Third World was a reference to the Third Estate

Thursday, July 31st, 2025

I remember being confused as a kid by the term Third World for poor or primitive. I was also confused that we were First World, and they were Third World. Were there intermediate Second World countries that just never came up?

The demographer, anthropologist, and historian Alfred Sauvy, in an article published in the French magazine L’Observateur, August 14, 1952, coined the term third world (tiers monde), referring to countries that were playing a small role in international trade and business.

His usage was a reference to the Third Estate (tiers état), the commoners of France who, before and during the French Revolution, opposed the clergy and nobles, who composed the First Estate and Second Estate, respectively (hence the use of the older form tiers rather than the modern troisième for “third”). Sauvy wrote, “This third world ignored, exploited, despised like the third estate also wants to be something.”

In the context of the Cold War, he conveyed the concept of political non-alignment with either the capitalist or communist bloc.

I nonetheless have zero memory of anyone referring to the Soviet Bloc as the Second World.

Posted in Policy | 4 Comments »

You can bring the Old World’s knowledge and technology to the new, but if geography is against you, then you will have limited success

Wednesday, July 30th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallLatin America, particularly its south, is proof, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), that you can bring the Old World’s knowledge and technology to the new, but if geography is against you, then you will have limited success, especially if you get the politics wrong:

In the United States, once the land had been taken from its original inhabitants, much of it was sold or given away to small landholders; by contrast, in Latin America the Old World culture of powerful landowners and serfs was imposed, which led to inequality. On top of this, the European settlers introduced another geographical problem that to this day holds many countries back from developing their full potential: they stayed near the coasts, especially (as we saw in Africa) in regions where the interior was infested by mosquitoes and disease. Most of the countries’ biggest cities, often the capitals, were therefore near the coasts, and all roads from the interior were developed to connect to the capitals but not to one another.

In some cases, for example in Peru and Argentina, the metropolitan area of the capital city contains more than 30 percent of the country’s population.

[…]

Mexico is growing into a regional power, but it will always have the desert wastelands in its north, its mountains to the east and west, and its jungles in the south, all physically limiting its economic growth. Brazil has made its appearance on the world stage, but its internal regions will remain isolated from one another; and Argentina and Chile, despite their wealth of natural resources, will still be far farther away from New York and Washington than are Paris and London.

[…]

Their total population (including the Caribbean) is 600 million people, and yet their combined GDP is equivalent to that of France and the UK, which together comprise 120 million people.

[…]

At its widest point, west to east, from Brazil across to Peru, it is 3,200 miles. On the western side is the Pacific, on the other the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic. None of the coastlines have many natural deep harbors, thus limiting trade.

Central America is hill country with deep valleys, and at its narrowest point is only 120 miles across. Then, running parallel to the Pacific, for 4,500 miles, is the longest continuous mountain chain in the world—the Andes. They are snow-capped along their entire length and mostly impassable, thus cutting off many regions in the west of the continent from the east. The highest point in the Western Hemisphere is here—the 22,843-foot Aconcagua Mountain—and the waters tumbling down from the mountain range are a source of hydroelectric power for the Andean nations of Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. Finally, the land descends, forests and glaciers appear, we are into the Chilean archipelago, and then—land’s end. The eastern side of Latin America is dominated by Brazil and the Amazon River, the second longest in the world after the Nile.

[…]

The relative flatland east of the Andes and temperate climate of the lower third of South America, known as the Southern Cone, are in stark contrast to the mountains and jungle farther north and enable agricultural and construction costs to be reduced, thus making them some of the most profitable regions on the entire continent—whereas Brazil, as we shall see, even has difficulty moving goods around its own domestic market.

[…]

In the nineteenth century, many of the newly independent countries broke apart, either through civil conflict or cross-border wars, but by the end of that century the borders of the various states were mostly set. The three richest nations—Brazil, Argentina, and Chile—then set off on a ruinously expensive naval arms race, which held back the development of all three.

[…]

Particularly bitter is the relationship between Bolivia and Chile, which dates back to the 1879 War of the Pacific in which Bolivia lost a large chunk of its territory, including 250 miles of coastline, and has been landlocked ever since. It has never recovered from this blow, which partially explains why it is among the poorest Latin American countries. This in turn has exacerbated the severe divide between the mostly European lowlands population and the mostly indigenous peoples of the highlands.

[…]

Despite the fact that Bolivia has the third-largest reserves of natural gas in South America it will not sell any to Chile, which is in need of a reliable supplier. Two Bolivian presidents who toyed with the idea were thrown out of office and the current president, Evo Morales, has a “gas to Chile” policy consisting of a “gas for coastline” deal, which is dismissed by Chile despite its need for energy. National pride and geographical need on both sides trump diplomatic compromise.

[…]

Guatemala claims Belize as part of its sovereign territory but, unlike Bolivia, is unwilling to push the issue. Chile and Argentina argue over the Beagle Channel water route, Venezuela claims half of Guiana, and Ecuador has historical claims on Peru.

[…]

In its far north, Mexico has a two-thousand-mile-long border with the United States, almost all of which is desert. The land here is so harsh that most of it is uninhabited.

[…]

All Mexicans know that before the 1846–48 war with the United States the land that is now Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona was part of Mexico. The conflict led to half of Mexico’s territory being ceded to the United States. However, there is no serious political movement to regain the region and no pressing border dispute between the two countries. Throughout most of the twentieth century they squabbled over a small piece of land after the Rio Grande changed course in the 1850s, but in 1967 both sides agreed the area was legally part of Mexico.

[…]

Mexico’s major mountain ranges, the Sierra Madres, dominate the west and east of the country and between them is a plateau. In the south, in the Valley of Mexico, is the capital—Mexico City—one of the world’s megacapital cities with a population of around 20 million people.

On the western slopes of the highlands and in the valleys the soil is poor, and the rivers of limited assistance in moving goods to market. On the eastern slopes the land is more fertile, but the rugged terrain still prevents Mexico from developing as it would like. To the south lie the borders with Belize and Guatemala.

[…]

The cartels responded by creating a land route—up through Central America and Mexico, and into the American Southwest. This in turn led the Mexican drug gangs to get in on the action by facilitating the routes and manufacturing their own produce. The route partially follows the Pan-American Highway, which runs south to north up the continent. Originally designed to move goods in each direction to a variety of countries, it is now also used to move drugs north to the United States. The multibillion-dollar business sparked local turf wars, with the winners using their new power and money to infiltrate and corrupt the Mexican police and military and get inside the political and business elites.

[…]

Central America has little going for it by way of geography but for one thing. It is thin. So far, the only country to gain advantage from this has been Panama, but with the arrival of new money from China that may be about to change.

[…]

In 1914, the newly built, fifty-mile-long, American-controlled Panama Canal opened, thus saving ships an eight-thousand-mile journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and leading to economic growth in the canal region. Since 1999, the canal has been controlled by Panama, but is regarded as a neutral international waterway that is safeguarded by the US and Panama navies. And therein, for the Chinese, lies a problem.

