Harold and George Destroy the World
tomclancy.info
tomclancy.info
The Dept of Defense was only created in the late 1940s. Before that the US had the Dept of War, the Dept of the Navy, and other organizations. The point of calling it "defense" was not because "everyone has the right to defense", but because the US was promoting the United Nations and waging a Cold War, and wanted to pretend that it would never do anything proactive or aggressive. That is, it was propaganda, as the current preferred name "Dept of War" is now for a different posture with regard to America's adversaries.
If you're going to call people stupid or immature for making certain decisions, maybe take a couple minutes to find out who made the decisions, and/or what the history of those and similar changes has been.
[1] https://www.ccac.gov/system/files/media/calendar/images/Semi...
[2] https://www.usmint.gov/coins/coin-programs/semiquincentennia...
Not to say that War is Peace folks won’t jump on it.
Many other countries similarly changed the name of their respective ministries, reflecting the ideal (if not the fact) that war should not be pursued for gain or used to resolve international controversies.
Actions trail behind ideals; ideals are set to remind us of how things should be even if we don't live up to them. Renaming the DoD to DoW reflects an aggressive, violent and ultimately predatory posturing that the West had chosen to abandon after WW2 and many millions of deaths.
No, it wasn’t zero. But there was still a notable drop. I don’t think it’s coincidence that blowing up this world order has only become a cause now that those who suffered the horrors of WW2 have died.
Here's what it came up with:
Period. Approx average deaths from war
1815–1913 ~5–15 per 100k per year
1914–1945 ~100–200 per 100k per year
1946–1989 ~5–10 per 100k per year
1990–today ~1–3 per 100k per year
Here's the "bottomline":
> Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the per-capita death rate from war has fallen substantially, with the huge exception of the 1914–1945 world-war era, which produced the highest war mortality rates in modern history.
TBH this surprised me. I thought that with much better killing machines in the 20th century, we'd be more efficient at killing, and as we're still having wars as usual that would mean death rates would increase... but it seems I was quite wrong.
Instead of complaining, do what prior generations did and stand up and build something.
For example 3 to 5 million were killed in the 2nd Congo war of 1998-2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
…which is the bad thing being discussed, yes. I don’t really understand why “there used to be one” would be exonerative. Not to mention, they didn’t rename it, that requires an act of Congress. Instead they just told everyone to change which name they use. Lines up with the “adult children” theory. Skip the actual work, (which would involve addressing the nation and justifying this change in posture), instead focus on the performative.
As we are seeing in real time with Iran, “we’ll just war!” was a juvenile idea, committed to with near-zero forethought or planning.
It's wild how people are just going along with it, too. They didn't officially change the name of anything. Why are journalists and people outside of the administration's orbit using the "preferred" but fake name?
As the original poster said:
> If you're going to call people stupid or immature for making certain decisions, maybe take a couple minutes to find out who made the decisions, and/or what the history of those and similar changes has been.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/09/fact-sheet-pr...
US hegemony lasted for a mere ~20 years. Today it does not possess hegemony, China is able to stand-off fully with the US both economically and militarily (at least in Asia).
Iran is a regional conflict. It will matter less than the Iraq war and occupation did.
It's possible that it will be a regional conflict the way the Serbian/Austro-Hungarian conflict was regional. Or the way people pretended that the Germany/Sudetenland conflict was regional.
I don't wish to catastophize. But I also think it's important to realize that this does have the potential to become much worse very suddenly. That doesn't make the decisions easy, but they shouldn't be easy.
Why does the US economy rely so heavily on chips manufactured in Taiwan, and on components, products, and services provided by China?
The difference between the US and China is that China understands that carrier strike groups are not the modern definition of hegemony.
https://www.semiconductors.org/chips/
China's attempts at hegemony have largely consisted of making loans on bad terms to corrupt developing countries and then trying to foreclose when they don't pay. This has not worked.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing_(Iraq...
If anyone feels sure they know what the next several years has in store regarding Iran they are just demonstrating their own ignorance. I’d expect more people here to be cognisant of the Dunning Kruger effect.
But I’m pretty sure that any imaginable outcome of this war will be bad for the US, at a time where they are withdrawing from global politics to concentrate on national politics.
IMO worst case this will lead to a massive civil war in the US and best case to a devaluation of US military might (aka their army will be less respected/feared). Or anything in between.
We can revisit this comment in a couple years and laugh about how wrong i was though
Referring to a dime as a dollar bothered me too. Going deeper, the absence of the olive branch is actually an intentional historical reference to the Revolutionary War, where peace was tragically lost. According to the artist who made it, the open claw is to symbolize the desire to regain it:
The image takes inspiration from the Great Seal of the United States, and represents the colonists before and during the American Revolution, Custer explained. While he included the arrows from the seal, he left out the olive branch to symbolize the fact that the colonies hadn’t yet reached peace — but left the claw open to demonstrate that they were waiting for it.
https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2026/02/philadelphia-mint-c...
The “Dept of War” naming is not aimed at our adversaries. It’s aimed internally. It’s chest beating from man children who want desperately to identify as “alpha males”.
The same man who calls himself the “president of peace” unilaterally renamed the department of defense. It’s entirely legitimate to call this out as nonsense.
“We won the first world war, we won the second world war, we won everything before that and in between,” Trump said at the signing. “And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense.”
Seems like a stupid and immature reason enough to me.
I think we haven't felt yet the true consequences of this. Worldwide.
IQ is also highly heritable: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927.
No amount of education, experience, and grit can turn a 100 IQ person into Einstein. IQ is a massive multiplier.
It's also worth noting that none of these individuals ever took an IQ test. Their genius is entirely recognized through their work. Which again raises the question of what exactly IQ testing and what IQ is adding to our understanding of exceptional ability.
It appears that over a century of research in psychometrics has demonstrated nothing we already could not infer. We do not need some boring puzzle test to tell us someone with Down syndrome will not be a Nobel Prize winner. Nor do we need some boring puzzle test to tell us that von Neumann or Mozart had godlike childhood abilities and could maybe make large contributions for humanity.
Here is the abstract from the original paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pms.1989.69.1.2...
> The purpose of this research was to assess how well success in early combat training was predicted by scores on a test of general intelligence
It seems this research pertains to early combat training and not broad, post-training success in one's military career. Not to mention the research is essentially predicting test performance from test performance. I imagine the same predictions can be made about one's two-mile run and one's three-mile run.
> Analysis indicated that intelligence test scores AND run time significantly predicted success, each adding to the prediction provided by the other.
Which is not surprising. It shows that intelligence is just one of the multiple contributing factors. Being exceptionally tall is essential in the NBA, but being exceptionally tall, alone, is insufficient to make it to the NBA.
