Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead to as a rule to Degeneration

October 8th, 2023

I recently revisited H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, first the audiobook and then the 1960 movie. Wells coined the term “time machine” and codified the trope of using a high-tech machine to travel through time, rather than “traveling” through dreams or visions.

Wells’ future darkly twists the utopian socialist vision of Willian Morris’s News from Nowhere:

In the novel, the narrator, William Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no marriage or divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work.

One of the dark twists reflects what Wells had learned from one of his professors, Ray Lankester:

“Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead to as a rule to Degeneration.” Degeneration was well known in parasites, and Lankester gave several examples. In Sacculina, a genus of barnacles which is a parasite of crabs, the female is little more than “a sac of eggs, and absorbed nourishment from the juices of its host by root-like processes” (+ wood-engraved illustration). He called this degenerative evolutionary process in parasites retrogressive metamorphosis.

When The Time Machine was published in 1895, The Guardian wrote in its review:

The influence of the author of The Coming Race is still powerful, and no year passes without the appearance of stories which describe the manners and customs of peoples in imaginary worlds, sometimes in the stars above, sometimes in the heart of unknown continents in Australia or at the Pole, and sometimes below the waters under the earth. The latest effort in this class of fiction is The Time Machine, by HG Wells.

It didn’t occur to me that the subterranean Morlocks were based, in part, on Wells’ own early-life experiences in the working class:

His own family would spend most of their time in a dark basement kitchen when not being occupied in their father’s shop. Later, his own mother would work as a housekeeper in a house with tunnels below, where the staff and servants lived in underground quarters. A medical journal published in 1905 would focus on these living quarters for servants in poorly ventilated dark basements. In his early teens, Wells became a draper’s apprentice, having to work in a basement for hours on end.

The 1960 film sheds the socialist-evolution theme of Wells’ novel for a series of vignettes of worse and worse wars, leading humanity to live underground. It’s not clear how the guileless Eloi evolve under those conditions, but they still hypnotically return to the shelters when the air-raid sirens call out.

The Eloi of Wells’ story are childlike, and the 1960 film portrays them as blond, Californian proto-hippies, but Yvette Mimieux, who plays Weena, the one named Eloi, is hardly androgynous.

I started wondering if a modern remake would have reality TV-star Eloi of indeterminate ethnicity, communicating through gestures and phatic expressions.

In the original novel, Wells simply refers to his protagonist as the Time Traveller. The 1960 film has his friends call him George. The name “H. George Wells” can be seen on a brass plaque on the time machine.

This brings us to The Invisible Man, which I also revisited recently, which features a certain Dr. Kemp, whose studies are interrupted by the sound of gunshots:

After five minutes, during which his mind had travelled into a remote speculation of social conditions of the future, and lost itself at last over the time dimension, Dr. Kemp roused himself with a sigh, pulled down the window again, and returned to his writing desk.

Posted in Media | 5 Comments »

The key to Sicily was the narrow Strait of Messina

October 7th, 2023

How Hitler Could Have Won World War II by Bevin AlexanderHitler’s senior generals had been pleading with him to follow a defensive strategy, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), ever since the failure to capture Moscow in December 1941:

Victory, of course, no longer was possible. But Germany might have achieved a standstill in the west if Hitler had transferred much of his army and air force to challenge landings by the western Allies. By husbanding his forces in the east, and above all by avoiding an offensive that might consume his little remaining striking power, he also might have held back the Soviet Union until everyone was weary of war.

But such a reversal would have required Hitler to see that he had made mistakes — and this Hitler could not do. On the contrary, he began in the spring of 1943 to concentrate every man, gun, and tank possible for a final confrontation with the Red Army in the Kursk salient northwest of Kharkov.

[…]

German generals in the Mediterranean were seeing that the principal Allied commanders were hesitant, slow-moving, and insistent upon overwhelming superiority before they undertook operations. Allied obsession with security played directly into the strengths of the German army. Compared to Allied commanders, German generals were, on balance, bolder, more flexible, more inventive, more willing to take chances, and more confident of their ability to overmaster opponents.