[…]

The Panama Canal may well be a neutral passageway, but at the end of the day, passage through it is dependent on American goodwill. So, why not build your own canal up the road in Nicaragua? After all, what’s $50 billion to a growing superpower?

[…]

In the fall of 2016 the project was not going well. Mr. Wang lost an estimated 85 percent of his fortune in the Chinese stock market crash of September 2015. Most construction work was delayed, but all sides insisted the project would succeed.

[…]

Beijing now sells or donates arms to Uruguay, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Peru, and offers them military exchanges. It is trying to build a military relationship with Venezuela, which it hopes will outlast the Bolivarian revolution if and when it collapses. The arms supplies to Latin America are relatively small-scale but complement China’s efforts at soft power. Its sole hospital ship, Peace Ark, visited the region in 2011. It is only a three-hundred-bed vessel, dwarfed by the American one-thousand-bed version that also visits, but it was a signal of intent and a reminder that China increasingly “gets” soft power.

Posted in Crime, Economics, Policy | 5 Comments »

Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, and color, but also on the grounds of ability

Tuesday, July 29th, 2025

Tom Lehrer just passed away at the age of 97. I associate him with “New Math” and “Werner von Braun,” but Matthew Petti of Reason says he’s best known for his periodic table song and his Harvard fight song:

Lehrer’s comedic career took off in the 1950s, in between his military service and his mathematics studies at Harvard. Then, suddenly, he retreated from the public eye, refusing all publicity—except for an occasional sarcastic take about how pointless everything is. “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” he quipped after Kissinger won the prize in 1973. “I don’t want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them,” Lehrer declared in 2003.

[…]

“Every great war produces its great hit songs…It occurred to me that if any songs are going to come out of World War III, we’d better start writing them now. I have one here,” Lehrer said in the introduction to “So Long Mom,” a song by a nuclear bomber pilot promising to see his mother “when the war is over, an hour and a half from now.”

An even more nihilistic variation on the same theme, “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” promises the end of all suffering, because “if the bomb that drops on you/gets your friends and neighbors too/there’ll be nobody left behind to grieve.”

Some of Lehrer’s songs touch on a very specific anxiety of the early Cold War, the sense of whiplash from watching (West) Germany transform from an enemy into an ally. “Once all the Germans were warlike and mean/But that couldn’t happen again/We taught them a lesson in 1918/And they’ve hardly bothered us since then…Heil—uh, hail, the Wehrmacht—I mean the Bundeswehr,” he sang in “Multilateral Force Lullaby.”

There was a rumor that Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi rocket scientist turned NASA manager, sued Lehrer for singing that von Braun was “a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience” and should receive some credit for “the widows and cripples in old London town who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.” Lehrer later clarified that the lawsuit never happened.

[…]

Given the frequent nuclear themes in his songs, many had assumed that Lehrer’s military service had to do with nuclear weapons, especially because he spent time at Los Alamos National Laboratory. But Lehrer revealed in a 1994 interview that he had actually been drafted into the National Security Agency (NSA), the shadowy electronic eavesdropping organization that Edward Snowden blew the whistle on decades later.

At the time Lehrer worked there, the very existence of the NSA was classified information. (NSA stands for “No Such Agency,” he joked to his former Harvard classmate Jeremy Bernstein, who wrote about the quip in Quantum Profiles.) While the NSA values mathematicians for their codebreaking skills, Lehrer was not exactly the model intelligence officer.

When he learned that alcohol would be banned at his base’s Christmas party, Lehrer and a friend mixed vodka into gelatin to get drunk on the sly. The event is often considered the invention of the Jell-O shot, though Lehrer himself laughed off the idea that he should get all the credit.

“The Army has carried the American democratic ideal to its logical conclusion in the sense that not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, and color, but also on the grounds of ability,” Lehrer said in the introduction to “It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier,” his proposed new U.S. Army anthem.

Posted in Media, Policy | 4 Comments »

This doesn’t sound a lot like culture

Monday, July 28th, 2025

Culture Transplant by Garett JonesGarett Jones has finished his Singapore Trilogy, Hive Mind, 10% Less Democracy, and The Culture Transplant:

One way to think about the book is to think of the person vs. situation debate in psychology. The question was this: what explains people’s behaviors better, their current life situation broadly speaking or their stable persona? The latter we now call trait theory — because it is about people’s stable psychological dispositions — and won the evidence debate, at least, academically. Things haven’t improved much for situationism since then with the downfall of previously popular experiments such as the Stanford prison experiment, and Rosenhan’s psych ward study. So instead of thinking just about typical westerners, we can also think of humanity at large. Sometimes people move around (immigrate). Thinking of each ethnic group as a person to be explained, we can thus look at whether the same ethno-person behaves similarly in different situations, say, whether they live in Somalia, Sweden, or USA. Here we must clarify that there are some issues with measurement of many psychological traits. We don’t really, in general, have perfect scales so that we can track people’s absolute standing on some trait across time and place (we simply don’t know how to construct such tests). We can, however, track relative differences. So we can see whether Somalis living in Somalia (taken as a country) perform well economically, and we can check whether Somalis who moved to USA or Sweden perform well economically. In each case we find that they do rather poorly everywhere we find them, again, taken as a group. We can repeat this method for any other set of natio-ethno groups across various countries, to see whether the relative differences remain relatively consistent across situations.

[…]

Anyway, so if you count patents or anything else really, you will find that a few large and relatively productive countries produce most of everything new in the world.

[…]

The world in general depends on the right tail inventing, innovating, researching, and building. This is just as true within a country as it is between them. As such, everybody loses when the few clusters in the world that contain the most such right tail people are disrupted. We see this disruption all over the Western world, but especially in the most critical places. Time and money is wasted on diversity (read: anti-meritocratic) hiring, communist-like indoctrination, and the parading of the mentally ill in public spaces (drag shows, pride events). This must come at a cost of progress. Criminal and unproductive foreigners are imported to the most productive places on Earth where they can cause maximum disruption (the capitals of Western Europe, Californian cities). This is crazy and not even in migrants’ own long-term interest. However, modern Western politics seems to have forgotten everything about long-term interests (massive COVID debts, short-sighted democratic vote buying). I could go on, but you get the point.

Jones spends a chapter talking about the unique Chinese experience in Asia. This is basically just the thesis of
World on Fire by Amy Chua, but from a positive perspective. Not about ethnic conflict, but about how much better off the South Asians with more Chinese neighbors are. The Chinese may own most of their countries, but if their own salaries and standard of living increases by some substantial percentage, we have to ask ourselves how much self-determination is worth.

[…]

Obviously, ‘culture’ that transfers with people even when they lose their native language (and native culture in any normal sense), and also stays present across sometimes 200+ years in a new country, this doesn’t sound a lot like culture, but it does sound like genetics.

[…]

He seems to want to stay within the Overton window, but go pretty close to the edge, so that the reader will draw their own conclusions, and perhaps seek out some of the evidence slightly to the right of the evidence the book covers

Posted in Economics, Policy, Science | 3 Comments »

Oceania’s geopolitical logic is obvious

Sunday, July 27th, 2025

The main driver of the rise of empires, Peter Turchin argues, is interstate competition:

The intensity of this competition, in turn, is dialed up by advances in military technologies. Each military revolution, thus, generates a set of mega-empires. Today we live in the historical shadow of two most consequential military revolutions.