I am not certain where you are deriving this claim from.
> Similarly, people don’t like the idea that some individuals are just born smarter than other individuals.
Nor this claim, as well.
I have had many discussions on the topic of IQ, and I have never once seen anybody ever argue that there is no variance in human intelligence. There is a large range of variance in every human attribute. That is not the focus of the debate. Rather, most of the debate seems to be surrounding the construct validity of IQ. Statistical validity != construct validity.
Sure. But in science, we regularly postulate the existence of some construct, and confirm that construct by conducting many empirical tests that return results consistent with the existence of that construct. General intelligence is like that. We can’t see it directly. But we have myriad results that are statistically consistent with its existence.
However, I have one question. What evidence is there that this 'g-factor' is actually representative of general intelligence? You may not use the correlation values used to derive the g-factor to support your argument. My understanding is that correlations cannot be used to explain the general factor because the general factor should be what explains the correlations.
If you are interested, I implore you to read this blog from the statistician, Cosma Shalizi, of CMU. His explanation is far better than anything I could attempt to make.
No need to apologize. Perhaps my g is too low to describe my thoughts properly.
> "is representative of general intelligence"?
This factor that is derived from the positive correlations, g, is called general intelligence. So, g is nominally general intelligence, but is g actually what the name implies? One can take n number of positively correlated but independent things, and there will always be a some factor that can be derived from it. However, that does not mean the underlying factor is necessarily causal.
> This is a very abstract statement.
We are discussing abstract concepts.
> What does this mean in scientific, empirical terms?
That causality would be scientifically and empirically verifiable.
> What kind of facts we would observe in the world where this is true? What empirical observations we'd make in the world where it's false?
Alas, that is precisely the point I was trying to paraphrase from Shalizi. Whether g be true or false -- the result wouldn't look any different. The methodology being used cannot determine what is true nor false, and that is the crux of this entire problem.
I hope you understand that your vague question cannot be seen as equivalent to this rather more concrete statement. That’s why I asked for clarification, and your patronizing comments were really not called for.
In any case, Shalizi is very wrong, probably because he is entirely unfamiliar with the literature. He is wrong on multiple accounts.
First, yes, any number positively correlated measurements will yield a common factor. However, when talking about g, this is not an artifact of how we constructed IQ tests. Shalizi says:
What psychologists sometimes call the “positive manifold” condition is enough, in and of itself, to guarantee that there will appear to be a general factor. Since intelligence tests are made to correlate with each other, it follows trivially that there must appear to be a general factor of intelligence.
But this is just not true. Tests are not made to correlated with each other. Any time anyone attempts to construct a test of general mental ability, we always find the same g factor, even if they explicitly attempt to make a battery that tries to measure distinct, uncorrelated mental aptitudes. Observe how Shalizi fails to provide a single example of a test that does not exhibit the positive manifold with other tests.
Second, unlike Shalizi, we know that g is the predictive component of the IQ tests. IQ predicts real world outcomes very well, but what is really interesting is that the predictive power of individual subtests of an IQ test is practically perfectly correlated with g-loadings of the subtest. This would be very surprising if g was just a statistical artifact.
Shalizi says
So far as I can tell, however, nobody has presented a case for g apart from thoroughly invalid arguments from factor analysis; that is, the myth.
But this is just baffling if you have any familiarity with the literature.
Whether g be true or false -- the result wouldn't look any different. The methodology being used cannot determine what is true nor false, and that is the crux of this entire problem.
That’s just not true. For example, if g was a statistical artifact, one of the hundreds of intelligence tests devised would have not exhibited the positive manifold with all the others. It would not be correlated with heritability. It would not be correlated with phenotype features like reaction time. The world where g is a statistical artifact looks much different than our world.
The U.S. military won’t hire people below an 83 IQ to peel potatoes, because experience shows that such people can’t effectively be trained. So it’s more than just “minor” predictions.
Two, the military does not administer protected IQ exams, but rather, the ASVAB which correlates with IQ.
Three, our entire global society does not revolve around who can do what for the military.
Four, what can someone with an IQ of 84 do that one with an IQ of 83 cannot?
Five, the US military has plenty of uses for low scores. If one can't peel potatoes, then I'm sure the military would just send them out to stomp for land mines. However, Federal law is what disallows this, not the military: https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-10-armed-forces/10-usc-se...
FWIW, ASVAB is an IQ test. Any intelligence researcher will tell you so, because it exhibits the usual positive manifold, you find the usual g factor in it, and it shows high correlation with other IQ test. The military doesn’t usually call it as such for political reasons, but will happily admit in private that ASVAB and WAIS measure the same thing: https://web.archive.org/web/20200425230037/https://www.rand....
Ah, this essay is very, very good. I’m not surprised, Shalizi is a genius, but I hadn’t read this particular one before. Thanks for the link.
You’re using Motte-and-Bailey tactics to conflate IQ test results with vaccines denialism, on the basis that they are both “for the greater good”, which conveniently paints my point in a certain political light. How exactly does selectivity on the basis of IQ test results “enhance health outcomes for groups as a whole”? Maybe you could back up this argument with some historical context.
> “Similarly, people don’t like the idea that some individuals are just born smarter than other individuals.”
What data do you have to support this claim? And how much of this inherent intellect factors into IQ test results?
No, I’m pointing out that in both cases people attack the science because the implications of the science are in tension with their ideological priors. The fact that top-down coercion is an effective response to pandemics is inconvenient for libertarian-conservatives. Likewise, the fact that people differ in their intellectual capabilities from birth is inconvenient for liberal egalitarians.
Yes, of course people differ in intellectual capabilities at birth. That is not the argument. The argument is how much that actually impacts IQ test score results.
Your point suggests that “science” supports the idea of IQ being predetermined at birth.
It is? Egalitarianism is usually considered to be the position that all humans have equal moral worth, not the position that all humans have equivalent physical and mental capacities. Not even actually existing Communists believed the latter, as far as I’m aware.
But just to double check:
> Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or moral status. As such, all people should be accorded equal rights and treatment under the law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarianism
Nor does the existence of special laws or practices concerning low (or high, for that matter) IQ people pose any great obstacle to egalitarianism, assuming the laws or practices in question do not infringe upon moral personhood.
Rawls is a typical egalitarian philosopher and he takes care to account for these natural variations in the human condition during both the classic _A Theory of Justice_ and the modern “restatement” in _Justice as Fairness_.
You’re shifting the goal posts from the first sentence to the second sentence. What I said was: “IQ is real and highly heritable.” Responding to that by asserting that IQ tests are “skewed” and culturally biased, as OP did, is up there with vaccine denialism.
