Astral Codex Ten

Navy

5 min read

Navy

Article

Navy is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between June 11, 2021 and July 14, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Holt’s revised edition gives a quick one from the Navy”; “he quits the Navy at 29”; “disabled people were banned from the Navy”. It most often appears alongside 1968 convention, 1970s radicals, 1976 Democratic.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: June 11, 2021
  • Last seen: July 14, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: How Children Fail
June 11, 2021 · Original source
Fear - The more visibly dysfunctional response to incentives. Fear is the mindkiller, as another U.S. Navy veteran would write in a book published the year after Holt’s. A student afraid of failure cannot acknowledge their own mistakes, and therefore cannot learn from them. Students labeled “Gifted” are so terrified of losing that label that they panic when they encounter something they’re not excellent at, end up doing even worse, and try to avoid that whole area whenever possible. Holt describes a lot of his students as “emotionally incapable of checking their work”--not as a rational response to any incentive, but because looking for mistakes is like checking under the bed for monsters.
Strategy - Perhaps uniquely for a rationality text, Holt identifies thinking strategically as a failure. Not in general--he encourages adults to ask themselves more often where they are trying to get, and then whether their current approach is getting them there. And he taught, often, through strategy games. But for a child, learning due to disinterested curiosity is much more effective than learning due to incentives. We’re born with powerful drives to learn (learning could hardly start as a learned behavior). Replacing that with a desire to gain reward or approval, or to avoid punishment, or to even to Be A Good Student, distorts behavior. Children, consciously and unconsciously, start trying to maximize their perceived score. They seize on the most reliable way of figuring out the right answer, even if that’s something overfitted to the classroom, like reading the teacher’s face. They find a level of achievement they can reliably hit, then manage expectations to make sure they’re never pushed to a higher one. If they’re punished for giving wrong answers in class, they’ll stop talking and disengage when they think they might not understand something. It’s a familiar problem across domains--once you attach incentives to a convenient measurement of something, it stops being a good measurement. Readers of this blog may remember examples from machine learning or centrally planned economies. Holt’s revised edition gives a quick one from the Navy:
Your Book Review: The Outlier
July 08, 2022 · Original source
Carter attends the Naval Academy and eventually becomes a lieutenant on a nuclear submarine. At one point, he participates in a cleanup mission in which he is lowered directly into the core of an active nuclear reactor, thus causing him to develop superpowers that he will later use to win the presidency. Perhaps because of this experience—but, more likely, because he realizes that his deep-seated religious beliefs make him a poor fit for a career in an organization designed to wage war—he quits the Navy at 29 and returns home to Plains. “God did not intend for me to kill,” he says, which would have been an awesome catchphrase had those superpowers actually been real.
You’re Jimmy Carter, and just 23 years ago you were an unemployed Navy dropout. Now, you’re the most powerful man in the world. What do you do next?
Contra The Social Model Of Disability
July 14, 2023 · Original source
To support his point, he gave various examples. Lord Nelson, who was blind in one eye, was a great Admiral. But in his own day, disabled people were banned from the Navy. This couldn’t because their disability prevented successful naval service, or Nelson’s victories would have been impossible. It must have been because of state discrimination.
This makes sense, but it’s a cherry-picked example. Someone in a wheelchair would flounder in a submarine, where space is at a premium and corridors are very narrow. Submarines big enough to be wheelchair-accessible would be extraordinarily expensive and unwieldy. Was Finkelstein suggesting the Navy needed to retrofit its submarines this way? I can’t find any non-cherry-picked examples like this in his writing, and I don’t know what he would have thought of them.