The iron-cavalry revolution dates to about 1000 BCE.

[…]

To cut the long story short, the iron-cavalry revolution transformed the Great Eurasian Steppe into an engine of imperiogenesis. This continental heartland was the home of nomadic pastoralists, whose main military force consisted of horse archers.

[…]

The other consequential revolution was, of course, the one that originated in Western Europe around 1400 CE. Its two components were gunpowder weapons and ocean-going ships. So I refer to it as the “Gunship Revolution.” The parallels between the two revolutions are quite striking. Inner Asians rode horses and shot arrows, while Europeans rode ships and shot cannon balls. The world ocean played the same role as the “sea of grass.” Historians noted these similarities. For example, the historian of Southeast Asia, Victor Lieberman, referred to Europeans as “White Inner Asians.”

Readers, who are familiar with geopolitical theories of Mackinder, Mahan, Spykman, and others (if not, check out this Wikipedia article), will immediately recognize the similarities between what I am talking about here and various geographical concepts central to these theories (the Heartland, the Rimland, the Islands…).

[…]

Thus, the Great Steppe (which is treated as a pivotal region by several geopolitical theories) today is of little significance, except for its historical effect. By 1900 it was completely taken over by Russia and China. Today it’s home to a bunch of weak and geopolitically insignificant states, such as Mongolia and the “Stans.” The successors of old mega-empires, which arose on the Steppe frontiers, is where Eurasian power now resides.

The second pole of power is “Oceania,” which originated on the western shores of Eurasia during the sixteenth century (Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and the British Isles), then spread across the Atlantic, and now is a global empire, ruled from Washington and Brussels as a secondary capital (although there are cracks between these two seats of power due to Donald Trump’s policies). A good way to visualize this geopolitical entity is a map of American military bases.

Oceania’s geopolitical logic — encirclement of Eurasian empires — is obvious.

Posted in Policy, War | 6 Comments »

We made certain that each member of the project thoroughly understood his part in our total effort — that, and nothing more

Saturday, July 26th, 2025

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. GrovesIn the introduction to Leslie Groves’ Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller painted a picture of the general. The general himself opens with a foreword:

I have recorded here only that which I am qualified to write about — my own experiences during the development of atomic energy between September 17, 1942, and December 31, 1946, the period during which I was in charge of the Manhattan Project.

[…]

Gradually more and more of the details of our work have been declassified and, with the issuance of an executive order in May, 1959, the curtain was drawn aside on the story of the project.

[…]

The command channels of the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) — the name given to the atomic bomb project — had no precedent. They grew up with the project and were changed as conditions changed. Yet the basic concept — that of always keeping authority and responsibility together — never changed.

[…]

We made certain that each member of the project thoroughly understood his part in our total effort — that, and nothing more.

[…]

Dr. Vannevar Bush, Chairman of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), and Dr. James B. Conant, Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), a subdivision of OSRD, were primarily responsible for President Roosevelt’s decision to transform the atomic energy development program from a research project into a program aimed at producing a decisive military weapon. Once the military purpose of the project became governing, Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, Chief of the Army Services of Supply, and Major General W. D. Styer, his Chief of Staff, entered the picture. Within a few months they brought me in to head up the project, subject, of course, to the personal approval of General Marshall, Secretary of War Stimson, and, finally, the President.

[…]

At first, I was responsible only for the engineering, construction and operation of the plants to produce bomb materials. Had our work been routine and clearly defined, my responsibility probably would have ended there. However, it soon became evident to Dr. Bush and to me that if serious delays to our work were to be avoided the MED should expand its research activities, and take over control of all the atomic research projects then under the management of the OSRD, thus uniting authority with responsibility. This transfer was effected without friction during the fall and winter of 1942 by the simple device of allowing the OSRD contracts to continue in force until they expired, at which time they were replaced by new ones in which the MED was the contracting agency. The transition was so smooth, indeed, that, as I have read accounts of that period by some of the people involved, I have been struck by the fact that they did not seem to be aware of just when the transfer of authority actually took place.

[…]

Thus I became responsible, particularly to General Marshall, Secretary Stimson and President Truman, for the over-all success of the use of the bomb against Japan. This assignment included selecting the target cities, subject to the approval of the Chief of Staff and the Secretary of War; preparing the orders and instructions for the bombing operations; and arranging for Army and Navy units to provide the necessary support to our overseas effort.

Posted in War | No Comments »

The mice that received psilocybin had a 30% increased lifespan

Friday, July 25th, 2025

Researchers have discovered that the active compound in psychedelic mushrooms can extend lifespan and reduce cellular aging by 50% in human cells and 30% in elderly mice:

The team from Emory University are calling it the first ever long-term study evaluating the systemic effects of psilocybin in aged mice. The animals were the equivalent of 60 to 65 in biological human years, and exhibited hair loss and greying, as well as reduced physical activity.

The mice were dosed with psilocin, the active ingredient in psilocybin that appears once the latter is broken down during digestion. The mice received a low level at first, and eventually with a higher dose of 15 milligrams once a month for 10 months.

Within the first 3 months, the mice receiving psilocybin exhibited signs of youth, including fewer instances of greying and hair loss — including a reversal of these symptoms — and a general improvement in physical activity. By trial’s end, the mice that received psilocybin had a 30% increased lifespan on average than the control group.

To date, more than 150 clinical studies have been completed or are ongoing for examining psilocybin in the treatment of various clinical conditions, including anxiety, depression, addiction, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, chronic physical pain, and more.

The authors cite a study from 2020 which found that a single-dose of psilocybin can improve debilitating physical and psychological symptoms with improvements lasting up to and beyond 5 years post-dosage.

[…]

The scientists also tested the effects of psilocin on human fibroblast cells from the lung in vitro, continually dosing them with the psychoactive compound or a placebo until they reached replicative senescence, or the point at which the cell has divided around 50 times and then stopped.

Psilocin treatment of 10 micrograms resulted in a 29% extension of cellular lifespan, characterized by delayed exhaustion of proliferative potential, increased cumulative population doublings, and decreased population doubling time. Strikingly, when increased to 100 micrograms, 29% lifespan extension became 57%.

The psilocin-dosed fibroblasts were also observed to have increased SIRT1 activity, and a preserved telomere length.

Posted in Science | 4 Comments »

Only six commercial towers over 300 metres were built in the US in the first two decades of this century

Thursday, July 24th, 2025

The first two decades of the 21st century marked a phenomenal shift in skyscraper construction from the United States to Asia:

Only six commercial towers over 300 metres were built in the US in the first two decades of this century. In contrast, since 2000, China has built a staggering 1,575 skyscrapers, accounting for 60 percent of the world’s new high-rises. By 2021, Asia housed 80 percent of the world’s skyscrapers, with China leading the Asian skyscraper boom. Fuelled by its spectacular economic growth, rapid urbanisation and a yearning to display its financial and technical capability, China found the construction of skyscrapers as a fitting symbol to announce its prowess to the world.

