J_Thomas2

Karma: 71

J_Thomas2 Aug 7, 2008, 8:35 PM
0 points
on: Hiroshima Day
Mark, you have the right to your untestable opinions. No one can ever show whether we would have used nukes other times if we hadn’t that time, or that somebody else would have used nukes if they had them, or that if you were in Truman’s place you’d do the same thing he did.

There’s no way for anybody to know about any of these things, so you have the perfect right to believe whatever you want just as you do about how many Santa Clauses there are in Heaven and whether the Yankees would have won the series in 1947 if they had Joe DiMaggio, and whether the germans could have won WWII if they’d pushed forward to take Moscow and they got their winter uniforms and if they tried hard to make friends with the ukrainians etc.

This idea that the best way to prevent a nuclear war is to persuade the world that we’re crazy enough to kill everybody so they’d better do what we say—there’s something kind of screwy about it.

If we actually want a world where nobody sets off nuclear bombs, we do much better to create a world where nobody builds nuclear bombs. There’s something kind of, well, obvious about that reasoning.

We’ve had less than 62 years when we have avoided nuclear war despite MAD. We have had 5,000 or 15,000 or 1,000,000 years where we avoided nuclear war by not having nukes, depending on how you count. Which looks like a more reliable way to avoid nuclear war?

J_Thomas2 Aug 7, 2008, 7:00 PM
0 points
on: Hiroshima Day
Frelkins, let’s consider MAD in action.

In 1973 israel lost a war. Egypt wasn’t ready to take half of the sinai much less the whole thing, but still it was clear that israel had lost and would have to negotiate. instead, israel threatened to nuke egypt.

The USA detected nuclear material crossing the dardanelles, and “we” initiated DefCon 1 and announced it as DefCon 3. “We” told the russians that unless they backed down and let israel threaten egypt with nukes when there was no countermeasure available to egypt, we would kill everybody in the world and let the russians kill us all too.

Luckily, the russians weren’t as crazy about egypt as the USA was crazy about israel, so they backed down. We then shipped to israel everything the israelis needed to win—our best planes, our best tanks, our best ECM, our best analysis of our best satellite photos, things we’d been keeping secret from the russians, etc. Israel then won the war and we negotiated with egypt for them, giving israel tens of billions of dollars in echange for their agreeing to accept the peace we negotiated for them.

Given this background, how could it be acceptable to have MAD between israel and iran? Far more pleasant for israel to be a nuclear power with only non-nuclear nations as enemies. When you can do anything you want and nuke em if they can’t take a fuck.… And the alternative is to have to negotiate? Negotiate with somebody who could destroy you?

If iran gets nukes there will be a big US uproar about it, kind of like “who lost china?”. The republicans will say that they were 100% ready to take care of the problem but the democrats wouldn’t let them. And every time israel and iran have harsh words the uproar will start up again. The only reason israel is in danger of total destruction is that the democrats made it happen.

We could make an argument similar to the one about hiroshima. We could say, if only there is one nuclear exchange between a couple of small nations—israel and lebanon would be ideal—and the whole world gets to observe the result, then we will get disarmament. The world won’t stand for anybody holding nukes. If one nation tries to do it their own public won’t stand for it. We could clear up the continuing MAD madness, but it takes one graphic example. Without that, too many people will keep beleving that MAD works.

See the problem with MAD? It isn’t just that wars can start from accidents or mistakes. More fundamentally, we have strategists who try to carefully judge just how far they can push our enemies before MAD will break down. The better we are at persuading the world that we are willing to kill everybody for trivial reasons, the more we can get away with. And the more we get away with, the more we try to get away with. The only way to find out how far we can push before MAD breaks down, is to push a little bit too far.

However it gets described, this is not a stable strategy.

But it will take a small nuclear war before we can get out of it. Therefore a small nuclear war is necessary, and beneficial, and if we do something to promote one we will be doing the world a great and necessary service.

I tend to feel there is something wrong with this reasoning. And yet, it looks so true....

