Interesting Twitter post from some time ago (hard to find the original since Twitter search doesn't work for Tweets over the Tweet limit but I think it's from Ceb. K) about a book called The Generals about accountability culture.
On the day Germany invaded Poland, Marshall was appointed Army Chief of Staff. At the time, the US Army was smaller than Bulgaria’s—just 100,000 poorly-equipped and poorly-organized active personnel—and he bluntly described them as eg “not even third-rate.” By the end of World War II, he had grown it 100-fold, and modernized it far more than any other army.
Having served as General Pershing’s aide in World War I, he decided the most important priority was clearing out the dead weight and resorting far more freely to performance-based promotions, demotions, hiring, and firing. He immediately purged 200 senior generals and colonels to clear the way for fresh and aggressive commanders, and he gave generals the power to veto the division commanders he sent them, ensuring that only the most competent would lead in battle.
He wrote that the key traits to look for in combat commanders were: common sense, education, strength, cheer and optimism, energy, extreme loyalty, and determination. Further: "The requirement is for the dashing optimistic and resourceful type, quick to estimate, with relentless determination, and who possessed in addition a fund of sound common sense, which operated to prevent gross errors due to rapidity of decision and action." The opposite type—the cautious planner, the worrier, the officer prone to hesitating or back-channeling—had to be rooted out like "a cancer."
This continued and if anything escalated as we officially entered the war. Just two weeks after Pearl Harbor, the top two Pacific commanders were relieved. When U.S. forces suffered early defeats in North Africa, the senior tactical commander was immediately replaced. At Normandy, three division commanders were relieved. Etc. Of all the Army’s senior generals from the 1930s, only two became combat commanders in WWII. During the war, 10% of division commanders were relieved—even though he had already made the selection process stricter than ever. So leaders rose fast: even Eisenhower was still just a lieutenant colonel in Washington State in 1940.
Yet precisely because he made promotions and demotions so much more normal and performance-based, relief wasn’t career-ending. At least four generals were relieved in Europe and returned to command within a year. Some were even arrested, only to work their way back up and ultimately retire as generals. Two of the Joint Chiefs during WWII had even been court-martialed in their early careers. There were so many firings that you can sort through them for all kinds of bizarre coincidences and funny twists—eg the time a Marine general named Smith fired an Army general named Smith.
Here's Eisenhower explaining why removal—not micromanagement—was the answer to failure: "The American doctrine has always been to assign a theater commander a mission, to provide him with a definite amount of force, and then to interfere as little as possible in the execution of his plans. If results obtained by the field commander become unsatisfactory, the proper procedure is not to advise, admonish, and harass him, but to replace him." This is the essence of what our guys have always believed, from Elizabethan privateers and colonial corporations through Thiel and Moldbug.
Basically, in WWII, commanders had 60–90 days to succeed, be killed, or be relieved—and failure was seen as personal, not circumstantial. This allowed all kinds of extremely useful outsiders and wild men to finally take power. There are far too many examples to list, but eg consider Terry Allen or even Men of History like Patton and MacArthur if you think any of the guys working for Elon or Trump are too "crazy" (code for: unpredictable, aggressive, and personalist; hated by a conformist and cowardly and crumpling establishment). As a result, the best officers knew they weren’t safe unless they proved themselves constantly—and even if they were relieved, they could fight their way back.
But by Vietnam, the Army had fully abandoned the WWII model. Only one division commander was fired in the entire war (and not even the one responsible for My Lai). Westmoreland still made sure that commands were cycled through at least as fast, eg by setting up six-month command tours; and it wasn't unheard of for grunts to cycle through more than six commanders in as many months—but if anything this just reduced the accountability and authority and individuality and cohesion of commands.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, no theater commander was removed for incompetence. The wars dragged on for two decades with no serious consequences for consistent aimless herdlike failure—just punishment for those who took risks, embarrassed politicians, or stuck out. The most famous firing of the War on Terror was probably Abu Ghraib— and that was for political reasons, not strategic ones. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, an Army Reserve officer, was blamed, despite having no control over intelligence interrogators. She was a military police general with no combat arms experience—a convenient outsider who could take the fall while the real decision-makers escaped accountability. She was demoted from Brigadier General to Colonel, which was by then seen as an extreme punishment, while senior intelligence officials who designed the policies walked free.