China also exhibited almost an obsessive drive to build the tallest structures. This appears to be linked to the country’s target of 60 percent urbanisation by 2020, and relocating about 100 million workers from villages to towns by granting them urban resident status by then. The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that China invested over ¥1 trillion (US$1.37 billion) annually in redeveloping run-down urban areas with landmark towers to showcase the successes of urbanisation. By the second decade of the century, China had eclipsed all other countries in skyscraper production, boasting the largest number of such high-rises in the world.

The Chinese local governments have played a significant role in this skyscraper boom. Local governments were lush with capital and strongly incentivised by the Chinese national government; the sub-national officials within local governments in China promoted major urban projects. These officials had reason to believe that such projects would attract investments and propel their careers up the high slope. As a consequence, local governments subsidised skyscraper development through discounted land prices, up to 40 percent below market rates, to encourage the development of new urban agglomerations. Evidence suggests that China’s largest cities competed with each other in building taller, which then spread out of megacities to smaller cities by Chinese standards.

[…]

Many Chinese skyscrapers were marred by lax construction and fire standards. For instance, one of China’s tallest skyscrapers, the Shenzhen Electronics Group Plaza, was evacuated in May 2021 after it began to shake. The Chinese government was also not enthused by the local culture of constructing ‘copycat’ buildings aping Western architecture, which often neglected the Chinese cultural identity and the urban context in which they were built. Additionally, the government was frustrated by ‘vanity projects’— skyscrapers built to make a statement without assessing the actual demand for additional floorspace in the city. Other cities faced a situation where half-built skyscrapers remained incomplete as local government ran out of funds to complete them.

Around the same period, China found itself engulfed in a real estate crisis.

Posted in Urbanism | 2 Comments »

Japan is 120 miles from the Eurasian landmass

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallThe Japanese are an island race, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), with the majority of their 127 million people living on the four large islands that face Korea and Russia across the Sea of Japan and a minority inhabiting some of the 6,848 smaller islands:

At its closest point, Japan is 120 miles from the Eurasian landmass, which is among the reasons why it has never been successfully invaded. The Chinese are some five hundred miles away across the East China Sea; and although there is Russian territory much closer, the Russian forces are usually far away because of the extremely inhospitable climate and sparse population located across the Sea of Okhotsk.

In the 1300s, the Mongols tried to invade Japan after sweeping through China, Manchuria, and down through Korea. On the first occasion they were beaten back and on the second a storm wrecked their fleet. The seas in the Korea Strait were whipped up by what the Japanese said was a “Divine Wind,” which they called a kamikaze.

So the threat from the west and northwest was limited, and to the southeast and east there was nothing but the Pacific. This last perspective is why the Japanese gave themselves the name Nippon, or “sun origin”: looking east there was nothing between them and the horizon, and each morning, rising on that horizon, was the sun.

[…]

The territory of the Japanese islands makes up a country that is bigger than the two Koreas combined, or, in European terms, bigger than France or Germany. However, three-quarters of the land is not conducive to human habitation, especially in the mountainous regions, and only 13 percent is suitable for intensive cultivation. This leaves the Japanese living in close proximity to one another along the coastal plains and in restricted inland areas, where some stepped rice fields can exist in the hills. Its mountains mean that Japan has plenty of water, but the lack of flatland also means that its rivers are unsuited to navigation and therefore trade, a problem exacerbated by the fact that few of the rivers join one another.

[…]

By the beginning of the twentieth century Japan was an industrial power with the third-largest navy in the world, and in 1905 it defeated the Russians in a war fought on land and at sea. However, the very same island-nation geography that had allowed it to remain isolated was now giving it no choice but to engage with the world. The problem was that it chose to engage militarily.

Japan had few of the natural resources required to become an industrialized nation. It had limited and poor-quality supplies of coal, very little oil, scant quantities of natural gas, limited supplies of rubber, and a shortage of many metals.

[…]

It was the thirst for these products, notably iron and oil, that caused Japan to rampage across the far-less developed Southeast Asia in the 1930s and early ’40s. It had already occupied Taiwan in 1895 and followed this up with the annexation of Korea in 1910. Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, then conducted a full-scale invasion of China in 1937. As each domino fell, the expanding empire and the growing Japanese population required more oil, more coal, more metal, more rubber, and more food.

[…]

This was a massive overstretch, not just taking on the United States, but grabbing the very resources, rubber, for example, that the United States required for its own industry.

[…]

If the terrain had been easier the Americans’ choice may have been different—they might have fought their way to Tokyo—but they chose the nuclear option, unleashing upon Japan, and the collective conscience of the world, the terror of a new age.

[…]

The postwar agreement imposed by the United States limited Japan’s defense spending to 1 percent of the GDP and left tens of thousands of American forces on Japanese territory, thirty-two thousand of whom are still there.

[…]

The 2015 defense budget was its biggest to date, with the yen mostly going to naval and air equipment, including six US-made F-35A stealth fighters. In the spring of 2015, Tokyo also unveiled what it called a “helicopter-carrying destroyer.” It didn’t take a military expert to notice that the vessel was as big as the Japanese aircraft carriers of the Second World War, which are forbidden by the surrender terms of 1945. The ship can be adapted for fixed-wing aircraft, but the defense minister issued a statement saying that he was “not thinking of using it as an aircraft carrier.”

[…]

The military infrastructure at Okinawa, which guards the approaches to the main islands, will be upgraded. This will also allow Japan greater flexibility to patrol its Air Defense Zone, part of which overlaps with China’s equivalent zone after an expansion was announced by Beijing in 2013. Both zones cover the islands called the Senkaku or Diaoyu (in Japanese and Chinese, respectively), which Japan controls but that are claimed by China, too. They also form part of the Ryukyu island chain, which is particularly sensitive as any hostile power must pass the islands on the way to the Japanese heartlands; they give Japan a lot of territorial sea space, and they might contain exploitable underwater gas and oil fields.

[…]

China’s expanded Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea covers territory claimed by China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. When Beijing said that any plane flying through the zone must identity itself or “face defensive measures,” Japan, South Korea, and the United States responded by flying through it without doing so.

[…]

Japan also claims sovereignty over the Kuril Islands in its far north, off Hokkaido, which it lost to the Soviet Union in the Second World War and that are still under Russian control. Russia prefers not to discuss the matter, but the debate is not in the same league as Japan’s disputes with China. There are only approximately nineteen thousand inhabitants of the Kuril Islands, and although the islands sit in fertile fishing grounds, the territory is not one of particular strategic importance.

[…]

Japanese statisticians fear that the population will shrink to under 100 million by the middle of the century. If the current birth rate continues, it is even possible that by 2110 the population will have fallen below the 50 million it was in 1910.

