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The "silver dollar" change isn't -- it's the dime. The design was in the works before the current administration [1], and is only intended to be for the 250th anniversary [2].

The Dept of Defense was only created in the late 1940s. Before that the US had the Dept of War, the Dept of the Navy, and other organizations. The point of calling it "defense" was not because "everyone has the right to defense", but because the US was promoting the United Nations and waging a Cold War, and wanted to pretend that it would never do anything proactive or aggressive. That is, it was propaganda, as the current preferred name "Dept of War" is now for a different posture with regard to America's adversaries.

If you're going to call people stupid or immature for making certain decisions, maybe take a couple minutes to find out who made the decisions, and/or what the history of those and similar changes has been.

[1] https://www.ccac.gov/system/files/media/calendar/images/Semi...

[2] https://www.usmint.gov/coins/coin-programs/semiquincentennia...

> the US was promoting the United Nations and waging a Cold War, and wanted to pretend that it would never do anything proactive or aggressive. That is, it was propaganda

Many other countries similarly changed the name of their respective ministries, reflecting the ideal (if not the fact) that war should not be pursued for gain or used to resolve international controversies.

Actions trail behind ideals; ideals are set to remind us of how things should be even if we don't live up to them. Renaming the DoD to DoW reflects an aggressive, violent and ultimately predatory posturing that the West had chosen to abandon after WW2 and many millions of deaths.

The millions of deaths are still happening, they just aren't our boys so we were all cool with it.

They haven’t, though. In the decades that followed World War 2, creation of the UN etc, the number of people dying in warfare and civilian death due to war dropped dramatically.

No, it wasn’t zero. But there was still a notable drop. I don’t think it’s coincidence that blowing up this world order has only become a cause now that those who suffered the horrors of WW2 have died.

https://ourworldindata.org/conflict-deaths-breakdown - certainly has been in the millions - maybe lower in the 'Western world' but countless of the dead in wars across the world in ww2, have been civilians.

For example 3 to 5 million were killed in the 2nd Congo war of 1998-2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

They may have dropped from the level of death during the war itself. A transnational conflict that involved every continent on earth. But I'd be shocked if the numbers dead from war in the post war period did not exceed the median number of civilian victims of war pre-WW1 or in the post war period. The World Wars normalised the idea of total war, of death squads and killing fields and mechanised genocide. Those have continued apace, everywhere from the Congo to Cambodia. At the time they were novelties in 'the civilised' world.

I asked ChatGPT to compute the rate of total deaths (civilians + military) since the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Here's what it came up with:

    Period.     Approx average deaths from war
    1815–1913 ~5–15 per 100k per year
    1914–1945 ~100–200 per 100k per year
    1946–1989 ~5–10 per 100k per year
    1990–today ~1–3 per 100k per year

Here's the "bottomline":

> Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the per-capita death rate from war has fallen substantially, with the huge exception of the 1914–1945 world-war era, which produced the highest war mortality rates in modern history.

TBH this surprised me. I thought that with much better killing machines in the 20th century, we'd be more efficient at killing, and as we're still having wars as usual that would mean death rates would increase... but it seems I was quite wrong.

Alas we're seeing a reversion to historical norms. The "civilized" world was a temporary and localized phenomenon. The usual pattern in conflicts between societies was always genocide: kill all the men, take the women and children as slaves, smash the cultural artifacts, and steal anything of value. Probably thousands of societies have been utterly erased that way. Hopefully we can arrest the gradual worldwide regression to barbarism but I'm not optimistic.

People love repeating this stuff, a form of navel-gazing: 'Norms' is used by bad people to support their obviously bad ideas - 'I know this sucks, but it's inevitable!'.

Instead of complaining, do what prior generations did and stand up and build something.

They are. They just are killed in utero instead of on the front lines.

I for one am happy the US is not being as hypocritical as to call its military department the Department of Defense anymore. The US has initiated or participated directly in many, many wars since the UN was founded, and none of them were in self defense - no country on Earth would be foolish enough to attack the US (arguably, Al-Kaeda did it, but they're not a country and Afghanistan was essentially scapegoated). Yet, we have a long list of conflicts the US either started outright, or entered on its own volition for reasons that just can't be called self-defense by any sane person: Korea (1950), Vietnam (1960s and 1970s), Libya (1980s), Iraq and Balkans (1990s), Afghanistan (2000s), Syria + Iraq + Libya (2010s) and now Iran. Not to mention the many CIA-led regime changes it instigated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Surely Iraq was the main scapegoat? I've never quite understood how a Saudi national (who hated the secular Saddam Hussein) hiding in Afghanistan caused Iraq to be attacked.

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> as the current preferred name "Dept of War" is now for a different posture with regard to America's adversaries.

…which is the bad thing being discussed, yes. I don’t really understand why “there used to be one” would be exonerative. Not to mention, they didn’t rename it, that requires an act of Congress. Instead they just told everyone to change which name they use. Lines up with the “adult children” theory. Skip the actual work, (which would involve addressing the nation and justifying this change in posture), instead focus on the performative.

As we are seeing in real time with Iran, “we’ll just war!” was a juvenile idea, committed to with near-zero forethought or planning.

> Not to mention, they didn’t rename it, that requires an act of Congress. Instead they just told everyone to change which name they use.

It's wild how people are just going along with it, too. They didn't officially change the name of anything. Why are journalists and people outside of the administration's orbit using the "preferred" but fake name?

To maintain access mostly

Hey, “Gulf of America”!

Starting the war with Iran was definitely a pretty stupid decision, even at this point of it. In a couple of years it will look like the beginning of the end for the US hegemony.

Starting the war with Iraq in 2003 was definitely a pretty stupid decision, and at the time some pundits predicted that it was the beginning of the end for US hegemony. But now a couple decades later the US is still looking pretty hegemonic. US hegemony will end some day, but we should be skeptical of predictions about timing.

For the 2003 Iraq war, US managed to goad 48 countries to get involved [1] For the 2026 Iran war, it looks more like the US was goaded itself. The current coalition consists of Israel and a dozen of Middle East countries providing bases to stage the war. If you squint, it is still looking hegemonic but nothing like what was 20 years ago.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing_(Iraq...

Let’s revisit this comment in 2030. Iran is very different from Iraq in many ways.

No it won't, that's merely fantasy projection (a personal desire for the US to suffer for what it's doing). US hegemony ended with the rise of China's economy into superpower status over the past 10-15 years. There was no scenario where the relatively brief US hegemony from the late 1980s to the late 2000s was going to continue no matter what the US did. China was always going to build a military to match its economic might. That military will gradually project globally.

US hegemony lasted for a mere ~20 years. Today it does not possess hegemony, China is able to stand-off fully with the US both economically and militarily (at least in Asia).

Iran is a regional conflict. It will matter less than the Iraq war and occupation did.

Maybe. But the Iran conflict also ties in with the Ukraine war, which is an assertion of Russian power into that US-Europe/China duopoly. And it's happening at the same time as the former alliance is breaking.

It's possible that it will be a regional conflict the way the Serbian/Austro-Hungarian conflict was regional. Or the way people pretended that the Germany/Sudetenland conflict was regional.

I don't wish to catastophize. But I also think it's important to realize that this does have the potential to become much worse very suddenly. That doesn't make the decisions easy, but they shouldn't be easy.

Nonsense. China remains unable to project power much beyond the first island chain. They're building fast and that will change in a few years but as of today their conventional military capabilities remain very limited and defensive. When was the last time a Chinese carrier strike group deployed to the Middle East?

If US hegemony is total, why is there no oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz?

Why does the US economy rely so heavily on chips manufactured in Taiwan, and on components, products, and services provided by China?

The difference between the US and China is that China understands that carrier strike groups are not the modern definition of hegemony.

There has never been any such thing as "total" hegemony, so that's a strawman argument. The US doesn't get much oil from the Strait of Hormuz and so while starting another war with Iran was a stupid move, the consequences are largely someone else's problem. I agree that depending on other countries for strategically critical manufacturing was a bad move. Fortunately that's now being rectified but it will take some time.

https://www.semiconductors.org/chips/

China's attempts at hegemony have largely consisted of making loans on bad terms to corrupt developing countries and then trying to foreclose when they don't pay. This has not worked.

This take is extremely arrogant. You can make the argument that shuffling the deck like this will lead to unexpected outcomes but claiming one way or the other to know the outcome is just silly.

If anyone feels sure they know what the next several years has in store regarding Iran they are just demonstrating their own ignorance. I’d expect more people here to be cognisant of the Dunning Kruger effect.

I obviously don’t know what the future has in store for us.

But I’m pretty sure that any imaginable outcome of this war will be bad for the US, at a time where they are withdrawing from global politics to concentrate on national politics.

IMO worst case this will lead to a massive civil war in the US and best case to a devaluation of US military might (aka their army will be less respected/feared). Or anything in between.

We can revisit this comment in a couple years and laugh about how wrong i was though

This war is like going to the dentist for a root canal. No one likes it, OTOH none of neighboring countries want a second "north Korea" as their neighbor. Time will tell.

Like going to the dentist for a root canal when it's your neighbors that actually needs one and you can't afford it because a significant portion of your income is already paying down debt, the problem is getting worse, and you just decided to make less money this year

It's like going to a hardware store for a root canal. The goal might be laudable, but the execution and results are just as important.

> The "silver dollar" change isn't -- it's the dime. The design was in the works before the current administration, and is only intended to be for the 250th anniversary

Referring to a dime as a dollar bothered me too. Going deeper, the absence of the olive branch is actually an intentional historical reference to the Revolutionary War, where peace was tragically lost. According to the artist who made it, the open claw is to symbolize the desire to regain it:

The image takes inspiration from the Great Seal of the United States, and represents the colonists before and during the American Revolution, Custer explained. While he included the arrows from the seal, he left out the olive branch to symbolize the fact that the colonies hadn’t yet reached peace — but left the claw open to demonstrate that they were waiting for it.

https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2026/02/philadelphia-mint-c...

We can soon rename "Dept of War" into "Dept of Debt".

USA= United States of Accounts payable

Famed spy fiction writer Tom Clancy surely knows the provenance of the name Department of War.

Totally different guy actually. The author died in 2013. I was briefly experiencing a bit of disgust at the idea that they were now ghostwriting blog posts as him, before clicking around the site.

Better to have two names for one thing than one name for two, that's my view.

Exactly

Suspicious.

> as the current preferred name "Dept of War" is now for a different posture with regard to America's adversaries.

The “Dept of War” naming is not aimed at our adversaries. It’s aimed internally. It’s chest beating from man children who want desperately to identify as “alpha males”.

The same man who calls himself the “president of peace” unilaterally renamed the department of defense. It’s entirely legitimate to call this out as nonsense.

The current preferred name is Department of Defense. Ask anyone who isn’t incompetence aligned.

That's the official name. The preferred one by the government is Dept of War. [1]

As the original poster said:

> If you're going to call people stupid or immature for making certain decisions, maybe take a couple minutes to find out who made the decisions, and/or what the history of those and similar changes has been.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/09/fact-sheet-pr...

Well I think the operative question here is “preferred by who?”. The current government prefers it. Voters do not. None of us are obligated to indulge the “secondary title” nonsense in an executive order clearly designed to sidestep the actual legal process for a name change.

> If you're going to call people stupid or immature for making certain decisions, maybe take a couple minutes to find out who made the decisions, and/or what the history of those and similar changes has been.

“We won the first world war, we won the second world war, we won everything before that and in between,” Trump said at the signing. “And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense.”

Seems like a stupid and immature reason enough to me.

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Just to add, it was in the process of manufacture during Biden, signed into production during Trump. A unfortunately timed nothing burger.

Not to say that War is Peace folks won’t jump on it.

In an alternate universe, Kamala Harris might be in Iran now. But her choice of SECDEF would be competent. No less than 1M Americans are more qualified than Hegseth; for the first time, I think.

The effects of Idiocracy are much worse than we appreciate. I believe it's hidden in part by technology (as a cognitive crutch) and part by top skilled immigration (people previously suppressed in their undeveloped countries). And education is much, much worse almost everywhere by leaning more to memorization and catering to the lowest common denominator. Student A is bad at math and good at language, student B is the opposite, both get the worst education for both subjects.

