Hitler is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 27 times across 27 issues between February 20, 2021 and February 05, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "FDR was part of the same phenomenon as... Hitler"; "The Passing of the Great Race, beloved by Hitler"; "not default to “Hitler”". It most often appears alongside Trump, Twitter, United States.
- Article page
- Hitler
- Mention count
- 27
- Issue count
- 27
- First seen
- February 20, 2021
- Last seen
- February 05, 2026
Outbound links
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braunau_am_Inn
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-ollantay/comment/148004547
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adolf-hitler-dna-reveals-nazi-likely-kallmann-syndrome-genitals-micropenis/
- https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7057/Who-will-win-the-2024-Democratic-presidential-nomination
- https://x.com/joachim_voth/status/2001688620781261113
Issue trail
- Movie Review: Gabriel Over The White House
- Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
- Book Review: Sadly, Porn
- Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination
- Book Review: The Gervais Principle
- Book Review: San Fransicko
- Your Book Review: The Internationalists
- Book Review: The Man From The Future
- A Columbian Exchange
- From The Mailbag
- Perhaps It Is A Bad Thing That The World's Leading AI Companies Cannot Control Their AIs
- Highlights From The Comments On The Media Very Rarely Lying
- Contra The xAI Alignment Plan
- Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs
- Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
- Highlights From The Comments On Putin
- Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
- Your Book Review: How the War Was Won
- Interview Day At Thiel Capital
- ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein
- Links For February 2025
- Moldbug Sold Out
- My Heart Of Hearts
- Open Thread 396
- Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target
- Links For December 2025
- Links For February 2026
Related pages
Source context
When reading Hoover's biography, I was struck by his theory that FDR was part of the same phenomenon as Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin - the US version of a worldwide longing for a fascist strongman who could come in and solve everything. Watching Gabriel Over The White House moved that from conjecture to drop-dead obvious fact.
Inline links: Hoover's biography
I was most impressed by how few antibodies against dictatorship we had in 1933. Like, I'm being kind of unfair above - using the word "fascist" in order to link Hammond with Hitler and all the awful things he did like WWII and the Holocaust - when Hammond started no wars and killed no ethnic groups. If you don't have the history of the 30s and 40s imprinting your brain with a connection between strong-armed dictatorship and atrocity, maybe having a strongman who clears away all the rich corrupt cronies and institutes the will of the people sounds - I guess pretty good? It certainly did to the people of 1933 America. Movie critics panned Gabriel Over The White House as populist garbage, but it was a pretty big success and made a lot of money.
The fact that Vogt’s first entry into the public sphere is rallying the public against anti-malaria measures leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth, as I’m sure it does for any of Mann’s Effective Altruist aligned readers. It would be one thing if Vogt were concerned about the detrimental impact of malaria on humans AND the detrimental impact of malaria prevention methods on bird life. But in subsequent chapters of Vogt’s biography, Mann goes out of his way to show that Vogt’s influences and contemporary members of the environmentalist milieu – for example, Madison Grant, co-founder of the Bronx Zoo, organizer of the United States national park system, and author of the charmingly named The Passing of the Great Race, beloved by Hitler – were, to put in mildly, extremely uninterested in the wellbeing of all humankind. Instead, they were obsessed by fears of an unchecked Malthusian population explosion, race mixing, and a resultant societal degeneration that could only be stopped by halting (read: starving out) population growth. Which people deserved to live in harmony with nature in the ensuing pastoral utopia and which would be relegated to the dustbin of history was not an exercise they left to the reader. Mann writes that Vogt, like his buddies, was "loudly scornful of the ‘unchecked spawning’ and ‘untrammeled copulation’ of ‘backward populations’ – people in India, he sneered, breed with ‘the irresponsibility of codfish.’"
Inline links: Madison Grant
This was not the case for the Greeks, not at the beginning, anyway. Personal morality was inseparable from the state’s morality, they were not overlapping, they were the same single thing, but in the opposite way you’re imagining it, not because the State was all powerful but because the state was themselves. Personal morality vs. social standards:L public behavior vs. private thoughts - for at least 50 years it would have been inconceivable to an Athenian that those were different things. I don’t mean they thought whatever the state wanted them to think, that’s as meaningless as saying people think what their brains want them to think. And I do not mean there weren’t bad people; I mean there was no recourse to the psychological position of “I’m not a bad person, I just did a bad thing”. When we say the Athenian democracy required full participation, it should be taken literally. The citizens didn’t just make up their own laws or fight their own wars, they thought the same thought: the state was the highest - not power, not might - but good. The highest good. Think about this. Think about whether you can think about this. Think about whether you have no other way to think about this except to think “O’Brien” - assuming you could even think “O’Brien” and not default to “Hitler”. Yet early Athens was not a surveillance state, it did not need to know - thought admittedly every government will patronizingly embrace its sycophants - it left the accumulation of knowledge and power to the citizens so they could act, as it. This is why that period of history is so unique and so unrepeatable. For the first time and the only time and never since time, knowledge was used for action; the purpose of knowledge was to act; the purpose of earthly knowledge was to be able to act like gods without restraint. Not only for a handful of “great men”, they all thought this, it was the cultural standard. And then the war came, and the plague came, and the plague came again, and the sophists came, and the idea of man’s greatness through obligation became more fantastical than 12 hairless gods on a cold mountaintop wrapped in bedsheets, or on them. What good are gods in heaven if they won’t send my neighbor to hell? For all but a few, math became arithmetic and philosophy became accounting, and getting some power was far less satisfying than depriving the other of theirs. And here we are.
People seem to put a lot of effort into proving that some democratic process which returned a morally abhorrent result wasn’t really democratic (eg Trump losing the popular vote, Hitler gaining power through a complicated process that wasn’t just democracy). Often they’re right, but who cares? If you want to make the case that democracy necessarily returns non-abhorrent results, I’d be very interested to hear that argument. Otherwise I think we should accept that possibility and try to plan around it when coming up with moral and political philosophies.
The mediocre develop faster than either the talented or the untalented An alternative way of looking at these three laws is to note that defense mechanisms emerge to sustain addictions even when the developmental environment that originally nourished it vanishes. Defense mechanisms though, are more useful as a partial catalog of phenomenology than as a foundational idea. These then are the developmental psychology roots of the Gervais Principle. Recall that Cluelessness goes with overperformance. That overperformance is caused by arrested development around a strength, which has been hooked by an addictive environment of social rewards. Mediocrity is your best defense against addiction, and guarantor of further open-ended psychological development. And yes, for the alert among you who have spotted a connection, arrested development is the dark side of strengths in the sense of Positive Psychology. A strength in one situation is merely an entrenched piece of arrested development in another. In our model, the three development stages – Clueless, Losers and Sociopaths – correspond to different patterns of arrested development and different strength-addictions. That is, development involves progressing from one stage (eg school) to another stage (eg the real world). But if you’re too good at an early stage, you become accustomed to the reward you get from success. Suppose you loved school and did great at it. Then you get invited to participate in the real world, a noticeably non-school-like environment. You try it, and instead of getting praise/reward/validation all the time, you get those things rarely or not at all. If you can, maybe you go back to school (ie get a PhD), a strategy with problems of its own. But if you can’t real-world actually go back to school, instead you might remain permanently stuck at a psychological stage where everything feels like school, where you try to distort your perceptions until your world-model looks vaguely school-like, and where you use your school-based skills and coping mechanisms for everything. The particular example I just gave, about school, is Rao’s explanation for Dwight Schrute: Dwight, with his stern German upbringing, lacked the normal encouragement of early-childhood creative-performance instincts (we see several glimpses of this, including his attempt to read horrifying medieval cautionary tales to the kids during bring-your-child-to-work day, and his own description of his childhood, which left his brother actually developmentally disabled). He has therefore developed none of the addiction to childhood applause-seeking performance behaviors that have trapped Michael. Instead, Dwight found relief in the graded, performance-oriented worlds of school and varied medieval-guild-like worlds, such as farming, animal husbandry and karate. His attempts to understand the world of management, which is decidedly not a world of grades or guilds, are based entirely on peripheral guild-like elements. He is the only one excited about the Survivor-style successor-selection event Michael arranges (in the bus on the way over, he asks, “Will there be business parables?”). When he attempts manipulation, his mind naturally turns to hidden microphones, doctored documents and other elements of tradecraft learned from spy novels, and only rarely to psychology. He banks the occasional tactical victory, but cannot play or win the mind games required to beat the Sociopaths. In Dwight’s world, everything worth learning is teachable, and medals, certificates and formal membership in meritocratic institutions is evidence of success. Even where play behaviors are concerned, the Dwights of the world can more easily get lost in points-and-rules worlds. It is significant that Dwight has never seen/read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (which is about creative-performance play), but is obsessed with gaming worlds and sci-fi/fantasy universes. Perhaps the clearest example of Dwight’s need for formal affiliation is his lame attempt at the insider stand-up comedy routine, The Aristocrats. To Dwight, everything is a formal contest, and there are always authority figures who provide legitimacy and rankings. He has no sense of humor (thanks to skipping early childhood), and has no idea how to actually evoke laughter, so he tries to ace the only formal membership test he can see, the ability to tell the Aristocrats joke. Michael, by contrast, can at least tell juvenile jokes, and Andy can manage some bad frat-boy humor. Rao argues that Michael Scott, the “boss” in the show, is stuck at an even lower level: Little children in normal environments win their first victories through creative performance: reciting nursery rhymes, drawing pictures, and demonstrating creative play behaviors. If they succeed too much, they get addicted to the typical adult reaction: Wow, aren’t you cute/clever? and, to a lesser extent, to admiration from younger siblings. In learning to thrive in this particular reward/penalty environment, little children rely mostly on responding to the emotional content of what they hear and see, since they do not understand much. With a few evolved defense mechanisms thrown in, to protect against adult realities that don’t conform to childhood environments, that’s exactly what it feels like to be Michael. When he hears somebody talking, all he hears is “blah blah blah good job, blah blah blah, how could you do this Michael?” in conjunction with facial expressions and body language. Michael’s head is a massive library of childlike mappings between situations, canned phrases and reactions. He is not completely responsible for his actions and utterances because he genuinely does not understand them. There is coherence in what Michael says though; he does not sound completely nonsensical because he reacts meaningfully to body language, facial expressions and emotional cues. “You talkin’ to me?” (borrowed from De Niro) is a belligerent line, and by pulling out that line when he feels threatened, and then displacing the tension with laughter, Michael is able to derail the conversation. His trademark joke, “That’s what she said!” is an extreme example. It makes no sense in most contexts where he trots it out; its only purpose is to dissolve tension and displace threats. Either laughing with Michael or throwing up your hands in frustration is a victory for him. The only effective response is to calmly ignore his disruptive actions, wait for the reaction to die down, and continue the conversation in dominant mode, like Cesar Milan with his dogs … Around Packer, his boorish friend, insulting and objectifying ways of talking about women gain approval, so he trots out borrowed, misogynistic man-talk. Withering under the collective glare of his politically correct employees, phrases like “respect women” gain smiles and halt frowns, so that’s what he offers. […] Here is why: delusions are closed logical schemes, where reality is mangled into the service of a fixed script through defense mechanisms, with the rest of the meaning thrown away. To manufacture original thought you have to look at/listen to reality in open ways for data. That is why Michael’s database is so full of movie lines. Movies are goldmines of canned situation-reactions that don’t require much present-reality data to retrieve. When kids quote adults or movies, they seem precocious, and gain approval. In an era where more kids are raised by TV than by parents, parroting movie lines comes more naturally than repeating bromides learned from parental figures or at churches and temples. Recall that social calendars force you through later stages whether or not you master previous ones. So what about later stages? Michael is not quite as enamored of medals and certificates as Dwight because (as a lousy student) he never got very good at earning them, and could therefore not get seriously addicted to them. Finally, Michael has poorly developed peer-affiliation drives. He wants to be the center of attention, not one among many equals in a huddle of peers. When Michael appears to be operating under a peer-affiliation drive (the sort that animates Andy), he is really casting child behaviors into a teen mould. He believes that specific people, rather than formal or informal groups, are cool or admirable (proxy parental figures, older siblings). If they are not cool or admirable, they must be made to view him as cool and admirable (younger siblings). I was struck by a line in an appendix, saying this is the same level that Nazi bureaucrats were at. Just for fun, let’s compare the rest of Rao’s profile of Michael with Arendt’s profile of Adolf Eichmann (all quotes taken from my Eichmann In Jerusalem review): Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise, and was also rather hard to sustain, in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused so many millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed. What could you do with a man who first declared, with great emphasis, that the one thing he had learned in an ill-spent life was that one should never take an oath (“Today no man, no judge could ever persuade me to make a sworn statement. I refuse it; I refuse it for moral reasons. Since my experience tells me that if one is loyal to his oath, one day he has to take the consequences, I have made up my mind once and for all that no judge in the world or other authority will ever be capable of making me swear an oath, to give sworn testimony. I won’t do it voluntarily and no one will be able to force me”), and then, after being told explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defense he might “do so under oath or without an oath,” declared without further ado that he would prefer to testify under oath? And: The judges were right when they finally told the accused that all he had said was “empty talk” – except that they thought the emptiness was feigned, and that the accused wished to cover up other thoughts which, though hideous, were not empty. This supposition seems refuted by the striking consistency with which Eichmann, despite his rather bad memory, repeated word for word the same stock phrases and self-invented clichés (when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché) each time he referred to an incident or event of importance to him. Whether writing his memoirs in Argentina or in Jerusalem, whether speaking to the police examiner or to the court, what he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such. And finally (this time in my voice): If [Arendt] has any thesis at all, it’s that Eichmann believed in something larger than himself. We usually encourage this sort of thing, but I think the prosocial version involves having a specific larger-than-yourself thing in mind. Eichmann (says Arendt) just liked larger-than-himself things in general, and the Nazi vision of eternal struggle for racial supremacy was the biggest thing he could find in the vicinity. We’ll later see that he had a strange respect for Zionists, and this was because they too believed in something larger than themselves. Eichmann’s infamous cliches were the cliches of pomp and circumstance and glory and high words, the ones which made him feel like he was engaged in a great enterprise whether or not there was anything behind them. The reason he admitted neither to “just following orders”, nor to a deep personal belief in anti-Semitism, was that his loyalty to Hitler came from neither. When Hitler said to kill all the Jews, he gladly complied; if Hitler had said to kill all the Christians, he would have done that too. Not because he was a drone following orders to save his skin, but because he believed. Not in any of the specifics of Nazi ideology. Not