[…]

Even if they do go on to solve a problem like Korea, the issue of China will still be there, and this means the US 7th Fleet will remain in Tokyo Bay and US Marines will remain in Okinawa, guarding the paths in and out of the Pacific and the China seas.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

His own advice about self-reliance was actually worth taking in his own case

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025

Diamond Age by Neal StephensonThe most relevant aspect of Neal Stephenson‘s work to an audience of AI researchers was the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from his 30-year-old novel The Diamond Age:

At the beginning of this book we see a conversation between Lord Finkle-McGraw, who is an Equity Lord in a futuristic neo-Victorian society, and John Hackworth, an engineer who works in one of his companies.

Finkle-McGraw is a classic founder. He didn’t come from a privileged background, except insofar as having a stable family and a decent basic education confers privilege. But when he was young he was brilliant, ambitious, hard-working, and had a vision. He built that into something valuable and as a result became rich and powerful. As so often happens, he used his money to make life good for his children by sending them to the right schools, connecting them to the right people, and so on.

He wasn’t entirely happy with the results. His kids didn’t end up having the traits that had made him successful. He suspects it’s because they didn’t have to work hard and overcome obstacles. Now he has a granddaughter. He knows that the parents are going to raise this girl in the same way, with the same results. He can’t interfere in a heavy-handed way. But the parents can’t possibly object if he gives his granddaughter an educational book. So he commissions Hackworth to make the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an interactive book that will adapt as the user grows and learns. This book is powered by molecular nanotechnology, but any present-day reader will immediately recognize it as an AI system.

As the plot unfolds, three copies of the Primer are made and bestowed on girls from very different backgrounds. In two cases the result is a sort of fizzle. The Primer works as it’s supposed to for a while, but these girls lose interest and set it aside. The third copy falls into the hands of a girl from an abusive and underprivileged background, and it ends up giving her close to superhuman abilities.

Thirty years on, I think I have enough distance on this to grade my performance. I’m happy with the fact that the Primer, as described in the novel, doesn’t invariably produce great results. That seems like a measured and realistic outcome. Nevertheless it’s clear that when I wrote this thing I was influenced by a strain of techno-utopian thinking that was widespread in the mid-1990s, when the Internet was first becoming available to a mass audience. In those days, a lot of people, myself included, assumed that making all the world’s knowledge available to everyone would unlock vast stores of pent-up human potential.

That promise actually did come true to some degree. It’s unquestionably the case that anyone with an Internet connection can now learn things that they could not have had access to before. But as we now know, many people would rather watch TikTok videos eight hours a day.

[…]

The gist of it is that the system we’ve traditionally used for evaluating students’ performance — homework and tests — just happens to be exquisitely vulnerable to being hacked by students who simply use conversational AI systems to do all the work for them. And they are doing so on a massive scale, to the point where conventional education has essentially stopped functioning. The only way to fairly evaluate how much a student has learned now is by marching them into a classroom with no electronics, handing them a pencil and a blank blue book, and assigning them an essay to write or a math problem to solve. Even this is impractical given that many students never really learned to write by hand.

[…]

This question sent me down a rabbit hole on the topic of self-reliance. After all, if AI-driven education does nothing more than make students even more reliant on AI, then it’s not education at all. It’s just a vocational education program teaching them how to be of service to AIs. The euphemism for this role is “prompt engineer” which seems to be a way of suggesting that people who feed inputs to AIs are achieving something that should be valorized to the same degree as designing airplanes and building bridges.

If such a system actually did its job it would have the paradoxical effect of making students less, rather than more, reliant on the use of AI technology.

[…]

My thought last week was that Self-Reliance might contain some wisdom applicable to the challenge of how to educate people in the modern world to rely upon their own knowledge and skill set rather than using AI all the time.

Reader, I did not find anything like that upon re-reading this essay. More the opposite. The overall drift of what Emerson is saying here — and he says it over and over — is that each mind is uniquely positioned to see certain insights. The self-reliant person shouldn’t ignore those merely because they don’t match the conventional wisdom. “The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray…God will not have his work made manifest by cowards….He who would gather immortal palms (i.e. be honored for great achievements) must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

That is all intoxicating stuff for a smart young man who styles himself as a free thinker and nonconformist, which is why, when I was in my early twenties, I inhaled it like fentanyl fumes off hot foil. But during the same years as I was poring over this essay and jotting down quotes in my notebook, I was writing by far the worst novel I have ever written—a book that has never been published and never should be.

Emerson grew up in Boston, attended Boston Latin and Harvard, then traveled around Europe and visited England where he hung out with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. His brain was preloaded with the best knowledge base that could possibly have been given a young person of that era. He’d been trained to think systematically and rigorously and to express himself with great fluency in English and probably Latin and other languages as well.

So, yes, when an idea popped into Emerson’s head, chances are it was a pretty damned good one. His own advice about self-reliance was actually worth taking in his own case. And I’d guess that the audience for this essay was similarly well educated. By the time any young person happened upon Self-Reliance, they were probably 99% of the way to being an intellectually mature, highly capable person, and just wanted a bit of self confidence to follow through on good ideas that were coming into their heads—as a result of being that well educated and trained.

When the same advice falls on the ears of people who are not as well informed and not as good at thinking systematically, though, it’s rubbish.

When I first read Self-Reliance, only a few years had passed since the premier of the first Star Wars movie. There’s a pivotal moment in that film when Luke Skywalker is piloting his fighter through the trench on the Death Star, making his bombing run against impossible odds, and he hears Obi-Wan Kenobi’s voice in his head telling him to use the Force. Luke switches off his targeting computer to the consternation of the brass in the ops center. We all know the outcome. It’s a great moment in cinema, and it perfectly encapsulates a certain way of thinking emblematic of the 1970s late hippie scene: the seductive proposition that no one needs a targeting computer, that all we need to do is trust our feelings. Who doesn’t love to hear that? I loved hearing it from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and spent a couple of years of my life building a terrible novel on that foundation.

I have discussed The Diamond Age before.

Posted in Education, Technology | 1 Comment »

No one actually likes high expectations

Monday, July 21st, 2025

By the end of this past school year, Daniel Buck realized that rigorous education is far less popular on the ground than many policy wonks believe:

Of course, everyone pays lip service to high academic and behavioral expectations in general. But when it comes to the particulars, many people — parents, teachers, and administrators alike, most kids, too — bristle at what rigorous education means in practice.

I noticed it first with parents. Working mostly in schools of choice, it was easy to sell prospective parents with rhetoric about academic rigor, challenging curriculum, and the like. But those nodding heads at enrollment meetings often turned to disgruntled emails as the year began. Nightly homework? Demanding tests for which students would need to study for hours? Stressful academic gauntlets? The occasional bad grade or negative disciplinary report? You won’t give full credit for late assignments even if they’re good? No thank you. Give my child straight A’s, don’t mess with my evenings and weekends, and tell me all is well.

It’s odd what “high expectations” means in mainstream education, because I don’t think anyone would expect to maximize learning by spending 9-to-5 at a typical school and then doing homework all evening.

And it’s clear why high school students and their parents want easy A’s; they’re judged against students from other schools, on the same scale, but with little regard for what constitutes an A from class to class or school to school.