I think we haven't felt yet the true consequences of this. Worldwide.

Education is a weird field with perhaps a few thousand years of very good unimplemented ideas.

Imagine training an llm by putting it in a room with other untrained LLMs? All that knowledge is sure to rubb of!

A big part of the problem education systems are solving is not "how do we get knowledge to children", but "how do we get masses of children to learn without coercion of the ugliest kind".

Some children are innately motivated to learn. Some are motivated so strongly you could give them a smartphone and watch them learn all they need to learn in life. But those children aren't the norm - they're the freaky 1 in 1000 outliers. And education has to work with everyone.

Thus, peer pressure. That's what putting a whole bunch of students in the same room accomplishes.

> Some children are innately motivated to learn

I don't think I've met a single child in my life that isn't excited about learning about new stuff, but it really depends on what it is, it differs a lot! And they're all different as well, someone who's really into math might hate history, or vice-versa. But they all want to learn something, in my experience.

The problem occurs when you place them all in one school, and force them to learn everything, even things they don't want to learn about, and that kind ruins the other parts they actually find fun and engaging.

> The problem occurs when you place them all in one school, and force them to learn everything, even things they don't want to learn about

A difficult part is that children aren't really in the position to know what they want to learn most of the time.

Sure, many prefer sports over math but covering a broad spectrum in pre-teen and teenager education is quite important to get them develop these preferences and themselves as a person. They are given more agency/choice (electives etc.) as they grow up.

There are also topics you need to learn that aren't fun/engaging (especially as fun/engaging is quite subjective and depends on the individual). Especially when those topics are prerequisites to other potentially fun topics (you will have to learn the fundamentals before engaging with advanced topics in most subjects)

Lest you think there’s one simple solution, my kid went to a school for one year that deliberately eliminated all that stuff - no set curriculum, no specific academic goals, and students get the majority of the vote on the rules and anything about the whole setup. They could learn about anything they want to, with no pressure.

Most of the kids spent their whole days playing Xbox, Switch, or brainrot games like Roblox on tablets. (No, they weren’t “creatively building new worlds” on Roblox, just screwing around consuming what others had made in order to manipulate them into spending Robux).

Yep. This is the human condition for the vast majority of humans.

I grew up in a place where education and hard work wasn’t valued much by the community. Those that could scam some sort of government benefits did so, and they certainly were not working on art or helping out their communities with all their spare time. At best was a consumption state - the median was actively self destructive behavior, and the worst was behaviors that ruined their surrounding community.

This whole idea that on average humans would hit some utopia of creativity and community mindedness if only they could throw off the yoke of needing to work to survive goes against every single bit of my lived experience. And recent history.

The kids who went to the local public school my nieces went to basically did the bare minimum - usually just showing up is enough these days. Zero interest in learning or putting effort in. Only when they were removed from that environment and put with self-selecting (well, parent-selecting) peers that were curated beforehand did this fact change.

The vast majority of humans are not inherently motivated to better themselves in any way.

Its so sad that humans perform best when suffering. I adopted a supper skinny worn out street cat, all she did was sleep eat and poop, she never went outside, straight from the sofa to the food and back to the sofa, really really slowly. For 4 years it did nothing but sleep, no exceptions. Then one day a different cat looked around the corner of the open door. In 0.3 seconds she launched from the sofa covering impressive distance and ran after it to the end of the street. Safe to say, if I don't move for 4 years I wouldn't be looking to pick a fight. But cats do get stupid if they don't have to work for food.

What about the minority?

There were a few kids, primarily among the handful of high school aged ones, who seemed to be doing some sort of work vaguely resembling schoolwork, doing some kind of reports on some topic, or a project writing some kind of video game mod.

I hear this often but I don't really buy it. Variety is good. If I had been routed into a field in first grade or whatever based on what I liked and was good at at the time my life would look completely different, but likely not better. I certainly never would have taken art history or design classes in college, both requirements that I wouldn't have otherwise considered, but among my favorite classes in retrospect.

>Some children are innately motivated to learn. Some are motivated so strongly you could give them a smartphone and watch them learn all they need to learn in life. But those children aren't the norm - they're the freaky 1 in 1000 outliers. And education has to work with everyone.

I worked as a teacher for a year. Children are innately motivated and curious (this is not just a cliche). If there was any laziness it usually stemmed from fear of not being good enough but they definitely all tried, even students that didn't know their 5 times table by age 10. Some students have greater self-perseverance than others though, some can't handle being wrong and fear being seen as less-then their peers. Others like to challenge themselves without such fear.

> fear of not being good enough

I believe that fear is not unwarranted. It's a learned behavior that helps one survive in their environment. I imagine many of those children were likely punished for mistakes or for not being good enough.

Don't ask me how I know...

>Imagine training an llm by putting it in a room with other untrained LLMs? All that knowledge is sure to rubb of!

Right around puberty your theory starts to break down.

LLMs have only a very small working memory and they don't have a memory beyond the current session.

What would you recommend I read if I wanted to learn more about a few thousand years of very good unimplemented ideas?

I mean, that LLM idea _sounds_ ridiculous, but similar ideas have worked really well in machine learning for games like Chess and AI.

This is assuming that the knowledge space being aimed at is discoverable solely by exploration of 1v1 games. Maths and maybe some of the sciences could be set up like this if you were very clever about it, but not much else.

> by top skilled immigration

who are mostly from countries where education is

> leaning more to memorization

There’s a potential irony here that a commenter lamenting the decline of education in the West is leaning on the “critical thinking over memorization” trope in contemporary Western education, when that trope has contributed to a decline in educational effectiveness.

The massive success of information retrieval allowed people to trick themselves that they no longer needed to remember things, and remember them easily. They should instead turn focus on critical thinking.

But critical thinking is knowledge based. At least, I buy E. D Hirch’s argument that it is.

Believe or not, if you look at Zhihu[0] you'll see a lot of people glazing Western education system. Grass is always greener on the other side of Pacific.

[0]: China's Quora equivalent, but much better than Quora

I think both viewpoints can be right. Chinese people come here, study engineering, chemistry, pharma, computer science, etc. and then graduate and then they invent and make insanely cool things.

Meanwhile at the same schools, so many Americans major in things like the various identity “____ studies,” fake sciences like psychology, etc. They graduate from college with potentially less useful skills or knowledge than could have been gained by watching a few (non-AI) YouTube videos a day.

We’ve turned half or more of our educational system into babysitting and self-esteem therapy for a generation we’ve raised to be incredibly anxious and fragile.

Memorizing is not understanding. You can see this clearly with LLMs trying to predict outside their training data.

Yes, memorization is important. What I argue it's pushing out truly understanding and critical thinking. Kids need trial and error from experimentation (play).

This argument is also explored by the “Quantum Computing for the Very Curious” series that uses spaced repetition to teach an advanced topic. The series has been posted to HN more than once.

I also find it convincing.

The trend of discounting memorization is damaging. Memorization is an incredible tool for learning.

Memorization is pretty much the single largest undervalued thing in the west which has a gigantic impact on the mental capabilities of people.

I mean I get that rote memorization of eg. The multiplication table (7x7=49 etc pp) feels pointless, but it is training your brain. And a growing person whose brain is still developing who continuously memorizes new things will be smarter by the time they're 20 then the same person that didn't, only put in minimal effort because everyone around them talks like intelligence is mostly genetics.

I mean genetics definitely plays a role given the same circumstances - but your effort - including memorization - is massively more impactful.

> And a growing person whose brain is still developing who continuously memorizes new things will be smarter by the time they're 20 then the same person that didn't,

I dunno, I guess it depends on what we mean by "smart" but I've definitively met (and been friends) with people who weren't able to live on their own by their 20s, although they were very "smart" in school and highly intelligent in general. I've also seen the reverse, dumb people being "better at life in general". I don't think it's as black and white as you're trying to make it out to be.

Possibly things are worse, but here’s an argument that we’ve gotten unrealistically ambitious about universal education through college:

What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Ever https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-people-want-from-o...

College and school are super suboptimal at dispensing education.

We keep smart kids co-mingled with disruptive kids and bullies. We need to do what Asian countries do - entrance exams at every level.

We don't let kids excel at their interest area. Math and science, obviously, but we lack programs for entrepreneurship and leadership that might be better for kids that aren't STEM-focused. Something like a scouts-type program that teaches them business, accounting, management, leadership. Sports and the arts are pretty well covered, though.

If you're born poor and/or without interested parents, the system doesn't help mobility much. Kids gravitate to the environments they live in, and school doesn't shelter them from this.

College itself is a bubble for many degree programs. It's fantastic for hands-on sciences, but useless for career development in liberal arts. It will put you into debt if you're not already wealthy. We need to subsidize STEM and reintroduce college loan dischargeability so risk to lenders is back in the equation.

Programs are too expensive. Universities sell themselves as "experiences". Amenities, facilities, day spas. Admins are too big. Kids are taking degrees they shouldn't.

Grad programs are also inefficient. Academic publishing, the research and grant treadmill, not letting smart students immigrate, ...

The whole thing needs to be gutted and rewritten. From early childhood to post-grad.

> We keep smart kids co-mingled with disruptive kids and bullies. We need to do what Asian countries do - entrance exams at every level.

When I was in about the 7th grade, our school switched to "Tracking": In each grade, the smart kids were in track 1, the next smartest were in track 2, all the way down to track 6 which were the kids who unfortunately needed so much remedial help that they were probably not even going to be functional adults post high school. The curricula were tuned for each track's academic level. Moving track-to-track could happen yearly. This system was great for keeping the nerds away from the troublemakers. Overnight, it changed for the better. I hardly saw the crayon-eaters, only in the hallways, and they hardly saw me. We never shared classes. It didn't fully stop bullying: Smart kids bully too, but in different ways. But, it did put a huge dent in it.

I don't know why we abandoned Tracking. It was such a drastic and instantly positive change, as a kid.

Worth mentioning that I also think bullying is less of a problem now? It's not gone, but when I was a kid I was bullied mercilessly on the playground and on my walks home for a few years (until I learned how to fight back, but that's a different story), my kids just do not have that sort of experience in school, I mean, it's "there" but it does not appear to be nearly as bad today as it was in the late 90's early 'oughts.

My kids were literally shocked to learn recently that people got made fun of for being gay when I was a kid, or that gay was a pejorative. They've never seen a fight on the playground etc. I only have n=3 as a sample size, so, maybe it's bad in other schools or other places, but yeah, at least for me, I think it's a lot less "Lord of the Flies" today than it was 25 years ago.

The college degree system is just so bad that I’d say it’s a farce but no one should be laughing.

They’ve managed to con us into believing that first every teenager should decide what their “true passion” is, then if it’s not white collar they should be pressured to change their answer until it is, then they should take out $100,000+ in loans to live on a pretty campus for four years and hopefully mostly pay attention to the classes, and then they graduate and are greeted with the reality that half the majors offered are primarily academic pursuits with the employment possibilities mostly just being the colleges themselves. It’s a recipe for making an entire generation of nihilists (GenZ), who have a right to feel completely bamboozled and ripped off. I blame their late Gen-X parents for teaching them these fairytales in the first place.

You get a free education in entrepreneurship and leadership when you're born into the upper socioeconomic groups.

I think you are reflecting on survivor bias for successful people.

Almost all rich families I met saw entrepreneurship as lower-status. They chase arts and such. They are posturing they don't need to care about money. [of course it's a lie, but they do it anyway]

Only a fraction of the new rich get their kids into entrepreneurship while the rest are just spoiled. I heard many times "I want my kids to have all the things I din't have growing up" and then the kids turn into horrible entitled brats who hate their parents. Then the inevitable "How could they do this to me! I gave them everything!". It's not easy raising kids, even with enough money.

What's the solution to that problem

Nothing can be done about that.

We need to focus on ways to boost class mobility at a young age.

> And education is much, much worse almost everywhere by leaning more to memorization

The idea that (correct) answers are something that can and may be known is all over the place, lately also in technology (LLMs, curve fitting, etc). Notably, answers must be able to validate themselves, every time. (Western) education used to be about this, before it reoriented towards instruction.

