I don't want to dogpile on the other comments (atheist, loved the book) but I think there's something interesting here.
Most science fiction tends to assume that religiosity will fade as humanity matures, and in a few thousand years we'll all have a good laugh at those silly ancient humans. This feels generally right to me. But it's not the only possible future, and Hyperion explores a far future in which religiosity becomes more ingrained.
I thought it was one of the more interesting aspects of the book, and contributed to the feeling of "not just another space opera". You don't have to appreciate religion to like the story.
This seems to only have a good track record in places with a democratic tradition. Some dictators have figured out you can just imprison and kill the opposition, and keep doing this until there is no more opposition.
The Khomeini government is not going to just say "oh, you're right" and change. Neither will the Kim or Putin governments. Sometimes - sadly - violence is the least worst answer.
Don't say sadly. Don't further the indoctrination that violence is bad.
It is a tool, it cannot be good or bad. States are the most prolific users of violence (even more when you also count potential/threatened, not yet materialized). Anyone who wants to claim that violence is bad has to oppose the existence of states.
Violence is risky, dangerous, unpredictable, costly, etc. But those are practical and legal, not moral, concerns.
Violence is also necessary, as you say, against governments or other actors which cannot be deterred, stopped or punished using other means.
Violence is also most effective when it's certain and overwhelming/indefensible. If we lived in a world where dictators and their flying monkeys get regularly shot or droned to death, we wouldn't have dictators. Not because they'd all end up dead but because nobody would dare try becoming or supporting one.
This is why we have to publicly support _proportional_ punishment of dictators and their supporters, both now and after they've been removed from power. Good people have to use the same tools as bad ones (after all, they are just tools, not good or bad).
> Don't say sadly...It is a tool, it cannot be good or bad
It's not just a tool, it's also a human action. An action that exacts consequences on its victim and its wielder. Necessary and regrettable aren't exclusive.
On the contrary, target is a neutral word, justifying the violence against a target is exactly as difficult as it should be - based on the circumstances instead of emotions.
Victim already implies wrongdoing so it makes justifying just violence harder than it should be.
For the record, i often use target instead of victim when talking about harassment, bullying, rape, etc. because it also doesn't imply surrender to the aggressor or lack of agency.
The problem is that it is routinely misused (especially by those who have overwhelming power), and the cases where it is really needed are really, really, really rare.
Even in cases when it appears that the use of violence is justified, the long term consequences (e.g. on culture and mentality, and hence ultimately on normal daily life) are usually such that it would have been better to avoid it in the first place.
At the moment you regularly shoot/drone the dictators, the one deciding who is dictator warranting such violence is the most scary dictator of all.
This talk about good/bad people is such naive childish ploy, are we adults here or what?
And that's why it's important to establish publicly known and accepted rules about this. Nobody suggests one person deciding this, usually people who imagine this situation have some issues of their own.
But the threat of absolutely any citizen having a decent chance of successfully killing a dictator would probably lead to democratization of power - individuals would not be attracted to having so much power they would likely become targets and we'd hopefully see more effort towards establishing more direct means of decision making.
> This talk about good/bad people is such naive childish ploy, are we adults here or what?
No need for insults, it's a simplification. It's obviously a spectrum. But broadly speaking, people who regularly intentionally harm others for their gain or pleasure (or see nothing wrong with doing it or support those who do) are considered bad. People who go out of their way to help others are good. The rest is neutral. Most people are neutral - don't see injustice or wrongdoing as their problem until it directly negatively affects them.
And obviously, there are people who do both a lot of good and a lot of bad. I consider those bad because more often than not, they only do the good things to gain support or compensate so they can get away with the bad things.
That's my personal opinion and experience. Other people could for example argue for simply summing up the good and the bad and the total would neatly categorize them. Intent also matters and that's even more complex but usually unprovable from the outside.
Some tools are definitely better than others. Also some tools are not "the right tool" for the job.
Fundamentally though I'm not sure I agree with you. Violence is often an emotional reaction. When violence is used as a tool it is usually (always?) used by bad people.
If it helps you reconcile my worldview, I absolutely oppose the existence of states.
Keep in mind this needs to be judged separately in the legal, practical and moral dimension. For example a state might determine that a person _legally_ deserves to spend 10 years in prison. But the same state will attack you in turn if you abduct that person and hold them for 10 years in similar conditions to prison because _practically_, it weakens the state's monopoly on violence, even if _morally_ that action can be justified (i.e. because if a punishment is just there is no moral reason why it should matter who carries it out).
> often ... usually (always?)
I think the crux lies in how we quantify this. If you live in a western democracy, almost all of the violence you come into contact with or hear about is in fact used by bad individuals (thiefs, gang members, drunks, etc.) or the mentally ill. But even then you have the right (moral and usually legal) to defend yourself.
If you live in other places, that violence might more often be used be institutions (such as states or religions) and might not be materialized (it is potential/threatened/implied). E.g. what happens to a muslim woman who refuses to cover her face - the violence usually never happens because she knows it would and therefore doesn't break the rule. It is still violence used to achieve a goal though and she has the same (moral but usually not legal) right to defend herself - even if any practical defense is beyond her ability to do so because the aggressors are too numerous and dispersed.