J_Thomas2 Aug 7, 2008, 5:39 PM
1 point
on: Hiroshima Day
It’s absurd to argue that “we” did the right thing because the results happened to turn out well. You can make that argument about anything. For example, if Hitler had not started WWII when he did, there would inevitably have been a world war after both sides had nuclear weapons and it would have been far, far worse. Hitler might have done it for the wrong reasons but we owe him our lives for doing it.

All it takes is to look at what happened, and make up a worse alternative, and then say that what happened was better than the alternative. You can do that about anything. Unless you can repeat the experiment and get odds, it’s bogus.

There’s the argument that without a horrible example somebody would inevitably have used nukes because they couldn’t wrap their minds around it. This is bogus. We have the example of biological warfare, which we have avoided so far without a horrible example. Ditto genetic warfare. However, a variant of it can be used to excuse Truman. Truman had been kept out of the loop, he didn’t know about the nukes until very late. Then he had to make a choice quickly. If national leaders couldn’t understand it without the graphic example, that would apply to Truman even more. Forgive him, he didn’t know what he was doing.

There is the argument that the japanese would not have surrendered without being nuked. This is the first bogus argument all over again, a completely bogus claim about what would have happened otherwise. But this one is special. We had no method set up to accept a surrender from japan. If all along, since Pearl Harbor, we had been negotiating with them about what it would take to end the war, we might at some point have negotiated a peace. But we didn’t want to. We wanted an unconditional surrender and nothing else. So there was nothing to negotiate about and no method arranged to do it, and it took the japanese days after our nuke to reach an agreement about how to surrender and we bombed them again while they did it.

So rephrase that. “We nuked japan because we would not accept a conditional surrender.” We could have ended our war with japan at any time after Pearl Harbor if we had been willing to negotiate terms. Right after Pearl Harbor the japanese might have insisted on some sort of favorable terms. After they took Manila they would probably not have wanted to give it back. By Midway they might have given back a lot, but of course we wanted them to give back all of china etc. Maybe we could not have agreed on a peace. But we were totally unwilling to find out. It isn’t fair to say that we nuked japan because they refused to surrender. It is fair to say that we nuked japan because we were unwilling to negotiate a surrender. We’ll never know whether we could have arranged a surrender without nuking japan because we made absolutely no effort to do so. We were unwilling.

There are arguments that we should not negotiate peace and fight at the same time. The basic reason is that peace negotiations weaken our resolve. Apply that this time. We were unwilling to negotiate a surrender with japan because that would weaken our resolve to nuke them.

VD Hanson says that to keep a war from starting again you really need to smash the enemy, show them that they’re completely beaten. Japan was already beaten that way, without nukes. The world would be a better place if Hanson got into an argument where he had to admit that his arguments were worthless and perhaps suffer some mild consequence like a YouTube bare-bottom flogging to prove it. The reason he keeps blathering on is that no matter how many times his bogus claims are definitively refuted, he doesn’t have to notice.

Bogus justifications aside, people who weren’t adults during WWII probably can’t understand what it was like. I’ve read old Life magazines from during the war, and it seems like an alien culture. We haven’t had anything like it more recently, except in the weeks after 9/11. For few weeks there, normally-sane people were saying we would have to kill every muslim who didn’t renounce islam, or turn the middle east into a glass parking lot, etc. I’m not talking about the insane people who were still saying that in 2002. For awhile there the nation as a whole went crazy. And in WWII it went on for years. We lost close to half a million dead and their families had the grief to deal with. Rationing. A whole lot of men away, in the military. Censorship, and particularly censorship of anything that hindered the war effort. I particularly remember the full-page photo of the steelworkers’ union organizer. He tried to start a strike when we were at war! He got a bayonet wound on his butt, and they photographed it and put it in Life magazine along with his recantation. He said he was wrong to hurt the war effort and he apologized.

Say what you like about what you would have done. But you weren’t there. People aren’t very good at predicting what they would have done if things were different.

So, it’s been 63 years and people are real intent on what “we” should have done. Why don’t we ever talk about what Genghis should have done, or what Tamerlane should have done, or maybe what Andrew Jackson should have done? We never give a lot of thought to what MacLellan should have done—if he’d done the right things. maybe the Civil War would have been cut short with far less loss of life. What should we have done in the philippines or the mexican war?