If you want to make a more nuanced point about what you can use IQ to prove, sure, that’s up for debate. But that’s not what we were talking about.
It's one thing to call out an interesting paper; it's another to act as if the matter has been settled simply by pointing to SIBS.
Find me any study that shows that IQ is more strongly correlated with SES than with parental IQ.
For the intuition think of height - a malnourished child will not reach their “genetic” height. A fully nourished child will be limited by their “genetics”. Why wouldn’t other biological characteristics be similar?
Genetically we’re not that different from cavemen, so the floor (without any weird eugenic theories about dumb people breeding too much) is “tamed caveman.”
Much like today on all sides of every significant debate. Where the loudest most emotional rise on feelings over logic.
If a person doesn't immensely value learning they're wrong, they exist as part of the problem.
I think never believing fully in your own ideas and always being able to admit you're wrong and always questioning is almost a super power that I wish we valued more.
You’re thinking of dysgenic, not eugenic.
Gattaca is a movie about eugenics.
And all men are Socrates...?
(For example, how stupid is stupid? How much breeding is to much? Is there even such a thing as too much breeding? All these are variables up for debate.)
But preventing the spread of an idea that you fear may be true, simply because you don't like the consequences, is intellectually dishonest.
Would you endorse suppressing the idea that the earth orbits the sun just because you lived in a milieu where the primacy of the church was more important than truth?
Argue against eugenics because it's unethical to prevent people from reproducing (and therefore no amount of "stupid people" reproducing is "too much"). Don't cloud your judgment by denying propositions that you fear may be true.
That movie can be understood in several different ways.
Also, I'd like to point out that the core problems with eugenics isn't an assertion that intelligence is hereditary, but that:
- Race is not a scientifically grounded concept
- Complex traits do not have Mendelian inheritance
- Measurement of intelligence is problematic
- Even measures that strongly correlate with success are confounded by environmental, cultural and economic factors
Thus, the conclusions drawn by eugenicists are based on their racism and prejudice, not by any scientific conclusions. It is a pseudo-scientific framework to justify (at the limit) ethnic cleansing.
The opening of the movie could also be read as a commentary or satire about a certain type of reality TV show or talk show that was popular at that time, but it was also a really cheap shot at a specific class of people and demonstrated a level of contempt that cannot really be defended.
But the rest of the movie was focused more on anti-intellectual and shallow culture and corporate greed - the heritability of intelligence never got another mention.
Maybe society should focus on supporting high quality environments for raising children well.
This probably includes a bunch of budget expensive things like...
* Rich interaction between smart adults and children, at low density
* Ensure good breakfast and lunch at minimum
* year round childcare
* Every child great medical care
- childfree is probably more enjoyable
- kids expensive and student debt crippling, so let’s delay starting till we’re 37 and own a home
- scary time/place to raise kids if you think about it too much
- etc.
So that’s thrown things out of balance. it’s not eugenics to say that smart people shouldn’t hold their birth rate so close to zero.
Imagine training an llm by putting it in a room with other untrained LLMs? All that knowledge is sure to rubb of!
Some children are innately motivated to learn. Some are motivated so strongly you could give them a smartphone and watch them learn all they need to learn in life. But those children aren't the norm - they're the freaky 1 in 1000 outliers. And education has to work with everyone.
Thus, peer pressure. That's what putting a whole bunch of students in the same room accomplishes.
I worked as a teacher for a year. Children are innately motivated and curious (this is not just a cliche). If there was any laziness it usually stemmed from fear of not being good enough but they definitely all tried, even students that didn't know their 5 times table by age 10. Some students have greater self-perseverance than others though, some can't handle being wrong and fear being seen as less-then their peers. Others like to challenge themselves without such fear.
I believe that fear is not unwarranted. It's a learned behavior that helps one survive in their environment. I imagine many of those children were likely punished for mistakes or for not being good enough.
Don't ask me how I know...
I don't think I've met a single child in my life that isn't excited about learning about new stuff, but it really depends on what it is, it differs a lot! And they're all different as well, someone who's really into math might hate history, or vice-versa. But they all want to learn something, in my experience.
The problem occurs when you place them all in one school, and force them to learn everything, even things they don't want to learn about, and that kind ruins the other parts they actually find fun and engaging.
A difficult part is that children aren't really in the position to know what they want to learn most of the time.
Sure, many prefer sports over math but covering a broad spectrum in pre-teen and teenager education is quite important to get them develop these preferences and themselves as a person. They are given more agency/choice (electives etc.) as they grow up.
There are also topics you need to learn that aren't fun/engaging (especially as fun/engaging is quite subjective and depends on the individual). Especially when those topics are prerequisites to other potentially fun topics (you will have to learn the fundamentals before engaging with advanced topics in most subjects)
Most of the kids spent their whole days playing Xbox, Switch, or brainrot games like Roblox on tablets. (No, they weren’t “creatively building new worlds” on Roblox, just screwing around consuming what others had made in order to manipulate them into spending Robux).
I grew up in a place where education and hard work wasn’t valued much by the community. Those that could scam some sort of government benefits did so, and they certainly were not working on art or helping out their communities with all their spare time. At best was a consumption state - the median was actively self destructive behavior, and the worst was behaviors that ruined their surrounding community.
This whole idea that on average humans would hit some utopia of creativity and community mindedness if only they could throw off the yoke of needing to work to survive goes against every single bit of my lived experience. And recent history.
The kids who went to the local public school my nieces went to basically did the bare minimum - usually just showing up is enough these days. Zero interest in learning or putting effort in. Only when they were removed from that environment and put with self-selecting (well, parent-selecting) peers that were curated beforehand did this fact change.
The vast majority of humans are not inherently motivated to better themselves in any way.
That it was their own idea apparently made all the difference.
Right around puberty your theory starts to break down.
I mean I get that rote memorization of eg. The multiplication table (7x7=49 etc pp) feels pointless, but it is training your brain. And a growing person whose brain is still developing who continuously memorizes new things will be smarter by the time they're 20 then the same person that didn't, only put in minimal effort because everyone around them talks like intelligence is mostly genetics.
I mean genetics definitely plays a role given the same circumstances - but your effort - including memorization - is massively more impactful.
I dunno, I guess it depends on what we mean by "smart" but I've definitively met (and been friends) with people who weren't able to live on their own by their 20s, although they were very "smart" in school and highly intelligent in general. I've also seen the reverse, dumb people being "better at life in general". I don't think it's as black and white as you're trying to make it out to be.
who are mostly from countries where education is
> leaning more to memorization
The massive success of information retrieval allowed people to trick themselves that they no longer needed to remember things, and remember them easily. They should instead turn focus on critical thinking.