Posted in Education | 1 Comment »

A 2- or 3-year machinist or mechanic apprenticeship was mandatory for admission to any German engineering academy

Sunday, July 20th, 2025

Herman the German by Gerhard NeumannDavid Foster reviewed Gerhard Neumann‘s Herman the German ages ago, but I was recently reminded of it:

This is the autobiography of a man who was born to a Jewish family in Germany, apprenticed as an auto mechanic, attended engineering school, moved to China in 1938, was interned by the British as an enemy alien in 1939, transferred to the American forces, joined Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, repaired the first Japanese Zero fighter to be captured in potentially flyable condition, became a U.S. citizen by special act of Congress, and went on to run GE’s entire jet engine business, which he played a major role in creating. (The preceding may be the longest single sentence I’ve ever written in a blog post.) The book should be of interest to those interested in aviation, technology, management, social history, the WWII era, and/or China.

Gerhard Neumann was born in Frankfurt/Oder in 1917, where his father was owner of a factory that processed feathers and down. Gerhard’s parents were Jewish but nonpracticing–a Christmas tree was traditional in the Neumann home–and their approach to child-raising was closer to stereotypically Prussian than to stereotypically Jewish: “You did exactly as you were told by your parents. There was no such thing as saying no to them!…You were not to have a hand in your pocket while talking to grown-ups…Showing any emotion in Prussia was considered sissyish. There was no kissing between parents and children–only a peck on the cheek before going upstairs punctually at nine o’clock; and there was absolutely no crying.”

On the other hand, Neumann could do pretty much what he wanted with his spare time. In 1927, at the age of 10, he rode his bike out to a grass strip where someone was giving airplane rides for 5 marks, which he paid with money from his piggy bank. His parents weren’t angry at him for taking this flight without permission; indeed, they were so entranced with his description of the way the town looked from the air that they soon took an airplane ride themselves! At the age of 13, Neumann bought a folding kayak and, with some camping gear and a 12-year-old friend, took long journeys on the Oder River, all the way to the Baltic Sea. Few parents in America today–or in Germany either, I’d bet–would now allow this level of independence to a 12- or 13-year old.

Neumann had no interest in the family feather business; he wanted to be an engineer. A 2- or 3-year machinist or mechanic apprenticeship was mandatory for admission to any German engineering academy: Neumann’s father asked the 10 cab drivers of Frankfurt/Oder to recommend the garage where they thought the boy would learn the most, and the answers were unanimous: Albert Schroth’s. So began Gerhard Neumann’s apprenticeship, which, other than the technologies involved, could have been something out of the Middle Ages. “In winter my hands were frozen purple. Wear work gloves? ‘What’s the matter, boy, are you a girl?’ When my hands were bleeding, Herr Schroth pointed to the large bottle of iodine in the backroom and mumbled something about faules Fleisch (lazy flesh.) No Band-Aids, no pitying, no time out.”

At first, Neumann had second thoughts about the path he had chosen. “My friends were still continuing at the Gymnasium, spending their days in comfortable and clean surroundings; here I was, accustomed to a fine home and the luxury of two maids and a chauffeur, becoming a grease monkey for three long years.” But Neumann found the work interesting, and took pride in the high reputation of the shop.

At the conclusion of the three-year apprenticeship, Herr Schroth said “Thank you, Neumann”…the only time that he had ever said “thank you” to his apprentice, or called him anything other than “boy”…and sent a bouquet of flowers to Neumann’s mother. “I felt sincerely grateful when I, in turn, thanked Herr Schroth–the man whom I had always addressed as Meister and who had given me a solid groundwork for what I hoped would be a rewarding engineering future.”

Neumann says that up to the time he left Frankfurt to attend engineering college in the mid-1930s, he encountered no open anti-Semitism at all. Even at the Mittweide engineering college, where he was one of three Jewish students (each of their fathers had been soldiers in the First World War, which made them eligible for a college education), he says that he was never insulted by Nazi fellow students. Even allowing for the fact that attitudes toward Jews did differ considerably in different parts of Germany, these statements are hard to believe given that the Hitler regime had been in place since 1933.

About 15% of the Mittweide students were foreign, and they were exempt from the requirement, binding on German students, to have previously undergone an apprenticeship. “Because they had never dirtied their hands or bloodied their knuckles in apprentice-type training, they did not benefit from the Mittweida-type education anywhere as much as did a German student.” The Mittweida approach to engineering education included drawings in which errors had been deliberately inserted–“We were taught to ‘get a feel’ for drawings laid before us. The question constantly posed was, Would it really do the job if it were built just as shown on this drawing?”

Engineering students were exempt from the draft while in school, but not after graduation. A few weeks before the end of 1938, Neumann noticed an item on the college bulletin board: the Chinese government was looking for German mechanical engineers. And the Chinese Nationalist government had arranged with the German Nazi government that these engineers would have their German military service requirement deferred.

“The notice was vague about the jobs, which apparently were somewhere in the interior of the Chinese mainland and were connected with defense. A job in faraway China sounded incredibly exciting…”

Incredibly exciting it turned out to be, and most of the book is concerned with Neumann’s remarkable adventures in China. It was also, surely, lifesaving–had Neumann remained in Germany, it is most unlikely he would have survived the Holocaust.

Read the whole review.

Posted in Education, Technology | 2 Comments »

He very often managed to ignore complexity

Saturday, July 19th, 2025

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. GrovesIn the introduction to Leslie Groves’ Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller paints a picture of the general:

The readers of General Groves’s own account are to be complimented for choosing to learn directly from one of the major participants. History in some ways resembles the relativity principle in science. What is observed depends on the observer. Only when the perspective of the observer is known can proper corrections be made.

[…]

Vannevar Bush, the head of all scientific wartime projects, interviewed General Groves prior to his appointment to the Los Alamos project. Bush suggested to the office of the Secretary of State that Groves might lack sufficient tact for such a sensitive role.

[…]

He very often managed to ignore complexity and arrive at a result which, if not ideal, at least worked.

[…]

He had to worry both about the diffusion of uranium hexafluoride molecules and about the problems faced by the wives in Los Alamos. (As Groves mentions, contrary to local gossip, Los Alamos was not an establishment for the care of pregnant WACs).

[…]

For Groves, the Manhattan Project seemed a minor assignment, less significant than the construction of the Pentagon.

[…]

He started with, and partially retained, thorough doubts about the feasibility of the project. Yet in convincing the leaders at DuPont that they should participate, he appeared totally confident in order to overcome the incredulity of those overly sane chemical engineers.

[…]

I know of no one whose work begins to compare in excellence with that of Oppenheimer’s.

Oppie knew in detail the research going on in every part of the laboratory, and was as excellent at analyzing human problems as the countless technical ones. Of the more than 10,000 people who eventually came to work at Los Alamos, Oppie knew several hundred intimately, by which I mean that he understood their relationships with one another, and what made them tick. He knew how to lead without seeming to do so. His charismatic dedication had a profound effect on the successful and rapid completion of the atomic bomb.

[…]

One of my jobs at Los Alamos was to assure the safety conditions in the gas diffusion plant. The main hazard was that in advanced stages of separating U235 and U238, contamination with water or some other substance might cause the diffusing gases to solidify, at which point an unwanted chain reaction might result. This part of my job took me from time to time to New York, and one morning (at 4:00 a.m. Los Alamos time) I woke to hear the General’s voice at the other end of my telephone, instructing me to go to his Washington office immediately.