What should Hitler have done? Clearly his approach was suboptimal, but if he had been sane—if you had been in his place, say—what might work for getting good results, mercy or at least much reduced injustice for germany?

Why do we only think about what Truman should have done—one single old dead guy—and not the other old dead guys?

J_Thomas2 Aug 7, 2008, 3:19 PM
1 point
on: Contaminated by Optimism
Suppose we break the problem down into multiple parts.

1. Understand how the problem works, what currently happens.
2. Find a better way that things can work, that would not generate the same problems.
3. Find a way to get from here to there.
4. Do it.

Then part 1 might easily be aided by a guy on a blog. Maybe part 2. Possibly part 3.

A blog is better than a newsgroup because the threads don’t scroll off, they’re all sitting on the site’s computer if anybody cares. Also, as old posts are replaced by new posts people stop responding to old posts. So there isn’t as much topic drift, we don’t get threads that last for two years with the same title and discuss two dozen different topics.

I tend to think a wiki would be even better. Or a wiki that lets people revise their own posts at will but not other people’s posts. Then rather than have long arguments where you finally come to some agreement, the arguments could turn into revisions of the original posts, and people could see at a glance where the remaining disagreement is. If you want to see how they got to where they are, you can look at the history of revisions.

None of this will change the world unless somebody pays attention. But it’s much easier to pay attention when there’s a coherent train of thought to pay attention to. And people who have a vague idea they want to flesh out, can do worse than present it on a blog and get people who want to help develop it or poke holes in it. Either or both.

J_Thomas2 Aug 6, 2008, 7:06 PM
0 points
on: Contaminated by Optimism
‘It seems to me like the simplest way to solve friendliness is: “Ok AI, I’m friendly so do what I tell you to do and confirm with me before taking any action.” It is much simpler to program a goal system that responds to direct commands than to somehow try to infuse ‘friendliness’ into the AI.′

As was pointed out, this might not have the consequences one wants. However, even if that wasn’t true, I’d still be leery of this option—this’d effectively be giving one human unlimited power.

Would you expect all the AIs to work together under one person’s direction? Wouldn’t they group up different ways, and work with different people?

In that case, the problem of how to get AIs to be nice and avoid doing things that hurt people boils down to the old problem of how to get people to be nice and avoid doing things that hurt people. The people might have AIs to tell them about some of the consequences of their behavior, which would be an improvement. “But you never told us that humans don’t want small quantities of plutonium in their food. This changes everything.”

But if it just turns into multiple people having large amounts of power, then we need those people not to declare war on each other, and not crush the defenseless, and so on. Just like now except they’d have AIs working for them.

Would it help if we designed Friendly People? We’d need to design society so that Friendly People outcompeted Unfriendly People....

J_Thomas2 Aug 6, 2008, 1:11 AM
0 points
on: Contaminated by Optimism
“Sorry, you’re not allowed to suggest ideas using that method” is not something you hear, under Traditional Rationality.

But it is a fact of life, ….

It is a fact of life that ….

I disagree. You list a whole collection of mistakes people make after they have a bad hypothesis that they’re attached to. I say, the mistake should not be to use your prior experience when you come up with hypotheses. The mistakes are first to get too attached to one hypothesis, followed by the list of “facts of life” mistakes you then described.

People will get hypotheses from whatever source. Telling them they shouldn’t have done it is like telling a jury to completely ignore evidence that they should not have been exposed to. Very hard commands to obey.

What’s needed is a new skill. In mathematics, I found it useful when I had trouble proving a theorem to try to disprove it instead. The places I had trouble with the theorem gave great hints toward building a counterexample. Then if the counterexample kept running into problems, the kind of problems it ran into gave great hints toward how to solve the theorem. Then if I still couldn’t prove it, the problems pointed toward a better counterexample, and so on.

So for things like evolutionary questions, once you have an idea about a way that evolution might work to get a particular result, the needed skill might be to look for any way that other genes could be selected while subverting that process. If you can be honest enough that you see it’s easy for it to fail and hard for it to succeed, then the proposed mechanism gets a lot easier to reject.