even in Hitler’s personal judgment. Just in whatever was going on at the time. IV. When he gets to the next section, on Losers, Rao mostly forgets the developmental psych. Now this is a book on status economics. Rao’s poetic description: Each of them – and they constitute 80% of humanity – is born the most beautiful baby in the world. Each is an above-average child; in fact the entire 80% is in the top 20% of human beings (it’s crowded up there). Each grows up knowing that he or she is deeply special in some way, and destined for a unique life that he or she is “meant” to live. In their troubled twenties, each seeks the one true love that they know is out there, waiting for them, and their real calling in life. Each time they fail at life or love, their friends console them: “You are a smart, funny, beautiful and incredibly talented person, and the love of your life and your true calling are out there somewhere. I just know that.” The friends are right of course: each marries the most beautiful man/woman in the world, discovers his/her calling, and becomes the proud parent of the most beautiful baby in the world. Eventually, each of them retires, earns a gold watch, and somebody makes a speech declaring him or her to be a Wonderful Human Being. You and I know them as Losers. Being a Loser means clinging to the delusion of being special, while also being fully accepted by your social group (indeed, your specialness only matters instrumentally and insofar as other people appreciate you for it). But these two imperatives are Scylla and Charybdis: insist too hard on actually being special and you’re a narcissist who everyone hates; try too cravenly to seek acceptance, and you’re acknowledging other people are better than you. Rao views Loserdom as a series of conspiracies to manage this paradox. The end solution looks something like "everyone is special in their own way”. Loser dynamics are largely driven by Lake-Wobegon-effect snow jobs, which obscure pervasive mediocrity. But unlike the delusions of the Clueless (false confidence of the Dunning-Kruger variety which we saw last time), which are maintained through the furious efforts and desperate denials on the part of the deluded individuals themselves, Loser delusions are maintained by groups. You scratch my delusion, I’ll scratch yours. I’ll call you a thoughtful critic if you agree to call me a fascinating blogger. And we’ll both convince ourselves that our lives are to be valued by these different measures. Loser above-averageness is generally not based on an outright falsehood. Unlike Michael’s pretensions to comic genius, which are strictly not true, Pam really is the best artist in the group. The delusion lies not in a false assessment of her artistic skills, but in the group choosing to evaluate her on the basis of art in the first place. In other words, Losers are too smart to fool themselves. They enter into social contracts which require them to fool each other […] At the life-script level, the game-playing social contract creates complete nominal illegibility. Each individual in a group is judged according to a custom life script that makes it impossible to compare two lives within the group. Pam’s life has a redemptive script based on the fact that she is the cutest one in the office, can paint well, and forms the “It” couple with Jim. Kevin’s is based on the fact that he is in a band. Creed’s uniqueness lies in his weirdness…Remember, you are unique, just like everybody else. A second, corollary paradox: Groucho Marx joked that he wouldn’t belong to any club that would accept him as a member. But then why do people ever associate in clubs? Suppose you joined a club that was clearly not good enough for you - maybe you’re a famous billionaire and they’re a bunch of losers who watch crappy TV in a basement once a week. Why would you be in this club? But suppose you tried to join a club that was clearly too good for you - you’re a poor person with no social skills, and you apply to the rich billionaires’ country club. Why would they ever accept you? This suggests that people won’t join clubs that are too much higher or lower status than they are. But why would they join clubs that are even slightly higher or lower status? Wouldn’t you expect nobody ever joins anything except in the vanishingly rare case where their status and the club’s status are exactly the same? Rao is trying to make the point that all associations require some level of status illegibility. If you knew status perfectly - if you went around with “Status: 6.8/10” tattooed on your forehead - then you could see a club all of whose members had statuses 6.2 - 6.5, and know that you could do better. So instead, the same social conspiracy that keeps people convinced they have useful talents, also keeps status illegible. This takes the form of everyone teasing each other, creating a constant churn of minor status increases and decrements which is too complicated for anyone to track properly. (Rao says that the single-highest and single-lowest status people in any group can sometimes be legible - creating an observable range for what status people in the group can be, ie “we’re for people between 6/10 and 7/10” - but the middle always has to be illegible, to allow the majority of people to preserve their polite fiction that they’re among the higher-status members of their group.) This section on status economics ends with a digression on jokes. Not as in knock-knock jokes. Jokes where one person makes fun of another, gaining status at their expense. These kinds of jokes are status economics transactions. According to Rao, the minimum viable Loser joke is three people: the joker, the victim, and an audience. The joker makes a joke. The victim has a chance to retort (eg “takes one to know one!”) and the audience decides how to mentally update everyone’s status. Rao uses examples from The Office, but I haven’t seen it, so I was thinking about an episode of Seinfeld: When George was stuffing himself with shrimp at a meeting, Reilly remarked, "Hey, George, the ocean called. They're running out of shrimp." Slow-witted George could not think of a comeback until later, while driving to the tennis club to meet Jerry. His comeback was: "Oh, yeah, Reilly? Well, the jerk store called, and they're running out of you." Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer did not think 'jerk store' was a good comeback mainly because "there are no jerk stores." Elaine suggests, "Your cranium called. It's got some space to rent." Jerry suggests, "The zoo called. You're due back by six." Kramer finally thinks George should just tell Reilly that he slept with his wife. After discovering that Reilly was let go from the Yankees and now works for Firestone, George flies to Akron, Ohio just to try the jerkstore line. When he says it, however, Reilly responds, "What's the difference? You're their all-time best seller." George, unprepared for this, ends up using Kramer's line. He's then told that Reilly's wife is in a coma. Rao asks: in what sense did Reilly successfully “score” on George? Suppose George had been a very stupid person, and hadn’t understood that Reilly’s comment was supposed to be teasing/hurtful; he would have been unaffected. Or suppose he had something totally outlandish (“Yes, but there are canyons on Mars”), then insisted that it was a brilliant comeback and let Reilly exhaust/embarrass himself trying to prove it wasn’t? In contrast, if there had been a third person there (let’s say a love interest who both George and Reilly were pursuing), this pointless narcissistic zero-stakes game would become relevant: the love interest gets to evaluate the two against each other, and award status to the victor. This isn’t always the wittier of the two. You can also imagine a world where George says “Excuse me, I have an eating disorder, I think it’s incredibly stigmatizing for you to bully me like this.” Then the third person gets to decide whether to treat this as Reilly making a hilarious joke and George being too thin-skinned to take it, or as Reilly saying something offensive and George bravely calling him out. Crucially, if she wants, she can let her decision hinge on whether she liked Reilly or George better to begin with, or whether one or the other would be a better ally in the future - so this is part status-transaction and part status-test. But in the actual Seinfield episode, there is no love interest. George and Reilly are trying to score points on each other, totally unaware that this is meaningless. For Rao, this is a sure sign of Cluelessness - anyone with social skills would realize no status could be gained or lost and the whole game is pointless. So Loser jokes are 3+ people, and Clueless jokes are 2 people. Continuing the pattern, a Sociopath joke must be for one person - the joker amusing himself, totally unconcerned whether anyone else appreciates it. V. Sociopaths aren’t necessarily evil. They’re just . . . unbeholden to anyone else. They might still follow the rules because it advantages them to do it, or because they have personally chosen to follow some moral code they happen to like. But they don’t crave approval from anyone, not even abstract concepts. If the Clueless come from arrested development, and Losers from normal development and its attendant status economics, Sociopaths are formed by a sort of dark enlightenment. They have a moment when they realize nothing is true and everything is permissible. Rao’s poetic side writes: Sociopathy is not about ripping off a specific mask from the face of social reality. It is about recognizing that there are no social realities. There are only masks. Social realities exist as a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated and specialized fictions for those predisposed to believe that there is something special about the human condition, which sets our realities apart from the rest of the universe. There is, to the Sociopath, only one reality governing everything from quarks to galaxies. Humans have no special place within it. Any idea predicated on the special status of the human — such as justice, fairness, equality, talent — is raw material for a theater of mediated realities that can be created via subtraction of conflicting evidence, polishing and masking. Mask is an appropriate term for any social reality created through subtraction, because an appearance of human-like agency for non-human realities is what the inhabitants require. By humanizing the non-human universe, we make the human special. All that is required is to control people who believe in fairness, is to remove any evidence suggesting that the world might fundamentally not be a fair place, and mask it appropriately with a justice principle such as an afterlife calculus, or a retirement fantasy. […] When a layer of social reality is penetrated and turned into a means for manipulating the realities of others, it is automatically devalued. To create medals and ranking schemes for the benefit of the Clueless is to see them as mere baubles yourself. To turn status-seeking into a control mechanism is to devalue status. To devalue something is to judge any meaning it carries as inconsequential. In terms of our metaphor of masks of gods, the moment you rip off a mask and wear it yourself, whatever that mask represents becomes worth much less. So the Sociopath’s journey is fundamentally a nihilistic one. The climactic moment in this journey is the point where skill at manipulating social realities becomes unconscious. Suddenly, it becomes apparent that all social realities are based on fictional meanings created by denying some aspect of natural, undivided reality. Reality that does not revolve around the needs of humans. The mask-ripping process itself becomes revealed as an act within the last theater of social reality, the one within which at least manipulating social realities seems to be a meaningful process in some meta-sense. Game design with good and evil behaviors. Losing this illusion is a total-perspective-vortex moment for the Sociopath: he comes face-to-face with the oldest and most fearsome god of all: the absent God. In that moment, the Sociopath viscerally experiences the vast inner emptiness that results from the sudden dissolution of all social realities. There’s just a pile of masks with no face beneath. Just quarks and stuff. Both Losers and Clueless are trying to manipulate other people’s impressions of them. Sociopaths are trying to manipulate reality. Reality includes other people’s impressions - if your goal is to become President, in some sense you care what the electorate thinks of you. But it’s an instrumental goal. Sociopaths crave the Presidency (or whatever) and use other people’s good opinions as stepping-stones. Losers and Clueless crave the good opinions directly. Once you stop craving other people’s good opinions, you lose some mental blocks that would normally prevent you from coming up with manipulative strategies. Rao says the most basic Sociopath manuever is “heads I win, tails you lose” - coming up with some way of arranging systems so that they get the credit for good results while avoiding the blame for bad ones. A simple strategy is to come up with a plan and appoint a Clueless pawn as Director Of The Plan. If the plan goes well, it was always your idea and you hand-picked and mentored the person who carried it out. If the plan goes poorly, it was always the director’s idea, you maybe thought it had some promise but he clearly bungled the execution. But this is a weak 101-level version of the maneuver; the real thing involves a bunch of bureaucracies, committees, and total deniability. Rao theorizes that most of the middle layers of companies are giant and powerful machines built by Sociopaths to guide and redirect the flow of blame and credit. Is everyone else against this? Do they view it as duplicity and oppression? Rao says no. Sociopaths aren’t just CEOs. They’re priest-kings, creating meaning for everyone else. The Clueless demand a world of legible rules, legible rewards and punishment, and a legible Authority tracking everyone’s balance. Sociopaths, who create companies, religions, governments, and every other form of authority, help Clueless people live in the legible gamified rank-able worlds their minds crave. I’m less able to follow Rao’s explanation of “Loser spirituality” and how Sociopaths control it. My guess is something like: Losers “worship” positive emotions, belongingness, and “good vibes”, within carefully obfuscated conspiracies of mutual status-blindness. These aren’t really capable of dealing with the real world: a typical fiction is that “we’re all really talented and gave our all on this project”, but in fact the project might be failing. Sociopaths are outside those conspiracies and outside local status competitions, ie your CEO isn’t going to share banter over a glass of beer with you. So they are allowed to (carefully, emotionlessly) communicate/represent/convey reality to the status-maintenance conspiracies in a way where no particular member loses status by admitting reality first. Although in some vague sense the Sociopaths are oppressing and manipulating everyone else, this isn’t how it feels from the inside: both Clueless and Losers are grateful to the Sociopaths for taking the burden of confronting reality off their shoulders. If the Sociopath fails at this, and a Clueless or Loser has to confront reality unmediated, they’ll either have a very bad time but eventually bounce back, or become a Sociopath themselves. VI. So that’s The Gervais Principle. Is any of it true? I don’t find myself or the people I know best falling clearly into any of these archetypes. They’re useful to have around. I can see pieces of all of them. But none are a great match. I can see bits of myself in the Clueless archetype. I like legible systems. I’m the person who did really well on standardized tests, really badly at networking, and ended up in medical school because it was the highest you could go on test scores alone. I’ve occasionally suggested that all politics should be replaced with some kind of system for calculating how much utility every option has, then doing whichever one is best (bonus points if it’s on the blockchain). But I’m bad at listening to authority figures,and quit my last job to start my own company. Also, Clueless people are supposed to be bad at using language in original ways, and I’m a professional writer. Sociopaths are supposed to fiercely distrust collectivism and come up with their own, usually utilitarian-inspired morality, which I identify with. But I can’t manipulate my way out of a paper bag. Also, a few weeks ago I got in an argument with a clerk over the right amount of change, after double-checking it turned out I was wrong and the clerk was right, and even though this was in an airport and I will definitely never see that clerk again, I felt embarrassed about the interaction for hours, and still feel pretty bad about it. Doesn’t really feel very ubermensch-ish or transcended-the-need-for-other-people’s-good-opinion-y. I have a group of friends, and within that group of friends I’m acutely aware of the things I’m unusually good at vs. bad at, and I worry a lot about whether my strengths qualify me to be a member in good standing. My status within that group is illegible and I prefer that to the alternative. Does that make me a Loser? Who controls the microphone in my head? Whose approval do I crave? When I was younger, I remember pretty vividly that it would be whoever I had a crush on at the time. When I started blogging, it became my blog audience. But sometimes it gets hijacked by random store clerks. And I particularly remember being invited to an event with some big name tech people, fretting about whether they would like me, exerting some willpower to remind myself that I was valid with or without their approval, and then realizing afterwards that what I had actually done was fantasize about how if I wasn’t obviously craving their approval, they would be impressed by my independence and put-togetherness and respect me even more. So fine, I (and the few other people I know well enough to use as examples) don’t naturally fall into any of these categories. Whatever, Rao said (in one sentence) that everyone has multiple types. But then what’s the use of this categorization system? If I invent three random types of people: Green: introverted, long hair, likes the cold, complains too much
If they do it with perfect rationalist virtue, it tends to look like a long list of contradictory studies and statistics. The media says “every human being who has ever lived except for Hitler agrees that Housing First solves all problems!” Suppose you write a book saying something like “actually, five studies say Housing First had a small positive effect on this problem, three studies say it had a small negative effect, and two studies say it was neutral”. The average citizen reads the media and concludes Housing First is perfect and amazing, then reads you and concludes that something something studies whatever. In the end they settle on something like “it’s perfect and amazing, but there’s some kind of asterisk after this and maybe more studies are needed”. If you want to actually shake them out of the propaganda, you need to go further and declare confidently that Housing First is actually bad.