But critical thinking is knowledge based. At least, I buy E. D Hirch’s argument that it is.
[0]: China's Quora equivalent, but much better than Quora
Meanwhile at the same schools, so many Americans major in things like the various identity “____ studies,” fake sciences like psychology, etc. They graduate from college with potentially less useful skills or knowledge than could have been gained by watching a few (non-AI) YouTube videos a day.
We’ve turned half or more of our educational system into babysitting and self-esteem therapy for a generation we’ve raised to be incredibly anxious and fragile.
Yes, memorization is important. What I argue it's pushing out truly understanding and critical thinking. Kids need trial and error from experimentation (play).
I also find it convincing.
What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Ever https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-people-want-from-o...
We keep smart kids co-mingled with disruptive kids and bullies. We need to do what Asian countries do - entrance exams at every level.
We don't let kids excel at their interest area. Math and science, obviously, but we lack programs for entrepreneurship and leadership that might be better for kids that aren't STEM-focused. Something like a scouts-type program that teaches them business, accounting, management, leadership. Sports and the arts are pretty well covered, though.
If you're born poor and/or without interested parents, the system doesn't help mobility much. Kids gravitate to the environments they live in, and school doesn't shelter them from this.
College itself is a bubble for many degree programs. It's fantastic for hands-on sciences, but useless for career development in liberal arts. It will put you into debt if you're not already wealthy. We need to subsidize STEM and reintroduce college loan dischargeability so risk to lenders is back in the equation.
Programs are too expensive. Universities sell themselves as "experiences". Amenities, facilities, day spas. Admins are too big. Kids are taking degrees they shouldn't.
Grad programs are also inefficient. Academic publishing, the research and grant treadmill, not letting smart students immigrate, ...
The whole thing needs to be gutted and rewritten. From early childhood to post-grad.
We need to focus on ways to boost class mobility at a young age.
Almost all rich families I met saw entrepreneurship as lower-status. They chase arts and such. They are posturing they don't need to care about money. [of course it's a lie, but they do it anyway]
Only a fraction of the new rich get their kids into entrepreneurship while the rest are just spoiled. I heard many times "I want my kids to have all the things I din't have growing up" and then the kids turn into horrible entitled brats who hate their parents. Then the inevitable "How could they do this to me! I gave them everything!". It's not easy raising kids, even with enough money.
They’ve managed to con us into believing that first every teenager should decide what their “true passion” is, then if it’s not white collar they should be pressured to change their answer until it is, then they should take out $100,000+ in loans to live on a pretty campus for four years and hopefully mostly pay attention to the classes, and then they graduate and are greeted with the reality that half the majors offered are primarily academic pursuits with the employment possibilities mostly just being the colleges themselves. It’s a recipe for making an entire generation of nihilists (GenZ), who have a right to feel completely bamboozled and ripped off. I blame their late Gen-X parents for teaching them these fairytales in the first place.
When I was in about the 7th grade, our school switched to "Tracking": In each grade, the smart kids were in track 1, the next smartest were in track 2, all the way down to track 6 which were the kids who unfortunately needed so much remedial help that they were probably not even going to be functional adults post high school. The curricula were tuned for each track's academic level. Moving track-to-track could happen yearly. This system was great for keeping the nerds away from the troublemakers. Overnight, it changed for the better. I hardly saw the crayon-eaters, only in the hallways, and they hardly saw me. We never shared classes. It didn't fully stop bullying: Smart kids bully too, but in different ways. But, it did put a huge dent in it.
I don't know why we abandoned Tracking. It was such a drastic and instantly positive change, as a kid.
My kids were literally shocked to learn recently that people got made fun of for being gay when I was a kid, or that gay was a pejorative. They've never seen a fight on the playground etc. I only have n=3 as a sample size, so, maybe it's bad in other schools or other places, but yeah, at least for me, I think it's a lot less "Lord of the Flies" today than it was 25 years ago.
Ah yes, the undevelopped and oppressive countries able to provide them good enough education and not make them debt-ridden for it.
I don’t blame people for moving for better wages, but the level of rationalization used here to make brain drain feel virtuous is off the charts.
The idea that (correct) answers are something that can and may be known is all over the place, lately also in technology (LLMs, curve fitting, etc). Notably, answers must be able to validate themselves, every time. (Western) education used to be about this, before it reoriented towards instruction.
I think it's kind of a good thing to learn how to not have to look literally everything up because that's a time suck. I speak 3 languages "decently." My native language, one I learned as an exchange student (it's rusty, but it's still in there and if I start speaking it regularly the words come back almost unbidden), and Spanish from several long-distance backpacking trips in Spain for months and months. I dabble in others as necessary. If I'm learning a new language for travel or something I find that memory alone is invaluable. A few months of using SRS and memorizing 1000 words and you are suddenly able to communicate with a millions of people. Sure you might speak caveman Italian or whatever, but read a little bit of grammar you're off to the races. You're no Dante, but you are able to get by - that's so useful, and I can't see why people eschew the practical advantages of learning how to memorize!
I'm taking some classes (perpetually, I don't know why I must hate myself) and I find I consistently do better learning new things if I just know some facts about a topic before I even learn all the connections between ideas. Let's say you are learning, I don't know, DC circuits? I'm taking that class for fun this semester because I'm mostly self-taught in hardware and wanted to fill in some of the gaps. If you need to know how to calculate the step response, sure you can do it from first principles if you've taken ODE. But imagine if you're taking this as your first "real" engineering class on the EE track as a 19 or 20 year old kid. At the university I went for undergrad and this university now, you wouldn't get exposed to ODE for another semester or 2. But if you can just memorize the formula now, you can absorb the material - the "why" can come later.
I mean, I can never remember some math things, so I just derive the math when I need it, sure, I assume everybody does this where they have to, but if I could remember the damn derivation I wouldn't have to. Same with some code. There are some things in this world like matplotlib - I have used it 1000s of times and somehow I've literally barely learned it beyond the basics and constantly end up looking up how do things. As soon as I get the chart I want, it falls out of my brain until I am forced to learn it again to make a chart for a slide a couple months later. But there's insane utility to just... knowing things. When I was a pilot for a living, there were certain emergency procedures and limitations that I was just... expected to know - down cold. I haven't turned a prop for money in almost 6 years now, and there's some emergency procedures and limitations that I still can recite from memory. What's a great way to learn those things? Well... memorizing them. Then there's the practical nature of things. You're not going to derive maneuvering speed from first principles when you encounter mountain wave, you just need to know what you've gotta slow down to.
