Three things converged for me recently and at the point of their convergence was the issue of placing women in frontline combat roles.

The first leg of the convergence was the election of Donald Trump. We’re still debating the reasons why he won, but certainly a reassertion of gender differences are near the top of everyone’s list. For example, allowing natal men into women’s sports.

The second was Trump’s nomination of Pete Hesgeth for Secretary of Defense. Hegseth’s nomination is controversial for a lot of reasons, but one of the controversies is his opinion that women should not be allowed into front line combat roles. 

Finally, I just got done watching the miniseries Band of Brothers, while at the same time re-reading the Stephen E. Ambrose book it’s based on. I would highly recommend the exercise (see my review of the book here.) In addition to being enjoyable it reminded me of how physical, grimy, and desperate combat can be. And of course the theme of both the book and the series is that Easy Company was so effective because they had developed strong bonds of brotherhood through the numerous challenges they overcame. These challenges include D-Day, Market Garden, liberating concentration camps, and finally being the first into Hitler’s stronghold at Eagle’s Nest. But if you were to pick the hardest thing they did, it was probably defending Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.

Watching and reading about Bastogne was a sobering experience. It is also the point where the three things I just mentioned crystallized into this line of inquiry. Given that it might be helpful to give you a brief overview of the Siege of Bastogne...

1. Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict by: Ara Norenzayan

2. A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains by: Max Bennett

3. The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump by: Max Blumenthal

4. What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars by: Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan

5. The Laws of Trading: A Trader's Guide to Better Decision-Making for Everyone by: Agustin Lebron

6. Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by: Oliver Burkeman

7. Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest by: Stephen E. Ambrose

8. The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement by: Sharon McMahon

1. AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference by: Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

2. Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by: Peter Hessler

3. On Grand Strategy by: John Lewis Gaddis

4. Leisure: The Basis of Culture by: Josef Pieper

5. Anatomy of the State by: Murray Rothbard

6. The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

7. Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration by: David Roberts

8. The Killer Angels: The Classic Novel of the Civil War by: Michael Shaara

He talks about the Village, and the River, but what we really need is a Redoubt.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything 

By: Nate Silver

Published: 2024

576 Pages

Briefly, what is this book about?

There are two different ways of approaching the world: the River, which thinks in terms of numbers, expected values, and quantification and the Village, which is the paternalistic expert class which manifests as the vast bureaucracy. 

What's the author's angle?

I got the impression that Silver just wanted to write about things that interested him. Because of this, his thesis was kind of tacked on. That said, he is a fairly passionate advocate for things that interest him. 

Who should read this book?

Silver is worried that people will skip the first half of the book which is about gambling, but in reality that was the best part, or at least the part I found to be novel. The second part is about Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), AI, and all the stuff you’ve already heard too much about if you spend much time online. With this in mind, I think there are three reasons to read this book:

1. If you want a deep exploration of high-level poker playing. 

2. You have never heard of AI Risk or SBF.

3. If you think my discussion of Silver’s model of the Village vs. the River is incomplete.

Specific thoughts: An mashup of the election and this book

...

One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, Volumes 1 & 2 

By: Whitney Alyse Webb

Briefly, what are these books about?

The alleged connections between organized crime and national intelligence agencies which led to the numerous illicit operations including Watergate, Iran-Contra, the JFK Assassination, and of course the entire Jeffrey Epstein mess. 

A key component of these operations was the tactic of collecting blackmail and using it to convince people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t.

What's the author's angle?

Charitably, Webb is an autodidact with an enormous command of facts and connections.

Uncharitably, she’s someone with a weak evidentiary filter making conspiratorial mountains out of tenuously connected molehills.

Who should read these books?

No one should just read them. You should either ignore them or study them intently as part of an “Intro to Conspiracy Theories” curriculum. Of the two I would recommend the former. Read on to see why.

I- How does one approach a book like this? 

...

1. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by: Neil Gaiman

2. There Is No Antimemetics Division by: qntm

3. The Man Who Had All the Luck by: Arthur Miller

4. How Green Was My Valley by: Richard Llewellyn

5. Theft of Fire: Orbital Space #1 by: Devon Eriksen

6. Assassin's Apprentice (The Farseer Trilogy, Book 1) by: Robin Hobb

7. Royal Assassin (The Farseer Trilogy, Book 2) by: Robin Hobb

With the enormous increase in the power of AI (specifically LLMs) people are using them for all sorts of things, hoping to find areas where they’re better, or at least cheaper than humans. FiveThirtyNine (get it?) is one such attempt, and they claim that AI can do forecasting better than humans. 

Scott Alexander, of Astral Codex Ten, reviewed the service and concluded that they still have a long way to go. I have no doubt that this is the case, but one can imagine that this will not always be the case. What then? My assertion would be that at the point when AI forecasting does “work” (should that ever happen) it will make the problems of superforecasting even worse.2 

What are the problems of superforecasting?

...

1. The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by: Michael A. Singer

2. Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It by: Ethan Kross

3. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World by: John Mark Comer

4. Dumb Money: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees by: Ben Mezrich

5. Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results by: Shane Parrish

1. Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos by: Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

2. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by: James C. Scott

This post represents a new feature (experiment?) I plan to occasionally write posts which take advantage of one or more books I read recently, but which aren’t actually reviews of those books. See, for example, my last post: Superminds, States, and the Domestication of Humans. 

Despite the fact that the books feature heavily in these posts, I assume my adoring fans still want actual reviews. But it doesn’t make sense to wait until the next book review collection for those reviews to appear, nor does it make sense to cram the reviews into the original essay which was about something else. And so I thought that instead I would have the reviews quickly follow the essay as sort of supplementary material. So that’s what this is. Let me know what you think. 

How durable is the state? How resistant is it to being overthrown? How closely does it reflect our desires? Is it possible it has its own desires?

But maybe more importantly how does all this affect the possibility of a very close election in November?