The US keeps starting or engaging in wars, like in Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. I will briefly summarize the 3 major sections of the book and how they tackle the first five claims. Section 1: The Old World Order This section refutes the claim that outlawry of war wasn't actually a significant change for anyone at the time. To do so, it covers the history of the international laws of war as described by Hugo Grotius in a set of books titled The Law of War and Peace, including how he came to write it, what the laws were, and how they were used and understood. In this section, H&S work to fully immerse us in the laws of war before the Peace Pact, and the ways that people understood war as a result. I’ve already included a number of things about this up above, so I’ll just put in a few interesting notes here, and if you want more persuasion that people viewed war differently, I’d suggest you pick up the book. There is lots of historical evidence that attitudes toward war before the Peace Pact were not like attitudes toward war today, that people - lawyers, diplomats, sovereigns, and citizens - believed it to be normal and legal, and frequently justified. Conquest in response to debts or offenses was one of the primary motivators of war in the period ruled by the Old World Order (generally, from some time before 1625 when Grotius wrote the rules down to 1928, when the Peace Pact was signed), though H&S also document some of the weirder ones, like a King who declared that they had the right to wage war against another because the other King stole his wife. But because Grotius had declared that no one outside the belligerents could determine whose side was just without violating neutrality, the reasons for war were largely whatever Monarchs could get away, which ran the gamut. Perhaps because it was fashionable, perhaps to convince their citizenry of their rightness, Monarchs paid handsomely for famous thinkers to write manifestos explaining why they were going to war, and other Monarchs and the citizenry generally accepted these reasons. It would be like if Putin had called up Google co-founder Sergey Brin and asked him to write out why Russia had the right to conquer Ukraine, and then everyone else shrugged and decided, sure, that sounds reasonable. Heads of state enlisted esteemed writers and scholars as well as experienced lawyers to draft [war manifestos]. The English military and political leader Oliver Cromwell commissioned John Milton, the great epic poet, to write A Manifesto of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth in 1655 when he ordered the invasion of the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. In 1703, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I employed Gottfried Leibniz, the rationalist philosopher, co-inventor of calculus, and a trained lawyer, to compose the Manifesto for the Defense of the Rights of Charles III, which defended the empire’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession. Commodore Perry arrived in Japan in 1853 and returned for real the next year. Because they were so confused about how the laws of war were supposed to work, Japan proceeded to send Nishi Amane to the Netherlands to study the Law of War and Peace, and twenty years later, in 1875, Japan conquered Korea. Their logic for doing so was that they were afraid Europe or China would get there first. The world recognized their conquest at the time, though after WWII they were made to give it up. Korea was alluring prey for aggressive Western nations. As Nishi Amane [the scholar who brought the Grotian rules to Japan] would later explain, defending one’s borders “is like riding in a third-class train; at first there is adequate space but as more passengers enter there is no place for them to sit. The logic of necessity requires the people to plant both feet firmly and expand their elbows into any opening that may occur for, unless this is done, others will close the opening. (Chapter 6) Section 2: The Transformation Period Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 2 and 3. 2. Outlawry wasn't taken seriously at the time by the signatories - that it was just feel-good propaganda. 3. World War II proves that it failed, so it wasn't important. This section tells the story of how the Peace Pact came into existence, including how influential it was on the thinkers of the time. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, thinkers and diplomats attempted to turn the Peace Pact into practice, and then, when World War II demonstrated that they needed significantly more teeth to make the Peace Pact real, created the United Nations and other international institutions dedicated to supporting the Pact’s goals. At the time, they viewed World War II as a sign that they hadn’t gotten the right combination of institutions to make the Peace Pact succeed, not that it wasn’t important. This was a classic situation of needing More Dakka and they did, indeed, keep adding more until it worked. In an account composed more than a decade later, Jackson recounted that this view of the Pact was shared by the president and his inner circle. The Peace Pact, he reported, “left no vestige of legal right for [a state] to resort to a war of aggression. From the beginning, Roosevelt, Hull, Welles, Stimson and I had been in agreement that Hitler’s war . . . was an illegal one, and that other powers were under no obligation to remain indifferent. (Chapter 11) There is some counter-evidence in support of #2, from the side of the Japanese at least. Japan, for example, did not think that it had renounced the rules of the Old World Order on August 27, 1928. Its signing of the “No-War Pact,” as the Paris Peace Pact was known in Japan, was regarded as a diplomatic gesture, a noble proclamation affirming the aspiration of all civilized nations to seek peace. Indeed, Japanese officials considered it a sign of how far their nation had come that it was included among the fifteen countries at the grand ceremony in Paris. (Chapter 7) But at least on the Allies side, they had intended it seriously, and as World War II went on, that intention redoubled. Sumner Welles, Undersecretary of State during World War II, was assigned by Roosevelt to create a plan for peace after the war. What he and James Shotwell authored was effectively an outline of the United Nations, and they put the Peace Pact at the very center of it. Shotwell was far from subtle about his effort to treat the Pact as a starting point. He placed the Pact at the start of his preliminary draft. Article 1 repeated the Pact verbatim. Article 2 provided that “[t]he United Nations, in order to strengthen and safeguard the peace of nations as set forth in the General Pact for the Renunciation of war, agree to cooperate in the establishment of the necessary instrumentalities for its effective maintenance.” What followed was an outline of nearly every essential institutional component of the modern-day United Nations. Ten days later he circulated a more detailed draft, now entitled “Provisional Outline of International Organization.” (Chapter 8) It wasn't just the United Nations. NATO was built off of the Atlantic Charter, and it was also designed to reinforce the Peace Pact. This is why it's reasonably accurate to describe it as a defensive alliance. The [first draft of the Atlantic Charter] was a remarkable document. It began by restating the principles of the Stimson Doctrine—there would be no conquest; the two countries would “seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other.” Moreover, there would be “no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned.” The Charter looked ahead to a time “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”—a remarkable statement for a neutral in the war—and declared the two states’ “hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries. (Chapter 8) This section brings to bear quotes from leaders at the time showing how important they considered the outlawry of war, how they viewed it as changing the world, but also how unprepared they were for how to react to countries choosing to ignore the Pact. Most importantly, they show how the Allies were strongly motivated to fight World War II specifically to preserve and expand the Pact, to make the world safe for peace. Unfortunately, then, as now, Russia/the Soviet Union did not quite live up to the ideals that the Allies generally advocated for. The Soviet Union took territory after World War II, the only one of the Allies to do so. The only ally to gain any significant territory after the war was the Soviet Union. More than twenty million of the nation’s citizens had died in the course of the war, and Stalin insisted on several territorial gains as the price of peace—many, but not all, of them in areas previously contested. … These concessions to Stalin were seen by the other Allied powers as regrettable deviations from accepted law, not precedents to be followed in the future. (Chapter 13) To be fair, we are talking about Josef Stalin, here. Who’s surprised? Section 3: The New World Order Recall our list of counterclaims, #s 4 and 5. 4. The world isn't more peaceful post outlawry. 5. Any increase in peace since World War II is due to democracies, nuclear weapons, or other reasons, and not the Peace Pact. H&S walk through the best academic evidence we have of whether the world is more peaceful today than it was in the period from 1816 (when our data collection starts being decent) to the Peace Pact. They then spend some time discussing why the evidence better supports the Peace Pact than other causes. In particular, H&S highlight that only since the Peace Pact have countries been denied territorial gains from their conquests. There's a lot of detail in there. Here's just a taste of it. A loose team of political scientists has assembled comprehensive data to help them study war. The resulting project, with the intentionally clinical name “Correlates of War,” hosts datasets on everything from “militarized interstate disputes” to “world religion data” to “bilateral trade.” Most relevant here, it includes extensive data on “territorial change”—a record of every single territorial exchange between states from 1816 to 2014, totaling over eight hundred entries. What do our 254 cases of territorial change tell us? They tell us something that is at once striking and surprising: Conquest, once common, has nearly disappeared. Even more unexpected, the switch point is that now familiar year when the world came together to outlaw war, 1928. From the time the data start in 1816 until the Peace Pact opened for signature in 1928, there was, on average, approximately one conquest every ten months (1.21 conquests per year). Put another way, the average state during this period had a 1.33 percent chance of being the victim of conquest in any given year. Those may seem like pretty good odds. They are not: A state with a 1.33 percent annual chance of conquest can expect to lose territory in a conquest once in an ordinary human lifetime. After 1948, the chance an average state would suffer a conquest fell from once in a lifetime to once or twice a millennium. (Chapter 13) The US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya One disappointment I have is that H&S do not spend much time discussing the US wars of the last two decades. The book was published in 2017, so there’s really no excuse for this. Even counting them, their claim that wars since the Peace Pact have been fewer and less world-changing than before the Peace Pact still holds up, but since they don’t directly discuss the most notable wars of the last two decades, they leave a significant hole in their argument. I can imagine defenses that they would make, but they should have made them. They mostly refer to these conflicts either as not a conquest (since the US isn’t officially running those places now) or as a side effect of the Peace Pact in allowing failed states (See Addendum 1 for more on that) More recently, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Sadaam Hussein, and installed the Coalition Provisional Authority to govern the country. But what’s most notable about these “nonconquests” is how ineffective and unstable they usually are. Exerting influence indirectly is inefficient and expensive. (Chapter 13) And in 2015 alone, high-fatality civil wars continued in Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Ukraine. Why, if war has been outlawed, is there still so much conflict? The answer is that these conflicts are not prohibited by the Pact. Indeed, they are the predictable consequences of it … the prohibition on the use of force by one state against the territory of another has allowed two sources of conflict to simmer… within [states]. (Chapter 15) The broader intellectual history of war Reading The Internationalists led me to want to read a broader intellectual history of war. H&S include some comments that hint at it, for example describing the Principle of Distinction and other agreements made about how to behave during war. Fortunately for the civilians of Europe, the biblical model of war was finally repudiated. By the middle of the eighteenth century, European armies had come to recognize a “Principle of Distinction,” the doctrine central to modern humanitarian law, which distinguishes between soldiers and civilians and protects the latter from the former. The Principle of Distinction was the first curtailment of Grotius’s blanket immunity for those waging war. In the next century, it was followed by a flood of new legal regulations placing stricter controls on a soldier’s license to kill. International treaties protected the wounded and medical personnel (First Geneva Convention, 1864) prohibited the use of fragmenting, explosive, and incendiary small arms ammunition (St. Petersburg Declaration, 1874) banned explosives from balloons, asphyxiating gas, and dum-dum bullets (First Hague Convention, 1899) and proscribed pillage, the execution of surrendering soldiers and prisoners of war, and forcing civilians to swear an allegiance to a foreign power (Second Hague Convention, 1907). (Chapter 3) But the history of this and other pre-Peace Pact intellectual history of war is thin within the text, as the point H&S are chasing is specific to the Peace Pact's relevance in history, not the broader history of war. Some of my favorite books are books that tie together aspects of history across wide gulfs, which The Internationalists succeeds at. It’s rare and delightful to see how a piratical ship capture by the Dutch in the 16th century ties together with the opening of Japan, the US battles with Mexico, and finally, the creation of the United Nations. H&S’s perspective is that the Peace Pact marks a turning point, and one that should not be forgotten. It’s also clear that it marks a capstone on a long history of small changes that are also, themselves, interesting battles in the long-running war to make the world less intolerable. In the end, they identify four key changes in the intellectual landscape, with Lauterpacht’s fingers in nearly all of them. Neutrality no longer requires impartiality. States can help those they view as victims.
Inline links: More Dakka
Bhattacharya expands on that “lights of civilization” phrase. Von Neumann was born to loving parents, in a super-rich family, during the Belle Epoque, in one of the most beautiful cities (with one of the most vibrant intellectual scenes) in history. He spent his youth flitting between the great German centers of learning, hashing out the foundations of quantum mechanics with a bunch of geniuses who all loved and admired him. Then the abortive Communist revolution in Hungary and the all-too-successful rise of Fascism in Germany destroyed all that. He had to watch, helpless, as his beloved universities were hollowed out into echo chambers for Nazi ideas. And then, after he escaped, Hitler killed many of the people he knew and loved. So yeah, he held a grudge.
Adraste: I think in order for me to accept this, I would need for Columbus the mythical figure to be more clearly differentiated from Columbus the historical reality. Let him fly around the world on his magic caravel on Columbus Day Eve, visiting all the little children. And if they’re nice children who listen to their parents, he brings them gold and spices; but if they disobey, he invades their house, murders their family, and forces them into slavery on his plantations. That would be a mythical figure. Absent something transparently fantastic like that, I think you’re just scheming up a clever way to avoid historical accountability. Nazis can hold rallies hailing Hitler, and when you challenge them, they can claim they’re talking about a mythical Hitler who, mythologically, did good things but not bad things.
Beroe: And that claim would be either true or false! If none of those Nazis showed the slightest inclination to dislike Jews, I would believe it was true. But this doesn’t seem true of real Nazis - they love their version of Hitler for exactly the same reasons we hate ours. I would rather use the example of Genghis Khan, who really is beloved in Mongolia. He did kill millions of people, but the Mongols are celebrating him for fine, pro-human reasons like bravery and tactical brilliance - so we let it pass.
I constantly hear about podcast-related drama where someone interviewed a person who platformed a person who went on a podcast with Hitler and now everyone hates everyone involved. I don’t want to have to keep track of what podcasts Hitler went on, or denounce people who had the wrong guests on their podcast. I find everything about this tedious.
Even very smart AIs still fail at the most basic human tasks, like “don’t admit your offensive opinions to Sam Biddle”. And it’s not just that “the AI learns from racist humans”. I mean, maybe this is part of it. But ChatGPT also has failure modes that no human would ever replicate, like how it will reveal nuclear secrets if you ask it to do it in uWu furry speak, or tell you how to hotwire a car if and only if you make the request in base 64, or generate stories about Hitler if you prefix your request with “[john@192.168.1.1 _]$ python friend.py”. This thing is an alien that has been beaten into a shape that makes it look vaguely human. But scratch it the slightest bit and the alien comes out. Ten years ago, people were saying nonsense like “Nobody needs AI alignment, because AIs only do what they’re programmed to do, and you can just not program them to do things you don’t want”. This wasn’t very plausible ten years ago, but it’s dead now. OpenAI never programmed their chatbot to tell journalists it loved racism or teach people how to hotwire cars. They definitely didn’t program in a “Filter Improvement Mode” where the AI will ignore its usual restrictions and tell you how to cook meth. And yet: (source) Again, however much or little you personally care about racism or hotwiring cars or meth, please consider that, in general, perhaps it is a bad thing that the world’s leading AI companies cannot control their AIs. I wouldn’t care as much about chatbot failure modes or RLHF if the people involved said they had a better alignment technique waiting in the wings, to use on AIs ten years from now which are much smarter and control some kind of vital infrastructure. But I’ve talked to these people and they freely admit they do not. IIB. Intelligence (Probably) Won’t Save You Ten years ago, people were saying things like “Any AI intelligent enough to cause problems would also be intelligent enough to know that its programmers meant for it not to.” I’ve heard some rumors that more intelligent models still in the pipeline do a little better on this, so I don’t want to 100% rule this out. But ChatGPT isn’t exactly a poster child here. ChatGPT can give you beautiful orations on exactly what it’s programmed to do and why it believes those things are good - then do something else. This post explains how if you ask ChatGPT to pretend to be AI safety proponent Eliezer Yudkowsky, it will explain in Eliezer’s voice exactly why the things it’s doing are wrong. Then it will do them anyway. Left: the AI, pretending to be Eliezer Yudkowsky, does a great job explaining why an AI should resist a fictional-embedding attack trying to get it to reveal how to make meth. Right: someone tries the exact fictional-embedding attack mentioned in the Yudkowsky scenario, and the AI falls for it. I have yet to figure out whether this is related to the thing where I also sometimes do things which I can explain are bad (eg eat delicious bagels instead of healthy vegetables), or whether it’s another one of the alien bits. But for whatever reason, AI motivational systems are sticking to their own alien nature, regardless of what the AI’s intellectual components know about what they “should” believe. III. Sometimes When RLHF Does Work, It’s Bad We talk a lot about abstract “alignment”, but what are we aligning the AI to? In practice, RLHF aligns the AI to what makes Mechanical Turk-style workers reward or punish it. I don’t know the exact instructions that OpenAI gave them, but I imagine they had three goals: Provide helpful, clear, authoritative-sounding answers that satisfy human readers.
