The Semi-Rational Militar Firefighter

P. João4 Mar 2025 12:23 UTC
72 points
10 comments2 min readLW link

LessWrong Context:

I didn’t want to write this.

Not for lack of courage, I’d meme-storm Putin’s Instagram if given half a chance. But why?

  1. Too personal.

  2. My stories are tropical chaos: I survived the Brazilian BOPE (think Marine Corps training, but post-COVID).

  3. I’m dyslexic, writing in English (a crime against Grice).

  4. This is LessWrong, not some Deep Web Reddit thread.

Okay, maybe a little lack of courage.

And yet, something can be extracted from all this madness, right?

Then comes someone named Gwern. He completely ignores my thesis and simply asks:
”Tell military firefighter stories.”

My first instinct was to dismiss him as an oddball, until a friend told me I was dealing with a legend of rationality. I have to admit: I nearly shit myself. His comment got more likes than the post I’d spent years working on.

Someone with, what, a 152 IQ wanted my accounts of surviving bureaucratic military hell? And I’m the same guy who applies scientific rigor to Pokémon analysis?

I didn’t want to expose my ass in LessWrong, but here we are. So, I decided to grant his request with a story that blends military rigidity with… well, whatever it is I do.

Firefighter Context:

Brazilian military firefighters are first and foremost soldiers. Their training is built on four pillars: first aid, rescue, firefighting, and aquatic survival.

We were in the jungle, undergoing a rescue training exercise with no food, alongside the BOPE, Brazil’s elite force, notorious for their grueling training and for carrying a skull-and-dagger emblem. Wherever they go, they shout their motto:
“Knife in the skull!”

Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais - Wikipedia

The Knife:

After a week without food, they released animals into the jungle. The female recruits had to hunt, and they managed to kill a rabbit with a single clubbing blow, its eye popped out. Then they turned to me:

“Brito! Are you ‘knife in the skull?’”
“I’m knife in the hose, sir!”
“But… doesn’t a knife in the hose puncture the hose?”
“And doesn’t a knife in the skull doen`t puncture the skull?”
(Some laughter)
“Then prove you’re ‘knife’ and eat this rabbit’s eye raw!”

So, channeling the most primal, savage creature I knew, I swallowed the eye and croaked out: “My preciousssss!” ,Smigle from The Lord of the Rings.

Later, during formation, another superior addressed my squad:
“We need more firefighters like this, who throw their whole bodies into following orders and still manage to have fun.”
Then he turned to me:
“Brito, what did the rabbit’s eye taste like?”
“I don’t think the rabbit was very happy, sir. It tasted like tears.”

Simultaneously, I:

a) Completed the tribal ritual
b) Avoided malnutrition

So

After taking plenty of hits from the military and with the help of two friends, I shifted back toward the rational side. Nowadays, solving complex problems through mathematics feels wilder to me than anything I ever faced was a military.

Well, this was one of my middle-ground stories, not the most logical, not the most brutal.
Should I continue with something heavier on pathos or logos?

next history here

P. João4 Mar 2025 12:23 UTC
72 points
10 comments2 min readLW link