I would argue that billions of people live in countries where violence is used against them every day because it is a threat which for example stops them from freely accessing information.
In that regard you're right that it is usually used by bad people. But it says nothing about its morality. The way I see it, violence being used by bad people is a stable equilibrium but it can be used by good people during a transition to a different stable state. It is usually not used by good people in a prolonged because materialized violence tends to reduce the number of people on both sides and cannot be sustained forever.
I don't believe that punishment can be just, and ergo I don't see a moral axis on which to judge violent actions for this purpose. I might concede the use of threatened violence as a means of control, but I don't see any pragmatic way to accomplish this without at least occasional actual punishment so it's a bit non sequiter.
It's likely our views are divergent enough that we wont come to a consensus on this, but I appreciate the nuanced discourse!
I've encountered such opinions before but never cared to engage with them since they seem utterly alien to me. Can you give me a summary of your opinions or links to some materials?
There are multiple goals to a punishment - e.g.:
- Deterrence
- Protection of others / prevention of re-offense
- Removal of aggressor from community to minimize further trauma for the victim by having to interact with him
- Restitution
- Retribution
- Vindication
- Removing any gains from the offense from the aggressor
- Further disadvantaging of the aggressor to make up for `expected_gains * probability_of_getting_caught`
- Further disadvantaging of the aggressor to put negative evolutionary pressure on such behavior
- Separation of the aggressor from others to prevent him from normalizing / spreading his behavior
These few are just off the top of my head, not all apply to all offenses, and not everyone will agree all of these are desired by their favorite society. But how do you achieve any, let along most, of them without punishment?
Sure. It's not something I was formally taught, but rather a viewpoint I came to over time, informed by my own anecdotal experiences and observations. So I don't have any links to share with you, but I'm happy to give a go at explaining my logic.
The naive summary would be that if an individual harms another this is "bad" (a harm to society). To then enact a punishment would be to apply another harm, which would be doubly bad. In my mind, justice is the restoration of balance to the whole, so double harm can never be considered just.
I understand the "goals of punishment" you've outlined and don't even disagree that they can be met (to some extent) via this mechanism. Though I wouldn't classify restitution as a "punishment"[0]. I can also see how the harms from punishment can be moderated when enacted by a state (a group of individuals holding some claim to legitimate power). The question is not whether a system of punishment is sufficient, but whether it is necessary.
If the goal is to reduce all harm to the minimum practical amount we must be pragmatic in our analysis and execution.
I have also seen states grossly amplify the harms involved well past what any individual could be capable of and I have seen individuals operating on behalf of the state launder harm through their office to absolve themselves of any personal accountability for what are ultimately personal actions.
From my observations, those who receive punishment after causing harm rarely become reformed and productive members of society. If anything the punishment[1] leaves them bitter and often actively disadvantages their opportunities for success, leading them to commit more harms and drawing us down a dangerous spiral. Even in confinement these individuals often commit harm to their peers or to those that guard them—and, more abstractly, to the tax payers that are compelled to back this system.
It's not that I doubt these methods can "work" to some extent, but that I see us stuck in a local maxima. I believe we can do much better.
I believe the vast majority of crime that is commited in modern societies could be eliminated through better education, cooperation, and social equality. Why commit crimes, especially violent ones, when the opportunity cost of not pursuing more productive activities is large?
For what remains, I would propose applying insurance. When the volcano erupts and the magma damages my house I do not feel the need to "punish" the volcano.
I do believe there is a floor to violence (and other criminal acts) that will exist no matter what we do. (One-off crimes of passion or acts commited by the criminally insane, for instance). For some of these there may not be any better answer than imprisonment or exile in order to protect the community from future acts. However, I'd love to explore the proactive solutions I recommended above (education, equality, etc) and leave the shrinking vestiges of the current system to handle these edge cases if necessary.
[0]: Likewise, I can see the utility of—e.g—restraining orders and would not call those a "punishment" either, though in this we start to get into the grey area of restraint (limiting an individual's freedom of movement could be classified as a harm).
That's a good way to think about it but unfortunately, human language is so imprecise that IMO many people will leave with the conclusion that "sadly" means "using violence makes me sad and implicitly is therefore bad".
Ideally we'd live in a society where laws are a complete and consistent description of a valid (also complete and consistent) moral system. That's not the reality.
(If it's possible at all because morality operates on reality while legality operated on provability - a subset of reality which can be proven to a neutral third party.)
I suspect this kind of nuance is lost on the sort of people who think having qualms about the use of violence is the same thing as pretending to be saintly pacifists.
Why would you want to, unless you live in a domain of indoctrination ("echo chamber") that pacifism is good and anything else is bad?
I always find it useful to ask "why", whenever someone tells me their beliefs. Children do it and adults sometimes tend to find it annoying because they realize they cannot justify their beliefs but being children, they are easy to dismiss. Harder to dismiss an honest question from an adult.
“If we lived in a world where dictators and their flying monkeys get regularly shot or droned to death, we wouldn't have dictators”
While I agree with the sentiment, the groups who support dictators (oligarchs, religious extremists) would decide to also use violence. So both dictators and the leaders on the side of the people would be murdered and society would be destabilized.
