This reminds me of Seneca.
Your modern parables give a better frame for some of his advises:
“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?””
A lot of important technology do not exists yet for the above.
You assume independent movement and coordination of said movement in a hostile area, while we barely arrived at self-driving cars in well governed, 1st world areas (available only very few places afaik due to not being able to demonstrate high enough reliability to be convincing to lawmakers).
Point-to-point laser communication would be a great solution indeed, but that would also be a great solution for a bunch of other military applications. Yet it is not used, as we do not have reliable solution for working with it in case of moving objects (apart from satelites), too much coordination is needed to find the end points.
There is no software system currently that is even close to completing the requirements.
Let me offer a different point of view on the whole question:
A suicide drone is just a missile. Until recently there was just no way to propel and guide an explosive charge accurately, reliably and cheaply other than using a rocket engine.
A recon drone is just a helicopter. Until recently there was just no way to propel and guide a good enough observer and transmit the information reliably and cheaply other than a human carrying object using gas turbines.
What happened is now we have better battery and material technology, and way better (smaller) electronic devices (and optimized global supply chains). The cost advantage against missiles is mostly due to inertia in the military-industrial complex: most missiles in inventory were designed against targets with different size and performance parameters. You need a a million dollar AMRAAM missile to intercept an Su-30 flying 80 kms away, maybe flying at 2 mach or at 40 000 feet or pulling 9g maneuvers while dispensing chaff, flares and using EW. (and the missile carrying aircraft may have already pulled the same speed and maneuvers, and may have took off from the desert with 45 degrees Celsius and arrived to − 30 degrees Celsius flight attitude in the next couple of minutes, yet the missile must stay safe and reliable).
The infantryman did not get replaced. They just got missiles available in large numbers, and their own miniature recon helicopters in every bush. It is harder to hide and there are more precision fires to throw at you after getting spotted.
I think I did experience something like that. When learning new skills to change positions, I found myself eager to learn even after a long and tiring day or week if I concentrated on my dissatisfaction with the job I had that time. When contemplating about the phenomenon I kind of described it how a Sith is supposed to work, using his negative emotions to channel energy into the task. And indeed, by using this “passion” to “gain strength/power”, I did “gain victory”, so it worked out, as the Sith code preaches:)
Slightly off topic, but I like how user “chaosmage” made this post about using “Vengeance”. I wonder if this can be classified as a case for Nominative Determinism.
I think this is an important addition to the site. There had been articles before about the “dark” side/arts, but I think this is the first one where the examples are not thought experiments and abstractions, but actual real world experience from an actual user.
It is helpful for understanding politics.
“Objection against “out of desperation”. How is it desperation to lose something that you didn’t own yesterday, just tried to take from someone and failed. (Yes, I am sure that Russia will spin it as desperation, but it is not.)”
I would make a comment here:
Losing a couple of provinces in Ukraine that just become part of the Russian Federation recently should not make “Russia” desperate. However, I believe we have a principal-agent problem here:
Russia can afford to lose this war, but the current Russian leadership does not. I think they believe there is a good chance that they would be removed by a coup or a revolution if they loose face due to military defeat.
I think the past 6 months of the conflict supports this view:
The Russian Armed Forces have been inefficiently throwing hard-to replace weaponry and manpower trying to conquer the rest of Donbass, while pretending this was the plan all along. It is a relatively worthless region(large portion of the population having fled, majority of industrial infrastructure having been/would be destroyed), and replacing lost equipment and professional personnel (especially officers and special operation units) will take many years, making Russian conventional forces severely weaker.
This seems to make as much strategic sense as trading your queen for a pawn.
That is, if you are using the POV of Russia. However, if you are considering the decision is made by the political leadership, hoping to hide that they screwed-up, it makes a lot more sense.
I think something along the lines of “Defense Against the Dark Arts” with actionable steps on recognizing and defusing them (and how to practice these) would be great. If you feel like you have the energy and time, more articles on offensive usage (practice) and on theoretical background (how to connect your practical experience to existing LW concepts/memes) would be also nice. But I think the first one (defense) would be the most useful for LW readers.
My quick impression for the overlapping similarities:
An ambitious leader with a strong vision and mandate to make important decisions.
Keeping the organization lean. Even in case of larger projects (construction), teams should be able to operate relatively independently, so at least being lean “locally” (not being forced into a larger hierarchy).
Having effective executives with a lot of domain level experience.
Keeping inferential-query distances short, whether by time (quick iterations) or space (engineers close to assembly plant), but preferably both.
For me this still points (yet again) towards shortening feedback loops: apart from directly being mentioned, generating the experienced leaders and workers is also possibly based on this. No one had as much experience in designing aircraft as the engineers who worked between the 40s and the 60s, just due to the sheer amount of equipment designed, both due to being less matured (lower hanging fruits), less regulated and just military spending being relatively higher during the era. I wonder though if we could replace some of the experience with simulations and games.