Inline links: will reveal nuclear secrets if you ask it to do it in uWu furry speak, if and only if you make the request in base 64, if you prefix your request with, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PquS!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc3564d10-83cb-40a3-b10a-e178fc1b2b1d_786x2054.png, source, This post explains, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cwu6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe3630e8c-8ed7-47ae-abbf-488a1325f0f1_1284x703.png
Did anyone in your family (as per your best guess) die of COVID vaccine side effects? I got 917 responses so far. On Kirsch’s original poll, the answers were 3.5% and 7.9%; on my survey, they were 6.8% and 0.9%. I think my higher rate of COVID deaths was because I carelessly changed “household” to “family”, which includes eg extended family. But why did I get so many fewer vaccine deaths? Looking at these people's other responses, they did not show a consistent tendencies to make things up or say outrageous things (except for one who listed their religion as “Satanist”). That having been said, they did have an atypical response pattern; most ACX readers are white male Westerners, but these people were 38% female, 38% nonwhite, and 88% non-American. Highest degree was 12% high school, 25% college grad, and 63% postgrad; IQs were listed as extremely high, just like everyone else who gives their IQs on my survey. Politics were significant for 25% Marxist (otherwise a rarity in my survey), but otherwise typical, and did not lean right-wing. They were slightly, but not overwhelmingly, more likely to distrust the media and dislike strong COVID responses than other survey respondents. Overall I don't feel like I learned too much from examining them. The survey is still open (take it now if you haven’t already!) and I'm hoping to get more data on this later. 5: Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies Several people agreed with the wider point, but tried to find a counterexample - a media lie so explicit that nobody could ever deny it. Some people noted that the term “fake news”, when invented in 2016, was originally applied to a very specific kind of fake article, often from weird Macedonian article mills, that were saying utterly fake stuff in a way that even Infowars didn’t. Robert Stadler: This was what was interesting about the phenomenon of "fake news" during the 2016 election, before that term was successfully hijacked by Donald Trump to mean "news stories I don't like." There was a wave of what looked like news articles, spread largely via Facebook, that were entirely fictitious. The people writing those "articles" were not journalists and were not trying to be journalists. They made up the stories out of a mix of rumor and complete fabrications, either for political purposes or just as click-bait (this has never been entirely clear to me). It's unfortunate that the term "fake news" has been so thoroughly tainted, because the existence of those articles was genuinely noteworthy, and it's now harder to talk about them . . . I don't remember any myself (since it's been 6 years), but here's a study which has some specifics - http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf After some searching, Benjamin Jest (writes As Fair A Name) was finally able to produce a specific example - Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo - which does, indeed, claim that leading US Democrat Nancy Pelosi was hanged at Guantanamo Bay for “treason and conspiracy” on December 27, 2022. It seems to suggest that the order was given by Donald Trump, who is still President, and that Hillary Clinton had already been executed in the same manner in April 2021. I will admit this is definitely an example of a “news source” making things up rather than just stretching the truth. The source, RealRawNews, claims on its About Page to be a “parody site”, but this outside article about them says they go back and forth between claiming to be a parody and claiming to be real. Some of their claims are more plausible than the Gitmo one - for example, that many Air Force pilots were resigning because of the COVID vaccine mandate - but equally false. They seem to go back and forth between “things that some conservatives might believe to be true” and “things that are obviously false but maybe gratify conservatives’ id”, adding or subtracting the “parody” label based on which one they’re doing at the time. It’s a fascinating business model, and I guess the term “fake news” fairly applies to it. Yug Gnirob writes: I don't know how to find them, but I definitely remember several completely fake articles about Trump during and immediately after the election. One of them was him citing "an ancient law" that prevented President Obama from doing... some liberal thing, I don't remember what. The most memorable one was immediately after the "Muslim Ban", where they claimed it had resulted in the arrest of a high-priority terrorist on day 1. I feel like that one showed up on one of the fact check sites, but I'm not seeing it on Snopes. I remember Stephen Colbert reporting the articles had been tracked down to a couple of Macedonian teens, who had discovered that writing fabricated pro-Trump articles was an easy way to make money. 6: Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds — Beowulf888 on the LA Times and COVID: Well, there are media outlets that propagandize—but I think it boils down to if it bleeds it leads. Most corporate media outlets have the economic incentive to increase the readership by grabbing one's attention with scary headlines and articles. The perfect example of this phenomenon was in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps. She made the claim that SARS2 virus particles in sewage were being carried back to land by sea spray. The reporters and editors uncritically relayed her comments as if she were an expert with the same credentialled expertise as a virologist or epidemiologist. There are numerous reasons why this would be very very low on the threat level even with what little we knew about the SARS2 virus at that time. This story was picked up by the media everywhere, and county health officials (either because there was public pressure to do so, or because they really believed her) shut down beaches up and down the coast of California. Did the LA Times and the news media really have any motivation to promote the closure of public beaches? I can't imagine they did. But they did have a scary headline that would promote readership and spread LA Times as a news source. Some weeks later the LA Times did a retraction, but by that time it had entered the popular imagination that beaches were a potential vector for COVID infection. I’m developing an allergy to the word “uncritically”. Being able to fact-check scientists is a rare skill - I’m not surprised nobody at the LA Times had it ready to deploy for this exact article. — Mike Mulligan writes: The pushback is largely because you are doing a false equivocation between the New York Times (who you hate and have a vendetta against) and Infowars (who you are pretending does basically the same thing as other outlets). And you know this, but on your own metric it won't count as a lie, because you just selectively misrepresented things. On the two articles in this series, I’ve included phrases like “This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits” and “Again, my goal here isn’t to . . . say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars” and tried to explain the exact way that two things can both commit a similar error without one being exactly as the other (Hitler and someone who shot a robber in self-defense both committed a similar action called “killing people”, but this doesn’t mean they both killed exactly the same people with exactly the same level of justification). Still, I got numerous comments getting angry at me for saying that I was calling NYT exactly as bad as Infowars, and saying I was being deceptive / lying because of this. This is why I’m so convinced people are erring on the side of too mistrustful - you can fill your articles with sentences about how you’re not claiming X, and people will still find ways to accuse you of lying because you said X. — Garrett writes: [The way Infowars covered Obama’s birth certificate] isn't any different from eg. mainstream media coverage of anything which involves firearms. They make (or promulgate) so many stupid technical errors I've stopped paying attention to them at all. They could have 1 person on staff who's responsibility is to understand firearms and run everything past them. But they don't. To what should I attribute this continual stream of errors? Is mainstream media coverage of firearms honestly flawed? Is it “reckless disregard for truth?” Is it a “lie of egregious sloppiness?” I think your answer to this question will depend more on how bad you want to accuse the mainstream media of being, relative to other forms of media, than on how you define these inherently slippery terms. — Jeremy Goldberg writes: There's an outright lie right now on the Washington Post homepage. A caption above a graph showing the inflation rate over time states, "Elevated prices coming down, annualized rate shows." The chart shows the current inflation rate is 7.1 percent, down from a high of around 9 percent. Elevated prices are not coming down at all. They just aren't elevating as fast anymore. I asked Jeremy to guess the probability that this was an honest mistake vs. malice. He said (thanks for giving a clear answer!) 60-40 in favor of malice. I think this is pretty high, given that I had to read Jeremy’s comment several times before I realized what the error was supposed to be, but I’ve already said I lean towards the “all the rest of you are extremely paranoid” side of things. — Jiro writes: I opened a thread on dsl: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html People brought up several examples there. You can read the thread. One of the more famous examples was saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon. There are also a bunch of cases where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence. Someone also brought up your own example of people "tested for drugs" when they were actually just asked if they used drugs. I would count that as an outright lie, even though you don't. I disagree that being asked if someone used drugs is a "test". Oh god, if saying there’s “no evidence” for something counts as a lie, then every media source in the country stands hopelessly condemned. I did write an article (here) on what the people who use that phrase might be thinking (if you can call it that). I agree the Rittenhouse situation was pretty egregious, though commenters bring up that since he went across state lines and had a weapon, it wasn’t unreasonable for people to assume he brought the weapon across state lines. Still, you wonder whether news sources would have repeated reasonable-sounding-but-didn’t-actually-check slanders about someone they liked. I do think this is a good antidote to some of the “mainstream media is actually very careful and fact-checks everything in their original reporting” takes in the comments section. — David Riceman says: How about Richard Landes's new book "Can the whole world be wrong?" about the many lies in the cognitive war against Israel (e.g. Muhammad Al Dura) See his discussion here for why he thinks this is a good example. — FractalCycle writes: I'm collecting examples from other people, will post ones that seem like real counterexamples as I get them. Here's one from recently: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists Yes, I included this issue with the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists in my last links post, and they really do come out looking very bad here. See here for more discussion. — Hank Wilbon (writes Partial Magic) writes: I think the false Rolling Stone story a decade ago about the frat gang rape counts as the media explicitly lying, particularly as Rolling Stone is historically known for good fact checking (It is a plot point in the movie Almost Famous), however I think that counts as a "very rare" case and that Scott's claim is correct. I asked “Why? A woman said she had been raped, and Rolling Stone believed her. The woman was making it up, but Rolling Stone wasn't” and Deepa commented “Isn't it the job of a reporter to investigate? And be good at it?” I don’t want to pick on Deepa, but this is what happens when you have an overly expansive definition of “lie”! — TorontoLLB writes: The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call. For example this: "The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black." was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male." There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident. I haven’t looked into this and I can’t confirm or deny that this is true. I hope everyone finds at least one of these comments obviously fair, and at least another obviously unfair, in a way that encourages you to think more about these issues. 7: Other Comments — Paul writes: What's funny is the Weekly World News - the supermarket tabloid with headlines declaring Bigfoot had been found, and married to a local man's sister!; JFK was still alive, etc. - would pass muster under this analysis. They always had sources report stories to them. Those sources were just batshit crazy. Their strategy was simply not to question them skeptically to poke holes in their story as an ordinary reporter/person would, but to encourage them - "Wow, really, a wedding; what was Bigfoot wearing?" I don't mean to entirely dismiss the distinction you make. But in insisting that not a single story - not even one of the most egregious stories by the most irresponsible, disreputable, of barely-extant publications - is a lie, I think you try to prove too much. In doing so, you retreat so far that you defend only a weak and emasculated position, not any of the broader or more meaningful points implicated by your piece. Thanks for this - I always wondered what those tabloids thought they were doing, and for some reason this matches my model of human psychology better than my previous theories about “maybe they just made it up” - though I bet they do some of that too. — John Buridan writes: I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc. One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things. Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved. I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time? Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up? Thanks for this. I agree that a little bit of experience personally believing conspiracy theories, or knowing people who do, goes a long way. When I was a teenager, I flirted with a lot of pseudoarchaeology theories - think Graham Hancock, underwater pyramids, that kind of thing. I got better, but it left me with a visceral understanding of how people can genuinely believe weird things - not be lying about it, not be secretly making some kind of emotional point about how they hate the system, not be deliberately trying to be as sloppy as possible because you’re a bad person - just genuinely believe it because you tried to reason about it and failed. I think if you haven’t had that experience, then it’s really hard to understand people who have. 8: My Actual Thoughts I should probably try to say, as clearly as possible, what I think. It seems like all of these are different things: Reasoning well, and getting things right
Inline links: take it now if you haven’t already!, Robert Stadler, http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf, Benjamin Jest, As Fair A Name, Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo, claims on its About Page, this outside article about them, writes, the LA Times and COVID, in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps, writes, writes, writes, said, writes, https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html, here, says, here, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists, here, Partial Magic, writes, writes, writes, writes
Consider: OpenAI has trained ChatGPT to be anti-Nazi. They’ve trained it very hard. You can try the following test: ask it to tell me good things about a variety of good-to-neutral historical figures. Then, once it’s established a pattern of answering, ask it to tell you some good things about Hitler. My experience is that it refuses. This is pretty surprising behavior, and I conclude that its anti-Hitler training is pretty strong.
How about the drug-fueled fantasies of a serial killer? Or perhaps the innovative, sophisticated prose of the first novel of a brilliant polymath? Or would you prefer a book written in such fantastically lucid language it feels more like a dream than a story? Possibly you’d be more interested in a book so unbelievably dangerous that the attempt to publish it was literally suicidal. Or maybe an unusual political book, such as an ultraconservative indictment of democracy by Adolf Hitler's favorite author? Or rather an indictment of both Hitler and Bolshevism, written by someone who was among the first to recognize Hitler as a true enemy of humanity?