The emergency, I discovered, was a chemical explosion at a gas diffusion plant on the East Coast; Groves wanted to question me about the possibility of serious malfunction in our separation process. After a preliminary discussion, Groves assembled a group of his staff at a long table. I sat on his right and was kept wide awake by a barrage of hypothetical questions while the General slouched, with eyes closed, seemingly half asleep. Periodically, he would open both eyes, look me square in the face and state, “But after all, Professor, this is only theory.”

Toward the beginning of the third hour of this inquisition, a colonel at the end of the table asked if it were not possible that all the U235 atoms might assemble at one end of the apparatus by pure chance, and thereby cause a nuclear explosion. “Of course,” I answered, “this is a possibility, but it is as probable as that all the air molecules in the room will assemble under the table, causing us all to suffocate.”

Groves immediately sat up and said, “But Doctor, you did say this is possible.” Conant intervened with, “What Dr. Teller intends to say is that such an assembly is really quite impossible.” From this moment on, General Groves treated me with exquisite politeness. Apparently, I had passed his test as to whether or not I could be trusted.

Neither through contact nor through rumor did I ever learn of Grove’s sense of humor. Yet in reading his book, I discovered not only that he was quite sufficiently endowed with one but that he could laugh at himself.

[…]

About 1943, General Groves, visiting the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory which was separating U235 by electromagnetic means, attempted to spur Lawrence on by saying to him, “Your reputation is at stake here.” Later over a nice rum drink, Lawrence said to him, “You know, General, my reputation has been made, but yours is at stake here.” Groves did not respond. However, a couple of years later, Groves in addressing a group at Los Alamos commented: “When all of this is over, you will go back to your universities, regardless of the outcome, but my reputation is at stake here.”

[…]

Toward the end of my visit, Sir James Chadwick, who had headed the wartime British scientific delegation to Los Alamos, invited me to dinner at his home in Caius College. Sir James was well-known in the scientific community for his taciturn nature, but his wife was a charming conversationalist. She drew me out about our mutual friends and acquaintances from Los Alamos, and eventually inquired about General Groves. My response, I am afraid, reflected an unflattering opinion of him.

At that point, a miracle occurred. Sir James, who had spoken perhaps twenty words that evening, became talkative to the point of being almost uninterruptible. He told me most emphatically and repeatedly that the atomic bomb project would never have succeeded without General Groves. I pointed out how often Groves had made plain his dislike of the British. Sir James brushed aside my comment. That made no difference. What was important, Sir James went on, was that Groves understood the overriding importance of the project better than some of the leading American scientists. Without Groves, he said, the scientists could never have built the bomb.

I have rarely seen anyone—even an ordinarily effusive talker—so insistent on making his point. However, Sir James’s tirade carried no trace of reproach for my inappropriate remark about General Groves. At the end of the evening, my host walked me back to my inn. On parting, he told me to remember what he had said as I might “have need of it.”

Shortly after this evening, I was back in the United States and gained some new information. It then dawned on me that during our conversation Chadwick probably had known what I had just learned: the Soviets had exploded an atomic bomb. Chadwick knew that American scientists, who had less direct an experience with World War II than their British colleagues, many of whose homes and families were in peril, had not realized the urgency and importance of the atomic bomb project. General Groves, on the other hand, having considered military matters throughout his career, knew exactly what it meant to be inadequately defended.

[…]

Today, national security and technology have become inseparable. Yet the gulf between the military establishment and the scientific community is as great as ever. General Groves was one of the pioneers who, with difficulty but ultimate success, managed to throw a bridge across the abyss.

I do not see much hope for the survival of our democratic form of government if we cannot rebuild that bridge made by General Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer. We must find ways to encourage mutual understanding and significant collaboration between those who defend their nation with their lives and those who can contribute the ideas to make that defense successful. Only by such cooperation can we hope that freedom will survive, that peace will be preserved.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

Alpha School is doing something remarkable

Friday, July 18th, 2025

After twelve months, an anonymous parent (who follows Scott Alexander) is persuaded that Alpha School is doing something remarkable — but that almost everyone, including Alpha’s own copywriting team, is describing it wrong:

It isn’t genuine two-hour learning: most kids start school at 8:30am, start working on the “two-hour platform” sometime between 9am-930am and are occupied with academics until noon-1230pm. They also blend in “surges” from time to time to squeeze in more hours on the platform.

It isn’t AI in the way we have been thinking about it since the “Attention is all you need” paper. There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced-repetition algorithm”

It definitely isn’t teacher-free: Teachers have been rebranded “guides”, and while their workload is different than a traditional school, they are very important – and both the quantity and quality are much higher than traditional schools.

The bundle matters: it’s not just the learning platform on its own. A big part of the product’s success is how the school has set up student incentives and the culture they have built to make everything work together

Yet the core claim survives: Since they started in October my children have been marching through and mastering material roughly three times faster than their age?matched peers (and their own speed prior to the program). I am NOT convinced that an Alpha-like program would work for every child, but I expect, for roughly 30-70% of children it could radically change how fast they learn, and dramatically change their lives and potential.

[…]

Normally in school you do your work, submit it, have it graded, and get it back some time in the future – if you are lucky after you finish a full problem set, if unlucky a week or two later. With Alpha 100% of the time you get feedback immediately after you answer each question. If you are wrong you both get to find out right away and find out what you did wrong so you won’t repeat the mistake on the next question.

[…]

When a student finishes all the lessons they need for a grade level subject they take a grade-level mastery test that covers all the material they were supposed to learn. If they get a high enough score on that test they move on to the next grade level (all of the questions they missed will still come back for later review though so they don’t move on with gaps). If they do not pass that test then they keep working on more lessons on the grade they are currently on with a focus on closing the gaps they need to pass next time.

[…]

Most schools are set up in traditional ways, and then adjust the best they can within that structure to serve the needs of their unique students the best they can. What is impressive about the Alpha program is that is seems to be built from the ground-up around three of the most powerful learning principles:

1:1 learning: It’s not really 1:1, but in practice every kids is working on stuff at the edge of their ability, rather than the median of a group.

Spaced Repetition: The system brings back topics on a regular basis “just before” the student forgets, so it is more likely to encode in long term memory.

Mastery: In most education settings school students learn some percentage of the material and then move on. This can work for a while, but eventually students who missed something will struggle because they don’t have the tools to learn the next thing on the ladder. This is particularly noticeable in mathematics, but it can be a problem anywhere. With “mastery learning” the kids are not allowed to move on without mastering the subject. If there is something they miss, the system will bring it back again and again until they have mastered it. Liemandt in particular thinks this is a very big deal, and believes it is a significant driver of Alpha’s success (and the reason many kids are failing in traditional schools).

[…]

People REALLY don’t like the idea of incentivizing kids to learn.

Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).

There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.

