Harold and George Destroy the World

https://tomclancy.info/harold-and-george.html

by tclancy • 4 months ago

231 280 4 months ago

tomclancy.info

SideburnsOfDoom4• 4 months ago

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-...

c223• 4 months ago

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

SideburnsOfDoom4• 4 months ago

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?

afavour4• 4 months ago

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...

Fricken4• 4 months ago

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

api4• 4 months ago

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!

bitexploder2• 4 months ago

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

simpsond• 4 months ago

All fights between my children stem from resource contention.

Fricken4• 4 months ago

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.

fzeroracer• 4 months ago

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.

rglover• 4 months ago

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).

simpaticoder• 4 months ago

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.

bitexploder2• 4 months ago

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).

enoint5• 4 months ago

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.

martin-t• 4 months ago

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.

---

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.

---

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.

enoint5• 4 months ago

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.

hyperhello• 4 months ago

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

amelius3• 4 months ago

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

glitchc• 4 months ago

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.

api4• 4 months ago

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.

trgn• 4 months ago

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.

65103• 4 months ago

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.

Configure0251• 4 months ago

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.

boogieknite2• 4 months ago

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

throwaway743• 4 months ago

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".

tclancy12• 4 months ago

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.

permo-w3• 4 months ago

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

danabramov• 4 months ago

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.

tclancy12• 4 months ago

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

basedkman• 4 months ago

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

slibhb3• 4 months ago

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.

tclancy12• 4 months ago

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.

api4• 4 months ago

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.

tormeh2• 4 months ago

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.

SomeHacker44• 4 months ago

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.

api4• 4 months ago

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.

BirAdam• 4 months ago

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

Ekaros• 4 months ago

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.

GeoAtreides• 4 months ago

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)

donatj2• 4 months ago

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.

Esophagus43• 4 months ago

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

megaloblasto• 4 months ago

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.

donatj2• 4 months ago

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.

bee_rider2• 4 months ago

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?

delichon• 4 months ago

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.

tormeh2• 4 months ago

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

hnthrow0287345• 4 months ago

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.

PLenz• 4 months ago

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.

Geste• 4 months ago

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…)

dyauspitr• 4 months ago

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.

ranyume4• 4 months ago

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.

randallsquared2• 4 months ago

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

seer• 4 months ago

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.

lucianbr• 4 months ago

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.

ainch• 4 months ago

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.

jayd163• 4 months ago

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.

tclancy12• 4 months ago

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.

alecco4• 4 months ago

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.

marxisttemp• 4 months ago

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

mchaver• 4 months ago

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.

throw3108223• 4 months ago

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.

bee_rider2• 4 months ago

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.”

BobbyJo• 4 months ago

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).

dalmo32• 4 months ago

Idiocracy really seems to appeal to eugenicists

And all men are Socrates...?

jstanley• 4 months ago

"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.

permo-w3• 4 months ago

Singapore seems to have done quite well operating on that notion

jeremyjh5• 4 months ago

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.

mjevans2• 4 months ago

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

If we like the idea of biological parents bonding strongly with their children, the whole 'work from home' and 'work life balance' things should also be strongly evaluated. I happen to think that delivering strongly on the above points would also pair well with at least some 'work from home' so that parents have time to work, time for being human, and time to be a good parent. Harder to measure experimental results probably include a healthier emotional and motivational status, lower stress for everyone involved, and maybe even higher output if not just higher quality output during hours worked.

xp845• 4 months ago

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.

econ2• 4 months ago

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!

ACCount37• 4 months ago

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.

wakamoleguy• 4 months ago

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

amelius3• 4 months ago

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

Fricken4• 4 months ago

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

tclancy12• 4 months ago

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.

ffsm8• 4 months ago

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.

embedding-shape2• 4 months ago

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.

raincole2• 4 months ago

by top skilled immigration

who are mostly from countries where education is

leaning more to memorization

thundergolfer• 4 months ago

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.

yoyohello13• 4 months ago

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

skybrian• 4 months ago

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...

echelon2• 4 months ago

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.

pyrale• 4 months ago

(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.

masswerk• 4 months ago

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.

djmips• 4 months ago

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

piloto_ciego2• 4 months ago

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.

skyberrys3• 4 months ago

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.

saaaaaam• 4 months ago

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.

tclancy12• 4 months ago

It’s post modern, y’know?

ranyume4• 4 months ago

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.

skyberrys3• 4 months ago

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.

jayd163• 4 months ago

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

est• 4 months ago

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

blitzar• 4 months ago

Those who can do.

Those that can't become politicians.

rayiner11• 4 months ago

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.

65103• 4 months ago

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

budman12• 4 months ago

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.

giaour• 4 months ago

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.

the_gastropod2• 4 months ago

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

zemvpferreira• 4 months ago

There is no difference.

throw3108223• 4 months ago

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.

genthree2• 4 months ago

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.

tclancy12• 4 months ago

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.

some_random• 4 months ago

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.

jrmg2• 4 months ago

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.

kjksf• 4 months ago

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.

js8• 4 months ago

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.

dudefeliciano2• 4 months ago

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.”

ericmcer• 4 months ago

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".

slibhb3• 4 months ago

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.

konart• 4 months ago

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.

genthree2• 4 months ago

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.

Fricken4• 4 months ago

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.

bethekidyouwant• 4 months ago

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

Vaslo• 4 months ago

Agreed - not sure why this nonsense is here.

bad_username• 4 months ago

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

tclancy12• 4 months ago

Boyo literally in the rules not to dot this.

jayd163• 4 months ago

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

tclancy12• 4 months ago

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

DoneWithAllThat2• 4 months ago

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?

eudamoniac3• 4 months ago

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.

DoneWithAllThat2• 4 months ago

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.

eudamoniac3• 4 months ago

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.

randallsquared2• 4 months ago

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...

conception• 4 months ago

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.

enoint5• 4 months ago

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.

throw3108223• 4 months ago

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.

SoftTalker• 4 months ago

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

brabel2• 4 months ago

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...

afavour4• 4 months ago

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.

ryandrake2• 4 months ago

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?

cyberge99• 4 months ago

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

boca_honey• 4 months ago

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...

MidnightRider393• 4 months ago

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.

adventured• 4 months ago

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.

nradov4• 4 months ago

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.

bengale• 4 months ago

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.

carveat6• 4 months ago

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.

linkregister• 4 months ago

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

tom_• 4 months ago

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

recursivecaveat• 4 months ago

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.

amelius3• 4 months ago

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

the_real_cher• 4 months ago

USA= United States of Accounts payable

nkurz• 4 months ago

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...

dpark• 4 months ago

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.

dudefeliciano2• 4 months ago

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.

jmyeet• 4 months ago

[flagged]

budman12• 4 months ago

"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.

sorokod2• 4 months ago

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/

jimkleiber• 4 months ago

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.

sorokod2• 4 months ago

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

arjie• 4 months ago

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”.

lyu07282• 4 months ago

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.

rakejake• 4 months ago

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.

thrw0452• 4 months ago

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.

enoint5• 4 months ago

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.

spudlyo• 4 months ago

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

tclancy12• 4 months ago

Finally someone get it.

readthenotes1• 4 months ago

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...

Harold and George Destroy the World

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