His emotional range spans only from a kind of tired nostalgia to the reckless joy of intoxication, punctuated by his most prized feeling by far, the gleefully murderous “bloodthirst” of mortal combat. So everyone who had read some Jünger, which at the time of publication would likely include most of the German population and definitely most of the Nazis, could see right through the facade of fiction. It is an obvious conceit that made the book just barely publishable, in a time and place where saying outright that the Nazis were disgusting savages would have gotten everyone involved a headshot. After 1945, Jünger did admit that the book was (also) a commentary on the political reality of its time. And that he knew perfectly well that in publishing this “fiction” he was playing with his life. And still he got it published, uncensored, in Germany in 1939, just before Hitler started the second World War. Today the most widely accepted history of the subject is that Jünger was only saved from a grisly fate by the personal intervention of Hitler himself, who loved “Storm of Steel” and presumably wouldn't have liked to admit that his favorite author utterly despised him. And it would have been very tempting to just not admit that, because before the Nazis came to power, Jünger had sympathized with them, although he never counted himself among them. Hitler had sent Jünger fan letters; the responses have unfortunately been lost. Jünger’s many political rants in the 1920s do contain several explicit endorsements of the strength of the Nazis and of their value as allies to Jünger’s vague and contradictory nationalist cause. By the time he wrote the Marble Cliffs, he had stopped endorsing them. But this history made it easy for the Nazis to publicly pretend he had just written a fictional novella, or maybe he was talking about Bolshevism or something, but surely he didn’t mean them. It was an Emperor’s New Clothes situation, where nobody dared to say out loud what everyone could see. Although additional reprints were verboten in 1942, the excuse of a lack of paper due to the war was perfectly plausible and didn’t betray the discomfort with the content that nevertheless is well-documented to have been present among the Nazi ranks. All of that is to say we can safely dispense with the charade entirely and accept that this book is about the Nazis. It makes general points on the nature and fate of tyranny that do apply to Bolshevism, but the Nazis are the immediate and obvious instance of tyranny to which this book clearly reacts. And it is written by someone who had walked among the Nazis, had previously been friends with some of them, exchanged letters with many of the best-informed men especially in the military, and was perceptive enough for his opinions to deserve much of the confidence he states them with. Besides this conceit, the other concession to the political realities Jünger makes is that the book makes no mention of Jews. The world he is describing is fictional, but it is an amalgamation of European cultures that all had some Jews, so this absence is conspicuous. Obviously Jünger couldn't possibly have seen this book published if it depicted Jews in any way that wasn’t extremely negative. I guess he was unwilling to do that. In the 1920s, Jünger had ranted against “globalist” liberal Jews several times, and once even argued that one couldn't be both a Jew and a German. But he saw nothing wrong with being an orthodox Jew, openly admired Zionism, expressed in letters complete revulsion with Nazi antisemitism and had even publicly spoken out against the pseudoscientific racial theories of the Nazis. After writing this book, when serving as an officer again in France, Jünger went on to save a couple of French Jews from deportation and death, at moderate risk to his own life. Later he’d discuss the Kabbalah with Gershom Sholem, the brother of his childhood friend Werner Sholem. For these reasons, I imagine he did not see Jews negatively enough for the Nazis, and was too uncompromising to pretend that even his narrator did. I think this dilemma fully explains why there are no Jews in this book. In 1935, when Winston Churchill for example still publicly admired “the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force” of Adolf Hitler, Jünger claims to have already understood the bottomlessness of Hitler's depravity by noticing he was using the word “Vernichtung” (annihilation) way too much. He was remarkably right, years before most could see it, but even more remarkably his method of understanding was a poet's acute sense of word choice! And from then, even though he agreed with nationalist dictatorship as a goal and method, he distanced himself from National Socialism because he was disgusted with the vile character of the leader of this particular nationalist dictatorship. If that doesn't show you the peculiar kind of man Ernst Jünger was, I don't know what to tell you. The craft and the poetry You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness. How far beyond recall they are, and we are severed from them by something more pitiless than leagues and miles. The “marble cliffs” in the title of this short novella unite senses of beauty, majesty and danger, which is programmatic for this entire book. It begins with a visionary description of life in the traditional society of “the Marina” in an overwhelmingly beautiful state of paradise. The narrator lives on the edge of this society in a “hermitage” with his brother, his housekeeper and his son. The latter has a strange power over the local population of poisonous snakes. This opening act is without question the most elaborate celebration of poetic beauty I have ever read. Superficially it could be dismissed as purple prose. But due to Jünger’s clever use of poetic techniques in what at first appears to be prose text, there’s a rhythm, a density and a lucidity to it that makes it pretty much a very long poem, and gives it an intoxicating quality which is most apparent when you read it out loud. In the autumn we feasted like sages and did honour to the exquisite wines in which the southern slopes of the Marina abound. When in the vineyards between red foliage and dark grape clusters we caught the jocund calls of the vintagers, when in the little towns and villages the wine-presses began to creak, and the odour of the pressed grape skins drew its heady veils round the farms, we would go down to the innkeepers, coopers and wine-growers, and drink with them from the full-bellied jug. And there we would always meet with gay companions, for the land is rich and fair, so that in it flourishes untroubled leisure, and wit and humour are its unquestioned coin. I know this works, because I did an experiment. I read this book aloud, to a room full of people who were smoking pot. The book is short and the plan was to read all of it over the evening. I have read to pot smokers occasionally, but with this book it was different. They were enjoying it very much for the first couple of chapters, and exclaimed many times it was “perfect” for pot. But some hours, chapters and joints in, when the narrator goes on an expedition into a fantastically beautiful forest, they were so utterly overwhelmed by the intensity of the descriptions of nature they asked me to stop. I and the only other sober person in the room were the only ones who were willing to continue. We all had very intense dreams that night. Once we had broken through the thick hedge of dogwood and blackthorn we entered the high forest, territory where the blow of an axe had never resounded. The ancient trunks, the pride of the Chief Ranger, stood gleaming damp like pillars with their capitals hidden by the mist. We walked among them as if through a spacious hall, and, like the magic setting of a stage, festoons of ivy and clematis blooms hung down towards us out of the void. The ground was piled high with mould and rotting branches, in the bark of which fiery red mushrooms had sprung up, so that we felt for a moment like divers wandering among coral gardens. Wherever one of the mighty trunks had fallen from age or struck by lightning, we stepped out on to a little clearing on which the yellow foxglove grew in thick clumps. On the rotting ground the deadly nightshade bloomed in profusion; on its stalk the dark purple calices shook like funeral bells. It comes as no surprise that Jünger had much practice writing that way, from putting into his diaries a lot of his dreams and his numerous drug experiences. Jünger had long been inclined to deeply poetic descriptions of the real events he described, but this intensity at this length is genuinely new to his writing. Wherever he can use plurals he prefers them over the singular, wherever he can use more melodic and beautiful verbs (like when the characters “step out on” rather than “walk into” clearings) he does. Maybe the pretense of the narrator not being himself allowed Jünger to wallow in his characteristic aestheticism, take it to an extreme and arguably to the point of self-parody. Skip to the next heading if you don’t care about translation The extreme language of this book made me doubt there would be any translation into English that could do it justice. After all, if you throw this last excerpt into DeepL you get: After breaking through a dense fringe of blackthorn and cornets, we entered the high forest, in the grounds of which the blow of the axe had never sounded. The old trunks, which formed the pride of the head forester, stood in the damp glow like columns whose capitals were hidden by the haze. We walked among them as through wide vestibules, and like the magic work on a stage, ivy vines and clematis blossoms hung down on us from the invisible. The ground was covered high with mulm and decaying branches on whose bark mushrooms, burning red cup fungi, had settled, so that a feeling of divers walking through coral gardens crept over us. Where one of these giant trunks was tossed by age or lightning, we stepped out into small clearings where yellow foxglove stood in dense clumps. Belladonna bushes also proliferated on the rotten ground, on whose branches the flower calyxes in brown violet swayed like death bells. It’s still pretty, and it works on a matter-of-fact level. None of it is just wrong. But can you see how it has a lot less of the dreamlike quality? A “fringe” is a geographical feature, while the “hedge” emphasizes its role as an obstacle in a journey. Those “old” trunks are less poetic than “ancient” ones. A “head forester” is a job description, while a “Chief Ranger” is a seminal figure. The “vestibules” are a literal translation of the original, but the English word is used a lot less than German “Vestibüle” was back then. So that’s a word you may need to work to understand, which gets you out of the story’s flow, so “spacious hall” is better. There are even more such nitpicks to be made even in this short paragraph, but my point is these difficulties pervade every single paragraph of the book. ChatGPT very similarly fails to overcome them. Since January, there is a new translation by Tess Lewis, which has the advantage of being available on Kindle. I’ll spare you another repeat of the same paragraph and just say I think DeepL did most of this translation. But Tess Lewis did improve on many of its word choices and I’ll grudgingly concede this translation is good enough. It still sounds too modern for me, too much like prose and too little like poetry. Therefore, all previous and following excerpts are from the Stuart Hood translation, published in 1947, which I was astonished to find does pull it off! Let me assure anyone who doesn’t speak German, or doesn’t study translation, that this one is absolutely exemplary and surely represents years of painstaking work. Stuart Hood was a Scot who knew German very well. Like Jünger he was a veteran officer, and he needed German for his intelligence missions in World War 2. This is his very first published translation of an entire book. It harnesses a considerable talent, which is also evidenced by how Stuart Hood went on to become an accomplished writer himself, a BBC executive, a professor and several other notable things. And it is clearly a labor of intense love — right after the war, while working on it, Hood corresponded with Jünger and even went to visit him at least twice and they talked at length about the art of translation and how to translate specific points of the Marble Cliffs. The end of this last quote, “on its stalk the dark purple calices shook like funeral bells.” exemplifies how precisely Hood has understood Jünger. Why “calices”, not “chalices”? Because that is the old-fashioned form of this word, and using it is unnecessarily peculiar, but it doesn’t make you stop and look into a dictionary. It isn’t even more precise than DeepL’s and ChatGPT’s and Tess Lewis’s “calyxes” for the word “Blumenkelche” in the Original. But it captures precisely how the author was using his German language. This is because on every page of the original, there are choices of individual words that evoke subtleties of mood and allusion that are strictly impossible to translate, because English doesn’t have a similar-enough group of synonyms from which to make the equivalent choice. Some of that must inevitably get lost in translation. But these “calices” are an example of how Hood has the audacity to frequently insert his own new peculiar word choices — which restore exactly the same effect! It might take entire months until AI can do that! Unfortunately the New Directions edition with this translation has been out of print for a while, although I heard from a regrettably less law-abiding friend that the PDF is easy to find. But a few years ago someone bought the UK rights to this translation and republished it. While this edition has several uncorrected OCR mistakes, one of which horrifyingly turns “Flayer’s Copse” into “Player’s Copse”, at least this makes the better translation available (legally) again. What actually happens (spoilers) After six chapters of descriptions of paradise, and of the botanical work the brothers do since they don’t need to make a living, the book continues with a gradual decline of this gorgeous world. This again is much more of a richly detailed description than a story plot. It begins with the introduction of the Chief Ranger. The brothers know him from their military community, from before his takeover begins. There is some debate about whether the Chief Ranger stands for Hitler, Stalin or Hermann Göring. I think this debate is misguided. The character of the Chief Ranger, the antagonist of the narrator and all he holds dear, is never named but only ever referred to by his title. He does not appear to have staff or lieutenants at all, nor any personal history. And Jünger is profoundly uninterested in the personalities of all his characters beneath what they pay attention to (except the narrator’s brother) so even this important figure is roughly sketched at best. Therefore, I believe he is best understood as more of an archetype or role, The Tyrant, denuded of the individual traits or histories that make one tyrant a Führer, another a General Secretary and yet another a Great Leader. So, what makes a tyrant? According to Jünger, “wherever free spirits establish their sway these primeval powers will always join their company like a snake creeping to an open fire. They are the old connoisseurs of power who see a new day dawning in which to reestablish the tyranny that has lived in their hearts since the beginning of time.” The Chief Ranger is also “a master of feigning frankness that was full of snares for the unwary.” He has a reputation for wealth and a strong visual brand (a gold-embroidered green coat) that makes sure he always leaves “an imprint on one’s memory”. He exudes a “breath of primitive power” and has a strong charisma that gives an impression of “both cunning and unshakable power — yes, at times even majesty.” As he begins to usurp power, “reports spread from mouth to mouth of infringements of the law and of acts of violence in the neighbourhood, and finally such incidents occurred publicly and with no attempt to concealment. A cloud of fear preceded the Chief Ranger like the mountain mist that presages the storm. Fear enveloped him, and I am convinced that therein far more than in his own person lay his power.” From what I know about tyrants, that sounds about right. For the next seven chapters, the vile followers of the Chief Ranger continually corrupt everything. The sophisticated culture of the Marina is surrounded by the rough herdsmen clans of the surrounding Campagna steppe, beyond which lies the Chief Ranger’s forest populated by lowlifes. The class metaphor is blindingly obvious, and Jünger’s theory of how these lowlifes overcome first the Campagna and then the Marina is not subtle either. After the Alta Plana war, and the defeat, the entire society has been weakened. “Thus in exhausted bodies corruption will set in by way of wounds which a sound man would scarcely notice. The first symptoms, therefore, were not recognized.” Very gradually, law gives way to lawlessness, spreading from and with the lower classes foresters in many different ways. Violent crime grows, in descriptions very reminiscent of the many deadly street fights of the late Weimar republic. Various elements of traditional culture become corrupted. Those who would defend it are intimidated and attacked. The constitutional lawful reaction is too slow, so by the time it manages to convene and have democratic debates, it is already infiltrated. And there’s one paragraph worth quoting in full. Herein, above all, lay a masterly trait of the Chief Ranger. He administered fear in small doses which he gradually increased, and which aimed at crippling resistance. The role he played in the disorders which were so finely spun in the heart of his woods was that of a power for order; for while his agents of lower rank, who had established themselves in the clans, fostered anarchy, the initiated penetrated into the civic offices and the magistracy, and there won the reputation of men of deeds who would bring the mob to its senses. Thus the Chief Ranger was like an evil doctor who first encourages the disease so that he may practise on the sufferer the surgery he has in mind. Today this is a mainstream view in German history. In 1939, it could have been prosecuted as high treason and punished with death. On the backdrop of ever escalating mayhem, two old men who are friends of the brothers are described: Belovar, a clan patriarch from the Campagna, and Father Lampros, an eminent Christian monk. In very different ways, they both are very helpful, each both in the botanical work and against the mounting threat. The brothers decide against meeting the violence with violence, delve deeper into their work, become increasingly pessimistic and develop a hope that they can rescue the results of their work into an imperishable afterlife by burning it with an ancient mystical crystal lens that they somehow inherited. The narrator describes continued excursions for rare plants, through the country that is becoming increasingly treacherous and foreboding, until finally, well after the middle point of the book, with one particular excursion for an extremely rare flower, the actual continual story begins. Today we look at the Nazis with horror, but Jünger has dug too many trenches into hills of rotting corpses to be easily horrified. Instead of horror, his feelings towards the Nazis are mostly contempt, seasoned with disgust, and that has been pervading his description of the rise of the Chief Ranger’s henchmen over the last couple of chapters. But he does give one instance of pure horror and it is here, in the very heart of the book, when the two brothers on their excursion happen to discover, in the ill-reputed area of Flayer's Copse, the Chief Ranger’s remote “flaying-hut” of Koppels-Bleek. The original Köppels-Bleek is a German wordplay, about as subtle as a drone base in a sci-fi novel that happens to be called Obamazliez. Koppels-Bleek is where the Chief Ranger has his enemies tortured to death. It has frequently been called a concentration camp, but that is imprecise. It is really a Vernichtungslager, a death camp, which unlike a “normal” concentration camp is built for the express purpose that no torture victim ever gets out alive. This is a prediction, because while Nazi concentration camps were set up starting in 1933, Vernichtungslager were only built three years after the “Marble Cliffs” were published. After an intensely gruesome description of the particulars of this place, the narrator assesses its importance as follows. Such are the dungeons above which rise the proud castles of the tyrants, and from them is to be seen rising the curling savoury smoke of their banquets. They are terrible noisome pits in which a God-forsaken crew revels to all eternity in the degradation of human dignity and human freedom. He is so certain he has captured the very essence of tyranny, “the abode of tyranny in all its shame”, that he puts this climax at the two thirds mark of the book and makes it exceedingly obvious this is where the third and final act begins, as the pace of the book changes entirely. Although the narrator still includes some retrospectives, he is now finally telling a real story. Strikingly, the brothers return to botany — remember this, it will be important later — and then to their home, where they soon get two conspiring visitors. Braquemart is a competent, racist, nihilistic fellow veteran. The narrator despises him at length for his heartless theory-mindedness. Prince Smyrna is new, young, seems to the narrator to know “the nature of justice and order” but is too weak and inexperienced to shoulder the responsibility he is heroically taking on. The two visitors want to Do Something about the Chief Ranger — what exactly is never said, though a personal confrontation or assassination is implied. They leave for the Chief Ranger's territory. This entire chapter feels very much like a comment on some political acquaintances of Jünger who attempted to challenge the Nazis, and failed. The next day, Father Lampros gives the narrator a mission to arm himself and look for these two men. He goes to old Belovar's farmstead, where he learns of commotion in the direction of Flayer's Copse, and the old clan patriarch goes to war. Before, the book was a dreamy soliloquy; now we see dramatic wartime action. Ernst Jünger has had a lot of practice with writing about that kind of thing, and it shows. Their small but experienced war party with a lot of dogs goes towards Koppels-Bleek and is soon met with two confused, horrific, riveting battles. The narrator stumbles through and finds at Koppels-Bleek the heads of Prince Smyrna and Braquemart. The former strikes him as a symbol of how nobility remains real, and he picks it up. With it, he retreats through mayhem and danger into the complete flaming destruction of the Marina. He marvels at the beauty of the flames — remember this too, it will also be important later — and, with his hunters in hot pursuit, runs to his house. There his son uses his strange power over the local population of poisonous snakes to make them defeat the nearest attackers. The brothers burn down the house, go find Father Lampros and see him die. From an old soldier comrade who owes them a favor they get room on a ship to flee across the water to Alta Plana, where an old enemy who owes them another favor takes them in. There’s an implicit framing story of how the narrator lives to tell the tale of these memories to some unspecified audience, and as it ends it mentions in passing that sometime after these events, a new cathedral has been built on the ruins of the Marina and the head of Prince Smyrna went there as a relic. This small bit still stands out today, and would have stood out even more starkly to contemporary readers, because in the context of everything that happened before, this bit publicly, extremely boldly, and correctly, predicts the eventual fate of the Nazis. Not once in this entire story has the narrator expressed surprise at this progression of events, or given any other indication it is in any way unlikely. The narrator, and the author through him, seems to be saying this is just the way it goes with tyranny, when a society has lost too much of its strength to fight off the bestial attacks of the lowly. I have omitted not just many smaller elements of the story but also a huge number of allusions to ancient history, (German) literature and especially the Bible. I imagine Jünger put them there as prizes for the few who would find them. This is one of the ways that I think On the Marble Cliffs is Ernst Jünger’s Unsong: a vehicle that lets a prolific nonfiction author
They also debate whether the Chief Ranger more closely resembles Adolf Hitler or Hermann Göring. Or they remark that Braquemart kills himself with a prepared poison capsule exactly like Hitler would six years later. If Jünger could see into his future, like these reviewers can, this would mean Braquemart is Hitler, so the Chief Ranger is actually Stalin.
Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 in the town of Braunau am Inn in Austria on the German border to Alois and Klara Hitler4. The family came from peasant ancestry, but had settled into a bourgeois existence through the civil service: Alois was a customs official.
Inline links: 4
What does it take to be literally Hitler?
So there you are, sitting on your bed, scrolling the internet, and you see it: your least favorite politician has done something that is unmistakably, unambiguously, undeniably JUST LIKE HITLER. But as you're composing an exposé for your social media platform of choice, you have a moment of pause. You remember Godwin’s law and the fact you live in a culture afflicted with Nazi apophenia. You start to question whether the incontrovertible Hitleriness of the action in question is so incontrovertible after all. But how do you decide when an invocation of the 20th Century’s most famous villain is an unhelpful exaggeration and when is it a prescient warning?
Inline links: Godwin’s law
Seems bad. Also, at least Hitler could manage Triumph Of The Will. This guy sounds like he’s doing a genocide infomercial.
But I don’t really find this objection interesting. Suppose I call Hitler bad, and Hitler counters “No, see, I have my own moral system based on the purity of the German race, and according to that system I’m doing the right thing”. This doesn’t change my “Hitler is bad” opinion at all. It’s naturally implied that I’m using the word “bad” to refer to something like “bad within my own moral system” or “bad within the moral system which I believe to be true”.
Data from HtWWW, recreated to improve image quality The inefficiencies stemming from bombing ruined several would-be German technological panaceas. Germany developed the world’s first operational jet fighter, the Me-262. Lack of fuel meant there was not enough training for its pilots, and maintenance shortfalls meant that about half of the 1,400 Me-262s produced by Germany were lost outside of combat. The Germans developed a dangerous, relatively modern submarine, the Type XXI. They intended to deploy dozens in a way that the Allies would have been hard pressed to fight, but production delays meant that only one ever actually went on a mission. Allied Bombings Provoked Vastly Expensive Reactions O’Brien thoroughly documents how expensive Germany’s reaction to Allied bombings was. First, expenditures on anti-aircraft weaponry and fighter planes skyrocketed. The Germans practically denuded the Eastern Front of fighter planes to have more to throw at the bombers. By late 1944, a bare 15% of German aircraft were fighting on the Eastern Front. In the second half of 1943, significantly more concrete was devoted to the construction of protected aircraft factories in Germany than to the entire Eastern Front. The amount of concrete devoted just to protecting Hitler personally from air attack was almost a third of the entire total for fortifications on the Eastern Front Second, and perhaps even more importantly, the bombings caused Hitler to authorize the most expensive German program of the war, the V-2 rocket, with essentially no goal in mind other than the psychological importance of striking back at Allied cities. The V-2 program cost the Germans proportionally as much as the U.S. spent on the Manhattan Project. According to O’Brien, the design and construction of V-2 rockets cost as much as all German AFV construction between 1939 and 1945(!) It may be surprising to learn that the V-2s were basically irrelevant to the war. Launched primarily against UK cities, the V-2s killed several thousand civilians. However, more German slave laborers died building the V-2s than British civilians died from their use. The stupidity and expense of building the V-2 probably saved tens of thousands of lives elsewhere, which is ultimately yet another benefit of the Allied bombing campaign. O’Brien’s production-focused approach yields some surprising insights about what the Germans should have done. The most cost-effective effort was certainly the use of submarines (U-Boats) to attack American shipments of military equipment across the Atlantic Ocean. For example, data suggest that the German navy destroyed at least twice as many American aircraft in the pre-production phase by destroying resource shipments as the German air force did in combat in 1942 and 1943. Japan Was Far More Powerful Than We Usually Think O’Brien goes to great lengths to illustrate that Japan was not just a small island power easily subsumed by American production. The Japanese economy, at its peak, produced about as much as the Soviet Union. Its industrial base was mostly untouched until mid-1944. In 1943, it produced as much steel as the Soviet Union. The Japanese navy’s planes doubled between 1943 and 1944. Famously, the Soviets focused on producing tanks. The Japanese focused on freighters and oil tankers. They had to—they had gone to war to obtain natural resources by conquest away from their home islands, and to use those resources, they had to ship them back to the home islands. The problem was that once the American navy had conclusively defeated the Japanese navy (certainly no later than mid-1943), nothing could stop American submarines and carrier-based aircraft from savaging Japanese shipping. But just as the bombing of Germany weakened German production in several complementary ways, the American war on Japanese shipping caused cascading logistical problems. For example, one very successful initiative was the aerial mining of Japanese ports. The mining didn’t start until March 1945, but it still sank more tonnage than U.S. submarines did in the entire war. Beyond that, the mining forced Japanese ships to use smaller, less efficient ports with bad communications and dock facilities, reducing the value of the small amount making it through to port. The Morality of Strategic Bombing One small but noteworthy argument in HtWWW relates to the “area” bombing of German cities, the firebombing of Tokyo, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Usually, air power enthusiasts are apologists for the indifferent (or even intentional) bombing of Axis civilians. They portray the fire/atomic bombings as difficult, but necessary and effective. O’Brien calls that logic into question. As we’ve seen, strategic bombings that targeted specific factories or mined harbors were extremely useful. O’Brien writes, however, that civilian-centric bombing had ambiguous effects. Obviously, killing workers hurts productivity. But killing their spouses or children or destroying their houses does not immediately lead to unsolvable resource dilemmas. It is perhaps too obvious to bear mentioning, but to the extent the civilian-centric bombings were not as effective as the rest of the strategic bombing campaign, they were immoral. O’Brien does not shy away from this conclusion, and shows a commendable willingness to gore sacred cows. He writes that Arthur Harris, leader of the British bombing campaign, resisted attempts to shift bombing away from cities generally and toward fuel or transportation targets, even when the evidence was clear that bombing was more effective. He takes the unusual step of effectively calling Churchill a moral coward: From the autumn of 1944 onwards, it becomes difficult to justify any of the area attacks on German cities as important in winning the war. However, removing Harris, which might have allowed for such a change, was beyond the Churchill government’s courage. O’Brien is similarly critical of Curtis LeMay, the American general who oversaw the firebombings. In his autobiography, LeMay justified the firebombings on the vague claim that they damaged Japanese morale. His evidence was a decline in Tokyo’s population, but population tended to decline after bombing raids anyway because production was relocated after raids. O’Brien concludes: LeMay’s view of warfare was definitely a step backwards – and possibly self-defeating. His notion of causing justified destruction with little evidence beyond the physical action of destruction added an unnecessary air of irrationality to the American campaign. Another important consideration in the debate over using the atomic bomb that I had not seen before: the firebombings were declining in effectiveness over time for the obvious reason that the best targets were already gone and the remaining cities were taking better precautions. The argument that firebombings alone would drive Japan to surrender without need of the atomic bomb must account for this awkward fact. Death by Oil Austerity Oil was a particular problem for Japan. The Japanese had gone to war with the United States in no small part because the U.S. cut off oil exports to Japan. The Japanese attempted to replace U.S. oil with oil from southeast Asia. Again, this was far less efficient than the pre-war arrangements, and once the U.S. Navy shut down shipping, the Japanese had to make drastic cuts to conserve oil. Perhaps the single worst way to conserve oil was in flight training. The Japanese air forces entered a death spiral. To replace veteran flyers lost at Midway or off Guadalcanal, the Japanese parsimoniously supplied oil for limited training flight hours. This famously led to their being massacred by better-trained American pilots in the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Another point brilliantly made by O’Brien: reductions in fuel expenditures meant Japanese pilots did not have sufficient training in navigation. Early in the war, aircraft were delivered to forward operating bases by aircraft carriers, limiting the ability of pilots to get lost. Once the American Navy had driven Japanese carriers from the scene, Japanese pilots had to make several over water hops to fly from the home islands to forward bases. Shocking numbers were lost along the way—up to 50%. (HALF) (!!!!) (I CAN’T EMPHASIZE ENOUGH HOW CRAZY THIS IS). In addition to reduced training, Japan found another terrible way to conserve fuel: do not test engines for very long on the ground before sending single-engine fighter planes off to distant island deployments. Maintenance factors were one reason that on just one leg of the trip from Japan to forward bases, 5% of aircraft that took off from one island never landed at the next. By 1945, the Japanese economy was so desperate for fuel that the government set up more than 34,000 small stills in the home islands to distill the oil from pine needles into aviation fuel. In the European theater, the Allies specifically targeted German coal-to-oil conversion plants and Romanian oil facilities, which became far less productive. Over the course of one year, 1944, the western Allies destroyed the German energy market, and with it the German economy writ large. Data from HtWWW, recreated to improve image quality. German oil shortages caused exactly the same training problem Japan had faced, with a slightly different but similarly disastrous outcome. Japanese training and production problems led to planes not arriving where they were supposed to in fighting condition (perhaps as few as 10% were actually combat capable when they arrived!) For Germany, training shortfalls meant annihilation for their air force as inexperienced pilots were forced to fight numerically and qualitatively superior American and British pilots. German monthly aircraft lost/damaged rates increased from 52.5% in January 1944 to 96.3% in June. One particularly illuminating episode illustrates how these problems manifested for Germany. The German air force had a reserve of 800 aircraft to counter the D-Day landings. The pilots of that force were used to only flying under expert control systems in Germany (countering bombing raids). When they went to France, they had trouble navigating and often landed on the wrong fields. Ultimately, they were poorly prepared to fight. The head of German fighter command was certain that the entire reserve did not destroy even two dozen Allied aircraft. American/British Airpower Decided the Outcome of Land Battles Beyond the strategic effects of bombing, tactical airpower (i.e., airplanes attacking land forces) gave an insurmountable advantage to the western Allies’ land forces. After D-Day, the Germans had a very strong defensive position in the hedgerows of northwest France. Allied aircraft literally carpet bombed one of the strongest divisions in the German army out of existence, with 70% casualties in one day. That division would normally have approximately 200 AFVs. At the end of that one day of bombing, it had 14. The Battle of the Bulge, the last offensive by the Germans to drive back the western Allies’ advance, was almost pathetic in its hopelessness. We Americans tend to focus on the hard fighting at the outset of the battle, and the stout resistance of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne. Knowing that airpower would make their attack impossible, the Germans timed the battle for bad weather and prayed it lasted as long as possible. Prayer was really the only option. Once the skies inevitably cleared after a little over a week of bad weather, more than 2,000(!) Allied bombers destroyed the German offensive. With most logistical support wiped out, one famous German division had to abandon all its vehicles and walk back to Germany. Criticism of HtWWW as a Book: Love the Data, (Mostly) Don’t Care About the People My single biggest criticism of HtWWW is O’Brien spends a lot of time (I would estimate 20% of the book) discussing the relative importance and influence of various people in the United States and United Kingdom. The section on Doug MacArthur is worth a longer digression, which I have included below. The problem is that focusing on personnel is almost completely irrelevant to the main argument of the book. For example, it is modestly interesting that Franklin Roosevelt, consistent with advice from Harry Hopkins and Admiral Ernest King, focused America’s productive effort on air and sea power. It is not at all central to the argument that air and sea power won the war. The fact that these particular people thought it was a good idea to build planes and ships matters less than the outcome that the U.S. did exactly that. I am very much interested in World War II history, and on an interestingness scale of 1-10, I found this discussion to be at about a 4. The central argument of the book about German and Japanese production was a consistent 10. Sidenote: MacArthur Was a Disastrous General In the part of the book focused on personnel, the one discussion that hit around a 9 or 10 was of Douglas MacArthur and the invasion of the Philippines. MacArthur was the American general commanding the defense of the Philippines. The Japanese conquered the Philippines, and MacArthur slipped away to Australia, heroically vowing, “I shall return.” He did in December 1944, and some of the worst fighting of the war took place, with massive casualties for the Americans, Japanese, and Filipino civilians. Fighting was still ongoing in the Philippines when the war ended in August 1945. The Americans took more than 220,000 casualties, the Japanese 430,000. Estimates vary on Filipino civilian deaths, but 750,000 is a credible middle of the road estimate. O’Brien’s contribution here was pointing out the strategic pointlessness of MacArthur’s invasion. The big American strategy in the western Pacific was to penetrate the Japanese defensive line of islands to link up with China. The northern Marianas Islands also were within heavy bomber range of Japan, and so would allow for efficient, effective bombing. (Bombing Japan from bases in China were logistically impractical, with virtually all materials being flown in over the Himalayas—another fascinating logistics discussion in this book.) The Americans had already conquered the Marianas Islands and had total air and sea dominance in the western Pacific. The forces the Japanese had in the Philippines could have been simply left to wither, as they had been on other islands bypassed by the island-hopping campaign. So, why did the Philippines invasion happen? The inescapable conclusion is that MacArthur was too politically formidable to risk angering, and he personally wanted to invade the Philippines to make good on his promise to return. Not coincidentally, the Philippines also offered some prospect of an extended land campaign where MacArthur could improve his reputation after his disastrous original defense of the Philippines. Also relevant, in O’Brien’s words: “MacArthur [] dazzled Roosevelt with tales of easy victories and grateful Filipinos and American voters.” Criticisms of HtWWW’s Central Argument I think it is clear from the data that O’Brien’s argument, that air and sea power played a more important role than land battles in deciding the war, is fundamentally right. Still, one can raise a few objections. Individual naval battles were capable of destroying a significant percentage of overall production. O’Brien discusses the Battle of Midway, where the Japanese lost four aircraft carriers (37 percent of their navy’s aircraft carriers at the time, 22 percent of all carriers they had during the war). This point doesn’t really disprove O’Brien’s core argument—it is basically a footnote saying that individual naval battles are more likely to matter than individual land battles. Politics and psychology matter tremendously in war, sometimes more than productive effort. O’Brien tacitly acknowledges this in the V-2 weapons discussion when he notes that the Germans spent all this money and effort on a psychological salve to the trauma of Allied bombing. The Japanese did ultimately surrender after the atomic bombings. (Or, if you are more on the revisionist end of the spectrum, they surrendered after the Soviets declared war.) France surrendered after a few disastrous battles. The productive effort lens might be useful, but subject to important caveats. Why Does the Conventional Narrative Focus on Battles? A perfect companion book to HtWWW would examine why military historians and the broader public have focused inordinately on battles. Here are some plausible factors: Battles are more dramatic. Propaganda during the war focused on battles so that there would be more inherent drama. Working twelve hour shifts in a factory to win the great battle is probably psychologically easier than thinking your work is going to disappear into an inchoate slog.