A couple of decisions illustrate the attitude of Eisenhower, Alexander, Montgomery, and other senior commanders. First, though no one expected much opposition, they earmarked ten divisions for the invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky), more than they were later able to get on the beaches of Normandy. Second, they insisted on attacking the Italian boot at Salerno because it was within the 200-mile range of Spitfires operating from northeast Sicily. Since the Germans knew about the Allied fixation on air cover, they spotted Salerno as the target and prepared a gruesome reception there.

[…]

The key to Sicily was the narrow Strait of Messina (in Greek mythology guarded by Scylla and Charybdis), less than three miles wide, which divides the northeastern tip of the island from the toe of Italy (Calabria). Any supplies to and evacuation from Sicily had to pass this bottleneck.

Since the Allies held command of the sea, the way to assure the capitulation of the enemy on Sicily without firing a shot was to invade the toe of Italy. There were virtually no Axis troops in Calabria. Its occupation would have separated Sicily from the mainland and prevented the evacuation of troops from the island — except those few who might have been flown out.

This idea never received serious consideration.

[…]

Instead, Eisenhower approved a completely frontal attack.

[…]

It took Eisenhower and his senior generals until May 13 to finish their plans. Yet, since only one of the divisions intended for Husky was being used in the last stages of the Tunisian campaign, the invasion could have followed directly on the heels of the Axis surrender. If this had happened, the attackers would have found the island virtually bereft of defenders and could have seized it almost without casualties.

Posted in War | 4 Comments »

These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild

October 5th, 2023

In the 14th Century, Oxford had a per capita murder rate four to five times higher than other high-population hubs like York and London:

Newly translated documents list 75 percent of the perpetrators of murders with known background as “clericus”, a term most commonly used to describe students or members of the then-recently founded University of Oxford. And 72 percent of the victims were also classed as clericus.

[…]

“Oxford students were all male and typically aged between fourteen and twenty-one, the peak for violence and risk-taking. These were young men freed from tight controls of family, parish or guild, and thrust into an environment full of weapons, with ample access to alehouses and sex workers.”

Posted in War | 7 Comments »

The panacea was drill

October 4th, 2023

Early firearms were hampered by their extremely low rate of fire (about one volley every two minutes):

Thus an infantry formation would only be able to fire once at an onrushing cavalry charge. The innovative Dutch commander Maurice of Nassau devised a solution. He restored the Roman practice of linear formations, drawing his men up in thinly-packed ranks (at most 10 men deep) of long lines. The first rank would fire, then retire to the rear to reload; then the second rank, now at the front, would unleash its volley and then perform the same maneuver. By rotating through lines, a Maurician army could theoretically sustain an almost continuous barrage.

Maurician tactics were demanding of the average soldier, now tasked both with performing coordinated actions with his comrades and standing firm in the face of enemy fire. The panacea was drill: practicing march and countermarch maneuvers. To facilitate this, Maurice divided his forces into smaller units and increased the ratio of officers to men. Companies of 250 with eleven officers were reduced to 120 men with twelve officers; regiments of 2,000 were replaced by battalions of 580. The diary of Anthonis Duyck, a member of the Dutch general staff, reveals a life spent constantly on exercises, supervising troops as they practiced forming and reforming ranks and marching in formation. These motions were codified by Maurice’s cousin John in an illustrated manual that sketched out how to use key infantry weapons. In 1599, Maurice also received sufficient funds to equip the Dutch army with firearms of standardized size and caliber. Standardization of uniforms followed.

It was not the Counts of Nassau, however, but rather Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who translated the ‘revolution in tactics’ into battlefield success. Thanks to extensive drilling, he improved his forces’ rate of fire until only six ranks were needed to maintain a continuous barrage.