Dumb people - smart computers. What's the consequence of that I wonder.

> (people previously suppressed in their undeveloped countries)

Ah yes, the undevelopped and oppressive countries able to provide them good enough education and not make them debt-ridden for it.

I don’t blame people for moving for better wages, but the level of rationalization used here to make brain drain feel virtuous is off the charts.

Idiocracy really seems to appeal to eugenicists. Is “stupid people breed too much” really an issue we think is worth propagating?

Society absolutely needs to more correctly incentivize smart people to 'get together' to form child creating and raising units (families).

Maybe society should focus on supporting high quality environments for raising children well.

This probably includes a bunch of budget expensive things like...

  * Rich interaction between smart adults and children, at low density
  * Ensure good breakfast and lunch at minimum
  * year round childcare
  * Every child great medical care

There can be also a softer version of it, which is that cultural richness and focus on education are easily transmitted within families. A society that doesn't value culture and education is going to produce less educated families with even less educated children.

It’s also true that IQ is both real and highly heritable. The military uses what’s essentially an IQ test to screen out the bottom 15% or so of the population: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201801.... The military has found that people with aptitude test scores below the cutoff can’t be trained to competently perform any job in the military.

IQ is also highly heritable: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927.

Genetic heritability, which is a subset of heritability, does not generally mean what people think it means, though. To the extent IQ can be attributed genetically to parents, it does not imply a "compounding" effect where smart people continuously have smarter kids and dumb people have dumber kids. This can understood by analogy to other personal traits like eyesight, height, weight, hair color, etc. which vary within a range across generations with occasional unpredictable outliers. This is why folks who do test for intelligence, have to test each person individually and not just rely on bloodline tracking.

Yes, but since the heritability is high, the average IQ of the children will be close to the average IQ of the parents, despite the fact that it will tend to regress towards the mean.

That’s not how genetics works. It’s not a simple averaging scheme.

That’s exactly how it works in the standard additive model of heritability, and we have lots of empirical evidence that heritability of intelligence matches that model very well.

IQ correlates most strongly with socioeconomic class, with members of the same ethnic group scoring higher over the decades as that ethnic group as a whole becomes wealthier.

Exactly the opposite is true. Adoption studies have been used to isolate the effect of SES itself, and the contribution of that factor is low: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... (“Proportion of variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects of parental IQs was estimated at .01… Heritability was estimated to be 0.42.”).

This is just SIBS data. It has all the standard "Minnesota" limitations: the study is tiny, the cohort isn't demographically representative, adoption isn't itself random, nothing deconfounds the prenatal environment, and the children in the cohort are also adopted at different ages.

It's one thing to call out an interesting paper; it's another to act as if the matter has been settled simply by pointing to SIBS.

The assertion I was responding to was this: “IQ correlates most strongly with socioeconomic class.”

Find me any study that shows that IQ is more strongly correlated with SES than with parental IQ.

Ah, yes, the IQ test; the universal, unbiased gauge of intellect across all cultures.

It isn't that, but it is one of the strongest predictors of success in the US military.

Sure, but what has that got to do with “IQ is also highly heritable?” which, in this context, suggests intelligence is something innate and biological, rather than recognizing an IQ test as a gauge skewed by culture and socioeconomic status.

Well, that was a different reference in GP's post. You can go read it. Heritability is definitely a thing, but far from the only thing and it isn't simple Mendelian inheritance - there are many components to intelligence that reflect differently in gene transfer and so while you can see a correlation in specific individuals and their immediate ancestors there are lots of exceptions and its probably a mirage - if seen at all - in any large demographic. See my other comment on the problems with eugenics in this thread.

I'm trying to understand your comment. You write: "heritability is definitely a thing". I think I agree? What thing is it you're saying heritability is?

Attacking IQ test is like vaccine denialism. People don’t like the fact that requiring individuals to cooperate can enhance health outcomes for the group as a whole. Similarly, people don’t like the idea that some individuals are just born smarter than other individuals.

I don’t mean to suggest that an IQ test doesn’t have any value, only that they don’t account for many subtleties across (sub)cultural boundaries and are too heavily considered in determining one’s intellect, and often worth, by society.

You’re using Motte-and-Bailey tactics to conflate IQ test results with vaccines denialism, on the basis that they are both “for the greater good”, which conveniently paints my point in a certain political light. How exactly does selectivity on the basis of IQ test results “enhance health outcomes for groups as a whole”? Maybe you could back up this argument with some historical context.

> “Similarly, people don’t like the idea that some individuals are just born smarter than other individuals.”

What data do you have to support this claim? And how much of this inherent intellect factors into IQ test results?

> You’re using Motte-and-Bailey tactics to conflate IQ test results with vaccines denialism

No, I’m pointing out that in both cases people attack the science because the implications of the science are in tension with their ideological priors. The fact that top-down coercion is an effective response to pandemics is inconvenient for libertarian-conservatives. Likewise, the fact that people differ in their intellectual capabilities from birth is inconvenient for liberal egalitarians.

> Likewise, the fact that people differ in their intellectual capabilities from birth

Yes, of course people differ in intellectual capabilities at birth. That is not the argument. The argument is how much that actually impacts IQ test score results.

Your point suggests that “science” supports the idea of IQ being predetermined at birth.

> Likewise, the fact that people differ in their intellectual capabilities from birth is inconvenient for liberal egalitarians.

It is? Egalitarianism is usually considered to be the position that all humans have equal moral worth, not the position that all humans have equivalent physical and mental capacities. Not even actually existing Communists believed the latter, as far as I’m aware.

But just to double check:

> Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or moral status. As such, all people should be accorded equal rights and treatment under the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarianism

Nor does the existence of special laws or practices concerning low (or high, for that matter) IQ people pose any great obstacle to egalitarianism, assuming the laws or practices in question do not infringe upon moral personhood.

Rawls is a typical egalitarian philosopher and he takes care to account for these natural variations in the human condition during both the classic _A Theory of Justice_ and the modern “restatement” in _Justice as Fairness_.

> People don’t like the fact that requiring individuals to cooperate can enhance health outcomes for the group as a whole.

I am not certain where you are deriving this claim from.

> Similarly, people don’t like the idea that some individuals are just born smarter than other individuals.

Nor this claim, as well.

I have had many discussions on the topic of IQ, and I have never once seen anybody ever argue that there is no variance in human intelligence. There is a large range of variance in every human attribute. That is not the focus of the debate. Rather, most of the debate seems to be surrounding the construct validity of IQ. Statistical validity != construct validity.

There's no debate on construct validity of IQ among the experts in the field. The consensus position is that IQ tests measure something real, that the tests enjoy extremely high measurement invariance (which implies construct validity), and that the results have extremely high predictive validity (relative to literally anything else in the entire field of psychology). The current debate is more along the lines, whether the contribution of genes to variance in IQ is closer to 30% or to 80%.

Wait, this comment starts out with an assertion about one scientific question (the construct validity of a quantitative psychological metric) and ends with a statement about the range of a totally different question, and it's one studied by different fields than the former question.

Yes, I could have left off the last comment. I added it to illustrate where the debate currently lies. I am not sure what your point is.

That the logic of your comment doesn't even hang together? Which debate? You've managed to cite two of them.

I’m really struggling to understand what your point is. The person I replied to was wrong as to where the current debate is among experts, so I pointed it out, and gave an example of where the debate currently is. Is that really so strange thing to say?

> Statistical validity != construct validity.

Sure. But in science, we regularly postulate the existence of some construct, and confirm that construct by conducting many empirical tests that return results consistent with the existence of that construct. General intelligence is like that. We can’t see it directly. But we have myriad results that are statistically consistent with its existence.

Results consistent with the existence of a construct are not sufficient evidence for the existence of a construct. We can talk about statistical correlations till the Sun goes down, and I will not dispute that this ethereal 'g-factor' can infer minor to moderate predictions in some domains of people's lives at a population level.

However, I have one question. What evidence is there that this 'g-factor' is actually representative of general intelligence? You may not use the correlation values used to derive the g-factor to support your argument. My understanding is that correlations cannot be used to explain the general factor because the general factor should be what explains the correlations.

If you are interested, I implore you to read this blog from the statistician, Cosma Shalizi, of CMU. His explanation is far better than anything I could attempt to make.

https://bactra.org/weblog/523.html

Sorry, what exactly do you mean by "is representative of general intelligence"? This is a very abstract statement. What does this mean in scientific, empirical terms? What kind of facts we would observe in the world where this is true? What empirical observations we'd make in the world where it's false?

> Sorry, what exactly do you mean by "is representative of general intelligence"? This is a very abstract statement.

No need to apologize. Perhaps my g is too low to describe my thoughts properly.

> "is representative of general intelligence"?

This factor that is derived from the positive correlations, g, is called general intelligence. So, g is nominally general intelligence, but is g actually what the name implies? One can take n number of positively correlated but independent things, and there will always be a some factor that can be derived from it. However, that does not mean the underlying factor is necessarily causal.

> This is a very abstract statement.

We are discussing abstract concepts.

> What does this mean in scientific, empirical terms?

That causality would be scientifically and empirically verifiable.

> What kind of facts we would observe in the world where this is true? What empirical observations we'd make in the world where it's false?

Alas, that is precisely the point I was trying to paraphrase from Shalizi. Whether g be true or false -- the result wouldn't look any different. The methodology being used cannot determine what is true nor false, and that is the crux of this entire problem.

One can take n number of positively correlated but independent things, and there will always be a some factor that can be derived from it.

I hope you understand that your vague question cannot be seen as equivalent to this rather more concrete statement. That’s why I asked for clarification, and your patronizing comments were really not called for.

In any case, Shalizi is very wrong, probably because he is entirely unfamiliar with the literature. He is wrong on multiple accounts.

First, yes, any number positively correlated measurements will yield a common factor. However, when talking about g, this is not an artifact of how we constructed IQ tests. Shalizi says:

What psychologists sometimes call the “positive manifold” condition is enough, in and of itself, to guarantee that there will appear to be a general factor. Since intelligence tests are made to correlate with each other, it follows trivially that there must appear to be a general factor of intelligence.

But this is just not true. Tests are not made to correlated with each other. Any time anyone attempts to construct a test of general mental ability, we always find the same g factor, even if they explicitly attempt to make a battery that tries to measure distinct, uncorrelated mental aptitudes. Observe how Shalizi fails to provide a single example of a test that does not exhibit the positive manifold with other tests.

Second, unlike Shalizi, we know that g is the predictive component of the IQ tests. IQ predicts real world outcomes very well, but what is really interesting is that the predictive power of individual subtests of an IQ test is practically perfectly correlated with g-loadings of the subtest. This would be very surprising if g was just a statistical artifact.

Shalizi says

So far as I can tell, however, nobody has presented a case for g apart from thoroughly invalid arguments from factor analysis; that is, the myth.

But this is just baffling if you have any familiarity with the literature.

Whether g be true or false -- the result wouldn't look any different. The methodology being used cannot determine what is true nor false, and that is the crux of this entire problem.

That’s just not true. For example, if g was a statistical artifact, one of the hundreds of intelligence tests devised would have not exhibited the positive manifold with all the others. It would not be correlated with heritability. It would not be correlated with phenotype features like reaction time. The world where g is a statistical artifact looks much different than our world.

> I will not dispute that this ethereal 'g-factor' can infer minor to moderate predictions in some domains of people's lives at a population level

The U.S. military won’t hire people below an 83 IQ to peel potatoes, because experience shows that such people can’t effectively be trained. So it’s more than just “minor” predictions.

One, you are conflating IQ and g, which are not the same thing. IQ is a proxy for the measurement of g, but it does not measure g directly.

Two, the military does not administer protected IQ exams, but rather, the ASVAB which correlates with IQ.

Three, our entire global society does not revolve around who can do what for the military.

Four, what can someone with an IQ of 84 do that one with an IQ of 83 cannot?

Five, the US military has plenty of uses for low scores. If one can't peel potatoes, then I'm sure the military would just send them out to stomp for land mines. However, Federal law is what disallows this, not the military: https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-10-armed-forces/10-usc-se...

