The Collapsing Leviathan

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4816

by nabla9 • 6 years ago

53 38 6 years ago

dustingetz3• 6 years ago

USA's power stems from having coasts on both oceans, which gives the USA unique naval advantages, according to a book:

The United States Navy controls all of the oceans of the world. Whether it’s a junk in the South China Sea, a dhow off the African coast, a tanker in the Persian Gulf, or a cabin cruiser in the Caribbean, every ship in the world moves under the eyes of American satellites in space and its movement is guaranteed—or denied—at will by the U.S. Navy. The combined naval force of the rest of the world doesn’t come close to equaling that of the U.S. Navy.
Having achieved the unprecedented feat of dominating all of the world’s oceans, the United States obviously wanted to continue to hold them. The simplest way to do this was to prevent other nations from building navies, and this could be done by making certain that no one was motivated to build navies—or had the resources to do so. One strategy, “the carrot,” is to make sure that everyone has access to the sea without needing to build a navy. The other strategy, “the stick,” is to tie down potential enemies in land-based confrontations so that they are forced to exhaust their military dollars on troops and tanks, with little left over for navies.

-- Friedman, George. The Next 100 Years (p. 45). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Basically he says that the USA can spend recklessly, be astoundingly inefficient, etc and still remain in power due to this.

leto_ii• 6 years ago

I've also read Friedman's work and tend to agree with a lot of his points. However, what we've started seeing for some years now is a severe degradation of the US's soft power. The hard power is still there and the US will probably make more and more use of it in order to keep other countries (or its own population) under control.

For the rest of the world (and for a significant part of the US population) this will make life more unpleasant, but at the same time will help dispel any lingering illusions about the benevolent or fair nature of American power.

dustingetz3• 6 years ago

what is soft power vs hard power?

riazrizvi2• 6 years ago

"The USA is so powerful because the USA is so powerful". That's empty.

somewhereoutth2• 6 years ago

Could this, almost word for word, once have applied to the British Empire?

dustingetz3• 6 years ago

yes and he goes through what happened in the book

knolax• 6 years ago

So was Afghanistan a burgeoning naval power that threatened our hegemony?

devnull255• 6 years ago

Afghanistan was never burgeoning power in recent history. However it was a strategic land-locked asset to other great and super powers throughout history. In the late, Cold War period Afghanistan, once an asset of the Soviet Union, was converted into a land-locked asset to the U.S. following the invasion by the Soviet Union in 1979. The U.S. provided weapons to mujahideen forces fighting against the invading Soviet forces, which ultimately forced their withdrawal.

Unfortunately, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, what had been a useful asset to the U.S. cold-war strategy of containment converted over time into a real threat to U.S. power, (by air, not by sea), as it served as the base of operations by a former mujahideen fighter, Osama Bin Laden, who planned and directed the 9/11 attack against three targets in the U.S.

rch• 6 years ago

do you not understand what your system will actually do to society’s underdogs? Or do you understand perfectly well, and approve?

I'm cynical by nature, but I'd rely on Hanlon's razor here.

makomk• 6 years ago

One of the amazing things about the coronavirus pandemic is watching what all the right-thinking, non-MAGA folks are expected to blame Trump for swivel 180 degrees in an instant. Not so long ago, the idea that it mattered whether the US made things anymore was a Trumpian delusion, a cynical and counter-productive attempt to exploit people's nostalgia that fundamentally didn't understand how the modern world worked. Now that it turns out that actually being able to make things matters and is what decides if you can supply your populace and doctors with protection, suddenly it's Trump's fault for supposedly destroying American industry in just three years. Similarly, his China travel ban has gone from pointless and xenophobic to not strict enough without anyone blinking an eyelid.

eat_veggies• 6 years ago

I agree with a lot of this post, but I'm skeptical of characterizing the SAT as "one of the most fearsome weapons against entrenched wealth and power ever devised."

The SAT was originally created by a eugenicist "to uphold a racial caste system. He advanced this theory of standardized testing as a means of upholding racial purity in his book A Study of American Intelligence. The tests, he wrote, would prove the racial superiority of white Americans and prevent 'the continued propagation of defective strains in the present population'—chiefly, the 'infiltration of white blood into the Negro.'" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#History

MattGaiser5• 6 years ago

His argument is slightly different.