Thank you, I wanted to say the same.
Furthermore:
SR-71 was not really flying above enemy territory: the high flight altitude made it possible to peek over the curvature of earth. It did not fly over the USSR like the U-2 did before the advent of anti-air missiles, but generally over allied/international borders, peeking into the forbidden territory. Interceptors were raised against it numerous times it but usually were unable to achieve a position where they could have attacked it successfully. I am not sure where the “fired at 4000 times” myth comes from, but it is nonsense. The S-200 (SA-5) systems introduced in the late 60s should have been able to shoot them down from relatively large distance, and it is recorded that Swedish JAS-37 jets were able to intercept and have a lock on it.
Probably my strangest bugfix was realizing that sometimes I get too immersed in an activity and go to bed hours after I planned to. This still happened even after I setup alarms/reminders for specific hours. I would just turn them off and continue browsing/playing/watching “just for another 15 minutes”, which would sometimes turn to hours.
The solution was to set an alarm with a title and decision that I am not allowed to turn it off, unless I temporarily stop what I am doing for a minute, during which I change my location to another room, and talk to one of my shoulder advisors ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X79Rc5cA5mSWBexnd/shoulder-advisors-101 ).
This had the desired effect of changing my frame of mind to one that can stop the activity for the day and start doing the night routine I planned for that day.
I would add that often automating the task is way more fun than doing the task itself. Once I spent a lot of time automating something that was so mind numbing (simple, boring, but required constant focus as a small mistake would have had negative consequences) that I thought I rather shoot myself than do it again.
Although it turned out to also have saved a lot of time in the long run (it was not clear during that time how many times I would have had to do the task), I would have still chosen automation for the mental health benefits.
I find it exciting for the following:
These AIs are (were) thought to be in the Universe of Go what AGI is expected to be in the actual world we live in: an overwhelming power no human being can prevail against, especially not an amateur just by following some weird tactic most humans could defeat. It seemed they had a superior understanding of the game’s universe, but as per the article this is still not the same kind of understanding we see in humans. We may have overestimated our own understanding of how these systems work, this is an unexpected (confusing) outcome. Especially that it is implied that this is not just a bug in a specific system but possibly other systems using similar architecture will have the same defects. I think this is a data point towards A.I. winter to be expected in the coming years rather than FOOM.
Russian military might. They have been hearing it all their lives:
learning about historical victories, watching movies about it on the TV, seeing the victory parade every 8th of May...
And they can point to the map, and show that Russia being the largest country by territory is proof enough.
Hell, even most of the world believed it until March.
I like the bird-plane analogy. I kind of had the same idea, but for slightly different reason: just as man made flying machines can be superior to birds in a lot of aspects, man made ai will most likely can be superior to a human mind in a similar way.
Regarding your specific points: they may be valid, however, we do not know at which point in time we are talking about flying or AI: Probably a lot of similar arguments could have been made by Leonardo da Vinci when he was designing his flying machine; most likely he understood a lot more about birds and the way they fly than any of his contemporaries or predecessors; yet, he had no chance to succeed for at least three additional centuries. So are we in the era of the Wright Brothers of A.I., or are we still only at da Vinci’s?
I personally think the former is more likely, but I believe the probability of the second one is a lot greater than zero.
Almost all of these could have been said 50 years ago with no or minor (e.g. change Trump to Nixon) change with pretty much the same emphasis. Even those that not (e.g. Pandemic), could be easily replaced with other things similar in nature in absolute outcome (famine in China, massive limitation of mobility (and other freedoms) in the Eastern Block etc.).
Even 100 years ago you could make similar cases for most things (except A.I., that is a newer concept, yet there could have been similar issues in those times for which people had the same hope for that I am not aware of).
Yet, here we are, better off than before. Was this the expected outcome?
Thank you for sharing. For me your original talk is more convincing, and your Death Star strike plan is the one I would be more willing to follow rather than movie one.
I suppose this is an area where one can have a strong conviction on how things ought to be done, assuming other smart people think the same way, but in reality the way they think about it is closer to the base rate, so communication towards them should be as such.
How much time did they spend practicing with the kids? (Frequency and length of sessions. e.g. 7 times a week for 5-10 minutes)
“Politician’s logic”
Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
Snappy British sitcom clip:
I agree that often the best don’t rise to the top, but you have bad examples here.
You are confusing expertise in different domains: just because one is exceptional in something, it does not follow they are good at teaching it or making videos of it.
This is especially apparent in Bottura’s channel. He might be the best chef in the world, but his youtube content is mediocre.