And why do you think Congress has passed this law? What prompted them to micromanage the military in this manner? I encourage you to research this topic, “McNamara’s folly” will serve as a good starting keyword. Spoiler: it has everything to do with unsuitability of low IQ enlisted.

FWIW, ASVAB is an IQ test. Any intelligence researcher will tell you so, because it exhibits the usual positive manifold, you find the usual g factor in it, and it shows high correlation with other IQ test. The military doesn’t usually call it as such for political reasons, but will happily admit in private that ASVAB and WAIS measure the same thing: https://web.archive.org/web/20200425230037/https://www.rand....

> If you are interested, I implore you to read this blog from the statistician, Cosma Shalizi, of CMU. His explanation is far better than anything I could attempt to make.

Ah, this essay is very, very good. I’m not surprised, Shalizi is a genius, but I hadn’t read this particular one before. Thanks for the link.

Attacking IQ is nothing whatsoever like vaccine denialism. The valid/meaningful uses of IQ are widely debated in several hard science fields. That's not true of vaccines.

> ttacking IQ is nothing whatsoever like vaccine denialism. The valid/meaningful uses of IQ are widely debated in several hard science fields

You’re shifting the goal posts from the first sentence to the second sentence. What I said was: “IQ is real and highly heritable.” Responding to that by asserting that IQ tests are “skewed” and culturally biased, as OP did, is up there with vaccine denialism.

If you want to make a more nuanced point about what you can use IQ to prove, sure, that’s up for debate. But that’s not what we were talking about.

Compared to what though? Also, how is success in the military even defined? Highest rank? Most years served? Least injuries? The highest body count? Lowest double-digit APR% on 2018 Mustang with a rebuilt title?

You can learn about these things by following the links given by the GP of my comment and reviewing the studies they reference. The other strongest criteria of success was the time of their two-mile run (at their specific age of enlistment).

I read the links, and the answers are still unsatisfactory.

Here is the abstract from the original paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pms.1989.69.1.2...

> The purpose of this research was to assess how well success in early combat training was predicted by scores on a test of general intelligence

It seems this research pertains to early combat training and not broad, post-training success in one's military career. Not to mention the research is essentially predicting test performance from test performance. I imagine the same predictions can be made about one's two-mile run and one's three-mile run.

> Analysis indicated that intelligence test scores AND run time significantly predicted success, each adding to the prediction provided by the other.

Which is not surprising. It shows that intelligence is just one of the multiple contributing factors. Being exceptionally tall is essential in the NBA, but being exceptionally tall, alone, is insufficient to make it to the NBA.

It loses its signal once you reach triple digits. You don't want someone with <80 but it tells you nothing about someone with 120 or 160.

They eliminate the bottom third of applicants by ASVAB score which would mean an IQ of 93 if it translated exactly (ADVAB to IQ and SAT is only about 0.8 correlation). That is the minimum to get in to do any job at all for a minimum enlistment contract. So to talk about statistically significant career success predictors you would have to get into the low three digits, just looking at nothing but the math of IQ distributions. A cut-line of 80 would only drop the bottom 9% of the general population.

I call BS. From my extensive anecdata:

No amount of education, experience, and grit can turn a 100 IQ person into Einstein. IQ is a massive multiplier.

Do we even know what turns someone into an Einstein? The sheer reason you even mention Einstein is because he was beyond exceptional. There have been millions of people to walk the face of this planet with astronomical IQs, but there has only been a handful of Einsteins, von Neumanns, Eulers, Mozarts, etc.. So few that the uttering of the names of these individuals carries strong meaning.

It's also worth noting that none of these individuals ever took an IQ test. Their genius is entirely recognized through their work. Which again raises the question of what exactly IQ testing and what IQ is adding to our understanding of exceptional ability.

It appears that over a century of research in psychometrics has demonstrated nothing we already could not infer. We do not need some boring puzzle test to tell us someone with Down syndrome will not be a Nobel Prize winner. Nor do we need some boring puzzle test to tell us that von Neumann or Mozart had godlike childhood abilities and could maybe make large contributions for humanity.

The movie did have an unfortunate eugenic implication, which is doubly unfortunate because it wasn’t even necessary for the plot. Society can just get dumb due to people not valuing education.

Genetically we’re not that different from cavemen, so the floor (without any weird eugenic theories about dumb people breeding too much) is “tamed caveman.”

Education is still very much present in Idiocracy (Brawndo blah blah). It's the lack of value in logic and thought process that causes the problem. When people value winning an argument on a logical fallacy, there's a severe issue. Education is oft used as the fallacy itself.

Much like today on all sides of every significant debate. Where the loudest most emotional rise on feelings over logic.

If a person doesn't immensely value learning they're wrong, they exist as part of the problem.

I think you hit on a key note about learning when they're wrong, and I think that's one of the biggest issues with social media and modern debate - namely that being wrong in public is incredibly painful and can often destroy a reputation. But then people realized there are groups who agree with them even when they're wrong, so the most important thing is to cater to them and never agree that you're wrong in public, and some percentage of people will go along with your argument.

I think never believing fully in your own ideas and always being able to admit you're wrong and always questioning is almost a super power that I wish we valued more.

A room full of people in charge of the most power nation wouldn't fall prey to something like false dichotomy, during an important address to said nation? Would they...?

>The movie did have an unfortunate eugenic implication

You’re thinking of dysgenic, not eugenic.

Gattaca is a movie about eugenics.

It’s not the stupid people’s fault. They’ve always bred. The problem is smart people used to as well, and now we’ve stopped. Because of lots of reasons that make sense for the individuals:

- childfree is probably more enjoyable

- kids expensive and student debt crippling, so let’s delay starting till we’re 37 and own a home

- scary time/place to raise kids if you think about it too much

- etc.

So that’s thrown things out of balance. it’s not eugenics to say that smart people shouldn’t hold their birth rate so close to zero.

"Stupid people breed too much" is a proposition that is either true or false, within some worldview.

(For example, how stupid is stupid? How much breeding is to much? Is there even such a thing as too much breeding? All these are variables up for debate.)

But preventing the spread of an idea that you fear may be true, simply because you don't like the consequences, is intellectually dishonest.

Would you endorse suppressing the idea that the earth orbits the sun just because you lived in a milieu where the primacy of the church was more important than truth?

Argue against eugenics because it's unethical to prevent people from reproducing (and therefore no amount of "stupid people" reproducing is "too much"). Don't cloud your judgment by denying propositions that you fear may be true.

Depends on the timescale you care about. It is, objectively, a very big problem over larger timescales (assuming we aren't killed off and don't engineer our children's genes).

Really the issue is about cultivating a culture of caring and willingness to learn. That generally threatens the powerful so it is always an uphill battle to protect said values.

> Idiocracy really seems to appeal to eugenicists

And all men are Socrates...?

Singapore seems to have done quite well operating on that notion

Casually tossing about an accusation like that is not at all in keeping with the guidelines for this website.

That movie can be understood in several different ways.

Also, I'd like to point out that the core problems with eugenics isn't an assertion that intelligence is hereditary, but that:

- Race is not a scientifically grounded concept

- Complex traits do not have Mendelian inheritance

- Measurement of intelligence is problematic

- Even measures that strongly correlate with success are confounded by environmental, cultural and economic factors

Thus, the conclusions drawn by eugenicists are based on their racism and prejudice, not by any scientific conclusions. It is a pseudo-scientific framework to justify (at the limit) ethnic cleansing.

The opening of the movie could also be read as a commentary or satire about a certain type of reality TV show or talk show that was popular at that time, but it was also a really cheap shot at a specific class of people and demonstrated a level of contempt that cannot really be defended.

But the rest of the movie was focused more on anti-intellectual and shallow culture and corporate greed - the heritability of intelligence never got another mention.

I'd actually say we could use more targeted memorization for things you have to know. I'd love if my kid's school taught them much about spaced repetition. At risk of being that guy, Anki has changed my life for the better and I'm trying to foster an understanding of the utility of SRS in my kids.

I think it's kind of a good thing to learn how to not have to look literally everything up because that's a time suck. I speak 3 languages "decently." My native language, one I learned as an exchange student (it's rusty, but it's still in there and if I start speaking it regularly the words come back almost unbidden), and Spanish from several long-distance backpacking trips in Spain for months and months. I dabble in others as necessary. If I'm learning a new language for travel or something I find that memory alone is invaluable. A few months of using SRS and memorizing 1000 words and you are suddenly able to communicate with a millions of people. Sure you might speak caveman Italian or whatever, but read a little bit of grammar you're off to the races. You're no Dante, but you are able to get by - that's so useful, and I can't see why people eschew the practical advantages of learning how to memorize!

I'm taking some classes (perpetually, I don't know why I must hate myself) and I find I consistently do better learning new things if I just know some facts about a topic before I even learn all the connections between ideas. Let's say you are learning, I don't know, DC circuits? I'm taking that class for fun this semester because I'm mostly self-taught in hardware and wanted to fill in some of the gaps. If you need to know how to calculate the step response, sure you can do it from first principles if you've taken ODE. But imagine if you're taking this as your first "real" engineering class on the EE track as a 19 or 20 year old kid. At the university I went for undergrad and this university now, you wouldn't get exposed to ODE for another semester or 2. But if you can just memorize the formula now, you can absorb the material - the "why" can come later.

I mean, I can never remember some math things, so I just derive the math when I need it, sure, I assume everybody does this where they have to, but if I could remember the damn derivation I wouldn't have to. Same with some code. There are some things in this world like matplotlib - I have used it 1000s of times and somehow I've literally barely learned it beyond the basics and constantly end up looking up how do things. As soon as I get the chart I want, it falls out of my brain until I am forced to learn it again to make a chart for a slide a couple months later. But there's insane utility to just... knowing things. When I was a pilot for a living, there were certain emergency procedures and limitations that I was just... expected to know - down cold. I haven't turned a prop for money in almost 6 years now, and there's some emergency procedures and limitations that I still can recite from memory. What's a great way to learn those things? Well... memorizing them. Then there's the practical nature of things. You're not going to derive maneuvering speed from first principles when you encounter mountain wave, you just need to know what you've gotta slow down to.

That doesn't mean throw out your analytical brain, but having access to facts that you can use in furtherance of your cognition is super useful. And I don't really think that is the major "problem" with education in this day and age? I have 3 kids in school. They're great kids and all doing more or less well. From the outside looking in today, I'd say the biggest issues I'm aware of are:

1) A downright authoritarian environment in schools. No seriously, even the school my kids go to which is by the numbers a pretty good school seems a bit like incarceration.

2) The teaching to the lowest common denominator (which you mentioned and I think is a very good point).

3) The money is going to the wrong stuff and so quality is going down but costs are still rising.

4) Schools are basically viewed as babysitting places so that the parents can go and work and contribute to the economy, not hallowed halls of learning or some-such. It's viewed as "jobs training" from the bottom to the top. Even at the university level.

5) The incentives, both social and financial, that exist to become an educator suck and needing licenses and specialized university training to teach in some states means that an engineer with 20 years of experience isn't going to go to school for 2 years just be treated like garbage at some middle school or high school. We're not getting "the best of the best" in education.

6) The phones. I don't think a constant entertainment drip is really that good for young people.

7) Educational software is usually pretty bad? And the kids are forced into using a lot of these garbage tools day in and day out. This isn't really as big of a problem as the rest of the things, but it irritates me when I'm forced to interact with iReady or the absolute garbage (and insanely expensive) platforms the school uses to track grades.

Also, I mentioned this in another thread and got downvoted, but I honestly think that the reversal of the Flynn effect might have some environmental basis too? We go outside a lot less, indoor CO2 counts are higher, issues start occurring above 1000ppm - that's not uncommon, we eat terrible, are more likely to be obese, had COVID, and are filled with plastic, we spend a lot less time bored and are mostly overstimulated. I'm not a biologist, so I wouldn't say that any one of these sorts of things is the "gotcha" like lead or whatever, but yeah, I suspect that there are other environmental effects that are making us collectively make bad decisions more often. I don't know.

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Something being old doesn't meant it's false. It even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_novelty

People have predicted the end of the world for literally thousands of years. Should’ve happened by now, right?