This logic applied to SDI, for example. The argument wasn’t whether we could build the advanced technology required to shoot down an ICBM. The argument was whether we could improve SDI as fast as our potential enemies could improve their SDI-blocking methods. And we clearly could not.

The question isn’t “Can it work?”. The question is “Can it outcompete all comers?”. Group selection advocates got caught up in the question whether there are circumstances that allow group selection. Yes, there are. It can happen. But then there’s the question how often those circumstances show up, and currently the answer looks like “rarely”.

J_Thomas2 Aug 5, 2008, 10:16 PM
0 points
on: Anthropomorphic Optimism
There’s always a nonzero chance that any action will cause an infinite bad. Also an infinite good.

Then how can you put error bounds on your estimate of your utility function?

If you say “I want to do the bestest for the mostest, so that’s what I’ll try to do” then that’s a fine goal. When you say “The reason I killed 500 million people was that according to my calculations it will do more good than harm, but I have absolutely no way to tell how correct my calculations are” then maybe something is wrong?

J_Thomas2 Aug 5, 2008, 4:12 PM
−1 points
on: Anthropomorphic Optimism
“If there is an act such that one believed that, conditional on one’s performing it, the world had a 0.00000000000001% greater probability of containing infinite good than it would otherwise have (and the act has no offsetting effect on the probability of an infinite bad), then according to EDR one ought to do it even if it had the certain side‐effect of laying to waste a million human species in a galactic‐scale calamity.

The assumption is that when you lay waste to a million human species the bad that is done is finite.

Is there solid evidence for that? If there’s any slightest chance that it will result in infinite bad, then the problem is much more complicated.

There has to be not the 0.00000000000001% probability that your evil might be infinite, before this reasoning makes sense.

J_Thomas2 Aug 5, 2008, 4:03 PM
2 points
on: Anthropomorphic Optimism
My point was that in an adversarial situation, you should assume your opponent will always make perfect choices. Then their mistakes are to your advantage. If you’re ready for optimal thrashings, random thrashings will be easier.

It isn’t that simple. When their perfect choice mean you lose, then you might as well hope they make mistakes. Don’t plan for the worst that can happen, plan for the worst that can happen which you can still overcome.

One possible mistake they can make is to just be slow. If you can hit them hard before they can react, you might hurt them enough to get a significant advantage. Then if you keep hitting them hard and fast they might reach the point they’re trying to defend against the worst you can do. While they are trying to prepare for the worst attack you can make, you hit them hard with the second-worst attack that they aren’t prepared for. Then when they try to defend against whatever they think you’ll do next, you do something else bad. It’s really ideal when you can get your enemy into that stance.

Of course it’s even better when you can persuade them not to be your enemy in the first place. If you coudl do that reliably then you would do very well. But it’s hard to do that every time. The enemy gets a vote.

J_Thomas2 Aug 5, 2008, 6:26 AM
9 points
0
on: Anthropomorphic Optimism
Humans faced with resource constraints did find the other approach.

Traditionally, rather than restrict our own breeding, our response has been to enslave our neighbors. Force them to work for us, to provide resources for our own children. But don’t let them have children. Maybe castrate the males, if necessary kill the female’s children. (It was customary to expose deformed or surplus children. If a slave does get pregnant, who’s child is surplus?)

China tried the “everybody limit their children” approach. Urban couples were allowed one child, farm couples could have two. Why the difference? China officially did not have an “other” to enslave. They had to try to make it fair. But why would the strong be fair to the weak? Slaves are bred when there’s so much room to expand that the masters’ children can’t fill the space, and another requirement is that it’s easier, cheaper, or safer to breed them than to capture more.

Traditionally slavery was the humane alternative to genocide.

Why didn’t Eliezer think that way? My guess is that he is a good man and so he supposed that human populations would think in terms of what’s good and fair for everyone, the way he does.

He applied anthropomorphic optimism to human beings.

J_Thomas2 Aug 2, 2008, 10:13 PM
2 points
on: A Genius for Destruction
If you can’t explain how your code works, how can somebody else maintain it? Do you want to get stuck with the job of maintaining your old code? Every time a change is needed, do you want to figure it out over again well enough to get the change to work?