Posted in War, Weapons | No Comments »

The TV set always needed something and so did Barbie

October 3rd, 2023

Philip K. Dick’s “The Days of Perky Pat” came up recently, because it inspired elements of Fallout, but I’m a bit surprised that I didn’t see countless references to it when the Barbie movie came out, because the story was clearly inspired by the doll:

It was the Barbie-Doll craze which induced this story, needless to say. Barbie always seemed unnecessarily real to me. Years later I had a girl friend whose ambition was to be a Barbie-doll. I hope she made it.

[…]

“The Days Of Perky Pat” came to me in one lightning-swift flash when I saw my children playing with Barbie dolls. Obviously these anatomically super-developed dolls were not intended for the use of children, or, more accurately, should not have been. Barbie and Ken consisted of two adults in miniature. The idea was that the purchase of countless new clothes for these dolls was necessary if Barbie and Ken were to live in the style to which they were accustomed. I had visions of Barbie coming into my bedroom at night and saying, “I need a mink coat.” Or, even worse, “Hey, big fellow…want to take a drive to Vegas in my Jaguar XKE?” I was afraid my wife would find me and Barbie together and my wife would shoot me.

The sale of “The Days Of Perky Pat” to Amazing was a good one because in those days Cele Goldsmith edited Amazing and she was one of the best editors in the field. Avram Davidson of Fantasy & Science Fiction had turned it down, but later he told me that had he known about Barbie dolls he probably would have bought it. I could not imagine anyone not knowing about Barbie. I had to deal with her and her expensive purchases constantly. It was as bad as keeping my TV set working; the TV set always needed something and so did Barbie. I always felt that Ken should buy his own clothes.

In those days — the early Sixties — I wrote a great deal, and some of my best stories and novels emanated from that period. My wife wouldn’t let me work in the house, so I rented a little shack for $15 a month and walked over to it each morning. This was out in the country. All I saw on my walk to my shack were a few cows in their pastures and my own flock of sheep who never did anything but trudge along after the bell-sheep. I was terribly lonely, shut up by myself in my shack all day. Maybe I missed Barbie, who was back at the big house with the children. So perhaps “The Days Of Perky Pat” is a wishful fantasy on my part; I would have loved to see Barbie — or Perky Pat or Connie Companion — show up at the door of my shack.

What did show up was something awful: my vision of the face of Palmer Eldritch which became the basis of the novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. which the Perky Pat story generated.

[…]

I found in the story “The Days Of Perky Pat” a vehicle that I could translate into a thematic basis for the novel I wanted to write. Now, you see, Perky Pat is the eternally beckoning fair one, das ewige Weiblichkeit — “the eternally feminine,” as Goethe put it. Isolation generated the novel and yearning generated the story; so the novel is a mixture of the fear of being abandoned and the fantasy of the beautiful woman who waits for you — somewhere, but God only knows where; I have still to figure it out. But if you are sitting alone day after day at your typewriter, turning out one story after another and having no one to talk to, no one to be with, and yet pro forma having a wife and four daughters from whose house you have been expelled, banished to a little single-walled shack that is so cold in winter that, literally the ink would freeze in my typewriter ribbon, well, you are going to write about iron slot-eyed faces and warm young women. And thus I did. And thus I still do.

Posted in Media | 5 Comments »

Bullying was considered a virtue

October 2nd, 2023

Elon Musk by Walter IsaacsonWalter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography explains that when Elon was twelve he was taken by bus to a wilderness survival camp, known as a veldskool:

“It was a paramilitary Lord of the Flies,” he recalls. The kids were each given small rations of food and water, and they were allowed — indeed encouraged — to fight over them. “Bullying was considered a virtue,” his younger brother Kimbal says. The big kids quickly learned to punch the little ones in the face and take their stuff. Elon, who was small and emotionally awkward, got beaten up twice. He would end up losing ten pounds.