This has names too btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

And what do you call it when someone flings the names of fallacies at their opponent without argumentation?

(I agree with you, though)

There's a first time for everything, and an end to most things. The roman empire lasted hundreds of years, and then it ended. Many empires did. The sun will end too, at some point. Ice ages last for thousands of years, then they end. And there are countless other examples.

"X has lasted a long time so it will last more" is so obviously wrong. Think about it for more than 3 seconds.

Or was it sarcasm? I can't tell anymore.

> “X has lasted a long time so it will last more” is so obviously wrong.

Smarter people than you and I have thought about this problem and come to the opposite conclusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Perhaps some folks don't get the reference.

They capitalized “Idiocracy” so it seems pretty likely they’re unfortunately, whether they know it or not, endorsing the eugenics-based thesis of the movie.

We don't have to support Eugenics to understand there's probably a real effect.

You can’t disentangle “smart people have few kids, dumb people have lots of kids, ergo we are gradually getting dumber” from eugenics (or class for that matter). It’s inherent in the argument. It’s also not how genes work.

It’s a very classist, flawed argument. In some way it’s emblematic of what the right calls “East Coast elitism” yet I find people from across the political spectrum have no issue embracing the argument (because they all assume they’re part of the “smart” group). “Wow look at all these dumb hicks having kids while the smart, responsible, educated people aren’t.“ You really don’t see the issue with that?

There’s even an XKCD for it: https://xkcd.com/603/

Your assessment of "classist" gives away the game. It's either a real thing that can happen via selective pressure (or lack of selective pressure) or it isn't.

You can call it a flawed argument, but then you need to point out the flaw. Intelligence is heritable. Flynn effect has reversed. High IQ people have less kids. What's the flaw?

It’s impossible to make a serious argument while citing IQ as a useful measurement of someone’s cognitive potential.

I also don’t need to prove anything. If you are claiming this phenomenon is real the onus is on you to prove it. I can link a dozen articles about the flawed argument people channel from Idiocracy but you should search it if it interests you.

If we can't agree that IQ is a useful predictor ("measurement") of cognitive performance and potential, perhaps the most supported and studied theory in all of psychology, then I'm afraid we have no common point of discussion.

That’s an alternate reality. IQ as a measurement of “intelligence” is highly controversial and is better explained by home life/environment.

Lots of people find it very politically and idealogically important that IQ be considered controversial, yes.

You can find a lot of ancient people saying it was happening. They were obviously wrong, right? Things are better now than then, so they were wrong. Nevermind that many of them were speaking of real social decline, not of humanity altogether in the long run but of their own society in a less global sense. When Socrates was bitching about "kids these days", Athens was peaking and a long period of uneven decline was starting. So really, he probably wasn't wrong.

Plato, and Heraclitus before him, both thought that society would eventually collapse. They sounded smart but would’ve been quite surprised to see what we’ve done with the world.

Their societies arguably were doomed. I'm sure they'd be impressed by much we have today, but after the shock wore off are you sure they would change their minds concerning humanity's long term fate? Between climate change, the nukes and dark forest aliens, a lot of people today think we're doomed in the long run. (For what its worth, I don't.)

No need to do a drive by on Predator Badlands like that, it's a perfectly enjoyable film in its own right. I agree with the author though, there's nothing nearly as emotionally deep or socio-politically engaging as One Battle After Another, and so it would make for poor choice as a double feature to run second in the pairing.

It’s something I do. I used to read good record reviews and buy both albums, love one and hate the other and then have to come back. I assume the Predator movie will be great based on what I’ve seen.

Just won’t be Friends of Eddie Coyle.

The movie was excellent. Killer of the killers is excellent as well. I was entertained.

thank you! spoiler alert if anyone hasnt seen Predator Badlands

Tom self owns himself quite a bit by dismissing a movie as drivel and then comparing it to dumb plots made by adult children. the entire point of the movie is to demonstrate how dumb and bad overt masculinity is. yes its oversimplified but its Predator. the audience is hormonal teenage boys who might think toxic masculinity is cool. the entire setup Tom thought was dumb is more or less called out as dumb later in the movie

I see your take but I took it as "don't limit yourself to the confines of tradition and culture, open yourself up to others, go your own path, do the right thing, and make friends along the way to enrichen your life and meaning".

i agree. im certainly projecting having grown up in an overly macho competitive family and couldnt help but draw parallels

I mean I owned myself in the writing, didn’t I? Ya dirty ai. Anyone else woulda gotten the upshot. Unless I am an ai too.

If you read a bit further he does say that the reviews are good and he should give it a proper go

His commentary is dead-on; Badlands is a movie for children. It has no characters and zero subtlety. The plot is utterly predictable. There's like...one non-CGI character in the whole movie which made it feel like a video game. It's bizarre to me that movies like this are critically acclaimed.

Coincidentally I just watched OBAA yesterday and found it very lacking. I’m so surprised by the positive reception. Great visual, acting and music, but I found almost no emotion in it because none of the conflicts it sets up actually resolve on screen. Characters don’t confront consequences of their choices and don’t grow.

So I feel that’s completely fair, mainly because you acknowledge Johnny’s sound design is otherworldly perfect.

I have genuinely put a lot of thought into this lately. I have the sensation like older media was more expressive and thoughtful, there's at least more... interesting flavors there generally...

I am happy to ponder and willingly accept this is probably just my perception.

I have a couple of theories. The creators of the media are becoming more and more my age. Do they have nothing interesting to say to me as our experience is shared? Is this something experienced by previous generations as their generation took over media, or is our zeitgeist as "digital natives" so newly shared that this is a new experience?

I know people who would blame "ensh*tification" and move on, but I really think that there is more to what is happening.

What I do know is it's exceedingly rare for me to watch a movie or show made after about 2015 and to find myself thinking about it days later. There are of course exceptions.

Its care. Us humans can feel when something was made with care vs when it’s made to check some lists people with ties made. Same with music, food, books, art, software, hardware, design, houses. Most stuff today is made to avoid some risks instead of being what it ought to be. Not trying to please anyone is the best way to make great things. Or maybe it is my hate of focus groups who spoiled it all (and I used to be a game user researcher…)

Weird analogy, but it feels similar to the way old music differed to new music.

Old music had more variation in volume - volume rises and falls to add nuance to the piece. New music is produced differently and has a more “flat” sound due to everything being louder and variation being reduced by compression.

Seems like some parallels to other forms of media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Music is interesting to me, because I've experienced the opposite.

What I've encountered is if you get outside the top 100, a lot of like TikTok and SoundCloud famous people are actually doing some really interesting music. Things that play with the sound in ways you would never hear on the radio.

I feel like music is the one area where I still genuinely find interesting modern stuff regularly.

I couldn't agree more. I think what has happened is that everything has become so fragmented due to the sheer volume of content being created that discovery is still a challenge. If you are someone who thinks that music, movies, novels, etc are in decline, then frankly you're just not looking hard enough.

For music, I'd recommend looking at Bandcamp Daily[0]. It's not all my cup of tea, but there are some amazing new artists out there spanning nearly every genre imaginable.

[0] https://daily.bandcamp.com/

I agree. I feel there is not a time in history where such a huge diversity of music was produced.

I strongly disagree. Just because compression is common in pop music (and perhaps overused in some genres) doesn't mean new music isn't innovative and dynamic. When I listen to music say from 1920 to 1950, it is so often so incredibly lame (not always). It's basic ideas and chord progressions and simple melodies with lyrics that don't say much.

Music is a way for people to express themselves and relate about how they see the world. People didn't stop doing that recently. In fact, I'd say people have been emboldened to say even more and push what music really means.

It's not just compression. Rick Beato has talked about this a lot.

Popular music no longer has any key changes:

From 1960 to 1995, between 20% and 35% of Billboard Hot 100 number one hits in any given year contained a key change. Around the turn of the millennium that rate started to dip until it hit 0% by the end of the 2000s. [1]

I believe that simple 4/4 time has also become more prevalent as compared to more complex time signatures. I don't have as good support for this claim, but the AI tells me "4/4 (simple quadruple) has dominated Western popular music since at least the 1960s, and corpus work suggests that compound and non‑4/4 meters have become less common over time in mainstream styles, implying an even higher proportion of songs in simple 4/4 today.".

Beato is also fond of pointing out how modern music is written by committee, and that modern artists are more a "product" than ever before. From memory, he's pointing out that in the past, the credited writer of popular songs was usually a band, or perhaps a single person. But more recently, the credited writer is a list of multiple people not the band (and in fact, top songs across recent years have been notable not under the name of a band, but of an individual performer).

EDIT: Further querying leads to this as well:

Timbral Variety: The "texture" of sounds. In the 70s, you had a mix of acoustic, electric, and orchestral layers. Studies show a "homogenization of the timbral palette" since the 1960s peak.

Lyrical Complexity: The vocabulary and reading level of lyrics. Analysis of Billboard hits shows the average reading level has dropped from 3.5 to 2.7 (roughly 3rd grade) since 2005.

[1] https://www.cantgetmuchhigher.com/p/revisiting-the-death-of-...

That could be true - but this was specifically referring to the volume levels in recorded music, rather than variability in melody or composition.

Is the loudness war still going on? I kind of assumed it died out with streaming. Music apps are smart enough nowadays to normalize loudness anyway, and there are better ways of getting attention, right?

Crowd-sourced metrics at:

https://dr.loudness-war.info/

2026 releases have varied dynamic range but the majority is still low. Loudness war mastering sounds better on phone speakers and in cars. Even though streaming services normalize loudness, you need quiet listening environments and good headphones/speakers to properly appreciate a high dynamic range recording.

Indeed streaming killed the loudness war - all major streaming apps either require masters to meet a specific loudness target or perform normalization on their end to move their encodes to their loudness target.

I’m not quite sure, tbh.

I mostly listen to pop music or pop-adjacent, which is like the ultra-processed food of music. Highly compressed and generally lacking much dynamism.

I assume there is plenty of interesting dynamism outside of the pop charts and Spotify mixes, but unless I’m listening to live versions or really raw artists, I generally don’t experience them.

I wonder how much this is just a sampling bias. Older media has been repeatedly filtered over time, so you don't see all the bland, derivative ripoffs that were abundant at the time. Likewise, interesting and forward-thinking work produced today may not be widely appreciated for many years - consider that Van Gogh's work was largely ignored during his lifetime.

Similar to how music changes perceptions of movie scenes (it's usually silly but the effect is there), newsrooms have been decorated to look like a crisis center with the choice of colors and words.

People are naturally prone to pointing their attention at sources of alarm. And attention is important for advertisements which pay the bills.

News was not produced or directed back then like it is today.

Interesting thought-provoking movies still exist. They're just far away from regular people's comfort zone. I'll recommend you three post 2015 movies that will get you thinking:

Wandering (2022)

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Monster (2023)

But I'd concede that maybe making movies nowadays is harder because things are turning more and more expensive and there's too much pressure for producing profitable movies. So Art takes a back sit in movies that look for profit.

EEAaO is a fun slop movie, but a thinker it is not.

I think that if you're going through a a hard moment it'll make an impact. But it's true that the themes are not "deep" nor complex.

It's more of a thinker if you get past the very well done and entertaining first layer of 'slop'. (Content warning: there's some offensive potty humor and LOTS of violence in that first layer!)

The movie considers potential. A literal multiverse of potential. It also explores how society treats people using their potential and time in different ways. As fellow readers gray and their family relations start to get older they too will likely have the misfortune of knowing people entering dementia. How people are treated as they slide away from this reality is represented rather well by the film.

Yeah yeah, it isn't arthouse but, is it a less of a thinker than Pulp Fiction? I have the suspicion that GP would find IMDb Top movies agreeable and they aren't all deeply introspective films, which isn't a bad thing.

I think it's just survivorship bias, we don't remember the pre-2000 schlock because it's schlock. The two real "things used to be better before" situations IMO are:

- The loss of DVD revenue killed mid-budget productions, in the US the options are mostly indie darling or outrageous budget blockbuster.

- Big productions look flatter than before due to VFX crew exploitation. The VFX must be reworked 100 times with minimal time because planning is for suckers. No complex lighting for you and only crunch for the non-unionized Korean.