We need reliable anonymous communication as yet another source of friction (drink!) which the state needs to overcome to subjugate the people. And that's why so many states, even western democracies, are trying to oppose it now using children or terrorists as an excuse. The authoritarians and wannabe-dictators (most of whom will never achieve their goal or even publicly state it) are already in government positions, always have been.
There are two upsides:
- There are more normal (good or neutral) people than there are authoritarians (bad people - who want to exercise unjustified control over other people's lives). If the leadership attributes are evenly distributed, then they need to kill more of us than we need to kill of them.
- I don't think people should need to be led. It's a symptom of submissivity many have been taught since childhood ("do what I say and don't talk back") and to some extent is it probably natural but hopefully it can be reduced through better upbringing. Teach your children to question everything and to guess people's incentives and motives. What we need need is enough independent thinkers who are able to communicate and self-organize.
Using violence against someone is the ultimate authoritarian act, so for one side this is business as usual while for the other this is the epitome of hypocrisy.
Your mention of anonymity reminds me of assasination politics [0], which is an idea I found enticing in the past. However I've since come to the opinion that such a system is neither optimal nor necessary, though I believe a similar outcome may be inevitable as we continue along the arc of the democratization of power through technical proliferation.
Only in single-step moral systems (one which judges actions as moral or immoral solely based on those actions in the moment and not what preceded them).
I have a multi-step moral system. Basically any unjustified intentional harm to a person justified proportional retaliation. Unjustified means it is not harm which is being caused as punishment to a previous offense. And proportional means that it shouldn't be too weak, neither too strong. IMO the optimum is causing something like 1.5-3x more suffering/"disadvantagement". However, it is important to signal to both the original aggressor and any potential witnesses why this is being done so that one is not mistaken for an original aggressor himself.
I am also a fan of judging others by their own moral principles. Basically, if someone thinks it is OK to, for example, limit my freedom or harm me (for various reasons or in various circumstances), I apply the same rules to him and it is therefore OK for me to limit his freedom or harm him (for similar reasons or in similar circumstances).
Either system leads to similar outcomes. (The first allows stronger response to offense, the second allows only mirroring).
Thanks for the link, it looks very interesting but it goes into my to-read list for today.
> seems to only have a good track record in places with a democratic tradition
"All that said, there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest. This isn’t really the place to talk about the broader concept of ‘coup proofing’ and how authoritarian regimes secure internal security, repression and legitimacy in detail. But a certain kind of regime operates effectively as a society-within-a-society, with an armed subset of the population as insiders who receive benefits in status and wealth from the regime in return for their willingness to do violence to maintain it. Such regimes are generally all too willing to gun down thousands or tens of thousands of protestors to maintain power.
The late Assad regime in Syria stands as a clear example of this, as evidently does the current regime in Iran. Such regimes are not immune to an ‘attack on will,’ but they have substantially insulated themselves from it and resistance to these regimes, if it continues, often metastasizes into insurgency or protracted war (as with the above example of Syria) because the pressure has nowhere else to go" (Id.).
> normal Iranian people who just want to leave their life?
Like the ones who are protesting? Idk, when people put themselves in front of a gun I'm inclined to listen to what they're demanding, not folks in their armchairs a world away.
Hitler was so bad that anybody is willing to publicly talk about killing him, there are movies glorifying it, people talk about going back in time and killing baby Hitler. He was so bad that the very strong taboo against killing does not work on him.
So, when _exactly_ did it become OK to kill him? Think about it.
What cumulative sum of his actions between 1889 and 1945 tipped the balance?
Now, do those same rules apply to current dictators or people in the process of becoming dictators even if the taboo is still strong there?
Are you comparing Iran to Hitler?! That does not make sense whatsoever.
If you mean 'At some point, you have to step in and make the change by force. Like we did with Hitler'.
I will say: Yes, at some point it is justified to step in. But, there must be a realistic chance that you will make things better, and low chance that you will make things much, much worse. International consensus would be highly desirable, as well.
In case of Iran: How sure are you that you can make a positive change in Iran by bombing only? If you kill (directly or indirectly, e.g. starvation/ruined water supplies) much more Iranians than Iranians killed themselves (like we did with Saddam), are you really helping?
I don't think there is a will (and maybe not even a capability) for boots on the ground. So, you are just hoping that the new regime would be a better one. Not many positive historical examples there.
Last, but not least: There are serious escalation dangers. What if China/Russia provided Iran with targeting data and/or missiles (not that Iran does not have their own) and Iran hit/sunk a carrier and some destroyers? Are you now in war with China/Russia? At what moment do you cross that line? Will you retreat with the tail between you legs, like from Afghanistan? Or will Israel decide to toss a nuke or two?
The idealism of helping the poor protesters is a noble one, but the road to hell is paved by good intentions.
IM messages aren’t really documents. They are text with some very minimal formatting that could be expressed with markdown. Any media attached isn’t embedded in the document, it’s attached externally / rendered at the bottom.
The only example I can think that messages are expressed as documents is Microsoft Teams. And it’s as much an example of what not to do as anything.
I'd disagree with that for most messaging apps. If you think about Discord or Slack for example. You have a plain text message and then media attachments externally. This could be very well expressed with JSON.
Very few messaging apps let you go beyond plain text and let you start embedding media or complex layouts inside a message.
