Douglas_Knight

Karma: 7,896

Douglas_Knight 21 May 2026 3:22 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Simon Lermen’s comment on: If AI is normal technology, history is not reassuring.
Just because the Holocaust was “industrial” doesn’t mean it was efficient. Slaughtering prisoners is physically easy. Genghis Khan set a quota of 300 executions per soldier per day. The death camps were about as efficient, using 25 people to kill a trainload of 2500 people in an hour. The trains were less efficient than the “Holocaust of bullets” that preceded them. The trains and death camps were not about physical efficiency, but about concentrating the responsibility on a small number of people who were willing to kill. The gas was about saving even those elite killers from the psychological cost of looking at their victims. Indeed, an early version of the death camp was to shoot through a window into the back of the head, clearly about psychology, not even saving a bullet.

Douglas_Knight 18 May 2026 17:48 UTC
2 points
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on: James C. Scott: Seeing Like a State
The Green Revolution was like mechanization of Soviet agriculture in that they both involved the obvious belief that technology would increase productivity. And specifically the belief that they would lead to consolidation of family farms, as had happened with both technologies in America.

The Green Revolution was not top down. The governments of Mexico and India did not impose the new crops and petroleum fertilizers on their people. Indeed, they would rather their people starve than consolidate farms and create an urban proletariat. The government of Mexico (and the Foundations, essentially the USG) ordered Borlaug not to do it. The government of India fought the new technology for years.

Maybe central planners want consolidation so that there are fewer people to tax. They individual is not more legible, but he is more productive so you can devote more resources to understanding him. I think this is orthogonal to much of what Scott writes. Maybe these technologies produce more predictable outputs. That would be exactly the legibility Scott talks about, but I am not sure it is true. I am pretty sure that is not why Stalin did it. He merely demanded numbers, rather than engineering Scott’s legibility.

Douglas_Knight 25 Apr 2026 2:52 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: rsaarelm’s comment on: Why no new notations since 1960?
How about linear logic? Maybe it’s a just small extensions, comparable to modal logic, but it’s new.

Douglas_Knight 23 Apr 2026 19:50 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: kbear’s comment on: An Angry Review of Greg Egan’s “Didicosm”
What do you mean by “explicit”? That you can give a citation? Would you do so?

Adam Becker claims that his lifestyle was his goal from before starting his PhD.

Douglas_Knight 20 Apr 2026 19:27 UTC
2 points
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on: Let goodness conquer all that it can defend
Was Truman the man in the arena? Did he take any actions? My understanding is that he was a scapegoat, both about the bombs and about his presidency in general. The buck stops here for responsibility, but not decisions. He didn’t make the decision to bomb the city of Hiroshima, but specifically wrote that he chose it because there were no civilians. He didn’t weigh the options and decide that it was worth the cost, but rewrote history to pretend that he did. No, he shouldn’t wring his hands about his lying subordinates, but he should do something about them. I hold him responsible for complicity in this charade.

Douglas_Knight 15 Apr 2026 17:21 UTC
4 points
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on: Some takes on UV & cancer
Sometimes you say cancer and sometimes you say deadly cancer. How careful were you to distinguish these? My understanding is that sun exposure is positively correlated with melanoma and negatively correlated with melanoma deaths.

Douglas_Knight 15 Apr 2026 16:29 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: mruwnik’s comment on: Annoyingly Principled People, and what befalls them
Semmelweis and Wegener are not so good examples because they were met with explicit rejection. I don’t like the example of Serpico, but I have trouble articulating my objection. Did he ever doubt himself? If he started at the top of a slippery slope, he explored all the way to the bottom and stopped doubting himself. He said he was subject to ridicule. I think it would matter whether he was condemned for having impossibly high standards or whether people simply defended bribery as a perk of policing.

Douglas_Knight 9 Apr 2026 18:33 UTC
2 points
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on: Am I the baddie?
What is bad about this? You only get to that in the last paragraph. I can’t quite tell what you mean. There seem to be two topics. One is doom and the other is job loss. These are totally different issues. If AI use is contributing to doom, that is bad. I doubt it, but let’s leave it aside. The rest of the paragraph seems to be about job loss. This seems like a general argument against technology. Do you really endorse the general argument? If not, what is the difference with AI?

Douglas_Knight 27 Mar 2026 19:58 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Dispatch from Anthropic v. Department of War Preliminary Injunction Motion Hearing
The Pentagon said in court that they did it because of Anthropic’s actions in the press. It would not be surprising if before they said that in court they wrote memos saying that. But if (as I predict) these are very recent memos, they tell us nothing about the real reason. The judge is taking them at their word and interpreting tweets (eg, “master class in arrogance”) as being about that. I don’t think those tweets were about the public conversation at all. In any event, they were after the designation was mentioned in the press, so are not evidence about the Pentagon’s motivation for the designation.

I think it is probably true that some people at the Pentagon saw unfavorable press treatment of their own leaks and assumed that they were Anthropic leaks. Possibly because other people at the Pentagon lied to them. But they were already talking about the designation before that.

The first mention in the press of the supply chain risk designation is on 2026-02-16 in Axios. It was explicitly named as punishment “for forcing our hand,” which is unclear, but doesn’t sound like public scrutiny.