No the rock being alive is super like, deep, man.

Risk management kills any attempt at bold choices, decisions are steered at the modelable and the low risk. There space is thus shrunk. When there were fewer media behemoths there were more variations on the risk models and the pattern was less descernable.

The barrier of entry for media is very low now. That means a lot of things that wouldn't have gotten made now get made.

What that also means is that there is much more cheap junk pushed out the door. The investment to try again is now much lower than to try to add meaning to so-so film, so you just quickly land it and move on.

There is certainly survivor bias when looking at the quality of older media but at the same time, the incentives to only produce quality media has evaporated.

We're in the stochastic age where all business is run on chance. Don't make 1 good films, make 20 and hope one is good.

I feel like nothing has changed in terms of art. It’s that movie studios are now owned by companies that will not risk money on non sequels.

I remember reading the letters of Cicero about Gaias Julius (Later known as Cesar) how he complains how the he and his gang is acting all amoral and wearing ridiculous scandalous clothes, waring the togas in provocative feminine fashion.

There are accounts from all over history of how "the times were more thoughtful and moral in the good old days" But here we are, thousands of years later, still complaining about the younger members of our species and how they will bring ruin to us all. Perhaps they will, but it all seems so human to complain about that.

I remember the art of the 90s - when my part of the world got access to marvelous pieces like Thunder in Paradise, Barbed Wire, American Ninja, Bay Watch ... at the time it was considered the pinnacle of art by teenagers like me, and despised by my parents. But at the same time we had things like The Matrix, The Shawshank Redemption, Leon ... We remember the good stuff and the forget the fluff.

There are some real gems being created all the time, maybe not always from Hollywood but human creativity soldiers on.

The Good Place, The Expanse, 3 Body Problem, Horizon Zero Dawn, Expedition 33, Project Hail Marry. There is a constant stream of incredible thoughtful stuff being produced - books, games, movies, essays, videos, podcasts - the medium might change but humans always try to find ways to discover, understand and express the world around us in novel ways, one just needs to listen/watch.

> But here we are, thousands of years later,

Not like there was a general lack of tragedy, pain, suffering, war, chaos in the intervening thousands of years.

Seems so superficial to ignore everything and just say if we're here, we exist, then the claim that things will go bad is proven false. The only thing proven false is if anyone ever claimed humanity will be extinct. But think of all the suffering in all the wars between the roman empire and now. Is that nothing? Does that not qualify as very bad stuff? Did humanity advance continuosly, or was it a chaotic path, with ups and downs? Don't the downs qualify as what the complainers predicted?

To me it seems history teaches us we will survive as a species. But there is definitely a lot of room for very bad stuff to happen. It has happened before.

> The creators of the media are becoming more and more my age.

I'm a boomer so the opposite is happening to me. The people in media look more and more like children to me. So I can't tell if the fact that they seem to be speaking more childishly is real or just the expected bias from an old fart. I should experiment with getting AI to put the same words in Walter Cronkite's mouth to see if it changes them.

Betting on "it's me that has changed" has rarely been false throughout history. Humans have mostly been the same throughout the ages.

It’s definitely not the only reason but it is a big reason in my opinion. All new movies are stripped of grit and edge. They have no gravitas. There are no rapes, purely objectified women, any sort of implied CSA, truly hero tier “alpha” men etc. Everyone in movies these days seem like mild mannered office workers. I feel like filmmakers are bound by many rules that turn everything into mass accessible milquetoast.

In my experience, everyone turns twelve when they disagree or are shown to be wrong. Very few have the temerity to accept their faults. Let's not throw stones lest they hit our own glass houses.

I’ll admit to having done that before. Sure.

When people say you’re wrong it triggers cognitive dissonance and social threat brain stem stuff that had to be consciously mediated. Even if you’re someone who makes an effort to do this it can catch you off guard.

it's instinctive, people will readily be accept to be told they're wrong by an authority rather than a peer. people cant cast judgement without having earned to position to do so. similarly, people will not receive judgement when it doesnt come from a valid position of authority.

the answer is not to try and change human psychology, it's to reintroduce the hierarchies and structures where correction and judgement flows through the correct channels.

I sit on the tip of my chair when told i'm wrong. I have either a moment of woah! realizing they are right or their argument becomes increasingly silly under scrutiny. I also know how to spot seeking new arguments for opinions without.

The most enlightening is to be repeatedly wrong about a subject. Most of those end realizing there is no actual data worthy of a conclusion. It suddenly becomes obvious that should have been the answer from the beginning.

Nothing changes in my life if the earth is flat or not. I'm so much not in a hurry finding the answer that I will probably never need to.

What’s childish is thinking that calling the Department of War by a euphemism changes what it is and always has been. The Department of “Defense” killed a bunch of people Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and countless minor actions. These bubbles of civilization we enjoy are built on adults killing a bunch of people, as necessary, to establish the order that allows more childish people to build social media websites.

It's better to have to justify a discrepancy between your ideal and your bad actions, than to declare that your ideal is behaving badly.

What am I, twelve. Literally the point. My dad went to Vietnam because he felt obligated to do so because he was a much better American than he raised. I am not quite so slow as not to know what I said.

Are you saying there is no difference between the aggressiveness shown by the Department of War since it was renamed vs the years prior to the renaming?

Because it sure looked to me like they renamed the department and immediately started bombing fishing boats, then affirmatively decided to start a war with Iran, all while the guy who came up with the new name goes on TV and screams about how we're free to kill more people now.

There is no difference.

Let’s not forget the kidnapping of Maduro, where we killed another ~80 people.

We killed a million people in Iraq, to overthrow a dictator that wasn’t funding cartels operating in the U.S.

Think how much more fun posting these Trump ass-kissings will be from your T1 Trump phone whenever it arrives! The anticipation must be overwhelming.

Consider the motivation behind the new nickname.

It’s plainly not an attempt at honesty. Watching almost any speech by Hegseth makes it clear it’s another “tough guy” thing—his latest effort included announcing “no quarter” in the war with Iran, which one supposes he did because it sounds tough, but it’s so incredibly illegal that just issuing that instruction, as he did, even if nothing happens afterward, is specifically illegal.

It’s a modern outgrowth of the conservative belief that we lost Vietnam because we didn’t war crime hard enough (this is a real, and common, thing, talk to republicans old enough and you’ll encounter it often) and that the military’s too soft.

if it was my idea I would call it the department of death.

renaming the DOD to DOW war is like renaming your company <old name>.ai . it will create a press release, but the result product is unchanged.

Is this an attack on Captain Underpants of the silly novels? Or are we arguing that the global leaders are immature and don't think through their decisions? I admit I've only just started reading Captain Underpants but it doesn't seem like George and Harold are willing to do pranks to the extent of harming anyone. I do recognize childness in leadership occasionally. When I directly have to interface with it I adapt my response as though it actually is a child. That tends to help moderate the results somewhat. Children for the most part have good intentions and pure hearts, when things go wrong it's through inexperience not malice.

Does Tom Clancy think the novels are literary trash? The books are made for children, it's about following your dreams and using your imagination in the face of grown up resistance.

The author seems to like the books, but somewhat downplays the children's world and nature. From my understanding of the author's article, It's a nature he believes adults shouldn't have and yet powerful people do. So he's bringing this up, comparing the children in Captain Underpants with these powerful people. And also he's reflecting on how media is created with a "childish mind".

Personally, I don't think there's anything to downplay or wrong about children or being childish as adults. That's not the problem. The problem's the insensitivity and shamelessness of powerful people.

That's a good point. You articulate the difference between childish wonder and the sometimes innocent but still dangerous childish behaviors. The chance to experiment with your vision of the world is a good and valuable thing in both kids and adults. The childish behaviors that are more problematic are things like not fully considering the consequences of your actions. For instance a two year old might pick up a bumble bee and never consider the danger of getting stung. Adults should know better.

While children have their own psychology, behavior and brain development cycle, I'd like to clarify that I'm being careful not to practice ageism, something deeply entrenched in our culture.

The things you listed are not a special innate properties of children past a certain age (maybe it's the passage from infant to child? I don't know). If you don't teach children how a bumble bee is dangerous, they'll never know, and adults either!. It's the same for not considering the consequences of actions. We adults know better because someone taught us and we learned via painful experiences, so it's our duty to guide them so they can avoid painful experiences (while not controlling them).

He's saying that adults are using the kid logic (as seen in Captain Underpants) and that is ultimately irresponsible for adults.

I didn’t read it as an attack on the novels. I think it’s meant to be about Trump. Or football. Or something. I couldn’t really tell.

It’s post modern, y’know?

It’s an evolved skin for blending with the other humans. Look at what they always actually do.

If you're saying they are only pretending to be stupid, then they're doing a really good job.

The author framed this as if "One Battle After Another" was some adult work and they couldn't watch "Predator" afterwards because it was so childish.

I had the opposite reaction and could barely make it through 15m of One Battle. The movie opens with women in skin tight dresses and mini skirts with automatic weapons robbing banks and breaking into migrant detention centers while yelling "this is what real power looks like". That feels like childish nonsense to me but then it is wrapped in this "radical chic" that is supposed to force me to take it seriously. Rather than movies like Predator which are intentionally dumb and fun the author should look at how vague political messages and sex are used to take extremely shallow work and make it "adult".

> That feels like childish nonsense to me but then it is wrapped in this "radical chic" that is supposed to force me to take it seriously.

We aren't supposed to take it seriously; it's meant to be "childish nonsense". We can easily see that these women are getting off, sexually and by exercising power over others. A woman in a short dress struts around on a counter and introduces herself as "jungle pussy" to captives in a bank robbery, all while ranting about "black power". What happens next? A (black) security guard dies in agony and we get a close-up on that. We see "radical chic posturing" and then its consequences.

Meanwhile Predator: Badlands truly is a movie for children. I sat through the whole thing with friends (who loved it by the way). Lots of adults love children's movies and books. I'm unbothered by this, because these people's tastes don't seem to the affect the production of books/movies that are actually good. But I do feel that people who eat this stuff up have failed to grow up in some fundamental way.

>But I do feel that people who eat this stuff up have failed to grow up in some fundamental way.

For many people this is just a way to turn their brain off. My wife (backend engineer too) describes it as something similar to cannabis intake as described by other people. Or alchohol.

I've had the thought that I could possibly enjoy movies like this high but I've never tested it.

Paul Thomas Anderson's films oft set within extreme and/or marginal cultures. The porn industry in Boogie Nights. The Master was a thinly veiled alter ego of Scientology founder L.Ron Hubbard. One Battle after another looks at radical leftists. PTA likes to take characters that are hard to empathize with and humanize them. Also OBATA is a comedy, everybody but the daughter is a caricature.

I bounced off it in about the same amount of time, just the other day. I’ll probably return to it at some point given how talked-about it is, but as soon as the woman was revealed to be pregnant the implicit “ho ho! Who’s the father?!” made my eyes roll so hard it knocked me right out of the movie.

I was totally with it until they started talking about the real world again. The Department of War was called that up until 1947 when it was renamed to the euphemistic Department of Defense (or more specifically merged with the Department of the Navy which was previously separate). It has nothing to do with the right to self defense, the undermining of which would make a great paragraph here comparing modern self defense law the world over with schoolhouse rules.

Just because something was done before doesn’t mean it’s good (obviously?)

The purpose of the Department of Defense should be to defend America and Americans. Waging war is an unfortunate necessity that stems from this sometimes. War is not the only threat that can require a military response, and should never be a goal. No matter how you swing it, having a ‘Department of X’ definitely gives the impression - to people within and without it - that ‘X’ is a goal.

Even if you think about it amorrally, calling it the ‘Department of War’ is myopic.

> The purpose of the Department of Defense should be to defend America and Americans.

Should be, but right now, it isn't. So the name is apt, I am afraid.

Since 1947 US has been involved in 5 major wars (Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Afganistan, Iraq).

Which begs the question: do you think it's more "moral" to wage wars and lie to public that you're in the business of defense OR say things that are truthful?

Spending trillion+ dollars on military is about the only thing that both political party agree on. Obama bombed more countries that most presidents.