Near the end of the first week, the boys were divided into two groups and told to attack each other. “It was so insane, mind-blowing,” Musk recalls. Every few years, one of the kids would die. The counselors would recount such stories as warnings. “Don’t be stupid like that dumb fuck who died last year,” they would say. “Don’t be the weak dumb fuck.”

Another heartwarming childhood story:

The Musk family kept German Shepherd dogs that were trained to attack anyone running by the house. When he was six, Elon was racing down the driveway and his favorite dog attacked him, taking a massive bite out of his back. In the emergency room, when they were preparing to stitch him up, he resisted being treated until he was promised that the dog would not be punished. “You’re not going to kill him, are you?” Elon asked. They swore that they wouldn’t. In recounting the story, Musk pauses and stares vacantly for a very long time. “Then they damn well shot the dog dead.”

And another:

“If you have never been punched in the nose, you have no idea how it affects you the rest of your life,” he says.

[…]

They came up from behind, kicked him in the head, and pushed him down a set of concrete steps. “They sat on him and just kept beating the shit out of him and kicking him in the head,” says Kimbal, who had been sitting with him. “When they got finished, I couldn’t even recognize his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes.” He was taken to the hospital and was out of school for a week. Decades later, he was still getting corrective surgery to try to fix the tissues inside his nose.

[…]

After the school fight, Errol sided with the kid who pummeled Elon’s face. “The boy had just lost his father to suicide, and Elon had called him stupid,” Errol says. “Elon had this tendency to call people stupid. How could I possibly blame that child?”

When Elon finally came home from the hospital, his father berated him. “I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless,” Elon recalls. Kimbal, who had to watch the tirade, says it was the worst memory of his life. “My father just lost it, went ballistic, as he often did. He had zero compassion.”

Posted in Animals | 6 Comments »

Past athletic performance doesn’t guarantee future results

October 1st, 2023

Athletes who succeed in junior age categories are, for the most part, completely different from those who succeed in adult competition:

The overall pattern was that top juniors tended to pick a sport early, practice it to the exclusion of other sports, and progress rapidly. But those who made it to the top as seniors had precisely the opposite pattern: they had spent less time training in their main sport and more time playing other sports as kids, and they made slower initial progress in their main sport.

[…]

The results are clear: most successful juniors don’t become successful seniors, and most successful seniors weren’t successful juniors. One example: 89 percent of international-class under-17 and under-18 athletes never reach that level as seniors, and 83 percent of international-class seniors didn’t make it to international class at the under-17 and under-18 level. To put it another way, these junior and senior populations are 93 percent different and just 7 percent the same.

These results undermine both of the main theories of how outliers get so good—i.e. that it’s all about natural talent, or that it’s all about how much and how effectively you practice. Both theories imply that how good you are as a junior will predict how good you are as a senior, and that success at both levels is predicted by the same factors. Instead, Güllich argues that what predicts junior success—a focus on training to maximize immediate performance—might actually work against the prospects for sustained long-term improvement.

Posted in Fitness | 2 Comments »

Men want to engage in righteous combat

September 29th, 2023

Men want to engage in righteous combat:

They want it more than they want sex or VP titles. They fantasize about getting the casus belli to defend themselves against armed thugs that will never come, they spend billions of dollars on movies and TV about everymen in implausible circumstances where EA calculus demands they use supernatural powers for combat, they daydream about fantastical, spartan settings where war is omnipresent and fights are personal and dramatic and intellectually interesting, and they’re basically incapable of resisting the urge to glorify their nation and people’s past battles, even the ones they claim to disagree with intellectually. You cannot understand much of modern culture until you’ve recognized that the state’s blunt suppression of the male instinct for glory has caused widespread symptoms of pica that dominate our politics, media, and online interactions.