Slack messages have a ton of formatting. You could implement it with some sort of extension on markdown but you'd have to write a custom parser. XML gives you a markup structure for free.
Slack canvases have full layouts including images.
Eh, XML is a machine-readable generic markup language. Why would you prefer using a less powerful format like markdown in a context like message representation? XML with inline tags seems the perfect fit.
Less powerful also means less complex and less exploitable. You can very easily grab a markdown renderer rather than trying to decode a .docx for messages.
Pretty much no messaging apps let you create messages more complex than markdown anyway.
I think this wave of guilt-by-association is starting to go a bit too far. There were some douchebags around Epstein, for sure. But knowing a douchebag, taking donations from a douchebag, or even going to parties hosted by a douchebag does not automatically make you a douchebag. Social people go to a lot of parties, and money is just money.
Call out the miscreants and bad behavior in the Epstein files, sure. But be specific. I don't like these articles insinuating "the world is full of douchebags". It isn't.
Oh please, the actual files have these people not just vaguely knowing Epstein, but asking him for help with dating, using him as advisor in dealing with sexual harassment issues in their schools (!), actually helping him to get further connections, connecting him to girls, praising him for intelligence in public and so on and so forth.
Epstein credit with them went up after he was convicted, not down. They were perfectly fine with who Epstein was and what he was doing.
Epstein thing did not went far enough at all. Instead, the actors are being protected, circling the wagons against each other.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when reading all of these "what is the big deal about being in the Epstein files" takes.
Like, there are people asking for Epstein's advice on how to fuck women that they have huge positions of authority and saying that she is "doomed" sleep with them. And these people haven't lost any material status yet! There are people asking Epstein for help suing feminists who sought to share stories of workplace sexual harassment. And there are tons of people who have publicly said "I was never friends with Epstein" all but making doe-eyes at him in their emails.
And suddenly we have a raft of "oh is it bad to have friends" and "don't all men want to fuck 16 year olds" articles coming from all corners. Insane.
Replace "douchebag" with what you should have written, namely "convicted child sex trafficker, rapist, drug and weapons dealer, torturer and sexual predator", and nothing what you said is anywhere near acceptable.
Besides, the article does not insinuate that "the world is full of douchebags"; it claims that a surprising proportion of people in a very specific, small subset of all people—male authors of a certain age connected to the Edge Institute—apparently had no qualms associating themselves with a person of the aforementioned description. You make it sound trifling when you call it "bad behavior".
I think the fallacy at hand is more along the lines of "no true scotsman".
You can define understanding to require such detail that nobody can claim it; you can define understanding to be so trivial that everyone can claim it.
"Why does the sun rise?" Is it enough to understand that the Earth revolves around the sun, or do you need to understand quantum gravity?
Good point. OP was saying "no one knows" when in fact plenty of people do know but people also often conflate knowing & understanding w/o realizing that's what they're doing. People who have studied programming, electrical engineering, ultraviolet lithography, quantum mechanics, & so on know what is going on inside the computer but that's different from saying they understand billions of transistors b/c no one really understands billions of transistors even though a single transistor is understood well enough to be manufactured in large enough quantities that almost anyone who wants to can have the equivalent of a supercomputer in their pocket for less than $1k: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0.
Somewhere along the way from one transistor to a few billion human understanding stops but we still know how it was all assembled together to perform boolean arithmetic operations.
With LLMs, The "knowing" you're describing is trivial and doesn't really constitute knowing at all. It's just the physics of the substrate. When people say LLMs are a black box, they aren't talking about the hardware or the fact that it's "math all the way down." They are talking about interpretability.
If I hand you a 175-billion parameter tensor, your 'knowledge' of logic gates doesn't help you explain why a specific circuit within that model represents "the concept of justice" or how it decided to pivot a sentence in a specific direction.
On the other hand, the very professions you cited rely on interpretability. A civil engineer doesn't look at a bridge and dismiss it as "a collection of atoms" unable to go further. They can point to a specific truss and explain exactly how it manages tension and compression, tell you why it could collapse in certain conditions. A software engineer can step through a debugger and tell you why a specific if statement triggered.
We don't even have that much for LLMs so why would you say we have an idea of what's going on ?
It sounds like you're looking for something more than the simple reality that the math is what's going on. It's a complex system that can't simply be debugged through[1], but that doesn't mean it isn't "understood".
This reminds me of Searle's insipid Chinese Room; the rebuttal (which he never had an answer for) is that "the room understands Chinese". It's just not satisfying to someone steeped in cultural traditions that see people as "souls". But the room understands Chinese; the LLM understands language. It is what it is.
[1] Since it's deterministic, it certainly can be debugged through, but you probably don't have the patience to step through trillions of operations. That's not the technology's fault.
>It sounds like you're looking for something more than the simple reality that the math is what's going on.
Train a tiny transformer on addition pairs (i.e i.e '38393 + 79628 = 118021') and it will learn an algorithm for addition to minimize next token error. This is not immediately obvious. You won't be able to just look at the matrix multiplications and see what addition implementation it subscribes to but we know this from tedious interpretability research on the features of the model. See, this addition transformer is an example of a model we do understand.