I once had a student who asked me to help him debug some of his code. I looked at it. “Why do you need these variables here?” “I like them. They make the code look more like Pascal.” “Why do you use this pointer when you never change it?” “I might want to change it someday.” “This routine is 16 lines long. Why not divide it up into a bunch of simple routines, none of them more than two lines?” “If it looked simple, anybody could understand it. I want to write it so that everybody can see I’m real smart.” “Then simplify it until it works, and then add an the complications later.”

His career has been far more successful than mine. Maybe he was doing the right thing.

J_Thomas2 Aug 2, 2008, 2:27 PM
0 points
on: A Genius for Destruction
Tim, that quote makes sense only with a broken debugging cycle.

If you write your code bottom-up and debug it as you go, then it simply doesn’t make sense to talk about writing clever code you can’t debug. If you can’t debug it, then it wasn’t clever in the first place—it was just something that didn’t make sense.

Taking it literally, this is like saying “Writing a novel is easy. Rewriting it so it isn’t completely boring worthless drivel is harder.”

Still, there’s a worthwhile thought in it. If you try to do something clever that you don’t completely understand, it’s likely to be easy to make mistakes.

J_Thomas2 Aug 1, 2008, 9:09 AM
5 points
on: Humans in Funny Suits
Katherine, the up/down thing would just work out for communication. If you turn your TV upside down the picture turns upside down with it. Or if the camera turns upside down your TV picture will turn upside down apart from your TV. It’s all in the signal.

The transporter problem would go the same way, if there’s a downside at the emitter then that information will get sent to the receiver which also has a downside.

Things like space battles usually don’t show enough detail to see that they’re thinking in 2D. The StarTrek movie The Wrath of Khan did a parody of that, though. Kirk realizes that Khan is thinking in terms of two-dimensional strategies, so when Khan is chasing Kirk’s ship, with all the advantages because he’s behind, Kirk moves his ship up and Khan is completely confused and goes straight ahead so that Kirk can then go down and get behind him. It’s possible it wasn’t meant to be a parody, but it’s so stupid I’d rather give them the benefit of the doubt.

I don’t remember that LeGuin story, but somebody—LeGuin? Joanna Russ? -- did a Clarion exercise where they had some of the writing students pretend to be aliens who communicated with stylized gestures, and the other students were supposed to react to that. The aliens did their thing and nobody could figure any of it out. The aliens started “dying” and they called it all off because it was so totally frustrating.

CJ Cherryh wrote a story where human soldiers were fighting on some dreary planet where the enemy never surrendered but sometimes would commit suicide rather than keep fighting. Their carrion birds actied kind of weird, everything was a little strange, the humans got very tired of fighting with people they didn’t understand. The viewpoint character has gotten completely sick of it, and at the story’s end when they’ve negotiated a sort of peace he realizes that to actually seal the peace a human soldier has to do a mutual suicide with one of the local soldiers, and he pulls the grenade pin while the other guy holds it.

People who read science fiction like to get insights from it. But when it’s alien stories, it’s hard to provide the right level of hints. Too many and it’s trite, too few and it never makes sense. Hard to calibrate that for the average reader.

J_Thomas2 Jul 31, 2008, 3:02 PM
2 points
on: Humans in Funny Suits
Yes, science fiction writers don’t write truly alien characters because the market is too small.

Aliens who don’t make sense are basicly all the same alien.

Aliens who make sense according to some logic that doesn’t fit human feelings can be an interesting intellectual puzzle. But they aren’t real, they’re puzzles. You can figure out the logic.

Aliens who start out not making sense but then start to make more and more sense as it goes along, and you keep fitting things together to understand things you didn’t see before, and at the end of the story you still don’t get it all—I find that satisfying, but it’s hard to write like that. CJ Cherryh has made solid attempts at it. She has aliens that are very much like big smart cats, but the longer she wrote about them the more like humans they got. In 40,000 in Gehenna she had aliens that were a lot like alien ants. One of her less successful stories. She wrote one where the aliens were like truly giant earthworms who communicated by building structures. She wound up with humans who could communicate with them after a fashion, but who weren’t very good at translating. It was odd.