Since we're talking about adults thinking like children: your simplistic ideas about what military should be have no effect on what it is.

If Iran had the firepower superiority over Israel and U.S. they would level both countries. This is no me saying. "Death to America" is a literal quote from now-dead ayatollah.

When you actually listen why they renamed DoD to DoW it's way more nuanced that you apparently believe.

One of the reasons is that political correctness is destructive in military. If you're actually at war, winning should be objective not PR optics.

And it seems to be working. See disaster of Afghanistan withdrawal compared to astonishing success of snatching Maduro and destroying Iran's capability to wage future wars.

Surely it's a bit early to declare "astonishing success of ... destroying Iran's capability to wage future wars".

As far as I can see, the US has managed to replace an older Ayatollah Khomeini with a younger Ayatollah Khomeini with even more reasons to seek vengeance against the US and obtain nuclear weapons.

> If you're actually at war, winning should be objective not PR optics.

Which of course is why a former TV host is clearly the most qualified person to be Secretary of Defense, sorry War.

There is so much to reply to here. I feel like I’m being Gish Galloped.

You didn’t actually justify most of what you said and when you did the reasoning seems circular. Most of what you say just has the premise that what’s being done now is good and necessary, and that’s not something I agree with.

I did listen to the justifications for the ‘rename’ (Congress named the department and has not actually changed the name - but that’s a digression…), and disagree with much of the reasoning.

I think it would be ‘more moral’ to have a Department of Defense that operates and has the goals I described. I neither think it’s ‘moral’ to strive for war nor to lie to the public about it.

I agree the military should be well funded.

You invoke Obama, I can’t tell if you agree with what he did or not, and it’s anyway not relevant to what we’re discussing.

Since we're talking about adults thinking like children: your simplistic ideas about what military should be have no effect on what it is.

This sounds deep but is actually nonsense. Our society absolutely gets to choose everything about what our military is and how it’s used. Indeed, you even seem to be arguing that it isn’t (wasn’t) what you think it should be!

Iran and our response to it is a different thing than I was discussing (the name of the department, remember), but I think it would be both ‘more moral’ and probably more effective to actually think and plan deeply than whatever this is. The current administration seems to be all tactics, no strategy.

And I find it ironic that you list a bunch of conflicts that have had, at best, mixed results, then just assert that what’s currently underway, which seems to have less long term planning behind it than any of those, is just obviously going to have a great outcome.

Sure it may have been a euphemism, but the reasoning of this administration for trying to change it back is just childish and stupid: “We won the first world war, we won the second world war, we won everything before that and in between,” Trump said at the signing. “And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense.”

[flagged]

No, it's not the right thing and it's done for stupid childish reasons.

I object to the person who was turned off by that sentence in the blog post, because it fits completely in an article claiming that the US government is being run by man babies.

That "rationale" is childish and dumb:

> Project greater strength, resolve, and readiness to adversaries

Why does the mightiest most powerful military in history need to project greater strength? Insecurity?

> Emphasize offensive capability and "winning wars" rather than just defensive posture (Trump argued the "Defense" name sounded too passive or "woke,"

Calling Truman woke is childish and stupid. And why does the US need to emphasize offensive capabilities and winning wars, when the Trump ran on a promise of no new wars?

> better signals "peace through strength"

So you get mad about a euphemistic Department of Defense but eat up some weird narrative about peace through strength? Interesting.

The US Department of War does not take full advantage of its name. Declaring a war has real legal and political consequences which presumably are not appealing to the current US administration.

https://www.war.gov/Spotlights/Operation-Epic-Fury/

I had no idea they actually changed the domain name. Reminds me of Musk wanting it to be X because it sounded tougher. Something about trying to appear tough seems to make me think those people are less tough. I'm sure there's some famous paradox in that.

Changing the domain name and similar letterhead style shenanigans are risk free and good enough for public relations.

One thing you learn growing up is that there, in a sense, are no such thing as grownups.

Nobody knows what they are doing in the sense we think they do when we are kids.

Some adults try a bit harder to live up to the ideals of being an adult than others. They are toddlers inside like anyone else, but there's a layer of restraint on top that evidently not everyone has.

I agree to a large extent. Yet, what we see going on in US political leadership truly is beyond my belief of what reasonable adults should do and act like, even as an (precocious, sharp) ex-child.

When I think about it I start to ask question what sort of reasonable person would even get involved in the top political leadership? Especially in USA on both sides. It feels entirely select to those who can manage the absurdly hostile environment both from inside and outside... Which to me doesn't look like exactly healthy population.

If I remove my own political leanings, this group just completely dropped the mask.

Yes, it’s next level and clearly a period of decline. This is Nero and Caligula stuff. We’ve been sliding this way for a while.

It doesn’t mean this is the end of the USA. All civilizations go through ups and downs. This is, at least culturally and politically, a down.

I also think it’s global though. The US is manifesting it clearly and starkly, but that’s kind of US style. Authoritarianism backed by populist grievance politics and venal corruption are on the rise around the world.

that's a millennial (and up) american pov

I assure you other cultures will be deeply offended if you imply 'there are no such things as grownup' (which sounds like a weird affectation to my east european sensibilities)

Observing toddlers fight over toys has yielded some of my most valuable insights into the nature of statecraft.

The narratives and what can be identity evolve. The brain’s core function to defend identity never does.

That was my oil pipeline and he broke it!

Did not!

Did too!

But he drove his tank on my side!

That’s not your side! That’s my side!

Is not!

All fights between my children stem from resource contention.

Some kids will hoard, steal, and spit mouthfuls of milk on the other kids toys even when resources are plentiful. They can go far in this world.

Sounds like Donald

> When you punish a person for dreaming his dream / Don't expect him to thank or forgive you

> Hail Satan

Finally someone get it.

I also have the same feeling about media since around 2015. The prime example being Alien: Earth, which people will argue has immeasurable depth and nuance while when I watched it I just facepalmed a lot. Although it did get better in later episodes.

I feel like no media today has really topped the stuff of the 90s and 00s. Star Trek Voyager season 5 still stands tall above the rest for me. The movie September 5 came close as it had interesting bits.

But besides that, there is a generational thing going on. I felt when I grew up online in the 90s and 00s that people who were older than me were smarter than my generation. My generation watched movies and played games while gen x and baby boomers did hardcore assembly programming and whatever.

And then the same thing happened with millenials and gen z. Gen z is just different from millenials which again are different from baby boomers. Each generation progressively gets less technical it seems like. There are always outliers in every generation of course but I think the trajectory is somewhat clear.

I also think this applies to movies and tv shows. Gen z just thinks differently and doesn't have the same ideas. I don't think a gen z'er could create Voyager season 5, and maybe not even a millenial could. There is so much information and knowledge and perception in the context a generation is born into and grows up in and a lot of that context and information is lost with the next generation.

I want to point out that one of those writers also wrote For All Mankind. Maybe Gen-X never expected to be culturally relevant, so our critical thinking actually got put to good use.

idk if this was the exact quote but:

H.R. McMaster: Trump’s knowledge was like a series of islands. He might know a lot about one specific thing, but there were no bridges between the islands, no way to connect one thought to another

Reminds me of this classic:

—

working on a new unified theory of american reality i'm calling "everyone is twelve now"

“I’m strong and I want to have like fifty kids and a farm” of course you do. You’re twelve. “I don’t want to eat vegetables I think steak and French fries is the only meal” hell yeah homie you’re twelve. “Maybe if there’s crime we should just send the army” bless your heart my twelve year old buddy

https://bsky.app/profile/veryimportant.lawyer/post/3lybxlwzj...

See also: the "Everyone is Twelve now" theory of politics.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91429448/everyone-is-12-twitter-...

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/everyone-is-12-now-theory-of-...

I think we hit "peak baby" around a decade ago, so this checks out.

Interesting, why do you say "a decade ago"? Peaks are only identifiable in retrospect, but what would mark "peak baby" then, that was more peak that current events?

a meta question about this. How is a short sort of musing current political landscape blog post the top on hacker news?

It's something to talk about that isn't AI. If you've got something new to post, now's the time.

HN is turning into Reddit. It's noticeably worse than it was 5 years ago.

Boyo literally in the rules not to dot this.

Dude I wrote it and am as shocked as you are.

Agreed - not sure why this nonsense is here.

Those who can do.

Those that can't become politicians.

At the risk of sounding very old:in partial response to the nonsense starting around the 2015/2016 era I decided it was a good time to start mining the cultural vault and catch up on classic movies and books (especially) that I’d always been meaning to get around to, and kind of immersed myself in it more and more over time. Lots of older science fiction, fantasy, and just random movies I’d heard of but never got around to experiencing.

Subsequently, trying to return to consuming modern media has been quite the shock to the system. In many ways, but maybe the most startling is the storytelling. Books and movies lauded for being modern classics are so brain-numbing stupid (sorry but there’s no other accurate way to describe them) abound. Just absolute paint by numbers stories, messaging so on the nose you almost need a new phrase to describe it because the standard one didn’t do it justice, small-minded and petty characters being portrayed as heroic or brilliant - it’s incredible. I know there’s already comparisons to Idiocracy in this thread, and yes I’m well aware of the term selection bias so there’s no need to point it out - of course classics are classic for a reason. But I’m talking the most celebrated stories of our modern age here, the supposed next generation of classics, and all I can think is… really? Really? Have you all gone insane?

Exactly my sentiment. Someone else ITT mentioned Everything Everywhere as a thought provoking, good movie. Does anyone actually believe that movie will be discussed in ten years? Because I know The Godfather still will be.

Cultural media output is absolutely in decline, and I think only someone not well-read could think otherwise about literature, and likewise for other media.

It's not now a situation of cream having not yet risen. I don't believe there are myriad hidden gems anymore. Bodies who are meant to discern the cream are coming up empty. The Oscars are full of bad movies now. Pulitzer prizes in literature are awarded to poor works. Hugo and Nebula books are horrendous. We have lost the culture of the literary, and it is very obvious to anyone well read. What's worse is the large majority of people don't even know what well-read is; they have consumed a critical mass of slop sci-fi airport novels and think this is somehow equivalent expertise to absorbing the classics.

The Hugo and Nebula awards in particular are shocking in what they nominate and elevate to winning. There’s no possible way these are the best sci fi/fantasy books being written every year. They’re not just bad, they’re laughably bad in every dimension. It’s incredible to witness.

Weren’t they completely undermined by exactly what I am complaining about here, Harold and George not understanding why people grew up and moved on? My memory was the Hugo awards got attacked by some pronoun warriors who did t get their “favorite” genre was smarter than them.

I recently downloaded a batch torrent of all Hugo and Nebula winners. It didn't take long before I realized I had to delete all of them published after a certain date. Disturbing and sad.

I'd like to reply to myself because I forgot about TV. TV is not one of the things in decline, so that's good. There have been a lot of high dramas in the last decade that are objectively good.

I think a lot of us have worked with That Guy at one point or another. The person that never internalized what being 'wrong' means. I don't mean the curmudgeons that might be really prickly about certain things, but the kind of person that is not only habitually wrong but incapable of recognizing it.

In a sense I think this is a different thing from someone that is antisocial or manipulative, because even they can admit being wrong or incorrect in certain circumstances. It's closest to narcissist behavior but it exhibits in such a specific way that makes me think it's a different type.

You could probably link it to a lot of different things. Extreme machismo social media brainrot, a society that rewards never admitting you're wrong, extreme wealth.

Garden variety malignant narcissism (my armchair psych opinion but grew up in this dynamic). It's acting out in response to their deep shame (the root thing that all of the narcissistic behavior is desperate to hide). They can't admit they're wrong, otherwise their entire psychological world collapses.

Coincidentally, that's also why it's so terrifying to see so many of these types in power. While most narcissists are mostly hot air and talk, occasionally, you get a legitimate wildcard that's destructive in difficult to repair ways (sometimes leaving nothing but smoldering rubble).