So those inscrutable matrix multiplications do have underlying meaning and multiple interpretability papers have alluded as much, even if we don't understand it 99% of the time.
I'm very fine with simply saying 'LLMs understand Language' and calling it a day. I don't care for Searle's Chinese Room either. What I'm not going to tell you is that we understand how LLMs understand language.
Your ultra-reductionism does not not constitute understanding. "Math happens and that somehow leads to a conversational AI" is true, but it is not useful. You cannot use it to answer questions like "how should I prompt the model to achieve <x>". There are many layers of abstraction within the network - important, predictive abstractions - which you have no concept of. It is as useful as asking a particle physicist why your girlfriend left you, because she is made of atoms.
Incidentally, your description of LLMs also describes all software, ever. It's just math, man! That doesn't make you an expert kernel hacker.
It sounds like you're looking for the field of psychology. And like the field of psychology, any predictive abstraction around systems this complicated will be tenuous, statistical, and full of bad science.
You may never get a scientific answer to "how should I prompt the model to achieve <x>", just like you may never get a capital-S scientific answer to "how should I convince people to do X". What would it even mean to "understand people" like this?
No one relies on "interpretability" in quantum mechanics. It is famously uninterpretable. In any case, I don't think any further engagement is going to be productive for anyone here so I'm dropping out of this thread. Good luck.
Quantum mechanics has competing interpretations (Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, etc.) about what the math means philosophically, but we still have precise mathematical models that let us predict outcomes and engineer devices.
Again, we lack even this much with LLMs so why say we know how they work ?
Unless I'm missing what you mean by a mile, this isn't true at all. We have infinitely precise models for the outcomes of LLMs because they're digital. We are also able to engineer them pretty effectively.
The ML Research world (so this isn't simply a matter of being ignorant/uninformed) was surprised by the performance of GPT-2 and utterly shocked by GPT-3. Why ? Isn't that strange ? Did the transformer architecture fundamentally change between these releases ? No, it did not at all.
So why ? Because even in 2026, nevermind 18 and 19, the only way to really know exactly how a neural network will perform trained with x data at y scale is to train it and see. No elaborate "laws", no neat equations. Modern Artificial Intelligence is an extremely empirical, trial and error field, with researchers often giving post-hoc rationalizations for architectural decisions. So no, we do not have any precise models that tell us how a LLM will respond to any query. If we did, we wouldn't need to spend months and millions of dollars training them.
We don't have a model for how an LLM that doesn't exist will respond to a specific query. That's different from lacking insight at all. For an LLM that exists it's still hard to interpret but it's very clear what is actually happening. That's better than you often get with quantum physics when there's a bunch of particles and you can't even get a good answer for the math.
And even for potential LLMs, there are some pretty good extrapolations for overall answer quality based on the amount of data and the amount of training.
>We don't have a model for how an LLM that doesn't exist will respond to a specific query.
We don't have a model for a LLM that does exist will respond to a specific query either.
>For an LLM that exists it's still hard to interpret but it's very clear what is actually happening.
No, it's not and I'm getting tired of explaining this. If you think it is, write your paper and get very rich.
>That's better than you often get with quantum physics when there's a bunch of particles and you can't even get a good answer for the math.
You clearly don't understand any of this.
>And even for potential LLMs, there are some pretty good extrapolations for overall answer quality based on the amount of data and the amount of training.
> We don't have a model for a LLM that does exist will respond to a specific query either.
Yes we do... It's math, you can calculate it.
> No, it's not and I'm getting tired of explaining this. If you think it is, write your paper and get very rich.
Why would I get rich for explaining how to do math?
> You clearly don't understand any of this.
Could you be more specific?
Quantum physics is stupidly hard to calculate when you approach realistic situations.
A real LLM takes a GPU a fraction of a second.
They're both hard to interpret, please realize I'm agreeing that LLMs are hard to interpret. But they're easier than QM on some other fronts.
And mentioning copenhagen or many-worlds doesn't show that quantum mechanics are easy to interpret, that's about as useful as saying an LLM works like neuron activation.
It would explain why the information density is so low. I got about halfway through hoping for something clever, then started scanning, then just gave up.
10k words for "migrating code and data is a headache". Yeah. Next.
I don't think this is realistic. A few thoughts in no particular order:
- War is logistics and you're talking about trying to get involved in a war, that would necessitate supply lines thousands of miles long, between two countries that are separated by 80 miles.
- China is extremely technologically advanced with the largest military in the world, by a wide margin.
- China is the at-scale manufacturing king of the world. In a shift to a war economy, nobody would be able to come even remotely close to competing. They parallel the US in WW2 in a number of ways.
- China is a nuclear power, meaning getting involved is going to be Ukraine style indirect aid to try to avoid direct conflict and nuclear escalation.
- Any attempt to engage in things like sanctions would likely hurt the sanctioners significantly more than China.
- The "rest of the world" you're referring to is the anglosphere, EU, and a few oddballs like Japan or South Korea. This makes up less than 15% of the world, and declining.
- War fatigue is real. The US really wanted to invade Syria, but no matter how hard we beat the war drums, people just weren't down with it. I think this is because people saw major echoes of Iraq at the time, and Taiwan will have a far louder echo of Ukraine. This isn't a show many people will be enthusiastic about rerunning.