Douglas_Knight 26 Mar 2026 20:55 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Dispatch from Anthropic v. Department of War Preliminary Injunction Motion Hearing
You got the impression because Michael wanted you to. But he is a liar, so don’t attempt to extract any sense in which there is a kernel of truth.

I addressed your parenthetical in my comment. I think the negotiation began after the election. The Biden officials could have shaped the deal, but Palantir and the generals knew that they were temporary.

Douglas_Knight 26 Mar 2026 20:52 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Dispatch from Anthropic v. Department of War Preliminary Injunction Motion Hearing
That is ridiculous. It was the Pentagon that went to the press, not Anthropic. And the Pentagon explicitly told the press that they were punishing Anthropic for refusing the contract, not for talking about it.

Douglas_Knight 26 Mar 2026 4:44 UTC
20 points
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on: Dispatch from Anthropic v. Department of War Preliminary Injunction Motion Hearing
Anthropic signed its contract with the Government in July 2025, the current administration, not the previous administration. It announced its partnership with Palantir a couple days after the election, probably to identify the new administration before beginning negotiations for this very reason.

Douglas_Knight 13 Mar 2026 18:13 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: JennaS’s comment on: The first confirmed instance of an LLM going rogue for instrumental reasons in a real-world setting has occurred, buried in an Alibaba paper about a new training pipeline.
Good call. The follow up is not entirely clear, but it looks like the teacher was trying to simulate an attack that the student could investigate.

Douglas_Knight 3 Mar 2026 18:16 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: Max H’s comment on: Epstein and my world model
It’s one thing to say “I know X is controversial, but I want to assume it and talk about the consequences.” But saying that there “this article is for people who know X and not the ignorant” leaves it fair game to attack X.

I have a different complaint. Saying “Epstein stuff” and not being specific could create an alliance between people who believe contradictory things. This is a common pattern. For a crisp example, consider anti-carb as an alliance between people who think glucose is fine and fructose is poison with people who think the opposite.

Douglas_Knight 28 Feb 2026 22:29 UTC
13 points
2
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Kaj’s shortform feed
I am skeptical of the framing “this episode” and the relevance of the Venezuela raid. The ~~Pentagon~~ White House has been complaining about Anthropic since September. There is a Pentagon memo dated ¹⁄₉ that talks about rewriting contracts to use the phrase “any lawful use.”

Douglas_Knight 28 Feb 2026 5:21 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Tom Smith’s comment on: Tom Smith’s Shortform
It is not clear about OpenAI, but it was never clear about Anthropic. The news coverage has never mentioned any details about enforcement, only the words in the contract. The closest we get is the claim that the Pentagon was upset that Antropic was asking questions of Palantir, which means that Antropic doesn’t have any direct channel to learn about lines being crossed.

Douglas_Knight 28 Feb 2026 5:09 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Tom Smith’s Shortform
In 2020, the DPA was used to order car companies to manufacture ventilators, a new product. Not for the military, but is that really the relevant detail? The car companies wanted to make ventilators anyhow, so it probably had no effect, but, in principle, this is the most extreme version of DPA.

Douglas_Knight 20 Feb 2026 21:06 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: We live in the luckiest timeline
I think your output number is correct, but all your inputs incorrect (in the same direction, not canceling!).

A few thousand nuclear weapons is too low even today. The peak number was about 60k. Maybe most of the bombs are aimed at rural areas, but how many are aimed at cities? 40%? First strike bombs should be aimed at military targets, but aren’t second strike missiles aimed at populations in revenge? Doesn’t RAND famously talk about cities as hostages? I believe Ellsberg’s book claims that an awful lot of first strike planning was aimed at cities, probably most.

But when Ellsberg asked the Pentagon in 1960 what would be the death toll, they estimated 600 million, evenly divided between the two sides, about 80% immediate and 20% from fallout.

Douglas_Knight 18 Feb 2026 20:39 UTC
4 points
2
on: The World Keeps Getting Saved and You Don’t Notice
How can we know that these examples are real?

Roman Malov links to a Hank Green video with much more mundane examples, like rumble strips on highways. The falling automobile death rate is evidence that car interventions are doing something right, if not proof of a particular example like rumble strips. But how do I know that the Y2K problem was not overblown? If a few systems had had big disasters, I could estimate how much all the other systems had accomplished by avoiding them. But if no one had disasters, I have to consider the possibility that the problem was overblown and the effort expending on the fix wasteful.

Douglas_Knight 18 Feb 2026 19:57 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Greg D’s comment on: Money Can’t Buy the Smile on a Child’s Face As They Look at A Beautiful Sunset… but it also can’t buy a malaria free world: my current understanding of how Effective Altruism has failed
You assert that the cost of fighting disease has increasing marginal costs. It is probably true that the cost of physical acts like distributing mosquito nets has increasing marginal costs. But we should test this and find out how fast it grows. Moreover, the sign of the marginal change to deaths/net is really not obvious and has to be measured. It might go down as you run out of people who would use them. Or it might go up, as you achieve herd immunity; or by keeping transmission out of houses, you might cause malaria to evolve to be less debilitating.

PEPFAR is a counterexample to your claim. Its original implementation had poor effectiveness per dose, in line with predictions. In 2006 it switched to generics, expecting to increase effectiveness per dollar by a factor of 10, leaving it still ineffective per dollar. But increasing doses by 10x turned out to be much more than 10x as effective. It is quite mysterious why its effectiveness improved, the best candidate being herd immunity.