chrismatic

I have to point out the irony of posting this diatribe under a post about a data leak that seems to pretty much confirm many of the assessments that have been made about the AfD being more than just another right-wing party.

I don't think that popularity should factor into the consideration of a ban. Lots of objectively bad ideas can trend for a while which is why modern democracies emphasize constitutionalism and institutionalism. Would you not, for instance, have advocated for a ban of the NSDAP even in 1933 knowing the consequences?

That analysis skips quite a few empires both before and after the Roman empire. Also, at least for the Romans the bureaucracy arguably came after the empire was already well established.

How does this analogy work when in 1980 you knew that nukes and people using them were a real thing, but we've never seen a frontier model "hack into core inference infrastructure to upload weights to other GPUs to survive"?

And? There's endless high quality content on YouTube.

I think that there is a huge leap between using the Kurds to do your fighting (like in Syria) and what he claims if you look at the map that he pulls up in that section.

He makes quite a few quite controversial assertions without evidence or even bothering to explain them. At the top of my head and paraphrasing:

- "The conflict is a game of chicken." Only in the vaguest sense in which any war or confrontation could be called that.

- "The USA is not equipped to handle a war against drones and fanatics". Idk they seem more capable than any other nation save Ukraine given that those two things have been a major feature of their recent wars.

- "Countries that are poor have more energy and are more cohesive". This is just demonstrably false, but he does not bother to explain why he thinks this.

- "The US wants to break Iran into ethno-states that compete for water until they are all dead." He even admits that this is pure conjecture and hand-waves this as the game-theoretic "optimal" strategy which is completely bonkers.

I do share his negative sentiment and outlook about the war, but there are way better critics that don't resort to this type of intellectual laziness.

I think we should hold people to a higher standard especially when they talk with this much confidence and present themselves as a professor. The issue is that "Game Theory" is a technical term so there really only is an "Academic" sense otherwise it's just a marketing term for whatever ideas you want to push.

While I agree with some of his sentiments the entire video reeks of half-baked conspiratorial thinking and shallow engagement with the facts.

A quick tell is that the video's title includes "Game Theory", while only referencing game-theoretical concepts twice in an off-hand comment. In both instances the usage is plainly wrong.

In general, he loves making big assertions without backing them up with evidence or explanations that go beyond hand-wavy examples.