* The US has the largest military logistics system in the world and regularly uses it to fight wars. It's a well exercised muscle.
* Being close to the front lines is as much of a liability as an asset. China's ports and shipbuilding facilities will be bombed out, the US' will not.
* This will be a naval and air war. You can't march troops across the strait, and as we've seen in Ukraine, flying them is a no-go either.
* China hasn't fought a war within the living memory of anyone of fighting age.
* You have a weird way of trying to diminish what represents most of the economic power of the world. Let's also add the Philippines and Vietnam to those "oddballs". China will be alone. And don't forget that China's population is shrinking.
* War fatigue is not an issue here when it comes to Taiwan. Adventurism in Venezuela was emboldening. We'll see what happens with Iran. I live in the generally pacifist part of the US, and I think most folks would demand that we intervene.
The most likely start to hostilities will be if China declares a blockade. Someone in the US will call their bluff - with warships. If China starts shooting, we're in a war. Moral outrage is an (often unfortunate) American trait.
You're speaking of a hot war which isn't ever going to happen owing to nuclear weapons. And if it did happen it precludes many of your scenarios. For instance naval vessels are highly vulnerable to modern weapons technology. Aircraft carriers were constantly sunk in WW2. The main factor that shifted after WW2 is that nukes precluded direct war between major powers, so they ended up being exclusively used against places incapable of defending themselves. More generally Ukraine has provided many lessons in modern war, and among them is that experience in invading these sort of countries is not only useless but perhaps even harmful as it can contribute to flawed assumptions.
That 15% no longer has the majority of the economic power in the world, or anywhere near it. There's a great visualization of the G7 vs BRICS here. [1] That's obviously not all countries, but those omitted aren't going to change the result nor trend. Just as important is what "economy" means. When we speak of war we're referring to the ability to go from ploughshares to swords, but most of the 15% have neglected their core manufacturing competencies and transitioned to service economies where these large numbers don't really translate into economic might of the sort we might imagine. Again, yet another lesson from Ukraine.
PPP is misapplied here; you literally get more PPP by having less economic power.
You think a hot war won't happen over Taiwan? I mean, I hope you are right. But if China wants to invade, it's going to turn into a hot war including the US and probably a number of other regional neighbors.
My guess is that MAD will keep the war conventional even though people have nukes. After all, Russia has nukes and they haven't used them despite their failure on the battlefield.
I'm curious where you are from? You don't sound like you understand the mentality of Americans. Your reasoning sounds quite a lot like the theories of victory circulating among Japanese leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
PPP is the exchange rate normalized cost of a basket of goods in different countries. The way you have a high PPP is by having an economy where people can buy a lot with a little. Whether that lot happens to be eggs, steel, or artillery shells. The US is avoiding a hot war with Russia over Ukraine. They will never, ever, engage in a hot war with China over Taiwan. They'll feed weapons to Taiwan and let the Taiwanese fight to the last man, somehow try to frame the eventual defeat as a victory, wash our hands of it, and rapidly move on to the next war.
And if you think Russia is failing, then I'm not sure you know what victory looks like when fighting a competent adversary. The Ukrainian army is being fueled by endless and increasingly brutal forced conscription, and backed by Western weapons, tech, hardware, and intelligence. But instead of the present, let's go 4 years back after the invasion and when the West decided to get overtly involved. Imagine I came to you and said 'hey stickfigure not only with this war last for years, but in 4 years Russia will have the strategic initiative, control a massive chunk of Ukraine, and be continuing to push forward' -- what do you think you would have said? 'Russia must be failing' wouldn't really be a logical response then, or now.
I take this as more or less confirmation that you are not American and are so detached from American culture that you haven't the faintest idea what Americans will do over Taiwan.
That adage about being doomed to repeat history would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
I thought your question was quite childish as it's effectively a masked ad hominem to avoid dealing with the fundamentally illogical points in your argument. I expect deep inside you know full well that you're living in a bubble, and that bubble's reality and the world's reality have long since diverged.
Part of the reason people are doomed to repeat history is precisely this effect. By the time Hitler was greenlighting the Volkssturm, he certainly knew it was over. But he refused to step outside of his cognitive dissonance, to the net result that vast numbers of Germans ended up dying for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
You've offered unsupported opinions about American attitudes and future behavior. Since you're setting yourself up as an expert on Americans, I'm impeaching your credibility. Strictly speaking this is not ad homenim.
Reread the thread. You've built something up in your mind that isn't accurate. Obviously I'm American, though it's completely inconsequential to what I have said.
> Imagine I came to you and said 'hey stickfigure not only with this war last for years, but in 4 years Russia will have the strategic initiative, control a massive chunk of Ukraine, and be continuing to push forward' -- what do you think you would have said? 'Russia must be failing' wouldn't really be a logical response then, or now.
"Four years" alone would've raised eyebrows.
If four years ago anyone had said that Russia would invade Ukraine with everything it got and that four years later it would still stuck fighting for the first eastern provinces, with casualties exceeding a million and no end in sight, they would've been dismissed as an insane doomer. And yet here we are.