That doesn't mean throw out your analytical brain, but having access to facts that you can use in furtherance of your cognition is super useful. And I don't really think that is the major "problem" with education in this day and age? I have 3 kids in school. They're great kids and all doing more or less well. From the outside looking in today, I'd say the biggest issues I'm aware of are:
1) A downright authoritarian environment in schools. No seriously, even the school my kids go to which is by the numbers a pretty good school seems a bit like incarceration.
2) The teaching to the lowest common denominator (which you mentioned and I think is a very good point).
3) The money is going to the wrong stuff and so quality is going down but costs are still rising.
4) Schools are basically viewed as babysitting places so that the parents can go and work and contribute to the economy, not hallowed halls of learning or some-such. It's viewed as "jobs training" from the bottom to the top. Even at the university level.
5) The incentives, both social and financial, that exist to become an educator suck and needing licenses and specialized university training to teach in some states means that an engineer with 20 years of experience isn't going to go to school for 2 years just be treated like garbage at some middle school or high school. We're not getting "the best of the best" in education.
6) The phones. I don't think a constant entertainment drip is really that good for young people.
7) Educational software is usually pretty bad? And the kids are forced into using a lot of these garbage tools day in and day out. This isn't really as big of a problem as the rest of the things, but it irritates me when I'm forced to interact with iReady or the absolute garbage (and insanely expensive) platforms the school uses to track grades.
Also, I mentioned this in another thread and got downvoted, but I honestly think that the reversal of the Flynn effect might have some environmental basis too? We go outside a lot less, indoor CO2 counts are higher, issues start occurring above 1000ppm - that's not uncommon, we eat terrible, are more likely to be obese, had COVID, and are filled with plastic, we spend a lot less time bored and are mostly overstimulated. I'm not a biologist, so I wouldn't say that any one of these sorts of things is the "gotcha" like lead or whatever, but yeah, I suspect that there are other environmental effects that are making us collectively make bad decisions more often. I don't know.
Tom self owns himself quite a bit by dismissing a movie as drivel and then comparing it to dumb plots made by adult children. the entire point of the movie is to demonstrate how dumb and bad overt masculinity is. yes its oversimplified but its Predator. the audience is hormonal teenage boys who might think toxic masculinity is cool. the entire setup Tom thought was dumb is more or less called out as dumb later in the movie
Just won’t be Friends of Eddie Coyle.
I am happy to ponder and willingly accept this is probably just my perception.
I have a couple of theories. The creators of the media are becoming more and more my age. Do they have nothing interesting to say to me as our experience is shared? Is this something experienced by previous generations as their generation took over media, or is our zeitgeist as "digital natives" so newly shared that this is a new experience?
I know people who would blame "ensh*tification" and move on, but I really think that there is more to what is happening.
What I do know is it's exceedingly rare for me to watch a movie or show made after about 2015 and to find myself thinking about it days later. There are of course exceptions.
Old music had more variation in volume - volume rises and falls to add nuance to the piece. New music is produced differently and has a more “flat” sound due to everything being louder and variation being reduced by compression.
Seems like some parallels to other forms of media.
Music is a way for people to express themselves and relate about how they see the world. People didn't stop doing that recently. In fact, I'd say people have been emboldened to say even more and push what music really means.
Popular music no longer has any key changes:
From 1960 to 1995, between 20% and 35% of Billboard Hot 100 number one hits in any given year contained a key change. Around the turn of the millennium that rate started to dip until it hit 0% by the end of the 2000s. [1]
I believe that simple 4/4 time has also become more prevalent as compared to more complex time signatures. I don't have as good support for this claim, but the AI tells me "4/4 (simple quadruple) has dominated Western popular music since at least the 1960s, and corpus work suggests that compound and non‑4/4 meters have become less common over time in mainstream styles, implying an even higher proportion of songs in simple 4/4 today.".
Beato is also fond of pointing out how modern music is written by committee, and that modern artists are more a "product" than ever before. From memory, he's pointing out that in the past, the credited writer of popular songs was usually a band, or perhaps a single person. But more recently, the credited writer is a list of multiple people not the band (and in fact, top songs across recent years have been notable not under the name of a band, but of an individual performer).
EDIT: Further querying leads to this as well:
Timbral Variety: The "texture" of sounds. In the 70s, you had a mix of acoustic, electric, and orchestral layers. Studies show a "homogenization of the timbral palette" since the 1960s peak.
Lyrical Complexity: The vocabulary and reading level of lyrics. Analysis of Billboard hits shows the average reading level has dropped from 3.5 to 2.7 (roughly 3rd grade) since 2005.
[1] https://www.cantgetmuchhigher.com/p/revisiting-the-death-of-...
What I've encountered is if you get outside the top 100, a lot of like TikTok and SoundCloud famous people are actually doing some really interesting music. Things that play with the sound in ways you would never hear on the radio.
I feel like music is the one area where I still genuinely find interesting modern stuff regularly.
For music, I'd recommend looking at Bandcamp Daily[0]. It's not all my cup of tea, but there are some amazing new artists out there spanning nearly every genre imaginable.
I mostly listen to pop music or pop-adjacent, which is like the ultra-processed food of music. Highly compressed and generally lacking much dynamism.
I assume there is plenty of interesting dynamism outside of the pop charts and Spotify mixes, but unless I’m listening to live versions or really raw artists, I generally don’t experience them.
2026 releases have varied dynamic range but the majority is still low. Loudness war mastering sounds better on phone speakers and in cars. Even though streaming services normalize loudness, you need quiet listening environments and good headphones/speakers to properly appreciate a high dynamic range recording.
I'm a boomer so the opposite is happening to me. The people in media look more and more like children to me. So I can't tell if the fact that they seem to be speaking more childishly is real or just the expected bias from an old fart. I should experiment with getting AI to put the same words in Walter Cronkite's mouth to see if it changes them.
People are naturally prone to pointing their attention at sources of alarm. And attention is important for advertisements which pay the bills.
News was not produced or directed back then like it is today.
Wandering (2022)
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Monster (2023)
But I'd concede that maybe making movies nowadays is harder because things are turning more and more expensive and there's too much pressure for producing profitable movies. So Art takes a back sit in movies that look for profit.
The movie considers potential. A literal multiverse of potential. It also explores how society treats people using their potential and time in different ways. As fellow readers gray and their family relations start to get older they too will likely have the misfortune of knowing people entering dementia. How people are treated as they slide away from this reality is represented rather well by the film.
I think it's just survivorship bias, we don't remember the pre-2000 schlock because it's schlock. The two real "things used to be better before" situations IMO are:
- The loss of DVD revenue killed mid-budget productions, in the US the options are mostly indie darling or outrageous budget blockbuster.
