and who the lion role?)

It'll take me a moment to switch out of lion mode; for the moment all I'm coming up with is that Xenophon et. al. correctly surmised they were default dead unless they could cross the chasm, err, make it to a friendly coastline.

(Θάλαττα! θάλαττα! being the cry of investors upon finding a second potential buyer?)

* note that E1R starts with pairs in the run-ups but concludes on full tricolons; no mere "shock and awe" for her.

** EDIT: eg, well before co-founding Likud, MVB was busy bombing brits

EDIT2: NB channels NdBdM:

> “Je sais, quand il le faut, quitter la peau du lion pour prendre celle du renard.” (when necessary, I can remove the lion's skin and wear the fox's)

My bad, I had an old number for OpenAI; at 3'600 it's actually getting close, in principle, to E1R's militia at Tilbury.

Closest equivalent in the US system would be a Brigade Combat Team, which (if SamA had the equivalent mix of occupational specialties as well as non-civilian equipment) incorporates support and sustainment elements and would be fairly leonine.

Compare early 2017 PMC Wagner.

EDIT: according to the doctrine of FM 3-96, BCT commanders (who have organic intelligence units) are not only responsible for outcomes in the field, but are also have responsibility for influencing audiences and narratives, which sounds pretty vulpine.

[NB that the notion of arming a 600 person AI company and asking them to hold a piece of ground is already at the edge of plausibility; asking a 3'600 person AI company to act as a BCT would require a clearly implausible acquisition of process knowledge]

...and while we're reading PG, Cicero (second use source) quoting Cato (ostensible source) on venture capital: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

[note that capitalism via *kaput (head) and feudalism via *fehu (cattle) stand in a metonymic relation. compare https://adebiportal.kz/kz/translation/view/595#:~:text=We%20... ]

Forsooth, That was a gem!! That is, i still dont know whether youd be happy to steer clear from invoking violence when discoursing economic approaches to moral issues…

Mongoose vs (king) cobra, thats a pairing from asia i could be curious about..

[I note another horseshoe-like effect where foxes mporp lions, realtime, get themselves confused..]

Anabasis is _the_ counterexample i’d like to have remembered.. fully vulpine Commanding Officer

(I mentioned assassinationtargetstateofmind because… inferred internal states tend to be insanely effective when identifying .. familiars?)

I've been invoking violence because that is ("keeping the lion-fox defos close to where they have always been") the historical leonine[0] trait.

Fox-lion confusion by a third party also occurs in one of the Panchatantra stories, where a mother leaps to the conclusion that the mongoose with blood on its mouth has betrayed her... (compare "Rikki-tikki-tavi")

From the violence-dealing viewpoint, wasn't the CO in the Anabasis designori? A 10'000 strong combined arms unit, even if default dead, is still well capable of holding its perimeter against wolves. (both here and in Persia)

That said, if you'd prefer to rotate the microscope lenses and narrow down to even-more-metaphorical lions and foxes, I'm happy to do so (if I may footnote the occasional ultima ratio[1] from time to time?) going forward.

[0] in the Tanakh lion is used metaphorically for scholars, but only as part of a total order, and there's plenty of violence in the (t <= R. Meir) fox and lion stories. (open Q: was the hebrew word, which gets translated fox, a fox or a jackal?)

[1] making people offers they can't refuse?

EDIT: this is probably the reason for our different distributional preferences: as metaphors for strategies, I'll grant a non-bimodal distribution, but as long as the lion stands (rampant?) for violence, doing gangsta shit effectively (which includes irreversible decision-making under the influence of adrenaline) implies a significant time sunk cost in having earlier practised doing gangsta shit; similarly all the skulking about meeting with (potential) informants is a significant time sink for the case officer: we can't all just have Hugin and Munin show up each morning with the news.

EDIT2: to what extent does Hercules' use of the Nemean Lion's claws to skin itself anticipate Cantor's use of diagonalisation?

One more violent lion: El Cid (or designori?)

Someday I'll have to actually read his story, because he took the Kolmogorov Option: his friendly suzerain died and an enemy inherited, so he wound up in exile, yet was able (while maintaining feudal proprieties) to capture Valencia, at which point (for story purposes) said hostile suzerain married the suzerain's sons to El Cid's daughters, leaving him sandwiched by inimical interests, and yet he still maintained his Kolmogorov bubble until death (and even some time after).