By now, the war against Ukraine is among the worst disasters in the entire military history of Russia, far worse than the 1979 invasion Afghanistan and the 1904 Russo-Japanese war, which until recently were regarded as the worst catastrophies of the modern era. Notable Russian fascist Maxim Kalashnikov goes much further. He says that Russia tried to subjugate Ukrainians, but failed, and Ukrainians will return for revenge. He calls it a "cultural and civilizational defeat": https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1985270960321130516
US military logistics minnow in Indopac vs PRC mainland logistics. Peak US war fighting capability was calibrated around adversaries with 50% of US GDP, even Iraq took 50% of USN CSGs + extremely favourable region basing in multi month surge operations. PRC conservatively 100x larger high-end target than Iraq, 150% US GDP by PPP, and more by actual industrial output. Before VZ uber trip, US was flexing and failing vs Houthis, i.e. shit tier adversary that actually bothered shooting US ships.
CONUS targets are on the menu, there's a reason China Military Report from last month included US west coast under PRC conventional fire, which TBH was years out of date, i.e. most of CONUS will be vulnerable, and PRC has more harden targets to attrite and more ability to deny US fires in the first place, i.e. PRC taking out exquisitely vulnerable CSG/unrep/tankers logistics tail drops US ability to deliver fires to PRC to zero, vs PRC global strikes complex chilling in hardened tunnels is extremely survivable.
You can aggregate everyone in 1IC and PRC still out manpower and out produce by magnitude. Hence most will stay neutral for the simple reason they're within PRC logistics backyard which US don't have remote capability to defend against. PRC simply that big in scale, i.e. their acquisition of 1m loitering munitions on top of 1m drones and cruise missile Gigafactory that can churn 1000 components (likely floor) per day makes any US posture in 1/2IC not survivable outside of cope war games. PRC has the fire power to literally fight everyone simultaneously, with domestic resources (no imports) to maintain war economy basically indefinitely.
Ultimately, if PRC starts TW blockading, US will likely look at ledger/force balance and bail because PRC sees through US bluff. Doesn't matter if pacifist muricans demand intervention if PRC throws every TWnese in torment nexus, ultimately US unlikely to out attrite PRC in backyard, and more fundamentally, cannot out reconstitute faster than PRC after the fact. US isn't gambling shipyards, energy infra, semi fabs, hyperscalers, payment processors, boeing/lockheed plants over TW. Now 10 years ago, when US could theoretically asymmetrically hit PRC without CONUS vulnerability, US intervention strategically likely, but this 2026, we see the new national security strategy. Much more sensible for US planners to retreat to hemisphere and accept spheres of influence arrangement. Americans being powerless to US foreign policy is an (often unfortunate) American trait.
> supply lines thousands of miles long, between two countries that are separated by 80 miles
I think this one is particularly important. IIRC, it's usually phrased something like "if the USA sends aircraft carriers across the pacific, then China has an unsinkable aircraft carrier 80 miles away: the mainland". It's a huge home turf advantage.
The USA seems to have a very low appetite for helping allies against bullies at present too. And no appetite for taking US soldier casualties.
I think that, if China tries to take Taiwan, rather than a direct military confrontation, the US might just block the Straits of Malacca against oil heading for China - or maybe against anything heading for China.
China would enforce a blockade against Taiwan. The US might or might not be able to break it. But China would have a very hard time breaking a US blockade down there.
You really believe that "the rest of the world" countries should conscript citizens and go to war to help Taiwan? Most people if faced with this choice would direct you to the place where the sun does not shine.
rightly or wrongly, I'm quite confident the US will not go to war with China if it invades Taiwan - the American people simply wouldn't support it. It's one thing to get public support for dropping a few bombs on a tiny opponent with little risk, as the US regularly does, it's another entirely to go to war with a major power with a very high casualty rate. The US wouldn't have even entered WW2 (as much as the administration may have wanted to) if the Japanese hadn't foolishly attacked Pearl Harbor and then Germany declared war as well. But unlike Japan and Germany, China has the manufacturing capacity and access to raw resources that would make it a very different enemy.
The PRC will happily sell chips to the West. I live in Taiwan, I don't want it to happen, but people need to stop acting like countries will prevent an invasion because it means the CPC will control chip manufacturing.
The choice is between possible nuclear war, or, the 5090s are more expensive and sometimes Americans can't buy them when the PRC is punishing the west for something.
Honestly, this is the most reasonable comment here, especially coming from someone in Taiwan. I hear similar views when I'm in Asia, which are very different from what I hear back in the West.
All you can muster to eek a gram of joy in your 996 life is internet trolling on foreign forums while you playact at being a communist - because you know as well as I that you can't even talk about communism on PRC social media.
The irony of enjoying the more open free speech of liberal democracies through a VPN while pretending to be a communist vanguard in a socialist paradise is absolutely beautiful to me, my friends and I are very much enjoying your comments. Please don't stop!
You both broke the site guidelines very badly in this thread. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are, or how large the gap between you.
I get set off specifically by wumao/little pinks (the Mandarin term for PRC based nationalist netizens, not necessarily an insult), something about their arrogance while wishing death on me and my family is very personal and hard to resist engaging with.
I accept I broke the rules and will try to avoid doing so again in the future, but for perspective, just imagine if you were Ukrainian, it's 2018, and someone from Russia was posting about how they can't wait for their country to invade yours.