Meanwhile, actual strategic failures—from Tommy Franks (who botched the plans for post-invasion Iraq) to Ricardo Sanchez (who oversaw the insurgency’s explosion in 2003-2004) and especially the people responsible for lying us into these wars—were never actually fired for their actual faults. McChrystal was fired in 2010, but only because of a Rolling Stone article where his aides openly mocked Obama officials. Petraeus resigned as CIA Director in 2012 due to a personal scandal, not operational incompetence. And everyone else realized that they could just stay on track and inside the herd and milk this waste forever.
That's how our costly occupations wound up as their own worst enemy: cracking down on tribalism and corruption while systematically bribing and covering up for warlords; pushing democratization and centralization alongside incredibly unpopular and unproductive culture-war single-issue red-meat carve-outs; etc. We just hired contractors and administrators to use p-hacked poorly-considered low-effort largely-unread papers to tell us to cycle through increasingly deranged and kludgy and byzantine procedures, instead of ever cycling through personnel; commanders ran away from every risk, and lost out on every opportunity, and wound up marching in circles and shooting themselves in the foot, or else they got owned for trying to take ownership of some potentially coherent goal. Headless chicken syndrome, enforced by tall poppy syndrome.
But a bit of leadership can easily chase out all the resentful sniverling midwit losers once again. Forget about getting the procedures right, and focus on getting the personnel placed. As Carlyle wrote: "Find in any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit. It is in the perfect state; an ideal country." Or, as Moldbug put it, back in 2009, when Steve Jobs was alive, and thus his company was too: "I can tell you exactly how decisions get made at Apple. First, Apple finds a man. Hires him, in fact. And having hired this man, it tells him: sir, this decision is yours."
I think this post is very good (disclaimer: I am the author).
It promotes better writing and the advice is concise, clear, and accurate. I think reading the post is a good use of the 90 seconds it takes to read the post.
With respect to the LessWrong 2024 Review, the question is whether the post is too narrow or the topic too mundane.
These stories are very funny. If anyone wants to express themselves by borrowing some money at 15% interest, or a $1 million forward contract on Bitcoin, my DMs are open.
In college I played poker: first a $20 buy-in game in the freshman dorm, then sometimes a $200 buy-in game at a frat house or similar, and also a weekly $1 buy-in game with many non-poker-playing friends in the lounge of the Computer Science building.
Because the numbers were so small, we kept a ledger for the $1 game, but then it also served as a public leaderboard, generated more interest than the money among those with a competitive disposition. So the game could play tight even with the small buy-ins.
A similar principle might make sense here. People want to be ranked highly for their predictions, so if there were a suitable leaderboard then people could lower the stakes and make fewer nonsensical "bets on their beliefs," while still disciplining the predictions.
I know there's Metaculus and prediction markets—maybe they serve this purpose already.
I agree—added these links to my post
Why is (1) obviously false?
I don't think this premise is as intuitive. For example, if someone said that a quadriplegic should have saved a nearby drowning child, then the objective appears immediately this it wouldn't have been possible and so the "should" claim isn't reasonable. On the other hand, if you say that the quadriplegic should avoid intentionally drowning the child, I don't think that's clearly nonsensical or false.
Yeah I've argued that banning lab meat is completely rational for the meat-eater because if progress continues then animal meat will probably be banned before the quality/price of lab meat is superior for everyone.
I think the "commitment" you're describing is similar to the difference between "ordinary" and "constitutional" policy-making in e.g. The Calculus of Consent; under that model, people make the kind of non-aggression pacts you're describing mainly under conditions of uncertainty where they're not sure what their future interests or position of political advantage will be.
3
1People should be free and equal
You opened with an assumption that your described audience ("progress studies people, economists, techno-optimists, anarcho-capitalists, proper libertarians") largely doesn't share. Why should people be equal? What sense of equality do you have in mind?
More generally, you make a bunch of undefended claims, e.g.
- You say that when one side has bargaining power over another, that's bad per se, but it's not explained why
- You say that when there is more wealth concentration, that leads to less freedom "empirically" but you don't present any empirical evidence
- You give Elon Musk buying Twitter as an example of the negative influence of billionaires, but in fact the Twitter Files reveal an apparently more serious threat to freedom from the state, whose power is actually counterbalanced by wealthy individuals
1It makes intuitive sense to me to say that if you have no way to do something, then it's nonsensical to say that you should do that thing. For example, if I say that you should have arrived to an appointment on time and you say that it would be impossible because I only told you about it an hour ago and it's 1000 miles away, then it would be nonsensical for me to say that you should have arrived on time anyway. This is equivalent to saying that if you should do something, then you can do it.
The converse "Whatever ought to be avoided can actually be done" doesn't make sense because there's no equivalent intuition.
1
Likewise I would say that Yarvin is influenced by (roughly descending importance)
Also Burnham