- Big productions look flatter than before due to VFX crew exploitation. The VFX must be reworked 100 times with minimal time because planning is for suckers. No complex lighting for you and only crunch for the non-unionized Korean.
There are accounts from all over history of how "the times were more thoughtful and moral in the good old days" But here we are, thousands of years later, still complaining about the younger members of our species and how they will bring ruin to us all. Perhaps they will, but it all seems so human to complain about that.
I remember the art of the 90s - when my part of the world got access to marvelous pieces like Thunder in Paradise, Barbed Wire, American Ninja, Bay Watch ... at the time it was considered the pinnacle of art by teenagers like me, and despised by my parents. But at the same time we had things like The Matrix, The Shawshank Redemption, Leon ... We remember the good stuff and the forget the fluff.
There are some real gems being created all the time, maybe not always from Hollywood but human creativity soldiers on.
The Good Place, The Expanse, 3 Body Problem, Horizon Zero Dawn, Expedition 33, Project Hail Marry. There is a constant stream of incredible thoughtful stuff being produced - books, games, movies, essays, videos, podcasts - the medium might change but humans always try to find ways to discover, understand and express the world around us in novel ways, one just needs to listen/watch.
Not like there was a general lack of tragedy, pain, suffering, war, chaos in the intervening thousands of years.
Seems so superficial to ignore everything and just say if we're here, we exist, then the claim that things will go bad is proven false. The only thing proven false is if anyone ever claimed humanity will be extinct. But think of all the suffering in all the wars between the roman empire and now. Is that nothing? Does that not qualify as very bad stuff? Did humanity advance continuosly, or was it a chaotic path, with ups and downs? Don't the downs qualify as what the complainers predicted?
To me it seems history teaches us we will survive as a species. But there is definitely a lot of room for very bad stuff to happen. It has happened before.
What that also means is that there is much more cheap junk pushed out the door. The investment to try again is now much lower than to try to add meaning to so-so film, so you just quickly land it and move on.
There is certainly survivor bias when looking at the quality of older media but at the same time, the incentives to only produce quality media has evaporated.
We're in the stochastic age where all business is run on chance. Don't make 1 good films, make 20 and hope one is good.
When people say you’re wrong it triggers cognitive dissonance and social threat brain stem stuff that had to be consciously mediated. Even if you’re someone who makes an effort to do this it can catch you off guard.
the answer is not to try and change human psychology, it's to reintroduce the hierarchies and structures where correction and judgement flows through the correct channels.
The most enlightening is to be repeatedly wrong about a subject. Most of those end realizing there is no actual data worthy of a conclusion. It suddenly becomes obvious that should have been the answer from the beginning.
Nothing changes in my life if the earth is flat or not. I'm so much not in a hurry finding the answer that I will probably never need to.
Because it sure looked to me like they renamed the department and immediately started bombing fishing boats, then affirmatively decided to start a war with Iran, all while the guy who came up with the new name goes on TV and screams about how we're free to kill more people now.
It’s plainly not an attempt at honesty. Watching almost any speech by Hegseth makes it clear it’s another “tough guy” thing—his latest effort included announcing “no quarter” in the war with Iran, which one supposes he did because it sounds tough, but it’s so incredibly illegal that just issuing that instruction, as he did, even if nothing happens afterward, is specifically illegal.
It’s a modern outgrowth of the conservative belief that we lost Vietnam because we didn’t war crime hard enough (this is a real, and common, thing, talk to republicans old enough and you’ll encounter it often) and that the military’s too soft.
Nobody knows what they are doing in the sense we think they do when we are kids.
It doesn’t mean this is the end of the USA. All civilizations go through ups and downs. This is, at least culturally and politically, a down.
I also think it’s global though. The US is manifesting it clearly and starkly, but that’s kind of US style. Authoritarianism backed by populist grievance politics and venal corruption are on the rise around the world.
I assure you other cultures will be deeply offended if you imply 'there are no such things as grownup' (which sounds like a weird affectation to my east european sensibilities)
Does Tom Clancy think the novels are literary trash? The books are made for children, it's about following your dreams and using your imagination in the face of grown up resistance.
Personally, I don't think there's anything to downplay or wrong about children or being childish as adults. That's not the problem. The problem's the insensitivity and shamelessness of powerful people.
The things you listed are not a special innate properties of children past a certain age (maybe it's the passage from infant to child? I don't know). If you don't teach children how a bumble bee is dangerous, they'll never know, and adults either!. It's the same for not considering the consequences of actions. We adults know better because someone taught us and we learned via painful experiences, so it's our duty to guide them so they can avoid painful experiences (while not controlling them).
https://www.fastcompany.com/91429448/everyone-is-12-twitter-...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/everyone-is-12-now-theory-of-...
It would make more sense (not much more, but more) to blame early life lead exposure in the generation currently at the top of the political pile. Or blame social media.
Did not!
Did too!
But he drove his tank on my side!
That’s not your side! That’s my side!
Is not!
Subsequently, trying to return to consuming modern media has been quite the shock to the system. In many ways, but maybe the most startling is the storytelling. Books and movies lauded for being modern classics are so brain-numbing stupid (sorry but there’s no other accurate way to describe them) abound. Just absolute paint by numbers stories, messaging so on the nose you almost need a new phrase to describe it because the standard one didn’t do it justice, small-minded and petty characters being portrayed as heroic or brilliant - it’s incredible. I know there’s already comparisons to Idiocracy in this thread, and yes I’m well aware of the term selection bias so there’s no need to point it out - of course classics are classic for a reason. But I’m talking the most celebrated stories of our modern age here, the supposed next generation of classics, and all I can think is… really? Really? Have you all gone insane?
Cultural media output is absolutely in decline, and I think only someone not well-read could think otherwise about literature, and likewise for other media.
It's not now a situation of cream having not yet risen. I don't believe there are myriad hidden gems anymore. Bodies who are meant to discern the cream are coming up empty. The Oscars are full of bad movies now. Pulitzer prizes in literature are awarded to poor works. Hugo and Nebula books are horrendous. We have lost the culture of the literary, and it is very obvious to anyone well read. What's worse is the large majority of people don't even know what well-read is; they have consumed a critical mass of slop sci-fi airport novels and think this is somehow equivalent expertise to absorbing the classics.
I had the opposite reaction and could barely make it through 15m of One Battle. The movie opens with women in skin tight dresses and mini skirts with automatic weapons robbing banks and breaking into migrant detention centers while yelling "this is what real power looks like". That feels like childish nonsense to me but then it is wrapped in this "radical chic" that is supposed to force me to take it seriously. Rather than movies like Predator which are intentionally dumb and fun the author should look at how vague political messages and sex are used to take extremely shallow work and make it "adult".