But, I like the site the way it is, and the rules make it that way, so I understand.
You both broke the site guidelines very badly in this thread. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are, or how large the gap between you.
It's weirdly myopic how HN users always think of TSMC as the main factor here. In reality the greater concern has always been containing China within the first island chain. As long as mainland China doesn't control Taiwan they have no way to secure their sea lines of communication.
looks at Ukraine, its white people and NATO wont fight for it. how about another group of chinse vs chinese in far far away? and the global south supports china more?
That's a total non sequitur. Ukraine wasn't a NATO member so why would NATO fight for it? (Several NATO members have given substantial aid to Ukraine.) In terms of a potential conflict between mainland China and Taiwan, the only NATO member with the capacity to do anything is the USA. The other players will be Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Australia so the outcome will largely depend on whether they decide to get involved.
Not really. The world got other problems. Europe is out for now, since we got Fascists at our doorstep trying to conquer Ukraine. The US has the orange clown as president, who is cozy with Putin. I don't think you can ascribe it to others being cowards, if "the world" doesn't react to protect Taiwan. It is right at China's doorstep. The logistic imbalance of trying to protect Taiwan, being this close to China is insane.
In the end, if a war happens, it will be idiotic again, from an economical point of view and from a humanitarian point of view. Economically, of course it will cost huge amount of resources to conquer Taiwan, and it will only disturb trade and what is already established on Taiwan. From a humanitarian point of view, of course many people will die.
The smartest China could do, would be to return to a soft power approach, and continue to develop mainland China, to continue to rival and even surpass Taiwan/Taipei. There are many young people, who don't have the walls in their minds, that the older population has. They don't want war, they want their freedom, and they want a high living standard. All this would be theoretically possible, if China didn't let ideology rule, but instead went for the economically best route, which is most certainly not an invasion.
China's takeover of Hong Kong proved that any notion of "one country, two systems" is a total lie and assurances from the Chinese Communist Party are completely worthless. There's no coming back from that, at least as long as Xi Jinping remains in power. Young people in Taiwan are less supportive of reintegration with the mainland than ever before. Fewer of them even have direct family ties there now.
> Young people in Taiwan are less supportive of reintegration with the mainland than ever before.
Well, go figure, if you run military "exercises" at the doorstep of your neighbor, people are not gonna like you very much, duh. But there was a time before more recent escalations, when lots of young Taiwanese people did not think too badly about being part of China. That's why I said that the smartest move would be (or would have been) to continue an approach of soft power and development, to rival life in Taiwan. Give the people comfort and high living standard, and they are less likely to dislike you.
This thread casually talks about Taiwan being a vassal state of the US during a civil war and Hong Kong being a colony of the British. Yet the world, largely the global south, should intervene and help the global north to exploit the rest of the world more?
Every one gets that far away countries across the world can’t put military bases right next to Europe or the US. However when it comes to China, that is not only acceptable but it’s the anti-cowardly move to support outsider aggressors.
> can’t put military bases right next to Europe or the US
Indeed, Japan and Korea and the Philippines have American military bases on them.
You mentioned Taiwan, curious why? It has no American military bases. Perhaps of all the countries in the region, it's the most sovereign in that sense.
This doesn't make any sense, the USA hasn't touched anything about Taiwan in any meaningful way ever since it became the ROC, and certainly not at all since the KMT was overthrown. In fact American overtures to control chip manufacturing here were rejected explicitly as "economic imperialism."
What's with this Americentric geopolitical analysis?
You mean when the American ambassador escorted Mao to the signing of the Double Tenth agreement because the Americans were worried the KMT would go back on their word and assassinate him? Or in 1950 when Truman announced Taiwan as "Chinese territory" and directed that no American navy presence was to be permitted in the Taiwan strait?
Anyway take up your grievances with the KMT, don't worry, they're about to come crying back into the CPC's arms begging for a shred of political power now that their regime has been overthrown for 30 years, and their efforts to sell Taiwan to the CPC in exchange for a teaspoon of political legitimacy are failing spectacularly.
I think it's pretty obvious that something like this product is going to be the future, but the technology is still pretty raw. Eventually, humans will have some kind of personal assistant baked into their field of view. Maybe we're on the cusp, or maybe we're 50 years out. Hard to know.
That's fine? I mean, this is how the world works in general. Your friend X recommends Y. If Y turns out to suck, you stop listening to recommendations from X. If Y happens to be spam or malware, maybe you unfriend X or revoke all of his/her endorsements.
It's not a perfect solution, but it is a solution that evolves towards a high-trust network because there is a traceable mechanism that excludes abusers.
That's true. And this is also actually how the global routing of internet works (BGP protocol).
My comment was just to highlight possible set of issues. Hardly any system is perfect. But it's important to understand where the flaws lie so we are more careful about how we go about using it.
The BGP for example, a system that makes entire internet work, also suffers from similar issues.
Most science fiction tends to assume that religiosity will fade as humanity matures, and in a few thousand years we'll all have a good laugh at those silly ancient humans. This feels generally right to me. But it's not the only possible future, and Hyperion explores a far future in which religiosity becomes more ingrained.
I thought it was one of the more interesting aspects of the book, and contributed to the feeling of "not just another space opera". You don't have to appreciate religion to like the story.
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