Larry Niven’s “puppeteers” were reasonably alien. Herbivores who had technology that let them live forever. If you were this kind of alien all you had to do was keep your place in the herd and you need never die. But ordinary ones were not allowed to reproduce at all, there was no place for more of them. And any individual who was willing to get in a spacecraft or go face-to-face with dangerous aliens like human beings was classified as insane and snubbed. Things that we would consider reasonable risks were not reasonable for them, when they might live forever. However, Niven wrote a short story, “Safe at any Speed”, in which immortal human beings behaved precisely the way his puppeteers did, and they seemed quite human. Niven at 40 years old had a quite limited concept of how 200-year-old humans would behave, much less immortal aliens. Still, his stories were interesting and they sold well.

Some people consider human beings inhuman when they do something that is considered socially unacceptable. Dictators who start purges that kill many of their own supporters, like Stalin, say. Or Mao. But people who get into high-stakes gambling will do all sorts of things for the chance to win, when the stakes are high. And dictators play for the highest stakes, it’s somewhat rare for them to lose and come out of it alive. The ones who survive and come to the USA etc tend to die in a few years of various things, typically cancer. They aren’t that different.

J_Thomas2 Jul 26, 2008, 3:33 PM
0 points
on: Can Counterfactuals Be True?
Lara Foster, consider the possibility that Obama’s assassination would be a boon to progressivism, as JFK’s death was.

Where is your evidence that JFK’s death helped “progressivism”?

How do you know what would have happened to progressivism if JFK had died considerably later?

Isn’t this an example of the fallacy we’re talking about?

J_Thomas2 Jul 26, 2008, 3:28 PM
0 points
on: Can Counterfactuals Be True?
Lots of counterfactuals are statements about how we think the world is connected together. We tell stories. We make analogies and metaphors.

Do you think Oswald killed Kennedy because he had free will and he chose to independent of anything else? If Kennedy died because somebody powerful and important wanted to have him killed, then if Oswald hadn’t taken the job somebody else surely would have. Maybe somebody else did and we picked up Oswald by mistake.

If Oswald did it for reasons that might influence other people too, then somebody else might very well have been influenced similarly to Oswald. Were there 5 independent lone nuts ready to kill Kennedy? 50? 500? We don’t know because the first one to do it, succeeded. If we could re-run the experiment a hundred times and it was Oswald 20% of the time versus Oswald 100% of the time, that would tell us something. If it was Oswald 30% of the time and nobody 70%, that would tell us something else. But we can’t rerun the experiment even once.

We can say what we think might have happened, based on our experience with other things applied as similes and metaphors to that one. It isn’t reliable. But it’s central to the way we think all the time.

J_Thomas2 Jul 26, 2008, 10:47 AM
0 points
on: Does Your Morality Care What You Think?
Physics is made of math. Physics describes the physical universe.

The physical universe is not made of math.

If you figure out a way to describe a physical event by taking some measured numbers and cutting them into an infinite number of pieces and putting them together in a different way, does that mean that the physical event happened by dividing something into an infinite number of pieces and rearranging them? Possibly. More likely the event just happened. The math comes from our need to start with the things we can measure and compute from that things that we want to know.

Would an alien society build the same math we do? Probably, if they happen to measure the same things and want to compute the same things. If they can easier measure something different or they care about something different then maybe not.

The idea that we shouldn’t take things from other people without their permission is a human one. No predator has that idea about their prey. The concept of human ownership is complex and changeable too. We come up with lots of exceptions—imminent domain, the abolition of slavery, etc. It’s a matter of continuing negotiation. I’m not supposed to burn my own charcoal in my own backyard—something about pollution. Is it really my own charcoal or my own land or my own air if I can’t do as I want with them? If one of my neighbors tells on me the fire department will confiscate my grill. My five-year-old doesn’t understand the complexities of the concept, but she knows how to argue about it. “We said we were going to share this toy and now Eris won’t share!” “I want it now, she can have it later!” Sometimes my solution is to have a “toy timeout” and take it away from both of them for awhile.

How can anybody argue this stuff is simple and easy and obvious when anybody can see how much we argue about it?

