(...) the term technical is a red flag for me, as it is many times used not for the routine business of implementing ideas but for the parts, ideas and all, which are just hard to understand and many times contain the main novelties.
- Saharon Shelah
As a true-born Dutchman I endorse Crocker’s rules.
For my most of my writing see my short-forms (new shortform, old shortform)
Twitter: @FellowHominid
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/view/afdago/home
Suppose I throw up a coin but I dont show you the answer. Your friend’s cousin tells you they think the bias is 80⁄20 in favor of heads.
If I show you the outcome was indeed heads should you still update ? (Yes)
A rumor is not the same as a demonstration.
This is convincing me to buy a sleep mask and blackout curtains. One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens as they say.
Great to hear this post had \geq 1 readers hah.
both the US and China are already deploying a number of surface and underwater drones. Ukraine has had a lot of success with surface suicide drones sinking several Russian ships iirc, damaging bridges etc. Outside of Ukraine and Russia, maybe Israel, nobody is really on the ball when it comes to military competitiveness. To hit home this point, consider that the US military employs about 10.000 drones of all sizes while Ukraine, with an economy 1⁄5 of the Netherlands, now produces 1-4 million drones a year alone. [ofc drones vary widely in size and capability so this is ofc a little misleading] It should be strongly suspected that when faced with a real peer opponent warring powers will quickly realize they need to massively up production of drones.
there is an interesting acoustic phenomenon where a confluence of environmental factors (like sea depth, temperature, range, etc) create ‘sonar deadzones’ where submarines are basically invisible. The exact nature of these deadzones is a closely-held state secret—as is the exact design of submarines to make them as silent as possible. As stated, my understanding is that is one of a few remaining areas where the US has a large technological advantage over her Chinese counterparts. You can’t hit something you can’t see so this advantage is potentially very large. As mentioned, a single torpedo hit will sink a ship; a ballistic missile hit is a mission kill; both attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines are lethal.
Although submarines can dive fairly deep, there are various constraints on how deep they typically dive. e.g. they probably want to stay in these sonar deadzones.
-> There was an incident a while back where a (russian? english? french?) submarine hit another submarine (russian? englih? french?) by accident. It underscores how silent submarines are and how there are probably preferred regions underwater where submarines are much more likely to be found.
however, sensors have improved markedly. THe current thinking is that employing a large fleet of slow-moving underwater drones equipped with very sensitive acoustive equipment it would be possible to create a ‘net’ that could effectivel track submarines. Both the US and China are working on this. I’ve seen prognoses that by 2050 the transparant battlefield will come for the underwater realm. I can’t assess this.
tidbit: I had a conversation with Jim Crutchfield about his whalelistening project. He build his own speakers and sonophones of course. He told me to get it work well required some very sophisticated mathematics. There was a well-developing literature in the ( ~)50s about this topic when it abruptly disappeared [sonomath was henceforth considered a statesecret by nat sec]
can you tell I exclusively publish in the Journal of My Brain 🧠
my brain (2007, Alexander et al.)
I would be interested what current SLT-dogma on grokking is. I get asked whether SLT explains grokking all the time but always have to reply with an unsatisfying ‘there’s probably something there but I don’t understand the details’.
The European wars of religion during the 16th to early 18th century were plausibly caused or at least strongly fanned by the invention of the printing press.
The advances build on top of each other. I am not expert in material sciences or magnetmanufacturing but I’d bet a lot of improvements & innovation has been downstream of improved computers & electronics. Neither were available in the 60s.
I’ve been told a Bayes net is “just” a functor from a free Cartesian category to a category of probability spaces /Markov Kernels.
In EA there is a lot of chatter about OpenAI being evil and why you should do this coding bootcamp to work at Anthropic. However there are a number of other competitors—not least of which Elon Musk—in the race to AGI. Since there is little meaningful moat beyond scale [and the government is likely to be involved soon] all the focus on the minutia of OpenAI & Anthropic may very well end up misplaced.
I don’t have any. I’m also wary of soothsayers.
Phillip Tetlock pretty convingingly showed that most geopolitics experts are no such thing. The inherent irreducible uncertainty is just quite high.
On Taiwan specifically you should know that the number of Westerners that can read Chinese at a high enough level that they can actually co. Chinese is incredibly difficult. Most China experts you see on the news will struggle with reading the newspaper unassisted (learning Chinese is that hard. I know this is surprising; I was very surprised when I realized this during an attempt to learn chinese).
I did my best on writing down some of the key military facts on the Taiwan situation that can be reasonably inferred recently. You can find it in my recent shortforms.
Even when confining too concrete questions like how many missiles, how much shipbuilding capacity, how well would an amphibious landing go, how would US allies be able to assist, how vulnerable/obsolete are aircraft carriers etc the net aggregated uncertainty on the balance of power is still quite large.
Elon building massive 1 million gpu data center in Tennessee. Tens of billions of dollars. Intends to leapfrog competitors.
EA handwringing about Sam Altman & anthropicstanning suddenly pretty silly?
The current boom in fusion energy startups seems to have been set off by deep advances in material sciences (eg. magnets), electronics, manufacturing. These bottlenecks likely were the main reason fusion energy was not possible in the 60s. On priors it is more likely that centralisation was a result rather than a cause of fusion being hard.
As a point of comparison—do you think the US nuclear programme was substantially slowed down because it was a centralized government programme?
I just donated $400. This is not a minor amount for me but after thinking about it carefully this is an amount that feels substantial while remaining in my budget. I think it’s important to support things, people and institutions that bring great value to oneself and the world. LessWrong is certainly one of those.
Thermal vision cuts right through tree cover, traditional camouflage and the cover of night.
Human soldiers in the open are helpless against cheap FPS drones with thermal vision.
A youtubw channel went through a dozen countermeasures. Nothing worked except one: Umbrellas.
https://youtube.com/shorts/gSDpovJmE-o?si=LlWHvclmOtCA47Mc
Sorry i phrased this wrong. You are right. I meant roundtrip time which is twice the length but scales linearly not quadratically.
I actually ran the debate contest to get to the bottom of Jake Cannells arguments. Some of the argument, especially around the landauer argument dont hold up but i think it s important not to throw out the baby with bathwater. I think most of the analysis holds up.
That’s significantly outside the prediction intervals of forecasters so I will need to see an metaculus /manifold/etc account where you explicitly make this prediction sir