It is very interesting when you explore the neurological mechanics of this. A narcissist is rigid thinking dialed up to 11. It is essential a special and pathological “skill” their brains have learned. They do not have to update their priors or spend metabolic energy on almost anything their life. Their brain figured out the best way to survive and conserve energy was to avoid costly updates to their beliefs. Repeated over years and that system becomes deeply myelinated, a core identity. Unwinding that is a feat. Some people just have a more narrow set of rigid beliefs (e.g. religion, work skills, etc).

Agreed on your neuro take. It would seem that the rigidness is somewhat reinforced by the pervasive mechanism of digital feedback. As we now can see clips of stupid behavior being propagated online as easily as opening our eyes and tap a screen, the rigid behavior of an overt narcissist is now on display as a model for lesser equipped minds to absorb. The narcissist acquires a visually recognizable position of power through their actions, and this makes them highly desirable by those lacking control in their own life. The audience is global... And where the terrain is fertile.. the said audience also votes for their model.

Yes, and here's an interesting (and clear) example that shows that narcissism is a complex delusion that puts one's own fault squarely into a blind spot that cannot be perceived. I watched this and, for the first time in my life, felt a huge pang of compassion and sadness for those that suffer from it, even though they make life more difficult for everyone else. They are broken.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqRIw5FICAs

A Kent State professor calls 911 because she can't get into her building to pee; she is clearly drunk; they give her every opportunity to get a ride home; she refuses and is eventually detained. Later she goes to the police department to get an apology from the officers involved. It was, to me, a shocking example of the narcissistic delusion, with stakes low-enough that one could focus on that and not the side-effects.

Trump’s shame, I wonder, might be more rare than the garden variety. Nothing seemed to endear him to Manhattan elites. Not the pro wrestling or bragging like an 80s rapper. I wonder how that important internalized shame could change.

There seems to be something about Pres. Obama mocking him during the Correspondents Dinner. A venue for mockery, sure, but a black man mocked a son of Fred Trump.

There are several subtypes of narcissism - overt (=grandiose), covert (=vulnerable), malignant, communal. (Some also use antagonistic as a further subtype of malignant.)

Normally, they are considered separate categories. However, how I like to think about them is a 2D spectrum.

Overt X covert is one axis, malignant X communal is another.

Overt X covert is defined by how the narcissist sees himself/herself:

- Overt thinks they are better than others and feel wronged when they are not treated the way they think they deserve - always respected even if they are wrong, or even admired, worshiped, celebrated. There's this implicit "I am the center of everything / I am the main character" about them. Many people accept this dynamic in order to avoid conflict or simply because they are natural pleasers and end up reinforcing it.

- Covert thinks they are worse than others and feel attacked by the smallest innocent things which threaten to expose some real or perceived weakness of theirs. You either end of walking on eggshells around them or end up triggering them in some ways you don't even recognize until you are their designated enemy.

Malignant X communal is defined by where they get their self-worth from:

- Malignant simply enjoys hurting others - they feed on other people's suffering and feel energized and empowered by getting away with it.

- Communal is driven by being seen as helping. This is not altruism but might look similar at first glance. However, altruism is about actually helping others, communal narcissism is about being perceived that way, that's their end goal. Actually helping is just a method to achieve that and becomes secondary when disagreement/conflict arises. This often happens when you don't show the appreciation they think they deserve.

Every narcissist is somewhere on this 2D spectrum (they are purely one subtype if they are at 0 on the other axis). But very commonly you see combinations like covert+communal and overt+malignant.

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A common misconception is that narcissists think they're better than others. They don't (only overt subtype does). But all narcissists think they are more important than others. They are the center of the world in their mind. This is implicit, they'd never describe it that way because that's what they consider normal. It would be like saying the air around us has transparent color - we don't say that because we consider it so normal to essentially ignore it.

What they do is they implicitly expect to be treated that way. Sometimes they manage to behave in ways which elicit this in others subconsciously. But if you don't, you get various antagonistic reactions depending on the combination of subtypes.

Flying monkeys are people who support their favorite narcissist. This is a good intro video and the channel has a lot more about this disorder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjZ3f-IXEXU&t=975s

Fleas are behaviors a person picks up by interacting with narcissists too often. In this way, narcissism can be said to be a socially transmissible disease.

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Disclaimer, I am not a psychologist, I have only read about this (and other disorders such as ASPD/psychopathy/sociopathy) extensively. However, that gives me freedom to express my thoughts more openly - a psychologist cannot for "ethical reasons" say certain things such as making value judgements of such people.

I don't have that limitation. I consider it a disease which should for example prevent the person from holding positions of power - the same way psychosis would. The only difference is psychotic people are harmful to both themselves and others and don't hide it, narcissistic people are primarily harmful to others and a re lucid enough to cover it up.

Thank you. It seems a common human experience to me that we’re all updating our inexact-but-useful view of the world. And every now and then I encounter someone who isn’t. Or, someone public who in private is contrastingly reflective compared to their off-putting public representation.

Complaining about called the former DoD the Department of War is like complaining about calling water wet. Just because the wars haven't been legitimately authorized by Congress as required in the Constitution doesn't mean that the US hasn't been waging war on someone for most of its existence.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_presidents_timeli...

tl;dr we’ve got the politicians that are most aligned with the majority of voters

I have a suspicion that it’s no different than any other highly efficient system. You’ll notice that every time there’s a natural crisis you’ll hear how facility X is the only place in the world where Y is done and now everything Y is going to go up in price[0].

There’s lots of reasons everyone downstream of X doesn’t have backup plans but one that certainly applies to the immediate consumers of Y is that over time market forces shave off any insurance against Y prices.

This phenomenon is well-understood and so most countries intentionally develop backup facilities to X in what they believe are crucial spaces. It’s why the US pays for both ULA and SpaceX (instead of just whichever works better) and pays more for locally grown food and so on.

But someone has to be watching and convince the rest of us that this kind of thing is worth doing and they need to keep doing it for a long time.

What I think happened is The Sort[1] happened. We got better at giving people with the requisite skills their rewards. Previously, you might end up with a smart steely-eyed guy as Flight EECOM at NASA but today that guy has a shot at 100x the wealth on Wall Street or in tech. If you look at the debate between George H W Bush and Ronald Reagan[2] you’ll see a sort of thing that isn’t so common today: they are asked whether the US should be paying for the education of children of people crossing the border with Mexico and where today the highly-optimized politician will respond that he will do what you, the constituent, is asking here[3] and stop paying for these people one way or another - both candidates actually contest that idea and offer a view that’s not populist.

You’ll see this today with the rise of direct to constituent social media. A big part of politicians’ approach today is about What Polls Well. Sen. Warren is the biggest example of this I think. Once the proponent of intelligent policy, she is now most commonly known for highly populist policy - to the extent that she is now often described as a slopulist.

So what I think is the difference is that earlier most politicians were more influenced by smarter people with low time preference and as the constituents became more powerful as a mass, politicians started being influenced primarily by the median person until we eventually have someone perfectly reflective of the electorate. The electorate, for the most part, would like all taxes set as close to zero and all spending set as close to 100% on their own pet interest; and second-order effects are rarely considered.

Therefore, in the common way of all people to declare monocausal roots of events, I declare that refinement culture has caused:

- highly efficient adaptation of politician to populace

- with low tail-risk mitigation

And consequently we’ve got a person who can’t do effective foreign policy running foreign policy because they are very good at politics.

A good self-test I think is “if chair of the Federal Reserve were an elected position would your party of choice have elected a multi millionaire investment banker like Jerome Powell to it?”. I think the answer to this is “no” for either party, yet he has performed his function admirably well, in my opinion.

0: often this is small and facilities X’ take on the same work at slightly raised costs Y’ but sometimes, like in the Thai flooding with HDDs, costs rise greatly

1: A term I first heard from patio11, but it’s related to the idea of refinement culture

2: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YsmgPp_nlok

3: because this is a Republican debate; if it were Democratic Party he would answer that he would do what you, the constituent wants, and assign a new fund to these people who he will declare (in agreement with you) are humans, not illegals and so on. The fact isn’t of significance here. It is whether they can talk the trade-offs of policy with their constituents. The modern leader is “I’m a leader. I need to follow the people”.

That's mistakenly conflating two concepts: the media propaganda in a more general sense of the word (like the pentagon reviewing movie scripts for war propaganda) and the underlying material and ideological reasons for US foreign policy (see natural resources, petrodollar, etc.). It would be a severe mistake to think the current conflict is somehow detached from the "grand chessboard" type of neoconservative thought dominating foreign policy for decades. In other words you shouldn't disagree with the war on Iran because Trump is an idiot, you should disagree because its an horrific atrocious war even if it were run by competent people instead.

Just as a very basic example: 4 presidents in a row have bombed Yemen: Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. This is consensus on very fundamental ideas on US foreign policy. But way more importantly than whether or not you agree with bombing Yemen, you should start to recognize that the real reasons for bombing Yemen or any other conflict are completely absent from public discourse and media.

Also once you broaden your horizon on film a bit it becomes very hard to watch modern mainstream western movies at all. Like watch The Battle of Algiers or any Costa-Gavras movie and you realize most western cinema is at best just infantilizing and at worst outright propaganda.

Like if you watched One Battle After Another and thought it was profound, did you not notice the absence of any real ideological exploration beyond "racism is bad"? What did the caricatured resistance really believe in? What can such a movie really say about "radical" politics on immigration if the liberals who made it have to account for liberals approval and funding of ICE? Like it said nothing at all, that's the issue with everything. We are so politically atrophied that we think its the most political movie ever, but its really apolitical if you think about it a bit more.

The word "profound" is a bit overused when it comes to movies. I agree that The Battle of Algiers is an excellent film, one of the best ever made even. One Battle After Another is also excellent but it is not really political in the way the TBoA is. It uses a political setting very effectively in a chase thriller. A movie like The Parallax View is a better comparison. That movie used the post-60s paranoia very effectively in a great suspense thriller.

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"eventually get to live in a world where all the baby boomers are dead"

man, that stings. as a member of the birth class of 1963.

each of us is a product of our times. i wish no ill will on those younger or older than myself. personally, i have lived my life in a way to be a good steward of the world. was it always successful; no.

not malice, perhaps ignorance. please enjoy what is left of the world. i did my best to leave it better than it was when I received it.

if you don't like the world, try to change it. you have agency.

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Absolutely nothing wrong with a coordinated, rapid response to a global pandemic. This was a bright spot in humanity's record, IMO. The corruption of public perception of the response by a handful of individuals is something we should regret.

Quite a bit wrong with it. From the beginning the threat level was exaggerated, especially considering the lack of threat to younger people.

We are still paying the social and economic costs (including sky high cost of living, directly connected to it).

It was also coincidentally very similar to the Event 201 table top exercise a mere six months before between Johns Hopkins, the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation (all unelected and unaccountable organisations which this "global" advice came from).

1 million excess deaths in the US alone, with an infection rate rapid enough to bring the hospital system to its knees. The threat level was judged perfectly.

You can blame the cost of living directly on the corporations charging more for their products than required, and buying up housing to extort renters. Inflation-wise, you have the Trump administration to blame for writing stimulus checks with his name on them, but mainly the corrupt Congress for spending an order of magnitude more on directly paying corporations with zero oversight to make sure they were playing by the rules (PPP).

More people died in the so called Hong Kong Flu in the 1960s. In some places more people died from suicide due to the enforced social isolation. I knew people who drank themselves to death or took to heroin. Others were not able to receive cancer diagnoses or treatment.

So no, not worth the cost. The deaths were very much exaggerated. In fact, pretty much every death I heard of was "Covid plus X" not Covid alone. It didn't affect the lower age group much.

"You can blame the cost of living directly on the corporations charging more for their products"

It has everything to do with shutting down most of the global economy for most of two years, and destroying supply chains. In some places in Africa, the annual harvest was destroyed because of the hysteria.

Not to mention rampant economic warfare by centralised government. They could have stopped debt and mortgages being called in after they forced people to stop working. Not to mention taxation.

The idea that I can't talk to my neighbour over a fence but Amazon and Pizza delivery can go door to door is sheer lunacy and unscientific.

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Perhaps this comment was intended for the age verification thread elsewhere on HN? Unclear how this relates to Department of War, Captain Underpants, etc.

Oops, I had several tabs open and put this on the wrong one lol. Thanks!