J_Thomas2 Dec 26, 2007, 2:41 PM
2 points
on: The Amazing Virgin Pregnancy
“Check of proof: would this have any value AT ALL if “Joseph” and “Mary” were swapped out for “Mike” and “Helen” and “Rabbi” were changed to “Mayor Wilkins” and “God” to “Elvis”?”

K Larson, I tried that and I found it much more funny that way.

However, I couldn’t help but think about Jesus while I was reading the story, and that probably had something to do with it. I’m afraid it turns into an even more effective political joke against Jesus when it’s Mike and Mayor Wilkins, the absurdity shines through even more obviously. And from a christian perspective it isn’t quite as pointed because it’s obviously stupid for these people to think they have Jesus reborn. “Who do you think you are, Jesus Christ?” Although yet again, aren’t we due for something like that right around now?

So the story becomes much richer and more ambiguous with the different names. At first sight it may be an obvious anti-christian joke and then it deserves some thought. And if Jesus did come back would he destroy the American empire? Would he be declared incompetent and sedated?

J_Thomas2 Dec 11, 2007, 4:01 AM
0 points
on: When None Dare Urge Restraint
Assistant Village Idiot, I sympathise with your desire to go over the old talking points again. I like to do that sort of thing myself sometimes. Like, I’ll find people to argue with about Kerry and the swiftboating. I didn’t like Kerry that much, he just turned into the only alternative to the Bush ongoing disaster, but he didn’t deserve what he got from the Swiftboat liars who certainly didn’t deserve nearly the media attention they got after their first lie was exposed. But the truth is, it’s a dead issue. The swiftboat liars won and Kerry lost, and arguing it out now is mostly a waste of time.

We have no obligation to go over your talking points about how invading iraq and spending a trillion or so dollars to kill a million or so iraqis for no particular result was not actually a mistake. If we were to argue it with you we would be giving the impression that it was debatable, that there are two sides that could be valid, that you might perhaps have a point. But the fact is, your side lost that debate. You tried to argue with the facts and you lost. Get over it.

Eliezer was using a generally-known situation to illustrate his point. If you think that in this generally-known situation the public is wrong and we ought to listen to you and realise that you’re right and the consensus is wrong, OK, good luck. I was facing exactly that situation after 9/11 and I lost hands down.

So when I don’t tell you that you’re a dirty neocon traitor, and if you want to talk that way you don’t deserve to live in america and you ought to go somewhere the people are like you and want to destroy america the way you do, it’s because I’m a nice guy and I don’t play it hardball the way your guys did after 9/11. But that isn’t something you are owed. If people treat you better than you treated them when the tables were turned, it’s because they happen to be better people than you.

J_Thomas2 Dec 10, 2007, 10:17 PM
2 points
on: When None Dare Urge Restraint
gator80, I haven’t noticed anybody saying why they thought the continental USA hasn’t been attacked since 9/11.

Here are three possibilities:

1. In the days after 9/11 we rolled up the AQ network, that we had been watching before but not doing much about since after all they weren’t doing much and the ones we let run sometimes led us to new agents and such. Once we eliminated the ones in the USA and our allies eliminated the ones in their own countries, new ones haven’t really gotten a foothold.

2. AQ is following Napoleon’s maxim which goes “Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake.”. They did 9/11 and we did what they wanted us to. If they attack us again we might stop doing what they want and do something else instead. It makes sense for them not to hit us again unless our will to be stupid starts to lapse.

3. It was an inside job and our own administration or their supporters or Mossad or whoever did it to get us to attack iraq and to get support for the Bush administration. They achieved their objectives. But after all the spending and chickenguano we’ve endured for the administration to stop terrorism, if we got an effective attack now the US public would decide that the current administration is a bunch of stumblebums who can’t protect us from AQ no matter how much money they spend or civil rights they revoke. The first time we banded together behind Bush. The second time we wouldn’t. So it would be stupid to pull the same trick again.

Our government might have information that would tend to disprove one or more of these alternative possibilities. But if they do, they’re keeping it secret. I have no reason beyond sheer prejudice to discredit any of them.
What links here?
- torekp's comment on Rationality quotes January 2012 by Thomas (Jan 2, 2012, 12:50 AM; 34 points)