We aren't supposed to take it seriously; it's meant to be "childish nonsense". We can easily see that these women are getting off, sexually and by exercising power over others. A woman in a short dress struts around on a counter and introduces herself as "jungle pussy" to captives in a bank robbery, all while ranting about "black power". What happens next? A (black) security guard dies in agony and we get a close-up on that. We see "radical chic posturing" and then its consequences.
Meanwhile Predator: Badlands truly is a movie for children. I sat through the whole thing with friends (who loved it by the way). Lots of adults love children's movies and books. I'm unbothered by this, because these people's tastes don't seem to the affect the production of books/movies that are actually good. But I do feel that people who eat this stuff up have failed to grow up in some fundamental way.
For many people this is just a way to turn their brain off. My wife (backend engineer too) describes it as something similar to cannabis intake as described by other people. Or alchohol.
In a sense I think this is a different thing from someone that is antisocial or manipulative, because even they can admit being wrong or incorrect in certain circumstances. It's closest to narcissist behavior but it exhibits in such a specific way that makes me think it's a different type.
You could probably link it to a lot of different things. Extreme machismo social media brainrot, a society that rewards never admitting you're wrong, extreme wealth.
Coincidentally, that's also why it's so terrifying to see so many of these types in power. While most narcissists are mostly hot air and talk, occasionally, you get a legitimate wildcard that's destructive in difficult to repair ways (sometimes leaving nothing but smoldering rubble).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqRIw5FICAs
A Kent State professor calls 911 because she can't get into her building to pee; she is clearly drunk; they give her every opportunity to get a ride home; she refuses and is eventually detained. Later she goes to the police department to get an apology from the officers involved. It was, to me, a shocking example of the narcissistic delusion, with stakes low-enough that one could focus on that and not the side-effects.
There seems to be something about Pres. Obama mocking him during the Correspondents Dinner. A venue for mockery, sure, but a black man mocked a son of Fred Trump.
Normally, they are considered separate categories. However, how I like to think about them is a 2D spectrum.
Overt X covert is one axis, malignant X communal is another.
Overt X covert is defined by how the narcissist sees himself/herself:
- Overt thinks they are better than others and feel wronged when they are not treated the way they think they deserve - always respected even if they are wrong, or even admired, worshiped, celebrated. There's this implicit "I am the center of everything / I am the main character" about them. Many people accept this dynamic in order to avoid conflict or simply because they are natural pleasers and end up reinforcing it.
- Covert thinks they are worse than others and feel attacked by the smallest innocent things which threaten to expose some real or perceived weakness of theirs. You either end of walking on eggshells around them or end up triggering them in some ways you don't even recognize until you are their designated enemy.
Malignant X communal is defined by where they get their self-worth from:
- Malignant simply enjoys hurting others - they feed on other people's suffering and feel energized and empowered by getting away with it.
- Communal is driven by being seen as helping. This is not altruism but might look similar at first glance. However, altruism is about actually helping others, communal narcissism is about being perceived that way, that's their end goal. Actually helping is just a method to achieve that and becomes secondary when disagreement/conflict arises. This often happens when you don't show the appreciation they think they deserve.
Every narcissist is somewhere on this 2D spectrum (they are purely one subtype if they are at 0 on the other axis). But very commonly you see combinations like covert+communal and overt+malignant.
---
A common misconception is that narcissists think they're better than others. They don't (only overt subtype does). But all narcissists think they are more important than others. They are the center of the world in their mind. This is implicit, they'd never describe it that way because that's what they consider normal. It would be like saying the air around us has transparent color - we don't say that because we consider it so normal to essentially ignore it.
What they do is they implicitly expect to be treated that way. Sometimes they manage to behave in ways which elicit this in others subconsciously. But if you don't, you get various antagonistic reactions depending on the combination of subtypes.
Flying monkeys are people who support their favorite narcissist. This is a good intro video and the channel has a lot more about this disorder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjZ3f-IXEXU&t=975s
Fleas are behaviors a person picks up by interacting with narcissists too often. In this way, narcissism can be said to be a socially transmissible disease.
---
Disclaimer, I am not a psychologist, I have only read about this (and other disorders such as ASPD/psychopathy/sociopathy) extensively. However, that gives me freedom to express my thoughts more openly - a psychologist cannot for "ethical reasons" say certain things such as making value judgements of such people.
I don't have that limitation. I consider it a disease which should for example prevent the person from holding positions of power - the same way psychosis would. The only difference is psychotic people are harmful to both themselves and others and don't hide it, narcissistic people are primarily harmful to others and a re lucid enough to cover it up.
The purpose of the Department of Defense should be to defend America and Americans. Waging war is an unfortunate necessity that stems from this sometimes. War is not the only threat that can require a military response, and should never be a goal. No matter how you swing it, having a ‘Department of X’ definitely gives the impression - to people within and without it - that ‘X’ is a goal.
Even if you think about it amorrally, calling it the ‘Department of War’ is myopic.
Which begs the question: do you think it's more "moral" to wage wars and lie to public that you're in the business of defense OR say things that are truthful?
Spending trillion+ dollars on military is about the only thing that both political party agree on. Obama bombed more countries that most presidents.
Since we're talking about adults thinking like children: your simplistic ideas about what military should be have no effect on what it is.
If Iran had the firepower superiority over Israel and U.S. they would level both countries. This is no me saying. "Death to America" is a literal quote from now-dead ayatollah.
When you actually listen why they renamed DoD to DoW it's way more nuanced that you apparently believe.
One of the reasons is that political correctness is destructive in military. If you're actually at war, winning should be objective not PR optics.
And it seems to be working. See disaster of Afghanistan withdrawal compared to astonishing success of snatching Maduro and destroying Iran's capability to wage future wars.
As far as I can see, the US has managed to replace an older Ayatollah Khomeini with a younger Ayatollah Khomeini with even more reasons to seek vengeance against the US and obtain nuclear weapons.
> If you're actually at war, winning should be objective not PR optics.
Which of course is why a former TV host is clearly the most qualified person to be Secretary of Defense, sorry War.
You didn’t actually justify most of what you said and when you did the reasoning seems circular. Most of what you say just has the premise that what’s being done now is good and necessary, and that’s not something I agree with.
I did listen to the justifications for the ‘rename’ (Congress named the department and has not actually changed the name - but that’s a digression…), and disagree with much of the reasoning.
I think it would be ‘more moral’ to have a Department of Defense that operates and has the goals I described. I neither think it’s ‘moral’ to strive for war nor to lie to the public about it.
I agree the military should be well funded.