And make no mistake — our half-hearted policy of deeming all such tendencies “toxic masculinity”, and refusing men the option to engage in reciprocal or consensual violence against each other, has been a bigger failure than the war on drugs. Lots of ink has been spilled on sphere of influence conspiracy theories that attempt to interpret America’s foreign adventures as rational power-seeking behavior. But the real truth is that men naturally form gangs, political cliques, and military theologies that attempt to justify violence within their existing legal and moral landscapes independent of any external incentives to do so. What they really want from all this is not some policy outcome but the self-actualization that comes from fighting the enemy, and the dearth of opportunities for them to challenge their opponents’ honor on the battlefield in a rights-respecting way is a much more important misandrist failing than child custody bias or divorce law or anything I’ve seen red pill people argue on the internet about. Men who are down especially bad will take absurd pay cuts to join artificial and economically unmotivated criminal sects, solely so they get the opportunity to pick mortal battles with other people who’ve opted into the same social systems they have.

There is no true modern substitute for these ambitions, with all of their cultural and social significance.

Posted in Martial Arts, Policy, War | 4 Comments »

Leadership explains the differences in the performance of nearly all armies at all times

September 28th, 2023

How Hitler Could Have Won World War II by Bevin AlexanderThe Battle of Kasserine Pass occupies a special place in the mythology of American wars, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II):

It was the most staggering and unequivocal defeat in American history, with the exception of the Union debacle at Chancellorsville in the Civil War. But at Chancellorsville Americans were fighting themselves. Analysts of that battle focused on the incompetence of Union General Joe Hooker compared to the brilliance of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. They didn’t raise questions about the quality of the American fighting man. After Kasserine, however, a crisis of confidence shook the Allied military. American morale plummeted, and doubts arose about the quality of American soldiers, especially among the British.

Actually the failure at Kasserine could be traced, as at Chancellorsville, to the quality of leadership they received. Leadership explains the differences in the performance of nearly all armies at all times. At Kasserine a Hooker-level incompetent named Lloyd R. Fredendall had the misfortune to come up against Erwin Rommel, the one true military genius to emerge in World War II.

Chancellorsville and Kasserine demonstrate that the outcome of battles depends upon leadership. But laying full responsibility on the commander is difficult for human beings to accept. Most people assume that groups arrive at decisions by the interaction of their members. This leads many to attribute a defeat (or victory) to the alleged inherent nature of the soldiers or their nation, not the leaders.

After Kasserine British officers and men condemned Americans as “our Italians,” implying Americans were inferior soldiers, as they felt the Italians were. The Italians did perform poorly, but the British forgot that the failures were not due to the soldiers but to their leaders, who sent Italian armies into battle with grossly inferior equipment and under incredibly poor commanders. In the few cases where Italians had good leadership they performed well, sometimes in spite of their atrocious weapons.

Kasserine taught a lesson all wars teach: a military organization must make life-and-death choices. It does not arrive at these choices by consensus. Seeking consensus leads first to debate, then to disintegration, since some will accept hard choices, while others will not. Military forces work only when decisions are made by commanders. If commanders are wrong, the units will likely fail. If they are right, they may succeed.

Kasserine taught another lesson: envious or blind officers on one’s own side can nullify the insight of a great general and prevent him from achieving a decisive victory.

[…]

General Fredendall had played into Rommel’s hand. Although Eisenhower had instructed him to set up a mobile reserve behind a screen of reconnaissance forces and light delaying elements, Fredendall had lumped his infantry on isolated djebels, or hills, along the line and scattered his reserves in bits and pieces.

[…]

To assist 21st Panzer, Rommel asked Arnim to send down 10th Panzer Division, with 110 tanks, plus a dozen Tiger tanks. But Arnim envied Rommel’s fame and did not want to help him gain more. He provided only one tank battalion and four Tigers, and withdrew these shortly afterward for an attack he was planning farther north.

[…]

Rommel’s whole operation killed or wounded 3,000 Americans and netted more than 4,000 prisoners and 200 destroyed Allied tanks, against fewer than a thousand Axis casualties and far lower tank losses. But, if Arnim had cooperated and the Comando Supremo had shown any vision, the Axis gains could have been immensely greater.