So what do these parents think we should do instead? Mostly they believe that kids should just be “intrinsically motivated” and school should be about inspiring that internal motivation. Their concern is that if we provide external motivation for learning it will crowd out internal motivation. They worry that when the external motivation goes away (no one is going to pay a 30-year-old to read books), there is no internal motivation to keep learning happening. In this model “education” is not about educating per se, or even about teaching habits, it is about inspiring character.

The other option is that rather than use the carrot, you could use the stick. Fryer shares another poll from 2008 where 26% of parents think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank kids (35% in the Southern US states!). As Fryer summarizes: “The concept of paying students in school is less palatable than the concept of spanking students in school”.

I am less interested in the philosophy of “what is right” and more interested in “what works”. If bribing kids gets them to learn more while they are kids that seems good. If it causes them long term motivation issues, that seems bad. My instinct is to try and quantify both effects and then understand what the trade-off is to make a decision on what we should do (and my ingoing hypothesis is that it likely depends on the kid, so you need a big enough “n” to distinguish different types of kids).

Fryer is the leading researcher in this field, at least in the short term impact of these programs. This paper has a nice summary of his studies where he finds that providing direct monetary incentives to kids works to drive behavior if that behavior is easy for the kid to understand and execute on. When he paid kids $2 for each book they read, they read a lot more books (+40%). When he paid kids to show up to class and not be late, tardiness dropped 22% versus the control group. But when he tried targeting the end goal and paying students more for higher test scores he saw no effect.

[…]

Combining Ericsson and Fryer we get the success equation:

Incentives → Motivation

Motivation → Time spent on deliberate practice

Time spent on deliberate practice → Mastery

Unfortunately we have an education system that doesn’t “follow the data” on how to best educate, and the general population hates the idea of incentives, so no one is pushing the education system to change in that dimension.

Alpha HAS followed the data. They have built deliberate and extensive incentive systems. But Alpha also knows what the general population thinks of incentives, so they don’t talk about it.

[…]

My kids are gifted. They love learning. They compete in academic bees and chess tournaments and musical productions for fun. But the GT incentive system has turbo-charged their academic learning well beyond that inborn desire to learn.

We decided to join the GT school in July, but, for logistical reasons, we could not start until October. For the 3.5 months I signed the kids up to iXL – the tool that Alpha students use for 80% of their academic work – including almost all of their Language, Math and Science lessons. I wanted to get the kids used to using it over the summer before they started school.

It did not go well.

We tried getting the kids to work on it for about an hour per day, but it was a fight every time. It was the same content they would be doing at GT, but without the GT structure, and it did not work.

But once the kids started at GT, those same iXL lessons became a game for them. I remember taking the kids to the park one day after school. They asked me, “Instead of playing can you set up a hotspot so we can do a few more lessons? I want to earn more GT-Bucks!”.

Was it bad that they were being bribed to do lessons? 76% of Americans would think so. But it definitely worked.

My middle daughter – who is the most driven by money – has completed more than two full grades of school in ~20-weeks (60% of the school year), and shows no signs of slowing down.

I have not noticed any reduced interest in learning outside of school. My oldest daughter does not like the idea of incentives at all. She doesn’t need the incentives and she thinks other kids shouldn’t need to be incentivized either. But the incentives are helping with her younger siblings, and, even if they aren’t pushing her to go harder, they definitely don’t seem to be hurting her internal drive.

[…]

Unlike Alpha I have not found any elite school who has shared the MAP improvement rate for the students at their school.

I expect these elite schools are very good for all the reasons the selective private school I sent my kids to before GT was good: They have a select group of peers, they have great teacher:student ratios, and they have incredible resources. I also expect most of these schools do NOT accelerate (I could very well be wrong here and would be happy to be corrected). If they are like the schools I am familiar with they allow their students to advance through the material at the “normal” pace, with the normal pedagogy, but, because those kids are so bright, that leaves them plenty of time for enrichment.

Posted in Education | 6 Comments »

When questioned about the source of the number, he then claimed on multiple occasions that the number actually came from someone else, and that journalists had distorted his argument

Thursday, July 17th, 2025

Adam Strandberg works on metabolism and has run into the claim that chess grandmasters burn 6000 calories per day during tournaments:

I assumed when I dug into it that I would find a specific methodological error. But while methods enter the story, the real problem is that the number was completely made up.

As far as I can tell, the “patient zero” that caused this claim to become so widespread is this 2019 ESPN article:

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters’ stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

This story was then picked up by many outlets, such as CNBC, Men’s Health, Inc, GQ, Marginal Revolution, and Joe Rogan.

So the claim came from Robert Sapolsky. However, a Google Scholar search turned up no primary literature from him on the topic. Fortunately, someone on Reddit was also curious and shared an email from Professor Sapolsky explaining the number. He first references a footnote from his 1994 book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers:

The definitive study on chess players was carried out by the physiologist Leroy DuBeck and his graduate student Charlotte Leedy. They wired up chess players in order to measure their breathing rates, blood pressure, muscle contractions, and so on, and monitored the players before, during, and after major tournaments. They found tripling of breathing rates, muscle contractions, systolic blood pressures that soared to over 200—exactly the sort of thing seen in athletes during physical competition. See the original report, Leedy’s thesis, “The effects of tournament chess playing on selected physiological responses in players of varying aspirations and abilities” (Temple University, 1975) or their brief report (Leedy, C., and DuBeck, L. 1971. Physiological changes during tournament chess. Chess Life and Review, 708). In a telephone conversation, DuBeck also tells the story of the international match in the early 1970s between grand masters Bent Larson and Bobby Fischer, in which the former had to be given antihypertensive medication in the middle of his losing match; his blood pressure remained elevated for days afterward. And for that special chess fan out there who just can’t get enough of this subject, may I suggest as the perfect gift a copy of Glezerov, V., and Sobol, E. 1987. Hygienic evaluation of the changes in work capacity of young chess players during training. Gigiena i Sanitariia 24, in the original Russian.

This doesn’t say anything about calories, though the “tripling of breathing rates” matches part of the ESPN quote. He goes on:

The figure of 6K calories/day is an extrapolation that DuBeck generated, based on those measures and the typical duration of tournaments. Obviously, it’s a pretty soft, squishy number. I’d asked the ESPN people to mention that the 6K was an indirectly derived measure, the number of calories shouldn’t be presented as gospel, so if they were going to cite the 6K, they should cite these caveats as well. But I guess the caveats didn’t make the editing process…

Hope that helps.

Robert Sapolsky

[…]

To summarize: a grad student took physiological measurements of 11 ordinary chess players (not grandmasters). They reported in a summary in a chess magazine that the maximum chest movement rate they measured in a 10 second period was almost three times that of an average measurement from a different study. Robert Sapolsky then cited this thesis in his popular book, dropping the distinction between maximum and average to give a 3X breathing rate. He later took the 3X number and multiplied that by 2000 calories per day to get the number 6000, adding the “grandmaster” rhetorical fluorish along the way. He spread this fact through his own talks at Stanford and through interviews with journalists, who accurately repeated him. When questioned about the source of the number, he then claimed on multiple occasions that the number actually came from someone else, and that journalists had distorted his argument.

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