You invoke Obama, I can’t tell if you agree with what he did or not, and it’s anyway not relevant to what we’re discussing.
Since we're talking about adults thinking like children: your simplistic ideas about what military should be have no effect on what it is.
This sounds deep but is actually nonsense. Our society absolutely gets to choose everything about what our military is and how it’s used. Indeed, you even seem to be arguing that it isn’t (wasn’t) what you think it should be!
Iran and our response to it is a different thing than I was discussing (the name of the department, remember), but I think it would be both ‘more moral’ and probably more effective to actually think and plan deeply than whatever this is. The current administration seems to be all tactics, no strategy.
And I find it ironic that you list a bunch of conflicts that have had, at best, mixed results, then just assert that what’s currently underway, which seems to have less long term planning behind it than any of those, is just obviously going to have a great outcome.
Should be, but right now, it isn't. So the name is apt, I am afraid.
> Hail Satan
I feel like no media today has really topped the stuff of the 90s and 00s. Star Trek Voyager season 5 still stands tall above the rest for me. The movie September 5 came close as it had interesting bits.
But besides that, there is a generational thing going on. I felt when I grew up online in the 90s and 00s that people who were older than me were smarter than my generation. My generation watched movies and played games while gen x and baby boomers did hardcore assembly programming and whatever.
And then the same thing happened with millenials and gen z. Gen z is just different from millenials which again are different from baby boomers. Each generation progressively gets less technical it seems like. There are always outliers in every generation of course but I think the trajectory is somewhat clear.
I also think this applies to movies and tv shows. Gen z just thinks differently and doesn't have the same ideas. I don't think a gen z'er could create Voyager season 5, and maybe not even a millenial could. There is so much information and knowledge and perception in the context a generation is born into and grows up in and a lot of that context and information is lost with the next generation.
H.R. McMaster: Trump’s knowledge was like a series of islands. He might know a lot about one specific thing, but there were no bridges between the islands, no way to connect one thought to another
—
working on a new unified theory of american reality i'm calling "everyone is twelve now"
“I’m strong and I want to have like fifty kids and a farm” of course you do. You’re twelve. “I don’t want to eat vegetables I think steak and French fries is the only meal” hell yeah homie you’re twelve. “Maybe if there’s crime we should just send the army” bless your heart my twelve year old buddy
https://bsky.app/profile/veryimportant.lawyer/post/3lybxlwzj...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_presidents_timeli...
Those that can't become politicians.
Just as a very basic example: 4 presidents in a row have bombed Yemen: Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. This is consensus on very fundamental ideas on US foreign policy. But way more importantly than whether or not you agree with bombing Yemen, you should start to recognize that the real reasons for bombing Yemen or any other conflict are completely absent from public discourse and media.
Also once you broaden your horizon on film a bit it becomes very hard to watch modern mainstream western movies at all. Like watch The Battle of Algiers or any Costa-Gavras movie and you realize most western cinema is at best just infantilizing and at worst outright propaganda.
Like if you watched One Battle After Another and thought it was profound, did you not notice the absence of any real ideological exploration beyond "racism is bad"? What did the caricatured resistance really believe in? What can such a movie really say about "radical" politics on immigration if the liberals who made it have to account for liberals approval and funding of ICE? Like it said nothing at all, that's the issue with everything. We are so politically atrophied that we think its the most political movie ever, but its really apolitical if you think about it a bit more.
man, that stings. as a member of the birth class of 1963.
each of us is a product of our times. i wish no ill will on those younger or older than myself. personally, i have lived my life in a way to be a good steward of the world. was it always successful; no.
not malice, perhaps ignorance. please enjoy what is left of the world. i did my best to leave it better than it was when I received it.
if you don't like the world, try to change it. you have agency.
I have a suspicion that it’s no different than any other highly efficient system. You’ll notice that every time there’s a natural crisis you’ll hear how facility X is the only place in the world where Y is done and now everything Y is going to go up in price[0].
There’s lots of reasons everyone downstream of X doesn’t have backup plans but one that certainly applies to the immediate consumers of Y is that over time market forces shave off any insurance against Y prices.
This phenomenon is well-understood and so most countries intentionally develop backup facilities to X in what they believe are crucial spaces. It’s why the US pays for both ULA and SpaceX (instead of just whichever works better) and pays more for locally grown food and so on.
But someone has to be watching and convince the rest of us that this kind of thing is worth doing and they need to keep doing it for a long time.
What I think happened is The Sort[1] happened. We got better at giving people with the requisite skills their rewards. Previously, you might end up with a smart steely-eyed guy as Flight EECOM at NASA but today that guy has a shot at 100x the wealth on Wall Street or in tech. If you look at the debate between George H W Bush and Ronald Reagan[2] you’ll see a sort of thing that isn’t so common today: they are asked whether the US should be paying for the education of children of people crossing the border with Mexico and where today the highly-optimized politician will respond that he will do what you, the constituent, is asking here[3] and stop paying for these people one way or another - both candidates actually contest that idea and offer a view that’s not populist.
You’ll see this today with the rise of direct to constituent social media. A big part of politicians’ approach today is about What Polls Well. Sen. Warren is the biggest example of this I think. Once the proponent of intelligent policy, she is now most commonly known for highly populist policy - to the extent that she is now often described as a slopulist.
So what I think is the difference is that earlier most politicians were more influenced by smarter people with low time preference and as the constituents became more powerful as a mass, politicians started being influenced primarily by the median person until we eventually have someone perfectly reflective of the electorate. The electorate, for the most part, would like all taxes set as close to zero and all spending set as close to 100% on their own pet interest; and second-order effects are rarely considered.
Therefore, in the common way of all people to declare monocausal roots of events, I declare that refinement culture has caused:
- highly efficient adaptation of politician to populace
- with low tail-risk mitigation
And consequently we’ve got a person who can’t do effective foreign policy running foreign policy because they are very good at politics.
A good self-test I think is “if chair of the Federal Reserve were an elected position would your party of choice have elected a multi millionaire investment banker like Jerome Powell to it?”. I think the answer to this is “no” for either party, yet he has performed his function admirably well, in my opinion.
0: often this is small and facilities X’ take on the same work at slightly raised costs Y’ but sometimes, like in the Thai flooding with HDDs, costs rise greatly
1: A term I first heard from patio11, but it’s related to the idea of refinement culture
2: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YsmgPp_nlok
3: because this is a Republican debate; if it were Democratic Party he would answer that he would do what you, the constituent wants, and assign a new fund to these people who he will declare (in agreement with you) are humans, not illegals and so on. The fact isn’t of significance here. It is whether they can talk the trade-offs of policy with their constituents. The modern leader is “I’m a leader. I need to follow the people”.