It is not a fearsome weapon to elevate the people at the bottom, but rather one to make elites prove that they are reasonably intelligent before being given the keys to the power and wealth.

Character, extracurriculars, awards, etc. can all be neatly packaged and generated for a student. Grades can be gamed very easily. Another local school near mine had internal grades and adjusted grades for sending to universities.

The student needs to pass the SAT on their own even if they are relentlessly tutored. It is one thing that someone cannot do for them entirely.

api• 6 years ago

His first point is valid. His second doesn't make sense to me.

The wealthy are already very good at gaming the SAT/ACT system via tutoring. Teaching to a test always improves test scores. Any metric will be gamed if an incentive to game it exists. No exceptions.

Meanwhile he ignores the real elephant in the room, namely that the elite university system as a whole is a major source of inequality in our society. Even if Harvard, MIT, and Stanford do everything in their power to make admissions as fair as possible or even to bias them toward underdogs, it doesn't matter much. All the top ten universities combined can't educate more than a tiny percentage of Americans. That means this tiny percentage of Americans get an outsized advantage that the vast majority of Americans will never experience.

Avicebron• 6 years ago

I see this as a bigger issue than the loss of the SAT/ACT system. There is a massive deference given to applicants to lucrative careers from these schools, which are often dominated by students from relatively wealthy backgrounds. Good but not top tier students are overlooked or discriminated against in interviews cementing a de facto caste system. Not disparaging those schools, they are clearly very good and can produce talent. But I think the argument about how people should be allowed to advance in their career should be more nuanced.

ribs• 6 years ago

Is teaching to the SAT really so distorting, and so expensive to obtain? It’s a pretty general-knowledge test, and there are tons of people out there who will tutor for reasonable prices, I’d expect.

MattGaiser5• 6 years ago

If you are motivated, no. If you are purchasing motivation, yes.

I have done a bit of SAT tutoring. Most of it is just making the kid do the work.

vkou• 6 years ago

and there are tons of people out there who will tutor for reasonable prices,

Any significant amount of 1:1 instruction is not a 'reasonable' price for a poor family. The middle class can afford it, the lower class can't.

One of the problems with the SAT is that if all the rich applicants can pay their way to acing it, being a smart poor kid doesn't actually set you apart.

You aced it, they aced it. You can't afford to be captain of the hockey team, they can. In that case, the test isn't actually a sorting function for talent, it's just another cash-expensive hurdle to overcome.

At least, this is the theory.

riwsky• 6 years ago

Re your first point: his point isn’t absolute ungameability, but relative ungameability

MattGaiser5• 6 years ago

The last side door for smart noncomformist kids is now being slammed shut.

How does a standardized test benefit nonconformists? I strongly disagree with eliminating the SAT, but always viewed success at it as requiring one to conform to a certain template. You need to shift your thinking patterns and your style to match what test writers want.

Wouldn't nonconformists have some of the more interesting extracurriculars and essays, things which have increased in value?

I agree with the part about smart kids being disadvantaged by the SAT going away, but nonconformists and smart people are not the same thing.

CDRdude• 6 years ago

I agree with the part about smart kids being disadvantaged by the SAT going away, but nonconformists and smart people are not the same thing.

In this context, "smart noncomformist kids" refers to the intersection of "smart kids" and "nonconformist kids". The proposition of this sentence is that college admissions officers will reject all the nonconformist kids because they can't tell which ones are smart.

dntbnmpls• 6 years ago

How does a standardized test benefit nonconformists?

Because it's an objective standard? You don't have to kiss your teacher's ass for good grades, you don't have to conform to extracurriculars to boost your standing, you don't have to frame your essay to win favors from the reader, etc. It's the only test that you don't depend on anyone else for.

but nonconformists and smart people are not the same thing.

That's why he wrote "smart nonconformist kids". The intersection of smart kids and nonconformist kids.

riazrizvi2• 6 years ago

University of California will now permanently end the use of SAT and ACT in undergraduate admissions. This is widely expected, probably correctly, to trigger a chain reaction, whereby one US university after the next will abandon standardized tests

You're really missing the point of this action. Since the College Admissions scandal, it has become clear that people with deep pockets can game the SATs and ACTs by paying people with inside knowledge. The UofC doesn't want to eliminate standardized testing, they declared they want a replacement. They are changing this because it is unfairly skewed toward people who can pay up.

