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Comment by kayodelycaon | Hacker News Reader

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Yes - only the Irish are brave.

It means that Irish immigration to the USA was massive around 1850 and the standards for the Medal of Honor in the Civil War were less than they have been afterward, due to the lack of other awards.

A lower standard would apply across the board, not only to the Irish. For your comment to make sense, forces would have to be majority Irish to begin with. Otherwise, Irish are vastly overpresented for selfless and superior bravery on the field of battle.

The proportion of Irish Americans among the American working class in the the era of the American civil war _was_ much larger than it is today.

No doubt that is true but it doesn't seem to account for the discrepancy, at least not without acquiring more data. Google's LLM is spitting out ~250K immigrant and first-generation Irish fighting in the Civil War, sitting roughly at 10% of the total. That doesn't account for second-generation and older, so I would be interested to see what social mobility was like for those more-established Irish-Americans: were they languishing in the working class, or did they exit from the middle class to go fight in wars disproportionately?

edit: how significant is the class factor, anyway? Does that model really apply, and how many citizens would be considered middle or upper class; enough to make a large statistical impact?

Google's LLM is an LLM. Results from an LLM are garbage unless you can test them. Any other sources?

Yes, I made sure to highlight that this was the (unreliable) source, consider it an invitation for the history buffs to chime in.

Food for thought: if I had posted the very first source available on Google as authorative, with no actual knowledge of my own to make the claim, that could be more misleading on aggregate, right?

Agreed, it's not so much where you find the source, but the source itself. Unquestioningly taking "first result" is just as bad as taking anything from an LLM and representing it as a factual answer. Also, kagi generally has higher quality search results (that can be checked).

Also we're not talking about the proportion of the entire nation that was Irish, we're discussing the fighting-age lower class population of the Union side only.

Yeah, in the UK there have been 1,355 recipients of ‘Victoria Cross’ their highest medal.

You know how many there have been since WW2? Fifteen. Recipients who are alive today? Five.

So the demographics of recipients are more reflective of them Britain of a century ago than of modern Britain.

I don't know of any MOH recipients in my Irish-American family, but I lost 3 great uncles in WW2 and my grandfather was a paratrooper who survived the war but was wounded in combat (but didn't receive a purple heart) and also injured in a jump. Maybe there is/was an Irish cultural tendency to take the initiative.

Also, some aspects of the stereotype are true: we're violent as fuck, but perhaps that's true of all h. sapiens sapiens.

My great grandfather, also Irish-American, is buried in Epinal, France. He died fighting in the battle of the bulge. I wonder what part of the US population was Irish-Americans during WW2, and furthermore what percentage of lower incomes were made up by Irish-Americans. That could explain the over representation.

Imagine immigrating to the USA from Ireland only to find yourself conscripted into the Civil War.

Some cultures priotitize strength, fighting, honor, etc, while others prioritize different things.

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