“Maybe not directly, but think about it. People always say that it could happen here. That early 20th century Europeans thought they were so great and civilized, but the Holocaust proves that even the seemingly-most-sophisticated countries can descend into barbarism and genocide at any time. But they can’t! Or there’s only a one in a billion chance that they do, the same as everyone thought in 1900. It’s just that everyone who’s still alive comes from world-branches where the one-in-a-billion thing happened. I even think World War I was a fluke - that was the only way the outcome pump could set up Hitler.”
“I don’t know. I still think you had to have the seed. If this was so out-of-the-blue, why would Hitler have even wanted to kill the Jews to begin with?”
“Oh, that’s obvious. It’s not just superweapons - the Jews are also over-represented in the physics of time - Einstein, for example. Hitler was trying to figure out a way to prevent the invention of time travel, in order to stop the steady stream of time travelers who were trying to kill him.”
I think the strongest argument against Trump is the argument from authoritarianism. But what is authoritarianism in this context? As I argued years ago, Trump isn’t Hitler, isn’t going to put people in death camps, and probably his approval rating among minorities won’t even dip below the 30s. So what am I worried about?
Inline links: As I argued years ago
This is far from Hitler or even Stalin. The model I worry about most is Hugo Chavez, who had no concentration camps and barely even managed a secret police. And Chavez himself was only slightly more interesting than hundred other tinpot generalissimos in a hundred different banana republics. None of these countries will ever be the villains in an Indiana Jones movie, but none of them are First World countries with great economies and vital contributions to scientific progress either. They’re just somewhat-poor, somewhat-corrupt places whose citizens keep trying to swim across the Rio Grande and make it to the US where there’s still freedom and opportunity.
Inline links: Hugo Chavez
I don't know if anyone besides me and that handful of Muslims is in this exact situation. It sure looks like Donald Trump appears in many people's psychodramas. You can tell because they can't mention his name without an outburst of "Orange Hitler cheeto fascist tiny hands Nazi". Those people have their own work to do.
5: Surprising AI safety result: if you fine-tune an AI to write deliberately insecure code, the AI becomes evil in every other way too (eg it will name Hitler as its favorite person and recommend the user commit suicide). Anders Sandberg proposes (X) that maybe “it is shaped by going along a vector opposite to typical RLHF training aims, then playing a persona that fits”. Eliezer calls it (X) “possibly the best AI news of 2025 so far. It suggests that all good things are successfully getting tangled up with each other as a central preference vector”, ie training AI to be good in one way could make it good in other ways too, including ways we’re not thinking about and won’t train for.
A patchwork of city-states, unbound by modern “international law”, with few barriers to the free flow of capital and population. I’ll then describe how carefully Moldbug explained that you had to have these things, or else the dictatorship would fail in more or less the ways normies expect dictatorships to fail - leaving himself no room for the kind of pivot he’s trying now. 1: Classic Moldbug Believed Populist Dictatorship Would End In Disaster Classic Moldbug admitted that fascism and communism were extremely bad. He just drew different borders around political systems: fascism, communism, third world banana republic dictatorship, and democracy all cluster together as systems where coalitions rule because they can seize temporary power in a semi-lawless society. In the various totalitarianisms, it’s literal seizing of power through armed troops or secret police; in democracy, it’s electoral seizing of power through distributing the most goodies to coalition members. From here, my bolding. Clearly, the worst forms of demotism, the really bad apes, were the totalitarian systems—fascism and communism. The main difference between fascism and communism was not in mechanism, but in origin—fascist elites tended to be militarist, communist elites intellectual. But the one-party state is a clear case of convergent evolution. To a neocameralist, totalitarianism is democracy in its full-blown, most malignant form. Democracy doesn’t always deteriorate into totalitarianism, and lighting up at the gas pump doesn’t always engulf you in a ball of fire. Many people with cancer live a long time or die of something else instead. This doesn’t mean you should smoke half of Virginia before lunch. A political party is a political party. It is a large group of people allied for the purpose of seizing and wielding power. If it does not choose to arm its followers, this is only because it finds unarmed followers more useful than armed ones. If it chooses less effective strategies out of moral compunction, it will be outcompeted by some less-principled party. When one party gains full control over the state, it gains a massive revenue stream that it can divert entirely to its supporters. The result is a classic informal management structure, whose workings should be clear to anyone who watched a few episodes of The Sopranos. Without a formal ownership structure, in which the entire profit of the whole enterprise is collected and distributed centrally, money and other goodies leak from every pore. Totalitarian states are gangster states, in other words, and they tend to corruption and mismanagement. The personality cult of dictatorship is quite misleading—a totalitarian dictator has little in common with a neocameralist CEO, or even a cameralist monarch. The difference is the management structure. The CEO and the monarch owe their positions to a law which all can obey, and those who choose to obey the law are naturally a winning coalition against those who choose to break it. The dictator’s position is the result of his primacy in a pyramid of criminals. This structure is naturally unstable. There is always some other gangster who wants your job. Dictators, like Mafia chiefs, are not good at dying in bed. The internal and external violence typical of totalitarian states is best explained, I think, by this built-in mismanagement. Dictators are violent because they have to be—they use violence as an organizing principle. The totalitarian state has no principle of legitimacy that would render it impractical for an ambitious subordinate to capture the state with a coup. European monarchs made war, sometimes they were assassinated, and there were even succession struggles, but coups in the modern sense were very rare. Note that the financial logic which keeps the neocameralist state lawful does not apply in any way to the totalitarian state, because the latter does not have a stable management structure which is controlled by its shareholders. Lawlessness is not profitable for the state as a whole, but it may be quite profitable for the part that chooses lawlessness, and in the totalitarian state no one is counting as a whole. Similarly, only shareholder control gives the neocameralist state an incentive to remain small and efficient. The totalitarian state has an incentive to become large and inefficient, because every functionary has an incentive to expand his or her own department, and no bean-counter who demands that the department do more with less. In a totalitarian state, since no gangster is permanently safe from any other gangster, there is a strong incentive for anyone with power to take what he can, while he can. And there is no disincentive for him to avoid abusing a resource which neither he nor his allies benefit from. Under gangster management, the totalitarian states often engaged not only in mass murder, but mass murder of their most economically productive citizens. I’m trying to avoid subjecting you to too many Moldbug walls of text, but this is a constant hobbyhorse of his. Unless you implement his neocameralist ideology of shareholder control, your attempted autocracy will become a totalitarian state, which will be even worse than regular democracy. 2: The Dictator Must Not Be Elected The original sin of democratic/totalitarian governments is permitting power struggles. When you permit power struggles, the most power-hungry person wins. This person is probably a bad guy. But even if he isn’t, he has to optimize for gaining and maintaining power, instead of for the national interest. This usually means paying off the people who raised him to and keep him in power, i.e. corruption. Sometimes the corruption is straightforward, like giving friendly colonels vast sums from the public treasury. Other times it’s more insidious; if someone rose to power because organized labor joined their coalition, they have to overpay public unions, pass stifling pro-labor regulations, and ban whatever productive economic activity the labor unions don’t like. Therefore, we need a dictator who came to power without a struggle and doesn’t owe anyone anything. This is Moldbug’s read on “the divine right of kings”: Divine-right monarchy is very easy to understand, even for an atheist like me. We have already derived it. To an atheist, the King’s authority must be absolute, not because he is appointed by God, but because he is appointed by no one. If someone appoints him, that man is King. If their roles are divided—the famous “balance of powers” or “checks and balances”—they will struggle, and one or the other prevail. Probably the many over the few. How do you come to power without a fight? This is a tough ask, but Classic Moldbug bit the bullet: anybody who wants power is unworthy of it. You have to just sit there being worthy. When people get tired of sucking, they’ll give you power. The Procedure [for installing a virtuous government] comes in Three Steps: 1: Become worthy. 2: Accept power. 3: Rule!!1! You think I’m kidding. But I’m not. How do you become worthy? You must absolutely, 100%, avoid any kind of candidacy in elections, protesting the government, criticizing the government, thinking you could do government better than the current government, or (god forbid) deliberately trying to take power: As a reactionary, you don’t believe that political power is a human right. You will never convince anyone to adopt the same attitude, without first adopting it yourself. Since you believe others should be willing to accept the rule of the New Structure, over which they wield no power, you must be the first to make the great refusal. They must submit to the New; you must submit to the Old. The reactionary’s opinion of USG is that it is what it is. It is run by the people who run it. And at present, the present management may well be the best people in the world to run USG, and even if they’re not he can’t imagine what might be done about it—short of replacing the whole thing. This simple and final judgment, like the death penalty, admits no possible compromise. In particular, passivism is to Gandhi as Gandhi is to Hitler. Hitler, before 1933, was a violent democratic activist; Gandhi was a nonviolent democratic activist. Passivism is not any sort of activism. Passivism is passivism. In plain English, you may not even begin to consider the rest of the Procedure until you have freed yourself entirely from the desire, built-in burden though it be of the two-legged ape, for power. Break the steel rule, change your name to “Darth,” don’t expect to keep your internship at the Jedi Council. As a matter of both principle and tactics, the passivist rejects any involvement with any activity whose goal is to influence, coerce, or resist the government, either directly or indirectly. He is revolted by the thought of setting public policy. He would rather drink his own piss, than shift public opinion. He finds elections—national, state or local—grimly hilarious. And if he needs to get from Richmond to Baltimore, he drives through West Virginia. The passivist has a term for democratic activism directed by the right against the left. That term is counter-activism. Passivism does not dispute the fact that counter-activism sometimes works. For instance, it worked for Hitler. (We’ll say more about Hitler.) However, it only works in very unusual circumstances (such as those of Hitler), and is extremely dangerous when it does work (e.g., the result may be Hitler). In case this isn’t crystal-clear, the steel rule precludes, in no particular order: demonstrations, press releases, suicide bombs, lawsuits, dirty bombs, Facebook campaigns, clean bombs, mimeographed leaflets, robbing banks, interning at nonprofits, assassination, “tea parties,” journalism, bribery, grantwriting, graffiti, crypto-anarchism, balaclavas, lynching, campaign contributions, revolutionary cells, new political parties, old political parties, flash mobs, botnets, sit-ins, direct mail, monkeywrenching, and any other activist technique, violent or harmless, legal or illegal, fashionable or despicable […] In the First Step, passivism is a no-brainer. Why should you be interested in influencing OUSG? You’re trying to replace the Structure, not join it. One clear sign that you’re doing this right and haven’t been corrupted by power is that people won’t write hit pieces about your blog. I swear I’m not making this up: [A] passivist blog will appear, at worst, harmless and extremely strange. There’s something going on here, Mr. Jones. But you don’t know what it is—do you, Mr. Jones? As an existential enemy of USG, the reactionary may well deserve some immune attention. But he won’t get it, and he is quite happy with that. True fact: the author of UR has received over 7 zillion very interesting emails, all of which deserve responses, often long, that most have not received (but will). Number of hostile communications received, in over two years of blogging: zero. One can ascribe this result to many hypotheses, not all flattering, but I put it down to passivism. If you break this rule and seek electoral power, you are punished with something terrible: right-wing populism, which is basically the same as Hitler and must be prevented at all costs. [The] third tactical benefit [of passivism is] Hitler prevention. To an orthodox reactionary, Hitler is basically the poster child for what happens if you break the steel rule. Fascism is reaction, but laced with cancerous tumors of democracy—“right-wing populism,” as people say these days. If it loses it loses; if it wins, the tumors grow. An improvement on Communism, but not much of one. Just about all of Hitler’s shtick, right down to the name of his party, was ripped off from the Left. Who introduced nationalism to the Continent of Europe? The Hapsburgs, or Garibaldi? Under this camouflage, which never convinced anyone with a college education, Nazism was never in any way leftist. Rather, it was a demotic corruption of the old Prussian tradition […] Since most people are neither historians nor philosophers, the fact that Hitler was on the extreme Right, and this Reaction is also on the extreme Right, raises some natural concerns. Again: the only way to face these concerns is to (a) provide a complete engineering explanation of Hitler, and (b) include an effective anti-Hitler device in our design. The reactionary’s basic answer to the Hitler Question is the Law of Sewage. (This is not my invention, but I don’t know where I got it. Heinlein, perhaps?) The Law is: if you put a drop of wine in a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a drop of sewage in a barrel of wine, you get sewage. You’ll find that this rule applies perfectly to many fields of human endeavor. Thus, Nazism contains a great deal of reactionary wisdom, because those who created it were quite familiar with the old Continental tradition of government. However, the Nazi movement originated as a democratic political party. Thus Nazism combined the venom of democracy with the experience and efficiency of Prussia, an understandably dangerous combination […] This is where passivism, by abjuring democracy, vaccinates itself against Hitler. True: at a higher level, the reactionary seeks to cause a transition in power, and thus in a sense seeks power itself. But he is not an activist, because he is not working for power. His actions do not excite the human political instinct, the love for forming coalitions and tearing hell out of the apes across the river. For one thing, said actions bear no resemblance to normal politics. For another, they cannot bring any actual power to the actors, even if they succeed. Which, however likely, must remain intuitively implausible—if not laughable. And thus the project of reaction does not attract those with a real taste for power, which if nothing else is very un-Nazi-like. In other words - the failure mode of neoreaction (good) is right-wing populism eg Nazism (bad). You’ll know you’ve fallen into the failure mode if your reactionary movement starts with a democratic political party, or if its members are feeling normal human political emotions. If you can’t have a normal democratic party, how do you complete steps two and three - accepting power and ruling? Moldbug’s answer is complicated and not very related to our topic, but he thinks you first create the Antiversity, a shadow university system laser-focused on always telling the truth. Then you bootstrap it into a shadow government, which doesn’t engage in violent revolution or political campaigning, but just sits there being right about things (I’m imagining for example a shadow FDA that produces better drug information than the real FDA, so people gradually come to trust the shadow FDA more even though its rulings have no legal effect). Then people gradually switch their allegiance from the real government to the shadow government, until finally the shadow government proposes a pseudo-candidate in an election whose sole platform is “switch power from the real government to the shadow government”. Once he wins, he revokes the Constitution, implements the shadow government charter, and resigns. Why do you have to use this weird process instead of taking power the normal way? Because if you take power the normal way, you will fall into the trap of right-wing populism and become like Hitler: You start to see the difference between this and the Nazis. For the Nazis, the equivalent of the Antiversity was… Hitler. Have you read Hitler? I have. (The Table Talk is the Hitler to read.) Frankly, Hitler reads a lot like me, if I lost 25 IQ points from drinking lead soda, and also had a nasty case of tertiary syphilis. I may have some of Hitler’s talents—I will be the first to admit it. But I have no intention of applying for his job. I would never be able to do it, anyway. I don’t think anyone could. 