Trump and the corruption and anticompetitiveness that he represents is a long line of Conservatism that up-ticked during Reagan's era. Yes, that is certainly a threat to America, and something to worry about.

Conservatives want it all, and they want it concentrated in the fewest hands possible. They are the scorpion on the back of the frog which is Capitalism. Capitalism is free-enterprise, the opportunity for people to create wealth by creating things that benefit society. Conservatives want to twist the rules, to cheat the system, so that you don't have the opportunity, so that the rules heavily favor the people who already have it. Why? Because Conservatives stand for no-change, keep the wealth in the hands of people who were born into it. And concentrate it into their hands even more.

Conservatism is the opposite of what created the USA and made it special, it is the opposite of what made the USA an economic powerhouse. Conservatism is the default that most countries are governed by, since the beginning of time, across all geographies. Conservatism is the reason why innovation and brilliant creativism is sidelined. Because incumbent power brokers don't need it, they don't need change, they don't need improvements. They just need all the gains to continue going to a very few, and all they need for that is the maintenance of exploitation. Occasionally throughout history Conservatism has been broken by special laws the created fairness. In Ancient Greece it was the Solonian Constitution. In Ancient Rome it was The Law Of Twelve Tables. In 1707 Britain it was Parliament which broke Royal Monopolies and led to the Industrial Revolution. At the founding of the USA it was the Constitution. In all these cases, these laws of fairness drove massive levels of economic growth, of creative destruction and innovation, that changed the world.

The Conservatives want to destroy that, because they want it all for themselves, no matter what the consequences. The Roman Emperors destroyed their equitable laws, and that lead to the decline of Rome. Now massive corporations, their heads, and their political stooges/lackeys want to destroy equitable economic laws, they want to destroy antitrust legislation that prevents them from controlling it all forever. The momentum that big companies are building to destroy competition and fairness in this country is an existential threat to what makes the USA special. Citizens United. Unfettered mergers and acquisitions. Widespread corporate surveillance using data snooping. All these are of great concern.

KKKKkkkk1• 6 years ago

So how do all the countries that don't have the SAT manage not to collapse?

MattGaiser5• 6 years ago

Most countries call it the national exam or entrance exam. They are very common throughout the world.

courtf2• 6 years ago

The elite schools have always been a caste system, we just convinced ourselves after WW2 that the entire country belonged in a global upper caste. The notion seems just as absurd today as it did in the 1800s.

I attended public high school in rural upstate NY in the 90s and scored a 35 on the ACT when I was 16, without preparing at all. With some amount of studying I had a 1440 on the SAT that same year (1998 or 99) and didn't bother taking it again. I've always scored well on these tests, but it never translated into much acclaim or academic success. I smoked weed at lunchtime every single day my junior and senior years of high school, which was the kind of achievement that gets celebrated in those parts. For a while there we all dropped acid on the weekends too, the winters upstate are brutal. Unlike most of my friends, I went to college where I slacked my way through a 2nd rung liberal arts school with a 3.7 in subject (mathematics), graduating in 2005. By 2010 I was in a hurry to leave the miserable customer service/QA engineer role I had worked for 3 years at Surveymonkey.com, so I took the GRE. After about a week of half-assed prep in the evening I scored a 790 math 670 verbal 6.0 writing, enough to get me a scholarship for my Masters. Turns out going to school to escape your shitty job isn't the best decision, but I didn't have a lot of other options. Surveymonkey is worth what, a couple billion today? Well they didn't treat me very well back in 2007. In today's climate of online outrage I probably could have parlayed that mistreatment into something, I am a protected species afterall (gay).

From my perspective, the problem with this whole system is that smart kids are not challenged enough. Everything is too easy in public school, and bad habits are never corrected. There's also no role-models to show smart kids that they might go somewhere in life. Upstate New York is in a permanent state of decline, there's nothing these kids can look forward to and they have no money to go anywhere else. Depression and doubt, difficult home lives, access to all manner of drugs, child abuse etc. The best results from my high school came from a few Indian immigrant families who sent their daughters off to Harvard and the like. We still got those girls to drink and smoke weed with us though :).

