"An extremist, not a fanatic."

The tagline of a blog by Chris Dillow, a Marxist libertarian.

(His comment on it, invoking Bayesian principles.)

Why are nuclear weapons morally different from conventional bombs or machine guns or cannons?

Strategic nuclear weapons - the original and most widespread nuclear weapons - cannot be used with restraint. They have huge a blast radius and they kill everyone in it indiscriminately.

The one time they were used demonstrated this well. They are the most effective and efficient way, not merely to defeat an enemy army (which has bunkers, widely dispersed units, and retaliation capabilities), but to kill the entire civilian population of an enemy city.

To kill all the inhabitants of an enemy city, usually by one or another type of bombardment, was a goal pursued by all sides in both world wars. Nuclear weapons made it much easier, cheaper, and harder to defend against.

Tactical nuclear weapons are probably different; they haven't seen (much? any?) use in real wars to be certain.

suggest that those with the power to wield nuclear weapons have in fact been more morally responsible than we give them credit.

Perhaps. Alternatively, when faced with a similarly-armed opponent, even our habitually bloody rulers can be detered by the prospect of being personally burned to death with nuclear fire.

For to translate man back into nature; to master the many vain and fanciful interpretations and secondary meanings which have been hitherto scribbled and daubed over that eternal basic text homo natura; to confront man henceforth with man in the way in which, hardened by the discipline of science, man today confronts the rest of nature, with dauntless Oedipus eyes and stopped-up Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird-catchers who have all too long been piping to him 'you are more! you are higher! you are of a different origin!' - that may be a strange and extravagant task but it is a task - who would deny that? Why did we choose it, this extravagant task? Or, to ask the question differently; 'why knowledge at all?' - Everyone will ask us about that. And we, thus pressed, we who have asked ourselves that same question a hundred times, we have found and can find no better answer...

Friedrich Nietzsche

What’s an example from your own life where building human capital and signaling quality to colleges have come into conflict? How did you resolve the conflict? Do you think you made the right choice? Is there anything you would have done differently?

When I planned to apply for university I had to find somewhere that would let me take A Levels, the cost of A Levels outside of school being prohibitive. Anyway, I eventually found a school that would let me do it. Naturally, however, the requirement to be in school from 8:30-15:00 allowed me far less time than I'd normally have to learn and pursue my own interests - the environment was utter hell if you were trying to learn in your free time. They didn't even really have a library you could go if you wanted somewhere quiet to think; they had a small room with books in that backed onto an open-plan classroom but it wasn't really suitable.

I resolved this by convincing the school change their registration procedures for the sixth form so that people could sign themselves in and out of school when they weren't meant to be in class.

Do I think I made the right choice? Well, it wasn't a bad choice. But there were better choices - I've since learned that some universities let you join without pre-existing qualifications if you do a bit of hoop-jumping, and I'd probably do that if I were doing it over again. Given what I knew then though I don't think I could have done much better.

Many bombing campaigns were indeed waged with an explicit goal of maximum civilian casualties, in order to terrorize the enemy into submission, or to cause the collapse of order among enemy civilians.

If Germany would have wanting to maximize causalities they would have bombed London with chemical weapons. They decided against doing so.

They wanted to destroy military industry and reduce civilian moral. They didn't want to kill as many civilian's as possible but demoralize them.

Foundations matter. Always and forever. Regardless of domain. Even if you meticulously plug all abstraction leaks, the lowest-level concepts on which a system is built will mercilessly limit the heights to which its high-level “payload” can rise. For it is the bedrock abstractions of a system which create its overall flavor. They are the ultimate constraints on the range of thinkable thoughts for designer and user alike. Ideas which flow naturally out of the bedrock abstractions will be thought of as trivial, and will be deemed useful and necessary. Those which do not will be dismissed as impractical frills — or will vanish from the intellectual landscape entirely. Line by line, the electronic shanty town grows. Mere difficulties harden into hard limits. The merely arduous turns into the impossible, and then finally into the unthinkable.

[...]

The ancient Romans could not know that their number system got in the way of developing reasonably efficient methods of arithmetic calculation, and they knew nothing of the kind of technological paths (i.e. deep-water navigation) which were thus closed to them.

• Stanislav http://www.loper-os.org/?p=448

Did Karl Popper populate his class with particularly unimaginative students ? If someone asked me to "observe", I'd fill an entire notebook with observations in less than an hour -- and that's even without getting up from my chair.

How do you convince yourself to have self-confidence in a given situation, even in the face of direct empirical evidence that such confidence would be misplaced in that situation?

This seems to be a thing that many successful people are very good at - shrugging and acting like they're good at whatever task is at hand, even when they're clearly not - and then getting people to "buy in" to them because of that confidence rather than because of any evidence of actual skilled performance.

How do you kickstart that process?

(EDIT: was this a bad question to ask?)

And not just that, but he had more education than the poorest Indians, and probably more than the second poorest.

Even the poorest Indians (or Chinese, for that matter) will sacrifice to put their children through school. Ramanujan's initial education does not seem to have been too extraordinary, before his gifts became manifest (he scored first in exams, and that was how he was able to go to a well-regarded high school; pg25).

And got his hands on a math textbook, which was probably pretty low probability.

Actually, we know how he got his initial textbooks, which was in a way which emphasizes his poverty; pg26-27:

Ramanujan's family, always strapped for cash, often took in boarders. Around the time he was eleven, there were two of them, Brahmin boys, one from the neighboring district of Trichinopoly, one from Tirunelveli far to the south, studying at the nearby Government College. Noticing Ramanujan's interest in mathematics, they fed it with whatever they knew. Within months he had exhausted their knowledge and was pestering them for math texts from the college library. Among those they brought to him was an 1893 English textbook popular in South Indian colleges and English preparatory schools, S. L. Loney's Trigonometry, which actually ranged into more advanced realms. By the time Ramanujan was thirteen, he had mastered it.

...He became something of a minor celebrity. All through his school years, he walked off with merit certificates and volumes of English poetry as scholastic prizes. Finally, at a ceremony in 1904, when Ramanujan was being awarded the K. Ranganatha Rao prize for mathematics, head- master Krishnaswami Iyer introduced him to the audience as a student who, were it possible, deserved higher than the maximum possible marks. An A-plus, or 100 percent, wouldn't do to rate him. Ramanujan, he was saying, was off-scale.

So just as well he was being lent and awarded all his books, because certainly at age 11 as a poor Indian it's hard to see how he could afford expensive rare math or English books...

but there are some who would have been geniuses if they'd had enough food when young and some education.

A rather tautological comment: yes, if we removed all the factors preventing people from being X, then presumably more people would be X...