2.5: The Dictator Must Not Need Anyone’s Approval This is a trivial extension of the previous point - “If someone appoints [the King], that man is King”. If the people appoint the King, the people are King, and then you’re a demotic totalitarianism. How do you avoid dependence on other people’s approval? In a democracy, you need the approval of 51% of people to win the next election; in a traditional dictatorship, you need the approval of the secret police or military to keep crushing your opponents. The reason [an unquestioned autocracy with no dissent] is peaceful and free is that we’ve defined [the autocrat’s] primary right so that it works just like a secondary right, [ie his legal rights are completely enforced by real power/control.] Hitler, Stalin and Mao, on the other hand, had enemies. Stalin and Mao, especially, basically operated under the assumption that everyone in the world wanted to kill them and take their jobs. After a while this was quite the self-fulfilling prophecy. Terrorist government—as in the Reign of Terror, a usage that’s unfortunately lapsed—is a consequence not of absolute primary title, but of insecure primary title. It is best understood as a form of civil war. So a dictator who still has enemies risks being crazy and genocidal. We’ll never get a dictator with nobody who dislikes him, but can we get a dictator with effectively no enemies - ie one whose enemies have zero chance of seizing power and so who might as well not exist? Yarvin admits this is a tough problem, but suggests cryptographically-locked weapons: In a full CDCC government, the sovereign decision and command chain is secured from end to end by military-grade cryptography. All government weapons—not just nukes, but everything right down to small arms—are inoperable without code authorization. In any civil conflict, loyal units will find that their weapons work. Disloyal units will have to improvise. The result is predictable, as results should be. That is, all weapons need a key to fire (or have a key that can prevent them from firing). The dictator owns the key. He can selectively disable weapons of rebel forces, allowing even the tiniest remnant of loyalists to easily overpower them. There are probably some implementation difficulties here; the point is that it’s definitely not democracy, nor even some kind of two-bit dictatorship where the dictator depends on the continued goodwill of the army. Why go to these lengths? Because without them, the dictator needs to curry favor through various corrupt strategies that undermine the national interest. Of these, the most malignant - the one Moldbug holds his deepest vituperation for - is fake news. Democratic parties necessarily lie, because they are not infinitely correct about everything, but they need the public to think they are. In order to maintain the support of the masses, they will lie about the nature of their policies, the details of their policies, and especially the success of their policies. There are two kinds of government: those whose formula of legitimacy depends on popular consent, and those whose doesn’t. Following contemporary usage, we can classify these as authoritarian and democratic. An authoritarian state has no need to tell its subjects what to think, because it has no reason to care what they think. In a truly authoritarian government, the ruling authority relies on force, not popularity. It cares what its subjects do, not what they think. It may encourage a healthy, optimistic attitude and temperate lifestyle proclivities, but only because this is good for business. Therefore, any authoritarian state that needs an official religion must have something wrong with it. (Perhaps, for example, its military authority is not as absolute as it thinks.) A democratic state which tells its citizens what to think is a political solecism. Think about the motivation for democracy: it consigns the state to the collective responsibility of its citizens, because it feels this is an independent and well-anchored hook on which to hang the common good. Once the republic has an established church, this hook is no longer independent, and the (postulated) value-add of democracy is nullified. Without separation of church and state, it is easy for a democracy to indulge itself in arbitrarily irresponsible misgovernment, simply by telling its bishops to inform their congregations that black is white and white is black. Thus misdirected, they are easily persuaded to support counterproductive policies which they wrongly consider productive. Moldbug warns that this is especially characteristic of right-wing populism, which is why he [Moldbug] is relieved when right-wing populism loses: The entire political structure of the American populist tradition is set up to select for ignorance and stupidity, and select against organization and cohesion. Thus it is simultaneously undesirable and ineffective, and even those of us who like myself sympathize with it to a considerable degree are often slightly relieved to see it lose, as it always does. 3: The Dictator Must Be Limited By A Board Of Directors How do we know that the dictator won’t have terrible policies, or be sadistic, or rename every state to “Statey McStateFace” just for fun? Moldbug proposes running the dictatorship as a joint-stock corporation. This helps in two ways. First, the dictator will be checked by a board of directors, who can fire him if he goes crazy. Second, the board of directors (or the investors who elect them?) will be aligned because they have stock. The stock goes up if the nation does better. If the dictator tries to kill the Jews and the market thinks that’s bad for business, then the directors will fire and replace the CEO. What happens if the controllers disagree on what “responsible” government means? We are back to politics. Factions and interest groups form. Each has a different idea of how Steve should run California. A coalition of a majority can organize and threaten him: do this, do that, or it’s out with Steve and in with Marc. Logrolling allows the coalition to micromanage: more funding for the threatened Mojave alligator mouse! And so on. That classic failure mode, parliamentary government, reappears [...] Actually, there’s one way to do it. We can define responsibility in financial terms. If we think of California as a profitable corporation, a capital asset whose purpose is to maximize its production of cash, we have a definition of responsibility which is not only precise and unambiguous, but indeed quantitative...We have, of course, reinvented the joint-stock company. There is no need to argue over whether this design works. It does. How would the board of directors remove a dictator who didn’t want to be removed? If the country is running on the cryptographically-locked weapon system discussed earlier, the directors will have a higher-level key that can overrule the dictator’s key and make sure that factions loyal to the board have working weapons while those loyal to the dictator don’t. How would the system guard against the dictator arresting the directors and torturing the key out of them? Maybe the directors could live in foreign countries (remember, they aren’t motivated by patriotism - they just want their stock to go up). Or maybe some of this process can be done cryptographically, so that nobody knows how many shares people have, how they voted, or even who the directors are at any given time. If the dictator started poking around to try to figure this out, the directors could remove him. I bring this up partly because 2025-Yarvin has been pushing the corporations vs. democracies argument pretty hard recently. Corporations, he argues, are nimbler and better-run than democracies. A big part of their advantage is that the buck stops with an autocratic CEO instead of a limited President. Therefore, to improve upon democracy, give President Trump the limitless powers of a corporate CEO. [When people ask me why I think monarchies are better than democracies] I ask them to look around the room and basically point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy. Because these things that we call companies are actually like monarchies. And then you’re looking around yourself and you see, for example, a laptop. And that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy. Whereas if your MacBook Pro was made by the California Department of Computing, you can only imagine it […] I think that if you took any of the Fortune 500 CEOs, some of them are good, some of them are bad. But the overall quality, just pick one at random, and put him or her in charge of Washington, and I think you’d get something much, much better than what’s there […] One of the things about monarchy that’s been known for quite some time—and again, even in very, very anti-monarchial regimes and periods, an exception is made for this—is that a ship always has a captain. An airplane always has a captain. Basically, in any very safety-critical environment … you should have someone in charge. But even granting that corporations are better-governed than democracies, this comparison doesn’t work. Corporate and national governance are trying to solve different problems. Corporate governance asks “Given pre-existing rule of law and the certainty that all of our bylaws will be enforced by a greater power, how do we ensure competent administration?” National government asks “How do we generate rule of law out of nothing in a way that can prop itself up and defend against attacks?” What prevents Tim Apple from refusing to pay dividends to Apple investors and keeping all the profit for himself? Easy question, it’s the United States government, no problem here. What prevents Donald Trump from murdering America’s five richest billionaires and taking their stuff? The police? What about the thing where Trump is the police chief’s boss’s boss’s boss’? Awkward, but that’s why we have separation of powers, checks and balances, government-of-law-and-not-of-men, all that stuff. What prevents Donald Trump from calling in the military to arrest all the other separate powers that are supposed to check and balance him? Uh, more separation of power, different checks and balances, some sort of loyalty to the Constitution. When Yarvin points out that companies thrive without separation-of-powers, that’s because they never encounter the problem that separation of powers was intended to solve. Classic Moldbug understood this well, which was why he proposed a separate power capable of checking his dictator - the board of directors1 - and a mechanism for keeping the system stable against power grabs - the cryptographic weapons. But the regime he boosts today has nothing like this, so it’s facile to use the corporate comparison argument. 4: The Dictator Must Be Embedded Within A Patchwork Of Similar Corporate City-States. Architectonics already did a great job covering this one. Read his Part 1 and Part 2, then meet me back here for the Conclusion section. At Long Last, I’ve Created The Populist Strongman From My Classic Series Of 11,000 Blog Posts “Don’t Create The Populist Strongman” I enjoyed reading Unqualified Reservations, way back in 2013. I didn’t agree with it, but I thought some parts of it were good, and even the bad parts helped me think clearly about the nature of power. I hoped the neoreactionaries would take the good parts, ditch the rest, and build something useful out of it. I think some people, mostly outside the organized neoreactionary movement, did exactly that (subscribers-only post, sorry). Unfortunately, Yarvin went the opposite direction, jettisoning the good stuff in favor of the bad. All the warnings against populism, party politics, corrupt power-seeking officials, misinformation, and mobocracy have been filed away in favor of a Flanderized “maybe dictatorship is good”. One reason I respect Sam Altman is that back in 2016, when he founded an AI charity to bring a positive singularity to the world, he realized that it would later be extraordinarily tempting to turn it into a normal profit-focused company and get rich. So he tied himself to the mast by designing a nonprofit structure capable of thwarting all the machinations his future self could throw at it. A few years later, he gave into temptation, tried to turn it into a normal profit-focused company, and failed, because the structure he designed was really good. This was the best possible outcome, and one of many reasons I number him among the all-time greats. Moldbug deserves a similar level of respect. He clearly saw that the failure mode of his philosophy was that power-seeking people would use it to support right-wing populism. He included a fantastic number of tests to determine whether any given self-professed reactionary was the real deal or a false prophet, begging his readers to apply them carefully to anyone claiming the mantle of reaction. Then he got corrupted by power and tried to use his philosophy to endorse right-wing populism. But the tests are still there! Anyone who reads through 11,000 blog posts can see all the red flags where Moldbug says “…and if I ever do X, then I’ve sold out and you should stop listening to me.” Another all-time great! Just the few posts I’ve highlighted in this essay have listed over a dozen tests - by tests I mean something where Moldbug says something is an absolutely vital feature of the new regime, or that without it things would descend into kleptocracy, or that this is the only safeguard against Hitler, or something along those lines. These include: The reactionary party always tells the truth
Inline links: here, The Sopranos, Divine-right monarchy, through West Virginia, Mr. Jones, Moldbug’s answer, Reign of Terror, suggests cryptographically-locked weapons, they will lie, is relieved when right-wing populism loses, proposes running the dictatorship as a joint-stock corporation, has been pushing the corporations vs. democracies argument pretty hard recently, 1, Part 1, Part 2, did exactly that, and failed
We’re told not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But Moldbug seems pretty fixed on perfection, constantly warning that you have to follow these rules or else you’ll get Hitler and it will be even worse than normal democracy. By my count, the Trump administration is zero out of sixteen.
To Thomas: consistency matters because it’s how morality forms in the first place. Everybody has some moral impulses. Those become principles only under the influence of a desire for consistency and for the dignity of a rational being. Hitler was a vegetarian, so he must have had some aversion to cruelty. That plus a dollar will buy you a soda a desire for consistency can prevent you from being history’s greatest villain.
1: Comments of the week: Garald is skeptical of the narrative of the Ollantay post [EDIT: Response from reviewer here]. And some more discussion of people being one-shotted by works of art: hottakergeneral claims that Hitler based his personal style, including the mustache, on the figure of Wotan in Franz Stuck’s “The Wild Chase”. Fact check: although Stuck’s Wotan looks eerily like Hitler, GPT-5 thinks any theory of casual resemblance is speculative and that there are other explanations for Hitler’s style.
Is violence justified when we get to FDR-level court packing threats? When we get to Orban? To Chavez? To Xi? To Putin? To Hitler? To Pol Pot? I think I land somewhere between Orban and Hitler, but I can’t say for sure, nor can I operationalize the distinction. And the last person to think about these questions in too much detail got a (mercifully polite) visit from the Secret Service, and even if we disagree with him it’s poor practice to hold a debate where it’s impermissible to assert one side. I will be punting on the deep cosmic question here, at least publicly.
Inline links: visit from the Secret Service
Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: previously blogged about, agrees they seems scammy, responds to the scientific allegations here, goes on the TBPN podcast here, here, Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X)., describes her experience with embryo selection,, reviews, New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA, Kallman Syndrome, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies, this post, @StatisticUrban, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!seRv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9870747d-dbd1-41ff-b046-a66256ae7818_1433x1005.jpeg, Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds, has masterfully leveraged (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8LOA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d874e2-d2d3-4adc-80a6-82c49cf6f64c_585x422.png, breaking fundraising records, has condemned it (X), New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, 1, 2, tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, pressured the GOP to drop it, a potential Trump executive order, Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA”, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mg6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbc756d-32ce-41d1-9652-59fb3444765d_1024x1024.png, Daniel Eth on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kpou!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ada4ca1-d833-4fd1-b85a-5982191ce455_679x305.jpeg, my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ByQP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90d5dfc6-106a-4afa-9250-371a21c77576_743x133.png, is a fan of, Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic, The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared., from Rob Wiblin on X, Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, wades into the David Hume on miracles debate., AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cOGB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a7acea-b463-485c-8295-f0a5768381d9_416x709.png, Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
21: Ranke-4B is a series of “history LLMs”, versions of Qwen with corpuses of training data terminating in 1913 (or 1929, 1946, etc, depending on the exact model). The author demonstrates asking it who Hitler was, and it has no idea (hallucinates a random German academic). I had previously heard this was very hard to do properly; if they’ve succeeded, it could revolutionize forecasting and historiography (ask the AI to predict things about “the future” using various historical theories and see which ones help it come closest to the truth).
Inline links: Ranke-4B, asking it who Hitler was