There was another local (ie, white) kid in high school who was really smart and smoked lots of weed and got into trouble the same way I did. A real math talent. We took a double period of AP physics together right after lunch, so we were both high as hell in the back of the classroom. We both scored 5's on the test at the end of the year, too. He is a seasonal worker now, puts up tents for country fairs and the like during the summer.

The alcoholism in upstate New York is something people out in polite society would not believe. Lots of DUIs in my old friend group. These guys are conscious when they blow a .4 (or higher) on the breathalyzer. One ex-marine friend is a fire jumper (seasonal as well) and went to the hospital with a .6! He was joking with the doctor while they were pumping his stomach, a real character. No small number of these kids are dead.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, ain't nothing new under the sun.

ErikAugust• 6 years ago

Just for reference: How far upstate are we talking?

courtf2• 6 years ago

This is all around Utica, but I imagine it lines up pretty closely with other rustbelt experiences from the region. It sounds a bit grim on second reading, and it can be, but we had a lot of fun. There is a lot of waste too, though.

Edit: Here's a little taste of the local culture, this guy was on tv all the time growing up :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FBY2qTLvTM

hindsightbias• 6 years ago

smart kids aren’t challenged enough

Public schools are factories and private schools in the sticks are little better. We get what we pay for, and the well-off can pay a lot more.

Gaming the system now will just require less mental effort for the well-off student while mom and dad figure out the obstacle course.

softwaredoug2• 6 years ago

I have been trying to think of a systematic way of testing whether and the extent of which the US is in collapse. It can be hard to separate the histrionics of the current media environment from facts on the ground. I’d be curious what model or factors people would consider relevant to such an analysis.

- influence on the world stage?

- GDP

- wealth inequality

- quality of life

cambalache• 6 years ago

Yes, those are good points. US is in an excellent position (but not as good as the average American think).

In 1960 the US was 40% of the world economy (in nominal terms). Right now is around 24%, it was 22% when Trump was elected.This number will decrease even further in the upcoming decades.

Regarding per-capita, quality-of-life measures, things like HDI, Gini coeffcient, Corruption Perception, Food and Enviromental protections the US tend to be in the middle of the pack for the OECD countries, usually around position 10-20. This was unthinkable in the 1960s when America #1 was taking for granted.

softwaredoug2• 6 years ago

How much of being 40% of the world economy In the 60s is being the only economy left standing after WW2? From that perspective growth elsewhere is just about inevitable... the short sightedness is perhaps not recognizing that the 60s was the anomaly, not the status quo

ur-whale2• 6 years ago

I disagree with this take for the following reason:

It of course depends how you define "quality of life", but in many civilizations throughout history, if your priorities in life are material wealth and creature comforts, then the decadence part of the cycle was actually the very best time to be alive.

Until things ran their course and the barbarians burnt it all down.

buboard• 6 years ago

The stock market didnt really crater.

But more importantly, the author has nothing to say about academia itself. The whole 'went to the moon and promised flying cars' has cratered too. Simple things like epidemiology don't work. World seems resigned to watch humanity pay the toll of herd immunity and call that an achievement.

somewhereoutth2• 6 years ago

Covid-19 has perhaps been a test of organisation, more than anything else.

Unfortunately the US (from what I observed during my short time there a few years ago), though really amazing in many ways, did rather seem (in my European eyes) to be somewhat floundering in that regard.

deogeo• 6 years ago

the US’s “holistic” college admissions system, with its baffling-to-foreigners emphasis on “character,” “leadership,” “well-roundedness,” etc. rather than test scores, originated in a successful push a century ago by the presidents of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to keep Jewish enrollments down. Today the system fulfills precisely the same function, except against Asian-Americans rather than Jews.)

"Fulfills" implies it is effective, but enrollment statistics show this to be utterly false: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21130080

ur-whale2• 6 years ago

Reminds me of a great movie called Idiocracy :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKyoSS3bwjA

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

The Collapsing Leviathan

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