In order to get a better idea of the distinction you have in mind, fox or lion: EES, DJT, NB1, DG, PG, SHA?

Ill need you to disambiguate EES,DG (DanG?) ..

NB1 designori, writing off Laplace as a chancellor was fox skin (see below)

DJT designori, but much less certainty, fox wearing lion skin badly, or with help of stims?

PG: from video, designori, from writings, fox, so maybe fox wearing a lion skin? (havent considered his encounters with wolves and traps)

DanG no idea, slight maybe of fox wearing lion skin (from interviews)

Another measure: warmth/intellect affectations, so if inferred from writings=propganda (uh modulo that french isnt my Ln) old boney is one hell of a fox, or lion wearing fox skin..

Theres also the Mahatma: designori imho certainly, if he said=he meant

live like youll die tomorrow,]l[earn like youll live forever

Sorry about the Xenophon, brainfatulence, as it was. So id encourge you to point out any egregious goalpost shifting above & below

Our Lord of the Masses, yes (designori, probably, as a guess from the 2nd hand ads and not from any scholarship whatsoever)

El Cid, no idea, too far back, but from what you just said , designori but no idea of what wearing what skin

(If youd like i would have to even put some bars on my responses)

Veblen: most likely fox, unless we surface something in Ellen’s papers?

Bw limited, so answering the shallower q’s because the discourse seems like it jumped in depth

EES: Eric Schmidt (not Edward Elmer "Doc" Smith)

no wuckers; I'm happy for any discourse with a timescale beyond the HN "look a squirrel!" mode.

EES might have seemed a fox but now he’s been mostly just living the life, so i’d wager he’d been always a lion albeit with a fox skin as the situations required..

A lot of (human) capital destruction happened “under his watch” possibly too; yesterday i found in my acorn stash an old html document from Hal Varian, “markets for information goods” which should provide a good framing story for that (im guessing that the nomenclature ICE is just fortunate)

“Lone” (子連れ) whiskered canid here.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5LmAo4tmT4

Erm, i (mostly) missed the flagged post, maybe rehash some of that stuff here?

EE’D’S always wondered if the moniker was inspired by “Lehnsmann” (aka UvH)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23980317

[NP Spiesser gonna spiess*; guess 31-60 are noisy channels too?]

the lone canid being the post-'69 Nu Pogodi sketch?

bright eyed and bushy tailed on the drones!

widespread solar could be like the old RN: unlike the non-nuclear bits of the USN, they only needed to put into port for fresh water, victuals, and the occasional repair. where are we on beamed power? (I'd think like charging, you'd want as large an area as possible on the receiving end, so maybe not so useful for keeping drones aloft?)

Igloo White reminded me of Project Loon (but maybe it's just pareidolia that I see dual-use everywhere?) which would be another (but probably insufficiently stealthy) approach to drone range-extension (witness DARPA fascination with perching).

Lagniappe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox

[in between I figured out the vampire teeth. È colpa di Celentano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRVNEIIhYpY#t=870 that's probably also the original source for Анонс?

Lagniappe2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZLIWoUbcyo ]

* compare The Scorpion and the Frog

I'll have to add RTT to the list that includes Mary Poppins, Pooh, der Ententanz, leg warmers, etc. (RTT has antagonists, but animals [or at least snakes] fall in the pirate class?)

Ogami, having had to carry weapons in the pram, would've appreciated UvH's bei ... Fischfang müssen wir eisengepanzert sein. (oops: why did I quote the german? UvH wrote in latin)

EDIT: I can't believe the en.wikipedia for LWaC doesn't mention Hard Boiled (1992) in its trope list; the baby scene was even referenced shot for shot in a recent Fast and Furious.

EDIT: I'd guess HRV knew what he was doing (1998>>1981) but he does seem to be from the wrong generation

EDIT: https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/08/16/242148/hal-varia... Growing up, he turned to science fiction for excitement. ICE was a shout out.

not so Lone Partisan (note the japanese maple!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAWnj3qwlSc

from MfIG: A fourth technique for deal with exclusion is to embrace it, and bundle the information good with information that sellers want to be widely disseminated such as advertising.

Crane vs Crab (ft Mongoose) is a good one...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com