That's significantly outside the prediction intervals of forecasters so I will need to see an metaculus /manifold/etc account where you explicitly make this prediction sir

Suppose I throw up a coin but I dont show you the answer. Your friend's cousin tells you they think the bias is 80/20 in favor of heads.

If I show you the outcome was indeed heads should you still update ? (Yes)

A rumor is not the same as a demonstration.

This is convincing me to buy a sleep mask and blackout curtains. One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens as they say.

Great to hear this post had \geq 1 readers hah.

• both the US and China are already deploying a number of surface and underwater drones. Ukraine has had a lot of success with surface suicide drones sinking several Russian ships iirc, damaging bridges etc. Outside of Ukraine and Russia, maybe Israel, nobody is really on the ball when it comes to military competitiveness. To hit home this point, consider that the US military employs about 10.000 drones of all sizes while Ukraine, with an economy 1/5 of the Netherlands, now produces 1-4 million drones a year alone. [ofc drones vary widely in size and capability so this is ofc a little misleading] It should be strongly suspected that when faced with a real peer opponent warring powers will quickly realize they need to massively up production of drones.

• there is an interesting acoustic phenomenon where a confluence of environmental factors (like sea depth, temperature, range, etc) create 'sonar deadzones' where submarines are basically invisible. The exact nature of these deadzones is a closely-held state secret - as is the exact design of submarines to make them as silent as possible. As stated, my understanding is that is one of a few remaining areas where the US has a large technological advantage over her Chinese counterparts. You can't hit something you can't see so this advantage is potentially very large. As mentioned, a single torpedo hit will sink a ship; a ballistic missile hit is a mission kill; both attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines are lethal.

• Although submarines can dive fairly deep, there are various constraints on how deep they typically dive. e.g. they probably want to stay in these sonar deadzones.

-> There was an incident a while back where a (russian? english? french?) submarine hit another submarine (russian? englih? french?) by accident. It underscores how silent submarines are and how there are probably preferred regions underwater where submarines are much more likely to be found.

• however, sensors have improved markedly. THe current thinking is that employing a large fleet of slow-moving underwater drones equipped with very sensitive acoustive equipment it would be possible to create a 'net' that could effectivel track submarines. Both the US and China are working on this. I've seen prognoses that by 2050 the transparant battlefield will come for the underwater realm. I can't assess this.

• tidbit: I had a conversation with Jim Crutchfield about his whalelistening project. He build his own speakers and sonophones of course. He told me to get it work well required some very sophisticated mathematics. There was a well-developing literature in the ( ~)50s about this topic when it abruptly disappeared [sonomath was henceforth considered a statesecret by nat sec]

can you tell I exclusively publish in the Journal of My Brain 🧠

my brain (2007, Alexander et al.)

I would be interested what current SLT-dogma on grokking is. I get asked whether SLT explains grokking all the time but always have to reply with an unsatisfying 'there's probably something there but I don't understand the details'.

@Zach Furman @Jesse Hoogland

The European wars of religion during the 16th to early 18th century were plausibly caused or at least strongly fanned by the invention of the printing press.