Posted in War | 10 Comments »

Logical reasoning and de-escalation won’t work

September 27th, 2023

Greg Ellifritz watched this video of a recent convenience store robbery, and it caused him to think about how common criminal attacks are fundamentally changing:

Multiple attackers: The attacks most people face are no longer from a lone drug user. In the attacks I’m researching, three attackers seem to be the bare minimum along with larger groups of 10 or more criminals working together on occasion. These criminals are organized and they have a plan to handle any resistance in the areas they are robbing. They also have lookouts and people assigned to confront witnesses and store security staff to ensure their robberies are unimpeded.

A merging of the distinction between process and resource predators: In the book Facing Violence, Rory Miller categorized predators as being two basic types. Resource predators are looking to take your things. It could be your watch, your purse, your car, or the goods stocked on a store shelf. Process predators aren’t interested in your stuff. They get pleasure out of the process of victimization. They revel in the act of causing pain and misery.

Historically, process predators have been comparatively rare. Most attacks were committed by resource predators. The bad guys wanted your stuff. They didn’t want to hurt you unless it was necessary to get what they were targeting. Today’s criminals seem to mix the two categories. They want your stuff, but they also take an obscene amount of pleasure in hurting you during the act of taking it.

Compliance will not guarantee your safety: Building on the point above, complying with the attacker will not necessarily keep you safe. In fact, it may embolden the criminals and make it more likely for them to physically attack or pepper spray you even after taking all your stuff.

[…]

The store clerk in that case did not resist at all. Despite the fact that she complied, the robbers selected one of their members to punch, kick, and stomp the woman for the duration of their crime.

Younger attackers; Today’s attackers are often young teens or even pre-teens. How would you feel about shooting or striking a 12-year old kid? Those kids know that you will hesitate more when attacked by a child. They also know that the court system isn’t likely to impose serious consequences for such young offenders. Are you prepared to shoot a kid if you have to?

[…]

Logical reasoning and de-escalation won’t work: Lots of police agencies and self defense classes are currently focusing on teaching verbal de-escalation skills. In my experience, verbal de-escalation seldom works in attacks involving group violence. Your singular efforts to de-escalate can’t compete with the efforts of several other group members who are trying to escalate. The group demands violence for its amusement. You likely won’t be able to prevent that violence no matter what magic words you utter.

On video: Everything you do will be recorded. The criminals are recording their own attacks for amusement purposes. Almost all commercial public areas are covered by surveillance cameras. Everything you do in the middle of the chaotic attack will be reviewed by people who don’t understand criminal violence and have weeks or years of calm contemplation to decide if you’ve made the correct choice.

Many prosecutors aren’t interested in filing charges against the violent kids who attacked your or stole your stuff. They won’t hesitate a bit to prosecute you if you make what they perceive is an unreasonable self defense decision.

Posted in Crime | 7 Comments »

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do

September 26th, 2023

Elon Musk by Walter IsaacsonWalter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography opens with two quotes:

To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?

— Elon Musk, Saturday Night Live, May 8, 2021

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

— Steve Jobs

Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

Extreme success comes from mastering games and metagames

September 25th, 2023

One very abstract way to understand people’s skills, Byrne Hobart suggests, is to think about their relative ability to execute some known task versus their ability to continuously reinvent themselves and determine what they ought to be doing differently:

Warren Buffett’s career has been justifiably studied because of his extreme skill at the first, but Charlie Munger made a major contribution to Buffett’s track record by pushing him to reevaluate where he focused his energy. Buffett and Munger both did plenty of scrappy deals early in their careers, buying mediocre companies at a massive discount to their fair value and selling once that value had been reached. But it’s a lot harder to do that at scale. You can find profitable or potentially profitable companies trading at less than net cash if you’re looking at $50m market caps and below, but it’s not going to happen if your cutoff for a needle-moving investment is a $5bn or $50bn market cap instead.

Munger’s story is a good case study in skill and serendipity: he might have been a fairly successful LA-based real estate developer and lawyer with a reputation for loquacity if he hadn’t tied up with Warren Buffett. On the other hand, if Warren Buffett hadn’t gotten the message on quality businesses from Munger, perhaps he’d be an oddball Omaha fixture, a frugal guy who made millions but not billions investing in textiles, local banks, steel mills, and the like. Extreme success comes from mastering games and metagames, and in this case it was a team effort, with Munger handling the metagame and Buffett excelling at whatever the specific game happened to be.

One frustrating note about this book [Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger] is that it just doesn’t give enough detail about Munger’s transition from someone who earned a salary and made investments on the side to full-time capitalist. It’s surprisingly hard to find details about Munger’s hedge fund in the 60s and 70s (it’s easy to find their biggest positions, but one of those positions was a closed-end fund that Munger & Co. took over in order to redirect its investments into better businesses. But which!?). And the book sadly omits this story, about how Munger would be worth multiples of what he has today if he’d bought one more small block of an obscure oil company in the 70s, which sold for 30x his cost a few years later. (This is a good case study in why you shouldn’t overrate luck: in an alternate world where Munger had bought that stock, clever people might point out that 80% of his net worth ultimately derived from one decision to call a broker back and make a trade. Whereas what probably really happened was that not making the trade meant that it took a few more years for Munger’s capital base to reach the point where it compounded closer to 15% annually than 30%.)

Posted in Business | No Comments »

Spider silk spun by silkworms

September 24th, 2023

Scientists in China have synthesized spider silk from genetically modified silkworms, producing fibers six times tougher than Kevlar:

Previously developed processes for spinning artificial spider silk have struggled to apply a surface layer of glycoproteins and lipids to the silk to help it withstand humidity and exposure to sunlight — an anti-aging “skin layer” that spiders apply to their webs.

Genetically modified silkworms offer a solution to this problem, says Mi, since silkworms coat their own fibers with a similar protective layer.

[…]

To spin spider silk from silkworms, Mi and his team introduced spider silk protein genes into the DNA of silkworms so that it would be expressed in their glands using a combination of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology and hundreds of thousands of microinjections into fertilized silkworm eggs.

The microinjections posed “one of the most significant challenges” in the study, said Mi, but when he saw the silkworms’ eyes glowing red under the fluorescence microscope — a sign that the gene editing had been successful — he was overjoyed.

The researchers also needed to perform “localization” modifications on the transgenic spider silk proteins so that they would interact properly with proteins in the silkworm glands, ensuring that the fiber would be spun properly. To guide the modifications, the team developed a “minimal basic structure model” of silkworm silk.

“This concept of ‘localization,’ introduced in this thesis, along with the proposed minimal structural model, represents a significant departure from previous research,” says Mi. “We are confident that large-scale commercialization is on the horizon.”

Posted in Science | No Comments »

A super-skilled AI might negate any risk of jamming and enable fleets of smart FPV drones to attack simultaneously without human operators

September 23rd, 2023

An AI racing drone recently beat human pilots, raising the question of when AI drones will transform warfare:

“The AI is superhuman because it discovers and flies the best maneuvers, also it is consistent and precise, which humans are not,” says Scaramuzza. He notes that, as with AlphaGo, Swift was able to use moves — in this case flight trajectories — which the human champions did not even think were possible.

[…]

A $400 FPV with the warhead from an RPG rocket launcher can knock out a tank, personnel carrier or artillery piece from several miles away, or chase down and destroy a truck traveling at high speed. They are cheap enough to use against individual footsoldiers and can dive into trenches. But it requires a skilled human pilot. Ukrainian sources say the training takes around a month to achieve proficiency, and many people fail the course.

FPV success rates appear to vary wildly, with different sources citing 20%, 30%, 50% or 70% — much appears to depend on the exact situation, the presence of jamming, and the skill of the pilot. A super-skilled AI might push that rate far above 70%, negate any risk of jamming and enable fleets of smart FPV drones to attack simultaneously without human operators.

[…]

Swift relies on having reliable information on the speed, location and orientation of the drone in real time. This is far more challenging outdoors where there are changes of illumination, wind gusts and other variables to contend with.

Also, Swift has to learn the course ahead of time to work out its flight path.

“The current system only works for drone racing and for a specific racing track of which you perfectly know the map,” says Scaramuzza.

The neural network which navigates through the gates is trained specifically for that layout . The other problem is that Swift trains on a specific setup and if conditions change – for example the wind changes direction – all its learning may be wasted.

“Swift’s perception system and physics model assumes that the appearance of the environment and its physics are both consistent with what was observed during training,” says Scaramuzza. “If this assumption fails, the system can fail.”

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 3 Comments »

This left federal bureaucrats with a lot of time on their hands

September 22nd, 2023

Steve Sailer reviews Richard Hanania’s “highly useful” new book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics:

For the ever-growing numbers of people paid to micromanage diversity and shut down potentially offensive free speech at work, it’s a living. It may not seem like a lot of money to Silicon Valley titans, but to many soft-major college grads it’s more than they could make doing anything else. To update Upton Sinclair’s famous quote, “It is not difficult to get a woman to believe something when her salary depends upon it.”

[…]

The Origins of Woke draws much from the work of law professor Gail Heriot of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, such as her article “The Roots of Wokeness: Title VII Damage Remedies as Potential Drivers of Attitudes Toward Identity Politics and Free Expression” on the malignant effects of specific provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

[…]

In the 1960s, the federal government geared up for a long twilight struggle with the forces of Jim Crow in the South, creating numerous bureaucracies to battle entrenched Southern segregation. But, it turned out, as soon as the federal government stopped allowing state-sanctioned or state-tolerated violence against firms that violated Jim Crow norms by no longer segregating their lunch counters and the like, overt discrimination almost immediately collapsed in the South. After all, Jim Crow with its persnickety caste rules was a drag on economic growth, so the Southern business class was happy to finally join modern, booming America.

This left federal bureaucrats with a lot of time on their hands.

Similarly, even though the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on sex discrimination in employment had been added as a joke by a segregationist senator trolling the bill, traditional sex discrimination in hiring largely evaporated in the 1970s. It turned out that capitalists loved having a law tell them to double their potential workforces. (That’s one reason 1973 shows up on so many graphs as the last really good year for male wage growth in American history.)

Rather than announce “Mission accomplished” and go find other work, the triumphant forces of the civil rights bureaucracy became instead the scourge of ever more esoteric forms of discrimination, such as disparate impact, hostile environment due to mean speech, sexual harassment, and disability access. They increasingly intervened in the American workplace in favor of complaining members of protected groups, which cultivated a culture of complaint.

[…]

Over time, Democrats figured out that it was in their interest for corporations to be uncertain what exactly the governments’ rules are regarding race and sex. This avoided making clear to voters, who, even in California remain strongly opposed to racial preferences, how much of a thumb the government was putting on the scale.

[…]

In response to the proliferation of government regulations (and the lawsuits that accompany them) banning discrimination against some people and encouraging discrimination against others, corporations vastly increased their human resources staff to cajole and mollify the bureaucrats.

Of course, corporate HR staffers are less the adversaries of the government and plaintiff attorneys than their codependents in a symbiotic relationship featuring slightly different career paths in the same business. Just as many of the environmental consultants hired by corporations to placate the Environmental Protection Agency are former EPA staffers (and thus are definitely not going to call for repealing environmental laws), corporate HR, federal civil rights bureaucrats, discrimination lawyers, sexual harassment trainers, and so forth have perfectly understandable mutual economic incentives to bring ever larger parts of American life under their purview to generate more business for people like themselves.

From 1968 to 2021, despite immense improvements in automation, the number of Americans working in Human Resources grew from 140,000 to 1,500,000.

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